Helen Street...Part 2

So when I left you last in Helen Street...Part 1, Margaret's health was failing and we knew our time there was coming to an end. However, we got a reprieve when Margaret's son Scott decided to move back home with his longtime friend Mike. We had met Scott several times over the years. He was quiet and friendly and was grateful for the assistance we had given his parents over the years. He was working for a bank and was able to transfer his job from Rochester to Binghamton, solely to take care of his mother.

Christmas 2012 on Helen St

Things went well at first as Scott and Mike took over maintenance of the property and care of Margaret. Then, one Fall day Scott fell ill. It began with headaches but shortly he became weak and spent more time in the hospital. It's not my right to tell you of Scott's diagnosis, but he simply became weaker and weaker, and eventually bedridden. On one awful winter night he begged us to take care of his mother as he laying dying. A few days later he was gone.

After the funeral and burial, Scott's friend Mike stayed around for a few weeks, then he moved back to Rochester. That left us back where we were, except that we felt a commitment to care for Margaret. Frankly, Cindy did most of the work, along with friends and relatives of Margaret while I took back over maintenance of the home.

This went on for a while when suddenly, Scott's friend Mike returned. This really surprised us but Mike said he had decided to take care of Margaret and keep her in her home. This was both good and bad news. Good, in that this would buy us more time, but bad knowing that Margaret's time at home was coming to an end, one way or another. We were apprehensive that Mike would not be able to take care of her in many ways.

Removing our name from the mailbox. 

25  years in our home at an end.

Things began to go downhill pretty quickly at this point. Mike became rather possessive, demanding, and pushy. Agreements and  arrangements we had made with Margaret ended, and Mike got more angry and reclusive. I'll spare you the gruesome details but he began hoarding and despite not working, bought new cars and expensive electronics. We tried to reach out to Margaret, but she had become so dependent on Mike she just made excuses for him. Being blind, she literally couldn't see what he was doing to her house with her money.

Things went from bad to worse as he began to leave us obscene notes and spray paint messages in the garage and on the driveway. We dreaded coming home fearing what we might find. One afternoon while I was at work, he screamed at Cindy, inches from her face, such that he spit on her.  Obviously time to go.

Me and the FBAN in  Idaho. Trust me. there WERE fires.
You just can't see them in this photo. 

We had been looking at homes off and on for many years with First Sister Karen Templeman, esteemed Realtor with Realty USA, but now things got critical. In the late Summer of 2015, the western wildfire season had gone crazy with record numbers of fires. For those of you that don't know, I'm an incident meteorologist and can be dispatched out west on a moments notice. However, I had been approved for leave (vacation) and given the home situation I was not anxious to leave.But then, the situation became critical and they became desperate for help so I agreed to cancel my vacation and go, with Cindy's blessing and encouragement. Off I went to Orofino, Idaho and the Municipal Complex for two weeks. Before I went, we walked though the house on Park St and were very interested. Cindy and Karen went through the process and we bought the house while I was in Idaho.

So there you have it. A series of mostly unfortunate events led us to the home we now love, which is the happy ending for us.

Miscellaneous...Chapter 1

I first called this edition "Miscellaneous Part 1" but didn't want to repeat the theme of my Helen St post, and also because it occurs to me that there could be several subsequent editions of this theme. (By the way, Helen St. Part 2, The Final Chapter, will be out soon)

Yes, it's been cold. That's -21 on the car thermometer.

The cold weather and busy work schedule has limited the amount of work we've been able to get done at the house. The fireplace has something to do with this as well as we really love to just come home from work, have dinner and relax. Still, I've started several projects, completed a few. Unless we have a major failure somewhere in the house, no new projects will be started until we tie a few of these off.

Onward!

