'Snew with you?

Ok, a little off-topic, but we had insane amounts of snow yesterday & today - so I went out & took pictures of the house and snowdrifts around it.. enjoy!:

Mosaic..

When we first started moving into the house, one of the first things I did was to remove the medecine chest that was in the bathroom. It was a really huge, hideous thing, with fake oak wood trim, a fake frosted-glass door, and it was falling off of the wall. I didn't like it, and I figured it'd be a pretty easy thing to find a halfway decent replacement one.

It was actually harder than I thought it would be to find one of the same size that I actually liked. so we lived for a while with a big hole in the wall, which was actually kinda neat looking..

..and provided us with a place to put the secret name of the house for future generations of owners of the house to one day find and be mystified by:


Eventually I found a medicine chest I liked, in a style I wanted - a sort of semi-retro, simple, metal and glass style, with simple side-to-side sliding doors. Oddly enough, it also turned out to be about the cheapest medicine chest available too, which was kinda nice. I couldn't even find a more expensive one that I liked at all. Unfortunately, the size of the new one left about a 2.5 inch border around it, in the space where the larger older chest was, leaving a gap of either bare wood or drywall between it and the white tile with which most of the bathroom wall is covered.

After thinking about it for a while, it occurred to me to try to put a border mosaic in the gap there, made out of little broken bits of black tile, to sort of reflect the pattern on the shower curtain we'd bought..

.. and my plans to eventually paint black the ugly fake oak wood of the vanity, and the bare wood trim in the bathroom.

After doing a bit of research on how to make a mosaic and lay tile and grout and all that, I went out and bought a handful of black tile and some little square mirror pieces. I took the bag full of black tiles, and proceeded to smash them on the basement floor in their bag, until most of them were appropriately mosaic-sized and randomly shaped.

Taking the tile bits up to the bathroom, I then proceeded to spread out some tile adhesive goop in the area we wanted to put the mosaic, and enlisted the help of Kat to start filling in the area with random bits of broken tile and mirrors. The whole process of putting the tile down took probably about an hour, and I think it came out looking pretty cool!:



The adhesive has to 'cure' for 24 hours at least before you put the grout down to fill in the gaps between the tiles and all, and we haven't gotten to that part yet, but I'll probably do that sometime soon..

Recycling..

This isn't so much about fixing something in the house so much as it is about making something out of something that was here in the house when we moved in..

The old guy who previously owned (and died in) this house was apparently a very paranoid and anxious old dude. Not only are there security cameras on both the front and back porches, an alarm system complete with motion detector, heat sensors, and warning siren with battery back-up..





..but among the things found left behind in the house were an incomplete set of "Anxiety Coaching" self-help videotapes..



At some point before we actually started moving stuff into the house, I decided that I was tired of seeing the light of the motion-detector and knowing that electricity was being wasted on this alarm system that wasn't even being monitored by the alarm system company, since the old guy had been dead for quite some time, so I disarmed the system by simply unplugging it:



What I hadn't counted on, however, was the fact that the system apparently had some kind of battery back-up for when power failures or whatever might happen to occur -- after all, PARANOIA NEVER SLEEPS. What I also didn't know was that the alarm system apparently had some kind of built-in warning signal for when the battery backing-up the system was getting low on power. Because a couple of days after I unplugged the system, Kat and I were standing in the livingroom after bringing a few things over from the apartment, talking quietly, looking curiously at the little alarm control box, when suddenly:

BWEEEEP!! BWEEEEP!! BWEEEEP!! BWEEEEP!! BWEEEEP!! BWEEEEP!! BWEEEEP!!

The siren started going off! I ran down to the basement, wondering what the heck to do, since I'd already pulled the plug on the system.. All I could do was whip out my pocket knife and - snip! - cut the power line to the siren!

yeesh..

A few weeks later on, it occurred to me it might be fun/useful/interesting to see if I could use this siren for something else, maybe some kind of musical instrument? Right about then I was asked to do a solo performance as part of a series of noise/drone/experimental music evenings at a nearby coffee house, and immediately I knew I had to work the siren into my performance!

I removed the siren from its place on the basement ceiling, checked the back of it where it said it needed 9 volts of power, and tried attaching a little 9V battery to its power cord.. Sure enough: BWEEEEP!! BWEEEEP!! BWEEEEP!! BWEEEEP!! BWEEEEP!!

Perfect!

