I don’t have any good pictures handy to illustrate this, but let’s just say that our kitchen is suffering from a lack of natural lighting. It’s got a one small south-facing window, but it’s flanked by two cupboards and really doesn’t provide much light to the room. There’s a nice east-facing window, but it has an eave and is largely blocked by our garage and trees. Removing the eave would help, but the previous owner left us a note saying that a family of house finches nests in there every spring – we looked, and sure enough there’s a nest… How much fun will spring be, eating at our breakfast nook and watching baby birds growing up?? More fun than removing an eave.

So I’ve been investigating skylights, specifically tubular ones, more exactly a brand called Solatube. They’re an Australian company that’s been around since the early 90’s and has really got the product "right" – lots of good technology being used to capture every ray of sunlight and send it down the reflective tube into a nice diffuser for what looks like fantastic natural lighting. More importantly for our needs, they offer an attached ceiling vent with the 10" model – it’s a circular intake that surrounds the diffuser and gathers the air into a separate venting tube. The fan is attached to the roof for quieter operation, another bonus. We could really use a vent in the kitchen for various cooking exploits – the main floor fire alarm is incredibly sensitive – and especially to suck out some of the vapor from the 60+ minute boils for homebrewing. I doubt there’s any immediate risk, but I get antsy seeing that much humidity on the cupboards and walls when I’m boiling, especially with winter coming and the windows closed.

But we’re down to the wire now, weather-wise. I’d really like to get this in before we get any snow and it’s freezing all the time, but that means this weekend or next. This weekend is filling up with halloween stuff, and next weekend I’ve got a presentation at a conference in Boston, so… Maybe I’ll take a day off work next week and do it then?

This is a late post, but since I took pains to try to document it while it was happening it’s worth putting up.

Last Tuesday, the 4th, dawned cool and foggy. Patchy rain throughout the day, then it seemed to let let up. I came home from work and was walking Bruno – about 6:30 – when it started to rain again. We hustled home, a bit wet, and got inside as it continued to rain. Earlier that day I had picked up our Fruit Share, apples and pears, and I decided to make an apple pie while Karen was at work. The rain kept falling, now joined by some huge peals of thunder. Bruno was a little nervous but much better than I expected, mostly just wanted to be right near me. I pulled his day bed near the kitchen and he seemed fine, getting up often to check everything out.

The pie made it into the oven and was almost ready to come out when I noticed there was quite a bit of rain coming in through the kitchen window–it was filling up the window well between the storm and the interior glass! I assumed somehow the window was open on the outside and began fiddling with it, but it seemed tight and every time I touched it it was letting in more and more water. The window well was about to overflow so I ran downstairs and grabbed a bucket and some siphon tubing from my homebrewing equipment. The water continued to pour in but was kept mostly off the counter by the siphon – but the bucket was filling up fast! I emptied two buckets, probably 2 gallons each time, before I realized I was going to lose this battle with the rain. I had to gain some time to get outside to assess the situation, so I ran back downstairs to grab a bigger tub (pictured).

While I was down there I noticed water entering the basement from the wall under the window. I know flooded basements happen, but man did my heart sink when I saw that trickle of water coming in… I mean, come on!! We haven’t even been here two months! I know some water is eventually going to get in there, but have the decency to wait!

Well, it wasn’t waiting. I got the tub situated under the kitchen window, threw on my quick-dry nylon pants and some old running shoes, and headed out into the storm. I was instantly drenched. There was at least an inch of standing water in our backyard, and in places it was creeping up the foundation. Aaargh! I pulled our free-on-Craigslist ladder out and went around the side of the house with the kitchen window. The eves there are much smaller than the rest of the house, and I could see water just gushing over the gutter, down the side of the house, and right into the window – the gutters and drains were clogged with fall leaves. Much cursing, careful balancing, and dinged up hands later, I had the gutter and drainspout cleared and water was now shooting forcefully out onto the lawn. I proceeded to the other four drains and did the same, feeling like the worst was over.

But it wasn’t. I checked the forecast online and the radar showed no end in sight. Here’s a writeup on how rare this amount of rain was for October… (hint: very rare).

I ran back upstairs and outside to find the low spot at the foot of the stairs was beyond full and a few inches of water was lapping at the foundation. I knew from the previous owner that corner was prone to flooding, so I panicked and started bailing out the low spot. (by bailing, I mean I found a metal container for a paint roller and was throwing the water into the middle of the lawn). For a brief moment the rain let up and I was able to clear nearly all the standing water out. Whew. Then it started again. Buckets of rain. I was totally unable to keep up by bailing, so I ran a hose from the growing lake down into the basement sink and tried to start another siphon. For whatever reason – clogging? The hose too soft to hold pressure? – the siphon wouldn’t hold for long, and it was back to cursing and bailing. I took some pictures during this time but it was too dark and they didn’t turn out.

Here’s the aftermath:
On the left you can see the puddle the next day where I was bailing from. On the right is the outer ring of water from the bailing efforts – the leaves sort of define the splash zone. Crazy. What lessons can be learned?

• Clean your gutters when the forecast calls for rain in the fall.
• Have homebrewing gear sitting around and be comfortable with siphoning. ;)
• Don’t overreact. I probably could have let the backyard go a bit and not had any more flooding.
• Never leave your house! Obviously impractical, but I shudder to think of the damage if I hadn’t been there to catch the kitchen flooding before it got bad.
• Double up the crust on the edge of your pies:

(the pie turned out great) The end.

Bruno in the back yard.

Best. Dog. Ever.

Another project I tackled the week Karen was gone was the kitchen cabinets. While not 100% done, good progress was made, and one cabinet is complete. It started out as you can see on the left – the interior paint was chipped, scratched, and battered, and there were only two shelves that spanned the cabinet. We ended up with a ton of dead space in there as we tried to fit plates, bowls, cups and more – there was just too much room over certain items but no good way to stack them. So I pulled the dishes and shelves out and started to sand the paint on the back wall. After about 10 seconds it occurred to me I had no idea how old this paint was or what it was made of – there could be lead in there! So I stopped sanding, researched lead poisoning and testing, and the next day bought a home lead test kit. I was nervous because a lot of kits have trouble testing red paint (it’s actually red, that picture doesn’t show it well), but this one included a test to make sure the paint didn’t "bleed" into the test. It didn’t, and the test showed no lead, so it was off to the races!

First thing I knew I wanted was several sub-shelves – portable units that would fit on the existing shelves to divide them vertically and horizontally. I also wanted a glasses rack for the top shelf, we had a bunch of wine glasses just standing in there asking to be knocked over and collecting dust. I ended up getting Medium Density Fiberboard (2′ x 4′) to make the shelves, and a nice piece of 1×3 white pine for the rack (short cuts and painted wood, so the white pine’s slow curves seemed ok). I’d never worked with MDF before – it was a good price compared to plywood, so I bought it – but it seems nice and worked well for the job. I’ll have to keep my eyes open for future projects.

I ended up buying a quart of Behr’s Pottery Red paint — we are maybe planning on using it to repaint the whole kitchen, so I thought a test batch in the cabinets would be good to see before we did all that work. So far it’s a bit pinker than the swatch looked, or maybe it’s just different in context..? I’m not sure. We’ll need to look at it more closely to decide.

So after much measuring and cutting I was able to use almost every square inch of the MDF, biuld the shelves, paint them, and install them all before Karen got home! Well, most of them – this is the only cabinet that got painted, the rest still need it, but with the shelves installed it’s a great start. We now have some room to spare in the kitchen! (Temporary, I’m sure…)

Mmm… Pickle on a stick…