Back working at the house today

The buyers had requested a few things that they wanted done before closing, so we headed to the house today to meet some folks who were coming to perform services, and to do a couple of tasks ourselves.

We had a chimney sweep/service guy (*not* Dick Van Dyke) and another guy working on cleaning and maintenance of the HVAC system. A fellow from our roofing company came by to check the measurement of a skylight that needs to be replaced.

Meanwhile, Dwayne and I worked on dismantling the kitty privy and clearing the french drains.

The kitty privy - Dwayne had built this incarnation of the kitty privy after the garage addition a few years ago. The new owners don't have cats and don't plan to have cats, and are concerned that the pet door that gives access to the privy from the utility room might prove too much of an enticement to their soon-to-be toddler.

Dwayne had built an "apartment" on the top of the privy so the cats could come out and hang out "in the garage" but not out in the garage. Tabitha frequently used this space to hide out if anything "dangerous" (like house cleaning) was going on inside the house.

The litter pans sat on plastic screening on the floor, and the cats had to traverse a distance on the plastic screening before re-entering the house which did a good job of cleaning their paws and limiting the amount of litter tracked in.

I did the job of dismantling the kitty privy. While I had appreciated the function of it, I had not realized how much work Dwayne had put into it until taking it apart. It was really sturdy and so well put together. He did almost all of it with screws so we have quite a number of screws now! Much of it will get trashed as it was custom made for the space and we doubt that anyone else would have need for the components. Makes me a bit sad...

While I was working on privy dismantling, Dwayne was working on clearing the french drains. He was able to make good progress on the part of the drain that empties into the street on the side of the house.

The part that empties toward the front yard, though, was not making as much progress.

 We realized that we were going to have to find the exit point that is a pop-up drain in the front yard. Dwayne installed this part of the drain many years ago, so we had an idea of where the pop-up drain was... but not exact location.

We first found the pipe under one of the garden areas (we could dig it up without making as much of a mess as digging in the yard, we figured). It was a bit deeper than we expected...

That gave us the direction and bearing on which to dig - we tried using long screwdrivers to probe down, but ended up digging a lot of holes too.

The screwdriver in the foreground is where the drain is located - once we found it, we recognized that the ground was wet there - a good clue that there was a little bit of water bubbling up... oh well!

A wider shot so maybe, if we ever need to, we could find the drain again! One of our neighbors stopped by and said, "I thought the house had sold and you had left!" We said, "We had to come back and dig up where the bodies were buried!" It sure looked like we were digging up something big!

 We decided that we should extend the end of the drain a little further down the slight slope of the front yard so it would more easily pop up above the ground level. As a result, a visit to Home Depot was in our future... we ended up getting help from a couple of the local Home Depot folks who were VERY helpful!

They only sold the pipe that we needed to extend the drain in 10' lengths (we need about 2'), and 10' would not fit into the Jeep, so we cut it into two pieces for easier transportation.

A funny thing that happened: after seeing Dwayne cut the pipe, another customer came up to us and asked, "Do you carry those pre-cut boards for making stairs?" I looked at him in amazement, realizing that he thought we were people who *knew* something! My sweet honey said, "Oh, I think they do, let's look..." and sure enough found them on the next aisle over! (Even *I* know that Home Depot helper people wear orange vestie thingies - does Dwayne look like a Home Depot helper person?)

We also stopped by the tool rental area and plan to rent a drain cleaner tomorrow to finish the job of cleaning out the french drains. I hope it works!