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captainsblogCue that Tool Time music and bring out the bimbo in the apron, for I did it all today.
When I was a little more awake and a little less distraught this morning, I discovered the reason for my latest falldown in performing a simple kitchen sink repair in five days or four hardware store visits, whichever comes first. The original working theory was that I'd broken one of the u-bends in the course of replacing the tee joint which, duh, joins them.
Not eggzactly. Turns out the replacement tee, which I swear on the Better Homes and Gardens Maintenance Bible I checked against the dud for exact sizing the day before, was about two threads short of its model on each side. This would tend to encourage leaking, so back again, parts and receipt in hand, to the newly named Closed for Labor Day Hardware.
There was only one thing that would get me out of this: a trip to one of the Big Boxes. I chose Lowe's as being a few hectares closer. Man I hate that place; bigger than a C-134 aircraft hangar and requiring a bullhorn, a map and a working knowledge of Spanish to get anything accomplished. (I know, they use the English, too, but the words eyeworm right into my brain as I try to figure out why "ell" has a separate Spanish translation but "tee" doesn't.)
I found yet another matching set, containing the larger tee, the shunt already soldered to it, and both bendos de usted in a single convenient package. I also priced out the drill bit I needed to replace on account of the next section of this tale I'd be getting ahead of myself with. So I headed back, realizing, the next part up from the u-bends is the bottom of the sink itself; given recent history, that will be the next thing to go. And heaven help us if the bad karma starts heading up the supply chain; when Eleanor's brother called just as I was walking back in the door, I explained my next-thing-to-go theory to him and told him that, at its logical extension, my replacing the main water supply to the sink will eventually cause the Big Blue Water Tower to implode. (Locals will understand that; I'll try to dig up a photo of this phallic local landmark, always referred to in exactly those terms, for those who don't.)
Amazingly, somehow, nothing blew up. The waterfalls receded to mere tears as I ran round with the pipe wrench and some teflon tape (cool stuff; never used it before) to get it all down to the smallest of occasional drips. We haven't cooked anything in three days, and therefore have no dishes of significance to handwash yet (the dishwasher, which discharges through a separate conduit, ran fine during all of this), so when that job comes up tomorrow, it'll tell the tale of the tape. And the shunt and the tee and the yew and the trap and the bolt at the bottom of the seeeeeeeeeea.
----
The other long off-put weekend task involves our primary television. When we moved here, there were tv's in every room and cable running all through the cellar connecting them. We used and needed none of it; our one small set went in this room, no cable came for years, and when it did, we ran it to the exact spot where the set had always been. The adults had fallen away from being regular tv watchers, and I preferred keeping an eye on the kid's choices as I worked or internetted from this spot.
With DVDs came a bigger set, and with the bigger set came the desire to watch it in comfier quarters than this office, so we've been rolling the set out to the living room whenever we've watched one. I remembered the Appian Way of cables crisscrossing the cellar, and specifically remembered one cable plug coming up into the living room in the exact spot where we now wanted it. I checked downstairs, and the guts of it were there at the living room end. All I needed to do was (a) drill a hole from our current cable incoming line to the cellar, and (b) fish the line back up to its former residence down the hall.
This all was, as the Coen Brothers once called it, a Simple Plan.
Let's start with the carpentry. Understand, first off, that I have the repair and maintenance skills of a garden slug. Never learned as a child, never needed until homeownership, and married all that time to a woman who did have the skills. So she'd volunteered to do the drill. As a token of effort, a few days before I'd nailed a small hole through a spot in the office closet, and ran a thin wire down the hole to be sure it was in an accessible location.
This morning, as I was in the kitchen working on my plumber's crack, I smelled the fresh burning wood of the closet floor giving way against the weight of a 1/2-inch bigass drill bit. But my it seemed to be taking long. And when she ran stuff down her freshly burned hole, nothing came out on the other end. I then realized- that my wife, ever the artist and follower of the rules of carpentry (Rule 1 being, don't pick indiscriminate spots for drilling your holes but use the edge of a baseboard), had put her hole smack into a floor joist, which, I'd neglected to mention (and to be fair, she neglected to ask), was about half an inch from where my dumb-luck pilot hole had been dropped.
No problem, she said. We'll use your hole. I know enough about Men and Women to know that if it's my hole, I'm going to be the one drilling it, so I bore down, and slowly popped a half-inch circle in place of the millimeter-size one I'd nailed through.
And listened to the lovely sound of the business half of the drill bit falling to the cellar floor after breaking in half.
