Adventures in wood bending

My original title for this post was "How NOT to build a steam box". Still not sure I went with the right one, but whevs, as the kids are saying. (I think it needs more ... spelling. Like, maybe "whyevfs". Or maybe less? "wfs"? Meh.)

Anyway, I'm currently working on some bookcases for a friend, and like EVERY project, I just had to go and make them complicated. The "client" needed a bookcase to go behind her couch, and really wanted a curve involved somehow. And, long story short, I needed to come up with a way to bend the edge banding to go on the faces (and backs) of the case.

I'll have a post about the project as a whole when I'm done, but wanted to vent (ha! Vent! Get it? Oh, no, wait. I should have saved that pun for the end. Sorry.) about this particular part. Mostly because I've been posting pictures to Facebook and there are a LOT of very confused people out there.

So the concept of bending wood is pretty straightforward: put the wood you want to bend in some kind of container, fill the container with nice hot steam, and wait for a couple hours or so. Then you take the wood out, clamp it in the shape you want it to stay and let it dry. Presto bendo!

I watched a couple of YouTube videos and took note of the ones that seemed to work, and then set out to bend some wood.

My first challenge was to come up with some kind of heat source. Fortunately, our barbecue has a side burner (which we've used exactly twice). If I could set up a steam box in the back yard, I could boil a big ass pot of water on the barbecue and wouldn't have to worry about running out fuel, thanks to the natural gas line.

The next part was to come up with a steam box. I saw quite a few people build theirs out of plywood, but I watched one enterprising fellow build his out of a length of heavy plastic pipe. I figured that was faster and slightly cheaper than the plywood option, and hied off to the plumbing supply store. I got a 10' length of heavy-duty PVC drainage pipe (I cut a couple feet off just to make it slightly less unwieldy) and a couple of end caps to help seal the steam inside. I drilled pairs of holes every eight inches or so, just slightly below center, and ran dowels through to give me something to rest the wood on. I even grabbed a cheap temperature gauge and attached it near the venting end of the pipe so I could have an idea of the temperature inside the pipe without having to open the cap all the time. (And I remembered to drill some drain holes at the low points to make sure the condensation build-up had a way to get out, and that the pipe wouldn't get too pressurized. Yes, I was that deluded - pressure! Ha!)

With that taken care of, I needed to find a vessel in which to boil the water for to be making with the steam hot. Finding a steel bucket proved to be a lot harder than I thought it would be, but my Crazy Neighbour came through as he usually does, and found a metal bucket that wasn't rusted too badly. I fashioned a top for the bucket out of a piece of plywood and some little c-clamps, and figured that would hold well enough for a proof of concept.

It's worth pointing out that I was still labouring under the impression that all of this was going to work on the first try. Faithful readers, you already know I was wrong.

So I had a heat source, a vessel, and a steam chamber. The next problem was getting the steam from the bucket into the pipe. After casting around a bit and checking out the usual suspects, I found a deal on a replacement shop vac hose. I figured it was probably a little bit long, but my main YouTube inspiration (he of the plastic pipe steam chamber) had a great jeezly long feed pipe and his set-up seemed to work out just fine.

I attached one end of the shop vac hose to the plywood bucket lid, ran the other end in through the end cap of the PVC pipe, and threw together a couple of quick stand-offs to support the pipe on the sawhorses beside the barbecue. And I had myself a steam box!

It took a little while, but the water in the bucket eventually started boiling, and steam began making its way into the shop vac hose which, catastrophically weakened by the boiling hot vapour inside, promptly collapsed upon itself and started to melt.

Back to the drawing board!

(The good news is that the shop vac hose is the same size as the one on our shop vac and, after a minimum of careful trimming, we now have a back up hose should ours ever get run over by the car. Again. But that's another story.)

For take two, I abandoned the frailty of the plastic shop vac hose and went to something that was a little more purpose-built for moving hot air: dryer vent!

A quick re-jiggering of the bucket lid and a little hollowing out of the end cap, and Take Two was up and running later that day.

Man, that dryer vent got hot! Whew!

Unfortunately, the inside of the PVC pipe did not. Time to reconsider.

I did a little more research and thinking, and came to the conclusion that the steam just wasn't getting into the pipe fast enough. The dryer vent was so big, and so poorly insulated, that the steam was cooling off about halfway through, and nothing of any significant temperature was reaching the chamber.

I decided I needed two things: a narrower gauge transfer pipe between the bucket and the steam chamber, and a way to get the steam into the transfer pipe faster. It took some online shopping and perseverance (and mutilation of the most beautiful gas can I'd ever seen), but I managed to accomplish both.

The gas can works better because the steam has nowhere to go except through the narrow opening. With a vigorous enough boil, the steam is forced into the transfer pipe (a piece of flexible exhaust pipe for a motorcycle) quite quickly. I also moved the entry point for the steam into the middle of the steam chamber so that both ends would heat evenly, and the heat would be concentrated in the center of the wood, which is where I needed it to bend.

