Plumbing update...

The stain that started it all....
So in my last post, the contractor was going to remove the wall. Here's what it looks like now.


With it open, our contractor was able to investigate all of the water damage. As you can see, there's virtually no damage to the dry wall anywhere. There's a tiny little bit around the tub and there's visible water damage to the subflooring underneath the tub but that's about it. (Yes, that's our snoopy Kitty in the room as I'm taking the photos). Brendon got the fun job of staying home the day they removed the wall and didn't find any damage. The contractor then went into the bathroom and said to Brendon that it must be our "showering practices" that caused the damage; that we use the shower head wrong and as we use the bathroom, we're hosing down the walls and floors, causing enough water to accumulate on the floors that it seeps into the adjecent room and soaks the carpets. Oh, and we don't use a shower curtain because we're complete dolts and haven't learned how to shower. He said this as he was sitting on the shower curtain. Cue the irony....
Given that Brendon's bald, it's hard to understand this guy's story... that we're too dumb to shower properly and we're in the shower for so long, splashing around like a bunch of little kids at a water park, making a huge mess, when we lather rinse and repeat?? Uh-huh, and I've got a bridge in San Fran....
Anyways, the contractor left and Brendon was still pretty gobsmacked with the baloney that they were feeding us that the Manitoba school system neglected us by not offering a "how to shower class" in school. Guess all my years in school, I opted out of the useful classes, like showering and basket weaving. The contractor recommended getting a plumber to fix the leak that was coming from the faucet. See, the thing is that the faucet that sticks out of the wall to fill the tub... when you start the water to have a bath, the water comes out the faucet and sprays against the wall. Brendon demonstrated this to the contractor, even showing how when you pull the lever to make the shower work, that the spray is even stronger ... that maybe *this* might be the problem?? No no no, couldn't be a leaking faucet causing the water in the other room!! It must be our showering practices. *argh*

We called a plumber and had him come in to remove the faucet and replace it. And since the wall was already open, we had him change the taps from a hot/cold 2-tap system to a 1-dial system that we liked better. Here's the bit of piping that the plumber removed and said "Well, here's your problem!!" (ala Mythbusters...)


I may be just a doctor that doesn't know how to shower properly, but I'm pretty sure that ain`t right. After removing the faulty section and replacing everything, we have our shower back and we're using the bathroom for nearly 3 weeks without a drop of water in the spare bedroom.

I had to email the contractor and our insurance adjustor twice a week for four weeks to get an estimate from him for how much the rest of the work that 'needs to be done' will cost. He wanted, get this, $1000 to put the drywall back up, $75 to remove the toilet, $100 to remove the flooring and $500 to put new flooring down and put the toilet back. There's some other stupid fees that he's charging but to fix everything, but suffice to say, it'd be $3000, minus our $500 deductible. We decided that we don't want insurance to pay for it and that we don't want to deal with him anymore and his accusations of incompetance on our part for not following shower directions to the letter.

Now we have to get the drywall back up to make the bedroom useable. We can maybe probably find someone in the city that's able to put up 1 sheet of 4'x8' drywall for under a thousand dollars. I know that trades and skilled labour is in high demand but I seriously doubt they're charging $1000/hr now!!

Home ownership is fun!

One step at a time...

We called our insurance company about the water damage in the spare room and within days, we had a contractor (Rick) and an insurance adjustor at the house to inspect it. Rick brought out a hydrometer, which measures water content in materials and found that there's water in the subflooring underneath the vinyl floor of the bathroom. Most of the bathroom subfloor is damp. There isn't much moisture left in the subfloor of the bedroom so the mould that's growing there has been cut off from its food supply. So, the issue now isn't the mould in the bedroom, now it's the mould growing under the vinyl in the bathroom.
Our next step is to remove the wall between the bathroom and the bedroom to expose the plumbing, hire a plumber to locate and repair the leak. After that, Rick comes back to remov everything in the bedroom and bathroom, clean up the mould, and repair the damage. Best case scenerio, there isn't a lot of mould in the subfloor of the bathroom so it just needs to be dried, cleaned up and sealed before everything that was damaged gets replaced. Worst case scenerio, the entire bathroom is gutted right down to the joists and we get a new bathroom. We'll find out Monday just how bad it's going to be, and whether insurance will cover it.
*fingers crossed*

Dead ant, dead ant, d'd ant, d'd ant....

