Mr. Fix It

I don’t think I’ve ever broached this subject about life here in China. I’ll preface the following blog with this statement, I understand that I’ve got it much better than the locals (so for those of you thinking, “suck it up buddy, stop your whining”…remember the preface). They just seem to have no idea how to “weatherize” their homes (or perhaps they just don’t, it’s something they’ve gotten used to and see no need to change). The apartment buildings here are basically cement block buildings and just don’t have the insulation built in to keep the heat in and the cold out (that means that there isn’t any of that pink, cotton candy looking stuff used in the home building process). So this winter, I’ve been trying to figure out why certain rooms in the apartment are colder than others (and one is like the garage in winter with the door closed, warmer than outside but not by much). Well, I start to diagnose the problem with the aiyee room which is the coldest room in the apartment. Now we call it a storage room but for many, this is a room for the live-in maids [aka aiyees and hence the term aiyee room] with a separate door that leads to an external stairwell. So the aiyee can come and go from the apartment without using the front door [sounds nice doesn’t it, you can live her but don’t use the same door that we do and for pete’s sake, don’t even consider the elevator]. The door to the stairwell is a steel door so it stays cold and I found it has a gap under it of about 2/3 of an inch (about 1.7 cm for the metric fans out there) so any air easily passes from the stairwell underneath the door and into the room. I know that there are some of you that are now in the “well duh, it took you months to find this” mode….well, we typically close the door to the storage room and have kind of just accepted that it’s cold out there. Plus the weather hasn’t been all that bad until the past week, it’s really dropped off recently (and we even had some snow on the 13th). I’ve found the same problem on many of the other doors to adjoining rooms and so I headed out to B&Q (the Chinese version of Home Depot….but not really with all of the things you find at Home Depot so it has a lot but it’s still limited in scope of products) and picked up some door sweeps and weather stripping for the doors. It’s not much but anything to try and keep the heat in is helpful. The thing about shopping at B&Q is that you may or may not find the help you need and/or the item you need. We’ve been there before to try and get some dryer vent piping and metal tape. Try and explain that to a Chinese person without knowing the words for the items. We did just about all we could with charades, point to the piping, point to the dryer and pointing at tape and indicate we needed to join them together but to no avail. It was never understood and we didn’t get the right tape but I kept searching (after all, I’m a man and I don’t like to ask for help, it’s in my DNA….I know how to fix it even if I don’t know what “it” is and I can find it on my own thank you very much) and eventually I found it (okay it was at work but the point is that I found it). Now to further my point, it’s cold inside of B&Q. Not like Home Depot or Lowes, more like Home Depot or Lowes in the garden area where they don’t try to block the outside temps. So everyone is walking around inside (all of the workers) with coats on to keep warm.
[I’ll sidetrack one more moment to emphasize the point again. Many restaurants also seem to be colder than one would expect. It’s not freezing but it’s also not really comfortable so in many cases, everyone eats the meal with their coats on. Strange but true…now back to the story].
A piece of advice about buying things in China, just because the door sweep package clearly states 910mm, don’t believe it. I think the packaging was perhaps 910mm but the door sweep contained inside was about 810mm. I know I’m not a metric genius or anything but I believe that 910mm = 91cm and I needed an 85cm piece. I got back to the apartment and just stared at it trying to figure out where I went wrong (obviously I was wrong because it didn’t fit). I may not have been able to read the package but the numbers are obvious, it clearly stated in English “910mm” underneath some Chinese characters. Unless the Chinese characters read “This item is less than 910mm” I don’t know how I missed this one. Luckily there was one door that was smaller and I was able to piece together some sections to make the sweep fix. So I covered the bottoms of the doors but it’s still cool and I’ve found more air leaks around door frames so I used some weather stripping to try and block the airflow there. Now, it’s the door frames themselves that are the problem. Now, I’ve got to go back and get some caulking but since I cannot read Chinese, I’m a little more skeptical about getting this since I don’t know exactly what is in each tube. But that’s another trip to B&Q to find out how much I want to resolve this.
Now, in the apartment we have many sliding doors, one for the front door, one in the aiyee room(out to the small balcony) and one in each bedroom (again out to a small balcony). The sliding doors we have are another problem with air flow going under and around the doors but it will take much more work to resolve this problem. I’ll take on that task in the coming weeks since it’s something that I’m used to doing. Fix the small things around the house was a common thing, now I’ll do the same for this apartment and perhaps the landlord will appreciate the effort (if she even notices).
One of the things I can’t fix is the floors; we have “marble” tile in the living room/kitchen/dining room and wood floors in the hall and bedrooms. This tile is cold; there is nothing we can do about it so you’ve got to wear slippers to keep your feet warm. Now carpeting would help but I don’t think they make a vacuum that can handle carpet and I don’t think carpet is an option for any apartment here since it seems that carpeting isn’t a natural fit for people. In the summertime, this should mean the apartment remains cooler (at least that is what I hope) but in the winter time, it gets pretty cool in the room. Some of my Chinese colleagues from work tell me that they wear many, many layers of clothes inside their homes due to the cost of heating. They can see their breath when they walk around inside of their homes. Again (for those that think I am whining) I know it could be a lot worse and I know that more of the locals live with this without complaint but it’s just different for us spoiled Westerners. The heat comes from vents near the ceiling and is positioned so the airflow is parallel with the ceiling and since heat rises (even in China), some of the heat doesn’t reach the lower levels of the room which only adds to the cold floors and cool rooms. Now if we had a ceiling fan…it could make the difference but we have none and to be honest, I’m not certain that a ceiling fan would hold on the ceiling (it may go on the ceiling but I wouldn’t turn it on because when it turns out, it’s coming out and down on your head). I was never much of a ceiling fan guy but you get used to having them help to circulate the air in your house and now I can see where they would be very useful to have. Either way, we’re headed into Spring and that takes us towards a new set of challenges in the apartment…the summer. The summers here are very hot and we hope that the apartment will remain cool during those times. For winter, it’s easier to layer (put on a sweater) to keep warm than to keep cool in a hot apartment. Tammy has forbidden me from wearing my speedos around (try getting that image out of your head) so hopefully the apartment will be cool in the summer. I’ll still probably need to do some weatherizing of the apartment but that’s okay. It’s what I would do at home so why stop now.