Archive for May, 2011
Take That, Broken Light
The other day I flipped on the lights in our kitchen and noticed one of the two pendants over the table was out.
No biggie, right? The previous owners had thoughtfully left us a spare bulb (since they take tiny special ones) so I popped it in there and voi… nothing. Darn. Apparently my fix wouldn’t be that easy.
I’m no electrician, but I figured-slash-hoped I could diagnose and solve the problem without having to call in help and/or buy a new light. Not that we have any special attachment to these fixtures in particular. In fact, we’ll probably replace them for one larger light fixture over the island that we plan to add when we start overhauling the kitchen. But since we aren’t quite ready to go down that road (which always seems to snowball into chaos if you’re not ready for it), I had my sights set on saving this fella first. So off went the power to the whole house (call me Captain Better Safe Than Sorry) and down came the light.
I tried tightening the wire caps in the ceiling. Maybe something had come loose? No luck.
I tried swapping bulbs with the working light. Maybe my spare bulb was a dud? Nope. Not it.
I tried removing it and reattaching it entirely, just because I was running out of ideas. Still nothing.
At this point Sherry was batting her eyelashes and sweetly requesting that I “leave it alone for now” (read: give up) because she could tell that I was losing patience with all of my light-related failures. And also because I accidentally dropped a screwdriver on my face (and might have cursed pretty loudly) during my latest attempt. Go me.
Speaking of short fuses, I even tried cutting the now-frayed wire ends off of the fixture and exposing some new fresh wire to see if that would help. All I ended up with was shorter wires. But still no illumination. Sigh.
Thanks for sticking with me through this riveting play by play by the way. At this point I’m ready to take Sherry’s advice and admit defeat.
My last task is just to put the darn thing back together so no wires are left exposed while we go light shopping. That’s when I noticed something on the bottom of the light. The white wire going into the light socket had somehow become unattached. I hadn’t noticed it before, so my guess is that maybe it was loose to start with, and all of my recent manhandling had knocked it completely out. So after a bit more manhandling (and basically disassembling the socket completely) I was able to get the white wire secured back into place:
And that, my friends, is how I showed this light who’s boss.
Don’t mind the wonky shade, I straightened that out after snapping this photo (well, after Sherry pointed out that it looked crooked).
Now I realize the specifics of this electrical solution smackdown hardly apply to everyone who ever has a light out, but it does go to show you that sometimes a little persistence (and a screwdriver dropped on your face) can solve a problem if you stick with it. Kinda like when we managed to fix the pocket door in the last house by flailing around aimlessly and trying a few different things. Maybe we’ll put the money that we saved on buying an interim replacement fixture towards a slightly more expensive permanent fixture someday when we actually dive headfirst into the whole kitchen redo. Call it a celebratory splurge. In case you’re wondering, Sherry has her eye on this one in white. Although knowing us we’ll be too cheap to pull the trigger and it’ll sell out, forcing us to DIY something or hit up a local lighting outlet in search of something else that lights our fire. And that my friends, is my second post of the day that ends with a cringeworthy pun. You’re welcome.
Garbage Pail Kid
When Clara discovered crawling almost two months ago, she discovered more rooms to play in. And when she made the kitchen her new favorite play area, she made our garbage can her new favorite toy. In a word: yuck.
See, our new house garbage solution over the past five months has been embarrassingly “interim.” The cabinet under the sink is too small for even our tiny garbage pail, so it landed in a random corner. Completely out in the open and waiting for little hands to find their way to it. Sooooo… we moved it into the nearby laundry room (which Clara has yet to turn into her playground).
Not our proudest housekeeping moment, but then again this whole laundry room has been living in neglect ever since the new washer & dryer arrived months ago (note the mess of shoes in the foreground). So at least the garbage can fit right in with the whole not-good vibe.
But on a recent trip to HomeGoods we chose to upgrade our trash situation, courtesy of this larger enclosed can.
