The Bard's Fire

Frankly, I thought it would be the clothes dryer, the refrigerator or, most likely, the dishwasher that would go to Valhalla next. But it was our 12-year-warrantied, 11-year-old water heater that turned up its toes sometime in the night. It started leaking, bigtime, as evidenced by the amount of water Himself cleaned up with the wet-dry vacuum first thing this morning. Fortunately, aside from some leakage into the laundry room, most of the escaping H20 went into the garage and out under the garage door.

We've spent the majority of the day looking at possible replacements and dealing with the manufacturer's warranty division, the vendor, and the vendor's installation department. It would have taken considerably less time if the three parties communicated with each other, at least to the extent what one told us about what the others did bore passing acquaintance to what the others told us they did. It took many phone calls to each, but we finally have all three agreeing on the process, a ballpark figure on what the monetary outlay will be, and a game plan and time window for the installation tomorrow morning.

Himself was able to shut off the gas to the thing, but the cut-off valve for the water intake wasn't as cooperative. So, for now and until the installation is complete, we've turned off the water at the street. Toilet tanks are being filled with buckets of water from the rain barrels out back, and we're washing our hands with bottled water.

I'm really hoping things go as planned. We have an out-of-town guest due on Thursday evening.

Back on March 22nd, the denizens of HarpHaven found ourselves, with all of half-a-nanosecond warning, watching big honkin’ implements of destruction tearing up a portion of our front walkway and leaving a hole in which one could conveniently hide a classic VW bug. (See entry for March 25: When City Contractors Attack.) The work in the neighborhood was supposed to be concluded by March 31st. You know where this is going.

Weather plays a big part in construction timelines, so I can’t entirely blame the contractor. Storms, some of them right nasty, have been a regular occurrence in the last several weeks. Each storm refilled the moat where my walkway used to be and kept the construction workers from their city-assigned task. When it wasn’t raining, we could hear work taking place on other streets in the area. Three plus weeks in, the front of my house was still a wheelie-no-go zone. It was getting a little old.

A call was placed to the number listed for the onsite supervisor, explaining that we understood about rain delays, but that the situation was starting to be a problem for the wheelchair-user in the family and asking when he thought they might be over this way to finish. He couldn’t give us a timeframe, he said, but would send someone over to cover the hole with something that might serve as a “bridge”. He got points for his attitude and for sounding like he at least understood the situation.

He got more points when, before the end of the day, there was *something* covering the hole. Granted, it was too flimsy for the BattleChariot and substantial occupant -- let’s just say I wouldn’t have ventured across it had the Tardis landed in the middle of the street and the 10th, 12th, and War Doctors, *and* Jack Harkness had stepped out and beckoned me aboard. But the supervisor was trying to be helpful, and that counts.

Yesterday, about noon, I looked out to see framing and rebar in the hole, and by late afternoon, concrete had been poured and smoothed into a a very nice section of walkway. That supervisor is getting a thank-you call shortly, and later today, I’m going out to reacquaint myself with the front of my house.

HarpHaven has been de-moated, and I am very happy.

Last week, Himself found a notice hanging on the front door when he went for the mail around 6pm. It was from a contractor hired by the city to “rehabilitate” the city’s sewer lines. We’d seen them working on streets all around our neighborhood during the last few weeks, and this was telling us they’d finally gotten to our street. We were instructed not to wash dishes or clothes, flush toilets, take showers or baths, or otherwise send anything down our drains between the hours of 8:00am & 5:00pm the next day.

At least they gave us a few hours warning. Unfortunately, it was too late to reschedule visits from the A/C maintenance tech and the fellow doing our annual termite inspection, which meant we couldn’t do the prudent thing of spending the day in an elsewhere with useable plumbing. So we toughed it out and gave the contractor points when they did, as promised, finished around 4:00pm that day.

I should have known it couldn’t be that easy. Fast forward to this past Wednesday, a bit before 8:00am, when an otherwise quiet and productive morning was broken by what sounded like an invasion of my neighborhood by a tank division from Ft. Hood. Himself went outside to find out was going on, and came back with another doorhanger, this one hand-delivered by the contractor’s onsite contact person, who apologized that it hadn’t been delivered the day before. Work was already starting and would continue, between 7:00am and 6:00pm, until the end of the month, as they “rehabilitated” the connections between each house’s sewer line and the city’s main pipe.

The words were hardly out of his mouth when we heard a concrete saw fire up and what sounded like something Really Big about to crash through the front wall of the house. Himself headed back outside, I headed for the front window. The section of our walkway nearest the city’s sidewalk was missing and a tank-treaded backhoe, size enormous, was attacking the dirt under where the walkway section used to be. Piles of dirt were everywhere and there was a hole big enough to bury a VW bug in, nose-first.

That backhoe driver was *good*. He was working scant inches from the mailbox, with many opportunities to cause damage. As near as we can tell, he didn’t even touch it.

The racket diminished a bit as the backhoe and crew moved to the next house, and stopped around noon when the crew took off for lunch. Himself went out to take a look. The hole was still there, without barrier tape or cones. At the bottom, there appeared to be some type of fabric wrapped around the junction of our pipe and their pipe, secured with what he described as “really big cable ties”. Around 3:00pm, the backhoe and a couple of the crew came back to fill in the hole, compacting the fill dirt every so often. What was left when they finished was a hole roughly a foot deep. Himself went down the street and liberated one of their cones and positioned it in the hole “just in case”. At least no one removed it when they broke for the day.

Thursday, they worked further down the street. Friday morning, we had thunderstorms and no one showed up. But – hey! – I’ve got a moat! And now it’s the weekend.