Two Weeks

Day 2

All about the driving. I spent the night in a rest stop outside of Elko, Nevada and slept from midnight until 4 a.m. Luckily I brought my thermarest basecamp pad with me which made the hard honda civic seats actually comfortable.

The route looks pretty short on paper, but I drove from 4:30 a.m. until 10 p.m. with not many long rests at all. I wasn’t going the full speed limit all the time since I decided to keep the honda’s rpms at 3k, which in overdrive on the freeway is about 69 mph.

Southern Idaho is a nice place. One of the cooler things was going over the snake river bridge at Twin Falls and seeing the cliffs it carved in the earth which musta been a hundred feet high, straight down into the river canyon.

There was also a town called American falls in Idaho that looked really nice from the freeway.

The only drama today was whether in Idaho Falls to take the I15 freeway which went out of the way (I’d have to double back a little), or the 2 laner that Google directions suggested, which skirted up just to the left of Yellowstone. I stopped at a Fred Meyer and started asking a few people the best way. It’s surprising how many people don’t have any idea which way to drive somewhere is the best. The only one that seemed really sure was the first guy I asked, who was all dressed up with a tie and everything, like he just came from his job as a bank teller. He said to take the interstate and seemed just too sure of himself so I asked some checker women who had no idea. When I asked them, they got a look on their faces like Montana (only a few hours away) was Siberia or something.

I bought some mustard for my 15 pound salami stick I bought at Costco in fairfield and was just gonna take the 15, but as I was driving out of the parking lot I saw a woman with a radar gun, just standing there pointing it at cars driving through the parking lot. The first thing she did was grab her phone and call her husband who wasn’t there. Then some gay d00d came out of an office who was her co-worker and he got involved. Turned out to be a huge production and they both were just guessing about this and that like they wanted to sound like they knew what they were saying but obviously didn’t.

I took the 2 lane highway that went close to Grand Tetons and by Yellowstone. It may have taken a little longer but not much, and I’m sure was much more scenic.

Drove until ten and slept 4 hours again. No mishaps.

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David had a good idea when we were soldering up the copper fittings at his parents’ house. I should drive my car out a month before so I could survey what I’d need to bring and not bring when I made the real trip on May 1. Sounded like a good idea so I packed up my beater 1990 honda civic with everything I could fit in it and set out last Tuesday for the 27 hour torture trip.

Day 1

Just after leaving Auburn, CA the honda started overheating. It was a warm day but it got worse so I pulled off and there was water leaking on the ground. I ate some salami while it cooled down, then got back on highway 80 and the water gauge immediately started shooting up into the “H” section, and I was still climbing up the mountain. After about 1 minute of it being totally in the red part of the gauge I heard a pop and then the gauge needle fell to normal. Luckily, within a quarter mile there was a rest area so I pulled in.

The pop I heard was the heater hose busting and all the hot water and steam escaping from the hole just near where the hose connects to the engine, next to the clamp that holds it on. Just before I left I threw in a pair of pliers, a screwdriver and a small crescent wrench. The clamp was one of those spring loaded deals you have to stick a vice grip onto usually, but I managed to get the pliers on it and cut the hose and stuck it back onto the hose receptacle, not before I poured what seemed like a gallon of water directly into the hose (bypassing the radiator so it would bypass the non-working thermostat that was causing the whole ordeal), which went directly into the engine. Then I started it up and turned the heater on full blast to dissipate the heat off of the engine, rolled down all the windows cause it was about 85 degrees and crept up over the summit by Donner Pass and into Truckee. My crescent wrench didn’t cut it so I found an Ace hardware and bought a little socket set, and found an auto parts store that had a thermostat, parked in the Safeway parking lot and did the deal. After the 4 1/2 hours I lost, then I drove to Boomtown and cashed in $362.75 worth of quarters and then all night to Elko and I was tired. 4 hours in a rest stop and I was ready to go again.

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Straightened the frame, ground it down to bare metal, primed and painted it, put new lights and wiring then all new primed and painted wood on it. Then I squirted silicone in all the cracks so my bed and tv won’t get drenched with road water. Had to get a spare from Les Schwab tires for $53 because trailer tires have a different lug pattern than car tires.

Now it needs some sweet shiny hubcaps.

It’s an original Peter’s Rentals 5×8 which is perfect to haul behind the Truck. It’s got leaf springs and 15 inch trailer tires, and it was almost free. The wood was shot so I stripped it and noticed one of the steel cross bars was bent so I had to weld it a little to beef it back up. This is what it looked like before:

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The lumber rack is in the way of the camper shell. Got to chop up the rack so the shell will fit and the rack will fit too, which Dennis said he thinks is doable–the next welding project to do.

Jim called me Friday night saying his son Joe was coming over to Ukiah to do some light welding project and that I should get up there if I wanted my lumber rack widened. The results:

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Chris has been finding out all kind of things about my house that I didn’t know existed. The profile of the property says that the land is worth $6.8k though the house practically nothing due to the water damage, according to the county assessor. They also have other information, that it was buil tin 1910, has 1800 square feet and also has a sketch of the floor plan that Chris redid in CAD pretty much to scale.

The site has pictures of all the houses in the neighborhood along with the profiles for each of them, which was cool to see all of the neighbors’ houses. I’d stick them in the gallery but their web site is too slow to load. Maybe tomorrow when they go back to work they’ll reboot the web server and it’ll work. That’s all the houses on the street.
He managed to pull them out of his browser’s cache and sent them to me so I stuck them in the gallery. the link.

This is the city from the air, turned south to north:

You can’t really make out the house from the google earth view, but it’s two over from the big building which is the ceramics lab for the campus.

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One day I was feeling sick of my surroundings so I went on eBay and started searching for real estate. I don’t know what my budget was, I just searched for deals. I came across a fixer-upper with a good price and bought it. I’ve done construction work, but have never been involved with every aspect like I will have to with this. I’m already going crazy trying to record every single This Old House episode the TIVO can find.

The first thing I did was look for a handyman to put a tarp on the roof where the tree fell on it and caused a ton of water damage in one of the bedrooms. None in Valley City so I had to find one in Fargo, 60 miles east, who was really freaked out about not getting paid so he overcharged me and did a bad job so I had to have Larry go back and fix what the other guy was sposed to do.

It has 5 bedrooms, 3 which make up the entire second story (plus a bathroom), and 2 in the apartment on the left of the house (chopped in two pieces by someone). From the pics I guess the bottom floor plan to look approx. like this:

They apparently added on a long time ago with the outcroppings that are the kitchen and 2 bedrooms. When they made the apartment they clomped the main kitchen, the 2 added bedrooms and part of the living room so there’s no kitchen in the main house (right). You can see from the pics they tried to stick some cabinets there while they were painting and forgetting to pay the taxes.

Valley City has 7k people and a ND university campus which I’m 1 block away from. Plan is to head out May 1 when it warms up. Probably gonna live in the main part while I fix the apartment during the summer then move in that side and do the main through the winter when I can and the next summer.

Dennis advised me to strip all the plaster off to studs and rewire, insulate and sheetrock, which I hesitated about but most likely I’ll end up doing it cause he knows his constructionisms.

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