Monthly Archives: February 2018

The View

Oops!

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Tech:  “Did you pull the thermostat off the wall?”

We are outside with the HVAC technician. He has just forced our heating unit to come on (that’s a relief, it’s not dead) and is trying to determine why it was not working.

Me:  “No.” Pause. “That’s an interesting question. Do people do that often?”

Tech:  “You’d be surprised at some of the things we find.”

We have had a spell of unusually warm February weather. However, last night, it turned somewhat cooler, and the house felt cold this morning. A glance at the thermostat showed … nothing. No breakers are tripped, but the thermostat screen is blank.

The technician digs around for a while, then comes into the house to show us a section of the thermostat cable that has been chewed by some critter—a mouse, squirrel, or chipmunk most likely. The wounds were old, the bare wire corroded, and replacing that section has not fixed our problem. He thinks the wire-chewing varmints have been at work farther in than he has been able to go. He will have to come back tomorrow with a partner to help pull cable.

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After a chilly night and morning, our technician and his buddy are back. Nancy and I go about our chores as the two traipse in and out, with many trips to their trucks (yep, two technicians, two trucks). This sure is taking awhile.

We are out in the garage when they track us down with an update.

“Your electrician cut the wire. We found one end, but we don’t know where it went from there.”

“Cut the wire? How could they have done that!” Nancy explodes.

It hits me in a rush. “No, they didn’t. You did,” I answer.

Okay. That was unfair. I told her to do it.

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A little background.

One of the unsightly features of our new house was wire—yards and yards and yards of wire. Telephone wire and TV coax tacked around the exterior and poked through the walls into each room. The house was built in the ‘60s, and decades of added technologies were evident in wire under eaves, wire up and down walls, wire protruding from baseboards. The service boxes had multiple inputs and outputs. It reminded Nancy of the 1920s scene from Disney’s Carousel of Progress. We have given up landlines and cable TV, so we have been pulling down these wires with abandon. Indoors, too. Our remodeling turned up wires from defunct doorbells and security systems. Cut ‘em out!

Last week, we finally got around to fixing up the musty closet underneath the stairs. Painted, hung shelves. There was a wire running along the intersection of wall and ceiling. Nancy asked me if it was needed. Clearly it was not a power cable. “Cut it,” I said. She did. And did such a neat job of patching the hole in the ceiling that the HVAC techs could not see where the other end of that cable went. The critters that chewed on our thermostat cable were of the species Homo sapiens. They took a six foot long bite right out of that cable.

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That was a costly six feet of cable. The only consolation I can see is that we are now among the infamous stories the HVAC techs can tell. I can just imagine a future conversation:

Tech:  “Did you cut a section out of the thermostat wire?”

Homeowner:  “No. Do people do that often?”

Tech:  “You’d be surprised at some of the things we find.”

The View

Lost Memory and Removable Tape

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“It lost its memory.”

I had an early morning appointment at the dealership as the front passenger window in Nancy’s van was misbehaving. Settling in with passable coffee, I had written my morning pages and was working on the design of a miter saw station for my new shop when the service tech approached with the news. Nancy’s window had “lost its memory.”

“It happens to us all sooner or later,” I replied, getting a slightly less business-like smile in return.

My mind reeled off in several directions: How does one test a window for memory loss? (“What year is this?” “Who is president?” “What is the date of your birth?”) My diagnostic skills are still stuck in the era when I could set the timing on my 1969 Fiat Spyder with a screwdriver and a continuity tester. And How does the computing power of a 2016 Odyssey compare with that of Alan Shepard’s Mercury capsule?

In stark contrast with my own memory, that of Nancy’s window can be “refreshed.” In less than an hour, we (the car and me) were off, happily under warranty.

Last week, we finally got all our possessions out of Old House, after managing to stretch the process out for four months. As the deadline approached, and I grew increasingly concerned that it would never end, I was tempted to run up the street and warn all the neighbors, “Run! Run from all your possessions while you still can!” Just when we would think we were making headway, we would open another closet and find half a pickup load of sleeping bags, tents, and other camping stuff that our son assures us he wants and will use. Or we’d pull out of the attic several boxes of bank statements and other detritus of a business we closed almost two decades ago.

We have had several luxuries with this move. We moved just two miles. We had time to be deliberate. And we were not forced by downsizing into unloading a lot of things we were not yet ready to part with. An uncle had the opposite experience. They had decided to give up their mini-farm and move into a condo, in another state. The farm sold instantly and they had just 30 days to vacate, without a place to move to. He still wishes he’d held onto more of his tools.

Installing the handles and knobs on our new cabinet doors and drawers was an adventure. If you go into your local hardware or big box store, you will find handles whose screw spacing is a standard 3 or 4 inches. Somehow, we ended up with “none of the above.” I was struggling to measure the spacing in preparation for making a template, and finding nothing that made sense in either inches or millimeters. Fortunately, I married a practical artist. Nancy’s solution was to forego the tape measure and directly copy the hole pattern. She transferred the pattern to a piece of removable tape, rubbing the back of the handle with a graphite stick, then pressing the tape onto the back. When pulled away, the tape held the graphite, clearly showing a full scale image of the back of the handle. Then the tape was placed onto the wooden template form, and the holes drilled with the drill press.

That’s not the first time I have had to abandon my “measure and math” approach for Nancy’s “copy the pattern.” Nor the first time removable tape has come to the rescue. My father used to say, “There’s more than one way to skin a cat.” It’s a colloquialism whose origins I do not care to know, but I understand the point.