Bathroom bits, pieces, and ... finishes? Really?

Well, with the windowsill finally finished and most of the other trim installed, patched, and painted, it was time to get Bob the Plumber back out to install the bathtub, toilet, and vanity that had been taking up valuable real estate in the garage for the past six months.

(Closer to eight months, but who's counting? By the way, this is yet another overdue completion of a post that's been sitting in the draft folder for oh... six? eight weeks?)

So, obviously, if it had been us doing this by ourselves, it would have taken at least three weeks and involved a minimum of six trips to Home Despot, at least one to the ER, and several dozen cases of beer. Bob, being the professional that he is, managed to install all three fixtures in one day. Of course, I had to help him (and another guy) get the tub up the stairs, and then help again when the vanity went up, but he got it done.

I took this when he went out for lunch (and to grab a couple of feeder hoses because the ones that came with the tub were shit):

Aside from the three-ring circus of trying to get the tub up the stairs, the most exciting part of the day was when we got the part where we needed to install the vanity. We had managed, between Bob and I, to get the damn thing up to the upstairs landing, where we left it while he installed the taps and other bits (easier than trying to do them in place). But moving the vanity into the bathroom itself was, well... trickier.

As I may have mentioned, the bathroom itself is exactly five feet wide. That's sixty inches for you metric users out there. The vanity is JUST under 60 inches. And when I say JUST, I mean it's really 59 and 63/64ths. Complicating the matter is the location of the water feed for the toilet, and its position relative to the door of the bathroom. See, to get the vanity into place, we have to slide it straight through the door, and then straight back to the wall. The toilet is slightly to the right when looking in through the door, but the water pipe that provides the water to the toilet is, of course, almost directly in front of the door and in line with where we needed to slide the vanity.

Marvel at my skills of an artist!

Oh, and did I mention that if we broke that pipe, there'd be no fixing it without opening up that wall again? Yeah.

Anyway, we managed to get the vanity through the door and into the bathroom without smashing the pipe, but when we went to slide it back into place, well, that's when we encountered another small problem. It turns out that the walls on either side of the vanity were very slightly bowed, either from Tony the mudder feathering out around the electrical boxes, or because, I dunno, I suck at drywalling. Whatever the case, getting the vanity past the edge of the door required first a little surgery to the vanity itself:

And then some serious gouging and scraping of our nice drywall/paint job. Which I did not take a picture of because, quite frankly, it hurt.

The next step in the process (or somewhere in there at least) was to order and install the blinds. Owing to the shape of the window (as shown in detail in the last post), we had to order custom-made horizontal blinds. Also owing to the direction the window was facing, i.e., south, we had to order real wood blinds to prevent any warping or shrinking from the sunlight. Needless to say, they weren't exactly cheap, but our options were a little limited so we ponied up, measured the windows carefully, and ordered them from Rona.

Within a couple of weeks or so, we got the call that they were ready to be picked up, so the War Department drove all the way out there on a Thursday night while I was at my woodworking course (more on that in a later post) to pick them up. Of course, they couldn't find them. They were somewhere in the store, at least according to the computer, but not anywhere the employees could actually see. So she had to drive home empty handed and I had to drive all the way out there the next night to pick them up. I did manage to raise enough of a stink that they gave me a gift card to make up for our trouble, but it was still annoying.

What was even more annoying than THAT, thought, was that the damn things didn't actually fit. See, we had made our careful measurements against the edge of the windows themselves. But the blinds were two inches thick, which meant that the inside corners overlapped each other.

Of course, I wasn't exactly welcome at Rona at that point, so we had to perform some surgery on our new, very expensive blinds. I had to disassemble each one, cut off a little bit of the metal spacer at the top (some from each side, of course, because why would anything be EASY?), trim the wooden slats CAREFULLY in the chop saw, and then turn them over to Amy, who stained the fresh cut ends the same color as the rest of the blinds (and did an amazing job, too). Only then could I actually hang the things.

