Mr. and Mrs. Fix-It
Shedding Some Light – On Everything
This weekend was the weekend for new lights around the casa. Whenever someone has asked “what’d you guys do this weekend.” The answer was “installed some lights, that’s about it.” These were much needed repairs, but just a good example of those frustrating, mundane home maintenance items that none of us want to pay for or complete. Alas, they must be done and therefore we must tell you about them.
Let me just say that as I wrote this, Barton was passed out in my lap – snoring very loudly. Just thought you might like to know that. Lucy stayed awake in order to watch the end of the Biggest Loser.
So, now that you have an image of our house on any given Tuesday night, back to those lights.
About three weeks ago one of our fairly new kitchen track lights started on a downward spiral. One week one light blew, and a new bulb did not fix the problem. Six days later number two of three lights did the same. Finally this weekend the third died. Bad track light.
So back to Home Depot we went and amazingly enough they let us exchange the $59.99 fixture no questions asked. It was obviously defective so we feel okay about the whole transaction.
Especially me, since I didn’t have to climb up on the ladder to reinstall the track.
Don’t think I got off so easy though.
Yeppers. That’s me in the attic. Don’t mind the messy closet. Now that we have a new light and can see all the mayhem it will be cleaned up. We just need more weekends.
Are you wondering how I ended up in the attic? Ever since we moved in our closet light has been touch and go. Again, not the bulbs. But when the man of the house took this light down, he discovered that the previous fixture was installed with those little butterfly drywall anchors and they came off in the ceiling. Still with me? They are the same do dads we used to hang our lantern in the bathroom if you need a visual.
Somehow we decided it was easier to hoist me into the attic to retrieve the lost anchors, since the access door was right there – instead of driving to True Value for new ones.
Our attic is nice, not to shabby up there. Our new closet light is just so-so. We obviously didn’t break the bank on this one, spending about $24.99 also at the Depot.
But it works.
Anyone else out there battling random home maintenance this weekend?
It’s A Girl!
We say that because we slapped a skirt on that puppy and called it a day. We’re pretty into just hiding our ugly stuff around here lately. Remember our trash can fencing from this weekend?
Yesterday morning we posted about the disappointment that was our little red table turned little red sink vanity. It was worth a shot right? In the end it was going to be a really time-consuming project (as if a few months of procrastination wasn’t bad enough already) that may or may not look like poo at the end of the day. It was getting to be entirely too piecemeal for our liking.
So, as we’ve also already told you guys, we stared down our leaking pipe and discovered a quicker and easier solution in a rubber washer and some carefully spread plumbers putty.
All that was left to do was cover up the ugliness. And by ugliness we mean some major rust and calcium deposits underneath our 1950′s sink.
We know, it’s a little irresponsible of us to just conceal all of this, but the sink is working perfectly now and is just a little worn underneath. Keeping the vintage charm of the original sink fixtures and not tossing one more clunky item into a landfill is worth the shameful rust-hiding.
When searching the web for sink skirt making inspiration we stumbled on a beautiful example and how-to guide from Miss Mustard Seed’s blog via HGTV. It certainly is perfect, as are all of her projects. But we’ll just be the ones to say it – she is an overachiever. As soon as we saw the words “sewing machine” Chad was laughing and I ran in the other direction to scheme up a cheap knock-off.
We used a method similar to our no-sew curtain making. Here are the details:
Step One: Measure your sink both around and from the sink to the floor. Our skirt was made to attach underneath our sink so we measured as far up under the sink as we could and down to the floor. Use a sewing tape for the most accurate measurement.
Step Two: Choose your fabric. We wanted our skirt to be as gender-neutral as possible, read “no flowers.” It was bad enough I was already putting a skirt on something in our house – the pups were just glad it wasn’t them!
Plus whatever fabric we chose had to easily tie into the color scheme of our adjacent kitchen. No clashing allowed.
So we headed to JoAnne’s Fabrics here in Durham and picked up two yards of burlap, marked at $3.99 per yard. When we got to the cash register we discovered it was 40% off. Score!
We think burlap is a nice complement to our wooden kitchen countertops and sisal rug, while giving some contrast to our start white walls (or at least half of our walls) in the bathroom. It says, “I’m girly enough for a skirt, but rough enough to go camping, or ride a horse, or something.”
The other supplies we purchased, also at 40% off, were a roll of burlap toned natural cotton thread and a package of Velcro made for fabric trimmings.
Step Three: Cut your fabric to size. We added two extra inches to the length in order to allow for a hem, and about 18 extra inches to the width to allow us to make little gathers in our skirt and also hem each side.
