Some of you may recall our complaining about "mouse smell" a few months back, originating from the basement. Mmm, sweet smell of death.

In fact, I disassembled nearly our entire heating system and rearranged the entire basement in the process of trying to figure out where the smell was coming from. No luck. (I was positive it was in a heat duct, since the smell was not there when I woke up that day, but the heat turned on while I was taking a shower, and something started to bake.) It subsided after a week, during much of which we were not-here, but there's been a bit of a lingering aroma.

Fast forward to now. I've got contractors installing a flue liner for our chimney, so that we stop getting condensation through the brick into our walls. Taking apart the furnace and water heater flue leads, the contractor called, "Hey, come here - you're lucky you didn't croak, man."

For those who have a touch of both hypochondria and arachnophobia, the internet is DEFINITELY NOT a good tool for answering the question, "What kind of spider did I just find (and adrenally smoosh) in my basement?"

Fortunately, I have enough self-control to venture only as far as Extension articles, and avoid both google images and wikipedia.

That is all.

Over at Eat Close To Home, Emily is both wondering whether to buy a chest freezer and also commenting on the one-wayness of the blogger-commenter relationship. So I'm going to go old-school - I was blogging before comments existed, yo - and post here, rather than there.

My family bought a chest freezer sometime in my childhood. Every year, we got a lamb and a quarter(?) of beef from my godmother, down the street. When we moved out of the North Campus Co-ops to Jorvik, my parents gave us that freezer - and bought themselves a smaller one. When we moved out of Jorvik and bought a house, my parents gave us a small chest freezer as a housewarming present. (...with a lamb inside it. Yummy.) (We donated the parents' -> Jorvik chest freezer to Growing Hope.)

To get a little less abstract than the previous post on the application of housing law during financial meltdown, I think I've satisfactorily chewed over a connection I've been working on.

A week ago, I attended the Global Suburbs conference at UMich (in no small part masterminded by Dale), and caught part of a talk on land ownership and housing costs in Lahore, Pakistan. If I followed correctly, one comment that was made was that Pakistanis had fairly recently received access to financing tools such as the 30-year mortgage, allowing many people the potential to purchase homes who never would have been able to previously. This increased buying power led to increased demand, contributing to rising prices.

There's a parallel here. Over the past decade, Americans have received access to financing tools such as the ARM, the zero-down mortgage, the interest-only mortgage, the no-documentation mortgage, and all sorts of bizarre hybrids. All of these were essentially justified by lenders on the grounds that mortgages were a can't-lose proposition, as well as the adoption of collateralized debt instruments, and allowed many people the potential to purchase homes who never would have been able to previously.

Yesterday, my sister sent me a link to The Daily Green's $250,000 home/car/life "eco-makeover" drawing. "Grand Prize Winner will win $250,000 which can be used to purchase products and services to help make your life and home more eco-friendly."

So, let me get this straight. You want me to consume more - a lot more - in order to be "green", which typically requires pursuing happiness more efficiently, or, in other words, consuming less. Gotta love America!

I've been feeling a little bummed lately when thinking of skills / hobbies I haven't practiced in a while. I think I've now caught up on homebrewing. Yesterday, I bottled a brown ale; today, brewed the third variation on the honey wheat that I served at our wedding. Meanwhile, Cara decided that today was a good time to exercise her grain-and-yeast skills as well, and has whole wheat bread and rolls on the rise.

Relatedly, I'm mid-read of Standage's A History of the World in Six Glasses (beer, wine, spirits, tea, coffee, cola), which I recommend to anyone who enjoys other fine works of single-food anthropology. (e.g. Kurlansky's Cod and Salt.) The first section discusses beer as the first significant non-water drink in civilization, invent/discovered concurrently with bread and equally important in encouraging/supporting agricultural society. (Today's lesson: beer is both safer and more nutritious than water, so drink up!)

Nothing like being in the basement while a family member is showering and hearing drip...drip...drip... I had meant to spend this past Sunday working on skills like "sitting" and "reading". Instead, I worked on "plumbing", "tiling", "caulking", and "cursing".

Essentially, our showerhead's hose (it's one of those removable hand-held dealies) had sprung a leak at one of the connections, which led to some spraying of water out of the tub, onto the floor, where poorly caulked aging vinyl tiles allowed the water to flow through, and into the basement. Lovely. (Note: I knew the floor tiles had said issues, but was hoping that issues would not become problems before we were ready for the full bathroom gut and rebuild.)

You may recall my commenting that I needed to insulate the walls where the first floor attic abuts the second floor walls of the house. Today, I measured the estimated area to insulate from the inside side of the walls, checked stud spacing in the crawlspace access, and bought a Sunfire-load of pink insulation from Home Depot. I suited up, including facemask and safety glasses, to ward off the evil fiberglassy bits, and ventured into the attic. Where a surprise awaited.

You see, the first-floor attic access is in the back of a second-floor closet that's cut into said attic. So, from the access, about the only thing you can see without going all the way into the attic is that back wall of the closet, about 7 feet wide, that you're sticking your torso through the middle of. That's uninsulated. Upon crawling around, though, I found that this part is the only uninsulated part - the rest of the backside of the walls is pretty well insulated. Including the closet sidewalls. So this isn't just an issue of somebody installing, and not insulating, the closet after everything else had been done - they just, for some reason, didn't insulate the back wall of the closet, the most accessible part, when they did all the hard parts. WTF?

The major project of year one in Houseone has been keeping out the water. Between soggy roofing and rivulets of water running across the basement floor during every rain, water was a significant issue when we moved in. However, this month gave us about two weeks of daily rain, much of it quite heavy, with the net effect of small amounts of dampness detectable at the basement wall-floor intersection. I'd say we've got the water problem pretty well solved.

The next major issue, looking at my spreadsheet of utility costs, is clearly heating. Our baseline cooking + hot water cost is about $1/day, but that spikes to $5-$6/day in January and February. Some of the window caulking we've done should help, and the new front door en route will do wonders. But some of the water repairs pushed us backwards on heating.

Yesterday was Cara's birthday, which means that today must be Houseone's closingday! Yes, as of about 4pm today, we will have been calling up our parents with panicked questions about various pieces of the house flooding, shorting, or falling apart for one whole year.

Thank you, parents, for raising us to think that living in a constant-work-in-progress house was a fine idea (which I still think it is); thank you, Riversiders and YpsiVotes kids, for taking up some of the social slack of our not living with a dozen housemates anymore; and thank you, Ypsi in general, for being an awesome place to live.