And I'm not even going to talk about hooking up the damn shower pipe and curtain ring. Let's just say Bob needed to come back and show me a few things, and leave it at that.

Anyway, to cut a loooooooong story short (can you tell this is the point I finally sat down to try to write the rest of this post), like, a couple or three months, the Ba'ath Bath is no more. We now have a master bathroom befitting the name, and I will shut up and let you enjoy the pictures, much as the War Department enjoys the fruits of our labours:

(Here's one without the flash so you can get a better idea of the actual colors:)

There's one TEENY little job left, and that's to fashion a brace for the shower head and hang the curtain, but given that we won't need the shower any time soon, and the War Department has already been enjoying the tub, I think we can safely call this project done.


Next time: Raw pine! Woo!

My kingdom for a floor

The mess in the master bathroom continues, though it's probably not quite as much of a mess as it was a few weeks ago. Mostly because we had a professional come in and do the plumbing for us, and we couldn't have him working in the war zone that we'd left after the subfloor came up.

Whatever would he think of us?

(His name's Bob, by the way, and we would wholeheartedly recommend his services to anyone in the Capital Region who requires the services of a good plumber. Once, of course, we're done with him.)

Of course, now that I think about it, I'm probably getting ahead of myself a little bit. Yes, we have taken up the subfloor, but before we could do that, we had to remove the last vestiges of the Ba'ath Bath. Namely the vanity and the toilet (not, sadly, the Toilet From Hell).

Vanity before...

Vanity gone:

As you can see, we continued removing the drywall, and finished up with a pretty much completely gutted bathroom.

Oh, did I say finished up? Ha! It was at that point that the real fun began, and we started taking up the subfloor. Not only did this particular task require pretty much every saw we own (yay for powertools!), but I FINALLY had an excuse to spend the gift certificate I got from the Top Brass for my birthday.

You see, I had to cut out the plywood subfloor using the circular saw and then pry it off the joist using crowbars and other implements of destruction. While this worked out pretty well, the blade guide on the saw meant I couldn't get close enough to the sill plates of the wall.

We have to "sister" a new joist to the existing one so that it will project out past the sill plate and give us a nailing edge for the new floor. Otherwise, the floor might sag along the edge of the wall, which would be extraordinarily bad if, for example, someone were to install a 400-pound tub right there, and then fill said tub with a few (many) gallons of heavy, heavy water. But the closest I could get to the existing joist was about an inch and a half -- which is exactly the width of the 2x8 we're using to sister the joists.

Now, I could probably have used the reciprocating saw to get most of the extra wood off, but it's not EXACTLY a finesse tool, if you know what I mean. Add to that the fact that there are an awful lot of pipes and wires and other, somewhat important bits of things that run through the wall and sill plates, and I REALLY didn't want to have to redo any of it.

So I hied myself off to the Home Despot, and spent my birthday money on one of these:

It's kind of like an angle grinder with a wood blade on it (along with a recessed attaching nut and a few extra guards and whatnot) and it totally did the trick. Well, along with a lot of sweat, dust, and a helping hand from a chisel here and there.

And then came Bob, to make our crappy old plumbing look all shiny awesome fun!

Befores:

Afters:

Once he was finished, we got busy with the sistering. Here are the new joists in place, with plenty of meat for the new subfloor to rest on.

And then we insulated (in a desperate hope to ensure that people sitting downstairs in the kitchen wouldn't be able to hear any "bathroom noises" anymore):

And then we covered it all up with 3/4" tongue-and-groove sheathing:

Bob came back and pronounced it ... awesome! Or, well, "good enough", which at this stage, you know - I'll take. At least I don't have to work while balancing on those damn joists anymore. I was utterly convinced that I was going to place one foot wrong and go straight through the ceiling into the family room. And probably wreck something else in the process. Something a little more... me.

Anyway, next up, even more fun! Electrical! More insulation! Drywall! Swearing! Possible injuries!

