CoffeeBear.net » DIY

Day 331: Temporary Halt to the Madness

Mark — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 23:01:24 +0000

While there are still a few things to do; we decided to go ahead and re-install the wire-frame shelving into the closet. This allows us to (finally) use the closet space again. It also gives me an opportunity to make a note of the things we did well and the things I’d do differently.

Done well:

Completed project without killing anybody and stuffing their body behind the drywall.
Kept project costs low by reusing existing materials whenever possible and buying some materials second hand from our local ReStore.

Things I’d do differently:

Take out the existing baseboard that runs in front of the closet area to give hanging items more vertical space.
Spend more time laying out the closet to make things a bit more square.

To do:

Paint the walls.
Install trim.
Install iron piping between the studs for more hanging space ¹

Previous Posts in this project:

Day 331: Temporary Halt to the Madness © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Notes:

We started on this, but the flanges we were going to use to attach the pipes did not go on easily. Well to be entirely accurate the flanges didn’t go on all the way; meaning the pipes + flanges don’t fit into the space. We’ll probably end up buying more pipe and trying this part again at a later date. ↩

Day 327: Flooring Fun

Mark — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 03:50:59 +0000

It’s been a while since I posted anything about our closet fun, so here’s an update. Last weekend our local ReStore was having a sale on cabinets ¹. We found a nice one, though it was a bit bigger than we strictly wanted. The important thing we actually found there was some nice laminate (engineered hardwood?) flooring with a cherry finish ². While we didn’t really know what we were doing ³, I have to say that I think it looks really good.

Day 327: Flooring Fun © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Notes:

We’ve been looking for an extra cabinet to put in our kitchen. ↩
At a dollar a plank! ↩
We did read some books on installing flooring from the library, but the advice they give is too general. ↩

Day 289: Our Madness Has Turned A Corner

Mark — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 03:41:44 +0000

There’s not been a great deal of highly, visible progress on the madness lately. At least there hadn’t been until today; when we finally used some of the painted, textured drywall scraps to patch the hole in the wall and put into place the last piece of drywall. Additionally I put up this bit of curved edging to protect the corner of the drywall. Next up, we finish the mudding and then we can move onto painting!

Day 289: Our Madness Has Turned A Corner © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Day 282: I HATE Plumbing

Mark — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 01:00:33 +0000

It’s not been a good weekend for my sleep schedule. When I tried to get to sleep this morning ¹; I heard the toilet running. I got up, took a look at it and ended up just turning the water off to it. Later after I’d gotten up for the day; I poked around at it a bit. From what I could tell the problem was with the flapper value not sealing properly.

As I was planning on hitting up Home Depot anyway ², I decided to pick up a new flapper. When I got it home, I swapped out the old flapper for the new one; unfortunately it was still leaking. So we took it back to Home Depot where they kindly let me return the new flapper. Then we bought a kit to replace everything in the toilet tank. I then ~~with hate overflowing from the depths of my soul~~ joyfully spent the next couple of hours working on fixing the toilet.

On the bright side, I only cut myself once the entire time I was working on the toilet ³ and the toilet is no longer leaking.

Day 282: I HATE Plumbing © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Notes:

Don’t ask how early it was when I went to bed. ↩
To get more drywall mud ↩
When I was cutting some tubing to the proper length to connect the fill valve to the overflow pipe. ↩

Day 267: Mudding Madness

Mark — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 02:41:26 +0000

Finally started mudding up the joints & gaps in the new closet’s drywall. Funnily enough this section looked a lot smoother until I took this photo.

Day 267: Mudding Madness © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Day 224: Even More Madness

Mark — Sat, 13 Aug 2011 03:23:45 +0000

Finally got around to working on our closet some more, but ran into a bit of a snag. Turns out there is something wrong either with my staple gun or with my knowledge of how to use it. Only about 1 press in 15–20 was actually spitting out a staple into the studs. My arms just couldn’t take any more of trying to use the damn thing, so we decided to quit for the night and try seeing if Michelle’s day can lend us his staple gun tomorrow.

*sigh*

I was really hoping we’d be working on just the drywall tomorrow and not still be mucking about with this [bleep] insulation.

Day 224: Even More Madness © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Day 023

Mark — Sun, 23 Jan 2011 23:05:22 +0000

I’m not sure if the best way to describe this photo is “the joy of old houses” or K.I.S.S.

The Story

The other day my wife wanted to make some tea, so she plugged in the electric kettle ¹. Only it wouldn’t start heating and she notice the microwave’s clock when dark. We tried hitting the reset button on the outlet ², but it didn’t help. Since it was only this one outlet that wasn’t working and there hadn’t been had any noticeable power fluctuations. So I assumed something in the outlet had gone bad. We had a replacement GFCI outlet lying around ³ So we waited until today when I’d have several hours of good light to try replacing the kitchen outlet.

Today was the day I worked on it and here’s the partthat makes me think this photo should be called “the joy of old houses”. For after removing the outlet cover and the old GFCI outlet, I found the junction box housing the outlet was only loosely hooked to the lath and to another piece of wood inside the wall. The second piece of wood was not firmly attached to anything, excluding the junction box. From trying to fold the stiff wires back inside the junction box, it’s my guess that most of what kept the junction box at counter height was a combination of the stiffness of the wiring and the screws holding the outlet cover on. After fighting the junction box for an hour, I poked a piece of wood along the inside of the wall to find where the studs were and then removed the plaster & lath until I had access to the stud.

