Property Project Part 5: Winter

Our story left off after the gutting of the rear cabin in July 2025.  On August 2nd, I received a photo from Andrew while I was visiting my mom out of state.  He had begun addressing the wood rot areas and, as he removed a little siding here and there, more and more wood rot was exposed.  Eventually an entire wall was torn down.

He tarped it up and it sits untouched at time of writing (the Feb '26).

The rear cabin is on a journey.  We subsequently learned that the foundation needed to be redone, decided to double the size of the structure, applied to the Portsmouth zoning board for something called a dimensional variance, petitioned the abutting neighbors within 200 ft as instructed, presented our case at the board who said, "You don't need to be here.  Why don't you just move it out of your neighbor's setback since you are rebuilding?", got permission to expand, fired our builder for providing zero guidance throughout, and started researching demolition.  Today Mr. Asbestos came by for the required demolition inspection and we realized he'd been over before.  He's the same guy who tested for mold spores on the 3rd floor last summer.  ... It's a tiny state.

The cabin, which was the center of my property woes for so long, is now an accessory thought befitting its size.  

The main house vs. winter is a battle.

We're having a real winter here in New England.  We've had two dips in to arctic temperatures in the past three weeks.  We had a foot of snow in January and it'll be with us for a while more.  Thankfully these have happened on weekends but regrettably that means Andrew hasn't had a day off from fixing stuff in almost a month. 

A timeline:

- Jan 25th, Winter Storm Fern:  Temps drop in to single digits (F); kitchen cold water line freezes.
-- Pull out dishwasher, aim heaters at water lines, melt ice.

- 2nd night of single digits:  Fail to drip our faucets.  Both lines (hot/cold) now frozen.
-- Repeat maintenance the next day.  (New rule: we drip faucets when temps get below 15 deg F.)
-- The dishwasher doesn't like being unplugged and refuses to come back online.  Troubleshooting reveals that a relay needs to be readjusted every time the dishwasher is reinstalled.

--- What this looks like:  Dishes in the bathroom sink, insulation piled up on the kitchen floor, the dishwasher in the middle of the kitchen, space heaters aimed and plugged in strategically so we don't trip any breakers.

- Following weekend:  In the cellar, discover a pinhole leak in the hot water line leading to the kitchen (unmistakable result of the frozen water line).
-- Andrew does some plumbing work and replaces the line using a good portion of his Saturday.

- Feb 7:  Wake up to the smell of melting crayons.  Run all over the house to make sure our handful of electric heaters aren't on fire.  Discover that the smell is coming from the vents.
-- We have an oil-fed, forced-air heater in the basement.  It's about 20 years old.  The furnace has two main parts:  an oil burner and a fan [for circulating air out to the vents].

-- We pay for a service plan that's supposed to come to the rescue during emergencies.  After chatting with the weekend on-call mechanic, we agree to turn off the system for a while and let it cool off.  Andrew decides to pull apart the fan and finds FOD stuck in the motor.  He removes it and, after a few hours, the melting smell disappears.

We're due to drop down to 1 degree F this night so the risk of losing heat is a real threat.

- Feb 8:  Wake up to kitchen water line frozen again, and now this time the drain is frozen and clogged as well (from dripping the faucet?).

-- Maintenance routine of removing the dishwasher and pointing heat the lines thaws the water source.
-- The drain is a different story.  It's PVC running outside the house and down in to the ground to connect to the septic.  We end up using some moving blankets and wooden boards to build an igloo around the drain pipes, and point a heater at them for hours.  We're able to partially thaw the candy-cane vent, but now the sink is draining through that.  Andrew decides to replace the frozen line and, after sawing it open, we realize just how solidly frozen the situation was.  

Kitchen is now back in business except for the dishwasher, which doesn't like being unplugged.

(Did I mention I'm working nights this weekend and supposed to be chilling out during the day?)

- Feb 9:  Andrew puts in his two weeks notice to his employer and is sent home same-day (big career move in the works for him!!).  We spend a lot of time recovering, connecting, walking the dog and lying around that afternoon-- and I'm grateful we did.

- Feb 10:  Around 2:30 a.m. I wake up to the sounds of metal contacting metal, coming from the heater blower.  I bump down the thermostat to make it kick off.  A few hours later, the house has reached the new temp (55 F) and the heater kicks on again.  I bear witness to the sounds of the blower motor churning to a slow death.  I bump the thermostat down to 50.  When Andrew wakes up I let him blink the morning in, break the news, and ask him to turn off the breaker.  We're turning this one over to the professionals.

