Category Archives: House repair

Carriage House – episode 2

September 28, 2019 Gary Pardun 2 Comments

In May I went back up to Kentucky for a couple of weeks to continue renovating the Carriage House so that we can live in it while we renovate the Big Brick House. My ever-loving wife, “Doreen” (not her real name), ditched me on that trip claiming she had to go to work because she had a job. (Some people take their jobs too seriously, in my humble opinion. I find that a job cuts into my day too much. But maybe that is just me.)

My plan was to have some fun and build some walls according to the new floor layout we had worked out. Well, that was the plan.

The back steps of the Carriage House go up to a deck where you can go into what used to be the kitchen. The door jambs (the boards on each side of the door) had dark blotches near the bottom of the door that stood out because the door and the jambs are painted white. Although I was tempted to just repaint the jambs and the door, I decided the grown-up thing to do was to take a closer look and see what was going on.

Water was obviously the culprit because the black stuff was right in the bottom corners of the door. It was probably due to a poor job of caulking and some fresh caulk followed by repainting would do the trick.

It is always best to clean out any loose caulk or other gunk in the crack before applying new caulk. So I took a pry bar and poked around where the jambs meet the threshold. I didn’t feel much resistance. The pry bar was poking more into air than wood. By the time I had cleaned out all of the rotten wood I had a hole big enough to store a large carrot (though I wouldn’t advise actually doing that). The other side of the door was the same.

A little bit of digging reveals major rotting and missing wood. Ew!

More rot. No caulk anywhere to be seen. Even the flashing was sliced through.

Furthermore, it wasn’t a case of a poor caulking job–there was no caulk at all! The door frame was just sitting there with a couple of nails holding it up and absolutely nothing to keep out the rain. When I pulled out the door frame to reinstall it, I also pulled up the plywood subfloor in front of the door and discovered that the rot extended down into the floor joists. So now we aren’t talking about just a couple of door jambs that need to be repaired, we are talking about the whole floor rotting out.

Even the plate under the door is rotted out.

Needless to say, if I had just painted over those dark spots and called it good we would have had a big expensive problem down the road after a few more years of rain did even more damage. Doreen would not have been amused and my main “job” is to keep her amused.

After digging out all of the wet, rotten wood, I cut some replacement pieces for the joists out of PT (pressure-treated) lumber and fastened them in place along with some pieces to wedge into the carrot-sized holes in the jambs. Then I caulked (what a concept!) around the door frame and the joint where the jambs meet the threshold and then nailed the door frame into the wall and caulked some more.

After sliding in the aluminum threshold under the door and flashing and caulking it (of course), I cut and installed a new piece of plywood for the subfloor.

3/4″ plywood for the subfloor makes it level with the original boards.

With the door frame all spiffed up, I could get back to building some missing walls and my full-time job of keeping Doreen amused.

house renovation, House repair

Carriage House – episode 1

April 4, 2019 Gary Pardun Leave a comment

The Carriage House behind the Big Brick House in Paducah, Kentucky, is two stories with a total of 1700 square feet. It originally had room for four carriages–each with a large door in front and a small service door in back for the groom. Two of the four large doors have been bricked in.

My ever-loving wife, “Flora” (not her real name), has for many years wanted an older house that we could completely remodel exactly the way “we” wanted it. A blank slate, as it were.

When we bought the aforementioned property, both houses were stripped down to the studs. The slate was as blank as it gets. Flora was thrilled.

The lower level of the Carriage House will become my permanent workshop and base for renovating the Big Brick House. The second level will become a one-bedroom apartment where we can stay until the Big Brick House is livable.

The top priority is to renovate the second floor of the Carriage House into an apartment. We started by ripping out the old flooring in the kitchen, which had multiple layers that were either glued or stapled or nailed.

Top layer of kitchen flooring has been pulled up. Three more layers to go.

Flora attacking the flooring with a hammer and pry bar.

We found that no one method or tool was able to pull up the flooring. We used combinations of a short pry bar, a medium size pry bar, a large crowbar, a regular hammer, and a 5 lb. hammer. When we got down to the nailed oak flooring, I used the circular saw to cut it into 24″ wide chunks so that we would be prying up a manageable section at a time. The saw was set to the depth of the oak flooring, which was 3/4″. The embedded staples that had held the previous layer of vinyl stuck up and made it hard to hold the saw straight and level. I considered hammering the staples flat before sawing but decided to just plow through.

