Laziness and Snowblower Abuse.

I think this happens with a lot of folks' home improvement blogs--they have a lot to say and show off at first, but it starts to taper off over time. This is for an obvious reason--there are a lot of big things to do before and right after a move, but once the pressing concerns are handled, there just isn't very much to say. And the blogging gets lazy.

In my case, I find this to be true--we're basically settled in and enjoying life in The Serpico House. Things are cool. But there are still a zillion things to do. We still haven't painted our bedroom, our guest room (I've started calling it "the turtle room" or "Mack's Room") still needs a desk and some other things, we need to replace our dining room's light fixture, the kitchen is awful, etc, etc.

But, for right now, let me tell you how I failed at the technology of living in the suburbs.

I'm guessing most of you are aware that the northeast portion of the U.S. has gotten a smidge of snow in January. Yep, it's true... a couple of minor storms, one big 'un and some icy rain. All told, I think maybe we've gotten about 25 inches of snow or something. I'm not complaining, really. I don't mind snow, and taking some days off due to snow provided us some nice unexpected family time.

Now, due to utter procrastination, we've failed to procure a new shovel for dealing with all of this snow. Yeah, we're still using Mrs. Serpico's old shovel. I should really get a picture of it--the thing is pitiful. It's nearly impossible to move snow with this thing. But we've managed to make it work... sort of.

If the condition of a person's driveway could, in some way, be correlated to the lifestyle or functionality of the relationship of the family that lives in the house behind that driveway... erm... well... let's just say our household discussions would look like something out of a John Woo film.

(My film school friends/former video store co-workers are snickering right now)



In short, our driveway is a mess. It's really a good thing that my car is an SUV with All-Wheel Drive. On the morning of the day after we got our last big snow, the view from our front window was this...


Yeah. That was taken around 6am. We got 15 inches of snow that night. This view would normally show our lovely front bushes and porch. After such snowfall, we just had white lumps that merged with the whiteness on our porch. It was kind of crazy.

When the snow finally ceased, I assaulted the snow on the porch and driveway with Mrs. Serpico's shovel, and I was sure I'd be able to clear enough of the mess to get my car out of the driveway. Well, I made a path to the car, and, foolish man that I am, I tried to back out of the situation. Yeah, that didn't work--I wound up getting stuck around mid-way through, where the snow was higher than my vehicle's axles.

Luckily, my wife's aunt (she calls me her nephew, so I should call her my aunt, too, I guess) has frequently offered us the use of her snow-blower. Now, she lives on a small Philly side street, and her house has a fairly diminutive footprint---I have no idea why she owns a snow-blower... other than that she likes gizmos.

My neighbor, Josh, had wisely paid one of the many roving gangs of snow-removal specialists (snow-opportunists? Snoppertunists?) to handle his driveway and sidewalk duties. However, since we were a bit light on cash (those dudes wanted $60 to do the driveway and sidewalk!), I was resolved to do this on my own.

Josh was nice enough to drive me over to my aunt's place, where we dug out her driveway and sidewalk in return for the use of her gas-powered snow-blower.

Now, not being familiar with the use of things like this (my last lawn-mower was an electric one), there was definitely a learning curve involved in making it work. Josh helped a bit, and we managed to get the thing started, and I found the lever that made the "snow-eater" work. I got into pushing the snow-blower into the huge mounds of snow and seeing the resulting spray of chopped-up snow fly off to the side. Pretty awesome. But... well... it was really hard to push the damn thing. I mean really hard to push it. The snow-blower weighs about 100lbs, and the snow itself was very wet and fairly heavy, so I was pushing it up and down my driveway by inches for an hour, dying from the exertion.

People who know how to use a snow-blower are laughing right now.

I almost shat out my spine before I realized that the wheels needed to be engaged with the motor--the engine makes the nubbly wheels turn and help push the machine along through the snow and ice. I didn't know about that. You have to pull on an extra lever to make it happen. In other words, I was shoving 100lbs of machine against that deep, heavy-ass, wet snow with no assistance from the engine. I didn't get hurt or anything, but I surely felt stupid when I realized how much extra work I was making for myself.

