ReadyMade: Instructions for everyday life

What I am about to share with you takes some courage on two fronts.  This first is to admit to you that last week while grading mid-terms in front of the TV, Garth and I decided to watch one of the two Lifetime Martha Stewart Bio-pics (Martha Inc: The Martha Stewart Story) that we had TIVOed.  Yes we TIVOed them, and yes, we watched one.  What is more upsetting than this is that I couldn’t help but COMPLETELY SEE MYSELF in this clip about re-doing her house.

The first month in our house for both of us was a flurry of motion.  Like Martha, I snapped awake ready to tackle the next task.  I could only think that one hour spent scraping paper from a wall in this corner would put me one hour closer to painting the walls and eventually relaxing in said space.  I’ve heard that women often don’t remember the full experience of childbirth and as I look back at the progress we have made it is hard to remember how we have come as far as we have.  Hours and days have disappeared.  I still don’t always know what day it is.

Over drinks, a friend said to me, “You can’t take everything on at once, it really does take years to change a house.”

Oookay, I thought.  It might take years if you don’t have drive and a crazed work ethic.  Years.  Ha.

During our wallpaper removal party, I overheard a friend’s boyfriend say to Garth, “There is so much work to do, I can’t wait to see you slowly change this place.  It is gonna take forever.”

Garth scoffed at him, “Have you met my wife?  The bulk of this will be done by Christmas.”

The former owner stopped by to pick up some mail that had failed to be forwarded.  She said she was glad we stayed in touch.  I told her we would love to have them over after we had the place in working order.  I was thinking January, perhaps?

She laughed and waved, “See you in five years!”

I shook my head and smiled– five years?  Ha.

The first area that we really attacked in the house is the living room and parlor.  The walls were sponge painted beige on darker beige with a wallpaper border circling both rooms just above the molding.  This seemed a logical place to start because there was little wallpaper to remove, and the walls could simply be primed and painted.

Naturally, before we even had keys to the house, I had selected colors for every room.  This room would be green.  If bright colors make you queasy now would be a good time to stop reading our blog.  The rooms in this house are moving from neutral and patterned to bright and solid ASAP, and it all starts in the living room and parlor.

Our very first night in the house we climbed ladders and sprayed fabric softener at the borders.  We had it all down in a couple of hours and I began to tape off the room.  I figured in one day we could have this room looking like new.

Not so fast.

These two rooms are fairly large, and my room painting skills were sorely out of practice.  I primed the walls and didn’t manage to fully finish this task before our wall paper removing party began.  The following day with Garth and I both painting the coverage wasn’t great, and it seemed like the walls would need ten coats at the rate we were moving.

Garth ran back to Sherwin Williams to grab more gallons of Direct Green and reported our problem to the paint man.  We used the wrong primer.  Feh.

I knew this and somehow let it slip my mind.  If you are using darker colors (reds, blues, greens– not pastels) it is good to prime the walls with gray.  You will need less coats of paint and the overall color will be more brilliant.  What is even better is to ask the paint person (they will do this most anywhere that they sell paint) to tint your primer towards your final color.  We have done this in other rooms and I wish we had done it in the living room.

Of course, I had used straight white primer.  This ended up costing us a lot more than we had intended and took precious work time away from other tasks that could have been accomplished during our week of work before we moved in.

Below is the color on the wall (I am not showing the entire space yet because we aren’t nearly finished with it).

Before the wallpaper party revealed the walls beneath the paper, my intentions were to paint the living room, dining room and kitchen before we moved in.  I shifted my focus to painting the living room, bedroom and studio before our move-in date.

I was still painting green around the trim four days later.  FOUR DAYS!!  I realized that maybe I wasn’t going to get the bedroom painted before we moved in (but I’ll be damned if I wasn’t up until all hours scraping at the glue the wallpaper left on the walls).

At this point you must be thinking, “This is where Claire comes to her senses and realizes that it just might take five years to pull the house together.”

Hmph.

I can make this into my vision of a house.  I can make it happen relatively quickly.  The bulk of it will be pulled together by Christmas.

It has to.  The In-laws are coming.

If homeowners love anything, it’s when somebody joins their club.  Every new homeowner helps to validate the huge leap of faith they took in becoming a homeowner in the first place.  If there’s anything that a homeowner likes more than a new homeowner, it’s giving advice to that new homeowner.

“Make sure you bring a carrot with you when you’re having the house inspected to check the garbage disposal”.

“Check inside the toilet tank, and you’ll find the date the toilet was made.  That will tell you everything you need to know about when the house was last remodeled”.

Now that I’m a homeowner, I’m more than happy to dispense advice as well.  My first piece of advice is to buy a house while you’re still young, stupid, energetic and too broke to pay a professional to fix things for you.  Where else are your handyman chops supposed to come from?

In my first month in our new house, in addition to the normal painting and cleaning, I’ve done some minor electrical work, learned to drywall, wriggled around in the crawlspace, puttered around in the attic and replaced some wall-mounted light fixtures.  None of these things comes close to the sense of achievement that came with my biggest handyman triumph to date:

I installed a dishwasher.