Flora standing up straight on a well-deserved break.

A previous owner had partially installed a tub surround in what would become part of the new kitchen, so it had to be removed …

Old tub surround had to be moved out of the new kitchen.

… and carried down these steps. This staircase will be removed and the floor extended to form the walk-in closet in the master bedroom.

Stairs to lower level that will be removed and covered over. Notice on the top step the lovely vinyl tiles that were removed from the kitchen floor.

With the tub gone I could take down the walls for the old, tiny bathroom. Contrary to what you see on TV, you do not start by swinging a sledge hammer and breaking things. The first step is to remove any wiring or metal pieces in the walls. Then hammer in the points of any nails that are sticking all the way through the studs. It is a lot easier to pull nails out of a stud while the stud is still attached to the rest of the wall. Pulling some of the nails out also makes it easier to knock the stud itself out from the wall. When the stud is free you can take out the remaining nails and stack the studs out of the way.

Studs from the old walls stacked up and ready to be used to make new walls.

I pulled the studs one at a time from the old bathroom walls but left the studs at the ends to hold up the top plate.

Kitchen floor stripped down and most of old bathroom walls removed.

Although you can’t see it in the photos, the top plate was about 18′ long and since I was working alone, I used some old wiring to tie up one end of it while I worked across its length knocking it loose from the ceiling joists.

One end of the top plate tied up so that the whole thing wouldn’t come crashing down when it came loose.

Scaffolding on wheels is really helpful in situations like this.

The next task was to support the sections of brick where an overzealous worker in days of yore had removed way too many bricks to make room for the plumbing stack. I think many of the adjacent bricks were held up with nothing more than friction. I stood a couple of studs on a sturdy spot and propped up the unsupported section of brick.

I did the same for the other side of the “slot” under the window in the picture above.

The next project was to replace the wall between the kitchen and the dining room with a 14′ beam. The helpful engineer at the lumber yard calculated that I needed either a pair of LVLs or three 2″ x 12″ boards nailed together. Since the LVLs cost twice as much as the 2″ x 12″ boards (and I was working alone) I went with the boards.

Before you install a beam to support a load (the ceiling joists in this case) you have to have a temporary wall to support it. I was fortunate because the wall was already there and I wanted to put the beam just a few inches away from the old wall.

I installed a jack stud on each end where the beam would ultimately rest and moved the scaffolding next to the wall. I rested one end of the first board on the top of the scaffolding.

Then I climbed up on the scaffolding and pulled the board into position so that the ends were resting on their respective jack studs. A strap held up one end while I wrestled the other end into its place. Since the right hand jack stud was on an outside wall there was no room to slide the board to the right to provide clearance for inserting the left end. But there was plenty of space to insert the left end of the board first and push it on through to make room to swing the right end into place and slide it over its jack.

After the first board was positioned left to right there was still the issue of ensuring that it didn’t have any bow in it, which would make the beam curve a little. I put my new laser level on the floor and aligned the endpoints of the laser line with the ends of the board such that the laser line should ideally run along the edge of the board the whole way. It didn’t, of course, but a clamp pulled the board straight and I put a couple of nails through the ceiling joists into the board to hold it.

A clamp pulls the board straight so that the laser beam runs exactly along the edge.

You could use a string or a chalk line but a laser is way cooler.

The second 2″ x 12″ board was lifted into place similarly and nailed to the first in a zigzag pattern spaced about 12″ apart. Same for the third board.

14′ beam in place supporting the ceiling joists. The temporary wall behind it is no longer needed.

After the beam was all nailed together, I doubled the jack on each end so that they were 3″ thick and plenty strong to support a heavy beam.

Since we are keeping the oak flooring in the dining room and the board ends are “ragged,” i.e. not lined up, I used the bottom plate of the wall as a guide for my circular saw to cut a nice straight line in the flooring where it will butt up against the new kitchen flooring.

Then I took down the old wall separating the kitchen and dining room by removing as many nails as I could that were used to toenail the studs to the bottom plate. Old nails tend to come out easier than modern nails because they have a slick coating on them rather than the cement coating used in modern construction, which melts as the nail is driven it and then bonds to the wood. If you can get the claw of the crowbar under the heads of the old shiny nails they will pop right out.

A few taps of the hammer at the bottom of the studs knocked them free from the bottom plate but still nailed to the top plate.

