Wet Hot American Appliance

In 2018, it was the Water Products Purchase. In 2019, it was the Laundry Filtration Installation. In 2020 it was the Solar System Setup (and the clothesline!). It seems like every year, I make another biggish investment in some planet-friendly home improvement, but in 2021, there was not an environment blog post to be found! What happened? Did I give up? Had I succumbed to the allure of conspicuous consumption? Was I just too busy riding high on a lavish lifestyle of gas-guzzling flights around the world? (Hint: it was still COVID. I was most definitely not).

Of course I hadn't quit my commitment to a life of extreme green—I just got lazy about blogging! But here I am, only 8 months after the fact, finally getting around to telling you about my latest eco-endeavor—switching to a tankless water heater.

This story starts all the way back in 2016, when I first bought my house. My memories of this period are a little hazy because I've tried to block them out. It was a stressful 7 months of nonstop fixing of things that I hadn't known were broken! But among the most egregious of those things was the state of the water heater. Shortly after closing, I do recall having to bring in the gas company for some reason—maybe because my gas dryer wasn't running, or maybe to get the gas turned on in the first place. In any case, when the gas man left, he left in his wake two big red tags wired to my furnace and water heater, reading something along the lines of "HAZARD: DO NOT USE! TO BE REMOVED ONLY BY A CERTIFIED PLUMBER" and the gas lines leading to them firmly shut off. I, um, removed the tags.

Well, for at least a few days, I left the tags on and focused on regretting my life decisions. Then I had another technician come to the house for some other reason, and he blithely removed the tag on the furnace without a second's thought. He was not a certified plumber. So with that good precedent, I removed the tag from the water heater and lived with it in its life-threatening condition for the next 5 years. I am only telling you this now because no one died.

In case you're curious just what made this appliance so dangerous, it was this: The top of it was pitted with holes from years of rusting. The flue pipe, which at one point had been affixed to the top of the tank, now just balanced on three spindly and unattached legs, one of which had slipped into a rust hole and caused the whole pipe to teeter out of position.  I was informed that, when out of position, it could allow combustion fumes like carbon monoxide to escape out into my living areas. The solution, I decided, was to make sure it stayed in position. I placed it back in its precarious home and precariously positioned other objects around it to help it stay upright. I also kept my carbon monoxide detector supplied with fresh batteries at all times!

I hoped we could limp along like this until the heater crapped out entirely, at which point my home warranty should cover a replacement. But after 5 years of limping, waiting with one ear cocked for the wailing of a carbon monoxide alarm, I decided I was going to have to take matters into my own hands and replace the water heater with my own money.

Research-Time had arrived, and the more research I did, the more it became clear that tankless heaters are by far the most energy efficient of the water heating options out there. Among their other benefits, they take up less space than a traditional water heater, and they never run out of hot water. Since I wasn't really hurting for space in my basement and had never run out of hot water, those weren't compelling arguments to make the switch, but in my quest to protect the planet, it was really the only responsible choice.

Tankless heaters are much more expensive to install than storage heaters, but I felt confident that I would get a nice rebate in exchange, because the utility companies are always giving out rebates for Energy Star appliances. But alas! The electric company only gives out rebates for hybrid heat pump water heaters...which aren't compatible with my basement layout. The gas company gives out rebates for tankless water heaters, but only if you have them installed by one of their participating installers, all of which quoted me such high fees that I'd end up spending more even with the rebate.

Eventually I settled on paying a cheap company full price to install a gas-powered tankless water heater. When it was all said and done, I was underwhelmed.

Going into the project, I'd been prepared for be the biggest downside of going tankless: you have to run the water longer before it comes out of the tap hot. I didn't figure that would bother me—I can have a little patience, if it's for a good cause. But as I repeatedly stood idly next to the shower, watching the still-cold water swirl uselessly down the drain for what seemed like forever before I could even get in, I began to wonder: had I just traded lower energy usage for higher water usage?

Well, according to this handy graph from the water company, probably not. 

 

 

My new water heater was installed right about December 20, 2021. The water usage in the two billing periods after the installation was exactly equal to the usage in the same billing periods the year before the installation.

On the other hand, according to this graph from the gas company, the energy savings from this new water heater, if any, have been negligible. 

 

 

My gas usage is in fact lower than the previous year's, for almost every billing period...but that includes all the billing periods before I even had the new heater installed. So while I'm apparently not wasting a ton of water with the new heater, neither am I saving any money or gas.

So, of all the eco-friendly home improvements I've implemented over the past few years, the tankless water heater might have been the least impactful. if I was expecting some monumental improvements in my quality of life or my bills, I didn't get it. The much higher up-front costs of this high-tech heater may never be offset by energy savings. And because it operates on a computerized system, I fully expect it to fail just out of warranty and require expensive repairs. I probably could have done just as well or better with a new, more efficient, storage-style heater. But, uh, at least I gained some extra floor space behind the furnace?

