Friday, 17 November 2023
11:49 AM
We’re staying in San Francisco for a few months, so we’re in a rental. It’s nice enough, but there are little things here and there that feel like they could be improved. (For example, no rental I’ve ever been in has had enough lighting.) One such thing in this rental is the kitchen faucet:
 I hand-wash dishes, so I like to have a sprayer attachment for the kitchen faucet. I reckoned that hey, they’re not expensive, I’ll just get one and attach it myself.
Well, not quite. I took the aerator off the existing faucet and went to a plumbing supply place, where I explained my quest to the woman. She got out one of those gauges that they use to determine size and thread count, but to her surprise, mine didn’t fit any of them.
Hmm. We went to find another guy who tried the same thing. At that point I mentioned that it’s possible that this faucet is from IKEA. Ah. “My condolences,” he said, adding that he couldn’t help me with metric sizes and threading.[1]
Being an old guy, I remembered that when I was a kid, we used to have a little shower-head-looking attachment for our kitchen sink. It just slipped over the end of the faucet. Did he have any of those? He did know what I was talking about but told me that those were long gone.
Well, not quite. I went online, and dang, there was the very thing I’d remembered:
Not only was the device still available, the web even told me that it was in stock at a hardware store within walking distance.[2] Price: $4.99.
And so I went to Cole Hardware off Market Street. The outside looked unpromising, but they’d somehow crammed a complete, old-school hardware store into a space that’s the size of a bodega—two floors’ worth.
I wandered up and down the tightly-packed aisles till I found the plumbing stuff. I had to get down on the floor and root around in the back, but sure enough, there it was: the Slip-On Wide Sprayrator (“For mobile home kitchen sinks,” wut). To my professional amusement, the instructions for installing it are wrong—they show you how to screw it on, whereas the entire point is that you don’t:
Whatever. I had to enlarge the hole a little bit, but it did in fact slip on, and I now can enjoy the benefits of a sprayer while I wash the dishes:
I enjoyed the entire experience so much—success in finding a nearly ancient piece of plumbing technology, plus my visit to Cole Hardware—that I got myself a hat that features a skyline made of tools:
At this point, it would probably be wise of me not to study our rental apartment too closely. As much as I’m now feeling empowered, I should probably rein in any further urges to improve the place.
[categories]
personal, house, travel
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Sunday, 14 June 2020
08:25 AM
We've been without a microwave oven for about 9 months now.
This is not because we have some sort of philosophical objection to microwaves; the reason is much more practical. Before we remodeled the condo, there was a built-in microwave above the stove, which doubled as the no-vent/recirculating range hood. We knew that we didn't want this 1980s-era microwave, and we replaced it with a dedicated range hood:
Our initial idea was that we would get a countertop microwave. But once we'd moved in and sorted out the kitchen, there wasn't really an obvious place to put a microwave, because there's just limited counter space, alas.
So we've been doing without. This means we've had to explore substitutes for how we used to use the microwave. Like, how do you reheat leftovers without a microwave?
We use our oven or toaster oven. The room we might have given over to a microwave is taken up by a small toaster oven. That appliance is more useful than a microwave, I think, because it can heat and toast and broil. I make toast all the time, and we have no toaster-toaster, so this is a daily-use device for me.
One of the advantages of a microwave is that it's fast. But heating things in our little toaster oven doesn't take that much longer. It's a little oven, so it heats up pretty fast. It also has a convection setting (which I think just means it has a fan that blows the hot air around). All in all, what might have taken, say, 2 minutes in the microwave takes maybe 8 or 10 minutes in the little oven.
We heat things on the stovetop. Anything that's got liquid—soup, stew, whatever—we can throw in a pot and heat on the stovetop.
There are definitely dishes that would be easier to reheat in a microwave. Leftover pasta, for example. What I've been doing is putting these into a pan on the stovetop with a glug of water and a lid. It's not perfect, since it inevitably steams whatever you're reheating, but it's tolerable.
We (mostly I) heat things in a frying pan. Some dishes can be fried or refried. Heat a splash of oil in a frying pan and toss in your leftovers. If I fried up hash yesterday and have leftovers (unlikely), I can reheat it by giving it a short version of the same treatment again. And if we've got something like leftover rice, I can steam it again, or I can make fried rice.
I never much liked defrosting things in the microwave anyway. These days, if I have to defrost a hunk of hamburger, for example, I'll put it in the Dutch oven on very low heat on the stovetop.
 And then there's popcorn. I love me my popcorn, but I never used prepackaged microwave popcorn anyway. I did have a series of microwave poppers, but they have an unfortunate tendency to break. So I went to the discount store and got a cheap 6-quart pan that is my dedicated popcorn popper. I heat it on the stove and do that classic thing where you shake the pan as the popcorn pops merrily.