Speaking only for myself and not for Brendon, I'm not going to say that I regret buying the new house, just that there have been significantly more problems that need immediate repairs than we'd ever had in 5 years at the old house. We've just discovered we now have an ant infestation. We killed 10 last night and 3 more this morning. Two in the basement, most on the main floor and 2 in the upstairs. Big, nasty, ugly, black ants. We found four (killed three) as they were coming in under the baseboards next to the fridge so we used black pepper (non-toxic to Kitty) along the baseboards as a deterant but we're off to Rona again today to get ant traps.

Our biggest problem began about a month and a half ago when we thought Kitty was sick and had peed on the carpets. The stain never really vanished from the (sorta) white carpets despite my best efforts. A few weeks later, after we were recovering from the worst flu either of us had ever experienced (I threw up every 20 minutes for 8 hours, he had a 102.5°F fever), we noticed that the stain was 3x the size and had spread from the original spot by the door and was now about 2/3 the way along the carpet against the wall that divides the main bathroom from the computer room. We moved the furniture that was against the wall and found the carpets absolutely soaked. After cleaning it up (again), we tried to locate the source of the water: either from the roof or from the bathroom. Both times that we noticed the stain on the carpets was after long days of rain, which would lead me to suspect it's a roof issue. But the fixtures in the bathroom are loose and leak, so Brendon and his friends worked on the fixtures to try and seal the leaks. We won't know if the problem is fixed until we get another few days of downpour. Fortunately, we have an en suite so we don't have to use the main bathroom. If there is water in the carpets after it rains again, then we know it's a roof problem. And before you ask, no, we can't access the attic to inspect the roof because the only attic hatch is outside, above the 2nd floor and we don't have a ladder tall enough, or nerves strong enough, to climb up and inspect the roof from the inside.
Now that the carpets have been peeled back, we can see the water damage to the underpadding and subflooring. No matter what we have to fix, whether it's the bathroom or the roof, we also need to replace the floors before the mould gets worse and aggrevates our allergies.
List of things wrong with this house that need repairs:

• dining room window seal is broken and moist is between 2 panes of glass so it's foggy
• deck is unlevel (Brendon has pretty well fixed this using shims and a car jack to level it as best as he can)
• stairs from the deck to the backyard are rotten and falling apart
• ants
• furnace that can't heat the upstairs and
• a/c that can't cool the upstairs
• damaged carpets from previous owners dog
• damaged carpets from water leak
• questionable wiring in the garage that has blown out two light bulbs already

*sigh* I really liked this house.

1 month in!

We've nearly unpacked all the boxes. We're still missing a 4L bottle of canola oil and the little plastic circle that makes the glass plate in the microwave spin around. Admittedly, the weirdest two things to lose during the move! We can't really microwave anything that isn't perfectly balanced!! The oil can be re-bought but the plastic ring really is microwave-specific? Sucks that we may have to buy a new microwave just for a $1 piece of circular plastic!!

As the boxes are starting to disappear, our house is starting to feel like our *home*. We've started decorating and putting up pictures in all the rooms so it's nice to see our stuff again. Brendon doesn't really like "messy" everywhere, but I like having rooms full of photos. I'm trying to find a balance between tidy and cluttered. We splurged on new furniture for the living room with navy leather reclining sofa and love seat, a "server" (topless hutch) in the dining room and a new bed, all from Paliser, plus a new bbq for the deck. Woo hoo bring on summer!!

We've been in contact with the previous owners of our new house and had them over just recently to pick up some of their mail and some of their gardening stuff that only recently thawed out. Surprisingly, we haven't heard from the people that bought our house. I sure hope the people that bought our old house aren't disappointed in their purchase. We went back a few weeks ago to clean it out, and I left in tears. So many good memories at the old place!!

New home sweet home

Moving day is never easy. Moving day with a 14 year old cat that's not good with change (not that I'm any better) is even worse. We spent since mid-December packing so by the week of the move, nearly every room was floor-to-ceiling with boxes. Kitty thought we were making forts for her to explore so she was jumping like a kitten from box to box. We'd been training her to get into her travel crate with less stress than 3 years ago when she nearly killed Brendon trying to escape from his clutches for the move to the old house. I took her, her stuff, and our frozen food and headed to our new Transcona house while Brendon waited for his best friend and his older brother and the moving company we'd hired to show up. I locked Kitty in the en suite while I unpacked and cleaned other stuff then let her go into the master bedroom while I read a magazine and sat on the floor listening to the radio. Brendon kept me in the loop through text messages and let me know when they were on the way so I could return Kitty to the en suite.
The movers really motored and unpacked with both engines on full. We stayed inside with clean(-ish) feet and hauled boxes from the front door to the right rooms while the movers ran back and forth to the truck and the front door. They packed the old house, drove across the city, and unloaded in under 5 hours. We're paying them $110/hour so the faster they worked, the better for us. And because we were running the boxes around the house, the mud and grit from their shoes wasn't being tracked too much on to the carpets that I'd spent 3 hours shampooing last week!
I started getting the kitchen set up while Brendon set up the basement. Took me about 5 hours (until ~9pm) to get the kitchen unpacked and useable. We actually have fewer cupboards and less counter space than our old house, but the square footage is larger. It's just really big and open, without much room to prep anything. Neither of us like the counters (or the cupboards for that matter) so we're pricing out new counters. Depending on the price, maybe new cupboards too???

