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Promises, Bestowments, and Unexpected Puddles

   Written by on November 23, 2016 at 10:42 am
The stories in this column are true. Averett lives a dull life in rural Southside Virginia with his wife Management, two children and a rotating assortment of goats, dogs, cats, snakes and other local fauna.

The stories in this column are true. Averett lives a dull life in rural Southside Virginia with his wife Management, two children and a rotating assortment of goats, dogs, cats, snakes and other local fauna.

Last month I promised my bride Management I would have the living and dining rooms finished before Christmas. In addition to my other questionable talents, I will now prove my mind-reading ability. You just thought, “Now he is going to say, ‘but I didn’t say which Christmas’.” I would never play those kinds of games with Management. If I’m going to stall, I stall from the beginning. Why would I set a trap for Averett that I know he is going to get caught in?

Although I didn’t say this Christmas and although she possibly didn’t believe this Christmas, that’s what I said and that’s what I meant and that’s what I intend to do. There really wasn’t a lot left to do. I just had to move out all of the furniture (after finding a place to put it), tear out the granite flooring where the woodstove was, find some more old heart pine boards, plane them, replace that floor, sand the floors, apply Tung oil on the floor, tear out two walls and replace them with paneling, paint the walls and ceiling, hang a door, install a brick face around the fireplace and a few other small and inconsequential things.

Excluding a few minor setbacks everything is progressing according to the progression. I did have to remove the first coat of oil, re-sand the floors and start over (twice) but I always expect a few inconveniences.

My progress report to date is: Dining room-finished, fireplace-finished, floor sanding-finished and granite removal-finished. I should be able to complete the project in plenty of time providing I can take next week off and find a way to clone myself.

I think I have found a way to bypass Christmas shopping. As everyone who has grown children knows, the parent’s stuff has a way of migrating to the children’s homes. In our case my tools have migrated to the son’s home and my books have migrated to the daughter’s home. My plan (pending Management’s approval) is to give them a card conveying permanent ownership of everything of mine they currently have in their possession.

This will be incredibly generous on my part even if we exclude the probability that I would never get the stuff back anyway. I can then replace my stuff after Christmas and they won’t have any reason to borrow mine again since they will have their own.

Saturday morning, just as I was starting work on the living room, our water pressure began to drop. This happens occasionally when you get water from a hole in the ground. We filled a few jugs with water for coffee just in case and when I finished painting I tried to find the problem. As it turned out there were several problems.

On Sunday evening we replaced a broken wire to the pump and still didn’t have water.

Now when I was digging ditches I learned that homeowners always think they know where their underground water and electric lines are. I also learned they never do. Fortunately, that isn’t the case with me. I dug the ditches, I put in the wire and I covered them up. I know where they are. All I had to do was follow the lines and look for the wet spot. The problem was by this point it was raining and dark which makes it hard to find the correct puddle.

Then the Godfather who visits on Sunday afternoons noticed he could hear water running in the Honey House. Now I hadn’t checked there mainly because we don’t have plumbing there. I removed it all when we gave up commercial beekeeping twenty years ago so I wouldn’t have to heat the building. There was simply no way water could be running in there. On the other hand, the Godfather has a reputation for reliability and I always trust his judgment.

I have to admit as he was standing in the middle of a large building insisting he could hear water running not only in a building with the plumbing removed but in a location where there had never been any plumbing, I was skeptical.

Of course he was correct. He could hear the water in the floor drain, which he traced to a broken pipe that was creating a small pond where I didn’t think there was a waterline. The pond was running into a drain in the back of the building so there weren’t the usual obvious signs of a leak. At that point I remembered I had installed a line in preparation of adding another building, which I never got around to doing and I forgot it.

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