The title kind of says it all.
I gave the bathroom a thorough cleaning yesterday morning. It really needed it.
Cleaning the bathroom is one of those things that I utterly despise while I’m doing it, and yet somehow after it’s done I feel a rewarding sense of accomplishment. Also, I really like using a clean bathroom.
However, I will dread the lead-up to the next time I have to clean the bathroom, and I will hate every minute it takes to actually clean it. And then BAM! Satisfaction again. It’s a weird roller-coaster ride.
As usual on Sunday morning, our kitchen looked like a bunch of frat boys had been up all night drinking and eating snacks while they did whatever frat boys do all night. In reality it was nothing like that. Tim comes over on Saturday afternoon for an early dinner and then we play a board game until usually eleven or twelve at night. We drink and eat a lot of snacks, so that part’s the same, but other than that it’s a couple of aging boomers and their indulgent son hunched over the dining room table, moving game tokens around on a cardpaper game board. Maybe frat boys do that, too, I dunno.
So this morning before I could even think about brewing a pot of coffee, I had to wash my hands, unload the dish washer, then stack as many of the dirty dishes, coffee mugs, and utensils into it as my finely-honed stacking skills would allow, which is quite a lot, if I may be allowed to humble brag on my domestic skills just a little bit. Took about twenty minutes, which seems like a long time to perform a complicated household chore so early in the morning before coffee but it’s actually a blessing to do it before I’m fully conscious. It passes in a blur and I rarely even remember doing it afterward. Best way to do kitchen cleanup, if you want my opinion.
Just FYI the game we played was Spirit Island, where you play the part of a minor deity defending an island against colonizers. My favorite spirits are River Surges in Sunlight, and Ocean’s Mighty Grasp, because their powers enable them to drown lots and lots of colonizers. As a bonus, Ocean’s presence on the island also enables other spirits to drown lots more colonizers, and every drowned colonizer gives Ocean an even Mightier Grasp. Great fun!
I did not play either of these spirits last night. Instead, I played two spirits completely unknown to me, just to switch things up and, as a result, I was not much help when it came to defending the island. One of my spirits was Volcano Looming High, and the most critical mistake I made was not asploding myself as soon as the colonizers built a whole shitload of towns and cities during the escalation phase of the game. When Volcano asplodes, he takes a whole lot of towns and cities out of the game. Lesson learned. The other spirit I played was Finder of Paths Unseen, and I have to admit I learned nothing about how this spirit works. I’ll have to play with it a lot more before I get even a basic idea how to use it.
I fixed the latch on the door to the garage, and now I keep walking into it.
More accurately, I fixed the latch on one of the doors to the garage. The inside door is a hollow-core door, the kind you would find in the doorway of any room in your house. It’s not insulated, so there’s a storm door, too. The latch on the storm door has not worked for years, allowing me to just push it out of my way as I walk through the door.
I was fixing lots of broken stuff last weekend, so while I was wielding all those tools and slapping on all that glue, I took apart all the bits that were keeping the latch on the door from working, fixed them, then put them back together. Latch works fine now.
Only problem with that is I have to re-train my muscle memory to stop and reach for the latch instead of giving the door a shove while I keep walking. Since I fixed the latch, I have yet to remember this. I must have walked into that door two dozen times already.
I got a visit from the Weed Man today.
He wasn’t selling weed. That would have been something I’d have considered buying.
He was selling lawn care. In January. As in, the first week in January, while our yard was covered in a couple inches of snow, we got a knock on the door from somebody selling something that didn’t exist just then and wouldn’t for many months.
I let him introduce himself, told him I was doing just fine (he asked), and then cut straight to the chase: “Thanks, but we’re not buying. Thanks.” I had to get him off our porch before I laughed in his face.
He was really very nice about it; said thank you and have a nice day before trudging through the snow to the next house.
My Darling B was looking for a shaker filled with pepper flakes she got from the grocery last week. She asked me if I knew what happened to it, as if I had a clue where she shelved her herbs and spices. I don’t put that stuff away, not because I have this highfalutin idea that I shouldn’t have to, but because she bought it for what I can only assume was a specific recipe, and if I put it away it’ll be lost forever because I’ll forget where I put it and wherever it was that I put it won’t be remotely like the right place. So I don’t do that. If it’s not in my way I don’t touch it. If it’s in my way, I set it on the counter or on the table so she can put where she’ll be able to find it later.
Well, that’s the theory, anyway. Where she put this particular ingredient, the aforementioned chili flakes, was apparently a bit of information that didn’t get transferred to her long-term memory. She looked in the kitchen cupboards, she checked the drawers under the counter, she looked through all the flotsam and jetsam on the countertop and the table, and I don’t even know where else she looked. But she kept asking me where it could be, so I fired off a few suggestions. Each time I did, she said she already checked there.