Yep, all in all, a much better set up than my first two attempts. In the end, it wasn't any more successful, though. The side burner on the barbecue just wasn't powerful enough to get the water really boiling. It only reached a gentle simmer, not the high rolling boil that I needed. No boil, no steam:

I was pretty much at the end of my rope at this point, and ready to just cut the bends out of a plank on the bandsaw, but I was convinced to give it one more go. Mostly because we're going to have to do some wood bending if we're going to restore our canoe, but partly because I wasn't going down without a fight on this one.

So I ordered a turkey fryer propane burner and reassembled the entire monstrosity in the front driveway.

(The neighbours were.... well, "intrigued" might be under-selling it. Let's go with "concerned".)

But damn me! It worked! We got steam!

The set up required some further tinkering, of course. After about 45 minutes or so, the transfer pipe started making a weird kind of chuffing noise. I poked around a bit, and figured out that the lower bend was full of condensate. I drilled a small hole right at the low point and once it finished draining, the noise stopped and full steam resumed.

Oh, hey! I bet you didn't know that PVC pipe will start to lose structural integrity right about 250 degrees F!

Yeah, I was getting some serious droopage. I hauled out a few extra sawhorses and roller stands to shore it up as best I could, but I was starting to think that I wasn't going to get a second shot at it out of this particular rig.

But I had a pipe full of steam, the wood was getting nice and toasty and I was going to give it a serious go. I set up my bending jig in the workshop and made sure I had a clear path between it and the steam chamber.

After almost two hours, I decided I'd see if the wood was at least close to bending. It was not.

I probably could have left it in longer, but really, I wasn't getting that curve out of it without the wood being 90% moisture, and I was worried I was going to run out of propane as it was. I had probably also failed to plan for how much the wood was going to twist as I was bending it. I would have had to have kept it in the jig for hours and I only had one jig - and four pieces that needed bending.

So, yeah. After all that, I had nothing to show for it except a badly misshapen length of PVC pipe and some slightly damp pieces of sapele.

The next time, I'm just making the box out of plywood, damn it.

Door surgery

We've been spending most of our shop time lately making some improvements to the layout and overall organization of the garage. Meaning we've come a long way, but I'm still moving that one pile of boards from the corner to the bench, back to the corner, to a different corner, to a different bench, to the other corner and so on and so on. (All the while hoping the War Department doesn't ask me why I insist on storing that huge stack of off cuts under the table saw.)

Anyway, that's what I was up to on the weekend when I came across a new door sweep that I'd been intending to put on the front door. The old sweep was getting pretty trashed, and I figured that what with winter coming on, a couple of minutes to make the swap would be time well spent.

HAHAHA! Nothing ever takes me only a couple of minutes!

Though in this case, it wasn't ALL my fault. See, this was THIS front door:

That's right - the door that looked like it had been cut by a spastic grizzly bear taking a running start with the world's worst circular saw. I'd forgotten just how bad it was, but once I removed the tattered old sweep, we were faced with a brutal reminder:

I could fit my hand right through the crack. I tried to just put the new sweep on, but even with it pushed down as far as it would go, there was still daylight visible between the threshold and the bottom of the sweep.

Did I mention that Sunday was the first really cold day we'd had this winter? There was no way I could leave it. So I convinced Amy to let me try to fix it, and - amazingly - she agreed.

I popped the hinges, and took the door around into the workshop. The first step was to clean up that awful cut, and try to make the bottom of the door solid again. Out came the circular saw and a whole whack of clamps, and hey presto:

Once it was all cleaned up, I found a nice sturdy piece of fir in my wood shed (did I post about my wood shed yet? Lemme check real quick.... damn it. Okay, stay tuned for that.) and carefully trimmed it to size on my table saw. Well, carefully enough, even though I did cut the damn thing about a quarter of an inch too thin. Sigh. It still worked okay, but man, that was dumb. Probably still feeling the effects of falling off the ladder on Saturday. Oh, yeah - about that.

The Injury Report

I was putting up the stupid Christmas lights on the stupid little flyout roof over the stupid living room windows and the stupid orchard ladder wasn't quite tall enough and the stupid extension ladder is too stupid and awkward and stupid and I hate putting up the stupid Christmans lights anyway and just wanted to get the whole stupid chore over with so I stupidly tried to pull myself up and the stupid ladder tipped over and sort of I fell off  even though I kinda of fell more down the stupid ladder than off really, but it was still stupid and now I'm no better than my stupid neighbour who falls off stupid ladders and I have a couple of stupid scrapes on my legs from the stupid ladder and a great big stupid bruise on my stupid fucking ego. So there.

Where was I?

Oh, right, so I cut off the bottom inch and half or so of the door, and then attached a new piece of solid fir right across the bottom (glued and screwed, baby):

I put the door back on its hinges, attached the sweep, and now there's no daylight and, more importantly, no freezing-cold air coming underneath the front door.

