Funmurphys: the Blog

The Triumph of Hope over Experience

Archive for category Family

Home Improvement – Begin Again

Nov 7

Posted by Kevin Murphy in Family | 1 Comment

For the last week I’ve had a nice concrete floor for the room addition, and nothing else. Work was halted because the roof trusses had to be re-ordered because of the measurement snafu. Today, the framers are supposed to show up and start. I have no idea what will greet me when I get home tonight. I guess that’s the exciting part of home improvement. The giant ruts in the yard from the bobcat hauling concrete for the frost walls and floor is, I suppose, the lousy side of home improvement. Now I can relate when I read histories of WWII that talk about the overwhelming tide of mud in the Russian spring, since my backyard has turned into a vast expanse of churned up mud. I just can’t wait to get out there and re-grade and re-plant (hah!).

Yesterday work started on the bathroom. We are putting in a new shower, new floor, and new countertop in the master bath. When I got home, I had a shower without walls and a floor of nothing but plywood. Frank Bielec would paint the tiles right on the subfloor, but I’m foolishly paying to have tile installed. Last night we began taking the old wall paper off the wall, mainly on the theory that with the toilet in the tub and the mirrors taken down, we could get to places we couldn’t ordinarily get to (nor want to, for that matter). I have come to hate stripping wall paper off the wall so much, I have sworn to never again put any up. The prior owner put up some sort of plastic paper that has to be taken down twice – first the plastic front and then the paper backing. No doubt this was felt necessary because it was going up in a damp bathroom. After 3 and a half hours, I have a majority of the paper off. Needless to say, it’s mostly the paper that’s hard to get to or that stubbornly clings to the wall that is left. Tonight I have a cub scout leader’s meeting, so I’m off the wall paper hook. I have a feeling the remaining paper is going to remain up until after the room is finished and I’ve regained my good humor enough to continue.

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Murphy-Shafer Conclave Reconvenes At Home

Nov 5

Posted by Kevin Murphy in Family | No Comments

My brother’s family has returned home today, so now my life returns to it’s regularly scheduled paths. Yesterday we capped off the visit with a trip to Dave and Buster’s, a Chucky Cheese’s for grownups. They had sent me a coupon for $10 in the mail; when I bought a power card, it was my lucky day and doubled. So I raced, blasted, shot, and otherwise engaged in testosterone laden activity, until my gun hand gave out before the money did. So now Max and Mark return to their planet where everything is familiar, unlike this strange planet where so many things are different.

Halloween on Planet Murphy

Nov 2

Posted by Kevin Murphy in Family | No Comments

Halloween was cold this year, and we didn’t get many visitors. Most of the kids were neighbors, so I waved and chatted to the parent who was walking with them. Only two groups I didn’t recognize. In St. Louis we have the custom that the kids need to do a trick to get their treat; almost always they tell a joke. After the hundredth house, that gets tiring for them, so the clever ones learn a couple. 

My nephews Max and Mark went trick or treating with the Fruit of the Murphy Loins this year, and so were introduced to this custom. When they got back from entertaining the neighbors, Mark told us that in our world, we have square pizza with no crust, but in his they have triangles with crust; in our world, you have to tell a joke to get candy, but in his, you don’t. Mark hasn’t just travelled to a different city; the contrast between San Jose and St. Louis apparently is great enough, he feels he’s travelled to a different world.

Family In Town

Oct 31

Posted by Kevin Murphy in Family | No Comments

My brother and his family have arrived from San Jose, so I’ll be enjoying Halloween, my fathers birthday, and all the joys of family life with them for the next week. They’ll mainly be trying to stay warm.

Home Improvement: First Hurdle

Oct 23

Posted by Kevin Murphy in Family | No Comments

I had to say the construction project was going better than Dream House. Late this afternoon I got a call from my wife with the news that the Architect screwed up his dimensions – the addition was 16 inches too short and the interior wall would have a jog in it. Well, fortunately my wife noticed before they poured the concrete for the walls – just the footing is off. So now they’ll hand dig the footing and wall (in clay that is slightly harder than Portland cement), repour the footing, and then pour the walls. They are also off by 8 inches away from the house, but I think we’ll just bank that for later consideration. Somehow, I have a feeling other things are going to come up.

