Dead bats and feminism

My project for today was fixing the ductwork for our bathroom ventilation fan. As I posted last week, our original "good enough" installation resulted in a dead bat inside the fan housing.

I thought I was prepared and had everything in the attic I needed to complete the job. But I kept making minimal progress before having to climb out the access hatch and wander around the house looking for tools. I didn't know where any of the tools were, because I think of them as "my husband's tools," and therefore not my responsibility.

During one of these expeditions, a recruiter calls me. Good, I think, another person helping to end my unemployment. "Well," he says, "the job I'm looking at doesn't accept women."

All tools finally collected, I really get down to work in the attic. And discover that self-tapping sheet metal screws require significant assistance to "self-tap." I kept having to take breaks to pant. I wished a man were there to do that part for me.

Near the end of the project, to let me work at a more comfortable angle, I detached the ductwork from the fan. Inside were four dead bats, furry and dessicated-looking. I pondered them for a while. Slowly, it dawned on me that they would have been unable to escape from the vertical portion. It was too small for them to fly out of. It was too large for them to chimney up, and of course too smooth for their claws to get any purchase. Becoming trapped while exploring the ductwork, they must have died of thirst inside it.

With that grim image in my mind, I descended from the attic once more, taking the duct with the bats down with me. I "buried" them in my compost pile, then finished the work that would save future bats from sharing their fate.

Later, I went to my radiation treatment. The techs asked what I had done that day, and I told them I'd fixed the exhaust ducting for my bathroom fan, and found dead bats during my work. "Wow, you must be really handy!" said one woman. The other woman expressed fear of creatures in her attic and commented, "I think my home inspector took pictures of my attic. That's the closest I'll ever get to going inside it!" My doing home repairs and being unafraid of creatures in the attic was not anything they could relate to.

Maybe they would have responded the same way to a man telling that story. But my own feelings of thinking of our tools as "my husband's" and wishing for a "strong man" during the project make me wonder if their reaction was specific to a woman doing these things. After all, as the recruiter reminded me (he was looking to fill a military position), we still live in a world where our gender determines what society expects us to do.

I guess I'll keep working on my own attitude, and trying to be an example of change. One dead bat at a time.

7 Quick Takes (home improvement edition)

--- 1 ---

Jen at Conversion Diary generously hosts "7 Quick Takes Friday". This is my second entry; my first "quick takes" post was a lymphoma edition.

--- 2 ---

Last weekend, we investigated the broken exhaust fan in our bathroom. Once we had taken apart the heat lamp assembly, we found a dead bat in the fan housing. After putting everything back together sans bat, the fan works beautifully.

--- 3 ---

Over the past five months, a contractor has been working on remodeling our house. They were here everyday at first, but for the finishing touches sometimes weeks have gone by with nothing more done.

The electricians worked all day Monday. And now the contractor's work is all done! We're doing some more work ourselves, but it's exciting to have passed this major milestone.

--- 4 ---

Another sign of progress in our house is that all our pictures are back up. The construction pounding had literally made them fall off the walls.

--- 5 ---

Through our remodel, I learned something new about contractors: gutter installation is a specialized trade.

As electricians work only with wiring and plumbers only with pipes, gutter installers only work with gutters. I'm not sure if this impresses me with the size of the construction industry (that people can make a living working with such a small building part) or with the importance of gutters. Maybe a little of both.

--- 6 ---

Recently, my husband prepared to replace a broken lamp socket. I asked, "Do you want me to come with you for moral support?"

"Of course," he replied. "Just think of the immoral work I would do without you."

--- 7 ---

Home improvement is a rewarding way to spend one's time. Completed jobs often provide a sense of satisfaction that lasts for months or years. I feel lucky to have a home I can improve; I hope I can continue to work on it for many more years!

Discovering light

About a year ago, the light in one of our house's closets stopped working. There seemed to be a problem with the socket. We never got around to fixing it, seemingly content with fumbling around in the dark when we needed something out of it.

At the end of last week, electricians came to our house to activate the wiring in our new living room. In what seems unlikely to be coincidence, this closet light now works again.

Upon discovering this, my partner and I gazed into the lit closet. "Hey, we have an iron!" I said. He says, "Are those my tennis shoes? I didn't know I had tennis shoes!"

It's like Christmas in July.

Patchwork of color

Most of the rooms in our house are currently off-white. We'd like to repaint them all with somewhat brighter colors; it makes sense to start with our new room.