Sure, it's not painted and it ain't pretty, but we're thinking of ripping out the whole damn door and putting in a new one in the spring anyway. This is just to make sure we don't blow the entire new door budget trying to heat the front hallway over the next few months.

Bushwhacking

Hello? Is this thing on? Hello?

Oh, hey there! How are ya? Been a while, eh? Yeah, I know, I know. This time, though, I swear, I really will start....

Well, we're here now, anyway, so let's get to it!

We've been telling each other for, oh, let's say five years now, that we REALLY need to do something about the blackberry canes in the backyard. But due to one reason or another (worried about disturbing the bunnies, laziness, too many wasps, or a combination of all three), we've been putting it off and putting it off.

Until our backyard starting looking, well, jungley, and it was starting to get ridiculous. So we geared up, invited the Not-Those-Clarks-The-Other-Clarkes over to join in the "fun", and waded right in.

Choose your weapon!

It was somewhat difficult to really get a decent shot that showed the true extent of the infestation, so here are some more-or-less "before and after" pairs showing roughly the same spots in the yard.

Before

After

Before

After

And my personal favorite...
Before

After

All in all, we cleared a metric shit-ton of blackberries, and really changed the entire look of the yard. This particular chore was long, long overdue. Of course, such a successful day did not come without cost...

The Injury Report

As it turned out, the machetes weren't the most effective tools in our aresenal. The best way to clear out the canes was to chop them off a foot or so above ground, and then get a firm grip on a few of them and just haul on them.

Well, I was deep in the jungle, doing exactly that. Unfortunately, somewhere in the mess of branches and blackberries that I was hauling on was a cane under tension. When the bunch I was hauling came free, the rogue blackberry came up and whapped me right in the eye. It felt just like that time I was pulling nails out of the flooring in the basement at the old house, and one of the nails came up and thumped me.

After the requisite swearing and squinting, the pain receded a fair bit, and I went back to work, thinking that I'd had a lucky escape - it would have been really nasty if a thorn had stabbed me, wouldn't it?!

We finished tidying up the piles of blackberry canes, figuring that we'd deal with actually getting them out of the back yard the following weekend and maybe even rent a chipper to make the job easier (which didn't happen, but it turned out that just cutting them up and taking them to the yard was easy enough). The Not-Those-Clarks-The-Other-Clarkes went off home to get cleaned up while I mowed the lawn, and then we all met back up for some well-deserved dinner....

Except my eye had REALLY started to hurt again. It was tearing up like mad, and I was getting sharp pains when I tried to focus or went into a brightly-lit room. Thinking that maybe the injury was worse than I had originally thought - or that I'd gotten something stuck in it, we sent our guests home (unfed, I'm sorry to say), and hied ourselves off to the clinic (which was closed, of course) and then to the emergency room.

(Nothing in that cupboard was for me, but I spent a good 30 minutes reading those signs and wondering what some of those things were for ...)

Turns out that the branch DID have a nice big thorn in it, and I'd done a tremendous job of puncturing my cornea. Yay me! It took a little over a week's worth of near-constant eye drops (four different kinds) and three trips to the eye doctor before it cleared up.

Pro tip: Even if they do make you look like a safety nerd, always wear your safety gogglers.

State of the 'Vation

State of the 'Vation! Get it? It's like, State of the NATION, but it's VATION, which is short for RENOVATION!

Okay, so it's not, but it totally should be.

Well, here we are, another year, another successfully completed Operation Fat & Happy (mostly the former, but enough of the latter to make up for it), and I thought it was time for a little general update/random assortment of words and almost-words to bring everyone up to date. Especially me, seeing as how the last two weeks or so are a barely-remembered haze of head colds, coffee with eggnog, and lots and lots and lots of really good food - often, but not always, at the same time.

(Note: The preceding paragraph was written just after New Years, and this has been sitting around in draft form since then. I apologize for the delay. Still fat, though.)

Our current project is probably my least-favorite project we've ever done. No, seriously: I hate everything about it. Everything. But it didn't start out that way...

So, we did a little laundry room renovation this past summer, and the room itself turned out great. It started out pretty ratty and outdated, obviously (and full of crap):

We took out all the crappy old trim and cleaned the walls off REALLY well:

Bonus! This Week In Mayonnaise!

I have absolutely no idea what that was about. It was an old drink coaster, stuck to the wall with mayonnaise, covering up a hole in the wall that was filled in with... mayonnaise. I... yeah. Just... no.

Then we painted the whole room a beautiful, warm grey color and put down some pretty stellar vinyl plank flooring, right over the linoleum.

We even cleaned up and repainted the security bars on the window. Not that I think we NEED security bars on the window, but they were already there, and repainting them was easier than trying to fill the enormous holes in the window sashes left by the mounting hardware.

The flooring is great stuff - way better than the crap we installed in the sunroom. No stupid adhesive tabs for one thing; it actually locks together like engineered hardwood. Super easy to install, really heavy duty, and easy to clean. Looks pretty snazzy, too.