I screwed the junction box to the stud, hooked up the outlets, turned the power back on and .… nothing worked. We poked the reset/test switches on the outlet for a bit and still nothing happened. I went back down to the basement, confirmed all the circuits were in the on position, flipped all the circuits controlling the kitchen off/on and then suddenly we had power back to that outlet. This makes me wonder if one of the circuits had been partially tripped so that it appeared to be on, but it wasn’t letting power through. And that’s why this photo could be called K.I.S.S..

Day 023 © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Notes:

I used to think these were a bit silly, but now love it. While it may seem… a bit wasteful to have an electric kettle, the electric kettle heats the water in about 2 minutes (versus 5–10 for the kettle we use on our stove). ↩
It’s a GFCI outlet ↩
From a plan to replace one in the master bath, before we realized that outlet’s cover was glued to the mirror. ↩

Dear 2011 Self

Mark — Fri, 28 May 2010 23:52:45 +0000

Hey there self! This post is a quick blast from the past, to remind you of something. Namely when you hit the first, nice day in say April or maybe early May; get off your butt and clean those gutters. That way when you get up on the roof, it’ll be much cooler out and the shingles won’t feel like they’re burning through your jeans.

Side note: I hope you’re still liking that sun hat we bought this year. It worked really well keeping the sun off your face while working on those blasted gutters. Too bad it didn’t do anything to keep all the gnats and mosquitoes from pestering us. That one which bit us on the back of the ear is still annoying as all get out, but by the time you should be reading this that nasty, little bite will be all healed up.

Lucky bugger.

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

Mark — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 14:00:13 +0000

The Good

Some time back my wife went into the doctor’s for a check-up and found out her cholesterol was completely out of wack. Since then she’s been on a restricted diet to fix it and since she’s the better cook, I’ve been on the same diet. We’ve been doing this for roughly 2 months now and this morning when I stepped on the scale, I was quite pleased to see not only have I already shed my “winter weight“¹ but I’ve also lost about another 10 pounds.

The Bad

This winter we’ve had ~4x our normal amount of precipitation. Our soil is heavily saturated with water and we’ve been getting more rain as we move into spring. The end result is we’ve been getting water into our basement. Our basement which happens to have carpeting in it. Fortunately, the carpet was just lying down on top the concrete floor but about half the carpet has been getting soaked.

The Ugly

We never liked the carpet down there but hadn’t done anything about it; however since we’ve had so much water down there this winter. We decided we needed to get at least the wet parts of the carpet out of the basement before it got moldy had destroyed our sinuses. So this past Saturday my wife and I put on our grungiest clothes, went into the basement, chopped up the carpet and hauled it out to our garage². It was one of dirtiest, nastiest jobs I’ve ever had to do around any house. And I’ve replaced entire toilets before, so when I say it was nasty I know what I’m talking about!

¹ Every winter where I’ve weighed myself, I’ve put 5–10 pounds which I quickly shed once spring comes.
² Just until we figure out if we can have the city take it to the dump for us, or if we have to get it over there ourselves.

A Bit of Home Improvement with Ryobi Tools

Mark — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 02:54:35 +0000

Back around Thanksgiving, I hit up a sale at Home Depot and bought myself a 4 piece Ryobi One+ combo kit¹. After Christmas I went back to Home Depot and picked up the Ryobi Tool Bag. The tool bag came loaded with a nice assortment of drill bits and a racheting screwdriver with a vast collection of interchangable bits (phillips, flat-head, sqare and torx). The bag was just the right size to hold my drill, flashlight and radio. Since then the tools have sat around mostly gathering dust.

Today while out doing some shopping, we found a nice set of bathroom hangers (e.g. for towels & toiletpaper) on clearance for less than $20. The set has a brushed nickel finish which we really like and installing it helped me avoid cleaning out our guest room². The set installed very easily and I really got to try out my tools.

Things I liked:

The magnetic strip on the base of the drill is fantastic for holding different drill bits, screws, whatever I need.
The ratcheting screwdriver makes it quick and easy to install/remove screws.
That tool bag really holds everything I need for most home improvement projects. The way it’s designed feels like somebody at Ryobi was sitting around their house wishing they had a bag to hold all the bits they’d ever be likely to need for a screwdriver and a drill.

Things I didn’t like:

The keyless chuck on the drill poorly grips the bits.
After 10+ years of apartment living, I’m out of practing with using a drill. Especially using a drill as an electric screwdriver and so I kind of stripped a couple screwheads. Ooops.
The metal splinter I got in my thumb after stripping a couple of screwheads.
The drill is heavier than I really like.³

¹ Mine was a slightly different kit as it came with a radio rather than the Corner Cat Finish Sander.
² I’m sooo going to be in trouble when my wife reads this.
³ My version of the kit uses the NiCd batteries which contributes the vast majority of the weight of the tool. At some point I’ll buy the 18v Lithium Upgrade Kit which should solve this complaint.

A Bit of Home Improvement with Ryobi Tools © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.