Old stud wall between kitchen and dining room. Notice the bottoms of the studs have been knocked free from the bottom plate.

When the studs are hanging from the top plate like that, they can be rocked back and forth until they slip off the nails and come free. This means you can stay on the floor for the entire operation. After pulling up the bottom plate I brought the scaffolding back around so I could knock the top plate free from the ceiling joists. As you might expect there were lots of nails in the top plate to pull out.

The beam really opens the place up.

The old wall between the kitchen and bathroom is gone. The new wall will start between the windows where all of that brick is missing.

Next time I go to Paducah I’ll take down a few more little walls and start building the new walls right where we (and by “we,” I mean Flora) want them.

House repair

Sail shades for a sunny playground

August 17, 2018 Gary Pardun 2 Comments

For some reason the kids weren’t interested in using the very nice slide in the new playground at the church. Some top-notch detective work revealed that their main complaint was getting their gluteus maximi seared on the way down the slide by the stainless steel that had been baking in the sun all day.

The director, “Sally” (not her real name) asked me for advice on how to solve the problem. My suggestion that they wear thicker pants was not well received. Instead Sally wondered if I could install some sail shades over the playground equipment to ward off the blazing sun.

Sail shades come in a variety of sizes and two main shapes. The triangular ones look like actual sails from a sailboat. I chose the rectangular ones because they cover a lot more area for a given size. For example, a triangular sail shade 12′ on a side will shade only about half of the area that a rectangular sail shade 12′ on a side will cover. This playground required three 13′ x 20′ rectangular shades.

Each corner of the shade needs to be pulled at a 45 degree angle to keep it flat and tight. With three shades that is a total of 12 lines pulling in various directions and this quickly became a complex 3-D geometry problem. My initial thought was to use a program like SketchUp but in addition to the steep learning curve there is the issue of visualizing an intricate 3-D pattern of sails and rope on a 2-D screen and I just didn’t feel I was up to the task.

So I built a model.

I cut out “sails” from some heavy cloth and used string for the ropes. The model made it easy to try different sail orientations and attachment points.

The playground has a large building wall on one side that provides several places to attach some of the ropes. There is also a utility pole directly across from the building at the edge of the playground, which provides some more. But the model showed that these weren’t going to be enough to keep the sails flat and tight. So I added a new pole to the model in the form of a broom handle and adjusted its position until the sails attached to it had the right shape. (It turns out that adding the pole to the model is not enough. You have to actually install the new pole in the real world.)

The model made it easy to try different positions and heights until the playground was shaded and the lines were straight. Then I measured everything on the model and converted it to feet in the real world. A color-coded “map” of the sails and lines became the blueprint for the actual installation.

Since this is near the coast it is important to be able to easily get the sails down in the event of a hurricane and then to put them back up in the correct order and position. A set of colored zip ties makes it almost idiot-proof. At the end of every rope there is a zip tie that matches the zip tie on the wall or pole where it is attached. For example, one sail has a rope with a green zip tie on its metal ring that is attached to a hook in the building wall that also has a green zip tie.

Notice the turnbuckles attaching to the utility pole

The lines connect to the eye hooks on the utility poles with turnbuckles, which allow me to adjust the tension of the sails. I’ve found that the sails tend to stretch a little over time and it is necessary to retie some of the lines so they are a little shorter and then tighten them up with the turnbuckles.

Here is a video comparing the model to reality.

Sally was so pleased with the playground and the cool slide that she has gone into business. Sally sells sail shades by the seashore.

Parts (about $300 total):

Ollieroo Shade Sail UV Block Fabric Patio Outdoor Canopy Sun Shelter

5/16″ Double Braid Polyester Rope Blue/white (about 200′)

Yasorn M8 Open Cup Hook Screw Stainless Steel Expansion Heavy Duty Bolts (screws into building wall)

National Hardware N197-244 V2151 Lag Screw Eye in Stainless Steel (screws into utility pole)

Uxcell a16022600ux0043 M5 x 60mm 201 Stainless Steel Webbing Strapping Welded O Rings (connects rope to hook screw in building wall)

uxcell M8 Stainless Steel 304 Hook & Eye Turnbuckle (connects rope to lag screw eye in pole)

House repair

Paving the way

January 19, 2017 Gary Pardun 3 Comments

When we go house hunting my ever-loving wife, “Daisy” (not her real name) and I draw up a list of requirements for the new house. We divide these requirements into two categories: 1) Desired and 2) Non-negotiables. The list of non-negotiables for our last house was short and realistic:

Not next to an apartment building
Not near a train
Garage and driveway.