A solar system for the planet

There's always some ecological endeavor going on in my existence, but since January, I've been keeping mum about my biggest, most serious investment in the environment yet. It's something I've been hoping to do ever since I moved into this house, and it finally happened! Can you guess what it is? I'll give you a hint: you probably won't find it too shocking, but it will certainly be electrifying!

Do you give up? (I'm pretending you haven't read the title of this post).

OK!

It's that I got my house hooked up with solar panels! I'm officially running on renewable energy!

Here's me sunning myself on my newly multipurpose roof!
(I really was up there for a legitimate reason, not just a needlessly risky photoshoot!)

The plan had been in the works since summer of last year, but good things take time. It wasn't until late January that I had a functioning rooftop solar array. I'm now almost 7 months into my solar-powered life, and I can tell you it's stellar.

Get it? Stellar? Huh huh huh?

The actual process of getting solar panels was so uninteresting that I won't detail it here (it mainly involved signing a lot of contracts and forking over painful amounts of money every few months), but I'll happily field questions from anyone who's interested in setting up their own home solar system (planets not included!).

Now that I think about it, the period after going solar was also uninteresting. My panels basically just sit up there on my roof and, well, sit there. The first few months, I wasn't sure they were even working because I was unclear on the complex financial dance between me and my solar cells, the power company, and the free market. But after a short delay, my electric bills went way down. And then a few months after that, I began receiving payments for all the surplus power my system was generating!

You'd think that with all that free money rolling in, I'd be ready to cut loose and burn electricity like there was no tomorrow, but, if the initial estimates hold true, I still have 8 years before I'll break even on my initial investment. So until then, it's business as usual. In fact, I'm bound and determined to conserve electricity more than I did before—because once you go green, why not go greener? So it's been an interesting summer—thanks to coronavirus quarantines, I've been home twice as much, but trying to use half the electricity.

2020 is the year we'll all remember as the one where COVID-19 ruined everything. But at least I'll also be able to remember it as the year I finally achieved my goal of going solar. I kind of always thought of it as a pipe dream, but now it's real! So 2020 does have a bright side, and that bright side is as bright as the sun!

In case you were wondering what I've been up to...

What do you get when you cross a DIY-obsessed homeowner with a state-mandated stay-at-home order? A long list of home-improvement stories, broken down by difficulty level!

Stuff that was easy

When I first received my stay-at-home orders, I was initially a human whirlwind of activity. Spending 18 hours a day staring at the dirty surfaces in your house is enough to get even the most unmotivated among us to start wiping things down.

I swept floors, mopped floors, and polished floors. I scrubbed walls and baseboards, I scrubbed greasy light switches and door handles, I scrubbed bathroom tiles until they were almost white again! 

Even after a good scrubbing, I realized that the walls in the guest room were never going to lose all their stains, so I painted them instead!

One wall painted, 3 to go!

This was a fun project because I mixed the paint from a collection of cans I've been accumulating for years, collected from Freecycle and the side of the road. I ended up doing blue on three sides with a darker blue accent wall! I've never painted a room before, and I surprisingly enjoyed it. Who knew that cutting in edges (the part that initially gave me the heebie-jeebies!) could be so gratifying?

The handrail brackets on the basement staircase snapped in half sometime in the spring, so I took a trip to Community Forklift and found delightfully cheap replacements. This time, the handrail didn't require a handyman—I was able to fix it myself in only a few minutes.

I ordered a clothesline online and set it up in the backyard. The only hard part was drilling holes higher than my head for what seemed an eternity, but it was worth it! I'm so excited about it that I'm probably going to devote a whole blog post to it!

The threshold for my front door has been cracked for some time, so I made a new one out of some wood I had lying around, varnished it, and nailed it in. Another successful task with a minimum of effort!

Unfortunately, that was the last of the minimum effort. Some of the other things I attempted did not go nearly so well.

Stuff that was hard

If you recall from the last time I fixed my kitchen sink, the faucet would only turn off if you angled the very wobbly handle just a little left of six o'clock, and that meant it was usually dripping. I was nervous about this fix, because my kitchen sink was only held onto the countertop by a slapdash contraption attached to the bottom of the faucet, so a replacement faucet was probably going to require a replacement contraption. But I went ahead with it, because the sink was getting more annoying to use with every twist of the handle, and being home alone with it 24 hours a day was not improving our relationship. The faucet removal was a challenge, but the installation was surprisingly easy (although the manufacturer forgot to include an important rubber washer, it was fortunately the same size as the one from my old faucet). But the foretold new contraption that holds the sink to the countertop is even more slapdash than the last one. It involves levers made of wood blocks that put pressure on the cracked countertop and rotting cabinet. So I fully expect this fix to only last another year before something falls apart. I have learned one lesson from all my frustrating repairs, though: keep the manual! The faucet manual is wrapped in plastic and taped to the underside of the sink so I'll never lose it!

My house gets no shade, so every summer, I cover the skylights with a solar screen to block some of the heat. For years, I've been wanting to do the same to my bay window, but I couldn't come up with a practical way to do it. I wanted to go all fancy with a roll-up screen...but finally this year, I decided any jury-rigged screen was better than none at all, so I hung the screen on suction cups! It looks silly, but maybe, just maybe, it helps a little with the heat.