Oh, almost forgot - I promised to post some pictures of the new window from the outside:

Sheer gorgeous-ity! Or -ness. Something. I dunno. I'm tired and haven't had a beer in more than a week. Shut up.

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.

A partial list

I've mentioned a couple of times how everything in our new house was broken when we moved in. I'm not sure, however, that I've really managed to convey exactly what I mean by everything.

I mean, literally, everything.

EVERYTHING.

And to show you that I really do mean everything, I offer herein a partial list of all the things that WERE broken, and we've already fixed. Notice that I don't include the things we haven't got around to fixing or just throwing out yet (okay, I might bring up a few); this is only stuff that we discovered was broken and that we've actually managed to do something about. Oh, and keep in mind that I'm probably forgetting a few things, too...

(Oh, and I know I said I'd write about those mysterious vents on the roof, but I neglected to take any pictures when I was in the attic dealing with those vents, so I'll postpone that little tale for now. Have no fear, though: I have to go back up into the attic to fix something and I'll try to remember to take photos this time.)


The Roof
Well, obviously. It was by far the single greatest expense we've ever signed away, but that whole project has been pretty well covered already.


The Kitchen Tap
Beyond being a terrible design choice for the sink (we had pots that wouldn't fit under it when put into the sink, and would have to be filled sideways, and even though it had a little directional nozzle on the end, the tap was still so low that you couldn't even aim the water up the sides of the basin at all), the tap would also shoot water all over the back of the counter whenever you pushed on the faucet - like, for instance, to move it from one side of the sink to the other. We replaced all the gaskets inside the faucet the day after we moved in, and have since replaced it entirely with a much nicer tap, but that does bring us to the next point on our tour...


The Water Filter
While replacing the broken kitchen tap, I removed a rather large, blue, beat-up water filter from beneath the kitchen sink. The lines to and from the cold water supply were cracked and pretty much just in the way, so I took the whole thing out. For curiosity's sake, I opened the thing up, and confirmed that the filter probably hadn't been replaced in YEARS - the whole inside of the container was coated in scale, and the filter itself was completely brown.

Of course, the corollary to this story is that there is still some scale or something in the lines, and the fancy new kitchen faucet we bought keeps getting clogged up and slowing to a trickle. Which means I have to reinstall the water filter - a process that has already required three separate trips to Home Depot or Rona, and I still haven't found the right parts yet. I COULD get it working, but not without an extra three or four feet of water line for the water to sit and stagnate in, or a hideous kludge of pieces stuck hopefully together on one end of the line.


The Front Door
I've probably mentioned that the front door is the only non-glass door in the house that had been painted (and not just left as builder's primer), but I don't know that I've mentioned that it was broken in other ways. The latch on the handle wouldn't catch properly, meaning that if we wanted the door to stay closed, we would have to lock the deadbolt each and every time. I fiddled with the latch and the strike plate a few times and managed to get it to work with varying degrees of success for short intervals, but changes in temperature or just using it all the time would quickly make it stop latching again.

This grew wearying rather quickly, as we'd have to take our keys with us every time we went outside, even if it was just to coil up the hose or bring the recycling bins in, or else the cats would start sidling towards the open door like it was some kind of feline gravity well of danger and irresistible curiosity.

Well, given that we wanted to paint it anyway, and the weather stripping around it was cracked and ... well, broken, we finally figured out a weekend where we weren't planning on going out anywhere and took the door off its hinges so we could sand and paint it.

Fortunately, the front door came equipped with one of those fancy screens that rolls up beside the door when not in use - kind of like a sideways roll-up blind. Unfortunately, of course, it was broken (the screen was ripped along the top and bottom edges), but we figured it would at least keep the cats in while we worked on the door.

