Adventures in plumbing

The kitchen sink had been leaking. Where it had been an occasional drip, it turned into a once a minute drip, and then a once every 10 seconds drip.
Intuition led me to believe that it was the hot water side leaking, and since my hot water is electric, this had the potential to be pricey if left unchecked.
While I was at Ian's over the weekend, we stopped by Lowes and I picked up the Moen Torrance Faucet and Sprayer. I had wanted a single handle design, and something that looked a little nicer than what was there.

Let's get this done.

The first thing to do was to get the old one off, which was a bit of a struggle. It had been on there a while. But tools and proper angles won the day, and it came off. The hardest part was getting off the two white nuts that held the old fixture down. There was just no good angle to get a wrench on them easily.

NUTS.
(Also, notice the rust.)

Oh yay! Happy day! It came off! And what did I find under the base plate?
No plumber's putty and rust. Lots of rust.

Old fixture is in the sink in the lower right.
That clear plastic gasket wasn't doing jack to keep the water out.

I had thought this might be the case because of the orange water that would leach out from under the plate when I was wiping up the area after dishes. I had no idea it was this bad though.
I got out the Barkeeper's Friend and a Scotchbrite and got to work.
The problem is that no amount of elbow grease will put back metal from where it's been dissolved.

All the black marks are pitting and pinholes.
The brown is surface rust.

I couldn't be replacing the basin last night at 8 pm, (well, I could, but I didn't want to.)
The intention (foolish as it may be) is to redo the kitchen eventually, so I'm going to try not to worry about it, and just keep the area as dry as possible from now on.

FYI - this faucet, for what I paid for it, was awfully cheap. A lot of the parts are plastic, and just don't feel like they are going to hold up over time. Also, the directions were sort of junk - they completely missed a piece, and were very difficult to follow. I get that everyone's cutting corners, but geez.
I did get it installed, and I'm pretty pleased with the results.
It doesn't leak, which is the whole point, so I consider it a success.

Tada! New faucet.

Gutters!

The gutters guys from A&G were here today, exactly at 8 am.
I now am at full gutter strength all the way around, instead of just on the south side of the house.

Gutters!

The front (east) pitches off the far side. The driveway side (north) pitches off the front, otherwise in the winter I'd wind up with a glacier forming back there.

It sounds silly, but I can't wait for it to rain.

In other news, day three: poison ivy is still itchy.

Moisture!

Yesterday I had a guy out to give me a price on how much it would cost to have a sump pump installed. It has to be a fancy air-tight sump pump, otherwise it will void the radon system warranty. The rough price is about $2k. This kills me, because a typical sump pump is about a quarter that cost.
At this point, I'm not convinced that I need one though. This was more an exploration for down the line. First and foremost will be the gutters and repointing, which I'm pretty sure will solve about 90% of my problem.
The first gutter guy had reached out to see if I was still interested and offered to let me pay in installments. He was professional and polite, and his price was right, so I told A&G Gutters yes. Within the next few weeks the house will now sport gutters on the east and north side. It won't be fancy. It'll use the rod hangers (which offend my aesthetic, but the pitch of the roof won't work with anything else). They will be functional and keep water from pounding on my foundation.

Spring is trying!

Soon, soon my oil tank won't have to stand in a puddle.
Hopefully this further reduces the amount of moisture headed up to the attic to feed the mold.

Nifty Particulates

One side benefit of getting the radon water handler installed is that they put a particulate filter in line before the radon bubbler. This serves to protect the radon system from building up too much sludge in it's big black box.
The filter housing is clear, so you can see when it needs changing. I don't use a ton of water, and the the well water is pretty clean, but it's neat to see what the filter is knocking out of the stream.

Neat.

 I'm sure much of it is blueish because that's the color of the PEX pipe that Radon Guy Dave used to zig zag all over my basement. (Blue = cold water.) Now that no one should be messing around with the pipes, it should sort it's self out. It will be interesting to watch over time, (but I was also the kid who really enjoyed sticking my head in the pond and watching the stuff under the water.)

What's Done is Done

The most expensive thing I've had to do to this house so far is also the least sexy thing to talk about and photograph.

Hrmph.

This fancy black tupper tub you see above is a well water radon mitigation unit. It basically takes the water from the well pump, bubbles it to jostle the radon out (radon wants to be in the air, not the water) and then blows the contaminated air out while pressurizing the water back to the house.
That black box, it's attached pipes and 3/4 a day's labor is $4500.

Double Hrrmph.

Here we see where the air vent exists the basement, through my plexiglass window, along with the air vent. That funny basketball sized thing on the pipe is a fan that is sucking the radon gas out from under my foundation through holes specially drilled and excavated to collect the radon gas before it passes through the cement into the basement air. This fancy contraption of PVC and fan was an additional $1400.
The nice man has to come back tomorrow and listen to the fan with me, because it's oddly loud in weird places in the house. Idling Train Engine Loud, at least to me. But I might be a bit oversensitive.

Here's where I'll make a note to myself to read all future quotes with a fine tooth comb. I went into this thinking that the total for the job was $4500, because the the number in bold at the bottom of the sheet next to the word "total" was $4500. I was pretty thrilled, until the nice man handed me the invoice. What I'd been looking at was the total for the Water section. There was no total for both Air and Water.
it's work I would have had to do anyway, but I wasn't emotionally prepared to lay it out right then. I'm really pretty angry at myself for missing it. It means that some other things I wanted to do sooner than later will now happen later.

One last insult to injury is that I'd just started considering getting a wood stove an tossing it on the unused chimney to get something resembling warmth in here.

Radon pipe, right in front of the chimney.

That idea was vetoed by the universe.