Professional window screening at its finest

Another thing you tend to notice when your office is right next to your bathroom, is just how noisy your toilet is. And when you start paying attention to that, you start to notice how low the water in the bowl is. And then you do some investigating and learn that both issues are symptoms of a faulty fill valve. Rather than buy a new fill valve (which is astonishingly cheap at seven dollars, but very bulky and plasticky and wasteful), you think maybe you can just replace the rubber washer inside the fill valve. But unfortunately, the only washer available does not fit, so you're out a couple bucks and still have a noisy toilet. Finally, you concede and buy the seven dollar hunk of plastic. You have difficulties with the locknut, but eventually you prevail. After only a few weeks of prep work, you have fixed your toilet, and you have the Instagram post to prove it! Doesn't that happen to you all the time? It happened to me!

View this post on Instagram

There's an actual hashtag for this! #FixedMyToilet #Fluidmaster

A post shared by Mostly just dogs (@valerie_n_stuff) on Jul 22, 2020 at 3:41pm PDT

Still more stuff

When I started writing this post, I was going to say that I hadn't accomplished much over the 4 months I've been quarantining, but after writing it all out, I realize it actually was quite a lot. I'm sorry for making you read all that. In fact, I'm so sorry, that I cut out the part about the three projects I still haven't completed, just to make it shorter!

Since the pandemic continues unabated, I'm sure I'll keep on plugging away at those, and have plenty more projects to keep me busy over the next few months. Until I write again, stay safe, stay home, and home improve!

It's Shower Curtains

The shower is a great place for thinking...which might explain why I think so much about shower curtains. Would you believe I have so many thoughts about shower curtains that I've dedicated a whole blog post to them? Well, believe it, because I have.

Buying my first shower curtain was a great "adulting" moment for me (this – right now – also marks the first time I've ever used the word "adulting," and I don't feel great about it....Do I sense a post coming about that particular controversial term?). It was when I moved into my rental house in 2010, and for the first time in my life, became the person in charge of all interior decorating. I did what I rarely do any more, and purchased some of the necessary objects brand new, from Target. One of those objects was a brown cotton shower curtain with multicolored polka dots. I remember thinking it was cute and fun, but not overly feminine should I get a male housemate, which I very shortly did.

My first shower curtain,
now a secret hideaway for office dogs!

That curtain lasted for a few years, but because I never used it with a liner, it eventually developed holes from the mold. I removed it from the bathroom but loved it so much that I kept the undamaged parts of it for future use. Eventually it got a second life as a draft-blocker for the bottom of my desk at work.

Since that early foray into buying home goods like a real consumer, I have evolved into the extreme thrifter that I am today and so far have avoided purchasing any more new shower curtains (but I did recently buy an antimicrobial liner that can be washed and reused, so you might say potato potahto). The last actual shower curtain I bought was an aqua one from the thrift store, which survived two moves and was still in regular use this past summer.

...Until...I got a new shower curtain from Freecycle! This one is translucent white and covered with images of bright tropical fish. I love it! It is just the kind of cheery, nature-inspired kitsch that I used to decorate my bedroom with when I was a teenager. Now that I am a mature 30-something in charge of my own household, I get to extend my tacky decor into the bathroom!

But a new shower curtain doesn't mean I have to dispose of my 7-year-old one, oh no! I'm just keeping that one in storage until the spirit moves me to change up the theme. Since I also recently acquired a hand-me-down curtain from friends, I could easily see shower curtains being one of the many items I accumulate and switch out seasonally—fish in the winter, florals in the spring... translucent curtains during the dark and cold months, opaque ones during the summer when every bit of light blocking can help to keep the bathroom cool... there are all kinds of shower-curtain related experimentation to be done!

But one thing I won't be experimenting with is the hangers that hold the curtain up. No, over the years, I've tried all sorts and I've come up with a favorite and no one is going to change my mind!

In my early days of home-making, I was drawn to ornamental metal shower curtain hooks. The set I got to suspend my brown Target curtain had, if I recall correctly, blue wooden balls at the end of the hooks. I was shooting for a plastic-free lifestyle, but as I learned, metal shower hooks are a pain! They were constantly slipping off the rail. When I tried to bend the hooks into a tighter loop so that they weren't so easily removed, I ended up breaking several of them.

Well, that necessitated the purchase of replacements from the thrift store—naively, I thought that maybe these cool crystalline plastic ones would work because they opening was smaller (they couldn't fall off the rail), but they were even worse than the metal ones—their hook-within-a-hook design meant the curtain would just fall off of them instead

So I set out to buy my third set of shower curtain hangers. This time, I went for the kind I'd grown up with: plastic rings that can be snapped shut. They worked OK for quite a while, but over time, some of the closures stopped working, allowing the curtain to slip off its mooring.

No and no.

It got annoying enough that eventually, I made my fourth and final shower curtain purchase. This time, I went as cheapo as possible—pink plastic C-rings that I think cost 99 cents, 50% off.

And whaddaya know? They're my favorite shower curtain rings yet!

