Ladder Brackets

I bought an extension ladder on Craigslist last year for $35. Unfortunately I didn't really have a place to put it. I think it would fit on some hangers above the garage door, but only with about an inch or two of clearance.

I had hung it on our back fence before, but the long drywall screws buckled under the weight. So I threw together some wooden brackets today . I estimated all of the measurements and it ended up pretty close.

I put a small notch on the end to ensure that the ladder couldn't slide off accidentally. It's made from old pallet wood, so I think the total cost was equal to 4 long and 6 medium length drywall screws.

Doesn't look too bad right? 

Toilet Troubleshooting

I noticed that sometimes our downstairs toilet would overfill the tank, wasting water down the overflow drain. I tried lubricating the valve itself, but that seemed to have little effect. Rather than waste too much time trying to fix it, I just went ahead and bought a new fill-valve kit.

Installing it really isn't too difficult. The first time I installed the new valve, I kept a plastic pan nearby to catch the last inch or so of water from the tank. This didn't catch 100%, but it was pretty good. The second time I pulled out the valve I sucked the water out with a shop vac, and it was much drier. First I disabled the supply (thankfully we have the nice quarter-turn supply valves, then disconnect the supply. Then I took the nut loose from the underside of the tank.

Once that was done I pulled out the old fill valve, and installed the new one. The new Universal Fill Valve is height adjustable, and I got the height wrong initially (and had to remove and reinstall the new fill valve).  There's a cavity in the toilet tank lid, so the fill valve can sit higher than the rim of the tank. I did the previous steps in reverse order. Then I reattached the bowl fill tube.





At the end of the repair I noticed that the tank-to-bowl bolts were leaking a bit, so I had to run out and buy a tank-to-bowl gasket/bolt kit. At that end of it I was only about $4 short of the complete repair kit, so my advice is: if some part starts acting up, just buy and install a whole-system repair kit. That way you'll have a few years free from toilet troubles, rather than fixing a new problem every few months.

Parts List:
Fill Valve (HD)
Tank-to-bowl kit (Lowes)

Should have bought:
Complete toilet kit (HD)

Flowerbed Border!

The flower bed in the front yard has needed some help for a while. Earlier this year we tore out the crepe myrtle that was inappropriately planted too close to the house. (the crepe myrtle is now happily planted at the in-laws). You can look back at the crepe myrtle post for some more before pictures.

The original border was what looked like the left over bricks from the house placed on end diagonally.The worked well enough, likely since 1993 when the house was built. They were loaded with mud and had grass growing though the holes.









I laid out the lines I wanted to follow with some string and stakes. The borders were probably laid out relatively straight originally, but have since shifted into pretty curves. This wasn't a big deal as I had to dig out about an 8 inch trench for the stone to lay in.

My parents were up for a visit and helped to ferry all of the stones in from Home Depot. We happened to check the price online and saved 20 cents per block by price matching the online price. We bought enough for the flowerbed border and the retaining wall.

I got started by the sidewalk because I knew that this would be trickiest for block placement. I had to split 3 blocks lengthwise to fit between the sidewalk and house, as well as split one in half widthwise to keep the pattern looking good. I was able to split these pretty easily with a cheap concrete chisel and a hammer.

The process is pretty simple. Dig out a channel about a shovel width wide (convenient width, eh?), compact the dirt, lay down some paver-base rock, compact the rock, lay down some sand to level the rock. Check the level left to right and front to back, and with the previous block in line.

The orange hammer was useful for this as it's a dead blow hammer. It's filled with some metal ball bearings that keep the heft of the hit into the block, but the plastic hammer doesn't scratch the block.

 You can see in the pictures that I would dig out the space for the blocks as I went.  I should have probably dug it all out first, but I didn't like digging. We have thick heavy clay that's really annoying to dig up.

The curve was pretty easy to do. I had a string line in the front, so I laid out a curve to line up with the sidewalk and the string line. The capstones were a bit trickier.

Options for cutting the cap stones for the curves.

I laid out the capstones in the pattern I wanted and then marked where the back planes intersected.In some of the surrounding diagrams. If I tried to leave the white cap stone whole (option 1), then the blue stone would end up sticking way further out at the back. This method only requires 1 cut, but looks worse.



The other option is to cut both blocks at their intersection point (option 2). This requires an extra cut, but I think it ends up looking much nicer.

I set up a fence for my saw to follow, and made repeated passes (each time lowering the saw blade a little bit). When I got about 60% through the block, I broke off the remaining bit with a hammer. Then I cleaned up the cut with the saw.

For the last few cuts I figured out that I could prevent paint scraping off of my circular saw on to the blocks if I laid down a couple of layers of clear packing tape. This also had the added benefit of making the saw slide easier on the block, so I could focus on cut itself, instead of on pushing the saw through

I also had to cut the capstones to match up with the edge of the house. Not too tough, and it ended up looking pretty nice. I made a lot of measurements, but wasn't too confident in my method. Thankfully it looks like I knew exactly what I was doing.

The other curve went pretty much the same as the other side, and they both ended up looking pretty nice.

It ended up taking me about two weeks working after work and a weekend or so. I took my time with it so I wouldn't be too exhausted. You can see how sloped the yard is from this picture. On the right side you can see two courses of blocks, whereas on the left it dips into the ground and you can just see the top of a block sticking out. I was worried this would look strange, but I'm really pleased with how it turned out. I'm hoping I did a thorough enough job so that it keeps looking good for a long long time. Now it's time to back fill in with top soil and lay out some mulch!

