Author: Walter Jowers

Attention wart sufferers and duct-tape users: According to the October issue of the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, you don’t have to go to a doctor and get your warts frozen off. Duct tape will do the job and do it better.

In a recent study at the Madigan Army Medical Center near Tacoma, Washington, 26 wart patients wore duct tape over their warts for six days. Then they removed the tape, soaked their warts in water, and filed their warts with emery boards or pumice stones. They reapplied the duct tape the next morning then continued the ritual for two months or until their warts went away. Eighty-five percent of the duct-tape patients ended up wart-free, as opposed to 60 percent of patients whose doctors tried to freeze their warts off with liquid nitrogen.

I call this a real breakthrough, especially for folks like me, who aren’t squeamish about taking on a little do-it-yourself minor surgery. When I was about 6, I grew a wart on the inside of my knee. I hated that thing, so every day I’d climb about six feet into the backyard china-berry tree and slide down the trunk, putting as much friction on the wart as I could stand. Just as I suspected, the nubby little sumbitch couldn’t stand up to that kind of abuse, and it just popped off after just a few days.

Since then, I’ve treated a whole bunch of minor skin imperfections myself. On my left thumb, I’ve got a little raised dot, where wife Brenda’s dog T.J. bit me 20 years ago. Every now and then, it raises up a little more than usual. So I take an emery board and file it down flush, just like the Madigan wart sufferers. I’ve also trimmed up a whole lot of guitar-player fingertip calluses, and I’ve snipped off several tiny things that looked like they wouldn’t bleed much or come back later. I figure I’ve saved myself dozens of trips to the doctor and thousands of dollars. Best of all, though, I experienced the thrill of a job well done.

But enough about me. Back to the duct-tape-vs.-warts study. Dr. Dean Focht III of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center said the researchers didn’t test any other kinds of tape and they don’t know what it is about duct tape that gives it wart-removing powers. For all they know, you could get the same result using regular old transparent tape, electrical tape, or the sticky part of a Band-Aid. Given my experience, I don’t think you need the tape at all. I say you just need the file and the courage to use it. Don’t go by me, though. Check with your physician.

All this goes to show what I’ve known for a long time: This world would be much worse without duct tape. The Apollo 13 astronauts would’ve smothered to death between here and the moon if not for rigged-up air filters held together with duct tape. My friend Little Bruce would have lost the side panels of his rusted-out pickup if not for duct tape. A few bold high school kids would have gone to the prom naked if not for the gowns and tuxedos that they made out of duct tape.

But there is one thing duct tape will not do, and that’s stick heat-and-air ducts together. Believe me when I tell you duct-taped ducts come apart and leak 100 percent of the time. In a 1998 study at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Max Sherman and Iain Walker tested duct tape, clear plastic tape, foil-backed tape, mastic, injected aerosol sealant, and every other duct sealant they could get their hands on. They found that anything worked better than duct tape. “Of all the things we tested,” said Sherman, “only duct taped failed. It failed reliably and often quite catastrophically.”

In attics, which in our part of the world can get up to 150 degrees, the glue on duct tape melts at the speed of ice cream. In our little home-inspection business, when we open up an attic pull-down stair, we often find it covered with wads of dead duct tape, which fell off the attic ducts.

Loose duct tape means leaky duct joints, and leaky joints mean the efficiency of the heat-and-air system has gone straight to hell. It’s not unusual for failed duct joints to leak 50 percent of the conditioned air.

So when you get your heat-and-air system serviced, make sure the technician checks the ducts. If the ducts are sealed with duct tape, tell the technician to replace it with something that works. The cost of the labor for resealing the ducts is sure to be cheaper than blowing half the conditioned air into your attic or crawl space.

If you’ve got duct tape on hand, use it on your warts, use it to hold your car together, use it to make little kids and compliant pets look like robots for Halloween. Just don’t use the stuff on your ducts.

I sincerely enjoy fall. When the summer haze lifts and the sunlight comes in low, the world looks clean, sharp, and new to me. When the daytime temp drops below my sweat threshold, I’ll get outside more and enjoy my little piece of the world. And one evening real soon, I’ll be treated to one of my simple fall pleasures, which is smelling a little oak smoke drifting out of a neighbor’s fireplace.

Now, some of you might be wondering, “Why doesn’t Jowers build his own oak fire instead of going around sniffing other people’s fires?” Well, I’ll tell you: I live in an 88-year-old house, which has an unlined brick chimney. I’m afraid to burn wood in it, and I don’t want to pay somebody a couple thousand dollars to line the chimney with stainless steel or some high-tech chimney mud. So, don’t you know, we Jowerses have gas logs.

Now, some of you chimney sweeps are thinking, “You still need to have your chimney lined! A chimney for gas logs ought to be as good as a chimney for real wood logs!” I know that. But since my gas logs don’t make embers that could set my house on fire and since they don’t make flammable creosote, I’m willing to take my chances without the liner. So far, the Jowers gas logs have performed admirably and they haven’t harmed any Jowerses or pets.