The flexible plastic means they're easy to pop on and off the pole, but the opening is too small to allow them to fall off by accident. The best thing is they can easily be flipped 180° while in position, so the opening can face either side of the shower rail.

 
This enables you to remove the curtain without removing the liner, and vice versa! Wow! Score another win for cheap plastic over more environmentally friendly materials. I can only just hope that my plastic C-rings last a lifetime.

I think that covers everything I had to say about shower curtains, so I guess I'll close the curtain on this post!

Green Washing

If my plastic-related guilt complex were a book, and its phases were chapters, they would look something like this:

1. Whether to pleather
2. Down on Downcycling
3. Bye, Bye, Bottles
4. Oh, Fork
5. Doing Water I Can

Chapter 6 (today's blog post) is really just Chapter 1 all over again—but this time, instead of just fake leather, I'm expanding my guilt to encompass all types of synthetic fabric.

Fabric is a topic very close to my heart, as you might expect of someone who relishes in having a constant stream of new clothes cycling in and out of her wardrobe.

The problem is, as I have been increasingly made aware, every time you wash your clothes, microscopic bits of those clothes get separated from the fabric and washed out into the sewer system, and thence into the waterways. If the clothes are made of synthetic materials, as most are these days, then the bits that come out are actually tiny fibers of plastic that don't decompose. Once in the waterways, those microplastics float around and get swallowed by animals, which is detrimental, to say the least, to their health.

So back to my conundrum, which is really everyone's conundrum: as a person who likes to wear clean clothes, how can I avoid polluting the world's water supply with the plastic effluent of my laundry habit?

Well, one solution is to eschew all synthetic fabrics. This is not easy. Since falling in love with online thrift shops, I have almost stopped buying any new (as in, not pre-owned) clothing whatsoever, but on those occasions that I'm tempted to purchase something firsthand, I do try to avoid anything that's not a natural fiber. If all consumers were to do the same, eventually, we might have an impact on the supply chain.

But in the meantime, most of the used clothes that are available are still made of plastic-based fabrics, and I'm not ready to stop wearing or washing my clothes entirely.

So what's the solution for the problem of clothing-related plastics? One word: filtration.

I can no longer remember how I learned that it's possible to filter your washing water to capture most of the plastic fibers, but I did! And once I did, there was no going back. I simply had to start filtering my laundry.

While they do sell little (plastic!) balls that are designed to be tossed into your washing machine to capture the microfibers there, I decided that wasn't enough. The best a little plastic ball can do is grab the fibers that happen to touch it, but with all that water spinning around in your machine, there is surely a much larger percentage of loose fibers that never come in contact with it.

So onward to the big guns: drain-hose filtration devices. With a filter that sits between my washing machine and the sewer system, I could be assured that every drop of water in my laundry load would eventually go through the filter, resulting in a much higher capture rate for microplastics.

According to my research, there are really only about 2 options for post-wash filtration devices, and I went with the Wexco Environmental Filtrol 160. I thought it would be a simple addition to my laundry room: Unplug some hoses, stick the filter in between, reattach, and run my washer with abandon!

Well, as with all of my home improvement projects, it was naturally a lot more complicated. There were some wall-mounting woes (not easy in a basement with cinder block walls), some hose-incompatibility issues, and some requisite laziness, all of which caused the installation process to take me about 4 months (2 if you don't count the time it sat in the box while I felt too daunted to start the project).

Finally installed!

Fortunately, once it was set up, it was smooth sailing. I planned to blog about the filter as soon as I finished, but due to the magic of procrastination, it has been 2 months since I installed it. In that time, it hasn't leaked so much as a drip, and it's filled probably about 1/5 of the way. At this rate, I can last almost a whole year on one filter bag (and then I'll probably empty and reuse it, because that's the eco-cheapo way!).

The bottom line for my faithful readers: If you had any qualms about the environmental impact of your clothes-washing routine, installing a filter is a good solution! It's relatively inexpensive, as far as home improvement projects go, and easy enough that any bumbling DIYer can tackle it in 2 months!

Ms. Fix-It

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.

Notice anything odd about this door? Of course you don't!

And such is the way of my home stewardship. I get things done, but I get them done in a way that will never stand the test of time. Should I be proud of myself, or should I slap myself on the wrist and tell myself to stop being so cheap and antisocial and call a pro next time? I don't know what you think, but I bet you can guess from the fact that I wrote a whole blog post about my handiwork, that I've decided to go with the former. From now on, you can just call me "Ms. Fix-It!"

How to DIY a Picture Rail

 
If you're like me, you can't stand having the same pictures on your wall for very long before wanting to change them up for something completely new. You can't just keep hammering new nails into your wall to accommodate all the different sizes of art, because pretty soon your wall would be all holes and no art. That's where a picture rail comes in!

We've all seen it, mostly in restaurants: an unobtrusive rail on the wall, from which any number of pictures of all different sizes can be hung and switched out with ease. The picture rail allows you to slide the art along its length so you can position it anywhere on the wall, and you can use any length of wire to adjust the height. A picture rail sounds like your dream, right? But how do you get one?