Once all that was done - and pretty easily, I might add - the real problems started. See, the War Department really wanted some built-in storage to hold the vacuum cleaner (currently stored in a relatively empty corner in whatever room it happened to have last been used) along with a few other bits and pieces. So, she came up with a design/general layout, and left it up to me to figure out the actual mechanics and implementation.

"No problem," I thought. "I got a garage full of tools and I've always wanted to make some built-in units!"

I'm an idiot, but you already knew that, and I'm getting ahead of myself anyway.

The overall design looked something like this (too lazy to figure out how to draw it up in SketchUp, even though it would probably be a good exercise):

That's three separate cabinets with doors (including a big one for the vacuum cleaner), a cubby on the bottom left without for the cat boxes, and a large open space on one side for the little chest freezer. The only common mesaurement was that they would all be 24" deep. The cabinets would go from floor to ceiling, and be attached directly into the studs in the walls.

I planned to make three separate units: one for the top right cabinet, one for the top left, and another that comprised the vacuum cubby and the open space for the cat boxes.

Here's a list of just some of the things that went wrong (in very rough chronological order):

• After cutting, painting, and assembling the cabinets in the garage, I brought them in to the laundry room to install them and THEN realized that the walls of the laundry room weren't actually square, and my oh-so-carefully built cabinets would have to be heavily shimmed before they could make contact with the walls. 
• When I measured, I had measured the distance at the FRONT of the cabinets - the room narrowed into the corners, meaning that I had to recut one of the cabinets (one I fortunately hadn't assembled yet) before it would fit.
• There was exactly ONE useful stud in each of the three walls. 
• The cabinets were so heavy and unwieldy that I bashed the hell out of the walls and ceiling trying to jimmy them into place.  
• I had glued and nailed the face trim to the front of the first cabinet before realizing that the face trim had to span both cabinet edges - I had to take it off and do a lot of scraping to get the faces flat again.
• I finally had a chance to use my fancy new (to me - I bought it used from the same guy who sold me the saw) Veritas Shelf Pin Drilling Jig to make adjustable shelf pins. The first cabinet went fine, but in my excitement and foolish confidence, I accidentally drilled the holes for the second cabinet in the top and bottom of the unit, rather than the sides. Which meant patching approximately 48 holes and repainting the entire cabinet. Not gonna lie: that really hurt.
• I had to redesign the face frame mid-build because I failed to account for a surface large enough to accept and support decent hinges. Oh, and I had to buy different hinges because the ones I was planning to use looked horrible.
• I had drilled a hole in the side of the litter box cubby hole because the plug was on the opposite side of the center piece from the freezer (of course). Stupid me drilled it too small and I had to cut out a larger one with a hole saw.
• I ordered some poplar from a store to make the doors out of (I had heard it was easy to work with and took paint really well). I went all the way out to the store in Langford the following weekend to pick it up and the guys in the yard in Vancouver had forgotten to actually put it on the truck - and then misplaced it. It didn't show up at the store for another two weeks. 
• I had to take the freshly installed, painted, and caulked trim off the door between the laundry room and family room so I could get the top right cabinet in. 
• Whilst reinstalling and repainting the trim, Amy noticed that the paint I was using was really shiny, and didn't match the existing paint. That's because I had inadvertently bought "medium base" instead of, you know, paint. I had to repaint the door trim on both doors in the laundry room - AND all of the cabinet trim, cabinet interiors, AND the cabinet doors, just as I thought they were ready to install. 
• When I finally finished painting the doors for the second time and went to install them, I realized that the curve in the wall to which I had carefully matched my face trim meant that the door on the top left cubby was overlappping on the top and gapped on the bottom - even with the hinges at maximum opposite adjustments. I had to remove and cut down the doors - and then repaint them to remove the marks left by the table saw.
• At which point Amy and I agreed that the finish on the doors was terrible (mostly due to the foam roller I had been using) and I had to repaint them all for a third time - by hand - to cover it up.
• Oh, and one last little indignity (and one Amy doesn't actually know about yet) I spent a VERY enjoyable evening in the shop making a sweet little jig for installing the handles. It worked like an absolute charm and the door handles are all lined perfectly (which is important because of all the parallel lines involved in the design). They're just a quarter inch too low because I measured the wrong damn thing. But because I double-checked before I drilled, I realized that the jig was wrong before I drilled the first hole. I went ahead and drilled them all anyway because god damn it I had just about had enough.

There's more (of course), but I'm depressed now just remembering all of it and I want to stop writing this. 

If I had to do it all over again, I probably would, but oh my god I would do almost EVERYTHING differently. Starting with the design, damn it. Who the hell thought 24" deep cabinets was a good idea? (Besides me, obviously...)

But, they ARE done - mostly empty still , but done:

Happy New Year!