I’ve always been a bit wary of the durability of these flip-toppin’ foot-pedallin’ garbage cans, and I was even more so when I saw the price tag. It took just about everything in me to pay $60 for it, so thank goodness it wasn’t still priced at over $100 (Sherry googled around for OXO reviews and said they were a great brand that sold many over-a-hundred-dolla cans, so the $60 deal was in fact legit). Maybe I’m just not up to speed on the garbage containment industry, but when did these things get so darn expensive? Did they start making waffles and changing diapers too and I just missed the memo?
Then again my sister does own (and love) an $100+ SimpleHuman trash can that calls for custom bags. So at nearly half that and without a need for custom bags we decided this guy was the can for the job. Har har. See what I did there? I replaced man with can. Oh the hilarity.
In the end, sixty beans is well worth this scene: Clara being able to play without us having to worry about little fingers fishing out an old teabag or clumps of lint. Instead, she can focus on practicing her gang signs (apparently she’s sending big ups to her homies on the west side).
And once we give the kitchen a much needed overhaul with sleeker appliances and more updated looking cabinets it should fit right in. Plus Clara doesn’t seem to have any affinity for the can’s step-lever on the bottom (something we initially worried about) so it’s nice to know that she’s kind of over the idea of playing with the trash now that it’s tucked out of sight.
Our new can also earned bonus points from me for this little feature – which we didn’t even notice when buying it: a bag lock that helps keep any old grocery store garbage bag taut around the can. It actually seems to work too (there’s a bag in it in the pic above and we love that it doesn’t flop out and look messy – or collapse into the depths of the can when we toss things in).
And not only does it look neat and keep our baby out of trouble. It might help her learn something too thanks to its magnetized sides which are compatible with Clara’s magnetic letters (which are a fun Etsy purchase – more info here). She discovered that herself – isn’t she smart?
As for me, I’m just happy not to have to do laundry next to an open garbage bag. Moving it out of this room even inspired us to tidy up our shoe mess with a basket that we already had around.
Not a big improvement, but at least it’s a step in the right direction, right? Booyah. Pun wholeheartedly intended.
Psst- We weren’t paid or perked for this post, we just dig our new trash containment device.
Can You Dig It?
Digging is right up there with the Kardashians for me. As in, I’m getting tired of it (What? I’m a guy – we don’t like those shows). I knew there’d be a lot of it involved in DIYing our patio (digging, not Kardashians), but I think I got a false sense of confidence after all of that liriope came up relatively easily last week.
Next up was removing the brick path which, based on the looseness of some bricks on the edge, I said to Sherry “shouldn’t be that bad.” At least I can pinpoint the very moment I jinxed myself. Do you hear that? It’s the sound of the universe laughing at me.
As Sherry mentioned yesterday, it came up pretty easily at first because the first half of them were just laid in sand. So I only had to find the edge of a brick with my shovel, give it a little pry and rows of brick would come loose at once… further luring me into that dangerous “this’ll be easy” mentality.
Then I hit a roadblock. And by hit I literally mean hit. And by roadblock I mean concrete. Suddenly I discovered that the second half of the bricks were set in some sort of mortar. It wasn’t that bad at first. It just took a couple of good whacks with my sledgehammer to get the bricks loose, but from there it was just as simple as prying them out with my shovel again.
By the time I had removed all of the bricks – aka prying them all loose, knocking some with the sledgehammer and carrying them away by hand (to the carport, where I neatly stacked them for use in a later project) I was pretty darn exhausted. And I still had about ten feet of concrete that had to come out. In the words of the always hilarious Liz Lemon: nards.
With my energy gone, so was most of my confidence. I whined to Sherry that I’d probably need to rent the demolition hammer that helped me bust out the floor of our old bathroom (which Sherry then relayed to Katie B who she was jabbering with on the phone with while attempting to cut fabric in the hopes of making a birthday quilt for the sleeping bean). But knowing that driving to and spending money at the Home Depot Rental Center wasn’t necessarily the easier solution, I mustered enough strength to give the concrete a few good whacks with the ol’ sledgehammer.
Miraculously, it shattered.
With that moment of good luck came another burst of energy, so I kept smashing away at it, making good progress for a while.
