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Bryan

Bryan

One super shady practice by Oregon realtors is the almost universal inclusion of unfinished basement space in the overall square footage in home listings. I often see houses listed at double their actual livable square footage. Buyers should do their due diligence and get the actual livable area from the county tax assessor. Often this info is public and sometimes it’s online. In the Portland area, you can look up any property at [Portland Maps](https://www.portlandmaps.com).

My property abuts two roads that don’t connect. My yard is often the shortest path between two
points, for kids coming and going to school, or adults trying to catch a train at the MAX station.

My camera catches people cutting through my garden all day. Recently, some kids trampled my acorn squash.

Instead of putting up a fence, I decided to clear away some landscaping for a path around my garden. It doesn’t take a degree in urban planning to know these two roads should’ve connected.

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I grew up in a very poor neighborhood in Saginaw, Michigan. I lived in a 900 square foot house with 7 other people. 3 bedrooms and 1 bathroom.

My mom was a teenager when she had me. My mother and I, and later my two brothers, all lived with my grandmother, also a single mother, who still had 3 kids of her own at home.

Yet, by some stroke of luck, our part of the neighborhood was included in a very good school district. Six houses separated us from a very poor inner-city school.

Sometimes, I’m amazed by what some of the neighborhood kids grew up to become given their home environments, especially compared to some of the kids who were inside the city’s school district. Several kids who grew up on my street, including myself, have graduate degrees. One of my closest friends as a kid is an attorney in Chicago.

It’s sad to think schools can have such disparate impacts on kids. The families on either side of the line weren’t any different from ours in terms of socioeconomic status.

As a humanitarian, as a city planner, I wish we could solve the problem of our schools. Good, properly funded schools would go a long way toward solving so many of our societal ills. I think a decent education, along with affordable healthcare for all, are human rights, and the bare minimum any wealthy society should provide to its citizens.

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I didn’t get to drywalling the kitchen ceiling yesterday. As I was squaring up some existing drywall in preparation for placing the patch, I noticed another small leak in the drain pipe below the master bath. My wife was just finishing up giving the kids a bath, and a small amount of water was coming out from the top of the P-trap. This appeared to be an error the plumber made when they built my house. Small annoyance, but I’m glad it showed itself before I closed things up. Homeownership, man.

It’s been a while since I’ve had the time to conquer anything this big in terms of home projects. Honestly, I don’t have many full days to dedicate to projects like this, but I’ve been sneaking in an hour or two here and there. Even though it’s nothing fancy, it feels good to work with my hands.

Last week I removed a soffit, which previously held some cabinets I removed a few years back. Mostly I’ve just wanted to remove it because it was aesthetically ugly and functionally useless.

However, we’ve always heard a “knocking” noise from this area whenever anyone showers. It was just enough to be annoying. So, two birds, one stone.

The knocking was from the expansion and contraction of a plastic pipe across wood. Whenever hot water rushed through the cold pipe, it rubbed against a joist ever so slightly.

Thankfully I did open it up, though. This is right below where two showers meet on the second floor, so lots of tight plumbing. Turns out that the master bath shower drain had a small leak. We were worried something like that might be the case and didn’t want mold growing under there.

I pulled out the side wall because it wasn’t mounted well and bowed in the middle. I also wanted to check for mold there.

On Friday, I replaced the side wall with mold resistant drywall and added outside metal corners. Yesterday, I fixed the leak (and the knock). Tomorrow I drywall the ceiling and start patching.

Honestly, I might hire out the texture. I’ve never done a job this big and it’s pretty much right in the middle of our house. If I screw that up, there’s no hiding it.

no

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