Our blower motor should be here in 2-3 days and that's about all there is to it.  The heater is out of service.

Current situation: We're forecast snow tonight but thankfully the temps are only dipping to 31.  My living room is a balmy 48 F.  We have condensed life down to two rooms, the office and the kitchen, with an electric heater in each.  We're ok but the house feels like an eerie ice berg that's betrayed us.

Takeaways:  

- The age of our home (built 1865) isn't the problem:  It's the shortcuts taken during the renovation.  Failure to insulate behind the new kitchen cabinets, running a drain line on the outside of the house instead of underneath.  Removing heat ducting to the master bedroom in order to knock out a wall on the first floor.  We do feel betrayed by the previous owners, who beautifully renovated and clearly never lived here through a winter.  This is a textbook flip.

We will hopefully have enough subject matter experts parade through the rear cabin this year whom we can ask about this stuff; maybe one of them will have a sustainable winter solution for the main house.

- We need to get off of oil heat and figure out an electric solution -- and not during the middle of winter.  The blower is one thing, and not a catastrophic expense.  The oil burner is another, and would be a terrible investment in future energy.

I am grateful for:
-- Andrew being home this week during the day.  I am praying that this all settles in time for him to fully focus on his new job starting Feb 23rd.
-- Potential good news (fingers crossed) about the rear cabin asbestos inspection today.
-- None of this has cost us a significant amount of money thus far.
-- Andrew's ability to fix our house.
-- A community I know we can lean on if it's just too cold to live here this week.
-- Being led to this property.  I know we are here for a reason.  It's easy to think of how simple it would be to be nestled in our previous home down the road.  ... But that's not a productive nor heat-producing train of thought.

The Bendy Ones

Years ago we were snuggled in an Indiana living room with a collection of Andrew's childhood friends and their spouses, nursing what red wine we had left and weaving together parenthood, careers, their shared memories and the integration of us who had joined the story in adulthood.
Andrew was explaining his latest two weeks' notice when Shelly profoundly summarized, "Someone has to be the bendy one."

This stuck with me and gave me a renewed appreciation of my spouse over the years.  (Andrew has ended more jobs - to follow my Navy career, and/or be home with our infants - than many people start in a lifetime.)

I'm surprised I haven't written about The Bendy Ones sooner, but perhaps I wasn't yet ready to see the concept this way:  We are designed to complement each other.  Not only in marriages, but in communities.  Everyone is uniquely wired and gifted so that not one person or group has to carry it all.  And sometimes we carry what we can so others can make the world better in whatever unique ways they were blessed.

The concept of The Bendy One has no regard for traditional household gender roles, and brings clarity to the word 'partnership'.  One of my dearest lifelong friends contributes brilliance to the ob/gyn field that I can't begin to wrap my head around.  I also don't pretend to know the intricacies of her marriage, but I'll never forget her husband's choice to be a force of stability for the kids rather than pursuing his own engineering career.

The most tangible and consistent examples to me are military spouses: who follow, set up shop, make friends, provide stability and support, pack it up, put their own careers on the backburner, and do it again.  Over and over until they're handed a flag and a bouquet after twenty years... often to find themselves at that point in their most critical supporting role yet: helping an ambitious high performer figure out 'what's next?'  

And the artists!  I think of my sweet violin teacher who has been teaching out of her home for 50 years and playing for the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra, making the world that much more beautiful and leaving a legacy in so many students.
There isn't much money in that.  Her husband spent a career practicing law, giving her the freedom to contribute her gifts to the world without having to worry about the bills. 

Not to be overlooked are the Steady Ones.

Call me old school (or something worse), but I think the quality of young adults we produce might hinge on having a Bendy One or a Steady One on the team.  For households who manage two intense careers, I've seen grandparents in this role.  In community.  I think that telework has enabled this bendiness or steadiness for many.

For years I've beat myself up for not being content.  My drive, unchecked, can almost be a handicap.
Not long ago I was chatting with one of my sisters about our hopes and dreams.  Mine included travel and a yearning for impact that I can never quite satiate.  Her dream was to own a compound where grandparents and kids and dogs roamed and coexisted in the sunshine. 
It hit me:  The world needs people who have dreams like each of ours.  Hers bring a level of stability and nurturing that is vital to family and community health.  People much smarter than me - but with the need to learn, go, solve and do -- these are the folks that cure cancer.  

The world needs all of it.

The thing about the Bendy Ones and the Steady Ones is, they're not going to shout their worth and often won't even put themselves first.  But make no mistake:  they are leaders and they have a muted strength that goes unnoticed if everything is running smoothly.