Then I started to notice that the concrete was getting thicker and thicker as I went. They must have used it to level out a much more dramatically sloped area beneath it. What had started off as easily-breakable inch-thick concrete was now about 6″ thick. Hence the creepy blue glove photo that Sherry shared yesterday:
As I later confessed to Sherry, to psych myself up / amuse myself I started to sling insults at the concrete as I swung away. I’m not very good at smack talk, so it quickly turned to weird geeky chants like “By the hammer of Thor!” (clearly I’ve been watching too many Thor commercials lately). Off in the distance I thought I caught a squirrel laughing at me. Glad to entertain the woodland creatures, I pressed on with my chanting and swinging. Either way it worked, and by the end of the day all of the concrete was out. Sherry snort-laughed at the insanity of my method, but hey, whatever works.
Okay, technically it was “out” but not removed. I saved the hauling of the shattered debris for the next day (right now it’s hidden in the back corner of our property behind some trees, although we might haul it to the dump a little later on – you know, when I have more energy).
Sadly my sledgehammer slinging days were not over. The bottom step of that pesky old unusable brick staircase (next to the wooden steps that are now used) was about two inches too high so it too had to be busted up so as not to interfere with the perimeter of our paver patio. I’ll spare you the gritty details on this one, but let’s just say that my second less-exhausted day of sledgehammering meant that old brick looked like pebbles by the time I was done. That’s right, Thor worked it out:
With my proverbial slate officially clean (read: no more liriope and bricks), we could now more formally start laying the foundation for the patio. I’m following the instructions from this series of Lowe’s videos about recommended patio installation btw (along with the advice of some local experts who lay paver patios both commercially and residentially, who agreed with every step from the video), so this clip covers most of what was ahead of me (unfortunately, it involved more digging).
The next steps would require about $40 worth of new supplies, like wood stakes, line levels, nylon mason string and a hand tamper – along with some already owned items like gloves, a yard stick/ruler, scissors, a marker, and a shovel.
Fortunately I got a respite from all of my digging since the next task was staking out the patio area so I’d know how deep to dig in all areas. We had already marked the boundaries with our hose when it came to the desired perimeter (straight on most sides but gently curved on that back perimeter like our old patio was in our first house). So I drove in some wood stakes at key corners and turns (I learned I should drive them in deeply since I’d soon find myself digging out a lot of the dirt around them).
Next came marking things off with string. The key objective being to mark where the top of your pavers should eventually sit while making sure things are level. Well, actually making sure things slope gradually away from the house (to stave off any water-collecting-around-the-foundation-issues). So just as the video showed, I used my line level to tie the string between two stakes (and ensure that it was 100% level).
Then based on how far apart the stakes were (these were 6 feet) I marked off where I should lower my string to in order to meet the general rule mentioned in the video (that a patio should slope down one inch for every four feet). To save on string slash effort, I just moved my strings rather than tying on a second one.
The whole string process took longer than I expected. The video fooled me into thinking it was a cinch because they were doing a square patio on a flat surface. I was doing a gently curved patio on an already sloped surface. Plus, I had pre-existing features that I had to line up with three of the four sides: the carport at the top, the deck stairs on the side and the fence at the bottom. And the area already sloped towards the house, so I was fighting the pre-existing terrain to create something that would later slope away from it.
But eventually I got all of my strings tied, my slopes going away from the house, and everything lined up the way it needed to be.
The video didn’t mention tying strings anywhere but the perimeter, but having seen Nicole’s DIY patio photos I opted to do some across the patio area too. This not only helped me check the diagonal slope as well as the perimeter slope, but also would give me some reference points across the middle while I was digging. After all, what good is a patio that’s perfect on the edges but bulges or sinks in the middle?
Oh, and if you don’t have a line level – you can always enlist a helpful chihuahua to double-check the slope of your lines.
Okay, clearly Burger isn’t smart enough to actually help with this project (besides peeing near my work area and licking my muddy face). He’s just trying to crush a bug with his neck in that photo. I recommend the line level (a two-pack was like $3) even though it’s far less amusing than a crazy bug-hunting chihuahua.
