Face First

Clearly, I didn't read the part of the jigsaw manual about not putting your face four inches from the blade. My beautiful face and I are fine, though, and our new cornhole boards are coming out great.

Bush Yanking

Up until recently (that’s foreshadowing, folks!), we had some of those stereotypical evergreen bushes lurking around our back deck. You know the kind: the classic hedge bush that’s kind of like a soft Christmas tree? Dark green but it grows those bright green shoots that festively announce to everyone that you’re taking a vacation from caring about your property? Not ringing a bell? Here’s a picture:

Erin had been talking about getting rid of them for a long time, so as someone who tries to “tune in” to things that his wife says more than once, since it must be important, I decided two weeks ago it was time to act. Though we had talked about hiring a tree company to take them out, I was too ashamed to call one, worried they might think that was a little beneath them, these being mere bushes and all.

Thus, it fell to us to do it ourselves. There was the option to painstakingly dig the entire thing out, which I figured would take months for each bush. Luckily, there was a faster, more exciting way, claimed every guy with a pickup truck we know.  Each of them encouraged me to wrap a chain around the trunk, hook the chain up to the back of my truck, and “pop those f[lat-needle bear]ers out!”  They all seemed very excited at the prospect.

When I looked into this more online, though, I saw several webpages talking about how dangerous this technique can be-- the chain can snap, hitting people or shattering your back window. Now, when the Internet, the most reckless person I know, is counseling me to beware, I tend to listen. But on about page 10 of the Google results, I started seeing testimonials/gloating from people who had tried and succeeded, or at least not been injured so badly that they were unable to post on message boards about it. I was sold. For example, one of the pages I saw mentioned that you should soak the ground beforehand; it would loosen up the soil around the roots and help the bush come out easier.  The page did caution the reader to apply tension to the chain slowly-- do NOT “pop” the bush out!

One Saturday night, we decided to try it the following evening, after our daughters went to bed. I didn’t want our girls to see mommy or daddy get their fool heads knocked in by a flying chain, or see their old man take down a load-bearing beam in the barn if the bush suddenly gave way, causing the truck to comically peel out of control.

It sounds stupid, but all day Sunday I had this nervous energy; the stupid Internet had made me pretty apprehensive about this thing, but I was also really excited to try it. I couldn’t wait to put the girls to bed and meet my destiny.

Finally, it was go time.

Keep your grill close, but your leather gloves closer (e.g., on your rear bumper)

I wrapped the chain around the trunk, hooked it to the back of truck, and had Erin stand way back to direct me to ease forward until the chain was tight, at which point I would slowly start pulling. We started the first pull and-- nothing. The back end of the truck started sliding sideways (the tires are pretty bald), further ripping up our lawn but not moving the bush even an inch. I got out to take a look. As it turned out, the chain was digging into the trunk and slowly cutting through it. The ground was a muddy soup, from all that fruitless root soaking I had done, but what did I have to show for it? Muddy jeans, that’s what, because I had to get in there and re-adjust the chain. I had pictured these bushes slipping out of the ground just as easy as can be, like pulling an old man’s teeth, but it was turning more into a horribly botched root canal, where the patient’s tooth has grown into the bone and he wakes up mid-surgery, screaming, because you're a horrible dentist.

After poking around in the soil, I decided to try to cut through some of the roots, hoping that would help. It was a painstaking operation, carefully removing dirt to expose each root before cutting through it with loppers, which, if you didn’t know, immediately voids your Lopper Warranty.

What the hell had happened? When I decided to recklessly rip these bushes out with a truck, I fancied myself an ironic cowboy, or at least a cool redneck-- in short, someone who would never use the term “fancied myself.” Instead, I ended up more like an archaeologist, and not the cool kind like Indiana Jones. This was supposed to be easier than the alternative, but here I was soaked in sweat.

Once I had cut through as many roots as I could find, we tried another cautious pull. Still no success, though now the bush was at least flinching a little bit. Luckily, I still had one more ill-advised trick up my sleeve-- the dangerous “popping” technique that everyone on the Internet had warned against! I told Erin to back up even further, told her I loved her for possibly the last time, and got a very slow running start. With a sickening lurch when the chain tightened, the bush popped right out. It wasn’t exactly like pulling an old man’s tooth; more like tying a kid’s tooth to a string attached to a doorknob and slamming it, except you tied it to the wrong tooth. In any event, the bush was out.

Bush hole. That log on the left has nothing to do with the bush; I was using it as a lever when I was trying to pry out the bush and--actually, you know what? I don’t have to explain myself to you.

We repeated the process for all of the other bushes, each seemingly having a more complex root system than the last. As anyone who's ever been around me after I've drank one or more beers knows, I worked in a tobacco field when I was a teenager, and this seemed harder than that. After the first bush, there were no other unexpected surprises, except when Erin accidentally uncapped a weird tube she found that may or may not have been connected to our septic tank.

Anyway, we didn’t die, and that’s a success in my book.

Built-ins: Conclusion

This is Part 3 of an occasional series on built-ins. You can also read Part 1 and Part 2.

