Down with A&P (in Haines)!

The old A&P building finally collapsed yesterday.  Snow brought down part of the ceiling and the rest was brought down by an absolutely HUGE excavator that Southeast Roadbuilders brought in to finish it off.  Now the problem is that there was asbestos in the building and the whole place is temporarily a hazardous waste site–Bummer. 

What’s particularly lame is that this is right near (or directly on top of) the future site for the assisted living center.

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Well, I finally got tired of having a cold tub and did something about it. 

We live in a panabode log house that has no insulation: just four inches of R 1.5 yellow cedar.  The only source of heating in the place is a Toyo Laser 73–a great heat source if you ask me.  If you have a Toyo, Monitor, or even a wood stove, then you’re aware of the main weakness these heat sources have: the further you get from the stove, the colder it gets.  We have our Toyo in the living room which is fully connected to the kitchen/dining area.  The bedrooms and bathroom are tend to get cold unless the door is left open, and even then they are bit colder than the main rooms.

Recently, I was down under the house fixing the plumbing (the water mixing valve on the tub broke) and discovered that the bathtub was completely exposed to the air in the cold air in the crawl space.  No wonder the tub was so cold.  The reason it was all left exposed was two fold: 1) the overflow drain from the tub was not plumbed into the sewer system and 2) it just hadn’t been done yet (other wise known as the twin headed dragon laziness and procrastination.

So I re-plumbed the overflow valve.  To do this, I ended up cutting the drain out of the tub with a saws-all type of reciprocating saw (I cut the drain into fourths and pried it out) and then replacing all the pipe that leads from the tub to the sewer line out of the house.

Well, now the floor is insulated in the bathroom and perhaps it’s somewhat warmer.  Time will tell. 

In the mean-time, two of the boys are congested and having a tough time staying asleep, and the basketball tournament in Juneau starts tomorrow, as does miniweek–the classes for the students and faculty that have been ‘left-behind.’