Given the excellent weather, I set up a painting station outside in the driveway, and proceeded to dismantle the door hardware. I got the old handleset and deadbolt off just fine, but when I went to remove the sweep on the bottom, I found a new and exciting reason to curse Frank's name:



I have no idea what he cut that with. It's like he had a spastic grizzly bear hold the door steady while he took a running start at it with a circular saw. The stupid bear must have kept flinching or something, because I don't think I've seen a more ragged cut in my life. I cleaned it up as best I could, and the new sweep at the bottom managed to hide it okay (barely), but I still know it's there, and it haunts me.

The door does look good now, though:



Well, okay, we still haven't painted the outside, but the new handle set is awesome, the new weather stripping has stopped the drafts, and the door at least closes properly now, without needing the deadbolt.


The Upstairs Toilet
Oh yes. Don't think I've forgotten about you, you evil piece of shit. This isn't over between us.


The Upstairs Bathtub
The drain plug in the upstairs bathtub didn't work. No matter how we jiggled, pulled, twisted, or swore at it, the drain would not seal properly. I wound up just removing the mechanism and buying a rubber plug.


The Master Bath Toilet
It's certainly not to the degree of difficulty of the other toilet, but I've already made a couple of minor fixes and repairs to the toilet in the Saddam Hussein bathroom.


The Master Bath Bathtub
Can't remember if I've mentioned this, but there's a tiny hole in the side of the tub - below where the waterline would be if one was to actually attempt to take a bath in the ridiculously shallow tub. The War Department has attempted to patch it, but the goop didn't seem to dry very well and we're not sure if it's going to hold. We'll probably just wind up not using it until we get around to renovating that whole bathroom.


The Downstairs Toilet
One of the things the home inspector pointed out to us was the fact that the downstairs toilet was leaking around the wax ring, and underneath the linoleum. We've ... well, sort of fixed it. If you count ripping everything out of the room so we can redo the entire thing.



We'll get to that eventually. Hopefully. Maybe?


The Wood-burning Stove
Actually, it's not that the stove was broken, per se, it's just that it wasn't anywhere near up to code, had never been used for anything except burning paper, and didn't sit quite level in the fireplace. So.. not really broken, I suppose, but given that it still required fixing, I think it deserves inclusion on this list. Especially given that it cost us an arm and a leg to get it working.


The Washing Machine
The first time the War Department went to put laundry in the dryer, I had to vacuum it out first because it was all full of various bits of debris. We got the clothes into the dryer and started a new load in the washing machine... which promptly started SMOKING.

We said screw it, and just bought a new set:




These Things



Frank had an entire garden full of Noma Moon Rays (or cheap knock-offs) and not one of them worked properly. A few of them would occasionally give off sort of a feeble, sickly glow, making the garden look like it was infested with radioactive fungus but most of them were full of water, broken, or both. Oh, and the wheelbarrow they're sitting in? That was broken, too.


The Garden Shed
One of the doors to the cheap-ass tin garden shed came off in my hand the second time I opened it. It took close to three hours to dismantle the doors, clean out all the debris from the tracks, replace the plastic bits that keep the doors in their tracks, and reinstall the doors.


The Window Screens
Actually, most of the screens were in pretty good shape - they just needed to be taken out and washed off - but all of the little plastic clips that keep the screens in place? Replaced. Every single one. Granted, pretty much every window was missing at least one clip, or had some form of garbage wedged into the window as a stand in, but each screen still had to get four brand new ones.


The Door Handles
Oh, man, I could write an entire post just on the damn handles for the sliding glass doors off the sunroom. Let me sum it up this way: there are three sets of doors, three different types of handle (with three different sizes and spacings of holes), and despite several trips to Home Despot, we STILL need a screwdriver to lock and unlock one of them. Oh, and when we moved in, the handle of the one between the sunroom and the living room was broken right in half - and fixed with several yards of duct tape.


The Sunroom Trim and Shade
Speaking of the sunroom, there was a sort of shade canopy thing rolled up in a corner of the sunroom when we moved in. When it started getting hot during the day, we noticed that the sunroom got pretty damn warm, and so we pulled out the shade thing to try and mitigate some of the heat. Well, the canopy was, of course, in tatters and evidence of former repairs was pretty plain, given the bits of duct tape stuck to various random bits. We also noticed that the trim to which the canopy was supposed to attach was loose and in dire peril of falling on anyone bold enough to actually try sitting in there.