Hence the Lowe's run for pricing out its replacement. It's not too bad and we're not likely to need it anytime soon. Hell, after today the only hammer I plan on touching for quite some time will be the one I use to break out of my own coffin.
----
Right. So the cable is dropped from the office. The pre-laid wire it's to meet up with is already mere inches from its destination, and I can readily connect the free end of that wire to the live cable I'd just carpentered into the picture.
Here, as they say, is where it gets interesting.
We have a semi-finished basement. (Let me explain terminology. We generally use "cellar" to refer to the whole lower level, but if referring specifically to the side with the greater amenities, we'll say "basement," because "finished cellar" sounds funny.) Actually, the finished part is just that- done, finished and through. Between water leaks, mildew and cat activity (I'll get to that part in a moment), the whole thing is gonna get ripped back to the bare unfinished walls before we're through. We've always been totally oblivious to the big effort by the previous owners to make a party room down there, years before us- there's a wet bar and everything, and the realtor practically squee!d when telling us that the barstools would stay!- and the whole area is just one big crapcatcher and staging area for Eleanor's seedlings.
One thing is does have, or rather did, was a full suspended ceiling of acoustic tile. Covering the exact spot where the cable entered the living room. The only way to go fishing was to go prying, so pry I did, taking roughly three bad guesses as to the location of the location before guessing within a tile and seeing the wire and the light from above, the hole in the baseboard which fate had pushed it back through when we thought there'd never be a tv out there again.
Emily was a doll. She helped fish, she helped pound, she loaned me her portable CD player so we could try to use sound rather than light (an on-and-off proposition down there) to guide the wire to its destination. We were on the verge of her catching it, tied to a downwardly hurled piece of string, when I just about peed my pants in surprise.
Michelle, my kneady cat from a few entries back, was marching around ON the acoustic tile, in the crawlspace formed between it and the real ceiling, not two feet from where I was working with cable and (trying not to work anywhere near) live electrical wires which also run in the same space. I got over the (figurative) shock after a second or so, but I'd spooked her enough to get her tail up to Big Bushy Position and she made clear, no, she was not coming out if I was gonna greet her like THAT. (She's sitting in full whore mode right now, less than an inch from the left margin, so you can rest assured she carries no grudges.)
The struggle went on. Just as I'd almost poke it through, I'd catch on the edge of the baseboard or the electrical wire I was trying like Joule Staite to avoid getting anywhere near, when in a final long reach of my full left arm (I'd just switched to get that extra little bit from not having to cut my right hand across), a whole Hollywood Squares board of ceiling tiles came crashing down as the one actual wooden frame up there gave way from the stress and Ray, hanging like Tarzan for all of a nanosecond, fell like Chevy Chase as the chair I was standing on tipped over.
Thank you Jesus, nothing other than pride was seriously injured. A little scrape on the knee, and my foot hurts is about it. More importantly, though, this pratfall opened up the work area quite nicely and I left the reptilian looking cord in Emily's hand while I came up to make the final connection. But not without noting the resemblance and screaming, in my Samuel L. Jacksonest tone, "I HAVE HAD IT WITH THESE MF'IN CABLE SNAKES IN THIS MF'IN LIVING ROOM!"
Two problems remained, eminently fixable compared to all that. One, the two ends of the downstairs cable were both male and needed a female capable of connecting them both. No problem; Radio Shack makes a part (I asked him if they carried something called "The Slut," and when he looked at me funny I changed the subject), which is now down there. Two, the wire coming up through all that is bare on the end, not possessing the round cably looking thing that you screw into the set. This I'd forgotten to account for, and I am not going back out there again, so I just jerry-rigged it a bit with some tv-to-vcr cabling for the time being. It's not permanent, but IT WORKS, DAMMIT!
I must be at my old office in Rochester to pick up stuff left for me there in barely more than 12 hours. Emily's first day of high school (and first 7:10 bus pickup) begin even sooner than that. I think we're both going to bed about ten minutes ago. After watching a few minutes of Mets/Braves, that is.
Because I can!
When I was a little more awake and a little less distraught this morning, I discovered the reason for my latest falldown in performing a simple kitchen sink repair in five days or four hardware store visits, whichever comes first. The original working theory was that I'd broken one of the u-bends in the course of replacing the tee joint which, duh, joins them.
Not eggzactly. Turns out the replacement tee, which I swear on the Better Homes and Gardens Maintenance Bible I checked against the dud for exact sizing the day before, was about two threads short of its model on each side. This would tend to encourage leaking, so back again, parts and receipt in hand, to the newly named Closed for Labor Day Hardware.