“Did you look in the refrigerator?” I asked. She said she did but was going to look again.
Since I wasn’t being any great help and since there’s only room for one person in the kitchen at a time, I left to go do whatever it was I had been doing before she asked me where the chili flakes were. Each time I came back, though, she asked me again, and again I offered what I thought were useful suggestions but which turned out to be dead ends.
Finally I came back to the kitchen to get something, maybe a glass of water. I don’t know. Whatever it was, by the time I went back, the cupboard doors were wide open and at least a dozen bottles, jars and other containers stood in a loose gaggle on the countertop. B stood in the kitchen, hands on hips, brows furrowed deep in thought.
“Let’s go over where you’ve looked already,” I suggested. “You said you searched in the fridge, right?” And I opened the fridge, reached in and took a big jar of salsa off the top shelf and what do you suppose I found right behind it? Yes! That big container of chili flakes she had torn half the kitchen apart looking for! Dear reader, the astronauts on the space station must’ve heard me laughing.
We have a dish washer again! Well, we always had a dish washer. For the past eight months I’ve been the dish washer, after our dish washing machine broke down at the end of February. I don’t have the slightest idea how to troubleshoot repairs to dish washing machines so I didn’t even try and in any case it had given us almost fifteen years of faithful service, so we decided the best course of action would be to replace it.
Fast forward to last week, when we finally bought a new machine. Sometimes it takes a while for us to spring into action. Okay, most of the time it does. My Darling B did the shopping and, when it arrived yesterday evening, I did the plumbing and wiring. I’m still surprised she lets me do that, not that I’ve ever botched the job so badly that we had to call the fire department, but I’m not a plumber or an electrician and yet she still trusts me to do that kind of stuff.
Quite a lot of the work required me to twist myself into many different pretzel-like shapes repeatedly, something I was never too worried about having to do before but I’m getting a bit long in the tooth so I was rather well chuffed to learn that I can still crawl through a tiny slot, wedge myself into a very limited space under the counter top, perform useful work with power tools, and finally extract myself, all without hurting myself or breaking anything.
Anyone who’s ever done home improvement DIY knows that nothing ever goes to plan, and installing the dish washing machine somehow resulted in restricting water flow through the faucet in the kitchen sink. I suspect that when I closed the hot water shut-off valve I might have broken off some built-up calc which traveled to the cartridge valve in the faucet, partially blocking it.
After yanking the faucet I couldn’t figure out how to open the cartridge and I didn’t want to spend any more time on this repair, so I bought a cheap replacement faucet. And hooked it up backwards. Because of course I would. But I decided I was done for the day so until I decide I’ve procrastinated long enough and carve an hour or so out of another day to reconnect it the right way, we’ll just have to remember that hot is really cold and vice-versa.
It’s another lovely day today but there will be no quiet reading on the lawn under clear, sunny skies because our next-door neighbor’s house is getting a new roof today, which means we’ll have to listen to the whap-whap-whap of nail guns while an air compressor thrums constantly in the background.
Yesterday was a lovely day but I didn’t get out into it because I don’t know how to budget my time. I intended to hang a humidifier from the furnace vent and that’s all I wanted to do. After I did that, I intended to stroll through the leaves in a park somewhere or go for a ride on my bike, something that would get me outside in the fresh air.
Hanging the humidified on the furnace vent went so well that I was pretty chuffed about it, so I decided to try to hang the controller as well. That took a lot longer because I didn’t have a drill that would cut a hole in the vent that was big enough but not too big. Took a long time to figure out the work-around for that.
Getting the controller hung meant I could wire the controller to the furnace and the humidifier, which was a lot more challenging than the wiring diagram makes it look. I didn’t finish up until just after three o’clock and by then I was covered with so much dirt and sweat that I had to hit the shower.
It was three-thirty by the time I was cleaned up and ready to get some fresh air. Because of effing daylight savings, the day’s almost over by four and the sun sets at four-thirty, so I had just enough time to take a short walk around the neighborhood.
Somewhere in the middle of hanging the humidifier on the furnace, My Darling B came down the stairs to let me know the news media had finally called the election for Biden. Hilarious that they waited until Trump was on the golf course so he was less likely to call a press conference or rant on Twitter. Across the United States Americans literally started dancing in the streets to celebrate Trump’s eventual removal from office. How awesome is that?
I haven’t done any shop work in a long time, mostly because I am very lazy but partly because every project I do generates a huge amount of dust, which makes the whole house dusty because my shop is in the basement, and the house stays dusty no matter how often I change the furnace filter because it just doesn’t move enough air, especially not in the basement. My Darling B’s allergies make it hard enough for her to breathe without me making more dust, so I’ve been trying to figure out how to get rid of it before it spreads through the house. Continue reading “cleaner”
Pardon me while I … vent.
