Category: Home

Our garage doors were in a terrible state.

The exterior handle dates them from a time before automatic door openers. The garage door guy told me they were at least 40 years old.

Look how dirty and wretched they were! The panels are actually made of wood (and glass): something else that dated them. They were extremely heavy, and when we lost power and had to open them manually it was a real chore.

Decades of snow and rain had started the wood rotting, and in parts gaps had formed. It was long past time to replace them! Today was the day.

The garage door guy turned up right on time at 8 am, and half an hour later he and his assistant had removed all the old hardware. Doors, springs, rails and weather seal: all gone. The noise was ungodly, but it was impressive how fast they worked given both were older than me.

Installing the new doors took much longer, and as you can see they came with shiny new rails. Only the motors remained from the old installation, although he opened and repaired the gears in one of them.

Interestingly the spring for the new doors is compact and installed above, which both takes much less space and is much safer. The doors are also quieter than the old ones.

And here they are. They’re metal, insulated and have sturdy plastic windows. They look great and I expect will outlive us. And no exterior handles 🙂

A couple of months ago we had a bit of water in our crawlspace downstairs which led to the discovery of roots growing into the pipe connecting the house to the main sewer line. Our options were to pay to have the pipe cleaned out every year or so, or get it replaced. Either way was an expensive proposition, so we chose the latter. Yesterday the work was done.

It was a fascinating procedure, since they only had a guess (within 3 feet) as to where the pipe exactly was under the ground, and the rise in our front yard meant they’d have to dig to a depth of at least five foot. The guy operating the excavator was a professional, and he was very careful and precise since he wanted to minimize damage to the front yard. almost immediately the scoop was breaking theough tangles of roots, and sometimes they were so thick his helper had to cut them with a chainsaw!

It took about 2.5 hours to reveal the pipe, and as you can see they had to shift the dig location a bit from their original guess. While this was happening there was another guy inside installing a new toilet and faucet in our downstairs bathroom, and he told me that on a previous dig they had unearthed (about 6 foot underground) a suitcase full of old style dolls, and that another employee had once found a box of cash (that the homeowner had let him keep)!

Here’s where the root had grown into the old pipe. It had created a dense root mass about 8 foot long and the guys were amazed we hadn’t had a serious blockage before!

The affected section was removed (the red circles show where it was cut out) and a new plastic one put in. They also added a clean-out access valve (apparently it’s required by code now) to make it easier to remove any future blockages.

The hole was then filled in and the work was almost complete. I say almost since the ground will settle so they’ll return after the thaw to add a load of dirt on top. Here’s what it looks like today, with the cleanout cap circled:

As I said this was very expensive, but we trust they did a good job and hopefully this will minimize problems in the future (plus we have a new loo and faucet downstairs). Stuff like this is just one of the many ‘joys’ of owning a home!