Michelle’s Home for Wayward Women: Adventures in home ownership
By: Michelle Paquette
Tags: Portland, Homeownership, Gay Marriage, Old House Renovation, Home Improvement

Michelle’s Home for Wayward Women: Adventures in home ownership

Laurie, her sister, and I are all living in a “new” 43 year old house in the Portland area. We bought the house in the summer of 2020, an “As-is” sale from an estate that gave us a great price for a home in a lovely neighborhood. We saw the home as a structure with great potential that we could craft into a “forever home.”

We had some definite criteria that a home for us would need to meet. First, it had to have a bedroom, bath, kitchen and other living spaces on the ground floor, both to support Laurie’s sister and to let us eventually age in place even if we could no longer handle stairs. Second, it needed an enclosed garage, rather than a carport. Third, we wanted to be free of arbitrary and irritating homeowner association regulations. Finally, we wanted some space around the home, for noise, privacy, and to give Laurie her important gardening space.

This home met our criteria, if we were willing to do just a little work. There was no downstairs bedroom or full bath, but there was a den/office space that backed onto a laundry room and half bath. A bit of work with a tape measure and a little sketching convinced us that we could rework the laundry, half-bath, and a closet into a more compact laundry and a full bath, with the den converted to a nice bedroom.

We immediately put in a bid on the home, and were delighted when the bid was accepted and we closed on the house a few weeks later. Our immediate goal now was to find a contractor in mid-pandemic and start a bit of remodeling. At the same time, because remodeling isn’t stressful enough, we would be getting married, moving my condo contents to the new house, and selling my condo in the San Francisco region.

Fortunately, we had secure housing in the form of Laurie’s old three bedroom apartment about a mile from the house, so we would have a safe place to stay while the remodeling project rolled ahead. We interviewed and discussed changes with several contractors, and settled on one, with plans drawn up to rebuild one end of the first floor to give us the desired bath and bedroom.

Meanwhile, we went ahead with our moving plans, and in three trips, moved most of my condo contents in the back of Laurie’s truck to the garage of the new home. We developed some serious road warrior skills, driving the 600 miles between homes in 10–11 hours. Laurie’s awesome Tetris-honed skills in packing the truck resulted in our moving all this stuff with no damage or lost items. Oh, and we even managed to sneak in some wedding planning en route.

We were married on October 3, 2020 in a ceremony held in the Mt. Diablo Unitarian Universalist Church Sancturary, with a total of 8 people including ourselves present. Marriage in the time of COVID-19 is a strange experience. Everyone was masked, and maintaining social distancing. Contact zones were established for each small social bubble, to ensure no physical contacts outside of very specific controlled items occurred.

We were blessed to have Rev. Leslie Takahashi as our officiant, as well as our coordinator and author of much of our service. We adapted a bit of the text for our needs, and in recognition of the pandemic denying many of our friends the ability to be present, we added a section to recognize those absent from physical presence.

We were honored to have our fellow UU and singer-songwriter Laura Zucker present to perform three of her songs that felt extraordinarily appropriate for Laurie and I. Visit her website at laurazucker.com, and listen and purchase her songs from Band Camp, at laurazucker.bandcamp.com.

We also very much appreciated the witnessing and support of three of our friends in the service, and the expertise of the MDUUC Music Director Mark in taking on sound setup and running the A/V deck and live stream. Yes, the wedding was live-streamed, a BoxCast broadcast that about 70 friends were able to watch!

We moved to Laurie’s old apartment a few days after the wedding, a cramped fit, but we did OK in working our lives together. We spent a fair amount of time at the house, both checking on and working with our contractor, and tending to assorted odd jobs to make our home livable. Somewhere in here three sibling kittens entered our lives, to add that necessary touch of feline insanity.

There was landscaping to tend to, decades of deferred maintenance in the roof and porch structure, a lack of networking infrastructure, and a few plumbing problems, including a strange low water flow problem. Much of this was quickly addressed.

With the help of our contractor, the worn orange shag carpeting was removed and replaced with high end laminate flooring downstairs, and better carpet upstairs. A roofing contractor was engaged to replace the deteriorating cedar shingles and slats with a more modern sheathing and composite roofing, far safer in this wooded area in the event of a fire. I ran networking and cable wiring into several rooms.

Laurie and I spent weeks painting, patching, and cleaning. Disintegrating curtains were removed and new ones ordered. A new washer and dryer, to be stacked, was ordered for the new laundry room. The lead time on that was about 6 weeks, another unexpected twist from the pandemic. Apparently everyone was ordering new appliances!

Our contractor had a plumber in for the bathroom work, who we asked to look at our low water flow problem. Throughout the entire house, we had a water flow problem. With no flow, the pressure was quite high, 80 PSI, but when any tap was opened the pressure dropped to something like 15–20 PSI, and the flow was maybe 2 gallons per minute. Running the kitchen faucet while someone was in the shower upstairs pretty much turned the shower into a dribble. This wasn’t really a livable situation yet.

We knew that the shutoff gate valve just outside the house didn’t fully close, and there was a fair chance that it had failed to fully open as well. The plumber replaced that, which let us finish the interior plumbing work with the water fully shut off. It didn’t improve the flow problem, though.

The plumber had mentioned that many homes had pressure regulator “bell valves” on the water line, often buried. If one of these had failed, essentially stuck slightly open, it could cause this problem. We started a hunt for the valve. It would be either by the shutoff at the house, or by the meter at the street. After a good bit of digging we found it at the meter, about 18” down, buried in the dirt, along with several elbows and a zig-zag of PVC pipe.