I don't miss the microwave as much as I thought I would. It's been interesting to, in effect, return to our pre-microwave days. I didn't grow up with a microwave (back when they were known as "radar ranges," ha), and it wasn't ingrained in me to rely on it. We might still get one someday, but I think that the longer we make do without it, the less likely it is that we'll want to house one more bulky appliance in our limited kitchen space.
[categories]
house, personal, technology
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Wednesday, 1 January 2020
09:33 PM
One of our accomplishments for 2019 was to complete the next phase of our downsizing. In 2017 we sold our big house and moved into a nice urban apartment. In 2019 we had a small condo remodeled that I owned, and then moved into that. This involved initially making many decisions (cabinets, carpeting, fixtures) and then doing some work (painting), and then of course actually moving and arranging many things. So many things.
I decided recently that I was going to mentally declare this remodel-and-move-in phase done. From here on out, I decided, we weren't crossing off the last items on the remodel-and-move-in list; we were starting a new things-to-improve list. But there was one final thing I wanted to get done before I could do this.
Bear with me a sec while I explain the situation. A feature I like of our new place is what we call the "book nook." In the area that was originally designed to be a little dining room (emphasis on little) we put a wall of bookshelves:
As you can see, there's a corner bookcase. It turns out that a "corner bookcase," at least as conceived by IKEA, is not a bookcase that fits into a corner. It's a bookcase that's angled against the two bookcases to either side and held in place with some brackets. As a result, there's space behind the angled bookcase. The following schematic shows the arrangement, looking down from the top. The bookcases are outlined in blue, and the open space is shaded:
I didn't think much about this until one of the kids visited shortly after we moved in and asked "What if one of the cats gets trapped down there?"
I had never thought about this. The cats are not bookcase climbers, or they hadn't been in our earlier places. But who knows—maybe the move would make them anxious and they'd try to hide on top of the bookcases or something. The bookcases are 7 feet high, and if a cat wound up behind one, it would mean dismantling a good part of the book nook. Not to mention a seriously traumatized kitty.
That very evening I jury-rigged a pile of big books and notebooks to sort of cover the top of the open area. This looked sloppy and it detracted from that nice book-nook look.
 So I decided that my last move-in project would be to deal with this, which I did on December 31. I used a piece of pegboard that I happened to have around. As you can see from the earlier schematic, there's nothing really to hold up the board on the wall. I ended up screwing an angle bracket into the wall in a way that the pegboard can rest on it. Here's the finished cover:
It's nothing you'd want to show in Architectural Digest, but I think it will work to prevent a cat from falling down behind the bookcase. And better yet, I can now declare that as of the last day of 2019, we were finished moving in.
[categories]
personal, house
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Saturday, 29 April 2017
03:01 PM
In the realm of home improvement, few things irritate me as much as people who paint over light switches and door hinges. One or more previous owners of our house engaged in this practice. Grrr. (<— see? I'm irritated) Since we're now doing some painting of our own, it seemed like it was time to deal with this.
I went looking online for non-toxic ways to remove paint from hinges. A technique that several people recommend seems promising: you throw the hinges, water to cover, and a little soap into an old crockpot and soak overnight. Alternatively, you can use an old pot on a low burner. That sounded fine, but our steady de-accummulation of stuff means we don't have old pots (let alone old crockpots) stashed in the garage.
So I improvised. I put the hinges in some empty cans with some dishsoap, and then poured boiling water over them and let them stand till cool, maybe 10 or 15 minutes.
It seems to have the desired effect, namely to soften the old paint:
I scraped a lot of this paint off with just my fingernails. You could use something else, but remember that brass is quite soft. A wooden scraper of some sort would be ideal.
For stubborn paint, I repeated the process, and when I got impatient with repeated soakings, I used a brush. You need something pretty stiff (not an old toothbrush), but again, not too hard (no steel brush). This brush worked great for me:
The end result came out pretty clean:
For extra thoroughness I got out some Brasso and polished the hinges, just because.
Disclaimer: I was doing this for what was clearly latex paint. (I could scrape the paint off in satisfying rubbery sheets.) I don't know if it would work also for oil paint. Maybe? I will note that very old paint can have lead in it, so take appropriate safety measures.
[categories]
house
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Thursday, 16 February 2012
11:04 PM
For some Friday Fun today, I'll tell you the story of how I solved (I think) a problem in my home office. My office is in the bottom level of the house ("daylight basement"), in what's normally known as the "rec room" but around here is just the man-cave. It's a nice setup, except that it gets cold — sometimes 10 degrees cooler than the rest of the house.