Well, the cheapest and longest pre-made picture rail I could find was nothing more than a 95-inch strip of moulding, and cost 22.40 plus shipping. That doesn't cover the cost of hooks and wires and installation supplies. If you're still like me, you're thinking you could do better than that, and you're right!

Here's how I made a picture rail that extends the length of an entire wall of my living room, and cost me almost nothing!

Supplies

• Measuring and marking tools -- a tape measure and a pencil
• 1 piece of wood moulding cut to length
• A Dremel and cutting wheel (I'm open to suggestions on better tools for this process—basically you need something that can cut a groove down the length of your moulding. One alternative is to find a piece of moulding that already has a groove or lip you could hang a hook from!)
• A stud finder
• A drill (strongly recommended, but optional)
• Finishing nails
• A nail sink (optional)
• Paint to match your wall (optional)
• Several picture-hanging hooks (you'll need at least one hook for every picture, but two makes it easier)
• Wire to hang the pictures

If you have to buy all of these things, this won't be a cheap project, but if you have (or borrow) most of the tools and can repurpose materials you already have, you can do it all yourself, as I did, for under 10 dollars.

Directions

Step 1: Get thee some moulding

Because the shape and size of the wooden rail will advise the measurements of every other part of this project, you really need to choose it first. Determine the approximate size of piece you're looking for, based on the length of the wall or space you want to fill. If you don't yet know, overestimate, because you can always cut it down later.

I get all my materials for minor construction projects like this at Community Forklift, my local home improvement thrift store. If you don't have any place like that nearby, you can always go to a regular construction store, where simple moulding can be bought for a dollar or less per foot. If you're looking to do less work, you should look for a piece which already has a lip about 3/8-in. wide, or a groove about 3/8 inch from the outer edge. This lip or groove is what you'll eventually hook the hanging wires onto. I couldn't find anything like that at the Forklift, so I settled for a piece of  3/4-inch shoe moulding (I had to look up its name just for this post), which is one of the cheapest and most plentiful types out there. I can't remember how much it cost, but I'm pretty sure it was less than a dollar.

Step 2: Ready the rail

If you were not lucky enough to find a piece of moulding with a conveniently sized lip already, you will next have to cut a groove into which your picture hooks will later fit. On my shoe moulding, the best place for it was on the narrower flat side, slightly closer to the rounded side than the other flat side. 

Positioning of the groove.

 

As you can guess, I wasn't a real stickler about the measurement. I just wanted the space between the groove and the edge to be wide enough that the weight of a painting wouldn't cause the wood to break.

Mark the location of the groove the full length of the moulding.

Then dig in! Like I said above, I used a Dremel and a cutting wheel for this part of the project, but I'm not sure that was the most effective option out there. It didn't cut nearly as fast as I'd expected, it produced a ton of smoke, and if I accidentally dug too deep into the wood, it shattered the cutting wheel. I lost a couple of wheels before I learned to make delicate touch-and-go strokes that enabled me to cut the groove without getting the tool jammed. It was surprisingly difficult to carve the groove an even depth and width, but that fortunately wasn't too big of a concern because it would be hidden above eye level at the top of the picture rail. 

Another view of the groove

If you know of a better way to cut a groove into a length of wood, by all means go for it! But if you don't, then the Dremel and cutting wheel are good enough.

Last substep in this part of the project—painting the rail! This is optional. A bare wood picture rail can be elegant in some rooms, but in my case, I thought it would look out-of-place with my all white-painted everything, so I chose to paint it white as well. The only matching paint I had was a gallon of white primer, so that's what I used! I've had the rail up for a couple of months, and so far it looks fine even though I never painted over the primer.

Step 3: Measure twice (or thrice, or four times, or as many as it takes to get accurate results from your stud finder!)

Once the picture rail is ready, it's time to make a commitment: where do you actually want it to be?

The wall where I planned to place my picture rail had some thick ornamental crown moulding at the ceiling (a little too baroque for my taste, but it came with the house!). I could have installed the picture rail directly below the moulding (like, stuck to its bottom), but something told me that wouldn't look right. So I gave it a little breathing room and decided to install it a few inches below the moulding. The moulding inexplicably comes to an end a few inches before the wall does. Having the picture rail stick out past the bottom of the moulding would look silly, so I decided to line up the end of my picture rail with the vertical portion of the crown moulding.

Final endpoint of my picture rail

I marked, in pencil, a few spots to align to the top of the rail.

Because the picture rail could potentially support any amount of weight, you need to be assured that it is firmly attached to the wall. And this means you need to nail it to studs, not just the drywall. Ugh, stud-finding is the bane of my existence! We have an electronic stud finder that's supposed to make this work easy, but it never really is. Prepare to spend several frustrating sessions running the stud finder along your wall until you're reasonably confident you've found the position of the studs, then mark the position of a future nail so that it will be as close to the center of each stud as possible.  

HELPFUL TIP: Mark this nail hole exactly above where you want the top of your picture rail to be, because once the rail is on the wall, you still need to be able to see the markings.

