Our Olde House: January 2026
I remembered to tape the pipe heater onto our back deck faucet before the first significant freeze this winter and even checked it one cold morning to see if it was warm, and yep, still working. If it is going to be below 20F overnight, then I drip the inside faucets and flush the toilets occasionally, just to be sure we don’t blow up a pipe under the house.
Our pin oak shed about half of its bazillion leaves when the temperature dipped below freezing for a couple of days. The pin oak is the last remaining huge tree in our yard after the other four were removed recently. It is a terrible tree because the leaves stick to everything and slide into every crack and crevice in your car. I decided to take my gutter snoot out for a spin just in case there were pin oak leaves clogging the gutters again.
The gutter snoot ‘system’ has several pieces necessary to make it work so I am usually pretty exhausted from its assembly, before I turn it on. For my convenience I keep the various pieces scattered around the house and tool shop, making for a kind of scavenger hunt and memory test. I retrieved the actual snoot from the tool shop, but noticed the blower was not in there. I found the blower in a bedroom, along with the power cord and a screwdriver so I could reverse the direction of the snoot. I found a hat I don’t like in another bedroom, so now I was ready.
After assembling the various pieces of the snoot system and hanging the blower over my shoulder, I fired it up and stuck it into the end of one of the backyard gutters. As a leaf tornado shot out of the gutter like a mushroom cloud from a nuclear explosion, I thought ‘Huh, I guess there are leaves in the gutter’; nothing gets by me. This thought was quickly replaced by some musings in French when the cloud of leaves fell on top of me as a wet, dirty mess; hence the hat in case you were wondering.
After blowing out the gutters I needed to blow the leaf debris off of our brand new deck which was now covered. By the way, just because you are not standing on a ladder, that does not mean that you are safe from serious injury; it is still very easy to trip over the blower cord, or step off the edge of the deck while looking skyward. I finished, and went to the front yard where there are similar hazards to the backyard, with the addition of the incoming power lines within reach of the aluminum gutter snoot; I definitely need to avoid that.
I had one security camera stop working at night. Well, actually the camera was working but the infrared light was not, so the picture looked like a shadow in a dark room. Remembering the fix for the front ‘go away’ security light, I powered this camera off, counted to 10, and powered the camera back on; that worked and now the camera and infrared light are working.
The heat did not seem to be heating the house as fast as it should, mostly because I forgot to clean the furnace filters last month and this month. I vacuumed the filters, scaring Hooch in the process and put the filters back. Apparently cats generally do not like the sound of a vacuum cleaner, but Hooch is particularly sensitive to this noise and spent two hours under our bed; however, since the air from the furnace was blowing hotter and faster from the heat vent he likes to lay on, I was forgiven, partially. It’s hard to be sure about anything with cats.
I can now say with complete confidence that putting up wallpaper is not one of my skills, far from it. Not only is the wallpaper in my bathroom peeling in several places, but it also is shrinking away from the seams and has some small cuts in it. I have no idea how either of these things could occur, which is support for my lack of wallpaper knowledge. I am thinking about putting bathroom flooring on my bathroom walls using a couple of finishing nails. Since my bathroom floor still looks nice, and it cannot shrink, be cut or peel, this should work well. I may be the first one to try this, which is not a vote of confidence or indication of possible success. Wish me luck, and maybe pray for me.
