Jeff: Pick A Different Title This Time
Greetings from North Vancouver, where it hasn’t rained in something like 37 days. That is approaching (or into, not sure) record setting territory.
Of course summers are always dry in the Vancouver area, but “dry” is a relative term. Compared with our old place in California — where it generally didn’t rain at all between sometime in April or May and sometime in October or November — going a bit over a month with no rain hardly feels like a problem. But of course it is. The local plants are not built for long dry spells, and they were already stressed by the Heat Dome a couple of weeks ago. The number (and size) of forest fires in BC’s interior is huge. It’s bad out there.
Climate change is hitting hard, and this dry spell is just another example. The 40° C temperatures we saw during the Heat Dome were an even more significant case of that. I’ve heard from those who study and monitor Canadian weather that such temperatures are (or should be) a once-in-a-lifetime event. I have my doubts.
Anyway, while it has been dry, it has been reasonably comfortable lately. Cool enough that sometimes we need to close the windows, which led to yet another discovery in the house. Details below.
As with most of life lately, I spent nearly all of last week working on home improvement projects.
Last time I mentioned we had a skylight with a crack. That’s been fixed. The new skylight is installed and you’d never know it happened unless you saw the old skylight in the side yard, waiting for me to figure out what I want to do with it. I’m toying with using it in the roof of a garden shed.
Also last week I discussed the update to the power supply for the water pump in the back yard. It needed a top to hide the posts. Well, this happened:
The first photo shows what it looked like last week. In the second I’ve added a top to hide the tops of the posts. It sits at a slight angle to help it drain rain water towards the back. Sadly, I was really annoyed with the white plugs in the holes on the top of the electrical box. The third photo shows the wood block I cut to cover them and let me stop fixating on those ugly things.
So the electrical update is really done now.
This week I got going on some painting in the hallway downstairs. It’s not done yet, but…
The first photo is what you see as you enter through the front door. Instead of an ugly, bug catching wall sconce light there is a row of LED bulbs that illuminate the picture and the floor. The opening above the light shows the skylight over the kitchen.
The second photo shows Cruzer laying on the drop cloths I have down as I work the hallway. The beams you see in the top of the photo need extensive work. I don’t know the history, but I suspect they were bare wood at some point, and then were enclosed in drywall by a DIYer, or someone who had no money to pay a competent drywaller. You could see joint tape and corner beads, and the bottoms were deeply concave. They looked really bad.
Of course that part of the house is 60 years old and it’s far from perfect, but those obvious issues really bugged me. So I applied multiple layers of drywall mud to smooth things out and hide the imperfections. As of this writing they’ve been primed and will be fully painted soon. Once that is done another light (exactly like the first) will go up on the wall at the box you can see in the upper left. In the end the hallway will be much brighter than it was before, and all one colour and sheen.
You can’t tell, but both doors on the left at the end are painted the new blue, and one on the right has been removed and is in the process of being painted.
Note the fancy supports I’ve created. On the hinge side they screw into the holes for the hinge screws, and on the other side there is just one that slips into the hole for the door latch. This lets me float the door while painting the final side and avoid setting it down on anything that might damage the paint. It turns out that paint can take a surprisingly long time to fully cure, and during that time you can easily create fabric impressions or other damage that then requires fixing or repainting. These supports let me avoid that.
It was while working in that hallway though, and in particular while hanging the door to the guest bedroom and taking down the door to the library that I noted the newest issue, teased above.
If you’ll recall, last winter there had been a water leak in the heating system in the guest bedroom that made a big mess. Wet stuff has an odour, of course, and that didn’t go away until we had dried everything out thoroughly. Things seemed fine during the winter with the house closed up, but I noted a faint version of that wet stuff odour again while going in and out of that room this week.
The heating system was not the problem — I watch that all the time out of paranoia — so I looked in the tiny half bath for a possible source. Sticking my hand into the cabinet below the sink I noted a drop or two of water on the bottom of the cabinet, probably from one of the supply shut off valves. Oh great. Here we go.
That room is really tiny. Really tiny. To make it possible to get in there and look around I removed the door to the bathroom and took the doors off the sink base cabinet. Inside I found this:
You can see the water spot on the bottom of the cabinet. That’s been there for some time, and was damp, but it isn’t the only issue. Note the corrosion on the copper pipe towards the bottom of the opening in the wall. That was also damp, as was some of the insulation. And the wood below.
What isn’t shown is the stack of drawers next to the sink base. I removed the drawers and found the grey plastic pipe that goes off the right side of the opening continues down to another of those white plastic compression fittings, which is also leaking.
This has come and gone for years, I suspect. I see no signs of mould, but it’s definitely damp down there.
