Today’s household-maintenance project was an unusual one: cleaning the refrigerator. It had accumulated several months’ worth of drips, crumbs & spills, and was looking pretty bad.

We all pitched in – even Sam, who complained bitterly about having to get up from his Minecraft session. (And just after coming home from shoe-shopping! O the injustice!) The threat of losing his computer for the rest of the day didn’t improve his mood, but did get him moving.

First, we took out all the food, and piled it on the kitchen table. (If we’d had a dozen coolers, and a truckload of ice, we might have used them; alas, we did not. Instead, we tried to finish before things warmed up too much.)

Then we removed all the shelves, drawers, attachments, etc., etc. Only afterward, when the refrigerator was empty – and looking much smaller than usual – did the idea of taking a picture occur to me. If we’d had one, the reloading might have gone more quickly.

Jennifer did all the washing, Jake & Sam did all the drying; I reinstalled all the shelves (more or less where they had been before – though without a picture, who can be sure?).

While all this was going on, the refrigerator beeped its open-door alarm with increasing desperation, then finally gave up. (It even shut off the light, making it hard to see what I was doing.)

Beginning to end, it took perhaps forty-five minutes.

Two of the more important machineries here at Stately Rice Manor are acting up a bit.

Our television – just five months old – has developed an annoying fuzziness in the audio. It sounds as if one of the speakers has worked loose, or failed outright. It doesn’t interfere much with playing Skyrim – at least, Sam hasn’t complained – but it tends to spoil regular programming.

Long ago, I was in the habit of watching television with the audio muted. That might become necessary again, if we can’t get the silly thing fixed.

The other dysfunctional machine is a bit more serious: after keeping us warm all winter long, the furnace has chose today’s (rather mild) cold snap to go on the fritz. It runs, but it blows cold air: not very useful.

Tomorrow, Jennifer will call the furnace-repair people. (Usually, they come out the same day. The house will stay warm enough until then.) I imagine we’re looking at another moderately-expensive repair – $300 or so – but with every service call I worry: is this the time we’ll hear, “You need a new furnace”?

I really do not want to buy a new furnace….

We used to have three small trees in the yard here at Stately Rice Manor: short things, dark red leaves, trunks & branches that grew in any direction but vertical. I have no idea what species they were.

The years were not kind to them. (Neither were the Japanese beetles.) We’ve been trimming dead limbs for a few years now; last year, tree #1 had to come down. This year, trees #2 and #3 were done in by the drought.

Removing them has been on the household to-do list for a while. Today turned out to be tree-chopping day.

Sam and I collected our gear – the pruners, a saw and a yard-waste bag – and headed out. Our technique: saw off a limb, prune the smaller twigs into one pile, cut the larger branches into short lengths (in a second pile); then, later, bag it all up.

Later, Jennifer & Jake joined in. It was a family bonding moment (if one ignored the grumbling from Jake, who didn’t want to join in).

After all the sawing and pruning, we had two trunks remaining: about four inches in diameter, two or three feet tall. They were too big for our saws, so Jennifer & I decided we needed something bigger.

A chain saw.

It’s an electric model – but not cordless; those are for professionals, or chumps – and fairly small. But it made short work of the two stumps. Jennifer and I took turns lopping off pieces of wood, but managed to avoid lopping off pieces of ourselves.

Now there’s a big pile of wood waiting for Wednesday’s yard-waste pickup.

(We have two more dead and/or dying trees in the back yard, but dealing with those can wait until spring.)

…and the new fence is finished. The crew – three cheery, friendly, but seriously weather-beaten fellas – nailed up the last planks around 11am.

They packed up their gear, collected from me the second-largest check I’ve ever written (the first being our down payment on Stately Rice Manor), and drove off.

I hated the old fence. It was old, half-rotten, always threatening to fall apart but never actually doing it. It was the neighborhood eyesore. I’m glad it’s gone.

As are the neighbors, I’m sure.

After a well-deserved day off, the fence guys returned to put up the rails & planks.

The fence is starting to look like a fence now, at least on one side. The others remain unfinished: when the temperature cracked 100, the fence guys packed up & went home.

They’ll be back tomorrow to finish up.

(It’s a cedar fence: very pretty, but not nearly as aromatic as I’d hoped.)

