Arcus, or jet contrail? Hard to tell.
–Simon
Another Arcus
The Ultimate Hobby
A house!
After my recent accomplishment of finally installing bathroom ductwork into proper external vents, I started to reminisce. We will soon hit our 10-year mark in this house, Easement Acres. What began as an American dream turned into a parenthood want: a place for the kid to grow up. And the romanticized homestead activities of decorating and gardening. I wanted a home. I moved a lot myself as a kid, with the longest stint in a Lubbock property – more of a prison, really, with a tiny backyard and a lack of permission to ever venture beyond the privacy fence unescorted. All it needed was some concertina wire to complete the feeling.
But now, with the decade landmark in sight, this will be the longest I have ever lived in one domicile. So I wanted to look back on what I’ve written about in my time here. Or more specifically, what I’ve written about regarding the house itself.
Here’s a chronological list:
2017
- Wifi and Ethernet
- WFH in my basement setup
- Splitting trees removed by BP
- Sump pump drainage
- Gardening and more trees removed
- Rain barrel
- Rain barrel #2
- Deck staining
- Lamppost
- Hostile neighbors
- Hanging pictures
- Basement growing
- Electrical outlet install
- Putting wire on the fence
- New TV stand
- Live Christmas tree
2018
- Live Christmas tree cleanup
- Ring doorbell camera install
- Gas leak
- New trees planted
- Ozone-ing the carpet
- Revised basement workstation
- Workout equipment acquired
- Hallway carpet replaced with laminate
- War on dandelions
- Property survey
- First reel mower
- Exploding electrical outlet
- Storm door install
- Grandfather clock acquired
- Basement aquarium acquired
- Front porch light install
- Dining room carpet replaced with laminate
- Fence repair after ice storm
- Ethernet patch panel install
2019
- Air purifier acquired
- Revised basement workstation again
- Wired basement desk with ethernet
- Backyard Ring camera install
- Sump pump drainage upgraded with brick
- Lounge carpet replaced with laminate
- Foyer tiled
- Copper cock added to roof
- Rain barrel #3
- Sliding backdoor shattered
2020
- Sliding backdoor replaced
- Second reel mower
- Barn star acquired
- Wine cellar acquired
- Bedroom carpet replaced with laminate
- Garage workshop pegboard acquired
- Dead spruce trees removed
- Retrofitted attic fan install
- Neighbor’s plywood palace and city complaint
2021
- Wood burner install
- Front door lock replaced
- Decorative external shutters replaced
- Security film installed on garage window
- Brick garden edging install
- Garden trellis installed to block view of problem neighbor
- Additional garage organization
- Built the garage door open sensor/indicator
- Roomba vacuum acquired
2022
- Bathroom fan replacement
- Bathroom fan remodel (For some reason, I didn’t post once on this project. I must have been trying to wipe it from my memory).
- Broken chest freezer turned into a root cellar
- Clematis planted on garden trellis
- Easement Acres name formalized
2023
- Garden Ring camera install
- Deck string lights upgraded
- Built deck gate
- Built backyard trellis
2024
- Removed unnecessary bathroom light fixture
- New couch acquired
- New HVAC
- Mosquito wars
- Easement Acres signage
- Hurricane damage
- Bench vise acquired
2025
- Bathroom grips install
- New oven acquired
- More trees planted
- Zombie door
- Ox yoke hung
- New roof
- Built firewood holder
2026
- Attic bathroom ventilation ductwork install
Conclusion
A lot of work has been done here on Easement Acres! It’s definitely more than my parents had ever done to their home. I think the difference lies with the generation gap. My home was never a given. There was a lot of doubt we’d ever get to have one at all! So every day is a new opportunity to, again, partake in the ultimate hobby! It’s not simply a place to live.
I wonder what the next 10 years will bring.
–Simon
Pee-yew Pipe
I like breathing. I wasn’t exactly consulted in the design of terrestrial animalia metabolic function, but breathing is a required component in the process of oxidizing hydrocarbons for cellular energy nonetheless. So it would follow that such a necessary and constant action should be made somewhat pleasant, right?
Why then does laziness and cheapness persist to make the process unpleasant? Why as a people would we not choose to band together and make air quality a priority? (Beyond the obvious monetary implications, that is.)
I complained about this when I originally discovered the bathroom fans exhausted into nowhere. Actually, I discovered one fan. The other fan I would later find to be buried completely under insulation. Both fans vented to the attic. Both lacked hoses. And one was covered. Not very effective.
The one fan I could find I attached to a flexible duct line and routed it to the top of the attic, but with no exterior vent hookup, I instead retrofitted a rotary fan onto a passive vent in order to vent the whole attic. It sort of worked, but eventually the fan rusted and seized. Back to square one.
The next phase of the saga revealed the hidden location of fan #2 when what I assumed was the master bathroom fan turned out to be the guest bathroom fan when I ripped it out of the ceiling to figure out why it wasn’t ventilating. Peering down from the attic into the wrong bathroom was an unpleasant surprise. I finally located the master bathroom fan by shoving a wire up beside it and having Liz wiggle it while I scanned the attic for movement.