I’m not afraid of my own gas logs, but I am afraid of some of the gas-log installations I’ve seen. First on my list: The dreaded vent-free gas logs. Vendors use the term “vent-free” like it’s a good thing to have a fire in your house and have no vent for it. No, bubba, no. Ventlessness is not a feature. It’s a downgrade and a clear and present danger besides. Fires make carbon monoxide. Carbon monoxide can kill people. That means fires need vents, even cute little gas-log fires.

Even so, if you go to a fireplace shop looking for gas logs, chances are somebody will try to sell you some vent-free gas logs. They’ll tell you that the vent-free units are affordable, and people love ’em. They’ll tell you that they’re safe, and they’ll say it’s because they have oxygen-depletion sensors. I’ve read the promotional literature for vent-free gas logs, and I know the sensor is supposed to shut off the flame if oxygen in the room gets too low. Problem is I don’t trust oxygen-depletion sensors. First of all, I wouldn’t bet my life that a cheap add-on gizmo on a set of gas logs will work. Second, people can die from carbon monoxide poisoning in a room that has lots of oxygen in it, as long as there’s plenty of carbon monoxide.

Then there’s this: Gas fires don’t just make carbon monoxide; they also make water vapor. Running a vent-free gas log set is a great way to load up your house with excess moisture and grow a nice crop of mold, mildew, and fungus. Some of those exotic molds can make a person sick.

Another worrisome thing about vent-free gas logs: Hardly a week goes by that I don’t see a whopping big set of those logs stuffed into a tiny 80-year-old fireplace. The gas logs hang way out onto the hearth. You people with oversized gas logs, listen to me: It is not okay to have a gas flame burning out on your hearth. Sooner or later, a child, a pet, or somebody in a bathrobe will walk too close to the fireplace and end up on fire. If you’ve got a tiny little fireplace, get some tiny little gas logs. If you shop around, you can find some that will fit into a fireplace that’s only nine inches deep.

Better yet, stay away from vent-free gas logs altogether. If you’re going to have gas logs, you need a real-enough chimney, one that will let the carbon monoxide and the water vapor out. You’ll need one other thing: a little clamp on the fireplace damper to hold the damper open ever so slightly. That way, if you forget to open your damper (as people often do), the flue will still be open. You can buy the little clamps at any fireplace shop.

If you don’t have a chimney but you’ve just got to have something that looks like a fire, get an electric log set. No gas, no emissions, nothing but honest-to-goodness fake fire. If you want to see a video clip of electric logs (and I know you do), go here: Innohearth.com/elg.html.

If you’ve got a chimney and you want gas logs, get the rip-roaring, yellow-flaming, gas-guzzling full-size ones like I’ve got. Open the chimney damper wide and max out the gas flame. All that hot air going up the chimney will set up a stack effect and create one heck of a draft. When you feel the cold air coming in around the windows and doors, do what I do: Crack a window, and you just might catch a whiff of a neighbor’s real oak fire.

Lately, in our little home-inspection business, we’ve been checking out a lot of spanking-new houses. If you ask me, this is a good trend. It means new-house buyers are getting savvy, and they’re showing appropriate skepticism when they hear the promises that the house passed a codes inspection and is guaranteed. (Reminder: They all pass codes inspections, and the guarantees don’t kick in unless the house has heinous problems.)

From what I’ve seen, it looks like just about every local builder makes the same set of mistakes in new-house construction. When I say mistakes, I’m not talking about a few blemishes on the walls or a door that won’t quite latch. I’m talking about dead-obvious building-code violations — stuff you could see from a running horse. Understand: A house built to conform with the building code isn’t something special. It’s the worst house a contractor can build legally. If a house falls a little short of the building code, that doesn’t make it an A-minus house. More like an F, or, if you want to be kind, an I for Incomplete.

Oddly enough, most of the common violations we find — we call ’em the “fish in a barrel” — could be avoided with just a little planning and effort. So I’m going to try to explain right here and now how to cure some of these things. I’m doing it for two reasons: First, because I think people ought to get what they pay for when they buy a new house; second, because I’m appropriately lazy. I want the builders to get these details right, and I want the codes inspectors to enforce the building code, so I can quit explaining the same things all the time.

So, you builders: Do it for yourselves, do it for the homebuyers, but most importantly, do it so I can knock off work earlier. Try my hints below. Pretty please with sugar on it.

Get the grading right. If you don’t, water will get into the basement or crawl space, mold and fungus will grow, and foundation walls could settle.

Getting the grading right should not be hard. All you have to do is get the dirt around the house to drop six inches in the first 10 feet. If you can’t eyeball it, screw a level to a straight 10-foot board and stick a six-inch leg on one end of the board. Now you have a real-enough grade-checking stick.

Don’t forget: Plan ahead to make sure the concrete pad for the heat-and-air equipment doesn’t have to go in a low spot. And don’t put the access hatch for the crawl space in a low spot. That just about guarantees water in the crawl space.