Step Four: “Sew” your skirt. We hemmed the right, left and bottom edges of the fabric using this method, same one we used on our bedroom curtains, with iron-on hem tape. We used the straight, factory-cut edge for our top and didn’t need to hem it.
Step Five: Attach your Velcro. The Velcro we purchased was made especially for fabric trimmings. This means that it comes with one glued side to stick to your sink and one rough side to sew directly onto your fabric.
We just stitched the rough strip along the top of our skirt by hand – no robot sewing machines. Make sure you sew the Velcro to the front of your skirt, otherwise you could be like us and have to snip it off and re-sew it. D’oh!
Step Six: Skirt ‘yer sink. Just attach the sticky side of the Velcro to the underside of your sink and press firmly. Go slowly so you don’t have to reposition it. The cleaner and drier your sink the better for sticking.
Ours is pretty rusty as we said, and our Velcro still stuck well. It’s good like that. We just pinched back little gathers in our fabric Velcro at the front of the sink to make the slightly pleated effect.
Now we have the perfect hiding place in our tiny storage-less half bath for extra toilet paper or even worse -golf magazines… boys.
What do you guys think? Too girly? Just right? Still mourning the red table like us? Anyone else with a hubs who insists on having golf magazines in the bathroom?
You Can’t Always Get What You Want…
Yesterday we celebrated the Beatles, so today we had to throw some love to the Stones, just to be fair.
This is a very disappointing post for me to write, however we’ve vowed to share the good and the bad on the blog. We don’t want to paint this totally rosy image of all our DIY projects when some of them don’t work out. Consider this our reality show. We have to show you the cat fights and hair pulling along with the good times. Consider this our DIY cat fight – with our half bathroom.
Remember Jessica our chopped up and reassembled side table?
We’re here to admit defeat. The table is being reassembled in our car port as we type speak but I fear it will never know it’s true destiny as our bathroom vanity.
Why? Well, it all started with the idea of throwing a white vessel sink on top, attaching a faucet and kapowee. We have ourselves one bathroom vanity that no one else in the world has. Fo sho.
Then more and more problemos presented themselves. We could not find a vessel sink small enough to fit onto our narrow table. The smallest ones available in our modest price range were 15″ in diameter. A good size but too big for this table because after all you have to also have room to mount your faucet onto the table.
Plan B? We found a great white bowl at Home Goods for only $25 and an online tutorial on how to make a bowl into a vessel sink. It was perfect right?!
But our drill bit, remember we talked about the top-secret hole saw project here, wouldn’t even scratch the surface.
So we reluctantly returned the drill bits and the faucet that we had picked out to go with the whole set up.
And then we decided to take our $200 back and spend less than a dollar on a new washer, and use some plumber’s putty to repair our old leaking sink. The wall mounted cast iron sink we have in the half bathroom is what started this whole mess, but as Chad has always said, it really does have some character – in a 1950′s high school bathroom kind of way.
So we’ve fixed the sink, are $200 richer and right back to where we started.
Plan c is to skirt the sink and call it a day. Not to spill the beans but we’ve already done that and are loving the finished look. We’ll get the steps all written up for you guys and pics online this week. So stay tuned for the manliest skirt sink we could muster. Dr.’s orders.
In the meantime we got a mirror too! Oh yea, Tuesday morning bonus. It’s getting crazy around here.
It was a $24.99 Home Goods find, much bigger than what was there.
We weren’t so sure about the brown at first but are thinking now that we like the way it contrasts with the bright white and the “gentle tide” on the upper half of our walls. The skirt will tie it all together. Just wait and see.
So that’s our Tuesday morning. Defeated by a table, but excited about a skirt. What evs (ha, we saw the Hangover Pt. II this weekend had to squeeze in a reference).
Don’t worry, we won’t trash the table. Once it’s completely reassembled it is going to live a nice life on our screened in porch. We wouldn’t dream of wasting that million dollar red.
Why We Blog
We are working on another DIY project around the casa, and while there is more to come on the specific project we felt the need to blog a bit about a hiccup in the process.
This weekend we’re working on finishing up our half bathroom’s thrift store table turned vanity.
Along the way, we have to drill some holes in our table – which requires us to use a hole saw drill bit. Now we have definitely used hole saws before. We burned up a couple when installing the plumbing fixtures in our kitchen counters.
You can see that these hole saw bits have a mechanism to attach the saw to the drill. Well, as we said we burned them up (read more about that in this old post) so we needed another for the vanity project. This is what we got.
Two completely separate pieces?
Things that definitely make us go hmmmm….