Avy offered to help, but I was so annoyed with myself that I just kept working. I know, I know. Typical male, right?

I finally cleared as much snow as I could, dragged the machine into the garage and went inside the house to dry off and warm up. Xavier was taking a nap after a tiring round of snowman building with Avy and a neighbor kid. I changed into soft, warm, dry clothes and took an Advil. I then planted my ass on the couch and went to sleep.

The damn suburbs kicked my ass that day.

Since that day, the snow has been melting fairly steadily, and the driveway has been looking better and better. Nature clears out snow better than I do.

On the Cusp of Fighting Alligators

This is it, peeps--tomorrow the papers will be signed, and we'll finally be allowed to enter The Serpico House and start working on it. I mean, yes, there will be a bunch of this-and-that and what-have-you before we're actually living in the house, but tomorrow will be the day it really begins.

So what do we want to do right away?

We've decided to address the floors first. Why the floors? Well, to put it bluntly, the carpets in there are funky... and not in a cool, James Brown kind of way. It's not that they're dirty, really, so much as they're just kind of awful. Thankfully, it doesn't appear that Ms. Serpico owned a dog or a cat, so the carpets aren't terribly stained or repugnant and stinky, but they do smell kind of stale and old, and they've got sort of paths worn into them. I would guess most of the carpet is at least 25 years old, and the newer stuff is less than five years old. We want it all gone. We're fairly positive there is nice hardwood under most of the carpet, and we're also pretty sure most of it has never seen the light of day. Wall-to-wall carpet was apparently the way to go for most people until fairly recently. Of course, these days we know it's just a major pain in the ass--it's annoying to keep it clean, it collects and attracts dust and other allergens and just plain gets worn out.

With any luck, we will hopefully find old tile under the carpet in the bathrooms... and possibly linoleum under the carpet in the kitchen. We can hope, right?

Of course, the big downside to removing all the carpet in a wall-to-wall carpeted house is this nasty stuff...

Tack strip. You know what it is, right? This is what the carpet-layers nail into the floor around the perimeter of your rooms and use to make the carpet stick to the floor. Awful stuff, really, and no fun to remove from a wood floor, either. One of my former homes had a huge first floor completely covered in awful, ancient blue wall-to-wall carpet. I pulled that crap up the first day we took possession of the house, and it fought me the entire time. But the removal of the carpet wasn't the worst part of that endeavor... nope. The worst part involved pulling all of the little carpet staples out of the middle of the floor (the installers were quite thorough) and ripping out those damn tack strips.

That process was brutal--sitting on the floor, inching along with a flat-head screwdriver, a set of metal pliers, a rag and a small trash can. It went like this: wrap the end of the screwdriver with the rag (to keep from marring the floor), coax it under the edge of the tack strip until it starts to come up, emit cries of frustration and pain after impaling fingers on those tiny metal tack-strip teeth, grab end of tack strip with pliers, pull up tack strip, more cries of frustration as tack strip snaps in half, leaving big-ass nails still embedded in floor, grab nail with pliers, pull nail like a maniac, remove nail, throw in trash, curse at floor, inch along... repeat. It sucked, let me tell you.

I finally got it all done, and it was really not fun at all. Humorously enough, at the time I was sure I had been handling the tack strip removal incorrectly and just got lucky by not ruining my floor--there's got to be a better way, right? Nope. Turns out almost every DIY outlet recommends the method I described. Wow. We can put a man on the moon and invent a thing to stick in your car that literally tells you how to get from place to place, but we can't come up with a better way to get this nasty stuff off of the floor? Come on, scientists--get to work on something useful, willya?

And, naturally, we will have to bust our humps to get this stuff up quickly, because once the carpets are up, leaving the tack strip on the floor is like letting little tetanus-bearing alligators live in every room of your house. And, with Xavier being the kind of kid he is, you can bet he'd find a way to face-plant directly into this stuff. So it's gotta go right after the carpets bite the dust.