When it's cold, I have a baseboard heater that I will sometimes use to prevent my hands from going numb. I can get the man-cave toasty, but in order to do that, I have to close the door to prevent all this nice heat from escaping.
And therewith is the problem: the damn door to the man-cave. First, you have to picture how the rec room/man-cave is configured:
Note the lengthy distance between my desk and the door.
I can close the door, but this introduces the following problems:
- People come in and out to go to the laundry room, and they leave the man-cave door open.
- The dog whimpers outside the door to come in.
- The dog whimpers inside the door to go out.
- The cat scratches on the door to come in.
- The cat scratches on the door to go out.
So I find myself constantly getting up and opening the door or getting up and closing the door. (Did I mention the lengthy distance between the desk and the door?) You can see that this is going to cut deeply into the highly productive time I spend constantly sitting at my desk.
Not long ago I had a thought, so I scrounged around and got two cup hooks and some stretchy hair ties (rubber bands, basically) and rigged a little closing device on the outside of the door:
After a couple of tries, I managed to get the hooks in just the right place such that now the door gently swings until it's closed but not latched.[1]
Dang, this solved problems 1, 2, 4, and 5 in one go. People can come and go, and if they leave the door open, it swings slowly shut. The dog and the cat can push their way in, and the cat has even figured out how to hook her claws around the door enough so she can pull it open and exit.
The only remaining issue was that the dumb dog couldn't figure out how to get out of the man-cave. So he would push his way in (door would swing shut), decide after a minute I wasn't as interesting as he'd thought, and then sit there whimpering to be let out.
I pondered this for a couple of weeks. Then one day I had another thought. I scrounged around some more and found some string and some screw eyes (yay for a garage filled with stuff). I used this to rig myself a kind of pulley system so that I could open the door from my desk, as long as the door wasn't actually latched:
I added a weight to my end of string that's enough to keep the string dangling but that isn't so heavy that it prevents the door from swinging shut.
In theory I'm all set: door stays shut (or shut enough to keep heat in), and I can open it from my desk as needed. I'll bet, though, that when we decide to sell the house, the real estate agent is going to "suggest" that I remove my contraption. Harumph.
[categories]
FridayFun, house
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Saturday, 26 January 2008
11:48 AM
It's Roundup (Mostly) Lite today, I guess.
Secret to Success. A short, clear list. I think the sticking point is that the list includes items that often require fundamental changes in thinking. Incidentally, the TED talks are great if you're inclined to watch a lecture on your monitor.
The sheep he rode his cattle back. A little homophonic fun has been sitting there in Windows in front of us all this time.
secretGeek's guide to selecting a cartoon to suit your chosen IT career. If you thought that only "Dilbert" is about working in the world of technology, here's a catalog for you, expertly matched to your job description by Leon Bambrick.
Dewey Decimal System Game. Bet you never thought you'd shelve books against the clock, eh? (Flash required.) I can't tell whether the cheesy music is, you know, intended ironically. [via Colleague Bruce]
[categories]
roundup, general, funny, house
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Sunday, 13 November 2005
10:01 PM
A brief follow-up to the continuing saga of the laundry room. I got a proper breaker for the water heater which puts a single switch on two branches, rather than the two separate breakers that had been in there, probably illegally, before. That cost about $15 and about 5 minutes, not counting Home Depot time.
I had also been concerned that the water heater seemed quite inefficient since I reinstalled it. It was producing hot water, but only enough for one shower, and not even a long one at that. I figured that all that manhandling I'd subjected it to had probably done something to one of the heating elements. I was thinking of pulling those and replacing them.
When I was researching that, I also ran across a suggestion that inefficient hot water can be caused by a broken dip tube, which carries the incoming cold water from the inlet (on the top of the water heater) to the bottom of the heater for heating. A broken dip tube lets cold water into the top of the heater, where the hot water is (since it rises). The article I was reading suggested: "A sign of this is just a few minutes of hot water before it turns cold."
That sounded suspiciously familiar. I went and had a look at the cold water inlet in my water heater to see how I might go about taking it off to get at the dip tube. While I was cogitating on the fact that the inlet appeared to have no obvious way to dismantle it, I noticed that the cold water inlet was connected to the outgoing hot water pipe. And the incoming cold water was connected to the hot water outlet.
Oops. I guess that I hooked them up backward last time. Gee, could this have anything to do with small quantity of hot water I was getting out of the beast?
I'm surprised I was getting as much hot water out of it as I was, actually. But anyway, I exchanged them and all seems to be ok now. Just to be sure, though, I went and took a long, hot shower.
