The Life of a Troll

For the do-it-yourself homeowner, here are a few tips I've learned about working underneath the house:

1. As a warm-up exercise, get on your hands and knees and crawl around the outside of your house in a clockwise direction. When you get halfway, lie down on your stomach and crawl the rest of the way soldier-style.
2. When you're ready to go back (or just realize you've forgotten a tool), reverse the process, crawling counter-clockwise.
3. The reason you're circling around the house is because, of course, the furnace is right in the middle, blocking any shortcuts. (See item #7, below.)
4. Working on your back under the floor with pipes in your face, nearsightedness is a benefit. In fact, it may be a job requirement.
5. Claustrophobia is just plain not allowed.
6. Don't work on anything directly overhead while lying on your back. Nasty stuff tends to fall into your face, mouth, and eyes, even with eyeglasses. Instead, move slightly to one side so all the dust can fall in your ear.
7. Remark on the incompetence of every plumber, electrician, and builder who came before you and wonder why, oh, why did they have to put that pipe/conduit/joist exactly where you're trying to work?
8. After you come out from under the house, shake off like a dog coming out of the pool. You don't want to track that stuff in.
9. If possible, wear pants without pockets. As you inch along in the dirt (see #1) your pockets will act as shovels, collecting an amazing amount of dirt and debris. You'll be 5 pounds heaver than when you started.
10. Always wear a dust mask or respirator. You may not think you need it, but careful examination of said mask will reveal all the stuff that didn't go into your lungs and nose.
11. Blow your nose after every trip under the house, but don't look at the Kleenex. Seriously.
12. Hardhats are for sissies. Just learn where the 7,459 exposed nails are.
13. Buy fresh batteries for your flashlight. In fact, buy several flashlights.
14. Christmas tree lights make excellent crawlspace lighting. They're cheap, small, not overly bright, and the LED kind don't get warm and don't use much electricity. Best of all, you can string them along the floor joists to make path lighting, like the floor of an airliner.
15. Item #14 requires a working AC outlet under the house, of course.
16. Safety tip: Learn to recognize the difference between gas lines and water pipes. Both are metal, but one is more fun to cut into than the other. Practice identifying them in dim lighting.
17. Never take down more than one object with a cord (work light, extension cord, long rope, etc.). They will inevitably get tangled together and you've got approximately zero space in which to get them untangled.
18. Banging your funny bone feels just like an electric shock. Don't panic.
19. Avoid power tools. There probably isn't enough room for them, the corded ones are more trouble than they're worth (see #17, above), and they'll just get dirt in the motors. Besides, a screwdriver hurts a lot less than a cordless drill when you drop it on your face.
20. Place all of your parts and tools in a small plastic box and keep them there. This allows you to push/drag everything at once, rather than hand-carry twenty different items while you're crawling on hands and knees.
21. Always, always put tools directly back into the box. Never set them down, rest them on your stomach, or let them out of your sight. They will disappear. The box will get very dirty and crowded, but at least you'll know where to look for your pliers.
22. Sharpies work upside-down. Crayons work even better.
23. Gloves are worse than useless. They scoop up dirt, which falls out when you reach over your face to work.
24. Do not drink excessive amounts of coffee, tea, or cola before starting an under-house project. Just sayin'.
25. Large screws require large screwdrivers, and large screwdrivers have long handles. There is no room for such tools under a low crawlspace. Deal with it.
26. Open all containers to one side, not over your face. This is especially true of liquid containers, and most especially of ABS cement.
27. Take twice as many small screws, wire nuts, couplers, or whatever little pieces as you think you need. It's a nuisance to go back for one more.
28. Prop open the door/hatch to your crawlspace with a brick or other handy object. Otherwise, the door will blow shut just as you've reached the furthermost recess, and it gets really dark in there.
29. Whenever possible, cut a hole in the floor near where you'll be working. This allows daylight to come through and admits fresh air, but most of all it allows you to place tools near the hole so you can reach up and grab them later. With practice, you'll develop a pattern so that you always know that the #2 Philips screwdriver is on the left, the flashlight is to the right, and so on.
30. Your cell phone should be among the items reachable from the hole. Just in case.
31. Sandy soil has a remarkable ability to swallow objects. If you think rainwater soaks into the soil quickly, try dropping a pair of pliers. Or that little screw you really needed to finish your project. Now I understand how ancient cities can disappear so thoroughly.
32. I'd make a great poltergeist, what with all the banging, grunting, and swearing.