I have no “during” photos of the next part because it was basically a bunch of digging, measuring, digging, hauling dirt, digging, rubbing my aching back, digging, sitting down for water breaks, digging, begging for Sherry to bring me an insane number of granola bars for “fuel”, digging, barely working up the nerve to get up again, digging, checking things with a level, digging, cutting out roots, and yes – more digging. It took me one and half days (about six hours in total) to get the whole area nearly seven inches lower than my nylon strings (6 3/8″ to be exact, which leaves room for 3″ of gravel, 1″ of sand, and 2 3/8″ of paver to make everything nice and flush again). By the end, it looked like this (there’s kind of an archeological dig site vibe going on, right?):
Oh, and when I was done digging I went over the whole thing one last time with a level to make sure I still had the right slope going on across the whole thing. After that, a vigorous round of tamping with the hand tamper ensued (yes, the word vigorous is the best I can do at making it sound like fun). It was not. I fully realize that renting a plate compactor would be the less laborious route, but frankly I’ve heard mixed reviews about how easy it is to use and I knew it would require removing all of my middle guide strings (which I consult so frequently that I’d never want to be without them for fear of a huge sunken spot in the middle of the patio that will collect water and debris for decades to come). Plus, what’s a little more manual labor at this point? My back didn’t exactly agree but after a few hours of serious tamping (and just one blister) the dirt was compacted within a centimeter of its life. And can I just tell you that it’s nice to put that step behind me?
My apologies if this post sounds a tad whiny. Just trying to keep it real as my lady likes to say. Fake Chipper John says: it was lots of good old fashioned sweaty fun. Keeping It Real John says: holy crap that was waaaay more exhausing than I expected, and it took waaaay longer than I thought it would. But it’s done and I’m psyched to have lived to tell the tale. Now we just have an insane amount of gravel and sand to layer into that leveled and tamped hole followed by some pavers. Although I’m sure I’m oversimlifying that step too. Haha. But to prove that I still have my sense of humor intact, I wanted to share the warning that came on the new wheelbarrow tire that I had to buy (our old one got punctured last year somehow at the old house).
So if anyone had plans to take their wheelbarrow for a spin down I-95, you might want to work on a plan B.
And might I suggest that plan B involves helping me haul and level all of the gravel and sand that got delivered yesterday morning? Doesn’t hurt to ask, right? Oh well, I guess it’s time to put on my tough guy pants (my Thor pants?) and get back to work. More details soon…
Because Nobody Sells “Ikea White” Paint
It feels like a theme lately to remind you guys that we mentioned that we were going to do fill-in-the-blank a while back and then exclaim that we finally got around to doing it. So this time fill-in-the-blank is finally painting the bedroom finials to match Ed The Bed. See how they’re a bit too white in this pic?
It definitely wasn’t rocket science (not much of what we do around here is, haha) but we wanted to share the super easy process when it comes to matching paint to any existing item of furniture, like if you’re planning to add legs to a painted dresser that you already own for example. The first step is to grab a bunch of white (or whatever color your item is) swatches.
We weren’t brand loyal at all (we wanted to get the widest range of white tones). Then we came home with all of them and held each one up against one of Ed’s posts to see which one almost “disappeared” when we held it up (meaning it was the closest match). The winner was Parchment White by Glidden.
So we got a tiny test pot of it in satin for a few bucks and I prepared to get my paint on. I had saved the cardboard packaging from the guest bedroom mirror that we picked up from Target (large cardboard pieces like that always come in handy since I’m so paint obsessed, and I’ve actually already used it a few times now) so I stuck each finial through the raised part of the packaging so they would “stand up.” That way I could paint all sides of them without worrying about having to touch/smear them to spin them around. And yes, of course I was watching some evening TV while I got ‘er done (The Apprentice if you’re wondering).
The result? Well they look pretty much the same color as Ed.
Oh but we’ve noticed that many items from Ikea vary when it comes to how white they are (for example, some of their white frames are brighter than others) so it’s not necessarily safe to assume that Parchment White by Glidden will be a perfect match to every white Ikea item. But bringing home some swatches, holding them up, and then buying a tiny test pot of the one that blends in the best for a few bucks is a pretty painless process.