So today, after a little digging around at Radio Shack for a 9V battery snap connector and something I could use for a footswitch, I rigged myself up a little foot-switchable siren dealy -- voila!:



Not sure how well this is going to go down in my performance, but it was kinda fun to make..

The final load-in..

Here's what I did yesterday:





I moved about a fifth of these upstairs this evening, on their way eventually to the attic. Most of the rest of these will also make it up there, hopefully by at least the end of the weekend. I really have to get rid of most of this stuff.. It's been in storage, basically, for about the last 3 years, so obviously most of it isn't all that important..

anyway, I'm about ready to pass out now, so, that's all for now..

Electrical insanity..

Well last night I attempted my first re-wiring job in the new house. My task was to install a GFCI 3-prong outlet in place of an old-fashioned non-grounded 2-prong outlet in one of the upstairs bedrooms.

Before I could do that, though, I had to figure out exactly which switches in the fusebox, or 'service box', went to which lights/outlets in the house, since nothing in the fusebox at all is labelled, other than a circuit for the A/C, and a circuit for the electric dryer.

Figuring out the circuits in the fusebox gave me greater appreciation for the pure, utter insanity of whoever it was who wired it up.. The house inspector had been rather amused by it during the house inspection, mainly because the wires behind the panel were pretty crowded and doubled up in weird ways, but just exactly how weird I only found out after turning each circuit off to find out what in the house was affected..

I'll post up a scan of my notes later, but suffice it to say, it makes no sense whatsoever. But at least I found out what I needed to turn off to work on this outlet in the upstairs bedroom, which was the main thing I needed to do..

When I first removed the faceplate of the outlet, which had been painted over several times, not only did the faceplate come off of the wall, but the faces of the individual outlets also pulled off of the innards of the receptacle, leaving me with the sight you see above.. Every time I so much as touched the inner receptacle, more bits and pieces fell off of it.. I was convinced it must be some kind of ancient antique receptacle, until I found a fairly modern-looking price-tag which had fallen off of it reading 89 cents, and noticed that the receptacle had been manufactured by the same company that made the GFCI I was about to install.. Didn't really give me a lot of confidence..

The next thing I noticed was that there was no electrical box behind the faceplate.. It being a late Sunday night, no hardware stores were open, so I ran down to Wal Mart who happened to have some real cheap plastic recepticle boxes.

When I got back home, I realized that there really wasn't anything there in the space where the recepticle was for the electrical box to attach to. It had some nails on it, but in order to hammer the nails into the adjacent stud in the wall, I would have had to bash out even more plaster in the wall, which I didn't really want to do. So I basically just kinda crammed the box in there after stringing the power line in through the back of it..



After attaching the wires to the outlets, and attaching the outlet to the box, it was time to try to figure out how to attach the cosmetic 'screw-less' faceplate to a box & outlets that were just basically kind of floating there, vaguely braced in place. This is undoubtedly one of the most stupidly-designed kind of outlet contraption faceplate thingies I've ever seen. And it certainly didn't help keep the box in place either.



But eventually it went on and after I turned the power back on (oh yeah, I forgot to mention I did all this work by the light of a fairly dim flashlight too) the GFCI tester actually worked and everything. Yay.

Still, there's all that mess with the holes in the wall around it, which I'll get around to patching up eventually, and the outlet is still kinda loosely held in place there. I have bought a more traditional "screws showing" faceplate to put in there, hoping the screws will also kind of help keep everything in place.. I'll probably install that and patch up the surrounding wall at the same time.

bah.

Upcoming projects..

I've been too busy the last couple evenings doing other things unassociated with the house to do any further fixing-up, which means I'll probably be feeling behind in fixing stuff this weekend.. At least last night I managed to turn a giant heap of boxes in the dining room into a small stack of 3 or so boxes, having unpacked or moved most of what was sitting there. Still being in the process of moving stuff into the house, it's difficult to know what to do first at any given time: Fix stuff up that needs fixing; Unpack and put away stuff that's been moved into the house; or move more stuff into the house.

I've got two kind of big projects I really want to try to accomplish this weekend:

First, buying and installing a replacement garbage disposal/disposer for the kitchen sink, to make the kitchen a tad more usable (as it is, anytime you run water in the kitchen sink for more than a couple of minutes, water starts collecting due to a non-working disposal, and you have to use a plunger to push the water down -- surely this can't be a good thing..). I'm really having major issues getting used to the total lack of counter space and cupboard space in this kitchen. It really makes doing anything food-related a major annoyance. We're hopefully going to get some kind of 'kitchen island' thing sometime soon too, which should also help, hopefully.. But at least having a sink that actually works will make washing dishes a little bit less torturous..