I found the perfect house. Unfortunately it was right next to an apartment building, the train ran behind the backyard, and it didn’t have a garage or driveway. By some miracle I convinced (a very skeptical) Daisy we should buy it.

My ever-loving wife also wanted a screen porch but had to settle for an open deck. It finally occurred to me that we could turn the deck into a screen porch that would double as a carport and turn the brick sidewalk along the house into a driveway.

The driveway needed to be “historically compatible” and permeable so that the rainwater would soak into the ground rather than run off and flood our neighborhood. I chose 3 ½” thick, colored pavers from Lowcountry Paver set about ½” apart. Laying the pavers is the easy part. The hard part is giving them a strong foundation, which means digging down through the clay using shovels and pick axes like the inmates at the beginning of “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” Continue reading Paving the way →

House repair, woodworking

Sagging ceiling beam (me up, Scotty)

November 19, 2015 Gary Pardun 1 Comment

A few decades ago the car phone was invented and the car phone antenna held by a magnet to the hood quickly became a status symbol. Not everyone could afford these expensive new phones–but many people wanted to give the impression they could. Some smart entrepreneurs took advantage of the situation and invented the Car Phoney, which was a dummy antenna with a wire that lead nowhere. For a few bucks you could slap an antenna on the hood and draw envious glances from the Joneses.

A decade or so before that it was all the rage to have exposed ceiling beams in the living room. The beams were typically dark-colored against a white ceiling. Real ceiling beams rested on top of the outer walls and held up the rafters of the second floor when there weren’t dividing walls to support the weight.

Again, many people wanted the look–even though the house didn’t need the support. So builders built these long beam-shaped boxes and attached them to the ceiling so that it looked like you had big rugged beams. The key phrase here is “attached them to the ceiling,” which means they were suspended from the ceiling rather than holding it up.

My parents’ living room ceiling had a pair of these pseudo-beams. They (the beams, not my parents) were clad in that rough sawn wood that was popular back in the 70s.

Picture what is going on. You’ve got two heavy beams, whose ends are not supported, hanging from a bunch of heavy rafters. Take a wild guess what is going to happen.

It did.

Old heavy things sag. That is just the way it is. For confirmation we need look no farther than my ever-loving wife, “Maggie” (not her real name), of 40-ish years. By that I mean of course that the bed and couch and stuffed chairs we got when we were first married have all started sagging over time. Age and gravity conspire to bring everything down–like the ceiling beams in my parents’ old house.

Fortunately only one end of the beams separated from the ceiling joists they were nailed to. There was a 2″ gap between the ends of the beams and the ceiling.

Landscape timber and a hydraulic jack pushing the ceiling beam back up.

I put a landscape timber between a hydraulic jack and a wood plate at the end of the beam and started pumping. The ceiling creaked and groaned as it went up but it didn’t crack. After propping that beam up with another landscape timber I jacked up the other beam.

My first attempt to fix the problem was to go in the attic above the ceiling and mount some large angle brackets to the end joist (or so I thought) and some framing around the fireplace. When I released the jack, the beams sank right back down. Apparently the joist I needed to support was the next one over and there was nothing to attach the angle bracket to on that one. Strike one.

For the second try I bought some sturdy-looking metal bookshelf brackets. After jacking up the beams again I drilled some holes into the brick of the fireplace and screwed the brackets into the brick. This time when I released the jacks, the beams … wait for it … sank down again. The very attractive rough sawn boards cladding the pseudo beam weren’t attached to anything solid and the shelf brackets pushed up the middle of the board when the weight of the ceiling pushed the pseudo beam down. Strike two.

I clearly needed a support as wide as the pseudo beam (unlike the narrow shelf bracket) so that it could distribute the weight evenly. The local Big Box store had some pre-cut pieces of oak called “plinth blocks.” They are used to join two large pieces of molding without miter joints.

Rosette clamped to plinth block for marking and drilling

For my third (and as it turned out final) attempt I bought a couple of plinth blocks I could screw to the brick wall that would hold up the beams. Since I didn’t want the screws to show, I also bought a pair of rosettes to cover them. Before drilling, I positioned the rosette on the block and marked three holes it would cover up. I used flat-head screws and countersunk the holes so that the rosette would fit tight to the block.