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Home Improvement: And So It Begins

Oct 23

Posted by Kevin Murphy in Family | No Comments

Thursday we got a good news/bad news call about our home improvement projects. The good news was, they moved up our start date to Friday for the room addition, the bad news was they moved back our bathroom start date by a week. So I took Friday off so I could move the plants that were where the addition was going, and to get ready for the cub scout pack campout the following day. The builders came by, looked around, said piece of cake, and left. A fire inspector came by and said we didn’t have a fire district permit. When I called the builder they said we did. Don’t you just love bureaucracy in action – I wonder how much I’m paying just for filling out all the permit paperwork.

Monday, they showed up, marked the underground cable and electric lines with spray paint, and demolished half the deck – the foreman told my wife that while using screws instead of nails is what he would have done, it made tearing the deck apart much harder. Tuesday they showed up, knocked down more of my fence than they told me, tore out the rest of the deck, dug and poured the footings, and tore up far more of my back yard than I expected. The hard clay – we’ve had a very dry summer/fall this year – defeated the first backhoe, pulling it into the trench when they tried to dig the footings. They had to get a bigger one to haul the first one out and finish digging. They poured concrete in the afternoon, so now I have a rectangle of concrete in a field of dirt for a back yard. 

They also accidentally cut the cable line. So they had to call the cable company, who came out amazingly fast (my wife figures they must have “pull”). When my wife found out, she told the foreman that she was upset because she was going to miss Trading Spaces. The foreman told her how much he loved the show and that he got to meet Ty when Trading Spaces was filming shows here recently. 

As many as the screw ups were, it is going smoother than any of the episodes of Dream Home I’ve seen.

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Use 1002 For Duct Tape

Oct 15

Posted by Kevin Murphy in Family | No Comments

There are a lot of uses for duct tape, and every handyman keeps a roll. Now there’s a new use for duct tape – wart removal. My first thought was the painful one of yanking the tape off quickly, but instead it’s a long term process of applying the tape for six days, soaking in water, and then scraping with an emery board, and reapplying the tape. Now I wonder what led them to try this therapy in the first place. I’m more than academically interested as my son is getting a wart on his forehead that he’s having issues with. We tried the dissolving kind of wart remover, but all I’ll say about that is thankfully no scarring occurred but the wart came back. We’ve been putting a band aid over it, and I noticed the other night it looks different. So before we jump to duct tape — I’m not sure it comes flesh colored — we may just stick with a band aid.

Such A Long Wait, Such Lousy Magazines

Oct 14

Posted by Kevin Murphy in Family | No Comments

I took my father to the hospital for an MRI this morning. For all the bustle and self-important people striding about, hospitals always seem to function on their own time — a notch or two slower than the Post Office. After my daughter was in the hospital for her heart surgery, I’ve maintained that a day in the hospital is like a week of real time.

They told my father to be there at 7 AM. They didn’t start the process for him until 8:10 AM. His doctor had sent over forms ordering a brain scan, but supplied some other material indicating back scan. After they got that cleared up, another doctor came out to ask a question because he couldn’t read the ordering doctor’s handwriting. We couldn’t understand him (I thought his accent was Eastern European), but after my father went on at great length about why he was there, he seemed satisfied.

As soon as my father went off to change into that delightful hospital gown, they asked a couple of the other people waiting if they wanted to go to the MRI facility in another tower because they were backed up at this one. As far as I could tell, 10 minutes after starting, they were already 30 minutes behind schedule. That’s the medical profession for you. They’re going to be there all day, so you might as well be, too.