There was only one thing that would get me out of this: a trip to one of the Big Boxes. I chose Lowe's as being a few hectares closer. Man I hate that place; bigger than a C-134 aircraft hangar and requiring a bullhorn, a map and a working knowledge of Spanish to get anything accomplished. (I know, they use the English, too, but the words eyeworm right into my brain as I try to figure out why "ell" has a separate Spanish translation but "tee" doesn't.)
I found yet another matching set, containing the larger tee, the shunt already soldered to it, and both bendos de usted in a single convenient package. I also priced out the drill bit I needed to replace on account of the next section of this tale I'd be getting ahead of myself with. So I headed back, realizing, the next part up from the u-bends is the bottom of the sink itself; given recent history, that will be the next thing to go. And heaven help us if the bad karma starts heading up the supply chain; when Eleanor's brother called just as I was walking back in the door, I explained my next-thing-to-go theory to him and told him that, at its logical extension, my replacing the main water supply to the sink will eventually cause the Big Blue Water Tower to implode. (Locals will understand that; I'll try to dig up a photo of this phallic local landmark, always referred to in exactly those terms, for those who don't.)
Amazingly, somehow, nothing blew up. The waterfalls receded to mere tears as I ran round with the pipe wrench and some teflon tape (cool stuff; never used it before) to get it all down to the smallest of occasional drips. We haven't cooked anything in three days, and therefore have no dishes of significance to handwash yet (the dishwasher, which discharges through a separate conduit, ran fine during all of this), so when that job comes up tomorrow, it'll tell the tale of the tape. And the shunt and the tee and the yew and the trap and the bolt at the bottom of the seeeeeeeeeea.
----
The other long off-put weekend task involves our primary television. When we moved here, there were tv's in every room and cable running all through the cellar connecting them. We used and needed none of it; our one small set went in this room, no cable came for years, and when it did, we ran it to the exact spot where the set had always been. The adults had fallen away from being regular tv watchers, and I preferred keeping an eye on the kid's choices as I worked or internetted from this spot.
With DVDs came a bigger set, and with the bigger set came the desire to watch it in comfier quarters than this office, so we've been rolling the set out to the living room whenever we've watched one. I remembered the Appian Way of cables crisscrossing the cellar, and specifically remembered one cable plug coming up into the living room in the exact spot where we now wanted it. I checked downstairs, and the guts of it were there at the living room end. All I needed to do was (a) drill a hole from our current cable incoming line to the cellar, and (b) fish the line back up to its former residence down the hall.
This all was, as the Coen Brothers once called it, a Simple Plan.
Let's start with the carpentry. Understand, first off, that I have the repair and maintenance skills of a garden slug. Never learned as a child, never needed until homeownership, and married all that time to a woman who did have the skills. So she'd volunteered to do the drill. As a token of effort, a few days before I'd nailed a small hole through a spot in the office closet, and ran a thin wire down the hole to be sure it was in an accessible location.
This morning, as I was in the kitchen working on my plumber's crack, I smelled the fresh burning wood of the closet floor giving way against the weight of a 1/2-inch bigass drill bit. But my it seemed to be taking long. And when she ran stuff down her freshly burned hole, nothing came out on the other end. I then realized- that my wife, ever the artist and follower of the rules of carpentry (Rule 1 being, don't pick indiscriminate spots for drilling your holes but use the edge of a baseboard), had put her hole smack into a floor joist, which, I'd neglected to mention (and to be fair, she neglected to ask), was about half an inch from where my dumb-luck pilot hole had been dropped.
No problem, she said. We'll use your hole. I know enough about Men and Women to know that if it's my hole, I'm going to be the one drilling it, so I bore down, and slowly popped a half-inch circle in place of the millimeter-size one I'd nailed through.
And listened to the lovely sound of the business half of the drill bit falling to the cellar floor after breaking in half.
Hence the Lowe's run for pricing out its replacement. It's not too bad and we're not likely to need it anytime soon. Hell, after today the only hammer I plan on touching for quite some time will be the one I use to break out of my own coffin.
----
Right. So the cable is dropped from the office. The pre-laid wire it's to meet up with is already mere inches from its destination, and I can readily connect the free end of that wire to the live cable I'd just carpentered into the picture.
Here, as they say, is where it gets interesting.
We have a semi-finished basement. (Let me explain terminology. We generally use "cellar" to refer to the whole lower level, but if referring specifically to the side with the greater amenities, we'll say "basement," because "finished cellar" sounds funny.) Actually, the finished part is just that- done, finished and through. Between water leaks, mildew and cat activity (I'll get to that part in a moment), the whole thing is gonna get ripped back to the bare unfinished walls before we're through. We've always been totally oblivious to the big effort by the previous owners to make a party room down there, years before us- there's a wet bar and everything, and the realtor practically squee!d when telling us that the barstools would stay!- and the whole area is just one big crapcatcher and staging area for Eleanor's seedlings.