Get the weep holes and flashings in the brick veneer right. If you don’t, the structural wood parts behind the brick might just rot out or grow a crop of toxic mold. I know, I know. The bricklayers don’t know how to put in weep holes and flashings. Here’s how you fix that: Go to the Journal of Light Construction Web site at JLConline.com. Search for the article “Keeping Water Out of Brick Veneer” by Jerry Carrier. In this article, Carrier explains in vivid detail exactly how to install weep holes and flashings. You’ll have to pay five dollars for the article. That’s a steal. The article will show you how to do the job right, once and for all.

Flash the decks. Every now and then, a deck falls off a house. Most of the time, it’s because the connection between the deck and the house wasn’t flashed.

Best I can figure, decks go unflashed because they’re built after the outside of the house is finished. Here’s an easy cure: Have your carpenters put up the deck ledger boards — and flash them — as part of the rough framing. That way, the flashed ledger is sitting there waiting when the never-saw-flashing-in-their-lives deck boys show up for work.

Fix those bathroom vents. One of these days, the sorry tradition of running cheap-ass dryer vents from the bathroom fans to the soffits is going to cause a house to develop a bad case of rot or grow a big crop of mold.

Here’s what you do: Get the roofers to install vent hoods as part of the shingling job. Then, get the heat-and-air guys to run real metal duct from the vent hoods to the bathroom fans.

Now, you codes enforcers, listen to me: You’re going to have to schedule at least one more inspection to check the weep holes and flashing in the brick veneer. If you ask me, there ought to be one inspection dedicated to flashings — roof flashings, chimney flashings, window and door flashings, and brick-veneer flashings. Y’all are smart men. You can figure out how to do this.

You can check the rest of this stuff during your normal inspections. You know what to look for: dirt that slopes away from the house, flashing at the deck ledger, bathroom vents run through real metal ducts to the exterior.

Finally, please stop playing nice. Everybody knows it’s hard to fix something after it’s already screwed up. That shouldn’t stop you from making builders fix things when you know they’re wrong. Make ’em fix the fish in a barrel a few times, and they’ll start getting things right.

If you’re about to buy a house, you’ll probably be hiring a home inspector to look at the place. Before you do that, there’s something you need to know about the home-inspection business: It’s not all on the up-and-up. Seeing as how I’m in the home-inspection business, it pains me to say such a thing. But, heck, you future homeowners need to know this stuff, and I figure I’m just the man to explain it to you.

Here’s the skinny: If you’re a home inspector, you have to get your customers from somewhere. For the last 25 years or so, the preferred method has been to go to real estate sales offices and convince the folks who sell houses that you’re the guy they ought to call whenever one of their clients needs a home inspection.

Understand: There’s nothing inherently wrong with this kind of marketing. A home inspector can go to a real estate office and market himself as the hardest-working man in the inspection business, a man who’ll bust his hump hunting down defects and potential problems and making sure the homebuyers understand them. Realtors who are serious about disclosing defects will prefer this approach.

On the other hand, a home inspector can market himself as a salesperson’s “partner,” a man who’ll work hard to be “objective” and “fair to the house.” He will promise to be a “non-alarmist.” In the home-inspection business, those are a few of the marketing buzzwords that constitute a wink and a nod, a veiled way of saying that an inspector will protect the deal and make sure all the folks who are counting on getting checks on closing day won’t be disappointed. Realtors who put closing deals ahead of disclosure will prefer this approach.

As an example of how the latter approach works, let me direct your attention to Herner v. HouseMaster, et al., which was tried in the Superior Court of New Jersey, Appellate Division. There’s a court report on the case here: LawLibrary.Rutgers.edu/courts/appellate/a6252-99.opn.html .

Just so you’ll know: HouseMaster is one of the big home-inspection franchises. You can read all about them at HouseMaster.com. From everything I know, HouseMaster’s marketing, inspecting, and reporting practices are close to the norm in the home-inspection business.

The Herner case turned up this little tidbit, from HouseMaster’s Inspector Guidelines Manual: “We all must be committed to our marketing program. As the inspector, you are actually the most important salesperson on our team.”

Then there’s this: “Don’t dwell on negative aspects of the house. We promote the fact that an inspection should be an impartial evaluation.”

And a little more: “We also stress that HouseMaster inspectors are very fair in their evaluation and non-alarmists.

“If you appear surprised or give off negative mannerisms, the buyer will pick it up … .

“A common agent complaint is that inspectors ‘nit-pick.'”

Well, don’t you know, the court saw through all this chicanery and dropped the hammer on HouseMaster. Here’s a little something from the court report: “What the Herners did not want was an inspection whose undisclosed and predominant purpose was to market HouseMaster. The record establishes that the realtor is HouseMaster’s customer in fact. Eighty percent of its business comes from realtors.”

And a little more: “In this case, HouseMaster’s system of home inspection resulted in a report to the Herners which was so ‘balanced’ as to render it pablum and worthless.”

Friends and neighbors, I’m ashamed to tell you that a fair number of home inspectors feed pablum to their customers every day. Just a few weeks back, co-inspector Rick and I looked over an 11-month-old house, which had defects and code violations that would cost tens of thousands of dollars to fix. Before the homeowner bought the house, he got an inspection. What did his inspection report say? It said, “Well-built house.” Well-built, my ass. The place was a nightmare, and any home inspector worthy of toting a flashlight would’ve known it and should’ve reported it.