Parts List:

Wall Blocks

Capstones

Paver Base - Any small gritty gravel will work

Play Sand

Cutting Wheel

Concrete Chisel

p.s. I really like Home Depot's online ordering system. Rather than search the whole store for the stuff I need, I can pick out the stuff online and have it waiting for me at Customer Service desk when I get off work.

Expanded Attic!

I'm a bit of a hoarder when it comes to sheets of wood. I bought a few sheets from a guy on craigslist a while back (along with a large galvanized bucket, and a fertilizer spreader). I also pick up various chunks of sheet goods that others are tossing out. I finally put some of that stuff to good use.

Out upstairs attic is a bit cramped. Not room for much else other than the A/C unit. After measuring out this end of the attic, I decided to add about 16 square feet of floor space.

Added board seen in bottom portion

The edge of the existing floor went flush to the edge of the joist, so I had to piggyback a 2x4 up against the joist. I used a board from a pallet so you can see the stripes a bit, but only until the plywood goes down on top of it.

Boards ready to haul up

Sadly a 4'x4' piece of plywood won't fit up the small drop down attic door. So I ripped the piece into two 2'x4' sheets. This probably was for the best anyways because it would have been really difficult to move a large sheet around up there.

I moved the insulation around a bit to make it even. The previous owners just threw boxes up here compacting the insulation down. Not only is this a bad idea because it reduces the effective r-vaule of the insulation, but it also puts undue weight on the sheetrock. (I really dislike all of the half-done jobs of the previous owners) Anyways, I slid each piece in and nailed it down separately to make it easier on myself. I'm glad to have the extra space. At the very least it will make it easier to reach the filter for the upper A/C unit.


While I was up here I wanted to add a small shelf just behind the hatch. Again the previous owners had just thrown stuff on to the slanted portion of the attic, so I had to fluff up the insulation. I added some riser blocks and some longer boards  resting on the existing joists to hold up this big piece of MDF. The MDF was pulled from a pile that a neighbor was throwing out. It's about 20"x54", so it's about 7 extra sq feet of usable storage; more that that, it will keep us from throwing stuff up there like the previous owners, haha.

I think the total cost was probably about $15, and about 3-4 hours.

(half a sheet of plywood and 5 inches of a 2x4 I bought. The rest of the 2x4s were pulled from the trash)

Rotten Plug

I noticed at Christmas time that one of the plugs on our front outdoor socket was holding firm, and the cover was pretty loose. It was a nice day out, so after giving the sprinklers a run through to make sure they were all working and pointed the right way, I decided to look at this plug. I pulled off the cover and pulled of the sealing foam and found part of the plastic receptacle was broken off. I also found that the receptacle housing had a pretty large mud dauber nest. I scraped that all out and swapped out the plug.

I've replaced several plugs in the house and I've found that the original builders just used the insert taps on the back of the receptacles rather that the screw terminals. While this isn't terrible, I don't really like it. I use the screw terminals on each plug I've replaced.

After replacing the plug, I filled in around the receptacle box with some indoor/outdoor caulking. Then I replaced the sealing foam and the metal cover. I then filled in around the cover with some additional caulking to help prevent more insects and geckos from trying to sneak in. There's a gap where two pieces of siding meet that seemed to be the likely entry point. Now the plug works like a charm. Total time, about 15 minutes.

The caulking is only evident in areas where I overfilled in an effort to keep out critters. There's a foam gasket that seals around a majority of the cover. 

Crepe Murder!

We've always hated the crepe myrtle in our front yard. It was too close to the house, blocked the window and was in a poor place for the plant's health. We had a warm day on the weekend so Claire and I got after it and yanked that sucker out. We gave about a shovel's width radius around the crepe myrtle. We down a then channel about a shovel deep.





 I used one of my many axes to chop through the roots we hit. Once we had dug a nice channel about 12+ inches down we tied it up to Claire's Car and with a little shoving from me we toppled the beast. Now the house looks even better from the street. Next Christmas the tree will really shine from the front yard.

Bathroom Tiling!

The downstairs bathroom had a few problems when we bought the house.

 The previous owners did a bad job caulking the tub. (took about 2 hours of scraping to get out the old dried caulk so I could do it right), they didn't tile under the new vanity (just laziness as they had spare tile), and they didn't attach the vanity to the wall at all to make it stable. 

We found some nice tile at the Habitat Restore for about 70 cents a square foot (a quick google search showed it being about $3 normally).

I removed all the fixtures, giving Claire thorough explanations along the way. It was awesome making her scrape the old wax toilet ring off the bottom of the toilet. We then got to smashing. With regular hammers, flat  head screwdrives, and some flat scrapers we managed to get all the old tiles up. 

First we hammered the screwdrivers under the edge of the tile and big chunks. We also got good chunks up by just hitting the tiles hard, haha. Once we had the tiles up, we went at the mortar with the scrapers. That was the most annoying part. Lots of hammering and lots of dust. Eventually we got it all up and then cleaned up. Tiling wasn't too bad, but I had to do it all in one evening after work, which was pretty rough. It caused a few joints to be uneven and for me to get lazy with some cuts, but in the end it looks pretty good. I grouted the next evening, and then installed the fixtures the next day (as I had to go out of town for work right after that). I'm really happy we got it done, but hopefully the next tile job is less rushed.