Day of the Machines

What's the difference between a tool and a machine?

A tool is reliably compliant whereas a machine is just waiting to turn on you.

We're in the middle of some weather, yard prone to flooding, bought trash pump to keep ahead of the rain.

Before the deluge, yard already saturated with this week's steady pour. And more is coming.

Will Trashy the trash pump help, or will more water instantly well up to replace what gets pumped out? Running a gas engine to alter the natural order feels perverse and I hope we can evolve a more natural, passive drainage solution. But this is damage control mode to keep water away from the house, so I sold my soul to The Machines.

And it didn't stop there! Laundry crisis imminent, hooking up washer and dryer was a priority. I knew the electrical outlets worked, but was the drainpipe still connected? Would the leaky old faucet valves fail? Laundry vent combust? Will the Whirlpools we got free off craigslist even work? Listen for yourself:

Actually, it did work, even if it sounded fit to throw a rod. Maybe I'll become a 10-minute expert on washing machine repair next.

 
This may be a funky legacy setup, but it beats driving half an hour to the nearest laundromat.

...I'm not the only ghost in the machine.


These mousers toyed with their kill until we lost track of it.
It ended tangled up in our dirty clothes. Sorry, mousey!

Comments

New comments are not allowed.

Popular posts from this blog

You Otter Slow Down

Image
Way back at the end of April, I was up on the roof patching a leak when our resident river otter waddled through the side yard and across the road to Hood Canal. Not sure what it does in our backyard, but it's pretty boggy back there so it's not too surprising and we saw them come through at least three times this spring. The posted speed limit at this bend in North Shore Road is 20 mph but I see people routinely doing double that, so I vowed to make an OTTER XING sign to hopefully improve their chances of reaching the other side. I thought it would be quick and easy, but the scrap plywood I used was pretty rough, so I used a whole container of wood filler to smooth it out. It took a couple of passes--fill, sand, repeat. I was hoping to find reflective paint, but this off-the-shelf oil-based yellow enamel seemed close enough. I bought gloss sunburst yellow and flat black to enhance the contrast. Enamel is sticky and it took a while to get even coverage, applied with a foam b
Read more

Trim Test

Image
After spending most of the past two weeks replacing inefficient aluminum windows and doing a lot of shuffling and reorganizing of materials to make space, today I shifted focus indoors to start getting a sense of what things might look like when we finally get around to finishes. Because so much of what we're doing at this stage is basic structural improvement, we've been resigned to living with the shoddy unfinished drywall look of a remodel that was abandoned midstream. But because we have guests coming, we thought it would be nice to tidy up the west-facing sitting room that's adjacent to the kitchen. The dangling cutout to the left of the heater was particularly irksome both as eyesore and source of drafts, so I started the day by taping and mudding it as well as the seams and corners of that wall (but not along the ceiling as that will be vaulted later). I also finally got around to cleaning up the rough edge from when I tore up the waterdamaged linoleum floor. I used
Read more

All Aboard!

Image
Twenty-five years before The Housegleaners blog--and well before blogs even existed--I started photo journaling online with Picture of the Day , which continues to grow and creep forward like a glacier with the weight of half a lifetime behind it. Things were on hold here for a week or so as I laid in bed getting over My First Covid ™️ . Right before that happened, I closed the book on this trilogy, an epic saga of discovery, disappointment, and ultimate triumph. Soon to be a major motion picture!   (((Click images to visit original pages with extra photo links; best viewed on laptop.)))  
Read more