Home Repairs - Nothing Is Easy When You Have My Luck

So I finally got the spare bedroom painted. Took about 4 weekends of my spare time. That is okay - no hurry here. It looks pretty good. I also took up the old carpet today, and when I saw the old floor underneath, I figured I'll have to sand it, then refinish it. That will not be the easiest thing to do, but not too hard.

Of course, with a house it is one thing after another. About a week or so ago, I tried to change the handle on the upstairs throne. As my luck and ineptness would have it, I broke the side of the toilet tank doing so. Luckily for me above the water line; but it is ruined. It needs replacing, but it is so old I cannot find a match. So after a week or week and a half of it being usable but broken, I took off the tank and tried to line up a new one. No go. So that left me with needing to replace the whole toilet and tank. Okay, I took off the old toilet too. Then there it was a major problem, at least for me who am no plumber. The brass flange to which the base of the throne attaches is cracked. It seems the knuckleheads who put in my new bathroom 14 years ago placed the tile floor atop the old tile floor. When they left the hole for the toilet, they made it too wide. Instead of the flange having floor under it to support it, they attached the flange to the drain pipe and left the edges of it in thin air. Well the toilet and floor must have settled causing the brass flange to crack. I imagine I could just put everything back atop it, but all the books I've read and advice I have been given is to have a new flange installed. While I am sure this would be a major job for me, I am hopeful it will be easy for the plumber I am calling on Monday. My guess though is it will be a major job for him just to remove the old one without cracking the drain pipe. I can only hope they get it done easily and inexpensively. Then I can put in the new toilet myself, or maybe may as well have them do it since that job will take all of a half hour more at most.

I have to say, it really sucks because all was going well, in fact better than I had expected, until I saw the crack. I had thought it would be tougher to do under normal circumstances, but replacing the loo would actually have been an easy job if there were no surprise problems like the cracked flange. Oh well, a house is, I suppose, a pit into which to throw money. I just wish I had the money. If it was not for my own personal black cloud following me around, maybe it would be less expensive. As it is though, I really am getting better at doing things around the homestead despite this most recent screwup.

I had other things to keep me busy today too, like moving the paving stones from under my oak tree. The tree is coming down next Wednesday. I was supposed to have it down weeks ago but the tree service guy never showed up. I got a new guy, at almost double the price, and he still is less than all the others I have called except for the bum guy who did not show. Then I did some spraying for ants/termites. Hopefully I don't have any in the house, but I sprayed all around it for a protective barrier. Those carpenter ants and termites can be nasty even in a brick house to what wood there is, especially the beams.

Now I am going to go out and do some gardening. The broccoli is coming in nicely, the lettuce has been unused and thus wasted by the wife, the cabbage looks good, and the tomato plants have been better in previous years. If I am lucky I'll find some ripe strawberries. Only had a few last year, but this year they are coming in strong. As for the pepper plants Mimi, the latest mutt in the house, dug em all up. I am learning, sprayed some hot pepper sauce in the garden and the digging sure has subsided. Next time though only on the soil as it really ruined some of the leaves on some of the plants.

Later for you.

All the best,
GB

I Started Painting...

...the small bedroom about a week ago. Well, not really painting, but opening and cleaning out cracks, then plastering. I did more of it yesterday,sanding (thank the gods for a good dust mask), then a second coat of spackle where needed. Then more sanding today, then vacuuming up the mess. After that I washed the walls and ceiling, just a rinse really. Then I taped up all the molding. Then I realized, holy horse feathers, some of the cracks were still not fully filled in with spackle. So a finishing touch with the spackle.

Before I started all this today, I tried to replace the handle on the upstairs toilet. Gave a turn of the nut to take it off, and wham the side of the toilet tank broke off. Thank goodness only above the water line. It looks like it must have been cracked there somehow, maybe however the handle got busted put the crack in the tank. I wonder. Did not matter, because I needed to think about replacing either the tank or the whole shebang. I opted for the tank, but the guy at Home Depot told me the tank size is no longer made. I find that hard to believe - I mean that a tank today will not fit on a toilet of old, if only because all the other holes, as in the ones to attach the bowl to the floor, the flush hole, the valve hole, remain standard sized throughout the years. So I hemmed and hawed and just bought some painting supplies. I figure I'll check better on the tank size, maybe go to a plumbing supply store and see if I can get just the tank. It would be a whole lot easier to fix that.

On the way home from HD, I stopped at the local supermarket. I picked up a couple of lamb chops, a 12 pack of St. Pauli Girl, and some cherry flavored seltzer (great with vodka). The chops went down on the grill right after I got home, and a couple of beers soon followed the chops down my gullet. Then back up to the room to get done what I outlined above. Right now, over another St. Pauli Girl, I am here typing this, and waiting for the spot jobs of spackling to dry. I figure about an hour or two. I'll get that sanded and then its primer/sealer time. Hopefully I get the whole room, really more like a jail cell, done tonight with the primer/sealer, then tomorrow I'll put on the paint. The wife wanted lime green, and I got something between the outside and inside colors of a lime. Green for the walls, white for the ceiling. I think it is disgusting, she has not seen it yet. I hope she likes it. Really though, I figure once on the walls, with the stained woodwork trim, it will look nice.