If you want to be a renegade, I suppose you could do this part without the stud finder and just attach the rail to your drywall, but you might want to use more nails, and hammer them in at different angles so they're less likely to pull out by accident.

Step 4: Hammer Time

This was a frustrating part of the project for me. I don't know if the nails were too weak, or my form was too poor, or my studs were too tough, but I bent more nails than I ever imagined possible. Because I had so much trouble getting the nails into my wall, I recommend that you pre-drill the nail holes before even touching a hammer.

This means holding the rail to the wall wherever you want it to be (you might need a partner!), then drilling through both the rail and the wall to the depth of the nail (I used 2-inch finishing nails). Even drilling a hole was difficult and sometimes impossible, so good luck! Once you have a hole, it should theoretically be simple to hammer a nail into the same spot. But I still ruined plenty of nails that way.

While I'm usually a cheapskate, I invested in a nail sink just for this project, which is a metal tool that you use when the nail has already been hammered most of the way in,. The get the nail to sink all the way into the wood, you place the pointy end of the nail sink on the head of the nail, then hit the nail sink with the hammer instead of hammering the nailhead directly. The nail sink, with its tiny tip, will push the nail deeper into the wood, without running the risk of you smashing the hammer into the wood and leaving a dent.

If you succeed in attaching the rail at both of its ends, then you can release your partner from servitude, which is helpful because then he will be fresh when you inevitably call him back to help with the hammering after you have bent too many nails and need to take a mental health break. At some point, you will both be finished, both with the work, and probably in a figurative sense as well. Take that mental health break! I'll be here when you get back!

Step 5: Cleanup

There's no time like the present, so even though you're tempted to skip on to hanging your pictures, take a few moments to make this picture rail look its best. Erase any visible pencil marks, wipe the greasy-fingerprints from every surface you touched, and dab a dot of matching paint onto each nailhead.

Step 6: Get hooked

This part was my favorite part, because it involved converting some useless hanging hooks into the most versatile hanging hooks I've ever owned. 

The hanging hooks were these, which, ridiculously, had holes that were too small for the nails that came with them. Whenever you tried to hammer one into the wall, you'd end up bending the nail on the first stroke. Totally useless. Since I didn't have anything to lose, I decided to make them into hooks for my picture rail.

With a bolt cutter, I snipped the "collar" around each nail hole on the hanging hook. This broke it into two parts, and it then fell off, which is what I wanted. 

The hook on top is one that has had the collar removed.
The one at right still needs surgery.

 Using a pair of needle-nosed pliers, I bent the top end of each hook into another hook with a reversed direction and flat top. 

The top portion was meant to slot into the groove on the picture rail, while the intact original hook would hold the picture wire.

A hook in the groove of the picture rail

You can do the same, but if you're going to have to buy hooks anyway, you might as well save yourself the effort and just get some hooks that are designed for use on a picture rail. In fact, you might want to buy the hooks first, so you can customize the position of the groove to best fit them.

Next, you'll need to shape some wire to hang your pictures from. Picture hanging wire is expensive AF! But there's no reason you need to use that! Get creative—strip some old electrical cord (or don't, and just use it with the insulation still on!). Use ribbons or shoelaces or any other kind of long skinny stuff you might have lying around.

I myself still had quite a bit of that wire I found on the street and used for my rabbit-in-a-hat costume, and so far that has proved sufficient for hanging 4 pictures, with plenty more wire to go! I'd like to come up with a way to reuse one wire for multiple lengths, but so far I've been content to cut a new piece of wire every time I want to hang a new picture.

The way I use the wire is to form a smallish loop with needle-nosed pliers. I hang this loop from one of the hooks on the rail. 

At the other end of the wire, I thread a few inches through the hole in another hanging hook, then stop it from slipping out with a series of twists to form a plug. 

One coil keeps the wire from slipping back through the hole.
The second coil was a previous attempt that ended up being too low on the wall.

This hook attaches to the hanging hardware on the back of the painting.

Step 6: Arrange and rearrange

Congratulations! You are now an art curator! The only thing left to do is to acquire a sizable collection of pictures, so you can swap them out at your whim!

Since I have had my picture rail, I've used it to hold up four different art  arrangements. 

The first was a summery set of painted-metal art pieces, which I kept next to a couple of family photos of me and my boyfriend. Next, I replaced the summery art with a Chinese brush painting of goats on a hill. This painting is the first – and for over a decade, only – piece of real art I've owned (I got it free from a neighbor who was moving out), and I am still proud of it today. When Christmas rolled around, I swapped that out for a huge snowman painting, in a style I might describe as American folk. 

Now that it's January, I've returned to the goats, supplemented with a pair of Japanese minimalist watercolors, which were Freecycle acquisitions from last month. They were originally advertised as just frames (I guess the offerer didn't think the paintings themselves would get any takers), so I'm doubly glad that they just happened to have a similar starkness to my beloved goat painting.

Quite a few different looks for one living room! What's next? Well, I've been collecting art from Freecycle every chance I get, so ultimately my goal is to be able to decorate the living room with a different theme every season! Thanks to my picture rail, now my wall can change outfits almost as often as I do!

