On Thanksgiving, I went by a house I own in Central Topeka, to find that someone had kicked in the door and ransacked the place.  But, worse than that they had taken some bolt cutters and try, semi-successfully, to cut out the copper plumbing and wiring.

I would normally have been sort of upset, but this is nothing new in that neighborhood.  Central Topeka is not a very good area.  Actually, it is downright dangerous.  I bought the house back in the 80’s, when I was riding for Wheaties/Schwinn.  I was audited by the IRS and they disallowed most of my travel deductions because I didn’t have a “tax home”.  So, I bought this house and it just sat there.  The area was nice then.

But, it got worse and worse.  Now, I think most of the surrounding houses on the street are Section 8, and no one seems the least bit interested in doing anything about it.  I’m not.

This is the same house where I had three cars stolen from the garage.  So, it is nothing new.

Topeka, in general, has a fair amount of crime.  Nearly every property I’ve been associated with has been broken into.  Copper is what most guys are stealing now .   I guess it’s about $3.00 a pound scrape, so it is semi-valuable.  Lots of people’s central A/C units are disappearing nowadays here in Topeka.

I had my scooter stolen from my driveway a few years ago.  There are lots of people  that are hard up, that don’t seem to have a problem taking other people’s stuff.

I doubt I’ll even call the police.  I have the bolt cutters that the guys used to mangle the plumbing, but I am nearly positive that the police wouldn’t take a fingerprint or do anything to try to apprehend the guys.  I never was contacted once about the cars or scooter.  This break-in would be $1000’s of dollars to repair, if you were a regular guy, hiring people to do it.  But, that doesn’t seem to matter to the police anymore.  I think they are so over-worked that break-ins at vacant houses are nearly nothing to them.

On a brighter note, it is supposed to be in the mid-60’s today, so we’re heading out at noon for a longish ride.  Last nice day for the foreseeable forecast.

The front door was kicked in. I fixed it now so that it would be very hard to do.

They only got about half the copper pipes.

And none of the wiring. I am sort of wondering if I walked in on the whole thing and they took off.

I found these down the basement. I hate these without the proper tools for the job!

Why is it that it is so unrewarding finishing someone else’s job?  I’m not sure that I’ve ever done a project, that was a continuation of project that someone started and baled, and ever been very satisfied.

I think it is because that no one really does anything exactly the same and that there are many ways to get to the end result of a project.  The problem is that when someone starts something in a specific way, you need to be thinking like them to get to the same end result that they envisioned.  And you might not have that vision in you.

I got thinking about this because I started, or more accurately, got involved in tiling a shower in Lawrence, that someone else had done the shower pan and cement board.  They wanted a no sill shower, a smooth transition.  They make a flush drain, a trough that would have been perfect, but the guy before me thought he could build a smooth little berm between the shower and the bathroom floor.  He did that, but he didn’t get any grade on the shower pan. And he didn’t know that the drain could be adjusted up and down, so it was mounted about 3/4″ too high.

So, yesterday, I chiseled out all the surrounding concrete, and lowered the shower drain, then tried to tile the floor so the water flows towards the drain.  I’m not sure how it is going to work.  I think there might be a couple low spots, which would be a total failure, or at least not good.

What I really needed to do was to knock out the whole thing and just start over.  Get the right drain and do it right.  That might still be what is going to happen.

I’ve run into this so many times.  Guys that have started working on their cars, or bikes and then get frustrated and quit.  A bike usually isn’t so difficult.  There isn’t much on a bike that I don’t know about.  But, someone cross-threads their bottom bracket or something and then calls and asks if I can “help” him install a new bottom bracket, when he already knows that he has jacked it up.

It’s much worse with cars.  I hate showing up to help someone fix their car and there are a ton of nuts and bolts laying around.  I pretty much need to remove them to know where they go back.

Michael Fatka had a sign like below at his shop, Michael’s Cyclery in Ames, Iowa.  I didn’t appreciate it as much back then as I do now.  The last number isn’t a big enough jump.

I put in the other floor next to the shower, so felt some connection to the project. The other floor has electric heat and is nice. You can’t tell how little slope the shower floor has here. Maybe 1/8″ per foot if I’m lucky.

I should have just put one of these in and got rid of the curb.