In the nearly 3 years that I have owned my house, I'm pretty sure I've become a contractor's nightmare.
While
I originally approached even the most basic of repairs with extreme
trepidation, I have evolved to take a very cavalier attitude towards the
maintenance of my home.
You might recall the series of jury-rigs
that were necessary to make the place fit to live in. After the first
seven months, I'd basically gotten the essentials under control, so all
that was left to work on were the "nice-to-haves"—things like a bathtub
faucet that doesn't spew water while the shower's running, a kitchen
sink that isn't warped away from the countertop...maybe, you know, a picture rail...and perhaps, an interior door that opens against the wall rather than right into the middle of the kitchen.
For these things that are hard to do right, but not exactly necessary for survival, I felt like I should Don't It Myself and enlist the aid of a professional...but then I thought about how many other things would have to be fixed concurrently to really
be done right...and how much that would cost...and how many people I
would need to interact with in order to make it happen...and I decided
that maybe I'd just take another stab at self-sufficiency.
So
over the past few months, I've tackled a number of things on my House
Things To Do list. Usually with very little forethought other than a
sudden impatience to get things done right now.
First
there was the bathtub faucet. It didn't leak...much...but the water did
run out the spigot when it should have been all diverted to the
showerhead, and all I could think about was how much money was literally
running down the drain with every shower. So, with the help of a couple
of online resources and a superhero of a friend, I took apart the
faucet and reassembled it with new washers. Naturally, that sounds a lot
easier than it was. It required two trips to Home Depot, the purchase
of a special tool I'll probably never use again, and most of a day of my
time. After my friend left, I learned that while the diverter and handles
were no longer leaking, the fixtures were actually leaking from the
back, behind the wall, and I had to take it all apart and do it again on
my own. Eventually I got the faucet working, and the shower diverter is
completely leak-free. Of course, now you have to crank the handle with
the force of a titan to get the hot water to shut off completely, so I'm
just waiting for the day when the whole process needs to be repeated.
Next time I'm just buying a complete new faucet assembly! Trying to find
the right replacements for an ancient plumbing fixture is just more
trouble than the money you save.
Then,
there was the kitchen sink. Whoever designed this kitchen apparently
did it (much like I do all my housing projects!) with a bunch of scraps
that were definitely not meant to go together. You are fortunate that
I'm going to spare you the details of exactly how messed-up this kitchen
setup was, but I will tell you that the sink was warped in several
places, which made the handle wobbly and allowed water to leak into the
cabinet. To fix it properly, I determined that we'd need to completely
replace the sink...and the countertop...and the cabinet underneath. Way
too expensive! So I did the next best thing. I got a 3-inch metal plate
with holes in it—it happened to be a scrap door hinge, but that's
irrelevant—and slid one of the holes over one of the bolts on the
underside of the sink faucet. I was able to brace the plate against
the underside of the counter and, with the magic of physics and a
couple of nuts, muscled the most warped part of the sink down into a
semblance of flatness. Again, it works, but I cringe at the thought of
having to explain that setup to a plumber!
And
that very setup is one of the major reasons that when the kitchen
faucet started dripping, I decided to fix it myself, even though my last
experience with faucets (see above) had been a trial I didn't wish to
repeat. Sigh. I repeated it. I disassembled the sink faucet, drove
around to three separate plumbing and hardware stores to find
replacement parts that looked about right, and reassembled it.
Several times. Today it works and doesn't leak...as long as you remember
to turn the handle slightly up and left of center when you close it.
Next time I'm just replacing the whole faucet with a new one (this time,
I mean it!), and keeping the model number in a sacred file!
Moving
aside from the struggles of plumbing, there was the relatively
straightforward issue of the attic ladder. Or, to be more precise, the
lack of one. I store a lot of stuff in the attic, and I was constantly
risking my neck on a rickety old 5-foot stepladder to get up there every
month or so. It was clear I was going to have to put in a permanent
ladder. For months, I debated if I should get a professional builder to
re-cut the opening and install a proper folding ladder (and maybe some
lighting, while they were at it!). But I'm saving my money for a
basement remodel that keeps getting delayed, so ultimately I decided I'd
make do with a cheap ($110 from almost all sellers), do-it-yourself
ladder that's especially designed for small openings. After the
requisite delays (such as the kit I first ordered from Home Depot being a
damaged customer return), the requisite amount of unplanned purchases
(a box of screws, to secure the floorboards before I could start), and
the requisite amount of cursing and crying (let's not even get into the
details of that part), I got the ladder set up.
The
second part of the project was to install a trap door so that the
ladder can be easily accessed. But the instructions required re-framing
the attic opening, and I was pretty certain I wasn't going to be able to
do that without ruining something. So instead, I set up this ridiculous
pulley system with a couple of metal rings and a length of Paracord.
It is absolutely unintuitive, and if anyone were to buy this house from
me, they would think me a crackpot...but it works, and I can get into my
attic without needing to drag a stepladder anywhere. The downside,
which I never considered until it was too late, is that the ladder takes
up so much space, it's almost impossible to fit anything else through
the hole. I might have been better off falling to my doom from the
stepladder.
But I
never did get around to falling to my doom, so I was obliged to
continue looking around for things to fix. This time, it was the kitchen
door. As with many of the other features of the kitchen, this one was
poorly thought out and sloppily done. The doorway was in a corner of the
kitchen, but the hinges were on the opposite side. So every time you
opened the door, it swung out directly into the room, rather than into
the wall where it would be out of the way. I tolerated this for years,
but imagine trying to release two extremely antsy dogs through this door
multiple times every day. It was like being in the middle of an
evacuation gone very wrong. I thought that whenever I contracted someone
to remodel the basement, I'd ask them to reverse the swing of this
door. But, as you recall, the basement remodel is interminably delayed,
so, over the past weekend, in a fit of frustration, I took matters into
my own hands.
It
isn't actually that hard to reverse the swing of a door...as long as
you're willing to reinstall the door upside-down. Apparently, doing so means that you're the devil incarnate,
but your soul is a small price to pay for convenience! I took my time
with this project (meaning I did it in a rush while the dogs were safely
sequestered in my boyfriend's room) and tried to do everything right
(as right as can be when you're doing something so inherently wrong!)
and managed to get the door back on its hinges, facing the other
direction. It still works, but I'm sure it would make anyone with a lick
of carpentry experience roll over in their grave.
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| Notice anything odd about this door? Of course you don't! |
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