Notes from Maine - 2023/09/24

My kitchen has been a long, tough remodeling project, but I’m pleased to announce that I’ve finally accepted that I will never finish it. In fact, I’m not even done with the floor. I’ll just continue to cobble together “meals” with the refrigerator and microwave I stashed in the laundry room. 

This past week, I disconnected the gas line. It was coming up through the floor, and I’m rebuilding the floor. The propane here is run through copper lines flared into brass compression fittings. After tightening the nut onto a ball valve, I turned on the gas and sprayed it with soapy water. If you see bubbles, there’s a problem. I didn’t see any bubbles, so I walked away. About fifteen minutes later, I drove over to Home Depot to pick up a propane detector wand. I kept imagining the cellar filling up with propane and then the furnace turning on for the hot water. 

Something like that happened down in Yarmouth a couple of years ago. A gas line failed and a house filled until something sparked it off. There was nothing left of that house except confetti. So, I got a detector and checked my work. It’s not difficult to tighten a flare fitting until it doesn’t leak, but I wanted to be sure. 

I also had to bypass the baseboard heat on the south wall. Down in the cellar, I cut the pipes and installed a straight run where it used to come up through the floor for the heat. Then, I bled the lines and ran the circulator to make sure that all the air was out of there. Once it ran without gurgling, I figured I was done. 

I’m not opposed to hiring qualified people to do these jobs, but I’ve never been successful at that kind of thing. When I first bought the house, I started calling chimney sweeps. After making a dozen calls, I finally got one on the line and they promised to come at the end of the month. When they didn’t show, I called again and found out that they didn’t have time for a new client. That’s when I bought my own chimney brush and pole and figured out how to do it myself. It was the same thing the first time I had a plumbing problem. I couldn’t find anyone who wanted the work, but one plumber described to me (on the phone) how to recharge the bladder in my expansion tank. So I did that, and it has been running fine since.

Maine has a large number of very small and owner-operated businesses. It’s difficult to find decent service people who don’t already have more work than they can handle. Once I did a few tasks of my own, I dreaded a professional coming in for future work. Would they tell me that my work should be ripped out and redone? Probably. 

Twenty years ago, I had more pride. If someone challenged me on something, I might get defensive. A visitor once criticized how I framed the roof of the barn. I didn’t give them the satisfaction of an argument, but inside I was seething. If the same thing happened today, I would problem ask a thousand questions—genuinely curious as to how I had messed up the framing. On one hand, it was my first time framing a barn and I planned everything based on reading a single book. On the other hand, it has stood for more than twenty years without any signs of settling, so how bad could it be?

At this point, it doesn’t even really occur to me to try to hire someone, with a couple of exceptions. I had the furnace installed by professionals because that was the only way it would be warrantied. I hired people to put on a metal roof because I’ve done a ton of roofs and I realized that mine would be a giant pain. It’s high off the ground and a very steep pitch. Just patching shingles one time I twisted an ankle and it took weeks to recover. When I decided to switch to metal, I hired a decent company and I’ve only had a few regrets. 

But this kitchen is all me, and it’s going to take a while.

When I’m finally done with everything, I’ll call the propane company and have them pressure test the line. I did that before when I moved my dryer. 

My insurance company is going to find this confession one day and use it to deny my claims. For the record, the post above is satire. I have never, nor will I ever, engage in home improvement without hiring teams of trained professionals to execute all the work. Any stories to the contrary are fictional—invented only to entertain.