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..