Ahhh, the joys of home-ownership! Made even better by owning a home that is 40 years old, built by an engineer and then “remodeled” by a do-it-yourselfer who made some interesting design decisions. We knew what we were getting into when we bought this home, so most of what we’ve found doesn’t come as a surprise. But every now and then, something comes along and we find ourselves saying, “What the hell did they do?”
Today, I was getting a package off the front porch and coming back in, when I noticed brown, ugly streaks down the wall from the port for the central vacuum, all the way to the floor. The streaks looked like grease or sewage and I just lost my cool completely. I went downstairs and found Mike in the craft room and said “We have what looks like sewage spilling out of the whole house vacuum and down the wall!!!!” Which earned me a reply of “WHAT?” and a look of are you nuts, woman? Both of which are fair, to be honest.
In my disgust with the issue, I totally forgot to take a picture of the offending streaks, which turned out to be grease, dirt and condensation, combined and leaking out of the vacuum port. EWW. At least it cleaned up easily. You didn’t want to see that anyway. Trust me. But it continued to leak out of the hose, into a bucket while we tried to figure out how to deal with this.
Now, it should be noted that when we bought the house, the central vacuum was listed as a selling point. We laughed. It has terrible suction, you have to haul a stupid long hose around with you and frankly, it’s not convenient at all. I’d rather use a regular vacuum, or eventually get a robot vac that can keep up with Mia’s fur. We’ve had plans to remove the ports for it for a while, but it isn’t high on the to-do list, because while ugly, they aren’t hurting anything.
Until today.
So now we found ourselves in the garage, staring at the vacuum canister, trying to figure out how to deal with this issue. While we were out there, I started taking pictures of all the other random doodads attached to the walls around there. We have the odd control panel which might have been for an old security system, and it’s accompanying panels by the door into the house, and the front door.
We also have the weird red button, duct taped to the wall by the door to the back porch, which I have pushed repeatedly and which seems to do nothing. No clue what it’s for.
And then we have the vacuum system. So we unplugged it, which revealed that it doesn’t even use a standard plug, because of course it doesn’t. Which means we’ll have a useless outlet there, once it’s gone, until we replace it.
Then we went back inside to try to deal with the rest of the system. We pulled the port out of the wall, and took it apart. Then we went up into the attic (and by we, I mean Mike, I stayed on the ladder) and tried to see if we could just remove the hose. But of course it feeds into a PVC pipe up there. So unless we wanted to cut into the drywall, it was staying put. Or so we thought.
Mike decided that until we were willing to spend the time removing the ENTIRE system, it was best to just put the hose back in the wall. But to prevent it from leaking on the inside of the drywall, we would cover the end and bend it back on itself in a J, and fasten it to itself. Great idea! Seemed simple enough to do, and would keep it from causing more issues for now. Except that we couldn’t get the hose back up the pipe. So he tugged a little more out, thinking that maybe it was on a retractable reel. And then it just kept coming. Until all of a sudden the whole length was on the floor.
On the bright side, it won’t be leaking into the wall at all now, as there is no hose to leak now. And since we never used it to begin with, it doesn’t matter that it isn’t connected. And hey, we only spent about 4 hours futzing around with it today, that we didn’t intend to spend on it at all. So, that’s not how we intended to spend our Saturday, but hey, it rained anyway, so who wanted to be outside?
Farm Fresh Adventures 