A photo of the Big Dipper reflecting in the calm waters. Surprise northern lights light up the distant sky with colors of purple and pink. The far shoreline is alight with night lights.

Sometimes you have to just enjoy the moment, regardless of the hellfire that surrounds you. May you all have a great night.

May your night be bright,
May you enjoy the moment,
Minnesota strong.

#Photography #Haiku #MinnesotaStrong

Pipe spaghetti. A view of plumbing (wildly not to code) that crosses over each other and goes in a bunch of different directions. There are valves colored in both blue and red simultaneously. As a workaround we have simply ID’d the hot water lines with painters tape. We can do better, y’all.

Next up: fixing the fuckass plumbing. The copper pipes are so old that they’ve started threatening to leak. A nonzero number of valves simply don’t close anymore. I’m redoing it in PEX. Crimped, not sharkbite. I’m also taking this opportunity to ease up on the pipe spaghetti. 🙄

Today, the Old Haus is not out to get us. Structural engineer braved the snow and came out to assess, and while yes, the house IS a little jank, none of the problems were unfixable or even overwhelmingly expensive. Good job not being a POS for once, ya bastard house. 🥹💕

This year we’ll be gutting & renovating my office and, with luck, our bedroom. But I would like that to not result in our house collapsing in on itself like a castle of playing cards in the wind. SO, time for an expert.

like the joist they cut underneath the bathroom to make room for the plumbing (you couldn’t just move the fucking toilet?? You had to cut a giant gap in the beautiful original joists?? Jesus wept.)—but we have plenty of other evidence of Shenanigans.

Next up while we finish the vapor barrier: a structural engineer. He’ll come out next week and tell us how fucked the bones are. We already know about some stuff that needs remediation—

Bare earth crawlspace with rusty HVAC accents (we’ll get to that some other time). There’s concrete foundation on one side of the picture.

A thick white barrier taped semi-neatly to the concrete interior wall of the crawlspace. Listen, it ain’t immaculate, but 20mil vapor barrier with 3m 8067 and a healthy inspection gap is good enough for government work.

At any rate, I hie’d me hence into the void. One afternoon to clear the debris, another for site prep & and so on. Today, actual install.

FWIW, every DIY guy and their dog has opinions about how stuff should be done. If you’re gonna tell me I should have done it differently, tell your dog instead.

SO WEIRD, but contractors just kept ghosting us when we tried to hire the work out….. 😂😂😂 I WONDER WHY

The crawlspace is like 18” tall and was covered in construction debris. It LOOKS like a place dreams go to die.

I’d have ghosted me, too.

So we remediate.
Lots and lots of work already done but we can talk about previous repairs some other time.

Today: the crawlspace. Vapor barrier who?? It’s open dirt down there. We’re having a radon mitigation system installed soon, but code requires a vapor barrier in there 1st.

I’ll be DIY-blogging (skeeting, whatever) the repairs & renos of our 1960whatever death trap.

To be clear: I LOVE this house.

But seriously, fuck this house, tho.

It was well loved once before (by the first owners)—and then they retired & sold it to people who had NO BUSINESS “renovating” 😬