When we left off, it was the end of day 2 of the built-ins project, also known as Sunday. We still had a lot to do, namely, making the tops of all of the boxes and adding the decorative fireplace elements to the bookcase side, as well as scribing that side to the wall. We also had a few random things to do, like building a box for the electrical outlet to be installed in the bottom of the entertainment center. But we had run out of weekend.

 Paul graciously offered to come up a few days later on Wednesday to finish it up, and I heroically skipped that day of work. We started early and soon had the tops of the right two boxes done. The only real crisis point of the day came when we both got hungry around 11:00 or so: do we suffer until lunch, eat a late breakfast, or say to hell with the conventional lunch hour and get a bacon chipotle cheddar cheesburger thing from Burger King? Need a hint? I don’t take care of my body! So burger for me, while Paul opted for the late breakfast sandwich from Dunkin Donuts.

 Fueled by grease, we finished up 99% of what was left that day. Paul actually came back the next morning by himself to do the outlet box. But in the meantime, we headed back to the old place to see Erin and the girls and drink some whiskey to toast our successful project, then a few more glasses for good measure. Thanks again, Paul. I learned a lot and really enjoyed spending the time working with you on this project.

 In the following few days, Erin painted the entire thing (I pretended to help with one of them for a few minutes once) and I made the shelves to go inside the entertainment center and the fireplace side. The whole thing came out great if I do say so myself, which I do since I can take very little of the credit (not even the photo credit for this picture):

Photo: Erin Harris

Fixing a Hole

How to repair a shower that’s leaking into the laundry room below.

1. Squint up at the exposed tub enclosure from below. For a long time. Aim a flashlight up there. Mutter. Position a bucket underneath the steady drip of water and hope it’s just condensation or something. It’s been pretty humid out.
2. It’s not condensation. And it’s leaking a lot more now. Conclude, based on a “gut feeling,” that the problem is the diverter, nestled in the wall behind the shower. (IMPORTANT: Get your spouse on board with this finding. It’s definitely the diverter.)
3. Get out your sheetrock saw and start indiscriminately cutting into that wall behind the diverter. Make sure to make the hole big enough!
   
4. The diverter is bone dry. It wasn’t the diverter, you now realize. Stare despondently out the window, into the fading twilight, at your goddamned patchy yard.
   
5. And anyway, what if it was the diverter? What were you going to do about it? What, are you a plumber now?
6. It has to be the diverter. You just cut that big hole, which is going to be a huge pain in the ass to patch, and it’s not like you don’t have a million other things to do around here. Feel the diverter. Does it feel wet? Or is it just cold from the water inside? You can’t tell! Ask someone to come feel this. Say, “well, I know--that’s what I thought too, but it looks dusty and dry.”
7. It’s definitely not that kick stop drain you put in, you know that for sure.
8. Calm down, you just need to isolate where the leak is coming from. Run the tub into another bucket, so that the water doesn’t go down the drain. Run downstairs and look for a leak. Go back upstairs. Leave the tub off, but now dump the bucket of water down the drain.
9. You still can’t tell where it’s coming from. Keep putting water into buckets and dumping them out. You’re sick of running up and down the stairs now, so just yell “is it leaking?” Then, “did you say ‘yeah’ or ‘nah’?”
10. Well, it doesn’t help that there’s a huge gap between the tub spout and the wall, and that the underside of the spout is so gunked up with minerals and mold and other junk that the water is just running right down the underside and into the wall.
    
11. Wait, your daughters’ beautiful faces were like inches away from that spout when you were giving them all those baths, remember?
12. Go to the store, buy a strap wrench, and the wrong spout. They didn’t have the exact right one but you figure you might be able to make this other one work. You can’t. Go to a different store and get the right one.
13. Remove the old spout with the strap wrench. Put a fat roll of plumber’s putty on the back of a decorative ring (which you should have bought at one of those stores), and slide it over the water pipe. Put the new spout on and tighten with the strap wrench, which you’ll never use again because won’t need it for a while and when you do, you’ll buy a new one because you’ll have forgotten that you had to buy one for this project.
    
14. Put a bead of caulk around the diverter handle plate and the temperature control plates. Because you’re still not convinced that the diverter is 100% innocent in all of this.
    
15. The caulking tube says to let it dry overnight, but give your kids a bath a couple of hours later anyway. Keep asking them to not splash.
16. Leave the bucket in place for a week, because you’re still not convinced it’s not leaking anymore. But it’s not. I guess you fixed it, hopefully.
17. (Optional) Vacuum up the dust from step 4. Keep talking about how you need to patch that hole up sometime soon.

It’s just that simple!

Built-ins: Part 2

This is Part 2 of an occasional series on built-ins. Part 1 is here.

By the end of the first day, we had built and fit the boxes for the entertainment center (right) and window seat (center). The boxes themselves are made from 3/4" hardwood plywood, and trimmed with 1x1", 1x2", and 1x3" poplar.  The only disadvantage there is that for some reason I have it in my head that it's pronounced "POPE-lar," so now I have to be hyper-vigilant for the rest of my life (assuming, as I do, that these built-ins will long outlive me). If anyone ever comes to visit and--attempting small talk to ease the oppressive tension from some unforgivable gaffe I've committed--asks what kind of wood we used for the trim, I'll want to be able to answer "POP-lar, and, by the way, I'm so sorry about earlier."