About once a week, I’ll have the opportunity to read a pablum report. One described a house at the bottom of a hill so steep that water literally ran through the house whenever there was a hard rain. The inspection report called the slope of the lot “moderate.”

So what’s a smart homebuyer to do? Here’s what smarty-pants lawyer — and construction-defect specialist — Jean Harrison says: “Before you hire a home inspector, ask him what percentage of his business comes from word-of-mouth and what percentage comes from realtors. The higher the percentage of word-of-mouth referrals, the greater the likelihood that the inspector will perceive himself as working for the homebuyer, rather than the realtor.” She adds, “I would also ask the inspector directly: ‘Do you consider me or the realtor to be your client?'”

I say don’t hire any home inspector until you’ve read a report that he actually wrote. Those pablum reports are obvious. You’ll know them when you read them. Whatever you do, don’t hire anybody who writes them. Those people have turned to the dark side, and there’s no bringing them back.

Go ahead and call your heat-and-air guy now and tell him you want your heating system cleaned and serviced. If you wait much longer, we’ll get a cold snap and hundreds of people will find out their heating systems died in their sleep, over the summer. Then, every heat-and-air technician in town will be booked from dawn ’til bedtime, and you’ll be shivering and thinking about buying one of those indoor-air-polluting, recliner-igniting portable heaters.

I tell everybody who’ll listen: Get your heat-and-air equipment serviced twice a year, once before the weather turns hot and once before the weather turns cold. Heat-and-air service calls aren’t cheap, but they’re way cheaper than running a dirty, inefficient, and maybe even dangerous system. Service calls are surely cheaper than buying a new system years too early, which is what happens to people who don’t want to pay for maintenance on their equipment.

I’m proud to say that my downstairs heat-and-air system is finishing up its 18th summer of keeping the Jowers house at 70 degrees day and night. Believe me when I tell you that’s remarkable. Heat-and-air equipment usually lasts about as long as a dog, but mine is easing into its blind-cat-with-bald-spots years.

Before your heat-and-air guy shows up, I suggest you do the following:

1) If your furnace — or heat pump — is outside, make sure there’s enough room around it. In our part of the world, a lot of people are furnace-hiders. They either plant bushes around the outside heat-and-air equipment or they build a little corral around it. Your service man needs at least two feet of walking, squatting, and working room. If you’ve got bushes in his way, trim them back or dig them up. If you’ve got a corral, take it down.

2) If your furnace is inside, and you’ve got junk piled up around it, move the junk. Just about every day, I look in attics and basements and find furnaces covered with Christmas decorations, baby toys, books, and luggage. Just like outside equipment, inside equipment needs at least two feet of workspace around it.

3) Take a look inside the equipment. Gas furnaces have easily removable panels. Take them off and look inside your furnace. Make a mental note — or even take pictures — of water stains, rust, and debris inside the furnace cabinet. When your service man is done, check again.

I know some of you are thinking, Why should I do that? Well, in our little home-inspection business, we look at hundreds of gas furnaces every year. We’ll find dozens of them filled with rust, burnt matches, and cicada carcasses from 1998. Every now and then, we’ll find a singed owner’s manual — left over from the original installation — stuffed inside next to the burners. When we point these things out, a lot of homeowners claim that they just had somebody clean the furnace. Sometimes, they even have receipts. So it looks like some of you people are getting ripped off. One way to cure that is to do your own before-and-after check. Another is to sneak up on the heat-and-air guy while he’s working and offer him some refreshments. If he’s doing something that you’re sure is work, good. If he’s sitting down smoking a cigarette and talking on his mobile phone, you might just need that before-and-after evidence. Just so you’ll know: After a service call, the insides of a furnace should be good and clean. In the business, they call that kind of clean “penny-bright.”

Another thing you ought to check if you have a mid-efficiency gas furnace: There should be at least an inch of open space between the metal furnace vent (the exhaust pipe) and anything that will burn. The specification for this one-inch clearance is written right on the vent pipe. Even so, a lot of heat-and-air installers and technicians ignore the specification.

It’s easy to check for proper clearance. Just follow the vent pipe. Here are the usual offenders:

1) The vent is too close to insulation. Often, the vent is touching — or very close to — insulation on the ductwork. Insulation has a paper facing. Even foil-faced insulation has a paper backing. That paper will burn.

2) The vent is too close to a wall or ceiling. Wallboard (which is the same stuff used for ceilings) is covered with paper. It’ll burn.

3) The vent is too close to wood. In basements, vents often are butted up to wood framing or subfloor. In attics, vents are often butted up to wood framing or roof decking.

Now, a recommendation for those of you who are about to find out your existing gas furnace is dead: Buy a high-efficiency furnace that can be vented through PVC pipe. That way, you get a unit that will be cheaper to run and you won’t have to deal with the costs, dangers, and installation headaches that come with metal vent pipe.

You heat-pump owners should always buy the most efficient system you can afford. High-efficiency systems are generally better-built, last longer, and work better than the mid-efficiency systems.