Today, the ratty gray fence that has enclosed the back yard of Stately Rice Manor since we moved here in 2000 (and, given its obvious superannuation, for quite a while previous to our arrival) is – finally! – coming down.

Three fellas with hammers, power tools & a Bobcat are even now knocking it down & piling it on their trailer.

Work on the new fence – a very pretty (and mind-bogglingly expensive) cedar job – will begin presently.

(Sam is fascinated by all the activity. He’s been glued to the back windows, taking pictures, etc., etc.)

The kitchen faucet – installed just about six years ago by Grandpa Norm – leaks.

We first discovered the leak last October. After cleaning up the mess, I put a bowl under the sink, to catch the drips. I check the bowl every evening after washing dishes; it stays empty for days at a time, then – with no warning, and for no obvious reason – the bowl fills, spills over, and soaks the cabinet. (There’s a towel under the bowl, and a sheet of vinyl flooring under the towel, so the cabinet itself has so far avoided damage.)

The problem is somewhere inside the faucet itself, not in any of the various pipes / tubing / etc. connected to it, so I doubt that repair is feasible. It’s time for a new faucet.

This is starting to remind me of the infamous garbage-disposal incident of 2002: the old disposal died a few days prior to October 3, 2002; we finally purchased a replacement in October of 2004, but didn’t actually install it until January 9, 2005. (Grandpa Norm installed it. I am quite useless at household repair projects.) For over two years, we stared at increasingly-vile standing water in the right-hand sink.

There’s talk of going faucet-shopping this morning, so – with luck – this latest problem will not fester for quite so long.

For the last week or so, we’ve had intermittent water under the sink. (Longer than that, really; but we first noticed it on Mouse Day.)

Tracking it down proved a bit frustrating: everything would stay dry for days, then suddenly a fresh puddle would appear. We couldn’t correlate it with anything: running the dishwasher, washing dishes, running the disposal.

I got in the habit of checking under the sink every day (sometimes two or three times a day); finally, I spotted the culprit: the faucet. I put a bowl under the drips, and contemplated what to do next.

(I’d been hoping it was the dishwasher. I hate the dishwasher & have been looking for an excuse to replace it. Maybe next time.)

After a few days of procrastinating – I wouldn’t mind having a new faucet, but installing one is more than I can handle – I remembered that the spray head on the faucet has a tendency to come loose from the metal hose. One time it actually fell off while somebody was using it to spray something. (And what a mess that made.)

So I checked, and the spray head was indeed working itself loose again.

Perhaps this means that the mystery leak has at last been found and fixed. I think I’ll leave the bowl under the sink a while longer, just to be sure.

One of the garage door cables snapped this morning, here at Stately Rice Manor. Nobody was in the garage at the time, so no injuries. (Also no property damage, aside from the cable itself.) It made quite a noise, when it let go: CLANG.

So, time for another call to the nice people at Overhead Door Co., who were last here in January of 2006. They’ll be coming out again, either this afternoon (unlikely) or tomorrow morning (more likely).

Their last visit ended up costing $90. One hopes this visit will prove less expensive.

The toilet went slightly bonkers this afternoon: the float stopped floating, the water wouldn’t stop flowing, the tank overflowed into the bowl, which threatened to overflow onto the floor.

I was at work at the time, but was summoned home to assist in damage control. By the time I got home, Jennifer & Jacob had used a strip of fabric to tie the float arm to a conveniently-placed towel rack. My only contribution was to loosen the valve handle so it could be turned off.

(If you ignore them for ten years, they tend to stick. Imagine that.)

I went back to work (it was a bit early to knock off for the day, and I’d left a few things unfinished), then stopped at Home Depot on the way home for some replacement parts for the toilet. (The complete kit is $20, which is not so bad. Cheaper than a new disposal, definitely.)

Removing the ancient & decayed machinery was messy, but not particularly difficult. Installing the new machinery wasn’t so hard, either. Tightening up the nine-and-ninety bolts enough to prevent leaks, but not so much as to crack the tank, was a bit more difficult.

I think it’s all watertight now, but just to be safe there’s a towel underneath the water intake. If it’s still dry in the morning, I will declare victory.

(Victory – over a toilet? Am I really so diminished that that is where I look for self-esteem?)