The only problem? Little paint projects like this leave me itching to find other small things to paint. What’s wrong with me? It’s a sickness I tell ya.
Perfect Schmerfect
I learned in grade school that trying to be perfect would probably result in a caffeine-pill-fueled freakout a la Jesse Spano (yes, many of my life lessons were learned thanks to Saved By The Bell). Pretty much since then I’ve been in the camp of try-to-do-it-right-but-perfect-isn’t-possible.
So sometimes it’s weird when people mention that they think we live in this perfect world where nothing goes wrong and we never fight and life is just hunky-dory from the minute we wake up to the minute we go to bed. Unicorns and rainbows if you will. I think sharing Clara’s birth story helped a little in that regard (that day was definitely not the fairytale that we expected). But beyond dealing with some serious and scary moments like that, we’re also no strangers to everyday stresses. In other words, just like the rest of the world, stuff doesn’t always go our way. We fight, our house gets messy, we go over budget, projects take way longer than we expected, our moving truck gets stuck in the snow. We like to joke that we’re so normal it’s crazy, so chances are if you deal with it at home (dust bunnies, burned dinners, stupid arguments, spilled milk, broken china ceramic animals) it also goes down here.
But since our blog is mainly just a big diary about our home improvement projects and making our house a home, it’s hardly fitting to devote a post to our latest argument about Clara’s missed nap or the dust bunny under our TV stand (this just in: dust happens, and if you don’t see it we’re just not zoomed in enough, haha). But when things don’t work out like we hoped in the home improvement realm we always try to share those trials right along with our triumphs (the good, the bad, and the ugly all have a place here). Like this post about a ton of mistakes that we hope we don’t make again and this post about a failed recycled glass project and this one about a bummer of a string lantern attempt. We’ve even posted a super candid average day video with junk all over the place and I’ve shared my goo-related secret. Our house is not a showroom, that’s for sure.
And although we pride ourselves on being cheap-os who hunt down deals, save our pennies, and research projects within an inch of their life as we go, we still totally break obliterate the budget from time to time. Take the patio we’re currently putting in, for example. Going into it I was intensely naive. “I’m certain it’s a two day under $500 project.” Famous last words, right? Originally we were going to go for those cheap 12 x 12″ gray concrete pavers at Lowe’s and Home Depot (I think they’re around $1 a pop) so I thought we’d just need to dig out a flat spot and lay ‘em down. Maybe it would come to $450 tops with some ground tamping tools and all the pavers. Then we decided we should do it right and match the fancier cobblestone pavers in our driveway, which turned out to be around $2.67 a square foot at Home Depot…
…and a whopping $3+ at Lowe’s. Our patio will be around 300 square feet, so $3 a square foot = $900 in just stone (let alone other supplies). We hoped that pricing out something local might save our budget and headed to a place nearby (Southside Builder’s Supply) and found out that they offered even higher quality cobblestone pavers than Home Depot and Lowe’s (that match our driveway and are made locally- score) for just $2 a square foot (67 cents cheaper than Orange and a dollar cheaper than Blue – which really adds up). Plus it was just fun to walk around their multi-stone sample patios to see what things would look like all laid out:
So after our local stone yard reconnaissance mission we felt pretty good about our deal seeking skillz and returned home to start digging up the side yard. And in a post about that I mentioned that the patio project would hopefully run us under 1K (I readjusted from my original $500 guess after realizing that cobblestone pavers to match our driveway would be pricier than the cheap $1 concrete square pavers that we originally planned to use). How did I get to 1K? Well, 300 square feet of stone at $2 a square foot = $600. And we figured that around $400 in gravel and sand and other materials and supplies should be about right.
More famous last words. But we’ll get to that.