My husband and I discussed paint chips and agreed on a color. The painters came, and now our new room is the color we agreed on. Neither one of us is completely happy with it.

We don't agree which direction to move, though, so we've bought a couple of samples and are doing test patches.

I think one of these colors will do quite nicely.

Remodeling excitement

Our new vinyl siding is going up. We liked the color of our house, and matched it as closely to our old siding as we could. It does mean no "new house color" excitement. But it's nice to see the insulation being added to our house, and to know we won't have any future need for paint.

Except for the siding, our porch is finished. We've had years of mild fear that our porch would sink into the ground and take part of the house with it. Now, it's obviously still a construction zone, but we have a structurally sound porch!


I haven't taken any pictures, but the drywall is up in our south living room, too. It not only makes it look more like a room than it did at my last update, it stopped all the off-dusting from the cellulose insulation. Ah, clear air!

I had written in that update that our roof was finished, complete with removal of our badly-damaged gutters. I got ahead of myself, though: the gutters have not yet been replaced. And our basement is suffering. The damp areas in this photograph? This weekend had a half inch of standing water.

It's not dampening our excitement over the progress, though. What an exciting summer.

Double hung

As part of our remodeling, we've had most of the windows in our house replaced. Our reasons for replacing them were typical and not very interesting: to reduce heat loss and to make cleaning the outside of the windows easier.

What I didn't expect to appreciate with the new windows was their being double-hung. Our old windows, while all completely operable (surprising considering their age), had their top sashes painted shut. With the new ones, the top sashes work.

Since our downstairs rooms are works in progress, we don't sit around in them at all. When we're in those rooms, we're standing. Opening the bottom sash blocks the eye-level view from a standing height. Opening the top sash (newly possibly with the new windows) makes the outside more visible from a standing height. I'm finding it very nice; it's like the icing on the cake of these beautiful days we've been having.

So, hurray for double-hung windows.

We have a roof!

Well, OK, the roof on our south living room was up two weeks ago. But I just now got around to posting the pictures, so here they are:

In the lower picture, the sunny spot to the left is our new back door (we won't have to go through the kitchen to get to the back yard!). The middle area will house a woodburning stove, and the room to the right is a competitor for world's smallest 3/4 bath.

Our porch rebuild is also still in the framing stage:


And we have a bay window in the kitchen:

I had the azalea (in back of the photo) for not quite three months before I killed it. Let me recommend the cyclamen (the one with flowers) to fellow brown-thumbs, though: it has managed to not only survive my ministrations the past five years, but bloom through them.

Back to the topic of roofs: our contractor has now fixed the damage from a tree falling on our house last summer (broken eaves, mangled gutters, damaged shingles). Since it rained all day yesterday, I was very appreciative of having gutters that worked.

I'm quite happy with how far our contractor has come in the six weeks they've been working. Maybe six more weeks and they'll be done? I guess I'll just have to wait and see!

Dancing floor

For nearly three weeks, the door from our dining room has opened onto a three foot drop. Yesterday, the floor of what will be our new living room was installed. Excited that there was something solid outside the dining room door, I opened the door and walked out shortly after getting home. "Congratulations on your new dancing floor," says our carpenter.

Foundation

The living room at the back of our house was not part of the original, 90-year old house. First, there was a cistern there. Then a back porch half the width of the house. And later, a living room spanning the entire width of the house. Only, the roof was at a much shallower angle than the rest of the house, and leaked. The previous owner (one of the daughters of the family that had the house built) was elderly and just let it leak, so there's a lot of water damage in that room. The previous owner's sister arranged for the house to be re-roofed before we bought it - but it still leaks there.

We have had that room torn off, and are rebuilding it with a flat roof (and the special membranes that involves) rather than attempt fix a shallow sloping roof that hasn't worked in decades. And while we're at it, we're adding an extra 200 square feet. As of Friday, the foundations are done:

The wall running halfway through the center is the foundations of the old room - beyond that is the new space we're adding. Our contractor demolished half of the old wall before realizing they didn't need to do that.

The progress so far has been really exciting. I'm sure the progress this next week will be even more so, as that room starts to take shape.

Demolition

Monday, a contractor started working on our house. Our south living room has roof/water issues, and while fixing those we're expanding the room. Currently, the south wall of the house is gone, along with the floor of that room.

