I note here, for the record, that I have just now, at 3:00pm on February 28, 2004, replaced the light bulbs outside both the garage door and the front door, using Aero-Tech "Rough Service" 20,000 hour light bulbs. These bulbs have heavy-duty filaments and five support wires and an "expensive krypton rare gas mixture" and a reflector disk and a corrosion-resistant brass base. They are supposedly "America's finest quality lamp". I note this because I am curious to know how long they will actually last.
My life is one continuous episode of This Old House. Our house was built in 1950, or part of it anyway. The original house was very small, but in 1965 the living room was converted to a bedroom (now Mike's room) and an addition was built that added a new living room, dining room, and, uh, a room that I guess is called a "den".
The house has been extended in other ways-- a small greenhouse was added off the basement and an additional basement room was dug. A back porch was added onto the den, but it's gone now, replaced by a patio.
The house has been owned by a series of Do-It-Yourselfers. Building codes? We don't need no stinking building codes. Nothing in the house is of standard size. I have to cut an inch off furnace filters to fit them in the duct. As things break down and give out, repairmen come and scratch their heads and point out where things have been rigged up and cut down and codes have been blatantly violated.
Masonry outfits and roofers and landscape architects and tree services leave flyers and coupons wedged in the front door and hanging from the knob.
Repairs snowball. The furnace gave out last week, and the furnace guys scratched their heads and crawled around trying to figure out where the power for the furnace was coming from, finally discovering that the line for the air conditioner had been tapped for the furnace. Not to code! Although why this should be a problem I can't imagine, since the furnace and air conditioner are never run simultaneously. But an electrician was called in to add a new line for the furnace, and he cut seven holes in the ceiling of the family room in the basement.
I called the Minor Maintenance Company to replace the drywall in the ceiling. When the man arrived I could have handed him a "to do" list that would have kept him occupied for several days, but I have to prioritize. I did have him remove the old doors off the fireplace, and I had him install a window-well cover over one of the basement window wells.