Joys of Home Ownership

Dead Woofer

Last night, Donna calls out to me to say, “Hey, I can’t get any sound out of the TV.” Well the first thing I thought of I might of knocked a plug out of the power strip. I was behind the TV a little while previous to see how come our vertical blinds can’t be opened fully. You can open the two halves to the ends fine, but the rotation of the vanes gets stuck at about 75 degrees. That is really fine with us, but the prospective next owner of this house might have an issue. Well, whatever is wrong1 it wasn’t readily evident.

I followed the power cord down to the strip and it was plugged in. The first troubleshooting step with electronics is to reboot, so I yanked out the cord. Dang, wrong one. I pulled out the Cable/TIVO box cord. So I had to sit contemplating my stupidity for 5 minutes while that rebooted. Unplugged the right cord, and plugged it back in and still no sound. Using the TV remote I changed back to the TV’s speakers to make sure that wasn’t the problem. It wasn’t. Next step is to get out the instructions for the VISIO sound bar. Turns out there is a setting on that remote to reset to everything to the default setting. After that I used the speaker test setting to see whether I was getting anywhere.

“Left Speaker”________________________”Center Speaker”_________________________”Right Speaker”

Then silence, no sub woofer and no rear surround speakers. The sub is connected to the sound bar via bluetooth, so the manual suggested that I try to re-pair the two. You have to press a button on the back of the sub down for 5 seconds, a small light would start blinking. You then go to the bar and hold the power button for 5 seconds. The lights on the sound bar would flash back and forth until the two units hooked up. Problem was the sub woofer light never came on. Turned the sub off and back on. Tried the pairing routine again and once again the sub never lit. It was pronounced dead at 7:17 PM on August 20, 2019.

Although I bet it was electrocuted dead way back in April when the house power was abruptly disconnected. We didn’t notice because we rarely watch anything that has surround sound. So for now we we are going to go with the just the sound bar.

The Shoe Is On The Other Foot

Back in late June when we were poking around Klamath Falls, Oregon looking at houses, I commented how it was nice to actually go inside a home because you can’t fully get an accurate idea about its feel just from the pictures on Zillow.

Now that the house we have lived in for the past thirty years is listed on Zillow, we have looked at the photos the realtor has uploaded, and now our own place seems slightly unrecognizable even to ourselves.

Brian Versus The Giant Lizard

This morning we were enjoying the screened porch and watching the Tour de France on the laptop, when Donna noticed something moving in her peripheral vision. When she saw what it was she jumped up. I turned to see what she saw and it was a giant gecko (or maybe a skink)2 crawling along on the screening, inside the porch.

It was requested that I remove the offending reptile. I went out to the garage and grabbed a pair of work gloves, a one quart pitcher (normally used to water plants) and a clipboard. My plan was to corner the sucker, force it into the pitcher, cover the top with the clipboard and escort this huge, Godzilla-like, beast outside.

I have exaggerated the size a bit, but this thing was more than twice the size of any we have seen around here before. It was probably 6-1/2 to 7 inches long, tip to tail, and it had a body diameter about the size of a Marks-A-lot.

After a couple of misses trying to get the lizard into the pitcher it became clear I needed something with sharp corners, not something round, because it kept evading me by slipping between the lip of the pitcher and the screen. Back inside. This time I returned with a rectangular piece of Tupperware. On my first attempt I almost had him (or her) but then he (or she) abandoned the screen and took to running along the floor hugging the back wall.

I side stepped around it and opened the door to the porch. I tip-toed back around where it was hiding, under the table that holds the portable gas grill, came at it from that direction, hoping to force it outside. We chased each other back and forth a couple of times until, surprisingly, it climbed the wall and ducked under the wood wall that closes the porch off from the old roof line.

As yet, our enormous lizard interloper has not reappeared.

House Hunters III

As I mentioned the other day how different a house and its street could look in 3D real life, as opposed to the satellite and street views Google provides. Figuring that same effect would apply to the interiors of houses and the photos on Zillow we decided to call a realtor and try to get them to show us a few homes.

We narrowed our list down to 4 houses. We picked the one that was the early favorite and called the realtor to she if she would show us that listing and if she had the time could she show us these other three. We agreed to meet at 10:30 on Wednesday. We were up front about our intentions, that we were just looking and and not actual buyers, for now. But we were seriously considering moving into town in the future and when and if we did, they would be our first call.

The first house we went into was practically around the corner from where we are staying. From there we headed into a nearby neighborhood that was close to the Oregon Tech. Then we headed off to get a look into a house we poked around outside of the 2 days ago. We even chatted with the neighbors. We finished off with the house that was the listing of our realtor. It was very interesting to see inside compared to the pictures online. At the end of the tour we thanked them kindly and went our separate ways.

If this were an episode of House Hunters and we had to choose from just the houses we saw today, we both agreed that the first house we saw would have been the winner. Not long after we got home, the realtor texted me to say that when she got back to the office she noticed that someone made an offer on that very house, earlier in the morning.