Our porch has no foundation, and has sunk over the 80-year life of the house. At some point, the sinking porch would pull down on the roof enough to damage the rest of the house. So the front porch is now torn off, in preparation for foundations and a rebuild.

About half of our new windows are installed. I was worried I'd miss the old wood windows with the weights, but I've found myself pretty excited with the new ones.

We wanted to do major work on this house from the time we bought it four years ago. Talking and planning for so long, and now it's actually happening. I'm almost giddy.

Shingle mystery

Last Wednesday, I came home from work and found a paper laying in my yard. I went over to pick it up, and found that it was a piece of a business check, the kind that come in three-ring binders. Looking around for a clue to where it came from, I see a shingle in front of my house.

A shingle and a business check in my yard? I think I know where these came from. I walk toward the shingle, craning my neck a little to look at my neighbor's house. I was right: there's no tarp on his roof. The damage from a storm in July was repaired.

Our neighbor taking so long on the repair had made us feel better about taking a long time. We recently hired a contractor to do some structural work and remodeling in addition to fixing our eaves and gutters; most of the work probably won't start until spring. We'll be the last ones by far in our neighborhood to take care of damage from that storm. The neighbor actually had a hole in his roof, though, so I'm glad he got it fixed before winter set in. It's good to be prepared for winter.

Not a ghost

About a month ago, I started hearing doors slamming and branches cracking while I was sitting inside my house. When I was in the yard, I'd hear crack! bam! thunk! It never got to the point of needing an umbrella, but the thought definitely crossed my mind.

My sidewalks and driveway and yard are covered in acorns. Walking out to my car I go "crunch, crunch, crunch". It's a novel experience for me. Last year, we had a late frost, and no acorns. The year before that, we had a drought, and few acorns. Two years ago, we had a lot of acorns... but nothing like this.

I'd like to try making flour out of them. I don't feel like I have time now, and was feeling conflicted for not prioritizing that: I may not have the opportunity to make acorn flour for many more years. Then I noticed something surprising: most of the fallen acorns have already sprouted! Weird wet fall weather... it does mean they're unlikely to be useful for flour, though.

Even absent acorn flour, the whole oak experience this spring and fall has been fascinating. (At least, when I wasn't flustered by the stunningly loud sounds of nuts ricocheting off our house and vehicles.) It's so neat and I am so thankful to live next to this oak tree.

A flying trespasser

My partner woke me up at 11 o'clock last night to let me know there was a bat in our house. "I didn't scream this time," he reported to me.

So we're going through our house, him holding a towel and closing doors behind us, me trying to open the windows of the rooms the bat has flown into. After opening one of these windows, I found my face inches from a quarter-sized peach-colored spider with a web that filled the whole window frame. Yikes.

Now, our house is 90 years old. All the windows are original, and amazingly, they all open. Only on one window have the ropes even broken. We opened the weight pockets to repair the ropes, and never got around to closing them.

So of course, the bat lands on the one window in the house with open weight pockets, and crawls right inside. It was probably a very comforting place to hide from people chasing it with towels and turning on bright lights everywhere it flew.

We cleared the window of the spider web (the spider had scurried off, fortunately), and then taped some clear plastic sheeting over the inside of the open window. Hopefully, sometime last night, the bat crawled out of the weight pocket and flew outside.

The bat was small and furry and completely non-aggressive. And it was neat to see how it could crawl using its wings; they're not like bird wings that are useful only for flying. The other time we found a bat in our house (3 years ago), it used its wings to cling to a 2x4 while I carried it outside. But I would have preferred to only experience that cuteness in a zoo, and not in my house.

"That's a really horny oak tree."

"What is it, 150 years old?" asks my partner.

I had just returned from visiting family. He was explaining why my car and driveway were covered in brown, stringy flowers: they had fallen from the massive oak tree near our house.

Our weather has been more plant-friendly than usual this spring, and I've noticed many plants being especially lush. It looks like this oak tree decided to join in the fun. When the acorns start falling, we might need umbrellas to leave our house.

Is it weird that I think that would be really cool?

Separating treads

The staircase in my house is hardwood. The treads on the staircase are coming apart, and some have gaps up to 1/8" wide.

These gaps are not noticeable during the day. But at night, any light in the basement shines right through. A convenient reminder that light needs turned out when we head upstairs for bed.

One could consider it an energy-saving feature. It may not completely compensate for having one room of the house with holes to the outside, but every little bit counts.