Three screw holes drilled and drilling a nail hole at an angle to hang the rosette

To hide the fastener that would hold the rosette to the plinth block I drilled a hole for a small finish nail from the back of the block and halfway into the rosette. This would allow the rosette to hang on the (invisible) nail after the block was screwed to the wall.

After jacking up the beams yet again, I marked the holes for each plinth block on the brick and used a masonry bit to drill holes in the brick for the plastic screw anchors.

Inserting plastic anchors in the brick for the screws

With the nail pushed through the back of the block so that the point stuck out about 1/2″ I screwed the block to the wall.

Block mounted to brick wall. Notice the nail point sticking out under the top screw.

Mounting the rosette was simply a matter of aligning the nail hole on its back with the point sticking out of the block. I considered using some double-sided tape to hold the rosette to the block or to keep it centered but it wasn’t needed in this case.

I might or might not admit to holding my breath as I released the jack to lower the beam onto the block to see if it would hold. But it did. And I exhaled.

Finished plinth block and rosette supporting the ceiling beam

Some dark stain on the new wood made it all blend together with the other wood in the room. The blocks are both functional and aesthetic. The Joneses are going to have a hard time keeping up. But it won’t be nearly as hard as the time I accidentally called my ever-loving wife “Saggie.” Trust me, you need more than a hydraulic jack to get up from the floor after a slip like that.

House repair, kitchen appliances, plumbing

Straining to do the dishes (and the coffee)

June 23, 2015 Gary Pardun Leave a comment

My ever-loving wife, “Skippy” (not her real name), likes to move. Move, as in from one house to another and one state to another. She got this endearing quirk by growing up in a family that moved frequently. She claims it had nothing to do with running from the law or staying ahead of bill collectors and I believe her. Really.

So we move a lot. It’s in her blood.

One advantage of moving into new houses every few years is the appliances are always new. The A/C is new. The stove is new. The dishwasher is new. Everything works like new because it is new. I conveniently forget that things wear out–especially if you don’t perform regular (ugh) maintenance. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is the easiest policy. (I know a guy whose motto is, “If it ain’t broke, keep fixing it until it is,” but I wouldn’t recommend that approach.)

We lived in one new house a couple of years too long. I learned the hard (expensive) way that you really are supposed to have the A/C serviced twice a year. The compressor burned out and we had to buy a whole new air conditioner. If we had just moved a year earlier ….

In our current house (of about 7 years) the dishes didn’t seem as clean as they could be. Right up front I want to say that it wasn’t Skippy’s fault. She did in fact put the dishes in the dishwasher (yes, with soap) and turn it on. But they came out a little hazy-looking.

So I pulled out the lower dish rack and cleaned out a few bits of food in the bottom of the dishwasher where the dirty water goes down the drain. Some dishwashers have a little plastic screen over the drain for trapping the gunk that you just pop out and rinse off in the sink. But this was a Bosch and it had a screw-in cylinder screen, which I had never seen before.

I took it out and looked at it closely and saw that a lot of the screen was plugged with a filmy layer. Continue reading Straining to do the dishes (and the coffee) →

House repair

Watching Mr. Ed

May 14, 2015 Gary Pardun 4 Comments

Being a computer guy I try to keep up with modern gadgets but I had no experience with surveillance cameras–excluding appearing in any video footage submitted as evidence in any court case for an alleged crime. We had been having trouble with the toilet paper being switched around from unrolling off the front to unrolling off the back. Apparently someone was breaking in at night and switching it around. This was a perfect opportunity to try out a new surveillance camera by mounting it near the bathroom ceiling focused on the toilet paper and catch the culprit in the act. When I shared my brainstorm with my ever-loving wife, “Prissy” (not her real name), she was not as enthusiastic as I had hoped.

Fortunately, but sadly, another opportunity arose.

Our neighbors, Nick and Gilda, have a little horse farm and when Gilda found an oily substance in the water bucket and around a horse’s mouth and some horses in the adjacent farm died under suspicious circumstances they decided it would be a good idea to install a surveillance camera to keep an eye on the stalls and watch for any miscreants. I jumped at the opportunity.