If you buy the high-quality stuff and treat it right, you just might get it to last as long as a good horse.

It’s hard to screw up something as simple as painting, but a few people still manage to do it. For instance, in our little home-inspection business, hardly a day goes by that we don’t find most of the windows in a house painted shut.

Granted, people don’t open their windows much anymore. In our climate, we might get a few days in the fall or spring when it feels good to have outside air in the house. But windows aren’t there just to let air in. They’re also there to let people out if the house catches on fire. Sure, you might think flames and smoke would give you the strength and motivation to break out the glass and crawl across the razor-sharp pieces left in the window frame, but it probably wouldn’t work out that way. It’s better, I think, to make sure the windows open before you have to leave in a hurry.

If your windows aren’t already painted shut, you’re way ahead of most people. All you’ve got to do is not paint them shut yourself, or, if you hire any window painters, don’t let them go home until they’ve shown you that all the windows open and close. It’s actually very easy to paint windows without getting them stuck — all you have to do is not slop paint into the gaps between moving and nonmoving window parts. And even if you do slop paint in a gap, you can just cut it with a razor blade while it’s still soft. Anybody capable of opening a can of paint and wetting a brush ought to be able to do this.

While I’m thinking about it, here’s a quick test that’ll help you know if a person is a real painter or an impostor: If he holds the brush like a hammer, he’s a fake. Don’t let him paint. Anybody who can paint a lick knows to hold the brush like a pencil. Also, be wary of anybody who wants to use a spray gun in your house. Spray guns have their uses, but as a general rule, people who use them to paint inside a house are either inexperienced, in way too much of a hurry, or both.

Now, back to painted-shut windows: Fixing them is simple work, and you can do it. First, put on a long-sleeved flannel shirt, a pair of jeans, then coveralls over that. Now slide on a pair of steel-toed work boots, two sets of leather gloves, a hard hat, and a full-face respirator with a shatterproof face shield. (The lawyers make me say all that. I do all my work in gym shorts and a raggedy T-shirt, barefooted.)

If there are storm windows or screens on the outside, you start by taking those off. Then, you use a box cutter, a putty knife, or a pizza cutter to cut through the paint where the windows parts are stuck together. You’ll have to do it inside and outside. This will make dust and bazillions of tiny paint chips. If your house was painted before 1978, the dust and chips will almost surely contain lead. People can get sick if they eat lead. Young children are particularly susceptible. Pregnant women shouldn’t go near the stuff. So keep children and pregnant women away from a window-liberation job, and make sure you clean up any messes before kids or mamas-to-be get into them.

If the windows are still stuck after you’ve cut all the paint film, use a Stanley Wonder Bar to nudge the windows open from the bottom. Don’t use much pressure, or you’ll destroy the window sash and break the glass. Never push hard on the top piece of a window sash. On old windows, those top pieces can come right off in your hand. If you can’t get the windows open with the Wonder Bar, just give up and call in a professional.

As if sticking your windows shut isn’t bad enough, here’s something else that unskilled painters routinely do to screw up a house: They get paint in all the outlets and ruin the electrical system.

It pains me to say that I see these messes fairly often. Some knucklehead-in-a-hurry will pick up a paint roller — or worse, a spray gun — and get paint into the wall outlets. The problem with getting paint into an outlet is that the paint will get on the metal contacts and increase resistance between the contacts and any plug that gets stuck in there. Resistance means heat, and heat can start a fire.

If you’ve got paint in your outlets, there’s no digging it out. You’ll have to get the outlets replaced. That’s a job for an electrician, and it’ll probably cost about $30 to $40 per outlet.

The best cure for these problems is to fight off the urge to hire some ultra-cheap fringe-of-society handyman who paints just because he enjoys the mineral-spirits fumes. Instead, hire a real-enough professional painter, somebody with a clean truck and references. Pay the going rate. I promise, it’ll be cheaper in the long run.

In our little home-inspection business, I pass out warnings like politicians pass out promises all day long, to anybody who’ll listen. I don’t do it just to show off or because houses are particularly dangerous. I do it because I have to. Sooner or later, if I fail to give out a fair warning, somebody will get hurt, and that hurt person will get mad at me because I didn’t say something.

But just this once, in the safe harbor of Helter Shelter, I’m going to tell you the things I warn people about that I would ignore if I found them in my own house. Here goes:

Gas Vents Too Close To Things That Will Burn

The “exhaust pipe” on gas furnaces and water heaters is usually a double-wall metal pipe called B-vent. This pipe is supposed to be kept at least one inch away from anything that will burn. Usually, the warning is embossed right on the pipe. If you’re like me and in the habit of reading pipe, you can’t miss the warning.

Lately, some of the companies who make B-vent have started sticking paper warning labels on the pipe. This tells me that they’re not really worried about the pipe getting hot enough to burn anything. (It also tells me that the manufacturers’ lawyers don’t know about the paper labels, but that’s another story.) Anyhow, I’ve seen B-vent smack-dab up against paper and butted up to dried-out lumber. I’ve never seen any evidence of charring or even overheating. So, if I had a piece of B-vent touching some wood in my house, I would not reroute the B-vent or start cutting out wood. I’d take my chances.