Rat Tale

The latest of my adventures in home ownership is a short one—about four inches, to be exact.

I speak of none other than Rattus norvegicus, a single creature that terrorized me like a plague for months on end.

I might have had a rat in my home as early as last November, when I first noticed chew-holes in a bag of coffee in the basement. At the time, I blamed it on my last Airbnb guest, a particularly negligent fellow who had left spilled food all over the carpet and a window open to the bitter cold when he checked out—I wouldn't have put it past him to have also somehow mutilated the bag of coffee. But as time went on, the evidence began to mount that I had some kind of vermin problem.

At first it was just noise—occasional scratchings from the attic that were so rare, I was sometimes able to convince myself they were nothing more than the neighbors working outside, somehow acoustically reflected to sound like they were coming from above.

One time in early March, I had to purge my basement renter's refrigerator during a 2-day power failure, and I found a bunch of bags of potato chips at the bottom of the fridge. I never asked her, but why do you keep chips in the fridge, unless you're trying to keep them safe from rodents?

The noises continued, and I was pretty sure we had mice, except that they were unusually loud for such small animals. "Do you think we have a rat?" I asked my boyfriend one day when the scratching was especially noisy. "Nah," he said. "People usually only get rats in the city."

Unfortunately, he was wrong.

One day in March, I stepped into the basement storage room, turned on the light, and saw a grey creature streaking along the floor and into the space behind the drywall. That was no mouse! At the speed it was moving, it looked positively enormous. There was no doubt about it; we had a rat.

Although I said this adventure was a short one, I'm lying. From the moment I discovered the rat to the day I finally rid myself of it, approximately a month and a half passed. The intervening time was a long journey of frustration, which you now have the pleasure of viewing, in timeline form.

• March 19-ish: I see rat in basement, and my life changes forever. On this date, I also find the place where I presume the rat originally entered the house: an exhaust vent leading from the basement stove to the outside. The flexible ducting that connected fan to the the wall had been torn to pieces, basically leaving a huge 4-inch hole in my house just above ground level.
• March 20-something: I get crafty and make a pitfall-style trap out of a five-gallon bucket, some ramps, and a cardboard seesaw. Spoiler alert: While this trap will remain in place over the next several weeks and even get triggered twice, it will never succeed in catching the rat.
• March 24: I order a catch-and-release wire trap from Amazon.
• April 2: All quiet on the basement front, I begin to believe that maybe the rat is gone. Or, possibly worse, dead and rotting in the walls. My bucket trap hasn't been touched in a while, so I disassemble it.
• April 3: I see the rat again! Same rat time, same rat place! I begin to suspect that this rat is cleverer than I give it credit for. It's been deliberately avoiding my trap!
• Date unknown: At several points during this month and a half, I realize that the various repairs I've made to the entry hole have been unsuccessful. Stuffing the ducting back into the hole does not seem to last long, even when using rags to press it in more firmly. Closing the flap from the outside with a tile works, until the tile slips out of position. My last fix, wedging the tile into the ground before pressing it onto the flap, stays where it's put, but it's frustrating to think that the rat could have been exiting and entering my home multiple times during this ordeal, possibly mating with other rats and getting pregnant! For my own peace of mind, I decide the rat is a male.
• April 14: Where the heck is that trap I ordered from Amazon!? I check, and the arrival estimate is not until late July / early August! Amazon failed me! I cancel my order.
• April 15: I ask my boyfriend to order the same trap using his Amazon Prime account.
• April 17: At around midnight, the rat begins his invasion of the upstairs kitchen, tearing into a bag of tortilla chips and leaving havoc in his wake. I move all foodstuffs off the counter and into hard-to-reach places.
• April 18: Boyfriend's Amazon order arrives, but the rat trap is not part of it. I suspected this might happen, and wonder if I am meant to fail at this endeavor.
• April 19: Around midnight, the most horrible scraping noise emanates from somewhere near the kitchen. It sounds like the rat is trying to chew the house down. In the morning, I find puffs of pink insulation all over the floor of the basement storage room, indicating that he has been burrowing inside the wall.
• April 20: Taking boxes outside for recycling, I find the rat trap in one of them. My boyfriend just did a terrible job of opening them, and completely missed the most important part of the order! I set up the trap in a corner of the basement storage room.
• April 20 - May 7: I check the trap diligently multiple times a day...then every day....then every couple of days. It has not even been touched. Again my optimism gets the best of me, and I wonder if I might have gotten lucky and sealed the rat outside the last time I closed off the vent.
• May 7: I see the rat again! He runs right past my trap, and has clearly been doing so for weeks, so either the trap must be in the wrong place, or the rat has lost interest in peanut butter and tortilla chips (for the record, he never seemed interested in peanut butter, despite all the Internet advice to the contrary). I take the trap upstairs to clean and re-bait with something more tempting.
• May 8: By this point, several friends know about my rat situation, and one has been encouraging me to "borrow" one of the kill traps that are all around our buildings at work. Upon hearing of this third sighting, even the friend who has patiently indulged my desire for a humane catch and release is now suggesting that I just put out some kill traps. But no! I stand firm! I will take this rat alive! I bait the trap with buttered popcorn and painstakingly maneuver it into a dark cranny behind some plumbing, where I saw the rat emerge from last time. Later, while doing laundry, I see a patch of paint scraped off the basement outer wall that I swear wasn't there a few days ago. The patch is in the same place where we had a water leak repaired a few years ago, so this gets me to thinking that maybe, the rat might be thirsty and trying to get at the moisture behind the paint. So I place a dish of water inside the trap as well.
• May 9: Success at last! When I get up in the morning, I check the trap to find the rat inside it.

