Warming the House.

Tomorrow (or later today, rather) is our housewarming party! I've been baking and cooking for the past couple of hours to get a head start on the morning. Really looking forward to hanging out with some people outside of work. Sounds like we are going to have around 30-40 people! I hope it's nice so we can go outside too...

In preparation for the party I did a bit more with the outside of the house. The front porch really needed some sprucing up, so I tried my hand at making some planters. I found this pretty hard as I was going into it with no idea what to do. I asked a woman at Lowe's for some suggestions and she started rattling off garden jargon and plant names and I had no idea what she was talking about. I pieced some things together and all in all I think they look pretty cute. I'm not sure if they will survive, but at least they will look okay for tomorrow.







I got a couple of great gifts from Jackie in the mail yesterday, one of which was this awesome switch cover that matches the framed poster we have in the living room. Thanks Jacks!



Last, but not least, I put the finishing touches on our master bathroom with another piece of artwork and some new colored glass bottles for the window in the shower.





Finally got the plumbers back over here, after a week of battling with them on the timing of it. They will only service homes between 8:30 and 10:30 M-F. They would not budge on that, and I refuse (and am not able) to take time off from work to meet with them. Finally the builder sent their building supervisor to the house to meet them and he locked up when they were done. Apparently the replaced the upstairs toilet, but did nothing about the valve. They swear to me that there is nothing wrong with it and that I shouldn't have any more problems. It's an exhausting story to tell, but the bottom line is that I have a feeling we're going to have a problem again. All I can do is wait for it to happen and call again. Perhaps this time I'll have to pull out some Teddy Baron (my grandfather who was notorious for sticking it to the man) attitude. For now the plan is to have everyone at the party use the downstairs toilet so the plumbers have a sweet surprise waiting for them when the go to check the valve next time...

Stay tuned for party pictures!

The Plumbing Fiasco 2007

The fam arrived in town safely Friday night. This brought the population in the household up to 6 adults, one toddler, two cats, and an odd looking dog. We ate pizza. We laughed. We slept. We showered. We went on adventures. Rinse and repeat. On Sunday morning, my father noticed that the toilet in the half bath downstairs was clogged. He spent quite a bit of time and energy trying to unclog it with the plunger, to no avail. As he was plunging, I noticed an odd gurgling in the kitchen sink, suggesting the problem may not be at the toilet itself. As I ran water in the kitchen sink, the toilet began overflowing. We now knew that a trip to Lowe's was in order. We got some draino and a snake and my dad got to work. After a trip to the park to let the draino take effect, it became quite obvious that we had a bigger problem on our hands. My dad checked out my pictures from when the house was built and was able to figure out where all of the plumbing ran. We have a sewer access point in the yard, but when we went to take off the "hand tighten only" cap, we found that it had been tightened way too much with some sort of fabricated tool. My dad tried everything he could think of to try to get that cap off, but just couldn't budge it. He even took another trip to Lowe's and bought some special tools, but it was on there for keeps. While at Lowe's he found the exact cap and piping he was trying to loosen. He bought it, knowing he was going to have to break the cap open to get to the root of our problem. He did just that and found that when the plumbers had put that cap on, they hadn't put it on correctly and the back flow valve which should be positioned just so was laying all haphazardly in the middle of the pipe--causing a major obstruction and back up of all the downstairs drainage. It appears it had been that way since they did the plumbing on the house, so everything that had been flushed or put down the drains downstairs since we moved in was backed up along the pipe. I'll spare you the gory details, but let's just say that my father rocks and we have some hilarious pictures and inside jokes from the incident. Once he removed the obstruction, everything was working fine again. Of course, I was an emotional wreck the entire time thinking that our plumbing in this brand new house was shot. I called the builders first thing Monday morning and they sent the plumbers our right away. He spent most of his time trying to get that cap off, and ended up having to use a hacksaw. It turns out that they do have a fabricated tool they use to unscrew these caps, but must be using it to tighten them too, and someone got crazy with it. Since the toilet downstairs had been overflowing he had to move that and make sure the floors were okay beneath it. Then he put a new wax seal on and re-caulked it for us. Everything has been working fine since then and I guess the good news is that Ted and I now understand our plumbing system better than we ever thought we would! Anyway, a special thanks to my father for working his butt off on Sunday, and for the rest of the family for cheering him on! I'm hoping that's the only plumbing disaster we'll run into...this year.

Stay tuned for "Plumbing Fiasco 2007: We're all gummed up."

The story in full will be coming soon...