Discharge Pipes On Water Heaters

Every modern water heater has a temperature-and-pressure (T&P) valve. The valve is supposed to open up if the water heater gets overheated or builds up too much pressure. T&P valves are important. Without them, water heaters could blow up. It’s impressive when it happens an exploding water heater can demolish a house then fly through the air like a rocket.

When a water heater gets close to exploding, steam and scalding water will come flying out of a T&P valve. If a person is close by when that happens, horrific injuries could result. So the manufacturers of the T&P valves came up with the idea of a discharge pipe, which would direct the steam-and-water blast toward the floor or out of the house altogether.

Every day, I find a discharge pipe that’s made out of the wrong material or is the wrong size or has too many bends in it. I tell people to get these discharge pipes replaced. Just about every day, I find a water heater that doesn’t have a discharge pipe. I tell people that the water heater needs a discharge pipe. By the time the plumber’s done, these jobs end up costing about a hundred dollars, which is fair enough.

But I’ve got to tell you: If I didn’t have a discharge pipe on my water heater, I sure wouldn’t pay a hundred bucks to get one. If I had a bad discharge pipe on my water heater, I’d just take it off and throw it away. I’m willing to bet a hundred bucks that if the Jowers water heater ever decides to erupt in a cloud of deadly steam, no Jowerses will be in the immediate vicinity.

Lining the Chimney

A bad chimney can burn your house down. Unlined chimneys that is, chimneys with no solid lining from top to bottom are bad. Likely as not, an unlined chimney will have little holes in the flue, where hot gases or embers can escape, find some nice dry wood, and set your house on fire.

So I tell all my customers to follow the National Fire Protection Association recommendation and get a Level II chimney inspection before they buy a house. A Level II job is pretty close to the chimney-inspection works, with a chimney sweep dropping a video camera down the flue. Once a chimney sweep has a good look at an old, unlined chimney, he’s almost sure to recommend that the chimney be lined. That’s the right recommendation, and it’s the smart thing to do.

However, the 88-year-old brick chimney at the Jowers house is not lined. We use gas logs and we’ve got smoke detectors. That’s good enough for me.

Now, let me cover a few other things that don’t scare me: My house is full of lead paint. I don’t worry about it for one minute. Lead paint is like dog crap; if you don’t eat it, it won’t hurt you.

I don’t worry for one second about toxic mold. It won’t grow without a big water leak. If I get a big water leak, I’ll get it fixed and get my house dried out before it gets all moldy.

I’ve got a little asbestos stuck to my old heat-and-air ducts. I plan to just leave it alone, so it won’t get airborne and hurt anybody. In case you’re wondering, here’s what does scare me: Liquored-up drivers with bad brakes and slick tires. When they’re all gone, I’ll start worrying about my house hurting me. n

Let me just come right out and say it: I hate crawl spaces worse than I hate pompadoured TV preachers, electric banjos, and American League designated hitters all put together. Understand, by crawl spaces, I mean the miserable little caves under houses. I’m not talking about attics, which, for some odd reason, some people call crawl spaces. If I were making the building rules, no house would have a crawl space.

Now, I know some of you are thinking, Why does Jowers hate crawl spaces so? They don’t really bother me. Well, I’ve got two big reasons: First, I’ve traversed several thousand of them, and each one sucked a little bit of life out of me. Second, since I’m in the home-inspection business, customers expect me to find every little thing wrong with a house, including all the little things wrong in the crawl space. I know I can’t do it. Nobody can do it. Believe me when I tell you that you could send a team of steely-eyed jet pilots, NASA rocket scientists, Hollywood animal wranglers, experienced exterminators, and crackerjack structural engineers into a crawl space and they wouldn’t be able to find everything wrong. And even if they could, it would be devilishly hard to fix the stuff they’d find.

Let me back up a little and tell you why crawl spaces suck the life out of me and everybody else who visits them regularly. It’s simple: Crawl spaces are earthly previews of hell. I can think of a few jobs that are worse than crawling under houses every day, and they all involve multiple trauma, third-degree burns, or severe mental illness.

Just getting ready to go into a crawl space is pure misery. First, you check your flashlights. It’s best to take two, just in case your primary light’s battery dies when you’re in the deepest, darkest part of the crawl space. Next, you put on coveralls, which, no matter how many times you wash ’em, smell like every other crawl space you’ve ever been in. Then, you put on mud shoes, gloves, and knee pads. That’s the minimum crawl-space uniform. If you’re safety-conscious, you put on a hard hat (to keep nails from ripping your scalp open) and a respirator (to keep poop-borne germs and nasty funguslike aspergillus from destroying your lungs). By now, you’re pouring sweat and breathing hard even if it’s 30 degrees outside.

When you finally waddle over to the crawl-space hatch, you knock down the spider webs and check for other critters. Since I’ve been in the home-inspection business, I have shared a crawl space with two snakes that I know about. It would’ve been three, but the third one crawled out from under some leaves as I was opening the hatch and I instinctively stomped him to death. Too bad, because he turned out to be a garter snake.