Well, here we are at the beginning of another year, and boy howdy, I hope the first few days of your new year are a hell of a lot better than ours so far. The War Department came down with a nasty case of the flu pretty much the instant we stepped off the germ tube coming back from Christmas with the Top Brass, and she hasn't even managed to go back to work yet. Couple that with the realization that our kitchen and dining room floor was pretty badly dinged up by some unfortunately pointy high heels at our New Years' Eve party, and it hasn't been a stellar start to the year.

But it is a new year, and with that comes my annual resolution to post more. In the interests of fairness, I should probably also mention that my OTHER new years resolution is to stop taking sugar in my coffee, and 2013 will be the ninth year in a row I've made that one. Don't get your hopes up TOO much, is what I'm saying.

Anyway, to try and start off the new year right, and to cheer Amy up after we noticed the dents in our floor, I got started with some much needed exploratory surgery on this year's major project: the master bedroom ensuite. Or, as my friend insists on calling it (rightly so): the Ba'ath Bath.

Before we could even draw up a plan or start to think about the budget for this project, we had to find out exactly what we were dealing with. You see, there's a rather large shelf jutting out from the back wall of the bathroom. I'm pretty sure this was installed because they weren't using a free-standing tub (and the strange little jut out in the wall on the one side would confirm this). We, of course, really wanted to install a clawfoot tub in there and without knowing what was under the shelf, we didn't know if the clawfoot would fit.

So with the War Department supervising from a distance (stupid flu), I grabbed a few tools and whatnot, and prepared to figure out what was under the shelf.

Oh, I should also probably mention at this point that the gold taps that make the bath ... uh, well, that make it Ba'ath, if you know what I mean, weren't original to the house. They were installed well afterwards by none other than Frank himself - or his handyman. And yes, we're pretty sure it was him. Why? Oh, you'll like this, I promise you.

So here's a shot of the shower from way back that shows what I mean about the shelf jutting out:

One of the first things we'll need to do is replace the windows, and unless the wall underneath the windows goes all the way to the floor, there's no way we're getting a clawfoot in there, and we'll have to replace the windows with something that can handle being part of a shower stall. (Sort of like what those windows SHOULD have been in the first place, but  the house was built in the 80s and hey - life was simpler then. More neon, sure, but simpler.)

Anyway, if you look closely at that picture, you can see the shelf, the taps, and the obviously different tiles they used to cover up the hole they had to make when they hooked up the new taps. Think about that for a minute though: Frank wanted these taps SO badly, he was so convinced that they'd dress up his bathroom so much, that he was willing to put in any old crappy ass tiles he had lying around to fix the hole he'd have to make. I just... gah. Oh, and keep in mind that there's also a huge, obvious patch in the family room ceiling where they had to cut a hole to access the drain and put in the matching tub plug.

Anyway, I grabbed a hammer and cold chisel (because I didn't have a grout blade for my hand-held flush cutter), and popped off the four mis-matched tiles. Naturally, they came off pretty easy because who ever installed them didn't actually use grout between the tiles. After all, why would they, when they can use....

This Week In Mayonnaise
Just when I think I've seen every possible use for the stuff, I get this:

I don't even...

Man, that's like a clinic on how NOT to tile, isn't it? Mis-matched tiles (seriously, not even TRYING to make those close - the only thing they have in common with the existing ones is the size), mayonnaise instead of grout, grey thinset under white tiles, no back-buttering, not enough water in the mix... man, I could tile better than that, and I've only done it twice.

Anyway, ten minutes with the drill (seven of which was going back downstairs twice for an extra battery and then a different drill) got the plywood patch off, and we could see underneath the shelf:

Inside the hole... well, it's hard to see, but it's actually good news:

That's good, solid subfloor, all the way to the wall. Looks like we'll be getting our clawfoot! Mind you, that's many months down the road, and so to keep the cats and their mistress happy, I fixed up a plywood patch to go over the hole:

Now the War Department can have her baths, and the kitties can sit on the ledges and drink the bath water she deigns to dribble on the sides of the tub for them.





Well, what did you THINK she did with it? If we're going to have a bath fit for the Queen of Sheba, she's going to damn well act like it!

Saying farewall to an old friend

There comes a time in every relationship where, whether through death, fate, or ennui, it comes time to end it.

Oh, might be a good time to mention that I'm NOT talking about us - or the kitties for that matter. They're fine, if you can call yelling at us all the time and barfing on the rug every other day "fine", and I'm sure they do.

Where was I? Oh, right, the end of a relationship.

This particular relationship started way back in 2005, even before we began the renovations at the old place. It ended last weekend and to be honest, I'm not sure we're really over it yet.

One of the first things we had to do to the old house was replace the furnace. At the time, it made a lot of sense to also replace the unbelievably crappy stove that came with the house, and so the War Department forked over her ENTIRE bonus cheque (that she got when the company she worked for got bought out) and bought us the most wonderful gas range. Here it is on the very day they installed it:



She's a beauty, eh? Five burners, flat cooktop, convection oven, warming tray, all the bells and whistles.

