As of this morning, we finally have a new interior shut off valve for water!

New Shut Off Valve

We started this project about 3 months ago since the old shut off valve was missing its handle and we were afraid it would leak or break if we ever needed to use it.  Instead, we wound up with a broken curb box when the city shut our water off outside and we had no water for about 3 days until we could get someone in with a mini excavator to fix it.  Since then, we’ve been a little hesitant to replace the shut off valve for fear of a repeat problem, but finally got brave enough to schedule it last week.

So, this morning, a plumber came out to replace the valve, and 45 minutes later, we had a new quarter turn shut off valve in place of the old one!  The plumber was a little concerned that the old galvanized pipe would be in a fragile enough state that it wouldn’t be possible to install the new valve, but (although the pipe is pretty rusty looking inside) there were no problems.  Now, we’re all set to replace faucets, old galvanized pipe, or whatever else we want!

We just posted our updated powder room on Rate My Space.  Check it out.

As of today, our yard is fully in bloom … here’s a picture before the deer help themselves to all the flowers:

Daffodils & Tulips By the Garage

It all started a couple weeks ago when we decided to replace the whole-house shut off valve for our water service, mostly as a precautionary measure since the current valve is old and the handle is missing.  We wanted to make sure it would be functional in case we ever needed to use it … namely, when we install a new faucet for the sink in the powder room we’ve been working to fix up.  So, we called a plumber to have the valve replaced.

In order to do the work, we needed to have the water shut off to the house.  So the city came out to locate the curb box  and verify that it would shut off water to our house to make sure everything was in place for when the plumber came to install the new shut of valve.  It took them a while to find the shut off since it’s located in the bottom of the ravine rather than somewhere near the street, but once they found it, they were able to shut off our water without any problems.  The problem came when the valve broke in the “off” position so that they weren’t able to turn it on again without replacing the curb box, which is buried about 4 feet deep.  Probably the most frustrating part of the whole thing was that this happened at about 2:30 on a Friday afternoon and we weren’t able to find anyone to come out to work on it before Monday, so we spent a weekend with no water service before a plumber showed up on Monday morning with an excavator to dig up and replace the curb box.

Installing a New Curb Box

It took the better part of the day for our plumber and the city water department to decide that they needed to shut off another valve that supplies water to our house and a neighbor’s house in order to complete the repair, but the sewer department wasn’t available to clean out that shut off for another few days.  So the plumbers were able to dig up the old curb box, tighten the nut that had caused the old valve to leak, and turn the water back on to our house (without replacing the valve) on their first visit, but it took another week for the city to get the second curb box cleaned out so the water could be turned off and our curb box could be replaced.  The crew came back a couple days ago to finally replace the shut off valve and finish the job.

As of now, we’re back to where we started, with a working curb box, but our original shut-off valve in the house.  The biggest thing we’ve learned from all of this is to never start a project like this at the end of the week.  It’s definitely a relief to have everything back in working condition, but I think we’ll wait a few weeks for the memory of this adventure to fade a bit before we tackle the project of replacing the whole house shut-off valve again.

Our house has 4 bathrooms, but the master bath was the only one anyone ever felt comfortable using.  The powder room on the main floor has a window directly in front of the toilet that’s also right next to the front door and the curtains the previous owners had up didn’t do much for privacy.  The bathroom that’s connected to the laundry room on the second floor (the one that’s supposed to be used by the occupants of the non-master bedrooms) had a door that locked, but wouldn’t latch and always stayed a little bit open.  And the bathroom on the third floor is located in a dormer with a floor-to-ceiling window right next to the toilet and nothing more than a see-through lacy shade to provide privacy.

Since we moved in to the house, we’ve slowly been making progress on making the bathrooms a little more usable.  We started by hanging a wooden blind in the main floor powder room that’s shut most of the time to provide privacy and last week, we hung a similar blind in the third floor bathroom.  A couple of days ago, we also decided to tackle the project of fixing the door to the laundry room bathroom so that it will successfully close and latch.

We figured out that the problem preventing the door from latching to start with was that the bolt was hitting the strike plate about an eighth of an inch too low.  To fix it, we unscrewed the bottom hinge for the door, placed some plastic spacers behind the hinge to build it out from the door frame a little and then screwed the hinge back in place.  It took us a couple tries to get the right thickness of spacers behind the bottom hinge, but we were eventually able to build it out so that the door was raised enough to be at the right position for latching.  We then scraped some of the excess paint off of the strike plate (the previous owner painted everything and there were big runs of dried paint that made it so that the door had to be pulled closed with some force for it to actually latch) and we now have a working door again!

The spacers we used were plastic strips that had come with some of the blinds we hung up earlier this week.  They did the job just fine, but we’ve also used cardboard in the past and it almost seems easier to work with because you don’t have to pre-drill the holes for the screws.  The screws in the bottom hinge were a little short to start with and, now that we’ve built it out with spacers, even less of them is actually holding the door to the frame, so I think we’ll pick up some longer ones the next time we’re out, but, for now, I’m so excited to have a bathroom door that shuts, latches, and locks!

I’d really like to replace the hardware on our kitchen cabinets with something a little less gold, but we took one of the handles off tonight and discovered that the door and drawer fronts are discolored where the metal plate had been behind the handles.  I’d really like to not have to use backplates with the new hardware, but I’m afraid it will look worse to see the discoloration behind the handles if we don’t put new ones on.

Anyone have any thoughts on how to make it not as noticeable without having to refinish the cabinets?

