Crazy House Things

Yesterday, my parents drove down from an hour away to come help do Crazy House Things. Because, well, I have to be out of my apartment by May 1st, so this is going to be the season of crazy house things. 

And by that, I mostly mean me running around my apartment like a lunatic, shouting "Holy buttmonkeys, Batman! WHY DIDN'T I PACK THESE BOXES WHEN I BOUGHT THE HOUSE SIX MONTHS AGO?!?". And then remembering that because of how long the renovations have taken, that would have meant having virtually everything we own in boxes. For six months. While living out of suitcases and frantically unpacking already packed boxes every time one of us went, "Where did that sweater go?"

In the process of doing Crazy House Things from approximately 10:00AM 'til 6:30 PM, I have discovered the following:

#1 - My mom totally can, and will, move boxes if they're light enough and if I make enough whiny facial expressions at her. This came as quite the surprise, given the fact that my family, my friends, and my college roommates have all made jokes about my mother "supervising" moving efforts from the time I was twelve on. And by supervising, I generally mean reading the newspaper on the couch while making comments about where things should go and why everyone else was being so short-tempered and cranky. This habit of my mom's has become the source of many family "lulz", or so I'm told the kids are calling it these days. She even volunteered to take a day off of work to do it. Thanks, Mom! That was totally awesome. <3 <3, even if you never read this. 

#2 - I am sorely out of shape, as evidenced by the fact that I am ridiculously, well... sore. In places I didn't think I even had muscles, let alone used. Hip muscles?! Since when do I have those? And why do they hurt so much?!

#3 - Measuring before buying is generally a good idea, or so I discovered after my dad convinced me to buy house numbers. We brought the plaque back to the house and it turns out, it doesn't fit. This may result in hanging the plaque in an unconventional spot or, y'know, just returning it for something smaller, provided we didn't cram the receipt in a funny place that will never again see the light of day. Whoops.

#4 - With a big thanks to Ray at the Home Depot in Broomall, I am hereby advising anyone having keys made to take one new, fresh set that hasn't been worn down yet and set it aside somewhere safe in your house. Don't ever use these keys. Ever. Keep them as the master set, which you use to make all your other copies. Otherwise, as your keys wear down over time, you'll end up making copies of worn down copies and eventually, they just won't work in your door anymore. That seems like such a ridiculously easy, common-sense thing to do! But it turns out that common sense isn't very common. 

#5 - After being locked out of the garage because the contractor left the wrong set of keys for the new door, we had to call him up and have him swing by with the right ones. This was so that my dad could take the old, rusted metal shelves left by the previous owner to the scrapyard using his pickup truck, where they will be recycled and my father will receive monies for his efforts. Because recycling is awesome. And so are monies. We like both. The good news about this is not just recycling and monies, but also the fact that I now have substantially more space in a much, much cleaner garage. The bad news? 

While we were in there, we noticed that not only can we not find the switch for the overhead light in the garage, but that the plumbing stack is leaking. Again. Which means that we no longer have functional plumbing, until the coupling is sealed.  And this is after I dropped $285 on having a plumber come out to the house four times to clear out the dried up crud clogging the lines, partly from them sitting unused for two years and partly - we suspect - from the subcontractors washing junky stuff like grout and sheet rock crumblings down my pipes. (After all, dried up crud in your pipes isn't usually a nice, bright, clean white.)

This is so totally me right now:

Repairing the coupling shouldn't be a big deal. It's essentially just the part of the plumbing stack where the PVC piping put into place by my contractor meets the old metal piping, which I believe was cast iron, that goes underneath the concrete floor of the garage and down to the sewer line. It should be quick fix, with the water shut off long enough to put a better coupling, like a Fernco coupling, into place and making sure that it seals. 

For those of you that don't know, a coupling is basically just a short length of tube that connects two pieces of piping together. In the case of plumbing stacks, they usually have metal bands that look kind of like belts around them and look like this, as taken directly from the Fernco website:

Depending what type of piping you're using, dielectric piping might be needed to connect pipes made of two different metals in order to prevent corrosion. There's a long and complicated physics explanation about this and atomic properties, ionization, etc., but to make a long story short? Not using them will junk-up your pipes and bad things can happen. Fortunately, that's not the issue here.

The issue here is that this is one more thing on the giant list of stuff that needs to be done by April 24th, which is nine days from now. The date has nothing to do with my move, so much as the fact that we closed on the house on October 25th and the 203K program only allows six months for construction. After that? Well, it may just be a matter of filing for an extension, which we've already done since my original completion date was December 31st, or... we might be totally screwed. I don't know. I really don't want to find out. So I reiterate: I am definitely a fat, angry, finger-flipping monkey right now. 

...Can I please just have my functioning plumbing back? It's only been (almost) six months!

Did I mention six months?!?