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.