So thanks to my mom and her trusty sewing machine, we got a new shade made up, and I devised a system of brackets that wouldn't put any additional weight on the trim (which we reattached using screws instead of just glue and the odd finishing nail). It's still pretty damn warm in there during the day, but with the doors on each side open for a cross-breeze, it's very comfortable. And, if I may say so, very stylish indeed:




The Outdoor Faucets
When we moved in, the faucet out front was wrapped in wet burlap (the faucet was leaking), the one in the back had been shut off completely (the faucet was leaking), and this thing on the side of the house...



...was leaking.

They're all fixed now, and yes, we kept the quail faucet. We weren't going to, but then we noticed that a) the faucet is actually well-made, solid brass, and in good shape, and b) we have a family of quails in the neighbourhood. They're really very cute.


Everything Else
Here's a sub-partial list of broken stuff that we're mostly still working on:

• Baseboard heaters: they will all need to be replaced eventually - we've already done about half of them.


• Light switches and wall sockets: again, we've already replaced half of them, but apart from a couple of overloaded circuits, the electrical in the house isn't TOO bad. The outside stuff, of course, is a different story.


• Range hood fan: not broken so much as just blocked with an enormous old chunk of wasp nest.


• Hand rail on the stairs: I "fixed" it by wrapping part of it in painters tape. Ta-da! No more goddamn splinters. Looks like hell, of course, but it'll have to do for now.


• Window seals: the seals on the windows of the sunroom roof and the two windows in the dining room are toast, leading to condensation inside the glass. Nothing we can do but replace them, but we have to recover from the sticker shock of the roof first.


• The faucet in the upstairs bath: not content with having the toilet borked, the shower head needing to be replaced (twice), and the plug not work in the tub, the taps on the sink faucet are also broken. There's a small cap on each of the taps that covers a little hollow. Inside the hollow is the screw that holds the tap handle and cartridge together. Both of the caps are broken and won't stay on the handle, meaning that water can get down to the screw head and rust it out. Great.


• The side gate: the fence was built way too close the tree, and the roots have heaved up one of the panels, making the entire section useless - and pushing the end post closer to the house so the gate no longer closes properly. Yay for deer eating all the plants! Not!


• The garage door opener: seriously - the damn thing is dialed all the way back, and it STILL manages to slam the garage door closed.

Well, that's certainly not an exhaustive list, but I think you get the picture. Next time, I'll either finish the ongoing saga of the bedroom floor, or finally get around to explaining the mysterious vents.

Or, you know, I might just have a whole post dedicated to This Week in Mayonnaise. Who knows?

A little bit of everything, including the kitchen sink

I was getting flack from certain unnamed sources (*cough* War Department *cough*) about not including pictures in my last post. Never mind that I really like the post as it was, and thought it was funnier and stronger for being somewhat deliberately vague, oh no: it's not a real post without pictures, apparently.

You'd think she didn't like my stories or something. (Okay, so, I totally admit that I have told the "So, this guy goes to India and buys a magic carpet..." story more in the past month than I have in the past six years, but still - she said "I do", she should at least have to pretend to enjoy them, right? Tolerate them? Refrain from openly mocking them? No?

Fine. Pictures it is.

Monday night at 7:30 (when we had finished dinner and cleaned up the kitchen so I could work on the sink):



Notice how it was still light outside? Yeah, not so much, when I finally finished at 11:30...