One thing is does have, or rather did, was a full suspended ceiling of acoustic tile. Covering the exact spot where the cable entered the living room. The only way to go fishing was to go prying, so pry I did, taking roughly three bad guesses as to the location of the location before guessing within a tile and seeing the wire and the light from above, the hole in the baseboard which fate had pushed it back through when we thought there'd never be a tv out there again.
Emily was a doll. She helped fish, she helped pound, she loaned me her portable CD player so we could try to use sound rather than light (an on-and-off proposition down there) to guide the wire to its destination. We were on the verge of her catching it, tied to a downwardly hurled piece of string, when I just about peed my pants in surprise.
Michelle, my kneady cat from a few entries back, was marching around ON the acoustic tile, in the crawlspace formed between it and the real ceiling, not two feet from where I was working with cable and (trying not to work anywhere near) live electrical wires which also run in the same space. I got over the (figurative) shock after a second or so, but I'd spooked her enough to get her tail up to Big Bushy Position and she made clear, no, she was not coming out if I was gonna greet her like THAT. (She's sitting in full whore mode right now, less than an inch from the left margin, so you can rest assured she carries no grudges.)
The struggle went on. Just as I'd almost poke it through, I'd catch on the edge of the baseboard or the electrical wire I was trying like Joule Staite to avoid getting anywhere near, when in a final long reach of my full left arm (I'd just switched to get that extra little bit from not having to cut my right hand across), a whole Hollywood Squares board of ceiling tiles came crashing down as the one actual wooden frame up there gave way from the stress and Ray, hanging like Tarzan for all of a nanosecond, fell like Chevy Chase as the chair I was standing on tipped over.
Thank you Jesus, nothing other than pride was seriously injured. A little scrape on the knee, and my foot hurts is about it. More importantly, though, this pratfall opened up the work area quite nicely and I left the reptilian looking cord in Emily's hand while I came up to make the final connection. But not without noting the resemblance and screaming, in my Samuel L. Jacksonest tone, "I HAVE HAD IT WITH THESE MF'IN CABLE SNAKES IN THIS MF'IN LIVING ROOM!"
Two problems remained, eminently fixable compared to all that. One, the two ends of the downstairs cable were both male and needed a female capable of connecting them both. No problem; Radio Shack makes a part (I asked him if they carried something called "The Slut," and when he looked at me funny I changed the subject), which is now down there. Two, the wire coming up through all that is bare on the end, not possessing the round cably looking thing that you screw into the set. This I'd forgotten to account for, and I am not going back out there again, so I just jerry-rigged it a bit with some tv-to-vcr cabling for the time being. It's not permanent, but IT WORKS, DAMMIT!
I must be at my old office in Rochester to pick up stuff left for me there in barely more than 12 hours. Emily's first day of high school (and first 7:10 bus pickup) begin even sooner than that. I think we're both going to bed about ten minutes ago. After watching a few minutes of Mets/Braves, that is.
Because I can!
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no subject
Date: 2006-09-05 03:48 am (UTC)So you would say cellar instead of basement. How very interesting that I was just thinking about that exact thing last week.
School is just now starting there? Jeepers. Our guys have been back since August 9th!!
And who won between the Braves and Mets? (go braves...)
no subject
Date: 2006-09-05 10:47 am (UTC)Erm, I answered that poll. Yes, I do remember things from a week ago. Not necessarily everything, but the important stuff, like choosing between Boy George and Sir Mix-a-lot.
I assume the Braves won- all the good it will do them- but I especially enjoyed the Hotlanta announcers lecturing us about how we can't lose in an early round of the playoffs or our season would be a total failure. Right. Now that the Braves are telling other teams that, they should officially change their name to the Atlanta Kettles.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-08 11:28 pm (UTC)Lowe's is always the best choice for the BB hardware stores. There's three Home Creepo stores between us and the nearest Lowe's; we don't set foot in them. Ever. The difference is a little thing called "customer service": I've never been in a Lowe's and not had someone available to spend ten minutes helping me figure out which kind of thirty-cent screw I need for my latest project; sometimes I have to look for them, because they're helping someone else, but they're always there and they'll always help me.
Creepo lost my business once and for all one day when they had three contractor lines open, and one consumer line, and there were thirty people in the consumer line (I counted) and they wouldn't open another even though one of the contractor lines had nobody in it.