[categories]
personal, house
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Thursday, 3 November 2005
12:48 AM
In the wake of finishing a multi-year project, our beneficent employer gave us some days off last week. A really lo-o-o-ong weekend! What should I do? Should I lie on the couch and read? Should I go away for the weekend? My mind reeled with possibilities. So much so, in fact, that I became confused and anxious. In the end, therefore, I went with that old stand-by for time off work: home improvement.
This time it was the laundry room. When I moved in, the floor was covered with these sort of vinyl-y tiles. But soon enough they cracked and pieces of them came loose, exposing the bare concrete floor underneath, along with a layer of black mastic. Ugly. Plus the room smelled like cat pee, having been one stop among many for a now ex-cat whose senility confused her about where the catbox was.
The job was straightforward enough on paper. Remove washer and dryer, remove laundry sink, remove water heater. That last gave me pause, but I suppressed my doubts. Once the room had been depopulated of appliances, I needed to take up what remained of the tiles. Then I had to scrape or otherwise remove the old mastic. Then put down new vinyl floor. Then reassemble.
I knew that I would be without hot water for the duration, which, er, incentivized me -- once started, I had to get the job done. I figured a long weekend would do it.
Which it did, but barely. All the usual home-improvement imperatives applied: unexpected difficulties; more ambition than time, talent, or energy; Hofstader's Law[1]; a sudden and debilitating loss of energy (mine, I mean) about 3/4 of the way through; and way, way too many trips to Home Depot. As I say, the usual.
A few notes, then.
Wiring I needed to disconnect the hot water heater, which (for those who are interested) is wired with two hot wires to make a 220-volt circuit. For a while I could not determine which breaker controlled the water heater, though. I eventually figured out that the two hot wires were connected to two separate breakers. When I noted this to the electrical dude at the (good) hardware store[2], he looked horrified. I guess the issue is if one breaker trips and the other doesn't, there's trouble that starts with T and that rhymes with E, and that stands for call the Electrician. Or maybe the insurance agent. So I put that on the list to fix soonest. After that, draining the water and lugging the empty heater out to the garage was no problem.
Old mastic I had a notion that I'd scrape up the old dried mastic with a sharp scraper kind of thing. Hardly. What I needed was a substance closely akin to paint remover[3]. I would brush this on, wait 15 minutes, and then use a putty knife to scrape the resulting black jelly off. As I learned very quickly, that remover stuff is eye-wateringly foul. According to the label, it contains chemicals "known by the State of California to cause cancer." And known by me to cause pounding headaches. "Use outdoors if possible," it says on the label. Sorry, I can't haul my laundry room floor outside. It took three passes in all to get the old stuff off the floor. To give you an idea of just how foul it is, when I was done I rinsed down the whole floor with paint thinner, and that was a great improvement. A rather thin silver lining is that this treatment definitively got rid of the cat pee smell. So there's a little tip for you.
Flooring I got new vinyl flooring at the remnants place. I sprung for some good Armstrong stuff; what sold me is that they guarantee against tearing, which seemed good for a floor I'd be dragging the wash machine across. Even at the remnants place the price made my eyes go wide. But I figured what the hell -- I sure didn't want to be doing this job again any time soon. While some minion was cutting the vinyl off the roll for me, I chatted with the sales guy about my old floor. "12-inch tiles or 9-inch tiles?" he asked. 9-inch, I told him. "Probably asbestos," was his guess. Oh great.
Too many jobs The temptation of having the laundry room conveniently empty was too great to resist, and I added more jobs to the queue. I patched a hole in the wallboard, which is a multi-day job (apply, sand, reapply, sand, reapply, …). I also thought that with the water heater out of the room, I should quick-like paint behind it. And I figured I'd re-install the water heater to code, which meant raising it off the floor and strapping it. In other words, rather than doing one job -- replacing the floor -- I was suddenly doing about four. Guess how many of those got completely done.
Tools and materials I do a fair bit of home stuff, and over the years I've accumulated a batch of tools and a garage full of leftover supplies. You'd think, therefore, that I would have a can of wallboard primer around somewhere. Nope. Vinyl-floor glue. Nope. Or maybe not "nope," but "not that I can find, dammit." The latter applied also to various tools -- for example, I have a stud sensor that I used not long ago, but which is now mysteriously nowhere to be found. So I got a new one. If you're a pro, you can amortize the cost of your tools and materials over your various job. If you're an amateur, you don't use your tools or leftovers enough and end up re-buying most of them for each job. That, my friends, adds quite a bit of cost to a job like this, not to mention the annoyance of many trips to the store.
