I don’t expect a huge number have been waiting with bated breath to find out more about my kitchen downspout we could call it. “I’m a little teapot…” never mind, just a song. However, hate to break it to ya, this is already a Part 2 (link to Part 1) of said saga. Yes I know, tedious as hell.
But the generalizations are what matter. Say you’re a realtor. What’s it like to enter the homeowner market in this area? You have a well-developed skillset but you know what they say (“location location location”) so you need to choose carefully, about where you’ll live yourself.
They’ve got a “garden city” for sure, those Portlanders, but the housing stock is old. Lets look at this old guy in 97214, typical, has one of those English lab dogs…
Demographer: “ooo, ooo, lemme guess, lemme guess… he owns a Subaru.”
Good guess, he owns a Nissan right now, but two Subs (pronounced “soobs”) in the past. Your second guess would prolly have been a Prius.
Exactly, you know your 97214. There’s one almost exactly like it in Austin.
So from that point of view, what happens to a guy like that when he finally realizes time has run out and his drain is clogged for good, unless he wants to spend K dollars?
Well, in some cases he’ll make the clog go away somehow, but it’ll come back. This time we got pictures. There’s a hand-patched segment. He gave us the history. Who knows how long that’ll last or even if it could withstand a hydro-jet treatment. Count us among the skeptics.
If you guessed “that guy” was me, yep, you guessed it.
So for now we’ll leave it alone (the downpipe). Let me keep fighting with it. Long story. He gave me some good advice for when and if I decide to snake it again — circumstances have changed since I last snaked it, which he confirmed I’d done. The plumbing company for sure does snaking (not just hydro-jetting and other stuff) but the homeowner has a role to play in these circumstances.
I’m pretty sure I blogged about that hand-patched segment earlier. You might wanna go looking. I’ll give a clue to use the search word “basement” at least.
It’s like a fortress down there, with walls many feet thick, except on a side they might’ve built out back in the day. I don’t myself have complete records regarding the history of this building. I speculate about what it used to look like. Wasn’t it a single floor there for a while? If you work with the Oregon Historical Society and want something to do… or maybe just city public records. I’m not a realtor myself.
We used to rent around the corner up around Stephenson. A darling place, beautifully appointed but structurally weak in terms of insulation and susceptibility to basement flooding.
This has been a dream house in many ways, after that experience, even though, yes, like many a Portland basement it gets more than damp in the rainy season (i.e. a big part of the year). I use pallets. It’s tidy enough down there, if a little dense. My plumber guy had no problem looking at my kitchen down pipe up close, snapping a picture or two for the database.
He found it interesting that I had two mains to the sewer, one for like this drain, and another for the starboard head.
Living in a 1904 or 5 house is really worth it, from my viewpoint. It’s walking distance to Fred Meyer (a Kroger chain supermarket), is packed with trees and exotic plants, sleepy streets, dog walkers pick up their dog’s poop, lots of Subarus and Priuses and like that. Wood everywhere.
People from China are often freaked out because it looks more like Old China than like Shanghai today.
Parks nearby. Lots of mom and pop shops. Still mostly single and double story, some three or four. Still more like SE Foster than like SE Division in some ways. Similar street calming measures with frequent bus service?
Chinese labor helped create the northwest as we know it. The Oregon Rail Museum near OSMI (I missed Train Day this year, and heard the Tough Guy train wasn’t rail-worthy enough to exit the building on its own, at this time) devotes exhibit space to some of that history.
More people know about the trains than about the role of Chinese in clearing area around Mt. Tabor, in what we call Asylum District today. Elementary through high school rarely covers local history in any detail in my experience. YMMV. In Rome we learned more about what’d been happening, but OSR was in no way a typical school, praise Allah.
So, to wind up, I’m a happy home owner with all these geek decals around my door as I’m stereotypical in that sense too: a remote worker with a head full of code and such geeky things. Silicon Forest is full of people like me, many even more so. I actually missed growing up here and came back in adulthood, so as geeky as I am, it’s in a different way than average and no, I’m not complaining. We’re a diverse lot in this zip code, I’m not claiming uniformity throughout Sunnyside-Richmond (another name we go by).
Since I brought up “geek topics” earlier, I’ll end with a segue to some story from Cascadia, about one of our main companies. I worked with Visual FoxPro for many years and served clients who used the Windows desktop environment all the time. I didn’t get deep into NT the way some did. My layer was more platform agnostic so when I jumped on the Python bandwagon, I found that my ticket to a more Nix-like environment. I stopped worrying about Windows a long time ago.
