my video game-playing career really peaked in early middle school*, which means that nearly all of my video game reference points are Super-NES-era games**. there was a summer that my brothers and i played metroid like it was our job. for those of you who were cool in junior high not familiar with the game, it follows the adventures of a sort of futuristic spaceman-bounty hunter who has to explore alien tunnels and caves. there’s a tremendous amount of territory to cover, but you can only see it displayed on the screen one room at a time and there’s no master map to reference. it became necessary to start mapping the tunnels ourselves to avoid falling into the jaws of the same monster over and over again. we’d draw the turns – right, left, up, down, elevator here, bottomless pit there, on an 8×11 sheet of paper, and when the map ran off the edge of the paper we’d just tape another sheet on to the side, so that the map grew in a sort of organic fashion.

over the course of the past two weeks, we’ve been taking measurements of the house as needed in order to hunt for vintage doors, to think about adding windows or moving walls around, or try to figure out where the furniture will go. usually i take and call out the measurements to ben who sketches it into his notebook, and then later drafts it to scale on the computer.

eventually we’ll draft the whole house (there’s no such thing as as-built drawings for this place, it was purchased strictly as-is and full of surprises), but without time to do the whole thing we keep popping in and grabbing a measurement here or there. the end result is that ben’s notebook reminds me of the metroid maps of my childhood. while we don’t have any elevators, or monsters***, we do have that weird random air shaft. (there will be more pictures of the air shaft as soon as it’s safe for us to get up on the roof, which is currently buried in some of the 66 inches of snow that have fallen in chicago this winter).

yesterday Ben was able to join the various pieces together to complete the map of the interior of our apartment:

and if reading groundplans isn’t your thing, here is the narrated video tour teresa requested last week.

in terms of progress this week: the electrical work is nearly complete. our contractor says that means that the “spaghetti bowl” that was our breaker panel has been all sorted out. there was a moment of panic mid-week when they opened up a kitchen wall and found some electrical wiring that had been run sans conduit. for a moment we thought the whole house might be like that, which would mean about $10k in extra work. but a few spot checks in other rooms determined that it’s only in the kitchen, where the recent, spectacularly shoddy, rehab work had been done, that had unsheathed wires running behind the sheetrock. everything else has nice, 1950’s era BX conduit. which means it’s still not up to code, but also not unsafe.

the plumbing was hooked up and turned on, only to discover that there is a leak between 1st and second floors (there’s now a hole in the 1st floor kitchen ceiling where they went in after the leak). the house was winterized, meaning that the pipes were blown out so that they couldn’t freeze, in 2012, but neighbors tell us that the place has been vacant for 3-4 years. which means there’s a distinct chance that the pipes froze in the winters of 2010 or 2011. so there’s no telling just how many leaks they’ll have to chase down. finding leaks seems to be an inexact science (ie, turn on the water and wait to see what drips), which means i can only hope we find all of them BEFORE we take possession of the house.

* after that i started hanging out with boys who were more interested in hacking a circa-late-70’s UNIX mainframe than they were in completing Metroid levels, and i never really made it back to video games. possibly, it’s just that i haven’t had any free time since i was 13.

** once in college a friend and i happened upon an old Super-NES system and stayed up all night trying to save the princess (we did). I was amazed to discover that i still know where all of the extra coin blocks are located in Super Mario Bros. there is a treasure trove of useless information rattling around up here.

*** unless you count the rats, which CAN get awfully big.