Because the previous repair was made by someone who had no clue what they were doing and left a mess, I am electing to hire a plumber to fix it. There is very limited room to work, and the entire thing is a shambles. The plumber will be here on Monday. In the meantime I have a fan in the room, the windows are open, and there is plastic under the drips as much as can be managed. Once the leaks are stopped we’ll keep the fan going and add a dehumidifier as well, trying to dry that entire thing out. I suspect it will take quite a while to fully dry out the wood in there.
I considered removing the vanity but it will not come out in one piece, so for now we’re going to try to save it. The plumbers think they can fix the leaks without removing it, and we’ll hope they are right about that. If not, well, we’re remodelling a bathroom. Such are the joys of home ownership.
Time to stop talking about home repair and ask an oddball question: what relates the movies Arrival and Stranger than Fiction?
And to head off anything I have not noted, the answer I’m looking for is not related to the actors or the people who made these movies.
If you have not seen these, I recommend both. While completely different, they stand up to repeated viewings and inspire thought.
I’ll put the answer in next week’s post. As with the last time I asked a question, I will award ten Internet Points to anyone who sends me the correct answer.
Enjoy the movies, and let me know what you think they have in common. Yes, you can use Google to find the answer if you want. I won’t know, or mind. Let me know what you think is going on!
Disclaimer: Internet Points are not really a thing and will not actually be awarded. But you already knew that, right?
In news that shows just how doomed humans are, I give you this:
Yes, really. A cop was convinced she was being followed by a drone that was actually the planet Jupiter. It’s amazing humanity has survived this long. Whether we get past Covid or not is still an open question, but this does not fill me with hope.
And speaking of Covid, I know cases are on the rise in the US and elsewhere largely thanks to the Delta variant, mostly in the unvaccinated. There are also some breakthrough cases in those who are vaccinated, which is to be expected, sadly. Here in BC we are seeing a slow rise in cases so far. I am trying to track the variant numbers to see how we’re really doing.
My friend Ducky has blog where she posts information about Covid. She spends a lot of time finding articles that summarize and show what is really going on in the science, among other things. If you are interested, you can find her posts here:
There are usually two posts a day, one specifically about Covid in BC and another about Covid in general. They’re short, with links to the detailed articles if you want more depth.
Here’s what she wrote yesterday about the situation in BC:
Cases are rising. It’s not just noise in the system, they really are rising. I have the sense that we are in a good space right now: case counts are low, most eligible people are double-vaccinated, and two doses of our vaccines work well against all of the variants which are circulating in BC.
But I have seen the graphs from other countries that have encountered Delta, and they are scary.
<<graph not included… follow the link above to see it>>
Some of these countries have very good vaccination rates. Malta is one of the world leaders in vaccination rates. There is nothing that makes me think that BC or Canada is somehow special, that somehow, magically, we will escape this. I think we’ve got a week or two before all hell breaks loose. I sure hope that I’m wrong.
So I would advise you to enjoy the next week or two responsibly. If you really want to go to the movies, now is the time to do it — but I think you’d be better off keeping your mask on. Have some people over — but six or ten, not thirty. Go shopping — with a mask on. If you want to sing with some friends, do it now — preferably outside. (Singing is really dangerous.)
I agree with her completely. And I think mask wearing and restrictions on activities and/or lockdowns of some sort will come back. We see that already in various places in the US, and I suspect this is only the beginning of the next wave.
When winter arrives and we’re all cooped back up indoors, things could get much worse. Delta spreads easily, largely because those who get it have a much higher viral load than is present with other variants. And they get that heavy viral load very quickly, often before they show symptoms. The science about disease severity is perhaps still unsettled, but so far it doesn’t seem appreciably worse as far as I can tell. It still kills, though, and causes long Covid in a significant percentage of those who get it.
Protect yourself if you can. Don’t panic, but do be smart about your exposures and definitely get vaccinated if you haven’t already done so. Being vaccinated greatly reduces the chance of getting infected with it in the first place, and also reduces the severity of the disease of you do catch it. No vaccine is perfect, and Delta spreads like wildfire, but the vaccines are amazingly good. Please make sure you and your loved ones are as protected as you can be.
Finally, we have continued our habit of dining out on Wednesday evenings. This time we went for sushi and were only ones there other than a few people getting take-out. The place we went is near the SeaBus terminal in North Vancouver, and we will go back, Covid willing. Wednesday nights are when to eat out if you want to avoid crowds. The local restaurants all seem nearly empty then for some reason.
Since it was nearby, we took a look at a new public art piece installed in the revamped bus terminal:
It’s lovely. The wall panels are metal, painted with a prismatic paint that creates the rainbow effect as white lights shine down on them from above. The lights dim and brighten, which causes the coloured patches to shrink & grow, adding to the feel of waves in water. We’d seen stories in the local newspapers about this work, so it was time to pay it a visit. It’s really quite impressive. Should you be in the vicinity I recommend stopping by.
That’s it this time. Stay safe and keep well.