TriumphAnt

At home, we’re finally down to the finishing touches on a renovation project that began seriously about a year ago with one too many repetitions of, “Gawd, I hate the linoleum in this room!”

“This room” is an enormous family room with a picture window that looks southward over a large backyard. The linoleum has been, for years, an ever more greying surface that might once have been moderately, even attractively tinted. But we’ve only ever known it as “yuck”.

(Its yuck factor was enhanced many years ago by several deep scratches added when a dozen brave men and true from the Ottawa Fire Department dragged what felt to me – when I eventually had to move it out to the curb – like a five-ton ice cream freezer up from the basement after I had inadvertently hacked open its ammonia line in an effort to salvage its motor, promptly filling the house with fumes that were toxic enough to cause paint to blister. The justifiable “Oh you idiot!” response was magnified at the time by the presence in our house of one who was then fairly recently born, and whose infant lungs required more unflavoured oxygen than could be biologically extracted from the ammonia-rich air I had caused to circulate through our home. Hence the “Help!” call to our fire department, who were absolutely everything you want in a fire department: prompt, overwhelmingly resource-backed with four trucks, a Chief’s car, probably 30 men – all wearing breathing apparatus – and sufficiently muscled that wrestling the massive olfactory offender from basement to backyard took them all of five minutes… but I digress.)

Finally, about a year ago, we decided the linoleum had to be replaced. After a lot of “maybe this / maybe that” consideration, we settled on a hardwood surface for most of the floor, and ceramic tile for the floors in the adjacent spaces – a hallway, a closet, a two-piece bathroom and a laundry room.

The hardwood, we did ourselves. That proved to be (home handypersons take note) a valuable lesson in spending a few extra dollars in favour of convenience – in this case the convenience of a compressor-driven nailer, rather than the manual hammer-blow driven nailer that likely would have given me irreversible wrist and elbow damage, given the googol or so of nails (actually staples) I eventually drove through the tongue-and-groove of the new ¾-inch thick planks.

For the ceramic tile, we had also attended a do-it-yourself seminar on installing it and had come away thinking we probably could do it ourselves. But in the end, because it involved a lot of “fiddly bits”, including circular cuts required to accommodate a toilet, and the drain pipe under a laundry tub, we decided to have professional installers do it.

After finding a tile we liked at a price we liked a lot, we contracted with the tile seller to have the installation done by them. That’s when we learned what they do – and what they don’t do. What they do – literally – is install. Period.

What they don’t do is any of the pre-installation prep work. So we, over an especially energetic couple of weekends and about ten evenings, did all of the following on the floors of the spaces slated for tile: tore up the linoleum and the underlying layer of quarter-inch plywood; pulled out or pounded down thousands, and I do mean thousands, of staples that remained behind when the wood underlay was pried up; removed a toilet, sink pedestal, clothes washer and dryer, laundry tub, and quarter-round baseboard moulding all around the rooms in question; and we cut and nailed down maple “shoes” to hold new rails and railings for the stairs at the entrance going down into our basement.

And that was just to get ready for the tile installers. I felt like one of those characters in a Cecil B de Mille movie who enter a room in advance of the returning conqueror, strewing rose petals about in the hero’s path. “Enter, Your Esteemed Grandeloquence! Your pathway is prepared!”

Turned out to be a marvelous little guy named Nino who has been a tiler since the age of 8, when he was apprenticed to his grandfather. (Another home handyperson Rule of Thumb: If you’re going to hire someone to do tile, stone, brick, concrete, in fact any form of masonry, make sure he or she has a family name that ends in a vowel. You can’t go wrong.) Over the course of two days of highly professional work, he regaled us with stories of just how many times he had been called into someone’s home to repair the damage that would-be do-it-yourselfers had caused, in some cases more than doubling their costs.

Which recalls another digression… (Bear with me, it’s hilarious.) During the toilet and laundry tub removal, we also had to shut off the water supply to the entire house because I discovered that, apparently, it never entered even the wildest imaginings of the original builder that someone might actually some day want to replace the laundry tub. After one of the more thorough walk and crawlabouts of my basement and crawlspace that I can recall, I discovered that there was no independent shut off for the water feeding the faucets attached to the laundry tub. They are split off the pipes that feed water to the washing machine. And while the washing machine lines have faucets that shut down just fine, the lines splitting off to the laundry tub were installed with no such option.

None.

The toilet has its own water supply shut-off. As does the bathroom sink. As do similar fixtures upstairs in our kitchen (No, we don’t have a toilet in our kitchen! Wait for the end of the sentence…) and full bathroom. (Oh.)

But the absence of separate shut-off valves for the laundry tub’s faucets left me with a dilemma. Once the house water was shut off, I thought I would have no problem whatsoever hacking the laundry tub away from its connections. But of course, that still meant I had to close off those severed connections before re-enabling the flow of water through the house, if I didn’t want water gushing from the open pipes when I turned the water back on.