The water in our pool started to turn a little cloudy over the weekend.  After running the first set of tests, the only difference we noticed about the water was that the pH level looked a little high.  So, on Tuesday, I added some pH Minus to try to bring it back to a more acceptable range, which appears to have worked (it’s now a much more normal 7.4).  After that adjustment, all elements of the pool chemistry were within the acceptable range, but the water didn’t look any better … in fact it started getting worse.  As of yesterday, the pool had turned a nice shade of green and was so cloudy I couldn’t see the bottom drain.

Even though the chlorine level has remained higher than we normally keep it all week, I still shocked the pool two nights ago to try to kill whatever was growing in the water, but it hasn’t seemed to make a difference.  Because the chemistry of the pool water seems to be fine, we’re now thinking the cause of the problem is the our sand filter becoming “channeled” so that the water passes through it without actually being filtered.  To fix this, I backwashed until the site-glass turned clear and then started the rinse cycle, planning to let it run for a while, but only about a minute in, the small corregated pipe we’re using as a backwash hose came detatched from the filter (and wouldn’t stay attached again with all of the water pressure once it had come loose) so I had to turn it off and just start filtering again.  Even with only a minute or so of rinsing, though, it seems like the filter is starting to work a little better … the drain was at least visible by the time I got home from work tonight.

We bought a bigger diameter corrugated pipe tonight to use for backwashing so we can get that back up and running this weekend.  Hopefully after a full cycle of backwashing and rinsing, we’ll notice an even bigger improvement in the filter performance and our pool water will go back to being crystal clear.

Our pool water started to turn a little cloudy over the weekend.  It wasn’t real obvious from the surface, but it was sure noticeable from under water.  Visibility was really limited.  We started by running the filter longer than normal – left it on for the whole 3 day weekend.  And we also shocked the water up to a chlorine level of around 9 ppm thinking that would clear the pool of whatever algae might be starting to grow.  After two days, though, the chlorine level is still over 5 and the pool water is looking cloudier than it has all weekend.

We ran a full battery of tests on it last night and the only thing that appears to have changed about the water since the last time we tested it (when it was clear) is the pH level.  It’s gone up to 7.8 (from 7.6).  Most pool resources (including our test kit) list 7.8 as being on the high end of being acceptable, so it doesn’t seem like that should be the problem, but nothing else has really changed and one of the symptoms of a high pH level is that the water will start to turn cloudy.

So, I stopped at Wal-Mart tonight on my way home and bought some pH Minus to start trying to reduce the pH of the pool water.  I put in about 18 oz, which is a little less than the recommended 4oz/5,000 gallons of pool water (for our 25,000 gallon pool), but I figure it should be ok since the pH isn’t really that high.  I added it to the water a couple of hours ago and then started sweeping the bottom of the pool.  It had only been a couple of days since we’d ran the pool robot, but the bottom was completely covered in a yellowy-brown dust that made the pool water turn an interesting shade of green by the time I’d swept it all up.  I’m hoping that between stirring the dust up again to give the filter a second shot at picking it up and adding the pH minus to the water tonight, things will start to look a bit clearer tomorrow.  Guess we’ll see how it goes …

This weekend has been a good weekend for learning more about the history of our home.  We came home from work on Friday and found that the previous owners had dropped off the abstract for the house (which they hadn’t been able to locate when we bought the house last fall).  Up until now, we’ve been going just based on what the previous owner and some neighbors had been telling us about the people who had lived here before us.  It’s kind of nice to have the official record now.

The documentation goes back to the 1800’s, long before the house we live in was built, clear up through the people we bought the house from.  We’ve only skimmed through most of it, but have been really surprised at all of the detail that’s included.  One of the couples that lived here in the 70s got a divorce and all of heir divorce papers are included in the abstract.  We also figured out that the address of the house changed at some point in the 70s when some lots were sold.  We’d suspected that this might have been the case, but now we have what the address was before.  It also looks like a local company owned the house for a while in the 1930’s.  It’s a little hard to piece together the full story from the abstract, but on first review, it looks like the person who owned the house at the time owed a large sum of money to the company and the house was used as partial payment.  Now that we have some names and dates to work with, it should be easier to start doing more research from here … it will be exciting to be able to piece it all together a little better.

This afternoon, we also had a surprise visit from a woman who was the daughter of a couple that owned the house from 1975 to 1978.  She walked all around the yard and the house and told us lots of interesting things about how the house was then in comparison to how it is today.  It sounds like the basic structure has remained unchanged.  During the 3 years that her family was here, they put in the swimming pool in the back yard (apparently complete with a cabana that made the front page of the local newspaper twice as it was being transported through town to the back yard).  They also completely re-did the kitchen to the layout it had at the time that the people who lived here before us bought the house.  It sounds like she had the entire third floor as her bedroom, but it had a different layout at the time with a couple more closets and a separate bedroom & living room space.

We’re excited to find out more about our house.  With everything we’ve learned this weekend, hopefully researching more about the history of the home will be a much easier job.

Check out the cool new light we got for our pool last week!

It’s a floating, rechargeable light called the “Glow Buoy”.  It’s pretty bright and it does an ok job in our 17′ x 34′ pool, although, we think it would be better if the pool was all one depth.  Considering that we have a 5′ difference in depth between the shallow and deep ends of the pool, though, we think we’d probably need 2 to really light the pool evenly.  Regardless, though, it does a good enough job of lighting the pool and surrounding area that we’ll be able to swim after dark now … and it sure beats installing lights in the pool.