Things looking better on the house
We have a couple bedrooms painted and have new carpet in them, too. It’s starting to look like a normal house. We’re going to add a total of 3 heat runs and ceiling lights/fans in those bedrooms, then the ceiling can go in. A little more sanding the walls in the bedroom basements and we should be able to prime and paint and then have the carpet put in.
About those heat runs…. We have what is called transite heat in the basement. There are heat runs in the concrete slab, running through PVC pipe, which was common in the 70s and 80s. The trouble is, they didn’t seal the pipe like a plumber does. The pipe was just pushed together and then the concrete poured around it. As one would expect, if there is water under the concrete, it will find it’s way into the heat runs. You could see a little standing water in them. This, along with the mold we found alarmed us a bit. It turns out that it’s not as serious as we thought. We had a heating guy come and take a look. He said to just run the furnace fan all the time and it will keep the pipe dry and mold won’t grow, because of the moving air. That was a relief, but we’re adding the overhead heat just in case the water problem gets worse under the concrete slab. I saw online where someone pumped over 500 gallons of water out of their transite heat runs.
We had some excitement a few days ago. Mitch was mowing by the lake and got a little too close to the hill. There is about a 10 foot steep dropoff down to the lake….and the mower went down. Mitch said he got off the mower before it went down the hill and was holding it up and yelling for help. No one came to help so he tried reaching for the parking brake and then it went down. I thank GOD that it didn’t roll over Mitch. The mower weighs 480 lbs and would likely have hurt him pretty bad, if not have killed him. I was at Menards and couldn’t help, so he got the 4-wheeler and hooked up a rope (in a knot that only a boy can tie) and was able to move the mower up the hill (which is just about vertical) a little bit. After I got home we tried pulling with the 4-wheeler some more, but were only able to get it about 1/2 way up the hill. Mitch got an ATV winch for his last birthday and it came in handy. We didn’t mount it on the 4-wheeler because I need to fabricate a mounting plate to get it hooked up right, but we did ‘wedge’ it in the front frame. The winch couldn’t get the mower all the way up over the hill – the mower was ‘bottoming out’ at the top of the hill because it was so steep. I had to get below the mower and help the winch lift it up. With a lot of effort, we did get the mower up the hill. I should have taken some pictures. I don’t know exactly what it was, but I felt a couple ‘pops’ in my chest, only later to find out that I was very sore. Every cough or sneeze was very painful.