I see two problems with our health care system, and no, it’s not the lack of health insurance for a lot of people or the lack of a single payer. The first problem is the whole third party pay for health care. By and large, the patient isn’t the customer, the employer or the government is. This leads to the crap you have to put up with a patient — the wasting of your time on a prodigious scale, the condescension, the constant questioning if the treatment is the best or just the cheapest. The other problem is that we don’t have enough doctors. I know it seems like a crazy complaint for someone who, if you couldn’t tell, doesn’t care for too many doctors. But the point is, part of the lack of competition is the undersupply of doctors. Have you ever heard of an out of work doctor? The supply is carefully controlled to insure that never happens, and not for the patients’ benefit.

Anyway, that’s the sort of stuff that goes through your mind as you wait around all morning long.

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Home Improvement, the Beginning

Oct 8

Posted by Kevin Murphy in Family | No Comments

We went to the neighborhood trustee meeting last night to get architectural approval for our plans to add on to our house. I was worried because a few years ago, when the other fearless leader was a trustee, neighbors of ours had a hard time getting approval for the front porch they were adding. They kept getting asked to provide better drawings. So I was nervous, but we didn’t have any problems. They looked our drawings over for a couple of minutes, asked a few questions, and signed the drawings. I guess the difference was, our neighbors kept submitting something they sketched up, and we gave them real architectural drawings, drawn up by an actual architect (and paid for with actual money, too).

The hardest part so far has been getting a contractor. In the spring, we wanted to get bids on the addition. So we contacted a couple of firms that people we know worked for. We got them to come out, and then we had a hard time getting bids out of them, and when they did, the bids were astronomical. The same neighbors who built their porch knew a guy who wanted to do our addition. He called a couple of times, begging us to let him come out and bid. So after getting the astronomical bids, we did. Then we had a hard time setting a date to talk to him, and after he came out and we told him what we wanted, we never heard back – even after repeated calling. So we gave up on the addition idea.

This summer, we decided that since we weren’t going to do the addition, we’d redo the master bathroom. The shower was in bad shape, the tile floor was in bad shape, and the other fearless leader didn’t like the countertop. So we began our search for a contractor. We were pleasantly surprised with the first one we tried. He was polite, showed up on time, returned phone calls, and gave us a bid in a reasonable amount of time. The only problem was, he did things a certain way, carried a certain grade of material, and that’s the way he did things. We decided to check with another contractor to better explore our options, and he was equally pleasant to deal with. We went with the second guy because we could get what we wanted. When my wife was complaining to him about how lousy the contractors we’ve dealt with this year (to get the carpet installed we had to issue two ultimatums and listen to a sob story about the contractor going to the hospital with our measurements), he told her they did room additions on the side. He gave us a reasonable bid, he seemed to check out, so now we’re having the addition and the bath done. Can you say debt? I thought you could.

I think I’m going to steer my kids away from white collar work, and try to get them to become tradesmen. If you are competent in your work, punctual, pleasant to deal with, and give the customer what they ask for, you can clean up. It’s too late for me, but like all fathers, I want my children to have a better life.

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Sunday in the Park with George

Oct 7

Posted by Kevin Murphy in Family | No Comments

OK, I took a little poetic license, as we weren’t with George. But we were at a park this afternoon, enjoying the beauty of the day. My wife figured it would be nice to pick up some fast food for dinner and hit a park with the dog, so we did. We weren’t as well prepared as another family that was there, with their table cloths and wicker hamper full of goodies, and us with just our sacks full of McDonalds, but even McDonalds tastes better al fresco. Trooper, our dog, was just happy as could be since he had a whole new set of plants to pee on. He rapidly reached the point where he would only squeeze out a drop before moving on, although he took just as long to sniff out just where he wanted to go. The Fruit of the Murphy Loins were happy to be able to frolic and gambol across the grassy field with the dog, enjoying the rare mix of sunshine and delightful temperature (rare for St. Louis, that is). The Murphy Fearless Leader even got into the act, running with the dog until they were both winded and tired. Fortunately, the sun was sinking even faster, thus providing a good reason to leave without any awkward embarrassment.