Both fans got replaced with ducts added. But again, with no external connection point, they vented into the attic for several years, awaiting a proper solution. Eventually, the proper solution came with the new roof. The installers, being very accommodating, added external vents for me – one for each bathroom and one for a future kitchen vent hood project. Huzzah. I triumphantly scampered up to the attic to finally connect the hoses, and was greeted by the sight of a square hole under the vents. Apparently, they’re universal external vents, meant to be fitted with connectors, but not including them by default. Damn. Had I known that, I would have fitted connectors to the old roof’s passive vents, which probably would have been a net gain even though I’d be sacrificing full attic venting capacity. Oh well. At least now I can do it proper.
And the internet told me that this is a very normal scenario, with the easy fix recommending bolting on vent collars and filling the gaps with that heat-resistant foil dryer vent tape. And go figure – that worked just fine. Duct work, unlike plumbing, is surprisingly imprecise. Tape, is part of the standard toolkit.
I should have taken some more “before” pics, but I was choking in the dust and trying to wrap this decade-long project up ASAP. But here’s what it looks like inside:
Here’s the guest bathroom fan. I had the foresight to install a 120CFM beast, even though the size of the bathroom only needed an 80. But with a shared bathroom for anyone visiting, expeditious air evacuation is of paramount priority:
And a final shot of both ducts connected! At last!
Side note: with no shingles on a metal roof, the attic ceiling isn’t studded with thousands of skull perforators. I can safely stand up higher than I ever dared before! The only blood shed on this project was from the sharp metal edges on the collars.
It is done!
–Simon
Choke on Polysaccharides
About two years back I planted sunchoke tubers in the forage patch. I caught on to the idea after reading some random gardening article during the height of the Ohio winter season and thought that they sounded like a good idea: native, low-maintenance, pretty flowers, edible tubers, perennial. What’s not to like?
They were also amusingly absent from any commercial catalog, so I had to source some from a fellow gardening nerd. They cleared postal inspection, unlike the black bean seeds my sister tried to send me, and I dutifully plopped them into the ground come early spring. A few plants grew, but I decided to wait an extra year for them to fill out before attempting a harvest.
After two years, they had spread quite nicely.
Now that the growing season is concluded, I wanted to try them. So I shoved a gardening pitchfork into the partially frozen ground at the edge of the patch and ripped up a mass. A surprisingly large mass, in fact. It would seem that they spread quickly.
Internet knowledge states that they can be cooked like potatoes. So Liz roasted them. And they were tasty – like an earthy parsnip. But, there were consequences.
Sunchokes store their energy in a carbohydrate very different from potatoes, specifically inulin – a polysaccharide. Polysaccharides cannot be digested (a notable exception being lactose, a disaccharide, though we all know isn’t a universal exception). Potatoes, on the other hand, consist of starch – also a polysaccharide, but upon cooking, breaks down into amylose and amylopectin, which are easy to digest. Inulin, however, does not fully break down into monosaccharides upon cooking, resulting in a food comprised of indigestible carbohydrates.
This leads to large amounts of food for gut bacteria, which ferment inulin into….gas! Lots and lots of gas!
So some more cooking research is needed to work around this better. Or…we eat them raw and have a juvenile fratboy-themed competition on the deck!
–Simon
Snowflake
I don’t want to post pictures from the holidays. I’m done with the holidays and want to move on. I’m middle-aged now and don’t find much magic in the rituals anymore. Any joy I had left was by proxy: watching my daughter enjoy them. But she’s a teen now and wants to distance herself from anything family-oriented. Plus it’s the age at which being overtly happy about anything just isn’t cool. It’s cool to be a cynic and hate.
So I’ll pass on the tree and house light photos this year. Instead, here’s a brief reflection on one of my own moments of lost magic. Here is a single snowflake, captured poorly with my aging phone camera:
It was cold enough that individual crystals were falling without clumping together. It reminded me of when I learned what they actually are.
Another consequence of a Texan upbringing, I didn’t see much snow. Some light dustings here and there, but rarely anything of consequence. So I knew snow mostly from movies. And there’s a particular scene in Disney’s Fantasia with fairies dancing in snowfall, using individual snowflakes as dresses. Granted I’d never seen a fairy before either, but my assumption was that they’re 6-12 inches tall. Representations in various media confirm this, probably because that’s a good size to work the physical world around. Any smaller and our existing environment wouldn’t scale well to make understandable films, any larger and they’re just small people. Ergo, I made the connection that a snowflake dress, presented as being as wide as the fairy was tall, would therefore be around 6-12 inches in diameter.
So you might understand my disappointment when, on a rare day of Texas snow, when my mother exclaimed “Snowflakes!” when glancing out the window, that I was greeted with the sight of tiny specks of white, and not gargantuan plates of ice crystals, floating gracefully to the ground. Such is life.
But still, on a micro level, individual snowflakes are pretty cool to look at.
–Simon