Archives for June 2008

(Music accompanying the post Our House– Madness or CSN&Y. Your pick,)

Ah the joys of home ownership. People often laud the many benefits of owning your own home and on the whole I do agree with them. There is something quite pleasurable about being master of the castle, however large or small it may be.

My own domicile is a very fine house. Built as part of the post WWII housing boom it has survived multiple earthquakes, riots, floods, fire and brimstone, mass hysteria etc. In short it is a house that is old enough to have a few aches and pains.

A few years back we survived the chaos and mess of a kitchen remodel. It was without question one of the best things we have done to add value to this place and it made a great background for the artwork I call Hand in The Kitchen. Did I mention it is where I store my Ginsu knife.

If you’re still reading you’re probably wondering what the hell the title means. Why would I call it sprinklers. Well, I am glad that you asked. Since we are taking the long way home I’ll link to a post I did last year in which I listed some things I want to do to the house.

If you read it carefully you’ll see that I said that the joint needs new sprinklers in the front and back. My Jack, you take an awfully long time to get things done. Well, there is some truth to that, but I also have a tremendous excuse. The fabulous city notified me that they were going to redo the sidewalks and that in doing so they would kill many of my sprinklers. I decided that since they were going to kill the sprinklers it didn’t make any sense to do the work twice.

And so I waited. It took the city a long while to get to the sidewalks, and then a good while longer to fix the sprinklers they killed. In turn I moved them down the list of priorities and took on other projects.

Anyhoo, today I decided that I was tired of having a sprinkler issue and made my way to the hardware store. Am I the only one who misses Builder’s Emporium. At the fair store I sauntered up and down the aisles and suffered great angst about purchasing a number of items that were not on the list of things I had come for.

In the end I settled down and purchased just the things I needed to fix the front sprinklers. An hour later and voila, the sprinklers were working as a team and not as individual units. For the sake of posterity and future reference there is a still a lot of work that needs to be done. Frankly I need to gut the front and back yards and redo the whole system as the existing is antiquated.

That is a job that I can do, but I think that in the interest of time I’ll probably hire someone to take care of it. While there is something quite rewarding in working with your hands, it is also quite nice to come home and have time to do things other than dig ditches.