Surrogate Home Ownership

I spent this past weekend hanging out at Bird & Jen's place up in New Hampshire. My original plan was to help Bird work on their master bathroom remodel--I brought up my bucket o' plumbing tools. However, just as we were setting up, Bird noticed some water dripping into the basement from the other side of the house. Uh oh.

We started disassembling the corner of the closet, where we saw the leak.


Jen photodocumented what ensued--after disassembling the closet wall, putting a recip saw into action, and engaging in some building proctology (as shown below), we found out that a cast iron drain pipe had cracked along most of its length, and was leaking down the wall into the basement. Yuckness.


At that point, we decided to clean up and hand off the rest of the job to a plumber--I have worked with cast iron hub & spigot pipe before, and it's not a fun job. In case you're curious, old cast iron drain pipe is put together using oakum (tarred/oiled hemp or jute fiber) to pack the joint, and then pouring molten lead to seal it (like this example). At horizontal joints, a collar was required to funnel the lead into the opening. Yeah, yikes.

Incidentally, I wanted to point out that we were dealing with a cracked pipe, not a crack pipe. While formulating an art-geek joke in my head, I did a Google search on the phrase, and found that somebody else had already made it, complete with illustration: "Ceci n'est pas une crack pipe." Damn you internets!!! Damn yooooouuuu!!!

Afterwards, we went to the local Home Depot that is being closed and moved to larger quarters (about 800 feet down the road). They are trying to sell all their merchandise before this move--therefore a 10-30% clearance sale. This seemed a bit counterproductive to me--they could have just run relays of pallet jacks down the street to move the store's merchandise, but Bird's understanding is that they wanted to start their new store with all-fresh merchandise. After all, you don't want any wallpaper that's past its expiration date.


I went in with great anticipation--here's my chance to buy some big ticket items and stock up on assorted useful sundries! However, to be honest, it was a bit disappointing to realize that there are fewer and fewer tools I want or need nowadays. Walking up and down the tool section, I reacted:

"Got one."
"Got one."
"In storage in New York."
"Got a crappy one that works well enough."
"Don't need one."
"Got one."
"Might need it eventually, but not worth buying yet."
"Would be fun to have one, but not sure if I'll use it."
"Got one."
"Can get a better deal on Amazon.com"
"Got one."

I ended up just buying a 4 lb sledge and some other sundry items.

Overall, back to the title of this post: I sometimes wonder if my attitude towards home ownership might echo my attitude towards children--fun enough to borrow once in a while, but doing it full time probably isn't for me. After all, I have too much fun wandering into various house projects at friends' places--if I had my own house to deal with, I probably would never have any free time available again.