Kitchen TV:  As has been written before, our kitchen is rather small so space is at a premium. We do enjoy the small TV we had in Helen St, where it sat on the refrigerator. I offered to purchase a wall mount and hang the TV in the kitchen and found a quality mount in Lowes.  But, the $60 price put me off a bit, so a search on Amazon found this same mount for considerably less (about $35). An easy job, right? Heh heh. Good one Dave. It occurred to me shortly after I began, that I would be mounting the TV to an exterior wall, which in our house is solid masonry construction. Well, no big deal, you can drill in block and concrete, right? Heh heh. Actually you can, that is until you hit some kind of steel plate or reinforcement in the wall. I still don't know what I hit when drilling, but I couldn't penetrate it (had a momentary panic attack when I thought I may have hit the cast iron drain from the bathroom above, but it wasn't, I don't think). I had measured carefully and was limited in the room I had to move the mounting plate, and decided to somehow adapt the mount to fit where I had drilled. Of the two mounts, the lower hole was fine, it was the upper drill hole that hit the obstruction. In any event, the silly dry wall screws and molly plugs that came with the mount wouldn't work so I ran to my local friendly hardware store and found what's called bolt shield anchors or masonry anchors. The lower one went in fine, the the obstruction limited the top one and it went in about 75% of the way. I decided to make this a feature rather than a problem and it actually allows the TV to lean forward a bit more than it otherwise would have, making it easier to see from the sink or stove. Heh heh. It's a FEATURE dear, not sloppy mounting.

Home theater: Hard to say how much of this is completed because I'm not sure how much difficulty I'll have completing it. First a little background. Several years ago my lovely wife decided to purchase me a new sound system, and was very generous about it. The money she gave me allowed me to buy an entry level audiophile or what's called a "beer budget" system. This gets you above the mass market systems you'll find in big box retailer and gets your foot in the door of another world of quality, and, unfortunately, complexity. I settled on a Sherwood-Newcastle receiver/amplifier and psb speakers. Now, this is by no means a plug and play system, especially when you consider I had the Time Warner box, Blue Ray player, CD player, Yamaha cassette deck, turntable and VCR all routed through the receiver and then into the TV. THEN, there's a complicated method of tuning the surround sound such that it is balanced and correct for proper listening. Anyway, so far I've assembled and placed the speakers and speaker stands and routed most of the wiring. A tricky part lies ahead though. The rear speakers need to be wired to the receiver and of course you don't want then running along the floor or baseboard, so you either have to go above or below and I've chosen below. There is an old electrical box in the floor (see earlier blog) and I plan to go down into the basement through that box with my speaker wire, and back up to the entertainment center through the heating vent on the other side. I've also decided to simplify my life by hooking up only the Blue Ray player and Time Warner to the receiver. I rarely used the turntable or cassette deck, and the CD player is on it's last legs. Too bad,

Plumbing: Leaks continue to be a problem around the tub and I've been caulking like a maniac trying to keep water from dripping from the kitchen ceiling. Eventually I'll have to remove all the caulk, and start again. However I'm concerned that we have some serious structural/rot problems with the floor near the tub as it is sagging a bit near the front of the tub.

Randy does the right thing. Bonus: No plumber's crack!
He doesn't just sell houses, he fixes them. 

During the very cold night, the pipe under the half bath froze. I was smart enough to shut the water off to the bathroom before I left for work that night (I've been worried about this since we knew it had frozen before). When I went to turn it on the next day, water squirted out of the push on plumbing connections. I called a plumber, since I know far more about quantum mechanics than plumbing,  left a message, and never heard back. First Brother-in-Law Randy to the rescue! After a struggle getting the broken fittings off due to their inconvenient location, the new push on's went on easily and with no leaks!

Fireplace: Already burned through our first face cord and had to head back up to the Robinson Hill Nursery for more wood. They didn't have much left but another face cord is all I needed (I hope!) and I'm back to keeping the wife warm and happy.

Foyer/Vestibule: I have put the floor protection down and am ready to move ahead in there. I have removed the wallpaper accents and will soon remove the awful molding from the ceiling. Will not go with the complex crown molding in there, which would be too much for the small room, but instead go with a simpler and easier to install design. The ceiling needs repair, walls need patching, and then a nice paint job will be done. We also need to shop for a new light fixture.

Desk/Den: Cindy has really led the way here sorting and replacing the stuff that was quickly thrown in boxes before the move. Together we lifted the massive walnut desk we have and put  felt floor protecting cups under the feet. We need to get a mat for the chair too. I purchased new hanging files and need to file the piles of sorted mail and documents on the desk before Cindy loses her mind.

There's so much more but I think this is a record blog length for me so I'm going to stop here. Any of you that are still reading will just have to wait for Chapter 2 for more ongoing tasks.