Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Nate's Home Improvement

New home owner, never really had to do any fixer upper stuff growing up and now I am paying the price!

1) Paint. Turned out pretty well. DON'T EVER PAINT A ROOM RED!!!! Fortunately the house was looking pretty good when we moved in. We painted two bedrooms and the basement. As part of the wedding present I painted the kitchen for Meg.



The two bedrooms we painted with rollers and brushes. The basement was a little bit bigger job so I borrowed one of the many products we have worked on at EAC, the Wagner Power Roller. It is awesome and it only took us about 20 minutes to do the entire basement. Only drawback is that it eats up about a half a gallon of paint because the hose is so long. As long as you are working on a bigger job, that shouldn't be a problem.

2) Electrical work. I changed all the switches and outlets so they were more up-to-date and looked clean. Nobody ever explained to me about the 3-way switch! I blew about a half a dozen fuses until I found out if you have a light that can be turned on in two different places, you need a different light switch...



The latest project was to run some ethernet cable from our upstairs to the downstairs. Just switched to DirecTV and in order to access their On Demand service you need to be hard wired into the box. This is such an easy job right?!? Nope... A wall in the office is directly above the crawl space so their shouldn't be any problem getting there right?!? The space was a wee bit tight so their was no possibility of getting a normal drill bit where it needed to go.

I head to the depot... After talking to a guy who seems to know what hes talking about he introduces me to the electrical drill bits. 54"-84" long! Whoa... He tells me to try it out and if it doesn't work just bring it back. We got there but the drill bit didn't lead me in the right direction. Luckily I found a closet. With Meg's help I was able to drill through the closet floor and run the cable from there to the crawl space. Cleanup will happen eventually...



3) Make the ugliness go away. The house we bought was built in the '50s and has a little nastalgia that should have disappeared a long time ago.

I only have an after picture but how bout some chair railing along all the wall?!? A not... Nico was a big help with this one, thanks bud.



4) Plumbing. First couple of attempts, success! And then, not so much...
Right after we moved the dishwasher went out. With the help of Papa Smurf I had no problem replacing the old one.

Replaced a faucet in our mini bathroom no problem.



Had a little backup of our drain in the basement. Had to call the Roto Rooter. Came in and cleaned everything out, super easy and a nice chunk of change for him.

Well I thought it was a pretty easy process. Our kitchen sink was backing up so I headed to the rental joint to pick up a snake. Got the snake home and went to work... Apparently they gave me one that was too big for my pipes, the snake head came off in the pipe, oh boy... I tried fishing, i tried a magnet but I just couldn't grab the thing. Put in a call to Roto Rooter. Came in, cleaned everything out, super easy and a nice chunk of change for him. Leave it to a professional!

Next adventure is fixing the back door and putting up some gutters with the help of Pops and hopefully Nick.

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