Duct, Duct, Go

With most of the plumbing now out of the way, it was time to tackle something different. Not any cleaner, but at least different.

The downstairs/restaurant kitchen isn't heated. Presumably, it stayed warm enough when they were cooking all day, or they just stayed out of the kitchen on off days. At any rate, there aren't any heat registers in that part of the house and it gets a bit cold in the winter. We keep the door to the kitchen closed, and we blocked off the waiter pass-through. Even though there are two bathrooms (and a storage room) in there, we rarely use them when it's cold. For the most part, we've treated the downstairs kitchen as, um, cold storage.

No more. Since we're pulling up the floor in the kitchen anyway (more on that later), this seemed like a good time to add a heat register in that corner of the house. Another trip to the hardware store! I got me all the bits and pieces I needed, including insulation, ductwork, fittings, fasteners, and so on. A new adventure awaited.

Cutting the hole in the floor was easy, especially since there was already a hole nearby. That allowed me to reach through the first hole with one hand while placing the duct and the register with the other. The plan was to tee the new duct off of another nearby duct about 6 feet away. Over at Home Depot, I got me a 6-foot length of aluminum duct and a similar length of fiberglass insulation. But over on the next shelf, they had a 25-foot length of already-insulated ductwork for the same price. Hmmm. Four times more than I need, but hey, free ductwork!

The weird thing was, the 25-foot length came in a 3-foot box. How does that work?

The answer: Stand back when you open the box. Sproing!!!! Massive jack-in-the-box, complete with fiberglass overcoat. Swell. Now I get to drag this big snake around with me as I crawl under the house to splice in the new ductwork. Flashlight in one hand, hacksaw in the other, screwdrivers, knives, duct tape, and whatnot stuffed into pockets, it's time to inch along the crawlspace. Naturally, the new duct goes right where the clearance is most narrow and congested, so I'm working on my back with gas lines, water pipes, and our spanking new drain maze all right in my face. I got to spend some quality time with the dark underside of an old house.

Now I've got about 19 feet of excess ductwork that I can't fit back into the box. Anybody need an extra heater vent?

And Now For Something Completely Different

We do occasionally leave the house and go shopping, you know. Otherwise, we'd miss important stuff like this.

At one of the finer retail establishments in the area, we stumbled across this little gem. Yup, that's genuine "Larry the Cable Guy" brand beer batter mix for fish. "Just add beer" it says on the box. So I gotta wonder: Is it really beer batter if you have to add your own beer?

And what marketing department thought that Larry the Cable Guy was the ideal spokesman for their product? Maybe the budget had run out. Or he's the company president's nephew. Or cable guy.

It gets better. The selfsame store also stocked Larry the Cable Guy Beer Bread mix. Just add -- you guessed it -- beer. And butter. Which sounds to me like it's a box of flour and baking soda.

Note that the boxes are cunningly printed in different colors, blue for fish batter, red for bread mix. Wouldn't want to mix them up. For people who pour beer on all of their food.

On a somewhat unrelated note, the upside-down box marked "Light & Fluffy" is not one of Larry's. It's another brand entirely, for Red Velvet Pancake Mix. Not cake; pancakes. I think they turned it face down because nobody wanted to see what that looks like. And if you look really closely, you'll see that it's marked, "Best by 01/24/2011." By my calculations, that was over two years ago. Shame, really. I only make Red Velvet Pancakes when they're at their best.