We also had scribed the trim on the righthand side so that it would join with the baseboard trim. Though we could have cut out a section of the baseboard trim, that seemed a little unnecessarily permanent and irreversible. Who knows? Maybe placing televisions on top of things and people sitting under windows will be relics of a bygone era soon. You certainly never saw those things on The Jetsons, which I still think generally got things right.

Also, Paul insisted on sleeping next to the built-ins that first night, to "protect the structure from vandals."

"I'm just resting my eyes."

Just kidding. He's actually checking to see if the boxes fit well together, which they do perfectly. And far from sleeping, Paul led the whole project smoothly and expertly. I learned a lot just by watching him and following his lead. But there were other times where I apparently just stared off into space like an idiot, totally missing whatever he was doing:

You're blowing this, Harris.

When I wasn't having full-blown mental lapses, though, I managed to make myself useful. Here I am using the Kregg jig to make pocket holes in a piece of trim to be used on the window seat.

By the end of day 2, the fireplace was also starting to take shape.

Flush

Before we bought the house, we arranged to have some plumbing work done. Over time, the toilets, like aging hippies, had embraced the eco-friendly, “low flow” ethos to an absurd degree. There were also issues with the hot water and the drains in the tub. With two little girls who spend much of the day covering themselves in food, dirt, and magic marker, this just wouldn't do.

We agreed to use the same plumbers the previous owner had used. I guess people do this because we assume that, despite visiting hundreds of houses in the area, these guys remember the little idiosyncracies of each house, which will of course save time and money over someone who has to “get up to speed” with your particular sink. That seems rather presumptuous of us as homeowners, secretly proud of our unique pipes and deceptively simple spigots.

The job had been quoted several weeks earlier by someone who wasn’t there the day the work was actually done. It ended up taking a few hours longer than expected, and I gathered from several hushed phone arguments that the estimator had somewhat underestimated the work involved. Nonetheless, they stuck to the original quote, and were consummate professionals, never once making the easy “we’re taking a bath on this job” pun.

They were, however, anxious to wrap up and get out of there by the end, so some things weren’t perfect. For example, the new toilets ran incessantly. I did my best to tinker with the mechanism inside, returning regularly to turn screws a half-turn and tighten plastic things. After a few days of this patient, trial and error approach, my father-in-law Paul showed up and simply bent the rod holding the floating ball slightly, fixing it instantly. (A few days later, I was walking through the house and heard water running somewhere. My heart sank, until I realized it was the pipes leading to the sprinkler running outside.)

Another thing the plumbers did was install new drain stoppers in the bathtubs. The old lever-style ones no longer moved, so they asked if we were okay with a “toe kick” style drain stopper, the kind where you just push it down to close the drain and push it down again to open it, kind of like a retractable pen. We told them that was fine.

After Erin gave the girls a bath the first time, though, she told me that the stopper wasn’t working and the water was draining out. I asked every question I could think of.

“Did you push it down?” I asked.

“Yup,” she said.

I was stumped, but was busy with something else and forgot to go take a look. The next day, she told me the same thing had happened.

“Don’t forget, you have to push it down,” I offered hopefully. She assured me she had, and it seemed we were at an impasse. But unlike our ongoing, impassioned “it’s too hot in here”/“I think it’s fine” debate, maybe there was a simple answer to this one.

I went upstairs to check out the situation. I wasn’t really sure how to adjust the stopper, so I just started twisting it counterclockwise.

Sure enough, the whole thing came unscrewed and pulled out of the drain. That’s when I realized the top unscrewed, revealing an adjustment screw. Perfect! I grabbed a screwdriver and had that tub holding water in no time.

Screwdriver in hand, and somewhat emboldened by my success, I wondered what else I could tighten. Surely there must be a loose screw somewhere! The screwdriver and I roved the house, and it didn’t take long to find our next victim, a loose cabinet handle.

Before

We taught that screw the meaning of the phrase “tighten until flush.”

After

And just like that, the tightening spree was over.

Built-ins: Part 1

As I mentioned previously, I decided a while back to try to construct some built-ins for the new house. The only problem is that I had no idea how to go about doing that.

Our sister-in-law, Tif, is an interior designer and had some great ideas.  She sent us this sketch, calling for a television stand on the right, a window seat in the middle, and a bookcase outfitted with a faux fireplace mantle on the left. 

A guy who knew what he was doing would probably translate this sketch into a plan with measurements and whatnot, but I'm not that guy. At one point, Erin's dad, Paul, asked if we had come up with any plans. I just sent him the sketch. Probably imagining his granddaughters being trapped under a pile of collapsed plywood covered in saw marks and stray nail holes, he kindly offered to help with the construction.

He and Erin's mother, Karon, came up this past Friday and spent the entire weekend helping us. Erin and Karon did a ton of painting (more on that later), while Paul and I tackled the built-ins.

We loaded up on lumber on Friday night, and got started early Saturday morning. The first order of business was me learning what a "kick space" is. The next order of business was building a frame for the boxes to sit on to create a kick space.