A while back, co-inspector Rick and I shared a crawl space with a tribe of salamanders who were making a pretty good living off a wheelbarrow-sized pile of human crap. Seems the plumber hadn’t bothered to hook the commode up to the waste plumbing five years earlier.

We have also had the company of many feral cats, some of whom avoided us and some of whom chased us. Some years ago, I made a 90-degree turn in a crawl space and found myself nose-to-eyesockets with a fairly fresh dead cat. I’m glad it happened, because it proved I cannot be scared to death.

Rick has been locked into two crawl spaces — once by a busybody seller who thought he’d carelessly left the crawl-space hatch open, another time by an obsessive real estate agent who just had to lock up doors as the inspection went along. Both times, he had to stay until I missed him and went looking for him.

With few exceptions, these adventures took place in two-foot-high, damp and dank mini-caves full of humpback crickets who like nothing better than hopping right onto an inspecting man’s face. Add to that the hidden puddles of filthy water, the collections of big, small, wet, and dry turds of unknown origin, and the maze of pipes and ducts that always block the short way in or out, and I think you’ll understand why I don’t like crawl spaces.

Frankly, it’s amazing that anybody is willing to go into a crawl space and even more amazing that anybody can overcome the distractions and discomfort long enough to find any broken walls, rotten framing, termites, loose heat-and-air ducts, dangling wires, and leaky plumbing.

When we get lucky and find something wrong, the first thing our customers want to know is who they should call to fix the problems. This brings me to the biggest problem with crawl spaces: Nobody wants to work in them. I mean, what person capable of doing passable work wants to haul materials under a house and spend his day working in a damp, critter-infested, nasty space that’s too short to even allow him to sit up? There are a few people who’ll do it. If you can find one, just pay him whatever he asks. And don’t make a big deal about the beer bottles he leaves in the crawl space. That’s just the price of doing business.

Business must be slow at the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Otherwise, I can’t imagine why they’d take up editing the Pledge of Allegiance. Sure, the phrase “under God” creates a theoretical separation-of-church-and-state problem. But it doesn’t create any real-world problems. I’m pretty dang sure that no atheist or agnostic schoolchildren have run away and gotten baptized, head-sprinkled, holy-watered, incense-smoked, prayer-rugged, or otherwise holy-rolled while under the influence of the Pledge of Allegiance.

If any of you people know of an American schoolchild who has been brainwashed by the pledge, bring that child straight to me. I will cheerfully deprogram and teach him or her how to tune out unwanted school background noise. Believe me when I tell you I am an expert in this field.

I counted up my school days in my head, and, best I can figure, I was subjected to the pledge, complete with the “under God” part, about 2,100 times. That comes to about 18 hours of pledging. After all those pledge-hours, I can tell you this for sure: I am no more or less patriotic or religious than I would have been without it. The pledge did do one thing for me: It spared me from 18 hours of classroom instruction from the meanest, most assbackward humans who ever walked this earth, the now-retired-thank-God schoolteachers of Aiken County, South Carolina.

In 1954, when Congress added the words “under God” to the pledge, President Eisenhower wrote, “In this way we are reaffirming the transcendence of religious faith in America’s heritage and future; in this way we shall constantly strengthen those spiritual weapons which forever will be our country’s most powerful resource in peace or war.”

Those are fine thoughts and words, but I think the real outcome was that America’s schoolchildren got to delay picking up their pencils for one more second each day. Saying the pledge in school is a brainless activity. There are more misheard versions of the pledge than there are misheard Rolling Stones lyrics. Check these three samples:

“I led the pigeons to the flag.”

“I pledge a lesion to the flag.”

“And to the republic of Richard Stans, one naked individual, with liver tea and just this for all.”

That last one is clearly pre-1954. In the now-disputed pledge, it would be “Richard Stans, one naked-under-God individual.”

Creative modifications like these don’t come from kids who are paying attention to the words. This stuff comes from kids who are dreaming their morning away, just trying to bluff their way through and avoid getting yelled at in the first five minutes of school. That was me. I knew I’d be in trouble before 3 o’clock. Might as well put off the conflicts until after recess anyhow.

Despite my bad attitude and worse teachers, I did learn how to look things up. In the last few days, I’ve learned a little about the pledge. It sprang from the pen of Francis Bellamy, the circulation manager of Boston’s nationally published Youth’s Companion magazine. The idea was to encourage schoolchildren to take the pledge in honor of the 1892 quadricentennial of Columbus’ arrival in the New World. The magazine’s owners printed up thousands of pledge leaflets and sent them out to public schools all over the country.

Well, don’t you know, the magazine’s owners were also in the flag-selling business. By the time the Columbus quadricentennial rolled around, the Youth’s Companion folks had sold about 26,000 flags to public schools.

The original pledge was this: “I pledge allegiance to my flag and the republic for which it stands — one nation indivisible — with liberty and justice for all.”

That’s nice, isn’t it? Simple, clean, and to the point. Downright poetic, complete with excellent cadence. Well, it wasn’t long before the bloodless wonks muddled it. In 1923, some folks got worried that immigrants might use the “my flag” loophole to secretly pledge allegiance to some foreign flag. So “my flag” got changed to “the flag of the United States of America.” Eleven extra syllables, when everybody knew good and well what “my flag” meant.