But, all in all, the move went spectacularly amazingly well. The house is beautiful and we've got most of the rooms (except for the guest room) setup and almost 100% the way we want them. There's still lots more to do, but it's starting to feel like home pretty quickly!!.nce everything's done, I'll post photos.

Battle on 2 fronts

We took possession of our new house on Friday morning after a flurry of phone calls and visits to the bank and to the lawyer's office to sign everything, including the bridge financing between our West End house and our Transcona house. Because I was performing on Friday night, we didn't head straight there after work. We'd gone over on Monday to meet with the sellers and pick up the keys and garage door opener. They weren't ready to move yet and the house was in total disarray so it seemed a lot smaller than we remembered from our last (and only other) visit in November when we bought it. However, on Saturday morning, when we'd showed up with paint brushes in hand, the house was empty and we spent about an hour running up and down all the stairs in disbelief that the house is now ours, at long last!! We'd gone to Home Depot and picked up paint to cover over the faux plaster look in the master bedroom and the orangey-yellow of the "office", a colour I particularly didn't like (But Brendon liked it). We thought we'd picked some really different colours, a deep plum for the accent wall of the master bedroom, and a mossy grey-green for the office (Behr's "Semi Sweet" and "Sage Grey"). But when we got them to our West End home, we realized we'd picked the *exact* same colours as we already have in this house. Our chocolate brown and teal master bedroom in the old house is now brown and lemon yellow in the new house. Our white and grey bathroom in the old house will now be white and grey office! Oooops!
No matter, the painting went quickly and I had another performance Saturday night at the Roller Derby bout at the Convention Centre. We did final touch up, some unpacking (mostly kitchen stuff and anything breakable) and cleaning today before rushing home to catch Canada's gold medal victory over US in hockey. Woo hoo!
Moving day is next Saturday!!!

Hiring movers

Because we're taking nearly all the appliances and March is a finicky time of year, we decided to splurge and hire movers instead of risking life and limb (and lower back) to move the stove during an ice or slush or rain storm or whatever Mother Nature will throw at us. I went online and found three moving companies that most people in Winnipeg have heard of. I contacted all three and the first one emailed back immediately with a quote of $550 for our house. Sight unseen but based on the square footage and moving date. Further investigation into this moving company revealed that they have millions of dollars in unsettled lawsuits from across Canada from disgruntled clients, and have their Better Business Bureau title revoked because of the sheer number of complaints. And people from work have had terrible experiences with them trying to rip them off, demanding cash payments before unloading their stuff, destroying their personal items etc. Okay, so they're out.
Next two companies came to the house wearing company uniforms, gave us their business cards, discussed insurance options, packing options, and had a checklist to mark off what all we have to move. Their quotes came in within $50 of each other, nearly $800-ish. Moving company #2 has moved many of our friends and co-workers so they have a better word-of-mouth from people we trust.
Company number four is where things got uncomfortably weird. They put a mailer in our mail box and I figured for the sake of interest, maybe a smaller company would be cheaper and just as good. Well, not so much. I emailed back and forth with the boss (Let's call him W) to arrange a time for him to come to the house. That time comes and someone shows up at the back of the house. His name starts with a G, not W. And he doesn't have a company jacket, or anything at all to indicate which company he's with. He does, however, have Gov't of Canada business cards (which all look the same so we both instantly recognized that he's a fed, not a mover. He explained that this is a side job, which we didn't buy. No one, especially not a fed, chooses to move people's furniture on a weekend for kicks??). He brought a notepad, just a standard Staples 8x10 notepad and wrote down a list of everything we owned. He started asking really weird questions like "how old is that laptop? Wht's the value of that guitar? Do you have any other electronics aside from what's out? Those bikes look pretty expensive..." AWKWARD!! We couldn't wait for him to leave, and once he did, we both realized that he never asked when we were going to move. Seems like an obvious question to ask, you know, to make scheduling easier?? We're still convinced that G's going to rob us when we're at work. Either way, they came in a over $900 so aside from it being completely unprofessional and creepy, they were too expensive.