OMG!! For such a thorn in my side, the rat sure was cute! With his bulgy black eyes and soft grey fur, he looked like he would make an adorable pet. However, after all the damage he did to my house, I was happy to get rid of him. After taking a couple selfies, I carried him off into the woods at the end of my street.

For the record and others who would rather put 1.5 months of effort into humanely catching a rat rather than just poisoning it and being done, PETA says that you should release a rat no more than 100 yards from where you found it, because putting it in unfamiliar surroundings might confuse it and ultimately lead it to die of starvation anyway. The woods at the end of my street just squeaks into that radius, and there are plenty of unguarded garbage cans in the vicinity!

I never knew rats could jump (and I'm glad I didn't, because I would have been terrified to even enter the basement!), but they do! When my rat exited the trap, he took a couple of hesitant steps and then bounded away, leaping into the air every few feet in an impressive display of acrobatic activity. Well, that explains why he didn't stay in my bucket trap! 

Afterword

If all this action in this tale seems to take place in the basement storage room, that's because it is the least finished area of the house. A flood a few months ago resulted in the bottom 3 feet of drywall being removed from this room, making it basically the only place where the exterior walls, and insides of the interior walls, are exposed. I never thought I'd be grateful for this disaster, but it proved instrumental in identifying and catching the rat, since the room is now basically a window into the guts of the house.

Don't It Yourself

I once said that every guy I ever dated, no matter how briefly, came into my life for a reason.

One guy, who I only ever met online (but with whom I had a short and very fiery online relationship full of drama), said on his dating profile that his talent was "Fixing things, rigging things to make them work."

Was it that throwaway line on okCupid that set me on my current trajectory – instilled in me my  philosophy of DIY-til-you-die? (Or was it the plethora of "life hacks" I keep stumbling upon on the internet?) I can no longer remember, but I can be certain that it had an impact on me. Before that, it had never occurred to me that being able to cobble something together was something to take pride in. But now, it's part of my unshakable M.O.

I have more love for my home improvement projects that end up like a Frankenstein's Mashup of glue, scavenged parts, and a smattering of mismatched screws, than I ever would for a beautiful brand-new, store-bought version of the same thing.

But there comes a time when every do-it-yourselfer must draw the line. And for me, that time came when I needed to install a handrail for my basement stairs.

The basement staircase was one of the many "special" qualities of my house when I moved in—it had no handrail whatsoever. That was not a problem for me, young and nimble and indescribably graceful at all times, but it became an issue when I wanted to begin renting out the basement bedroom. Suddenly the primary user of the basement staircase wouldn't be me with a load of laundry in my agile and capable hands, but a paying guest. Who would no doubt be happy to sue me for any slip or fall. I don't have much of a defense in a lawsuit when my staircase lacks a basic safety feature such as a railing.

But I wasn't worried! As an avid DIY-er, I was ready to take on the challenge. Fortunately, the stairs had come with a railing...it just wasn't installed. I found it in the storage cubby under the stairs! All I needed was a few screws, and my staircase would be ready for business!

Cut to 5 months later. The railing has still not been installed. Turns out the hardware that came with the railing was bent and needed replacement, and it took me this long to get motivated and find suitable parts (I got them from Community Forklift for 99¢ each, of course!)

Cut to 4 months after that. The railing has still not been installed. Turns out my basement drywall is just as "special" as the rest of the house, and has no studs upon which to anchor a handrail. But that hasn't stopped me from trying. Now my drywall is pocked with screw holes of varying sizes, and a couple of places where whole chunks are missing, thanks to my inability to master the art of drywall anchors.

I had literally been failing to install my handrail for 9 months, before I finally reached the line of Don't-It-Yourself. I brought in the professional contracting big guns (which was of course a struggle in itself, between the lack of call-backs, the no-shows, and the refusals to provide an estimate). But once they arrived, my handrail was up and stable in less than 30 minutes. And in the two hours that they were there, they also replaced my non-functioning gas oven with a new one (one which I'd picked up for free from a Craigslister, of course!), and installed a new bathroom fan in my basement.

Those tasks would have taken me, on my own, days, weeks, or even months, which would have undoubtedly been filled with many frustrated tears, and possibly a blown-up house!

So no, I'm not ashamed that this time I decided to let the pros handle it. In fact, I just might be changing my tune. Next time I'm faced with a home improvement, no matter how DIY-able it might seem, I may just treat myself to a professional job.