Wait a minute. What was that? I think I hear a duetches frauline calling me, a St. Pauli Girl at that. Time for another cold one; later for you.

All the best,
Glenn B

That Southern Light...

...is just too harsh to do the unevenly painted walls justice in this snapshot. Yet, look closely and revealed to your eyes will be the darker and lighter areas, the runs (in the paint), the blotches, the roller marks, the forgotten patches of white, a mess, a disgruntled artist in the making, and a yellow ladder, all in there somewhere. Somehow I just don't know if they would have seen this as artistic subject matter, but you can never tell now since Vincent painted subjects that had pretty much never before been seen on the artist's canvass. Now if you are unaware as to that of which I make reference, see the post directly below this one.

All the best,
Glenn B

Painting...

...is for me not a form so much of art as it is a necessity to keep the inner walls of my house from crumbling and being rent asunder. Sure I like a nice van Gogh now and then (he had some way with the brush he did, what with his magnificent way of seeing things), but I have no to little known artistic talent especially when it comes to painting. Yet somehow I must wonder if a guy like van Gogh could see my son's room, maybe he would think otherwise.

I've got two coats of paint on it now, and I figure I should have left it white, but my son wanted red. The white was just something of my fancy, he did not like it, so over it went the red. Sure I know it needs another coat or two, but if van Gogh, or Monet (yes he too did some out of this world painting) got to see it now, with its swirls of fiery red hues on its old plaster walls, if they got to see the angled roller lines, the spilt paint splotched over the old lavender colored carpeting and closet door (yes it used to be my daughter's room), they might find it artistic; or at least they might when the sunlight hits it at just the correct angle. Maybe, by some quirk of the imagination, Vincent would have found my son's room almost as fascinating as was his own when he twice painted it on canvass, once in 1888 and once in 1889 (this one above the 1889 version - strikingly similar but vastly different in subtle ways than the 1888 version).

Alas though, it is a southern exposure, but who can tell what the eyes of the Masters would have perceived. Maybe they would have painted me as I painted the room - the old bespectacled middle aged man covered with splotches of various colors, struggling to make his home look like a castle, from atop his yellow paint stained ladder.

Maybe it would look something like the painting van Gogh did of the inner corridors of an asylum (and yes my son's room, my whole house could be considered an asylum - though I will not divulge the type of asylum it offers). Too bad I have to go up there and re-coat it today - hopefully with 2 final coats - so the job will finally be done. I was kind of hoping that the job could wait until they figured out how to bring back a guy like van Gogh so I could get his opinion after the weekend, but then less gets accomplished by me on weeknights, so a Saturday is always better to get it all done in a day. Well by all, in this case, I mean the last two coats. Yes this is the same job that has been persistently pestering me into performing work on the home front for about 2 weeks or so - just one room, but still not done. Why is that ask you, because I am no van Gogh says I, nor am I adept at house painting.

First of all let me say if you paint and use a primer sealer that dries to a somewhat enamel like appearance, never use two coats of it. Just one will suffice and two will make the surface so slick, it will be akin to painting atop gloss enamel. In other words and eggshell enamel in red will not adhere properly, but will go on with the premiere stroke of the brush only to slough off with the secondary or tertiary strokes. Thus if you are lucky, unlike me, when you decide to cover all that messed up red with white flat paint - your child will love the larger than life effect of the white paint. Mine did not and insisted on red, which was his due as I had promised him his pick of colors. Let's see that was scraping and opening cracks, plastering twice (and still not getting it really well done but good enough for a government worker), then two coats of primer sealer, then a coat or two of white on the ceiling, then starting with the red eggshell enamel but finding out it would not properly adhere, then finally winding up with a couple of gallons of the same red in flat finish. Of course this meant multiple trips to a large hardware store owned by a larger conglomerate, wherein I wanted to explode on some each of my visits there. Oh well, I have the implements of artistic expression all laid out and ready for the job today. I am feeling better than I have over the past two days, when I felt rather indescribably miserable.

Now I have to grab my son out of the shower and put a roller in his hand. Hmm - I wonder why he is taking a shower now - he must have not thought that he too has to get this job done. He has not helped me as much as I would have liked with homework and all, but today is his day to slave away. Tomorrow is his birthday, so it had best be done today for him to get the most enjoyment out of his day tomorrow. Of course if he does not help, I may just not lift a finger, and leave it the way it is for him to complete by the time he reaches 30, and since he is still in high school (his last year, and no he has never been left back) that will be a long wait.

All the best,
Glenn B