Check in on your Bendy One.  Thank your Steady One.  Everyone is pulling their weight.

Life Lessons from the [Kia] Soul

We just came home with a 2019 Subaru Legacy, which is exciting, but also frustrating since I think we've averaged a car purchase every 2 years since we've been together. 
(We're so over this that, for the first time, we have everything warrantied past 100,000 miles in hopes that we can pause on vehicle trading for some time!)

As I drove it home I reflected that there were a lot of lessons packed in to this whole experience.  

1) You get what you pay for.

We sold our beloved Audi (our 'Treat yo'self' in 2021 upon returning home to the U.S., and sort of a career milestone celebration for me) because it wasn't only inappropriate for our 16-year-old to be driving, but it wasn't purring like it used to and was getting up there in miles.  Audis are expensive to repair - an oil change typically cost around $300.
We "replaced" it with a 2010 Kia Soul that I bought with cash off an outbound foreign exchange Naval War College student headed back to his home country, Latvia.  Scratched, dented, tiny and working, it seemed like the perfect vehicle in which our new driver could putt around Aquidneck Island and to/from school.

Until one piece after another started failing due to the undercarriage being completely rusted out, the tire pressure light never extinguishing despite trouble shooting and repair, and the recent realization that the suspension was shot.

Which leads me to lesson #2-

2) Sunk Cost Fallacy.
This is actually something I've taught in a 'Bias in Decision Making' class.  And what a classic example in which we were wallowing!  We'd sold our Audi, spent money on the Kia, sunk about another $1,000 so far to repair it, and knew it needed more attention.  The Rhode Island roads are icy this time of year and we want our kid to be safe.  
It's time to put serious work into it or replace it.
How easy it would be to just keeping pouring money in to this hunk of junk because we'd already started!

We decided to replace it - after hardly six months of ownership - since we had taken on the additional need of me needing a better commuter than our family 3-row vehicle, and a small car would give me and Levi the chance to swap back and forth based on the needs of the day.

The fun thing about December decisions is that they all get put off to January action, which makes that first full work week after the New Year pretty intense.

3) Getting around to it.
We knew we needed to go car shopping and all that entails.  It was glaring at us on the family white board.  It was a classic "Important but not urgent (Quadrant 2)" item in Covey's time-management matrix (I taught this too).  We didn't really want to do it at all.
The fun twist on 'Important but not urgent' is that, if you put these items off long enough, they become 'Important AND Urgent' at the most inconvenient times.

So I pulled out the family Google calendar and found a few 3-hour blocks, between the standard weekly work/school days and my nonstandard January weekend work schedule, and all of the evening activities, and invited Andrew and Levi to go car-shopping 3 separate times over the next 3 weeks - and off we went after school on a Monday.

4) Give a man shoes a size too big.
This one isn't original, and was neatly repackaged by a friend of mine we visited over the holidays.  Give a kid a crappy, scratched up vehicle, and you're telling him that you expect him to ding up the car.  Give a kid something nice to keep nice, and you're telling him the expectation is to take care of his things.  You're also extending trust. 

I mean, duh.  The latter is how we're trying to raise our kids.  Why would we do something different when the stakes are higher?

5) Financing
It doesn't feel appropriate to go in depth on this here, but we decided not to take out a loan for this vehicle because we'd taken some big leaps with our credit in 2025 and we just wanted to chill on forking over interest to the bank.  I've never before swiped a debit card for a vehicle before; I think the dealership and I were equally - pleasantly - relieved when the transaction said, 'Approved.'

6) Rash decisions.
My first car-buying experience was with my dad, when I came home with a career starter loan from USAA and asked him to help me shop for a Jeep.  The only ground rules we established were, "We're not buying a car today."
We found the right car and bought the car that day.

I have always set out on a vehicle purchase with this mentality but seldom do Andrew and I make it 24 hours before the deed is done.  We're just... sure.  (And we value efficiency of time.)

By scheduling three different times to shop, and taking our teen son along, I thought surely we were going to break ourselves of this habit of making big decisions quickly and with a lot of confidence.  Maybe the two of us talk ourselves in to our own kind of group think bias. 
In our defense, we had talked about it quite a bit before we started shopping, we'd written down what we were looking for in detail, and we spent at least 30 minutes in the CarMax lot cruising Civics, Corollas, Sentras, and the like until we couldn't feel our fingers.  

I just have to laugh, because this is us.  Maybe we'll be shopping again in another two years.