Tuesday, February 4, 2014

Kitchen Project. Day 13.

Day 13.  Well, Day 7 was not particularly impressively good**, and Day 13 (today) was not particularly impressively bad.

I didn't take any photos today.  I'm just tired.  My back went out after I went to bed last night (yes, after I cuddled down beneath the quilts).  I spent from 11:00 p.m. to 2:44 a.m. in blinding pain, but it was the dark of night, so I guess it didn't matter that much.  Finally, at 2:44 poor Shawn got up and brought me 600 mg of Advil, and after that I slept until 6:45.

If you were to look at my kitchen today, it wouldn't look that different from yesterday.  There is more sub-flooring down on the floor, and much of the sub-flooring is covered with some sort of brown paper, taped down with blue tape.  In the corner with the bay window, all the appliances stand clustered, or at least the washing machine and the refrigerator.  Perhaps the dryer is in the garage.  The laundry room is empty now, and its floor is partially covered with sub-flooring as well.

It is progress.  It just feels slow, and photographically uninteresting, which probably means that it is more-boring-than-tap-water to read about.

We are in the midst of quite a winter storm, with 6-12 inches of snow predicted, and what looks like 5 inches already fallen, and the state has already used up its stores of road salt for the year.  This may mean that nobody will be able to make it to the work site tomorrow, and it probably means that the workers will be called out on emergencies on Thursday and Friday once the storm passes.  We had chicken patties in the toaster oven tonight, and they were fine, plenty filling.

The fragment of something more interesting to say flitted through my mind and escaped, dissolved, evaporated.***

So I will end for the day and hope for more dramatic progress to report soon.




** Actually, in retrospect, Day 7 was probably our hardest day so far.  It was tremendously loud, long and dirty, dirty, dirty.  I am still finding clumps of pink fiberglass insulation hither and yon, despite cleaning efforts that may have prolapsed all my remaining internal organs.  If it hadn't been for the lights they put into my bathroom, that day would surely have driven me over the brink.

*** Oh dear.  I remembered.  Today, Shawn noticed that our laundry room heat vent was not putting forth any heat.  Upon close inspection, he discovered that the heat duct that runs from the furnace through the basement crawlspace to the laundry room is full of water, blocking the flow of warm air.   Apparently on the day of the flood, a bunch of water ran down the heat vent into the duct, and stayed there.  It's bowed down, curved like a drain pipe with a trap.  We have to figure out how to get the water out, but we have to be able to do it with what we have, because we can't drive to a hardware store in this weather.  It's pretty low, so it's going to be hard to get gravity on our side.  Ideas appreciated. 

2 comments:

AmyC65 said...

Can you puncture/drill a small hole in the duct then patch it with HVAC tape? Or, just leave the small hole there for a few days? it's just warm air, after all, leaking out.

Ruth said...

What do you think would be a good instrument to use for making the hole? We are concerned that the rush of water might expand the hole and result in a wet mess in the crawl space.