The happy news is that the floor went in pretty smoothly, allowing for the inherent awkwardness of laying out a big sheet of vinyl and then gluing it down by halves. There was one recalcitrant bubble that I convinced to lie down and stay by piling bricks on top of it. Crude but effective.
From that point, it was "a simple matter" of reinstalling the water heater and the other appliances. I assembled the little steel table which was to be the heater's new throne. I even figured out a way to hump the empty heater 12" up and onto the table.[4] Then came another of the unexpected difficulties: the old water tubing wouldn't reach, nor would the old electrical cable. I had known this, but what I didn't know was just how hard it was going to be to find the right replacements. In the end, it proved impossible, actually, or at least, impossible to complete by Sunday. So I took the water heater back off the steel table (oof!) and reinstalled it in its original location. But I did get it all strapped in:
So the floor is done (and nice, too), and the appliances all work. (When I hooked up the washer, I reconnected everything except -- oops! -- the drain pipe. So I had the opportunity to mop my new floor right away.) I have to get the two-breaker problem resolved, and I do still have to raise the water heater, maybe not as high, and I have to finish painting and I have to finish the patch on the wall and I have to come up with some kind of baseboards. So perhaps another long weekend will come along soon, heh.
For all that, it wasn't all just home improvement. Sabrina had three concerts and I did do some socializing and I read some and did in fact get some benefit from having down time. As I was noting over the weekend, this home improvement stuff, it's fun and it's necessary, but it can't be the only thing I ever do with my long weekends. So I won't.
[categories]
personal, house
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Sunday, 26 December 2004
10:12 PM
I had an addition put on my house a couple of years ago, which included a master bath with a stand-up shower. (No tub for me! :-) ) Ever since the thing was finished, the water pressure in the new shower has never been so great, and over time it's gotten worse. I tested the supply to the bathroom itself, and that seemed ok, so the problem seemed to be with the shower itself.
So, ok, holiday's done, back to fun. Today I dismantled the shower from the back, going through my closet. I wanted to get the valve body out so I could see if there were blockage or something. The removal took some doing, as it was not installed with the idea of being removed. But I managed to get it out. I disassembled the valve body, and sure enough, the thing had a stupid restrictor valve in it that moreover had gotten silted up or something.
So I took the restrictor valve clean out, since I'd never had decent pressure with it in place. Then I spent some time reconstructing the shower, which gave me a chance to do some soldering. (Fire! Melting things!) I was pleased that I got everything back together and could turn the water on again by mid-afternoon. Here's where the backend of it stands now:
Fixing up the wallboard is not critical to having a working shower, so I'll get around to doing that patch Real Soon Now.
As with most home improvement projects, there were delays with bits I thought would be easy, and the job did not go quite as I thought. But it wasn't unenjoyable, and it works, and I now have a most excellent blast-o shower, which is what I'd wanted all along.
[categories]
personal, house
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Tuesday, 6 July 2004
10:45 PM
As part of my garage cleanup, I need to Do Something with an old Sears radial-arm saw I have. I got it years ago from a friend who didn't want it any more. I've actually used it only a couple of times. Frankly, the thing kind of scares me. Not only do all the lights in the house dim when you flip the switch and start that big 10" blade to spinning, but there's something a little nerve-wracking about pulling a blade on a 1 HP motor toward your midsection. A more practical reason I haven't used it much is that I don't have a proper table and fence. (If you don't know what that is, it's not important ... it's just missing some stuff.) I got onto the Web today to see what I might do to find or make a table for it. Not much luck on the table front, but I did stumble across this: "CPSC, Emerson Tool Co. Announce Recall of Craftsman® Radial Arm Saws Sold by Sears, Roebuck and Co." They continue: CPSC and Emerson have received about 300 reports of injuries while using these saws. Injuries include hand and finger amputations; lacerated hands, arms and fingers; fractured hands and fingers; and facial injuries. "Hand and finger amputations"!? "Facial injuries"!? Ok, so the notion of doing something with the saw takes on, mmm, a new dimension.
Options? Emerson, the manufacturer, makes a blade guard that can be retrofitted. Enter your model number, please ... <think, think> ... nope, not for the model I have. Further options? Well, it looks like you can send in the "carriage" -- the motor with the blade assembly -- and get $100 from the company. Shoot, that actually sounds like an ok deal. It's more than the saw is probably worth on the open market. I'll give them a call tomorrow to see if this offer is still good. The recall was in 2000, but the website (http://radialarmsawrecall.com/) is still up, so we'll see. I can imagine how much fun it would be to ship 50 pounds' worth of saw motor somewhere. Hope I don't drop it on my fingers in the process.
[categories]
house
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