Since the horse farm was a few miles away from their house, they needed a camera they could view remotely over the web. I chose the Foscam FI9821W v2.1 for its reasonable price and combination of features. That has proven to be a nightmare. Continue reading Watching Mr. Ed →

House repair, plumbing

Royal (water heater) flush

March 5, 2015 Gary Pardun Leave a comment

The hot water in the shower seemed to be kind of wimpy, which is to say that it wasn’t very hot. The temperature ranged all the way from lukewarm on the one extreme to tepid on the other. My ever-loving wife, “Paris” (not her real name), is not one to complain but she made it clear that it was not up to “Hilton” standards. I turned up the temperature dial on both water heaters from the “A” position to the “B” position and then to the “C” position but it didn’t make much difference. Every once in awhile, the shower would put out a brief burst of water that was actually hot. This made me think there must be a blockage somewhere in the hot water pipes or the water heaters.

I did a little reading on the subject and apparently you are supposed to drain hot water heaters once a year to flush out the sediment and corrosion in the bottom of the tank. I calculated my water heater flush rate: number of years in house: 5; number of times flushed: 0.

I was a bit behind schedule. Continue reading Royal (water heater) flush →

House repair, plumbing

Overzealous kitchen faucet sprayer

February 7, 2015 Gary Pardun 2 Comments

So I was down in the carport, which is under the house, minding my own business when I noticed water dripping on the sheets of MDF for my new workshop. I ran up stairs to the kitchen where my ever-loving wife, “Hazel” (not her real name), was cleaning up the dishes. “Something’s leaking!” I announced in my this-is-serious-but-do-not-be-excessively-alarmed voice. Hazel had been unaware of the problem because the sink and faucet looked fine but when I opened the door under the sink we were looking at the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Old faucet — The old faucet doesn’t look so bad but …

After taking out the soggy contents of the sink cabinet and sopping up the water we figured out that the faucet leaked only when it was turned on and only under the sink. I pulled out the sprayer, which is on a flexible stainless steel hose, and made sure the hose was screwed on tightly to the sprayer because recently the faucet was leaking a little and that was the reason. When I turned on the faucet, it looked like the water was spraying out of the middle of the hose, which I have to admit I’ve never seen before.

I shut off the water supply, disconnected both ends of the hose, and then sawed off the connector on one end so I could pull out the rubber tubing inside.

Old leaky pullout hose with one connector cut off — Old leaky pull-out hose with one connector cut off

As you can see in the next photo, it had a good-sized hole in it. This faucet was about 9 years old and the hose saw relatively little use. (I am in no way saying Hazel doesn’t use the kitchen sink very often. She does the dishes and cleans up just as often as any other American housewife. She just doesn’t pull out the sprayer excessively when she uses the faucet. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.)

Apparently these hoses fail pretty often because the Big Box stores carry replacement hoses that you can put in fairly easily. It wasn’t too hard to imagine some other part failing on that aging faucet in the near future so I bought a new faucet instead. Besides, I’ve never gotten in trouble for buying something new for my ever-loving wife’s kitchen.

Tools for installing a faucet. The faucet wrench is on the right with the red handle.

Getting out the old faucet is not rocket surgery but it can be tricky because there is no room to work. To get the nut off that holds the faucet in place you really need a special faucet wrench, which is shown in the photo. You put the jaws around the nut and then twist the handle to unscrew it.

New faucet with top ring slid up over the tubes. The plastic and metal washers and the big nut on the counter will be slid up from below after the faucet is inserted.

I gently pressed the tubes of the new faucet together so I could slide on the top ring and feed the tubes through the hole in the counter top. Then underneath the sink I slid the big washers and nut over the faucet tubes and tightened the nut to hold the faucet in place. This is where it would have been helpful to have an assistant to hold the faucet from above to keep it from turning as I tightened the big nut with the faucet wrench. Unfortunately, my ever-loving wife was unavailable at the time and I had to prairie dog it: go under the sink, tighten a little, come back out and turn the faucet straight, back down under the sink, tighten, …

Faucet connections. It's a bit crowded under there. — Faucet connections. It’s a bit crowded under there.

Hooking up the water supply tubes to the faucet tubes is not difficult–if the tubes are long enough. The tubes on the new faucet were shorter than the old faucet, which meant that the supply tubes didn’t reach. The tubes on the faucet are different lengths so that their connectors don’t hit when you feed them down the hole in the counter top. I took the longer supply tube and connected it to the longer faucet tube. Since I didn’t want to make another trip to Lowe’s right away, I “appropriated” a longer supply tube from another sink that we don’t use very often.

