The Old House My House blog on the This Old House site broke the news of lead tile contractor Joe Ferrante’s death. Obviously any death from heart failure is tragic, but this one hits me for a variety of reasons. The tile work always seemed to me to be closest to a black art of any of the trades on the show, and I always enjoyed watching Joe demystify the work while still making clear how much effort and intelligence was really needed to do it right. My heart goes out to his family and the TOH crew.

I hadn’t planned to have any work done on the house this weekend—it’s been kind of a long week. But opportunity knocked—in the form of a paving contractor.

One of the things I haven’t liked about our house since we moved in is our road. Our neighbors are fine—it’s the actual pavement that is problematic. Like a lot of people in Arlington, we live on a private road—what this means is that the city doesn’t do anything about paving, sidewalks, or storm sewers, and we get a break on rules about things like on-street parking. It’s not a great trade-off if you have a driveway, like me. The biggest issue we have is that the last time the neighborhood association had the street paved, they left an unpaved triangular strip, about a foot wide at the widest, where our property line angles away from the street. It picks up road sand and salt, grows weeds, and generally annoys us. Add to that—the pavement that was there wasn’t level, and we generally had a big puddle in front of our house after a rainstorm. But I didn’t really figure on doing anything about it.

Until the paving contractor showed up to do our neighbor’s driveway—acting quickly, professionally, with a crew of about eight guys, they had the work well in hand before 9:30 in the morning. I knew they would be working on our next-door-neighbor’s curb, so I asked the foreman for a quote.

Before noon, the crew had laid in new asphalt right up to the curb, level from one end of the property to another, with no place for a puddle to form and no room for mud. Plus they fixed a huge crack in our sidewalk for free.

We got a bunch of rain with the Nor’easter that roared through Sunday and Monday. Did it bug us? Did it float our possessions, the way the rain last May did? Reader, it did not.

Instead, here’s what happened: Sunday was uneventful. Monday, Lisa went downstairs and reported that the sump pump had kicked on and was running steadily. I said, “Ooh. We'd better move the hose further away from the house.” The end of the sump hose was currently about three feet away from the foundation wall, pointed out into the lawn. We dragged the hose out toward the sidewalk and let it run on. At one point, when we realized that the steady trickle of floodwater coming out had flooded our sidewalk, we redirected it against the natural drainline along the edge of our property, so it could trickle down into the drainfield into the back corner.

Curiosity got the better of me at one point, so I lifted the cover of the sump where the pump was steadily working. I was astonished to see that the pit was not even a quarter full of water, thanks to the pump, but that a gush of water—like the outflow from a washing machine!—was rushing into the pit continuously as the water table inched higher from the rain. The pump had absolutely no trouble keeping up with the inflow, though; no sweat at all.

The pump was still running when we went to bed. I think it stopped overnight, but the precipitation we’re getting today probably caused it to kick back on. Still: no sweat, no problem, no moisture at all in the basement outside of the sump itself. This was hands down the best money we ever spent on a home improvement project.

We wrapped another kitchen/dining room project this weekend. Where prior projects had put cabinetry on the opening between the dining room and the kitchen, this new project put a wall + base cabinet combo around the corner, in the dining room. The placement echoes the corner cabinet directly opposite, but doesn’t try to be a corner cabinet. But we did want to keep continuity with the kitchen cabinetry. Specifically, I wanted to use a single countertop surface that would wrap around the outside corner from the existing cabinets to the new ones.

This turned out to be a little more challenging than I thought. I had to construct it in two pieces, and had to do a fair amount of trimming. We are using very narrow base cabinets (really just wall cabinets mounted on legs and hung so that they stand on the floor), so I had to trim the IKEA butcher block countertop that I had purchased. Fortunately, I had already done this for the doggy bench, so it was just a question of getting enough crap cleaned out of the garage so I could set up the sawhorses and run the circular saw. This time I managed to make the cut straight and clean, so I was able to rough it in pretty quickly.

The challenging part was the transition. I saw three options: a mitered cut that would come to a point, a straight line transition that would have left a triangle of linking surface between the two cabinet tops, or a curved transition. Lisa wanted the curve, so I gulped and worked it out. I used a piece of string stretched between an awl (for a fixed point) and a pencil to draw the semicircle, then bullied my poor SkilSaw, which really isn’t intended to cut one-inch butcher block, into negotiating the curve. Amazingly it turned out pretty well, especially after I sanded it down with the orbital sander.

I have a few things left to do before I post pictures: I want to put a piece of trim on the back of the countertop to mask the fact that the wall isn’t square; use some putty or something to mask the transition between the pieces; and put the plinth on the base. But the whole project was a strict weekend: hang two cabinets, doors and hardware, and cut and mount the butcher board including the transition. It was actually kind of fun.

I am starting to think I may need an intervention.

I have three lengths of trim waiting installation for the kitchen; two new Akurum cabinets to mount to add storage to an underutilized 30" wall in the dining room; and a bunch of spare shelves to mount in the garage. But I see this post on Ikea Hacker about turning extra Pax Wardrobe shelves into storage for odd-shaped nooks, and all I can think about is how this would make the space under the basement stairs so much more manageable. And how I need to pick up some missing parts for one of those Akurum cabinets, so I could just check out the as-is section while I’m there...

This is how madness happens.