First, we figured we’d do some digging before heading back over to the stone yard to place our order. Just to be sure we could get a nice level bed to place stones and not hit some unforseen craziness like a buried car or something that would make a non-returnable $600 purchase of cobblestone pavers a bad move. Remember that John had a little liriope digging party last week but we still had that brick path to remove? Well, at first it came up really easily…
… until we learned that half of it was laid on top of a huge thick slab of concrete…
… which took some pretty major sledgehammering to get through (and effectively demonstrated how NOT a two day project this was, seeing as we were already on day two without a single paver in sight).
But lo and behold, John got ‘er done. Ding dong the path is out. It took longer than we guessed and hubs was more than a little sore but it was a pretty sweet victory indeed (we worried we’d have to rent a demolition hammer for the thick concrete slab but John was a rock star with the sledgehammer).
He’ll drop in with more details about the entire digging process soon, but back to our stone order. After all that brick was up, we headed back over to the stone yard to place our order and were blown away when they worked up a grand total for us. Are you ready? $1,565. I almost dropped the baby. How could $600 worth of stone nearly triple when it came to the total cost? After I got a little color back into my cheeks I managed to stammer “ok, what can we do to get that down, because it’s waaaaaay over our budget.” Notice I was the one doing the talking stammering – John hates negotiating so it falls into the things-I-do category. Oh well, he does laundry so it’s all good. Anyway, we worked with this lady Jeri (she was great) for at least an hour to get costs down (we reduced the amount of gravel we were getting, which then allowed all of our cargo to come in one truckload- which reduced the delivery fees we were being charged and we even negotiated a discount on the stone and downgraded from the fancy top layer of sand to regular sand).
In the end we got our total down substantially, but nowhere beneath our 1K goal. We walked out of there paying $1,260 for all of the stone, gravel, sand, border edging, and stakes that we needed (well actually $1,340 but we’ll get an $80 deposit back when we return some of the bags that our shipment comes in). But that total still doesn’t include the tamping tools, landscaping fabric, and a few other supplies we still have to purchase/rent. And you might remember that we mentioned wanting to add a 6′ privacy fence along the back wall, so if you toss that expense in on top of everything else it’s fair to say that this might end up being a $1,500-2K undertaking when it’s all said and done. Which is definitely a far cry from that original stupid-me $500 budget that I tossed out in the beginning. Oops.
But there’s no use whining about it right? I mean don’t get me wrong, I whined the whole way home from that stone yard, even after we negotiated our total from nearly $1,600 to $1,260, but there’s no sense in blog-whining about it (although sometimes sew-crying can lead to blog-whining). But we did want to share our budget explosion with you guys to demonstrate that junk like this just tends to happen in the home improvement game. Not all the time, but definitely some of the time.
In the end we’re still psyched to save some major money by tackling it ourselves (hiring someone to whip up a 300 square foot patio with the same materials would run us around 5K+) and we’re sure we’ll get a ton of use out of it so it’s still well worth the time, loot, and effort. See there I go being all cheerful about something annoying that happened. Haha. More pluses: I get to see John get all dirty. Which is always my idea of a good time. And Clara can have some fun with chalk and a baby pool out there when it’s done, which is going to be priceless. We just try to keep plugging away, even when curve balls like broken budgets or broken spirits threaten to derail us. Such is the DIY way I think. You just gotta keep on keeping on or you lose momentum and might never pick up the ol’ hammer (or crowbar or shovel or paintbrush) again.
So all of this is to say, I know that I’m annoyingly enthusiastic most of the time, and John can be a pretty chipper guy too. But crap happens. We just try to make the best of it. And you’d be surprised how helpful it is to blog/blab about failures and shortcomings (the entire reason we started this blog was because John wanted to blow off some kitchen-planning steam and we thought it would be fun to keep our family in the loop about it). So I highly recommend publicly airing your dirty home improvement laundry to come to terms with it and maybe even find a few folks who can commiserate, offer some helpful advice, and encourage you along the way. Seriously, blog-venting = our Prozac. And you guys are our therapists. So thanks. You know we love a good deal, and free therapy is up there with paint sales and appliance close-outs.
Psst- Ahhh, Mother’s Day is coming. Check out this week’s BabyCenter post about how I spent the last one and how I’m guessing we’ll spend this one (aside from hopefully laying some pavers).