So after reliving a bit of the early 90′s we decided to Google.
And found some unexpected answers. Our favorite of which suggested that anyone asking such a dumb question go take a class on how to use power tools.
Now we are far from experts, but we’ve used a power tool or two in our time and for some reason these insensitive answers bothered us enough to write about them.
Come on seriously? Ask you neighbor?
After closing the laptop and hopping in the car and driving to Lowes, we just realized that our particular hole saw bit also required us to buy a mandrel to attach the two pieces. Nowhere was this suggested in any of our Googled unconstructive insults to our intelligence tips.
Our vanity isn’t photo ready yet, so for this Saturday afternoon we’re just here to say, thanks for reading our blog, we hope our tips are helpful, and if you have an unattached hole saw you might just need to buy a mandrel - but you are not an idiot. It is for this reason we blog – in hopes of offering real stories and real tips for those of you who are like us – eager DIY beavers who are just learning as they go.
Making Lemonade
This post should really be titled “S%*! Other People’s Dogs Tear Up” but we wanted to be kind because let’s face it – dogs are dogs no matter who they belong to. Our own pups are not completely innocent themselves, judging by this post and this post.
Over Easter weekend we sat on our friends’ pup Annie, also known as Annie the Wonder Dog, or Annie Bananie as she’s now known in the Whited casa. The good news is that sweet Annie had a great friend in Lucy this time around, you might recall their first slumber party together didn’t go nearly as well.
The bad news? Day one, while Annie was home alone (our pups were spending the day outside) she got a bit frisky and ate our window blinds.
Annie’s parents offered to pay all $30 of the damage (thanks Rob!), so we ran out right away to get a replacement set – twice. We hate it when we measure, forget the post-it at home, think we remember correctly and end up making a second trip. Oh well, good thing Home Depot is close to the casa.
After trip number two’s success we had even greater success at home in that the replacement blinds fit our window so well that we didn’t even have to use new mounting hardware or the instructions. We just popped the old blinds off, pulled the new ones out of the box and slid them right in to the existing brackets.
Lookin’ good – and it literally took three minutes once we got back from the store, twice.
Sorry for that hazy, orangy shot, it’s like our dining room is trying to look younger with a blurry camera filter. Consider it the Barbara Walters of dining rooms. You get the idea though.
As a second bonus to the lightning fast install, we were also able to use the guts of these half-eaten blinds to repair another pair of broken blinds in our casa. When we moved in almost two years ago (yikes!) one of the sets of blinds in our living room was broken and no longer had the mechanism that helped them hold a rod and turn. This meant that we basically had to grab the wooden slats by hand to get them to open or close. Pretty annoying.
When pondering if there was any possible way to recycle our old set of blinds (hated the idea of just tossing them in the trash, teeth marks and all) we realized that we could take out their guts and use the pieces to replace the broken parts in our living room blinds. Score.
So although Annie gave us lemons by eating our dining room window blinds – we made lemonade by quickly replacing them and the parts of another set of broken blinds which was, at the time, w-a-y low on our to-do list of home repairs. That my friends is mucho bueno – times two.
How To: Replace a Toilet Flush Lever
Sometimes I don’t know my own strength and apparently sometimes I even flush the toilet too aggressively. So aggressively that I break the handle, or at least the plastic flush lever. This is what I did earlier this week.
Oh snap, is right.
The biggest problem in all of this is that I broke the plastic flush lever in the hub’s favorite toilet. Yes, you read correctly – he has a favorite toilet. We both do. Chad’s is the guest bathroom and mine is the new throne in our half bathroom – out of pride of course.
Like I said, oh snap.
Luckily repairing one of these guys is a 15 minute process. But it did take us a few days to get to Triangle True Value to buy the replacement lever – longest three days of his life.
One of these guys will run you anywhere between $4 and about $25. We opted for the $18 version because it was the only side mount model they had with a true chrome handle instead of a chrome toned plastic handle. That is tip number one, make sure you note where you current flush lever is mounted – in the side or in the front. Also decide if you want to go for plastic or not. These two options will determine which replacement lever you buy.
Then you can just follow the instructions to install it, likely printed on the back of the lever packaging.
Honestly, we didn’t even look at them until the end though. All you really have to do is, first, unhook the chain and flap from your current lever.
Then you unscrew the existing level inside the toilet and replace it with the new lever – reattaching the chain.
So easy a super strong cave woman could do it – after breaking it in the first place. Insert Tim the Toolman-like grunting here.
Have you guys tackled any mundane but absolutely necessary projects these days? Any one else have a favorite toilet?
