Back to work

I know it's been a long time since I haved blogged. As some of you might know, Eleni and I went on our East coast tour in suport of our latest album "Other Places." After the tour, we went to Europe for a month and a half ,visited some family, and played some shows there as well. If you go to Binge Cafe you can read about the tour. It's been great! We met a lot of cool people and ate great vegan food. I'm happy to be home.

Ok, here are some new updates of the house. I'm not going to go into a lot of boring details this time. That's right: short and sweet.

1) I put gutters on the house. It seemed that there was a lot of water under the house and it smelled.

2) Some of the outside wall and siding was rotted out and the bricks need to be cemented back into place.

3) I replaced the outside wall and some of the inside floor joist. The former kitchen sink's pipes burst a while ago. No one was living here at the time so the water rotted out the floor and the wall. There was a nice hole to the outside, which Greco (our cat) was using for a cat door. I replaced some loose bricks and stuccoed the brick foundation.

4) I decided that it was time to do some serious work on the foundation. There was all kinds of junk under the house. Apon cleaning out the basement I noticed a cracked pipe (not a crack pipe). The best part
about this was we hired some plumbers to fix the bathroom pipes. They connected the new drain pipes to the old cracked pipe. That's right! All this time water was draining under the house. Next time I'll just do the job myself. As you can see, the foundation columns aren't very straight anymore. Well...I had to cut the pipe out and replace it. As I was cutting it, it fell apart. Six hours later, we could take showers again. That old pipe was a pain to cut. More plumbing will need to be replaced in the future, but for now we need to move on to bigger jobs. I built some forms for the footing and dug a 4 ft. hole. I mixed concrete for the footer, and using cinder blocks, created a column by stuccoing the sides after piling the blocks into the footer (dry stacking).

More pictures to follow. I've had a few days off from this work, and been writing some new music with Beloved Binge, but will be returning to the nether-world tomorrow.