My first thought was that perhaps I could simply re-connect the faucet and leave it hanging off the wall over a sinkless space while the flooring was laid down. But unfortunately, removing the tub required the destruction of the faucet’s fittings, because it had clearly been installed with an eye to permanence – its joints welded or soldered – and it was not going to give up its perch without a struggle. The struggle, however, once I unlimbered the serious artillery – a pipe cutter and a hacksaw – was very short lived. The faucet lost.

But for me it was a Pyrrhic victory because I found out that I cannot solder worth a damn. Or so I thought. It turns out that soldering just has some very specific rules beyond the simple “Make it hotter than the fires of Hell” that I thought was the only requirement.

After a couple tries at capping the pipes’ open ends with a soldered copper cap, only to be rewarded with a tiny jet of spray when I re-started the water flow, I called a friend who told me the pipe being soldered had to be bone dry – inside and out – at the point where solder was being applied. And because one of them ended ultimately at the hot water tank, I was faced with the prospect of 40 odd gallons of hot water slowly trickling, drop by relentless drop, out the end of the pipe (a plumber would call it “siphoning”), even with the house water off. At that rate, the pipe would by “bone dry” in about 30 years.

Unless…

And here’s a fantastic plumber’s trick. Because the trickle is, literally, a drop by slow drop process, the solution is to jam something into the pipe, something with sufficient absorptive capacity to capture and hold the trickle while you solder, and because you’re putting a cap on the pipe using a method that is a permanent seal, obviously your pipe-stuffer is not going to be removable when you’re done. So it also has to be water-degradable and capable of swiftly breaking down inside the sealed pipe so as not to interfere with the water’s flowing to other outlets in the system (like our upstairs – where our kitchen and bathroom are located). Sound familiar? Yep – you stuff bread into the pipe.

My plumber advisor also told me (and this is the hilarious part – no, I haven’t forgotten that several-paragraphs-ago promise) of an episode where he had been replacing a hot water tank in a tony home in one of Ottawa’s wealthier communities. In response to his request for “some bread”, the homeowners produced a thick slice of a lavishly nutritious whole-grain brown seed bread that probably commanded a good $5 a loaf at a nearby gourmet bakery. They no doubt assumed he was simply feeling peckish. He didn’t hurt their feelings by actually letting them watch his successful use of the bulky slab as a pipe-drying accessory, but he did get a call about 24 hours later that not one of the home’s faucets was working.

When he returned to the house to investigate, he discovered that faucets throughout the house were equipped with aerator heads, and every single aerator head had become completely jammed with the whole grains and small seeds that were released into the water feeding system when the full-bodied bread dissolved.

Needless to say, I used Wonder Enriched White Bread. Just my luck it’ll atrophy into something like cement.

But it turns out that my repair has been so far successful. (Knock on the W-O-O-D keys.) When I re-enabled the flow at the main valve, water flowed only where it is supposed to and only when we turn on a tap or pull a flush lever down. (And this entry has taken a little longer than usual to find its way into the blog because it’s a lot more difficult to keyboard when your fingers are all crossed.)

So take that, Bob Vila!

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Crossing my mind (a short trip at the best of times)

After seeing yet another preview for an upcoming movie (“Polar Express”) produced entirely using computer animation, I wonder how much of a future remains for “movie stuntman / stuntwoman” as a career.

Granted, a lot of the movies by Dreamworks, Pixar, Disney and their brethren still feature character voices provided by actual flesh-and-blood actors, but obviously the computer-generated stunts hardly need the gymnastics or the car-flipping capabilities of highly-skilled stuntmen and women any more.

Even in movies that are largely live action (Spiderman and its son, Spiderman II, come to mind) all the stunts which require motion beyond a simple walk across the street are called forward from a hard drive instead of being staged – as they were until recently – as carefully choreographed products of the USA (United Stuntmen’s Association / United Stuntwomen’s Association).

So kids… maybe you oughta be asking your guidance counselor for contacts in a thrilling field like chartered accountancy (or given the current corporate climate, forensic accounting).

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And finally, from the “You can’t win” pile. In the wake of the US election, left-leaning chocoholics who might be looking for solace among the wares of Lindt, Toblerone, Godiva and their like recently woke up to discover that the world price of cocoa is now soaring because its principal supplier, the Ivory Coast, is presently (at this writing, that is) in the throes of a major shooting battle.

On one point of the gunfire triangle is the current government, who accidentally killed several French peacekeepers in a recent attack aimed at rebel forces. On another point of the triangle are the armed rebels and, on the third point of the triangle, French military regulars sent in by the Government of France, who promptly destroyed the Ivorian Air Force (two old Russian Sukhoi-25 jet fighters and a trio of MiL-24 “Hind” Russian combat helicopters).

Unfortunately, like the hapless policeman called to quell a vicious domestic argument, the French now find themselves under attack by forces of both the “mind your own business” Ivorian government and the “mind your own business” rebels, the latter who for good measure are also now going after the homes, businesses, property and life ‘n’ limb of any French civilians still living unsheltered in the country.

Given the uncertainty of cocoa moving around the country for a while to places like… oh, say the “departure” dock at Abidjan, it’s now going through the commodity market roof.

Sigh.

Maybe a glass of Cabernet-Sauvignon instead…

Just wait ‘til 2008!!

Dammit.