We loved that stove from the moment we turned it on. We loved that stove when we cooked our Christmas dinners in it. We loved that stove to make quick meals during the week. We loved that stove so much that when we bought our new house, we specifically excluded it from the list of appliances that were to be included in the sale of the old house. We even paid for a professional gas fitter to come over and disconnect it, and wrapped it in blankets so the movers wouldn't scratch the finish. They loaded it carefully into the truck, and just as carefully unloaded it into our new garage.

Where it promptly sat for twelve months.

Oh, we shunted it around from one corner of the garage to the other, always moving it carefully and taking great pains not to scratch the finish. There wasn't much we could do: the new house didn't have gas service, and what with having to do the roof and everything else, the new gas line wasn't in the budget right away. So our poor, beautiful range sat in the garage while we cursed and hated the piece of crap that Frank left us.

Well, as I mentioned in the last post, we FINALLY had enough money to get the gas line put in. So after a fair amount of back-and-forth between and with Terasen and the local municipality (you'd think they do this all the time, but it just seemed like everything we were doing was the first time anyone had ever brought it up: "Natural gas? To your house? I've never heard of such a thing! Oh, wait, here's a form. Well, I'll be...") we finally got the gas line run. We even had some pictures of the process, thanks to our Crazy Neighbour™ who monitored the whole thing for us while we were at work.

Which I seem to have misplaced... oh well, they'll turn up.

Anyway, the gas line was installed, the fireplace was installed, and all we needed to do was install our old friend the gas range and we'd be - in the inimitable words of my friend Steve - "golden". Only one small problem.

Well, probably more like a half-a-dozen or so small problems. Small, brown, furry, problems.

You see, one of the side... er, benefits? of having so much wildlife in the neighbourhood is that some of said wildlife wants to live inside with you. Where it's warm. Failing that, they'll happily live somewhere sort-of-inside, where it might not be as warm, but where there are no predators and there's a good source of food. Like, say, a garage. Where there are bags of birdseed and peanuts (oh, someone PLEASE ask Amy about the peanuts), and nice tight crevices where they can build their nests. For example, in the side cavity of a crappy old freezer, or a beat-up old chest of drawers, or, well, a very nice stove.

Yeah. We had mice.

We actually had an exterminator come in a month or so after we bought the place, and he laid some traps in the attic (none of which were ever sprung, so THAT was good news) and in the garage. The ones in the garage were quite successful at catching little mouses, but not so much at not killing them, which upset the War Department somewhat. So we took the exterminator's advice and let the cats out into the garage once in a while so they could rub on things and leave the smell of a predator. It must have worked, at least a little, because the last trap never did get sprung, and I figured the mice had probably found a less-cat-infested home.

Unfortunately, the damage had already been done, and they had made themselves a nice little home in the insulation in our beautiful gas range. Well, okay, we thought, we'll just have to clean it all out and replace the insulation. And when we called around to ask for parts, and looked online for advice, it seemed we certainly weren't the first people to have mice in a stove. So we ordered new insulation for it and once it (finally!) arrived, we asked our good friend Mr. Awesome to come over and give us a hand - he used to fix appliances, and was willing to work for beer; I call that a win-win.

We started taking the stove apart on a chilly Friday night a little more than a week ago, and it quickly became apparent that the damage was more extensive than we thought. The first few panels came off easily enough, and were put aside to be wiped down later.

Once we got the cooktop off, however, we found out just how bad it was:



And then it got worse:



And worse:







And then we found out that the idiots at the part store where we bought our replacement insulation only gave us enough insulation to do the top and sides, and not the back. So we left the carcass of our poor stove surrounded by its pieces, and waited until the next morning, when we could start calling around and hopefully find another piece of insulation.

Well, the next morning brought good news and bad news. The good news was that the War Department talked to an exceptionally knowledgeable and helpful person at West Coast Parts (not, unfortunately, the place we had ordered the original insulation from or we might have saved ourselves a lot of trouble). The bad news was pretty much everything the guy told her.

You see, mouse pee is really, really, REALLY stinky. It's also pervasive, and mildly corrosive. The end result is that the smell is really difficult to get out - especially if the afflicted appliance were ever to get hot. You know, like a STOVE. Essentially, the only way to get the smell out - even from a metal panel - is to soak the part in a strong solution of janitorial cleaner (bleach doesn't work, apparently) and then let it dry for up to two weeks.

To cut a sad story short, after speaking to the technician and re-evaluating the extent of our infestation, we came to the reluctant conclusion that there was just no way we were EVER going to get the damn thing clean. The mouse pee was all over the electrical components, the burners, the gas lines, everything. It had seeped into the welds in the frame and the back of the box, and even onto the heat deflectors INSIDE the oven.

I think if it had been an electric stove, it might have been different, but we had to take all the gas lines off to get the panels apart, and there would have been no way to even test the thing without putting it all back together and installing it.

