Category: House

Two nights ago we had our first severe water/house event. The toilet in the bathroom on our master bedroom level was clogged. That alone of course is not a problem but at the same time our water tank sometimes does not shut off properly and the water keeps running. Not a good thing of course but not a disaster by itself. Of course mixing up those two problems is a highly dangerous mix. I woke up after one hour of sleep it was 3am and heart a load water dripping like in a major rainfall but kind of not muffled enough such that it caught my attention. I went to the bathroom and saw it mostly flooded the water still running. I stopped the water unclogged the toilet went down to the living room and saw the water pooring through our ceiling and into the basement.

I woke Ana to help me and while I cleaned up the living room she took care of the bathroom. The basement luckily enough is self cleaning, the water drained out at the lowest point and the humidity is taken care of by the dehumidifier 🙂

Ana called the home insurance and they will come by on Tuesday….. The ceiling does not look good but imagine I would not have woken up. By now bathroom and living room are dry but the ceiling of course needs some time to dry out. I increased the temperature in the house to help the drying process, it should help.

Hello after a long break! Finally, I find the time to write something in the blog again. The reason is that today we finally have a bathroom on the upper floor with a non-carpet floor. I have just completed the new floor which is a good solution until we will completely redo the upper bathroom.

We choose a floating floor from allure ‘resilient floor tiles’.

The main problem was of course to properly fit the tiles around the toilet itself. I was not willing to take it out and risk a leak on the upper floors and had to cut around the not really straight sections. I succeeded and after adding some silicon it should not even leak but I think with more experience I could have done better 🙂 Unfortunately our camera is broken and I could not take pictures. Maybe for the next project I will add some if we get a new camera on time.

To all future visitors: now we have an acceptable bathroom upstairs, and I also change the shower head which make the shower upstairs quite pleasant. I would even go as far as saying better then in our master bathroom.

More projects are already planned and the material at hand: the insulation in the upper floor will be fixed and we are going to have an extended wardrobe in our mud room.

After almost two months since we have taken the carpenters seriously as a thread to our home, I have reviewed the situation in the last few days. Regular visits to the attic and detailed inspections of the area shows that there is some very mild ‘dropping’ of saw dust and wood chips (no cleaning done upstairs to preserve) and no more sighting of living ants either.
For the moment we seem to be doing ok, though during the last very hot days we have been seeing more of the craftsmen around our house, on our balcony and in the lower levels. We have now increased the number of toxin boxes and have even put some up outside around the house.
Bottom line: the situation has dramatically improved, but we will have to continuously fight them to not have major invasion up there in the future. I think we can do that.

Yesterday and today I started my first serious attack on the trees reaching close to and over our house. I started with the North side where the trees are reasonably young still they are very high. In the first round I cleaned out the lower branches hanging over our parking spot. I used the ladder and cut the branches while standing on the ladder. The work was relatively straight forward. I left reasonably long remainders of the branches, as I was planning on using them as steps to later climb higher into the trees.
In the next two steps I left the ladder and mounted into the tree always staying on the trunk and carefully moving upward. While mounting upwards I removed the big branches towards out house and finally I reached the point where I could just take off the top of the tree without risking the remainders to fall on our house. It is almost 10m high and I worked carefully keeping my legs and at least one arm to secure myself. The cutting in all cases went very smoothly and as a result now all of the trees branches reaching towards our house are gone. It adds a lot of light to the kitchen, Gisele’s room and the attic, but most important of all it gives the roof some sun and no more easy access for squirrels or ants.

And I also took some breaks…. watching Germany win against Australia (4:0) in the World Cup and having some quality bonding time with Blaki.