Four Square Nightmare?

 Well, repairs are coming along slowly, but they are coming along. Part of the problem are the holes we are finding between the two floors, like this one. This is how either the chipmunk or the squirrel (or maybe both!) accessed the bathroom and nested in the insulation around the tub. From the bathroom they could run between the joists along the whole length of the house. It is also why there are some large holes in the floor of the other rooms as well as drill marks in the flooring that allowed the previous owners to pull up the floors to check what was underneath. So there are mouse traps between floors to find and remove (found one- assuming there are more!)   This is going to take some time. The hole from different angles. You can see the gnaw marks if you make the pictures bigger. Solving the problem. We have already used one box of 100ft of copper mesh so far and are well into our second box. .

It seems like a lifetime ago when we lived in town, in a newer home with heat and a working kitchen, bathrooms (plural!) and, and, and....but it has only been two months since we fully moved in.  And a very long two months! It seems when we fix something, something else doesn't work. Let me tell you about my sump pump. The above picture is from my inspection report. That mess is part of my jury rigged sump pump. Which never, ever came on. What we had was a small wet area in the basement in a shallow groove in the floor. Sometimes it had water in it. Not my idea of what a sump pump should be, nor my husbands. And since we live near the water, we thought having a functional sump pump was a good idea. So as part of the plumbing job we contracted (the removal of the cast iron soil stack pipe was part of this job) we asked if they could put in a proper sump pump. And they said they could. So on December 6, 2023 the first of the plumbing tasks commenced: the sump pump.  The removal ...