And so it was with a heavy heart and a great deal of reluctance that I loaded all the pieces (except for a few that I forgot, damn it) into the back of the pickup and hauled it all up to Hartland where it went straight into the recycling bin.

Yeah. Top of the line, and not even six years old. Finished. Talk about your expensive lessons. Anyway, I'm still too verklempft to continue. Throwing out that beautiful, wonderful, awesome stove really, really, really sucked.

(I think the worst part is that now I have to clean the burnt stuff out of the crappy old stove that I spilled turkey drippings in over the holidays. Stupid delicious turkey.)

Tune in next time for pictures of our next project (which we've already started)!

Yet another toilet saga

I dunno what it is about toilets in this house - maybe it's because we have three of them, and they're all in cahoots about how best to annoy the shit out of me. Or maybe it's just the Toilet from Hell, spreading its influence through sheer malevolence...

Anyway, when last we checked in on the downstairs powder room, I had just grouted the floor. (Man, is it really that long since I posted? Yeeesh. No wonder I've been getting flak from the regular readers. Sorry about that.) Since then, we installed the vanity and sink, painted and rehung the door, and, well, installed the toilet.

Three times.

Sigh. Yes, there's a story behind that; get comfortable, and I'll spin you our tale of woe...

I must admit, right up front, that a large part of our issues with the toilet, at least at the beginning, are my fault. You see, it was my first real tiling job, that slate floor in the bathroom, and let's just say that maybe doing slate wasn't the best idea for a rank amateur such as me. The tiles weren't anything even approaching uniform in size, they were not cut square, and they varied widely in width - even across a single tile. Couple that with a lack of experience on my part, and you have a recipe for an uneven floor. It didn't look too bad:



But as we've seen, looks can be deceiving. That being said, I did put quite a bit of effort into the tiles under where the toilet would sit, and thought I'd done a fair job at that, at least. So I was pretty confident that we would be able to seat the toilet on the flange fairly easily.

Hahahahahahahaha! I'm so stupid!

Anyway, this particular project started with a trip to Rona to buy a toilet flange extender kit, a wax ring, and some rubber wedges to help level the bowl on the slate (you know, just in case). We got the parts home, and set to installing the toilet.

You know, I don't even remember exactly the steps we tried to follow the first time. Maybe I've blocked it out, maybe I just don't really want to remember, but let's just say it's a good thing wax rings are cheap. We tried installing with the extender and a wax ring, and it didn't work so hot. So we took the wax ring off, and set the toilet in place without it, and tried to level it using the rubber wedges. That didn't work so hot either, and neither of us was at all confident that we'd be able to do it all.

It was time to call in the professionals. Well, A professional, anyway.

Sadly, Leonard the miracle worker had given up the plumbing business in favor of sailing around the Southern Hemisphere on a tall ship or something, so we needed a new plumber. I called the guy who installed our floor, and he recommended a company that he had used a fair bit. Well, those guys were too busy to come and install a lone toilet, but they recommended a guy they had used for some other small jobs, and as luck would have it (and after I name-dropped the company that recommended him), he was available to drop by and install the toilet for us.

So, a couple of Fridays ago (a day later than he had originally planned, but at least he called and let us know, right?), he showed up, and promptly installed the toilet - in about thirty minutes, start to finish. Hell, he finished so quickly, he even had time to take a quick look at the drain under the vanity - which, of course, leaked after I installed it the first time. I thanked him profusely, saw him out, and headed off to work.

When I got home after work, I noticed some drops of water beside the toilet, underneath the tank bolt on the left side. Huh, I thought. Maybe he didn't tighten it enough for fear of cracking the tank.

So I grabbed a wrench and gave the nut a couple of extra turns. No dice. After checking it over a few times and fiddling with a couple of seals, and realizing that it still leaked, I talked it over with the War Department. I figured I could probably fix it myself if I took the tank off, but we agreed that we didn't really want to pay a professional to do a job and then have to fix it ourselves anyway. So I called the plumber back, and set up a return visit. (The vanity still leaked after he was done, by the way, but I figured that out and fixed it myself.)

So the following Thursday, he came back, removed the tank, doped up the gasket (which is what I had planned on doing), and reinstalled the tank. He tightened everything up, I saw him out, and headed off to work.

The next day, I got an email at work from the War Department, who had double-checked the toilet on her way out in the morning, and noticed that it was still leaking. I sent her an email back that had a lot of swearing in it.

So that afternoon, I got home from work and checked the toilet again. Sure enough, it was leaking at the gasket between the tank and the bowl. I called the plumber again, and he said that it might be because either the tank or the bowl had a casting flaw that was causing the gasket to not seal properly. He said he could come back and install the other toilet (the one we had bought to replace the Toilet from Hell, ironically), but that it would cost us for another trip as the defect wasn't his fault.

