Burn, Baby, Burn!

It's official. We've given over our house to the local fire department and the big day is this Saturday.

The morning starts with volunteers fighting several pre-set fires upstairs, then they fight pre-set fires downstairs.

Eventually they get to the really good stuff: the structural fire that brings the whole house down.

A couple dozen volunteers will take part, and some of their family members will gather to watch.

The neighbors have all been informed, including the neighbor whose house is immediately adjacent to the leaping flames. They've been extremely receptive to having fire fighters clambor over their roof to station a live hose. Wouldn't you be?

We plan to camp out on the river side of the house, reading books and watching the fun. There should be a couple of great photo ops - like Brian with his back to the flames, smoking a cigarette. We'll see if I can sneak that in. He hates having his picture taken.

Today we finally resolved our issue with surveyors and surveying. The first surveyor did initial work, then "forgot to mention" the need for an additional $1500 worth of work they'd need to do. Duh oh! Game over.

The new surveyors had a good price and solid recommendations, but their contract was waaaay sketchy. Like, there's a retainer fee up front AND the work is C.O.D.? Why pay a retainer before they do the work if they have complete control over their work product? They basically have the power to withhold their results until I pay them. Seems like that should be enough.

Oh yes - and the big signs on the doors saying their lease is up and the space is for rent also made me reluctant to write them a big ol' check before they do any work.

Fortunately, we had a good, reasonable chat and hopefully things will get underway now.

There's a great deal going on these days. We should have house plans posted to an FTP site so you can see them soon. We're wrestling with all kinds of insulation, sound proofing and siding decisions, and I keep looking at the lot and wondering where on earth the house is going to go. It just doesn't seem like we can get the garage built on a slab-on-grade without bringing the house back toward the (very loud) road and away from the river.

But first things first. Let's burn this baby down!

Canine Fear and Uncertainty

In all this, the dogs have had a great deal of change to contend with: The upheaval as we packed up in Poulsbo, living in several different places at different times, handing them off to my parents for awhile, stowing them in the back of the car for hours at a time.

Through it all they've mostly been troopers. Dogs sleep a lot.

Now, we've been in the RV for a couple of weeks. We have figured out a way so they can have the run of the (falling down) house and deck, with occasional sojourns to the yard for bathroom breaks.

They spend their nights with us in the trailer, and they occasionally go on jaunts to the hardware store or to visit friends.

This has all gone pretty well, with a couple of notable exceptions.

For some reason, Quirk has decided the heating vent in the trailer is the devil. It makes noise. It sucks in air. It's right next to where he was sleeping.

So, he refuses to be anywhere near it. To be clear here, it's a small trailer. It's not actually possible to be very far away from the heating vent. After all, it's in the middle of the tiny living room/kitchen/dining room/lounge area.

He compensates by trying to sidle one hip up onto the couch when he thinks we're not looking, hoping to climb up fully onto the couch as he cowers away from the dreaded vent.

Needless to say, we're all glad to see the warm weather that lets us turn the heat off entirely.

Peach has been unflappable about the heating vent. Her nemesis has a different form: the invisible fence.

We decided to install an invisible fence for the dogs so they could have a space to run around on the lawn unattended.

This is a bit of a hassle, since it involves running wire around a permeter, securing it in the ground so it's not going anywhere, but so we can pick it up and move it when demolition begins, and it involves plugging into electricity - and you know the dilemmas with that at our place.

She started getting nervous when we started playing out the wire off of the spool, running it in a big loop around the yard. Nervous, but not completely freaked out.

Peach didn't start shaking until we put the invisible fence training flags up. These white flags are placed along the wire, so dogs have a visual cue of their boundary. This makes it easier for them to learn the permeter and avoid being shocked by their collars. Sounds good, right?

Wrong. Peach appears to associate the act of LOOKING at the flags with being shocked.

Her approach: do not leave the trailer.

Even when the urge to pee is nearly overwhelming, do not leave the trailer. Let the humans coax, weedle, even hold out food. It's not worth it. Just stay with the trailer and avoid being shocked.