At some time — I can’t find out when — somebody stuck another “to” in front of “the republic.”

Finally, in 1954, Congress put in “under God.” Not so much because 1954 was the peak of a religious Golden Age in America but to draw a line between us and the godless Commies.

Now, in 2002, a busybody federal court has a whole lot of perfectly good American citizens ready to pick up pitchforks and torches to get their two words back in the pledge. You judges, listen to me: Before you start poking at harmless but time-honored schoolhouse rituals, consider the rile-up factor. What children mumble during a time-killer at the beginning of the school day is not worth even one yelling match or fistfight. I’m amazed that I have to explain this.

Now, you riled-up people: The basic rules in this country are the same as they were two weeks ago. Your kids can think or say anything they want about the flag or God or anything else. Schoolteachers just can’t make ’em say things they don’t want to say. That’s the way you want it, right?

I don’t get to visit with my daddy, Jabo Jowers, as much as I’d like to. When we do get together, it’s always back at the old house in South Carolina. We visit in early spring, when it’s cool, and we can enjoy sitting under the oak tree by Jabo’s metal shop. Jabo hasn’t changed much in the last 30 years. He’s got the same no-maintenance, inch-long crewcut. He wears the same green JCPenney coveralls, unzipped about halfway to his navel, with a white T-shirt underneath. Thank heaven, he did give up smoking. Now I can sit and talk to him without dreading his fingers digging in his breast pocket.

In recent years, Jabo and I have mostly talked about what’s going on in my life — my amazing good luck in finding wife Brenda and business partner Rick, my daughter Jess’ softball career. From what I can tell, Jabo’s fairly proud of how my life has turned out.

All of our visits end the same way. I look Jabo in his sweet old ice-blue eyes and I say, “Dammit, there’s just one problem with these get-togethers. You’re dead.”

Then the scene just pops itself gone, like a fat, floating soap bubble, and I wake up home in bed, spooned up to Brenda.

Shortly after Father’s Day 1971, Jabo had a heart attack and fell supine on the dance floor of the Augusta, Georgia, Amvet’s Club. He has remained supine ever since. Since his big going-away party at Posey’s Funeral Home, he has been confined to his underground manufactured home in Sunset Memory Gardens. He is wearing my tie.

About this time of year, my Jabo dreams turn into daydreams. I imagine that Jabo gets a day off from the afterlife and knocks on my door. Don’t you know, I have to spend a minute deciding if I should let him in. Jabo was trouble. Probably still is. There’s no good reason to think just because he’s come back to life, he’s reformed. More likely, he’s looking to pull a caper that’ll work out bad for both of us. Even so, I open the door.

“Damn, boy,” he says, “how did you end up in this big old two-story house? Did the band hit the big time?”

“Not hardly,” I reply. “I sold that raggedy-ass house of yours for $20,000 as soon as I could get that evil, thieving stepwife of yours off my back. The rest is sweat equity.”

“Now, don’t start up about Montine again,” Jabo says. “You know I’m sorry, and I’ve been haunting her as hard as I can.”

With that out of the way, Jabo wants to see his one and only grandchild. “You’re going to have to do that from a distance,” I tell him, because Jess is a little shy by nature and wouldn’t react well to a ghost granddaddy. So I take Jabo out to Jess’ summer softball camp, so he can watch her catch and throw, hit and run. When the girls take a break, he listens in while she entertains her friends with a few stories. Jabo does enjoy a child with a wicked sense of humor.

By then, it’s 10:30, time for lunch. I call Brenda, ask her to meet us down there, and we get Jabo and Brenda introduced over some fried chicken, mashed potatoes, turnip greens, blackeyed peas, and cornbread. I order Jabo a slice of chocolate pie, still warm from the oven. Hell, it can’t hurt him now.

After lunch, we drop Brenda off at the house then go put a couple Harley Springer Softtails on my charge card and take off down the Natchez trace. We stop at an overlook, and I show him my bypass scar. “Look at what they can do for a clogged-hearted man these days,” I gloat. “No dropping dead on the dance floor for Jabo Junior. With any luck, by the time I clog up again, I’ll have a clone heart in a jar all ready to go.”

By then, it’s getting dark, so we turn back toward home and get back to the house just in time for a late-night offering of Jabo’s favorite TV show, Soul Train.

“Turn it off, son,” Jabo says. “The singing sounds like a bar fight, and the music sounds like the sirens and horns I heard right after I hit the floor at the Amvet’s Club. It makes me uneasy. I’d better get on back to what I was doing before I came here.”

I fall asleep on the couch. Next morning, I wake up and walk out into the backyard. There, behind the home plate where Jess practices her pitching, there’s one of those “Your Speed Is” radar trailers. I hear Jabo’s voice in my head: “Make sure your girl throws 55 before she gets in high school. She’ll need 65 by college.”

“Hey,” I say. “Where’d that radar trailer come from?”

“Found it at the side of the road, boy. Just found it at the side of the road.”