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sixty pounds of gravel for a hole in the floor
Thursday, August 5 2021
Gretchen had a bit of a meltdown early this afternoon when pricing out the cost of removing the last of Eileen Peppers' shit, the many things she'd left behind for us to fucking deal with. At minimum, it was looking like it would cost $500, so that was what it was going to have to be. Another issue was that the vacuum cleaners had stopped working, though that was probably just Gretchen not knowing how the elements of matter within them are intended to interact. I told Gretchen what button controlled the Dyson's carpet brush, and we even shared a video call in hopes I could better direct her to the vacuum cleaner's idiosyncrasies, but no matter what she couldn't get it to work.
I took a brief break from my workday in the Red Hook office to drive the Bolt into the middle of the village to get yet more supplies for the Brewster Street house: brass hinge pins (because of course residents of Eileen Peppers' flophouse had managed to lose those), white spray paint (to refresh the world's ugliest washing machine), an electrical box for a new, permanently-installed motion-sensor light in the basement, and a container of what turned out to be the world's worst epoxy (FIX YOUR THINGS epoxy paste; don't buy it), for filling some huge door-jam voids making it impossible to install strike plates.
After work, I drove directly to the Brewster Street house using a new route: south on Route 32 from the west side of the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge, then south on 9W, then west on Delaware Avenue. I ended up taking Hasbrouk Avenue to Foxhall, which worked, but it would've been faster to take Delaware straight to Broadway. Anyway, that's definitely the way to get from Red Hook to the Brewster Street house in the future. There are fewer traffic lights, you can drive much faster, and the roads aren't so shitty. At the house, I found Gretchen, who'd mostly been cleaning up, and Mustafa, who was focused mostly on painting the front door. She'd managed to get the vacuum cleaners again, but then they'd failed again. The problem with the shop vac was simply one of being clogged. [REDACTED] Gretchen didn't stay long after I'd arrived.
My initial task was to help Mustafa get the old refrigerator off the back porch and push it to the curb, where a sign Gretchen made would say it worked and offer it for free to anyone who wanted it. (To make it perfectly plumb on the curb, I used an ugly wall hanging featuring angels to prop it up from below; their feet stuck out like those of the Wicked Witch of the East.)
I then turned my attention to fixing and replacing yet more doorknobs. But then it turned out I'd overlooked the bathroom doorknob, which was still a hideous gold color, meaning I would have to go to the store and get yet another one. But before leaving the house, I would have to wait for the front door Mustafa had just painted to dry so I could lock the place up during my brief absence. So I went down to the basement and installed a big two-bulb outdoor-style motion-sensor light pointed at the basement stairs. (There had been a simple motion sensor light here earlier, but, being simply plugged-in to an outlet, either Eileen or her band of squirrelly white men had stolen it.) I also cleaned the ugly soapy gunk off the top of the washing machine, sanded away the rust, and used many layers of glossy white paint to make it go from looking like something you'd hesistate to put your clothes in to almost looking brand new.
I drove out to Home Depot to get a sixty-pound bag of gravel and yet another set of doorknobs. This allowed me to finish all the doorknob chores on the second floor as well as filling a hole that had opened up in the concrete slab in the basement. I don't know if there's a sink hole under there or what, but that hole, which didn't look to be bigger than a gallon or so, managed to eat all sixty pounds of that gravel.
Before leaving, Gretchen had sternly warned me not to dumpster-dive any of Eileen's trash. But when I saw a box of plumbing fittings, I couldn't just let a bag of half-inch 90 degree fittings and a bunch of brass toilet supply valves end up in a landfill. I probably should've taken the PVC fittings as well, though they had much less value per unit of volume.
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