Well, this, now, this was starting to piss me off. So I had a closer look at the toilet, and noticed that the tank really wasn't secured all that tightly. As a matter of fact, I figured that if I just straightened it out and tightened the bolts, it would work just fine. So I emptied out the water, doped up the rubber seals, and reseated the tank - nice and tight this time.

No dice. Still leaked from the gasket between the tank and bowl. Much swearing ensued.

So once again, the War Department and I talked it over: I reckoned, now that I knew how to install the bowl over the flange, I could install the damn thing myself. She agreed, and the next day I dragged out the other toilet and unpacked it, and then started removing the other toilet.

Well, right away, I noticed some weirdness. For starters, the plumber hadn't used the right plastic and brass washers on the floor bolts - he had used the metal ones meant to connect the tank and bowl, and therefore had nothing to snap the little plastic bolt covers to. He got around this problem by filling the bolt covers with plumbers putty and squishing them down over the bolts. Not quite how I would have done it, but I figured maybe it was a plumbers' trick to make it easier.

Then I noticed that he hadn't actually used the right washers to connect the tank bolts. The ones he used were too small, and had actually cut right through the rubber washers underneath when I had tightened them up in my efforts to stop the leak the night before. I wondered about this, too, but the plumber had bought a new gasket and tank bolt set when he came back to "fix" the original problem.

Anyway, I got the first toilet out, and started installing the new one. It took me about an hour, start to finish. It doesn't leak.



It does make me wonder, however, whether the "old" toilet has a casting flaw at all, or whether the plumber was just rushed because it was such a little job, and he had other things he needed to get to. I do know that he didn't follow the instructions that came with the toilet, which called for TWO sets of washers and nuts on the tank bolts (which makes a lot of sense to me, actually), and for plastic clips and brass washers on the floor bolts...

Anyway, the bathroom is officially done. I don't have any pictures right now, because I installed the flooring transition piece this morning and the door is still block with boxes...

I'm just kidding. Here:





Maybe one more shelf or something, just above the toilet there? No hurry to get that, though - I'm still saying it's done.

That's not all we've done this weekend, however. We had bought a couple of new lights to replace the ugly-ass pieces of shit that hang on the front of the house, on either side of the garage door. These things:



Yeah, there are actually three of them, but we only got two lights - another lurks outside the front door, but its days are also numbered. Anyway, the War Department actually started this project herself, but it quickly became a joint effort - and a whole day affair, at that.

The trouble started when she took the first light off the wall and found this:



In case you were wondering, that is not up to code. Technically, it's not really AGAINST code either, if only because the people who came up with the electrical code never in their wildest dreams imagined someone would be so goddamned stupid as to install a light on an OUTSIDE wall like that.

Let's review, shall we?

- piece of 3/8ths plywood carefully cut to form a precise (and flammable!) mounting bracket? Check.

- bracket from another light fixture fastened haphazardly to the plywood mount? Check.

- duct tape AND electrical tape? Check.

- no sign whatsoever of any caulking or weatherproofing? Check.

- two different sized marrettes? Check.

- a flat-head, a Philips, and two different-sized Robertson screws all used in the same application? Check - and a big-ass nail, to boot.



Yeah, this couldn't have been more messed up if he tried. Oh, wait - it totally was. No, I'm not kidding. It gets worse.

The light closest to the electrical panel. was mounted in a proper "pancake" box - not ideal, but probably up to code at the time the house was built. It seems, however, that someone wanted to add the second carriage light on the other side of the door sometime after the house was built. To do this, they made a hole in the drywall and fed in their electrical wire (what does it say about us that we were actually quite happy to see that it wasn't speaker wire?), and then poked it through the junction box. So far so good, but then they ran it across the wall at the front of the garage, and fed it THROUGH a couple of holes in the brackets for the garage door. Yes, METAL brackets. That, as we say in the trade, is double-plus ungood.

Anyway, it took us another trip to Home Depot, and a full afternoon of cutting, swearing, wiring, and caulking, but we now have two very nice coach lights on either side of the garage door; here's one of them:



The story, of course, does not end there. But to tell it properly, we need to turn this over to

This Week In Mayonnaise

I mentioned above that the person or persons who installed the light had cut a little hole in the drywall to access the back of the first light so they could tie in the electrical wire. Well, this is what it looked like after they had patched it (I propped the piece I cut out back in the hole so you could see - it's not staying there):



That's not the best part, though. Oh no, the best part is what they stuffed the hole with so they'd have something to backfill the mayonnaise against:



Mmm.... flammable!

Anyway, it's getting late, even with the time change, and I've got some wine to finish. Before I go, though, I'd like to leave you with a little bonus.

Remember way back when, I spent an entire post waxing on and on about how you really start to learn about the previous owner of a house, even when you don't want to know?

Well, something arrived in the mail the other day, addressed to Frank, that explains SO MUCH. It's a magazine - more of a catalog, really. It's called Bits and Pieces and... well, how about you just take a look at the cover, and see what they're selling:



Oh yeah. Me - ow, baby.