The guys who put the siding on my house installed the dryer vent on the bottom. It’s basically a flimsy aluminum tube shoved through a hole in the wall with four flimsy plastic flaps to shut out the weather. It’s not screwed or glued or fastened to the wall in any way. Nothing’s holding it in place except the vinyl siding. I found this out when I started poking at it, looking for a way to add a draft excluder.
I added the white dryer vent on the top. There’s been a hole in the wall for it since we moved in. I guess the dryer used to vent out the top but for whatever reason somebody decided it would be better to add a vent closer to the floor. From my point of view, it’s a lot harder to hook up the vent that way. I have to climb on top of the dryer and reach as far as I can, hanging over the back. I’ve hurt myself a couple times doing that but never badly enough to motivate me to move the vent back up top. I couldn’t figure out how to remove the crappy flapper vent without damaging the vinyl siding, though, so today was the day the vents got swapped around.
The upper hole used to be plugged but the guys who did the siding must have knocked the plug out because there was just a handful of fiberglass insulation wadded up in there. Besides the fiberglass, all that was keeping the weather out was the vinyl siding and a layer of plastic. I drilled a series of holes around the edge of the hole, then cut it open with a Dremel tool. The white vent has a heavy-duty aluminum pipe sticking out the back that slid in as if it was meant to be there, which it was, and four construction screws fastened it to the wall. I had to trim the pipe, again using my trusty Dremel, but the hardest part of the whole operation was moving the dryer, which isn’t all that heavy but is rather large and hard to get a grip on.
I stuffed the wad of fiberglass insulation from the upper hole into the crappy flapper vent and covered it with a piece of extruded foam for now. I’ll do a better job of patching that up when I figure out how to do it without messing up the siding.
Almost forgot to mention: I got voicemail from the guys who did the siding. They wanted to know if there were any jobs around the house that I wanted them to do. I was half-tempted to reply with something snarky, like, “No thanks, I’ve already patched up all the half-assed stuff your guys did.”
If it’s Monday, this must be the last day of my stay-cation. What have I been doing with it? So glad you asked.
(Just a note: I do not actually hear anybody talking to me as I type these words. Self-isolation has gone on a long time, but I am not at that point in my craziness, not yet.)
I spent a lot of the day yesterday unfucking more of the screwups left behind by the contractor who sided our little red house. I’m assuming that most, if not all, of the actual siding was installed correctly, but I have no experience with siding and how it should be correctly installed, so I have no way to know for sure they did a good job with that unless something dramatic happens, like it peels off in a storm. Fingers crossed, that never happens.
But there are a few things they did that lead me to believe their work is less than exemplary. I mentioned recently I discovered an electrical outlet with something *not quite right* about it, and which I had already spent the better part of an afternoon working to fix. Yesterday, I finished that job after a quick trip to the hardware store to buy a new outlet and weatherproof cover for it.
It was a fairly simple fix: I bought a GFCI outlet to replace the regular one that was in there. It was grounded, but it never hurts to have extra insurance, especially for an outdoor outlet. I had to futz around with the box it was mounted in to get the fat-butt GFCI outlet to fit. All I had to do, really, was take a couple of screws out of it, but to do that, I had to dismount the box from the frame I’d built around it, because nothing is easy when it comes to home DIY projects. After remounting the box, though, the rest was easy-peasy.
While I was at the hardware store, I picked up a second outlet and weatherproof cover for another outlet the contractors left in less-than-serviceable condition. That outlet is in a box mounted in an inside corner of the back patio. When they removed it to tear off the old siding, they broke off all but one of the plastic tabs sticking out from the sides of the box. Normally, you’d securely mount it to a wall by driving screws through all four tabs. With only one tab left sticking out, they screwed it in place with just one screw rather than replace the box, so it would sort of flop around when we plugged in or unplugged from it. In my admittedly amateur but somewhat informed opinion, it was probably not the best way they could have fixed that particular problem.
I also picked up a new outdoor light for the patio. The light over the door was a single old-fashioned spotlight; the bulb must have weighed a pound and a half all by itself. Replacing it was something I’ve been meaning to cross off my to-do list for years, but it’s one of those things that I thought about only when I needed to use the light. Because it was a spotlight, it illuminated just one spot, and because it was a crappy old light fixture, it was rusted into position and pointed at a spot somewhere out in the yard. Not so useful.
Taking down the old fixture, which the contractors had had to remove like all the other fixtures when they did the siding, I discovered they’d half-assed reinstalling that, too, shooting a single construction screw through the base of the fixture into the wall, instead attaching it to the box as they should have done. The box was a good inch and a half inside the siding, so I had to find a couple of very long screws to substitute for the screws that came with the mounting.
All that futzing took a couple hours, so by the time I was done I was more than ready for a cold beer and a few hours in the shade with a book. Time with books & beer is so much more satisfying after I’ve scratched a few projects off my list.
This Is Drivel 