We had that replaced, but again, there was no improvement. By then the contractor was done with the remodel, so we thanked and paid him. Laurie decided to excavate the line herself to see if we could find some clue as to the problem. As she dug out from the house, she found the copper pipe transition to old PVC plastic line about 5’ out. Additional digging uncovered a 90 degree bend straight down, and about 3 feet down, another elbow and the line headed more or less toward the meter. With the mess of pipe elbows at the street, we had a pretty twisty water line, although not enough to explain the whole low flow problem. With another 30 feet of three foot trench to dig, we thought it was time to call in the pros.

Cornel’s Plumbing agreed to come out and take a look. Alex, the plumber, suggested starting at the meter, opening up the line and checking the flow capacity, and then moving to the house and checking other points until the area with the restriction was found. He rigged a fitting onto the end of the meter, attaching a 50 foot hose. Opening up the meter valve, we had well over 10 gallons per minute out of the hose. Now we knew the problem was on our side of the meter, and not on the city side.

We knew at this point that the flow was poor at the connection to the house, and Alex the plumber had an idea. He took the other end of the hose up to the house, and screwed it onto the hose bib just past the house shutoff valve. Opening the hose valve and street shutoff valve, we had great water flow in the house’s plumbing. He said this lash up with the hose was how they normally supplied water while running a new water line in, but this was only the second time he had seen a home water line blocked in 7 years as a journeyman plumber. The hose lash up told us the water line from the street to the house was where the clog was.

The cost to dig up the old PVC line and find where it was plugged would be high, labor intensive as hand digging was needed to avoid destroying the pipe. It would be much cheaper to put in a new line with better materials using modern boring technology. We concurred, and he gave us a quote that was much lower than I had expected from doing a little shopping around. So, we bought the replacement installation project.

The crew showed up on time, and went to work. They dove into the crawl space through the hatch in our pantry, scoped out what they needed to do, and started prep. The driller showed up around 11 AM, and set up by the water meter at the street. They started drilling into the gentle slope there, at about the depth of the water line, aiming to miss the other utility lines and tunnel under the house. The plan was to surface the drill head near the pantry crawl space hatch, and install the house shutoff and reducer there, rather than in a vault outside. This would be both more convenient, and avoid any possible frozen pipe issues in the winter. One worker walked along with a special instrument that read out the drill head position, and called out steering instructions to the drill operator. They ran the line over 3 feet deep, past the perimeter foundation, and hit their target. The plumbing crew attached a long length of extremely heavy-duty modern PEX line, and a grounding wire (per code), and this was pulled back through with the drill head. By noon the drill crew was packing up and leaving, and by 2 PM we had a completed new water line in service.

It was time to shift our living and sleeping arrangements from the old apartment to the new house. Laurie could finish the huge job of emptying her old 3 bedroom apartment that she and her sister had occupied for a few decades. That was quite a task in itself. I could assist in moving things, but sorting and deciding what to keep and what to discard was a task Laurie reserved for herself.

We were ready to move in. With some assistance from a medical supplier, we set up everything for Laurie’s sister, and got her room ready. We would be sleeping in the guest room with my furniture until we got Laurie’s stuff moved from her apartment. We spent a few weeks shifting accommodations, moving boxes and such, and settling in. We thought we had everything in great shape, what with the new roof, new floors, plumbing overhauled, lights working, and a new washer and dryer on the way. We would have a great Christmas in our new home.

Woman plans, Goddess laughs…

The 42 year old Jen-Aire cooktop had other plans. The grill and one burner control failed, and I had the choice of repair or replace in front of me. Replace? There are two downdraft 30” cooktops on the market, and both needed 40 Amp service. We had 30 Amp service installed, which meant that we would have to pull a larger line and install larger breakers. But, the power panel was a Federal Electric, which has it’s own issues. Local code would require us to replace the entire panel. The cost of replacing the cooktop was going to be well over $5,000, which wasn’t in the budget.

So, repair. Naturally, the original parts were discontinued about 35 years ago, but there was a suggested replacement, discontinued about 20 years ago… The parts are something called an “infinite switch”, the heat regulator for an electric range element. There are so-called “universal” replacements, but they didn’t consider the “unique” wiring of this old cooktop. The cooktop circuitry assumed that the switch internals worked in a certain way, which no modern switch actually does any more, for good reasons. They used their assumption to power up the vent fan whenever the grill was on, bypassing the fan switch. The new switches were wired differently, and resulted in the fan power momentarily being interrupted every few seconds while the grill was on. Even better, if the fan were switched on directly the grill ran at full power, with no temperature control!

Chasing down the internal design of the switches and the wiring of the grill I determined that I needed to disconnect one wire between the fan and the grill proper, and replace the fan switch with a proper double-pole single throw switch, along with the previous replacement of the “infinite switches.” It’s all working now, and the cooktop now largely uses standard parts I can get off the shelf. The fix cost about $110. While Christmas dinner was cooked entirely in the oven, for New Years Eve we had our cooktop and grill, suitable for some T-bone steaks. Yay!

We’re largely unpacked now. I’ve gotten proper radio antennas set up for my amateur radio hobby, and Laurie has been weeding the yards using a come-along and some rope rated to 5,600 lbs force (she broke one of her old ropes pulling blackberry vines). She’s getting the outside planted and landscaped more to her liking. I’ve been cooking, and working on some changes in the interior, including a hobby workroom in a former loft space or attic over the garage. Life goes on, and we are enjoying our new home in the “woods.”