This afternoon we did a little more geocaching. Very little more, looked for 5 and found 3. Today’s walk was a touch over 1-3/4 miles. This “park” is on the other side of the Link River from yesterday and the word park is in quotes because it is basically a developer’s failed dream. There was a small loop of paved road with street lights and the utility boxes on home sites that covered a hill between the Upper Klamath Lake and Lake Ewauna, but no homes had ever been built. The land is city owned and open for walkers. Today’s photo is a field of wildflowers that had taken over one side of a large hill between caches numbers three and four.

House Hunters II

This morning we did a little more lookee-looing at houses around Klamath Falls. The one new house on Zillow that we added yesterday, its the one furthest east on yesterday’s map, we had high hopes for because it checked all the boxes and had a killer view. We drove up and down the street in front of it once and then parked at one end. We walked back up the block to see if we could get a good look at that view, we could and it was as advertised. As we started to walk away, the front door opened and a gentleman walked out to say hi. He told us that house was listed on Friday and the very next day they got a full price offer. Ouch for us, good for them.

We then checked out the community pool and YMCA pools for Donna’s swimming addiction. The community pool was way too busy and it was outdoors. The water is heated to 83-85 degrees, but still, with daytime highs in January of 40, that has got to be cold. The Y’s pool would work though. Its indoors and the cost would be not too much more than Golds is costing now.

We found a nice park with a ton of trails near our AirBnB, so this afternoon we did a little geocaching. Very little, looked for 3 and found 2. We walked only a total of about 2-3/4 miles, but both of us noticed the diminished oxygen at our current 4,200 foot elevation on the 120 foot climb up to the cache locations. The picture above is looking out over a piece of Upper Klamath and was taken from around the spot where cache #2 was.

House Hunters

We have made no secret about our reason for staying a week in Klamath Falls, Oregon, we think we might like to move there. To that end we have been perusing Zillow for a while looking for possible homes that we might like. We narrowed it down to a price range we think should be attainable if we sold the Bogardus Estate in Aiken. It has been fun “window shopping”, but now it is time narrow down the list of twenty odd homes that Mr. Zillow provided us with.

We spent pretty much the whole of Monday morning and then a little of the afternoon just driving by about 8 houses. We dismissed about half of them after seeing them in their natural habitat because we didn’t like the neighborhood. Amazing how different a house and its street looks in 3D real life as opposed to the satellite and street views Google provides.

But we discovered almost that many to add to the list because we happened to drive by them as we drove through neighborhoods between the ones on our list. And we found one that was almost perfect, except it is about $20k above what we want to spend and it is at the top of a steep hill.3

This evening we did a little more Zillow searching and found a couple new listings to drive by and look at in the morning. And then to balance it out we dropped two that were on the bubble. The blue pins with the white squares on the above map represent what our current possibles are.

It Was a Dark and Stormy Night

Tuesday night we were sitting in our usual spot, the two chairs on the screened porch facing the backyard doing the usual thing, listening to the FRS on the “radio”4 when it started to rain. This was not unexpected because the weather folks told us is was going to happen. And there is nothing better than a nice rain storm on a summer5 evening. The flashes of lightning in the distance, the muted booms of thunder, the sound of water drops crashing through the surrounding trees and, of course, the 20 degree drop in temperature.

About 9:30 there was a very bright flash that was followed almost immediately by a boom that sounded like a 155mm howitzer firing in our backyard. After nearly crushing my hand in hers because the close-by noise, Donna suggested, “Let’s go inside.” So we gathered our stuff, unplugged the small fountain, shut off the fairy light LEDs, turned the ceiling fans to low and decamped to the living room.

Twenty-five minutes later the whole house A/C shut off. Donna asked, “Why’d it do that?” I replied, “Maybe because it is down to the temperature the thermostat is set to.” “No,” she said, “it is still 2 degrees warmer in here than the thermostat setting.” Oh boy. I turned the thermostat off, then on. I lowered the temperature. I swapped the fan from Auto to On. Nothing. I grabbed a flashlight and went outside to check the breaker. It wasn’t tripped, but I cycled it anyway. Still nothing. Guess we’ll call the repair people in the morning.

We pay a fee each year to a local place so that we can get priority service appointments, free troubleshooting, a discount on parts and a free yearly check-up. I called at 8:00 AM and by 10:30 I was being told we need a new controller board. The fuse had blown, but apparently not fast enough as the heating section had failed (which also controls the blower motor.) Cost, around $500, but he’d have to check. In the meantime he had worked some jumper magic to ensure the A/C part would work.

In the last 4 years, every time they have done the check-up they they tell us that we should think of changing our unit out for something newer because it is getting close to the top of its average lifespan range and it would be more energy efficient. In those 4 years we have had to have two motor capacitors replaced, another controller board go bad and a gas fitting replaced on the furnace side of things. Maybe it is time to replace. We are getting ready to go on another west coast vacation soon, so with the A/C working, we told them to hold off on ordering the board, we’d worry about it all when we got back.