He's flying over our heads in a million pieces!

Because we're painting the house, Greg felt like it was time to finally fix this nonsense that Comcast foisted on us.

Cables across the front of our house.

Cables across our threshold.

Cables across our chimney and across the side of the house . . .

. . . which came in the ceiling of our basement and ran across the length of the room because Comcast doesn't care what your house or rooms or cables look like when they are charging you $85 an hour to give you overpriced cable and Internet service.

So Greg donned this suit, crawled into our scary crawlspace, and ran the cables the right way.

He cheerfully informed me every time he found another spider egg sac, ensuring that I will never ever get in there to help him.

But sometimes your dude is in the crawl space and you're in the office, trying to fish a cable out of the wall and you're trying to figure out where the fuck he is, and you keep tap-tap-tapping on the floor, as if that will help, and he's like, "Heather, that's not helping. I'm underneath the bathtub pipes and I can't hear anything," and sometimes you drill too many holes in the wall trying to figure it out.

But that's okay because I am good at patching holes. Or I am willing. And that's a good thing because we made a LOT of holes in the basement.

I don't even want to explain what happened here, but it involved an unexpected horizontal beam that necessitated a six-inch hole in the middle of the wall, the purchase of a 45-degree drill attachment, and more patching. But we now have a hard-wired ethernet connection to the basement and the office and Greg has plans to install network drops in every room of the house, but probably through the attic next time.

Oddly, my sewing kit came in handy with all of this work. We used the forceps my mother gave me (super handy for sewing AND retrieving cables from the wall), safety pins for attaching the Cat 6 cable to the fish tape, and a seam ripper for undoing all of our safeguards with string.

We're so tired but we have almost no visible cables on the outside of our house and Greg can copy files quickly between his XBOX and his computer and I didn't care about any of this, but it was great to be the helper instead of the instigator, for once. And now I don't have to feel bad when I inform Greg that we're spending next weekend removing sod, right?

(Hat tip to Jess for the Willy Wonka reference in the post title.)

That weird crawlspace

So that weird crawlspace that was added underneath the dining room is only accessible via this window in the basement.

The former owners made weird decisions (like burying things in the yard) and they liked to use the crawlspaces as storage.

There were, if I remember correctly, 23 bags of insulation in the main crawlspace. My electrician pulled them out for me (I don't get in the crawlspace because of SPIDERS, OH MY GOD SPIDERS) and my contractor friend took them off my hands.

The weird crawlspace was apparently used as a junkyard.

We found a bag of potting soil, a broom, an old window screen, and a lot of small pieces of wood. The boy awesomely volunteered to pull on his hoodie and his workgloves and fetch them through the window. I held the flashlight and SCREAMED when a huge spider came coasting down onto the boy.

Oddly, he didn't seem to appreciate this.

But it's clean and we didn't kill each other afterward, so I think we can call this one a victory.

Wherein the boy should get a medal too.

Just a warning on this post: BAD PHOTOS, AHOY. I was working in low-light/flash situations and they look terrible.

I was doing some research on my house and I decided to ask for help from the Multnomah County librarians. I always feel a little sneaky doing that, being that I'm a librarian and all, but nobody knows how to use their resources better than them. They found this newspaper clipping:

One of the houses I blacked out is mine. My house is modern! Hell yeah it is.

I also found this historic map that showed the proposed design of my house. It doesn't match the way my house looks now.

My house actually looks like this, with no nose at the front of the house.

The boy checks pretty frequently on Zillow to see how my house is doing. I don't do that because it's depressing (and I don't think it's accurate). It turns out one of the OTHER houses mentioned in that newspaper clipping is currently for sale.  And from the pictures it looks EXACTLY like mine on the inside. The boy got megapoints for that find.

I've written before that I don't believe my dining room has always been this big. I think it used to be two rooms.

Exhibit A: the hardwoods in this room inexplicably end about six inches past where the carpeting begins. There's only subfloor under the grody, grody carpet.

 

Exhibit B: this window in the basement looks into a very small square crawlspace that runs underneath the far corner of the dining room where the windows are. It meets the main crawlspace only via a small ventilation hole. That's not normal. I think it used to see daylight.

Exhibit C: there's a high spot on the dining room floor where that wall with the window to the crawlspace hits. Something is amiss.

Exhibit D: variegation in the finish on the wall . . .

 . . . which makes me think a wall used to be here. 

I really wanted to look inside that house for sale, so I sent an email to the realtor and asked. We pretended we were househunting and I have such a terrible memory, would he mind if I took photos? Playing spies is FUN. I was worried that Greg wouldn't be able to play the part because he's an enginerd but he was awesome. He totally kept the guy involved while I measured and took photos.

Their living room is identical to mine. They have the same fireplace tile (many people told me mine wasn't original, *coughDADcough*), except that they have twelve tiles across where I have ten.

Theirs

Mine

Oh, looky here. They have half as much dining room as I do. Their dining room ends right about where my wood flooring runs out. Hmmm.

Theirs

Mine

We both have excellent taste in living room paint colors!

Into the kitchen we go. They didn't retain any of the original tile or fixtures, sadly.

Theirs

Mine. We win because we have Gatorade.

That light fixture above the sink is going SOON. So what's on the other side of that dining room wall?

A breakfast nook!

Theirs

Mine

We measured the depth of their breakfast nook, which was 78", corresponding exactly to the high point on my dining room floor.

Their house was really dilapidated and sadly had lost a lot of the original charm. They bumped out their attic, adding two bedrooms upstairs (but no bathroom). This is good food for thought, should we ever want to add on.

We also discovered in the basement that they have the original oil tank!

Their window looks into their front yard.

This is excellent news for me. I had assumed that the tank was buried on my property, which makes it a hugely expensive pain in the ass to decommission and remove. If the tank has leaked (and they always leak) they have to bring in a back hoe to remove ALL the contaminated soil. My neighbors three doors down did this and spent $15,000. $15,000 for something that doesn't even look pretty or improve the function of your house. $15,000 to basically mess up your yard.

I looked at the historical permits and theirs look the same as mine. Both are labeled as underground yard units.

Theirs

Mine

It might explain what this random pipe in the side of my house is. Maybe where they used to fill the tank?

So, to recap, here's what I think happened. My house used to look like this in the front, with a separate dining room and breakfast nook.

They knocked down the interior wall between the dining room and the nook and brought the exterior nook wall out so it was flush with the outer wall of the dining room, creating a dining room on steroids and an exterior that looks like this.

Clear as mud? Am I crazy to think this or even care about it? Don't answer that.

I had so much fun being sneaky with Greg that I think we should quit our jobs and become grifters. Just think of how much more interesting this blog would be.