Something in the basement

Today I had my house inspector come round for another look at the house. When he came to inspect the house before we bought it, he gave us a verbal report of all the things that were wrong, but didn’t write anything down. Because I wanted to remember everything, I got him to come back and write up a report and remind me of everything.
Just before he left, he got me to go down to the basement, and pointed out that the smell of gas was stronger than when he’d inspected the house before, and I should see about sorting that out.

Now, a few years ago a building was blown up in Seattle by a gas leak, so Puget Sound Energy are pretty assiduous about sorting these things out. I called them up, and ten minutes later a man arrived in a van, carrying a gas detector. This is a lump of blue plastic with a long metal goose neck sticking out of it. He turned it on and held the end of the sensor near various bits of piping around our furnace.

To begin with, nothing much happened. Then all five lights on the detector shone red, and then we could be sure we had a gas leak. Which is nice, because I’ve been in the house for a month running the furnace to get hot water for the shower.

Fortunately, the same chap was also equipped with a large wrench and some sealant, and within another five minutes he was poking his sensor around again and there was no more gas leaking into the basement.

So that was nice.

My whole body was sore today from climbing and running at the weekend, so after I finally got all the horny handed men of toil out of my house, I headed off to the office and spent the rest of the day typing, drinking coffee and doing other less-than-macho activity. Maybe tomorrow I’ll hang out with some roadworkers, and then go take a barre class