Monday, July 27, 2009

Husband Hijack 7: House Projects!

I'm baaaaaaaack! I've been busy doing some projects around the house the last couple weekends. So here's the rundown:

Project #1: New Storm Door
I have a love/hate relationship with this thing. I'm not going to get into the details on this one or it will make this post 10 pages long, so lets just say that not a single piece out of the box fit our door jam, so I ended up basically custom fitting/cutting every piece all the way to the finish. A door that should have taken maybe an hour or two ended up taking around 3-4 hours to get in. In the end though, it looks great, fits great, and works!
The view from the lawn

Project #2: New Wet Bar Sink
OK, this one was easy. This sink had been leaking a while back and was shut off. Finally got around to changing it out. Simple swap out of the flex connections from the wall and a swap of the fixture and it was done! Ended up looking pretty good!

See? Looks good!
Project #3: Entryway bathroom sink
This sink was a royal pain in my butt. This sink was also leaking like the wet bar one, so it had been shut off. Changing this one was not so much fun... The biggest pain was the p-trap. First, it wasn't the right size, then the fittings leaked, then I realized I needed an extension of the drain pipe to make it work, then the fittings still leaked, the the trap wouldn't seal around the drain pipe included in the fixture. So after hours of toying with it, I finally got the drain piping sealed and working.
Next was the plunger. Did this work? Heck no! The bottom portion of the part that joins the plunger to the handle under the sink was hitting the drain piping. Ugh. But I said, "you know what? screw it!" So I just moved it off to the side and it works just fine, albeit at an angle.
After that was the water piping. Was this smooth sailing? Psshh, yeah right! The piping that was installed before, when the house was built, was a little leaky now. Also, the pipe that went from the shut off valve to the piping at the fixture was an old accordian-type metal flex tubing. Well, it didn't work with the new fixture, and because it was built into the valve body, I had to swap out the valves as well. Basically, I had to end up replacing everything from the copper tubing at the wall and on. After some good practice with choice words from the english language, the whole thing was done. Eventually, we will replace this sink (and flooring) with a new vanity, but this was a good change so that we can at least use the sink now.
New valve, supply pipes, and drain pipes

New sink in place

Project #4: Front door lighting and painting
Jamie finished painting the front door trim white. I think it looks great! I ended up changing out the light fixture around the door. I'm very happy with the way everything turned out. The lights had very few hitches on there install. Really the only thing was that the mouting bracket for the fixture did not line up at all with the J-box in the wall. So I improvised and used some wood screws to mount the bracket to the exterior wall and get the fixture screws out of the way of the J-box so that they sat were able to be screwed down properly.

Not bad huh?
Project ?: Failed computer
My old computer in the music room failed this last weekend (and with it. When I say failed, it was catastrophic. Motherboard overheated and I lost some caps (still trying to figure this one out) and hard drive total failure (the needle is grinding the platters if you turn it on). So an upcoming project for me will be to build a new music room computer that I plan to make look both sleek and have some sweet case lighting/windows/mods, as well as have some speed to last a good while. You might see this build start in the coming weeks.
Finally, I've got some more projects on the way including changing the entryway chandelier, swapping more wall plates and switches, and changing the necessary electrical parts to get our light post in the front lawn working again. Be back soon!

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