So why was I working on the faucet in the kitchen on a Monday night after work? Well, I might have mentioned at some point (I might not, I really don't know) that everything - EVERYTHING - in this house is broken. In fact, the very first thing we fixed after moving in was that bloody tap up there. The day we moved in we noticed that it worked okay as long as you didn't, you know, touch it or anything. The least amount of pressure on the faucet and water would shoot out the back of the tap, all over the counter. It took two trips - one to Crappy Tire and one to Home Despot - to get new o-rings and a new cartridge, but we did get it fixed. Of course, it was remarkable not for the fact that it was broken when we moved in, (because, as I've mentioned, EVERYTHING is broken) but because it seemed to be the one thing in the house without any mayonnaise on it. Even so, we hated that tap - it doesn't have enough clearance underneath it to wash any large pots or pans, and the directional nozzle doohickey doesn't have enough play to spray more than half a side of either sink.

In short, we hated it so much that we felt it more than worthwhile to spend our Home Despot gift cards from the wedding on a new faucet:



Which, of course, took two tries and some creative counter modifications to install properly. On a weeknight. Hence, the maxims.

Speaking of the maxims, if you don't believe me about the first one, here's another example...

One of the outlets in the bear pit is on the wall right above the stairs. Given that Mike spent a lot of time and energy putting some flooring pieces on the riser all along that side, and we wanted to top it with some baseboard to make it all tie in to the other trim, I decided to move the outlet up about 12 inches so it wouldn't be right in the middle of the baseboard. All in all, a relatively simple task, and one I figured shouldn't take more than an hour or so. When I got started, the outlet looked like this (as with all the pictures on this blog, click to embiggen):



After the War Department marked out where the bottom of the outlet should be, I carefully cut a SMALL hole in the approximate location (knowing that if I tried to cut it full-size, I'd either make it too big or in the wrong spot). Well, the location where we marked the outlet to go just happened to be exactly the point where the guy who installed the outlet in the first place had drilled through the stud and passed the electrical wire through from one side to the other. Which meant that the new location for the outlet was in EXACTLY the wrong spot.

After the requisite swearing, I figured out that I'd have to move the outlet down about an inch-and-a-half. Which, of course, would require that we patch the drywall afterward. At which point the War Department told me that this outlet was now officially my own damn problem and walked away to do something else. (In retrospect, I probably shouldn't have told her that she was going to have to patch the old hole for the outlet anyway, so why not part of the new hole, too?)

After I finished enlarging the hole enough to put the box into the wall, and moved it to its new location, it looked like this:



Fortunately, the War Department came back to do the actual connections - she's not crazy enough to let me do the electrical myself. She also realized that letting me do the mudding was probably a bad idea and stepped in to do it herself. She smoothed and sanded it nicely, and even painted it over. Which is when Maxim the First bit HER, too. You see, we had had to buy a new can of the "cappuccino" we used in the living room between the time we first painted that wall and the time we got around to moving the outlet, and the colour match wasn't quite exact. So we'll have to paint the whole damn wall over with the new stuff.

Oh, one more thing while I'm (sort of) on the subject of the kitchen. Remember this monstrosity?



That thing came in tied for last place in the Ugliest Light Fixture Poll, but -- aside from the Dear Sweet Jesus, What Is THAT!? entry which we tossed into a dumpster down at Ellice more than three months ago and the Faux-Bling chandeliers which didn't survive the first week -- we've decided to replace it first. We replaced its bastard stepchild above the sink ages ago with a nice pendant light, and actually bought this light at the same time, but never got around to putting it up until a few weeks back:



Now if only we can do something about those hideous counters...

And finally, for this post at least, we turn our attention to the outside. I think our long-suffering neighbour had dropped more than a few hints -- chief among them being the time he gave us a dandelion fork with the lame excuse that he already had a few -- about the sorry state of the hedgerow in the front yard. And I have to say that, even without comparing it to the immaculate lawns and frontages of the other houses in our neighbourhood, he had a point:





So on the first really nice Saturday we've had in months, we spent the day weeding, hacking, and cutting all the weeds and nonsense out of the bed, and covered it up with a nice layer of bark mulch:





Looks pretty good, eh? As long as nobody comes into the yard and looks at the other side of the hedge, we're golden.