Second, I need to replace some old 2-prong non-grounded electrical outlets with grounded outlets, and in one instance, a GCFI outlet. I've done this before, although not for some time, so hopefully it won't be too difficult, and hopefully I'll have something to ground to.

Installing a new disposal seems kind of intimidating to me, but hopefully doable without *too* much trouble.. They wanted about a hundred dollars to install it at the hardware store, and at this point I think I could use that money better elsewhere..

Playing catch-up

I wanted to try to keep this list of repairs done to the house in a chronological order, but if I try to go back and start with the first stuff we had done to the house without also keeping up-to-date with what I do to the house on a daily basis, I'm going to end up constantly playing catch-up, I think. So for the time being, I'm going to do a little bit of both.


First off, a recap of what I did last night, which was really just a couple of quick little projects:


First, I had to fix the door-latch-plate on one of the bedroom doorjambs, where the door wouldn't stay shut, and feuding cats kept barging in disturbing the peace. For some reason, the latch-plate was installed upside-down and backwards, and was completely misaligned with the door latch. Even when turned the right way around, the plate still would have been misaligned from the door somehow. So after figuring out where the latch-plate should be to enable it to engage the doorlatch, I had to remove the latch plate, and take a wood chisel and slice out a little piece of wood about 3/4 of an inch tall and about 1/16th of an inch thick so I could move the plate upwards a bit. As it turned out, I ended up slicing out about a quarter of an inch too much, so that when I put the plate back on (using new screws, since the old ones were really dull and somewhat damaged) there still remains a spot of bare wood just above the plate. It's a little unsightly now, but it wasn't much to look at to begin with - nothing a little paint won't fix up - and the door now latches like a proper door ought to!


The other thing I did in this bedroom last night was to put up a little black & white shelf on one wall. These are nice little shelves, very sturdy, pretty clean & simple looking. We have 3 or 4 of these..


TODAY'S HOME-FIXING HISTORY MOMENT:

The very first things we had to have done to the house, before I could even buy it, were: a) some plumbing work done in the bathroom, and b) a gas line running through a cold-air return had to be moved outside of the cold-air return. There were also some roofing issues, but the sellers of the house agreed to take care of those if I took care of the plumbing issues, so I did.


As far as the bathroom was concerned, there were two main problems: One was that the bathroom sink drainpipe was disconnected for some reason, and needed to be reconnected. The second and worse problem was that there was a lot of water damage to the floor around the toilet - there apparently had been a leaky wax ring around the base of the toilet for some time, and the flooring was rotted and weak around it. There was also evidence of water damage from it on parts of the kitchen ceiling. So we had to have a plumber come in and fix the sink and toilet, and a carpenter come in and replace the flooring and put new linoleum down on the bathroom floor. There's still a bit of clean-up work to do on this job - no molding around the floor behind the toilet still, mostly..


The gas-line problem was sort of a weird one, but one which housing appraisers would probably have taken exception to, so the house inspector recommeded getting it moved. Gas lines should not run through cold-air return ducts, in case the pipe ends up leaking gas and drawing gas directly into the open flame of the furnace.. could be bad news..


Next up I'll write about some of the things we had to work on after buying the house, but before we started moving in..

Fixing a house..

So I bought a house recently, and it's an older house, built in 1923, and while the previous owner put a lot of work into remodelling it, it still needs some work to put it in comfortable shape, as well as to get it in line with my own admittedly somewhat quirky aesthetic tastes.

I decided to start what might end up being an excruciatingly boring blog to keep track of all the various work I do on the house, as I do it. Partly to keep track of what all I've done with the house, and also to keep track of what all I still want/need to do with it..

My 'handyman' skills, as such, are really pretty limited, but I sometimes still surprise myself with what I'm able to fix & figure out on my own.. I also don't have a lot of money to spend on 'renovation' and most of this stuff will be done as much on my own as possible, which will probably test the limits of my abilities and patience..

Maybe this will help someone else with similar projects going on somehow sometime..

Anyway - I guess that's the intro to this. Now let's see if I actually end up keeping up with it.