When we bought the house, it was dishwasherless, and my dear wife made it very clear that there would be a dishwasher in our near future….or else.  I did some research about energy efficient dishwashers and poked suspiciously through our kitchen cabinets near our sink.  Surely it wouldn’t be a problem to take out a cabinet or two and run a hot water line from the sink.

Claire and I had been checking the local Sears (just about our only local option for appliances) for deals every week or so, and we were loving some of the high efficiency stainless steel dishwashers in their showroom, but they were a little out of our price range.  We had no idea that modern dishwashers come with bells and whistles like built-in garbage disposals and rotating water jets on the adjustable top rack.  We read that dishwashers actually saved water and energy in the end, but only if the dishwasher was efficient and powerful enough to wash off the gunk without pre-washing in the sink.

Last Saturday, while we were making our garage sale rounds, we stopped by Sears to see if any of our favorite models were on sale.  It was our lucky day, because they were having a crazy sidewalk sale.  At the very end of the sidewalk, close to the Hot Dog on a Stick store, was a crazy efficient, gleaming stainless steel number that had been marked down from $1600 to $550.  It was used, but we were able to buy a 4 year parts and service warranty for $100 more.  We dug deep in our pockets and shelled out, wedged the machine into the back of our Ford Focus hatchback, and took it home.

Now I had to figure out how to install the damned thing.

I realized that we had spent more than we planned on the dishwasher, so I would have to do most of the installation myself.  I rolled up my sleeves, grabbed a hammer, a crowbar and a saw and started poking around in the cabinets by our sink.

The cabinets were crazy old…maybe 100 years old.  They’re made of solid redwood, but they weren’t exactly works of stunning craftsmanship.  The drawers didn’t have dovetail joints…they didn’t even slide properly, and they were covered with layers and layers of old paint, so I didn’t feel too bad cutting into them.

I started by measuring the dishwasher and looking around on the internet for advice.  Dishwashers are surprisingly straightforward, as long as you have a source of electricity (check), a source of hot water (check), and a drain (check).  Lucky for me, the previous owners had installed a garbage disposal and run new wiring to the sink.  Even more fortunate, most garbage disposals come with a hose attached to drain a dishwasher.  All I had to do was purchase a dual valve for my hot water that would supply both the sink and the dishwasher.  No problem, right?

Lucky for me, I had just purchased a Dremel “Multi-Max” oscillating tool that my Father-in-Law had recommended.  I feel bad shilling for a product, but this thing turned out to be a godsend.  This little tool comes with interchangeable blades for sanding and cutting, and works by vibrating incredibly fast.  The oscillating tool cuts through redwood (and even much harder woods) like it was butter.  The blade isn’t very big, but it worked much better in tight spaces than the reciprocating saw that is now gathering dust on my workbench.

I took out some old drawers and cut a 24″ opening for the dishwasher.  I ran into trouble with some of the larger boards that hold the countertop up.  I had to cut the bottom of the cabinets out as well.  I held my breath as I took out the boards on the bottom, because there were bound to be some icky surprises that had crawled under the cabinets during the past 100 years.  To my surprise (and relief), there were only some dust bunnies.  I also wound up having to cut a bit of the top layer of hardwood flooring away to make way for the dishwasher’s feet.

When I pushed the dishwasher into place to check it, I realized that the electrical box directly behind the dishwasher stuck out too far to push the dishwasher in all the way, so I ran to the hardware store to buy a thinner box.  I was going to have a friend help me install the dual valve, but he didn’t show up.  I watched a couple of YouTube tutorials that made the installation look pretty easy, so I decided I could do it myself.

Luckily, the valve installation was pretty simple.  I turned off the hot water, cut the copper pipe using a simple pipe cutter, then screwed the valve on top using the compression nut that came with it.  It worked!  Unfortunately, I bought the wrong hose to connect the hot water to the dishwasher.  After two more trips to the hardware store, I finally had the right combination of hoses and couplings.

Next, I drilled a hole in the cabinet for the drain hose and ran it over to the garbage disposal under the sink.  I removed the hose that was plugging the drain… unfortunately, it was filled with years of rotten food that had gotten up in it.  When I tried connecting the drain hose, I realized that the prior owners had already cut off the variable-sized connector, and after bloodying my knuckles by trying to force it, I realized there was no way that it was going to fit.

I’m sure most of you know this feeling.  My primal inner-handyman wasn’t going to rest until I did a load of dishes, and unfortunately, the hardware store was closed.  I decided to go MacGyver, and rooted through the house until I found the only thing that would connect the two hoses……the barrel of my paintball gun.

It was ugly, but when I turned on the dishwasher, it powered up and worked like a charm.  I went back to the hardware store in the morning and bought a proper connector for the drainage hose.  Now, whenever I do a load of dishes, I feel…..EMPOWERED!

Shit.  I just now realized that Claire somehow tricked me into feeling empowered by doing dishes.  Why are women so smart?