I have since read that it is a good idea to replace the supply tubes when you replace the faucet because they do wear out and leak. Get a handful of sizes of the braided tubes when you buy the faucet and then return the ones you don’t need. Saves trips to the store.

The old faucet used two holes in the counter top (one for the handle and one for the spout) but the new faucet uses only one. So instead of replacing the old soap dispenser with the new, I decided to install the new soap dispenser in the hole next to the faucet and leave the old one in the outside corner of the sink: one for dish soap and the other for hand soap.

Hazel is happy with the new faucet because it is stylish and easy to use. (Did I mention that she frequently washes dishes? Multiple times a week, I’d say.) I’m happy because my lumber isn’t sitting under Niagara Falls.

electrical, House repair, sealing leaks

Whence come the roaches?

January 22, 2015 Gary Pardun Leave a comment

Whenever we returned to the beach house after being gone for several days we would find a handful of mostly dead (in “The Princess Bride” sense) roaches scattered about. Where were they coming from? I caulked or foamed every crack I could find. Fortunately, my ever-loving wife, “Rochelle” (not her real name) was patient and cut me some slack because she knew I was really trying. (Not to be confused with the phrase, “He can be really trying,” which means something else entirely. I’m pretty sure I heard Rochie correctly but now I’m starting wonder if I was listening carefully.)

Plumbers and electricians like to drill holes. Lots of holes. The licensing test for plumbers has two questions:

Can you glue PVC pipe?
Can you drill a hole?

If yes, here is your license.

For electricians the questions are different:

Can you strip Romex cable?
Can you drill a hole?

Here’s your license.

Notice there isn’t a third question: Can you seal the hole? So although they are both good at drilling holes, the answer to that one is typically, “Not so much.”

Dryer vent in wall and floor needs to be sealed

In the pantry I found a dryer duct going into the floor that had enough space around it for a squirrel to get through along with a year’s supply of nuts so I foamed around that baby to slow down the varmint traffic. But still the roaches came.

I foamed the holes around the water pipes in the sink cabinets in the kitchen and all of the bathrooms. Still they came.

In the attic, I foamed the wiring holes that go into the tops of the walls. I caulked around the outside doors. It didn’t slow them down.

I pulled out the kitchen stove and foamed the openings in the floor underneath the stove. Same for the refrigerator. I squirted little puddles of roach bait poison in corners and by the doors. They are supposed to take the poison back to the nest so that the whole colony is wiped out. Maybe the roaches can’t read the instructions or they purposely flaunt them but that didn’t work either.

Then one day my ever-loving wife said she saw a roach on the countertop that scooted off and disappeared under the edge of the countertop. I looked up under there but couldn’t see where it had gone so I took out the top drawer to get a better look. (The drawer slides on each side have a little plastic lever that releases the drawer.) Nothing obvious so I figured it must have gone down behind the other drawers so I took them out too. Eureka! The answer was blindingly obvious.

The electrician had drilled a hole in the base of the cabinet to run a wire for the outlets. Oh, and I’m sure he sealed the hole. NOT! I was staring at a roach superhighway. The whole roach contingent could have crawled out of there side by side in parade formation. It was now clear that the little black dots in the drawers were roach rest areas when they needed to take a break from the highway.

Roach superhighway in cabinet bottom and through subfloor

Not only was there a hole in the bottom of the cabinet but there was another hole in the subfloor below it. Taking advantage of a more-or-less direct line to the roach hoard, I shot some poison down both holes.

Then I foamed the subfloor hole by sticking the Great Stuff gun down the cabinet hole. Did I mention it was a large hole? Then I foamed the hole in the cabinet bottom and replaced the drawers.

Result? No more roaches.

Sometimes I like to imagine the puzzled look on their stupid little faces when the survivors, if any, bump into all of that foam. What the …? It warms the cockles of my heart, if I have any, which I doubt because I tried to pay attention in school and I have no recollection of any mention of “cockles” when we were learning about hearts.

Gary's Fix

Category Archives: House repair

Carriage House – episode 2

Carriage House – episode 1

Sail shades for a sunny playground

Paving the way

Sagging ceiling beam (me up, Scotty)

Straining to do the dishes (and the coffee)

Watching Mr. Ed

Royal (water heater) flush

Overzealous kitchen faucet sprayer

Whence come the roaches?

Upgrade Your House and Have Fun Doing It