Peach was trained on an invisible fence at our old place in Poulsbo. She was quite young, and even the mildest shock used in training made a BIG impression on her. She shakes and quivers when she has to go out in the yard.

The irony of this is, we can't figure out how to get power to the fence, given our current electrical situation. So, not only is she not wearing a training collar, it wouldn't shock her if she did because the fence isn't "live."

We've tried telling her this, but old habits and associations die hard.

When I pause to think about this, it's like having a big board whack me on the head while saying, "Look at the assumptions you make about things that hold you back, and push on them once in awhile!" Not that I'm eager to do this. I'm just saying there's a big board whacking me on the head.

At the risk of being trite and cliche' I'll throw it out there: What's your invisible fence? And is it really a fence, or is it just a set of warning flags? Food for thought, brought to you courtesy of our canine friends.

Out, Out, Damn Asbestos!

I started removing the asbestos tiles and mastic the same day a friend of mine pledged to be "Polly Positive" in her Facebook post.

With the help of a good-friend-former-OSHA-guy, the tiles came up with a minimum of fuss. We whaled away on the floor with scrapers and created heavy bundles of tiles, all ready to be double-wrapped in REALLY thick plastic and duct tape. Oh, yes. And he thought wearing masks was unnecessary, since we hosed down the tiles before we started. This is not what I was expecting from a former government inspector.

Then came (insert dramatic horror music here)...the mastic. This seemingly benign black layer has become the personification of evil. It is hard. It is ever-so-slightly sticky. Just sticky enough that you'd think it would be possible to scrape it up. But noooooo. Even a sharply hone chisel skids right off it, occasionally creating a tiny nick in the surface. Just enough to give you hope that if you only found the right angle, it would slice right through and peel up the gluey substance. False hope, I'm afraid.

After much online research (which at least showed me I wasn't alone in my frustration), I found a magic product called Bean-e-Doo. I call it magic because it's made of soybean oil and it basically dissolves the black mastic into a puddle of goo.

Ahhh! It was heaven. I just let the oil sit on the surface over night, came back in the morning and voila! One wipe of the squeegee revealed clean, smooth cement.

Unfortunately, only a few feet of the downstairs has smooth cement. The rest of the concrete floor was apparently spread by four-year-olds using serrated spoons. The surface is so rough the mastic slides down into the scratchy troughs as if it will still be there when global warming has run its course and mankind has perished.

The former owners apparently noticed this, and took action. First, they installed some kind of flooring using mastic. Then they took up that flooring, left the mastic, and poured on some kind of plaster-like leveling compound across the two rooms, in a spotty, unpredictable way. Then they installed another floor using a different, thick yellow mastic that doesn't respond to Bean-e-Doo. It was only then that they installed the last layer of asbestos-containing tiles, with yet more asbestos-containing mastic.

That's a long way of saying, it's been a bitch to get this junk up off the floor.

Now, as I was discovering the many layers of mastic, etc., I kept seeing my friend's post in my head: "I will be Polly Positive today." Inspired despite the many trials and tribulations, I came up with the Top Ten Things About Removing Asbestos from Our House:

10. The soybean oil solvent makes the air smell like salad dressing. (Most mastic solvents are very flammable and toxic.)

9. It builds up all those knitting muscles in my arms and hands.

8. I didn't like the clothes I'm wearing for this project anyway, and now I have a reason to throw them out.

7. My husband thinks I am amazing for taking on this project, so he's extra adoring.

6. We're saving jillions of dollars by not hiring a contractor.

5. At least they didn't tile the walls.

4. The dogs only walked across the goo-covered floor once. And we immediately washed their

paws off.

3. I've single-handedly increased Safeway's sales of scrubbies and mops for the month of May.

2. The solvent leaves my hands extremely well moisturized.

And the #1 thing about removing asbestos from our home is...

I'm finished!

That's right. The mastic is basically all removed and we're moving on to the next phase: demolition.