D-Day - Drywall Day that is

We are getting the garage wall and bath ceiling drywalled, so we can stop looking at gaping ceiling holes while we shower.

The drywall guy has these nifty little stilts to work on the ceiling - no piddly stepladders for him.

Ballardia Side Sewer – the Movie

We've finally done the little procedure we should have gone through back in November, and had Roto Rooter + camera film the guts of our side sewer. The camera is on the line to the left, and the little viewer off to the right shows the sewer line and simultaneously films the movie (VHS sadly).

The average life of a concrete sewer, which we have, is 50-70 years, so at 76 it appears age has caught up with us. There are 4 holes in it, one of which is enormous, and an ominous looking crack. Essentially what’s been happening is that we get “buildup” – my euphemism, not theirs – in the enormous hole, which eventually dams up the sewer line, and then we get our lovely backups.

It would appear that our sanitary facilities are less than sanitary. Is it time to carve a crescent moon on our bathroom door?

Ever wanting to know if I did anything wrong, I asked Mr Rooter if there was anything we could have done….poured their special enzyme down the drain, given up my predilection for Squeezably Soft Charmin tissue….but he says the only thing we could have done was fire up the garden hose, shove it down the cleanout and give the sewer line a weekly blast. And that would only solve the backups, not our sanitation issue.

Next activity: sewer replacement quotes. They will use the ‘pipe burst’ method, where they run PVC pipe along the previous sewer route and break apart the old sewer, then they reconnect all interconnecting drains. Roto Rooter marked the interconnecting drain locations, which they could spot using the camera , and they can see the sewer plan maps online at the Seattle DPD site.

Now, since it’s Friday night, Martin & I can curl up with popcorn & watch our sewer video. If I can find the VCR that is, it’s been awhile.

Renewing my Acquaintance with Mr. Rooter

Having removed the basement drain, it seems our next low point is the drain outside the back door. Unfortunately, we don’t actually use this door, so discovery of the problem came a little late. I will spare you the photos.

Moving Closer to Having Television

Time to start terminating some of our cable, because I’m having drywallers come in next week to drywall the bath ceiling and garage wall, and I’d like to move our cable modem to a Safe location where it won't become cemented in joint compound.




Westlake Electronic hooked me up with SNS connectors (the coax ends) and a Thomas&Betts combination coax stripper/crimper tool. HomeTech Solutions has a great site showing how to crimp.



It really was quite easy, and worked on my first try, although I had a moment of panic when the cable modem worked, but the wireless router didn’t. After an hour or so of frantic diagnostics, I realized that the cable company had given me a 1 GHz splitter. Replacing this with a 2 GHz splitter did the trick.

I've also crimped the location closest to the TV, so if we should do something drastic, like subscribe to cable,
we could actually see it.


The book Sunset Wiring Home Networks was a rather helpful resource, available of course from Amazon.com, or from the Seattle Public Library after I return it.

Finally A Garage Wall

Carpenter Jim has framed in our new garage wall, and I've put up my new Fave - JM encapsulated insulation.

Fire Door is of course from Frank's The Door Store.

The Raspberry Crop

On the back of our lot, Dorothy planted a long row of raspberries, which have not yet succumbed to my Black Thumb of Garden Death, so we have quite a Crop to use. I’ve been collecting about 4 cups/day, which is a lot of berries for two people to use without turning into a big Raspberry.

I tried making a raspberry pie, which was quite disappointing really as it just tasted like a Generic Berry Pie, rather than preserving the flavor of the raspberries. I've been bringing berries to every summer gathering, foisting them off on friends, even having my parents U-Pick. And still they keep coming.

I’ve been taught the cookie sheet trick of freezing berries – line the berries up individually, unwashed, on a cookie sheet, cover with aluminum foil, let sit overnight in the Ginormous Freezer, then remove the berries from the cookie sheet and put them in a plastic freezer bag. This way one can thaw out a few berries at a time, rather than one Unified Blob of Berries.

While We're At it, How about Television?

Since the basement is exposed, now is the easiest time to run low voltage cable and network wiring to various places within the house. We've been living with merely one coax cable line running in to the basement, which is a step up from Dorothy's existance, where there were zero coax cable lines. We do not know if she favored rabbit ears, or was simply TV-free.

I have a decided that we need 15, count ‘em, FIFTEEN outlets for network & cable. For the network/cable boxes, we figure we will run 3 cat 6 lines and 1 cable – this will give us the opportunity to have up to 2 data, 2 phone, and television from every outlet location. Excessive? Not for two techno-geeks like us!

Sadly, once I saw the materials bill, I thought otherwise – $389 for 1000 feet of Belden 1694A quad shield coax cable from Westlake Electronic, and another $429 for 2000 feet of Systimax Cat 6 cable from Accu-Tech. We actually needed closer to 3000 feet, but Martin had managed to find 1000 feet on Ebay and squirreled it away some time ago.

Why Cat 6, and not Cat 5? We are not content with a paltry 100 Mbps!

Really, although Cat 6 is a premium cost, and Cat 5 no doubt fulfills all our basic network needs, the real work here is pulling cable, so we might as well go for the best so we NEVER have to do this again.

We are setting up our central network panel and terminate cable and cat 6 in our future “utility room”. You can get off the shelf panels from Leviton, but we'd like the flexibility to use the components of our choosing, so we're going with the Sheet of Plywood option, where we will simply make our own termination panel, mounting the components to the plywood.

And here it is - just a bunch of cables at this point.