Archive for February, 2007

The Maintenance Catches Up

Monday, February 19th, 2007

After living in the Old Man for over two years virtually maintenance free (quite impressive, actually), it caught up with us in December. First it was the leaky roof, which Nyberg Exteriors repaired for us.

A week later while making a trip to the basement I discovered a small puddle on the floor which turned out to be a pinhole leak in one of the ancient galvanized pipes. Fortunately, American Vintage Home showed up in less than 90 minutes to fix it, but the fix took more than half a day since the leak was, of course, in the most hard to work location of the water system.

Less than a week later we had a different repairman out from American Vintage Home to take a look at our main furnace which was overpressuring to 30psi, tripping the overflow valve and creating another puddle on the basement floor. Fortunately, it was just a waterlogged expansion tank, but since our hot water radiator system doesn’t have a single shutoff, it took some creative draining to drain the expansion tank without draining the entire system.

So that was December. It’s now mid-February and today was our first day above freezing in twenty-two days. Fortunately, the Old Man deals with the cold weather well enough (ignoring, if you will, the lack of insulation).