Over the past few weeks, we determined that we were going to get Behr paint from Home Depot. The idea is that we will paint most of the interior walls the week after my wife finishes her finals and before she starts working this summer, so that we can get rid of the awful mint green that permates the majority of the house. Consumer Reports had nice thing to say about the paint, and we found some paint chips that had the colors we were looking for and hung them on the wall.

Being as busy as we were, we had only managed to narrow down the selections but had not made any actual choices on paint yet when I went to Home Depot yesterday morning. I had a few tools I needed to get, and figured that I might as well wait until I could get a free light bulb. I happened to notice that Behr was running a promotion for a 25% rebate on paint. I came home, we chose our colors, we measured our walls, and we were out the door to get our paint. We were going to buy it in a week anyway, so this way we can get some of the money back in a few months.

Measuring how much paint we needed was a fun experience. What we did was basically measure each surface that was going to be painted for each color. We had one column that had the height and width that would be painted, and another column for the height and width of anything that would not be painted such as doors and windows. I then threw all of those numbers into a spreadsheet, had it figure out the square footage, and add and subtract all of the numbers for us.

The paint requirements for the house spreadsheet is pretty simple, and could easily be made more useful. However, this was a one-off thing so I just went quick and dirty. The amount of paint needed was off a little bit, because I assumed that one gallon of paint could cover 350 square feet of wall space. According to the guy at Home Depot, the stuff that we bought covers about 400 square feet per gallon.

If you are interested in downloading the spreadsheet, take a look and let me know if you find it useful. We wound up buying 5 gallons and 1 quart of paint, and 3 gallons of primer. Our kitchen will be yellow and orange, and the yellow will carry through the hallways and the living room. Two of the walls in the living room will be a darker yellow. Our bedroom will be a different green than is in there now. The dining room is going to be red.

This weekend I installed raft-r-mate soffit extenders in my attic, and then doubled the existing insulation. I currently had insulation installed between the joists, but I wanted to make sure that I got the most for my heating oil dollars this winter. Between being sick and getting ready for a marathon, I did not have time until this weekend to take care of this project. Thankfully, I did not have anything else that I needed to get done this weekend; it took me a while to get everything done.

Yesterday, I went to Home Depot to get everything that I needed. I wound up having to make 3 trips in total (2 trips, plus I turned around and went back a third time when I was 3/4 of the way home when I realized I forgot something), and rather than having more than I needed of everything I wound up having not enough.
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This weekend, I am finally getting a chance to insulate my attic. More on that next week. Today, I’d like to talk about the customer service that I received at Home Depot. The service that I received ran from great to awful, but not necessarily in that order.
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I have not yet purchased the insulation for my attic. It was raining too hard this weekend, and I am supposed to be tapering for a marathon, so I decided to wait for a few weeks before I purchased it. One of my concerns about buying a lot of insulation at once was that there was no way I would get it home in one trip. I have a pickup truck, but insulation can take up a lot of space (hence the point of having it) and a small Ranger just will not cut it. There is a solution, though!
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Having a few runners in the family, we can sometimes wind up with a clogged toilet. It seems to happen more frequently now that we have our own house than it did when we were in the apartment, but that is probably a function of the toilet being pink. I’m not really sure though.

Tonight, I could not get the toilet unclogged. Normally, I just take the plunger to it, and in 5 minutes to a half hour I will usually have everything working normally. Plungers are very easy tools to use. You cover the hold at the bottom of the tank with the bottom of the plunger, and then you just push it in and let it pop back out until you unclog it or until the water level in your toilet gets so low that that it does not create a seal around the plunger. In that case, you can dump more water in or try flushing to see whether it will work or not (and fill your bowl up with water to try some more if it did not work.)

Tonight, that just was not enough. A trip to Home Depot and we now have a toilet auger. Basically, it a plastic tube shaped so that you can get the cable up into your sewage line. You just push the cable through the tube and rotate the handle to dislodge whatever is clogging up the works. Then you carefully pull it back out and everything works the way it is supposed to. Just be careful not to scratch your toilet bowl.

Today was my day to do work around the house. As such, I had to run over to Home Depot today to pick up a few odds and ends. The parking lot was about half full. There were a couple of vans, half of a dozen cars, and pickup trucks. Yep, it’s Home Depot on a holiday in Maine! At a rough guess, I would say that there were about 120 pickup trucks in the lot.

Of course, one of the pickup trucks was mine…

We have been having ants in the house all summer, but never more than a few at a time. Trying to get unpacked and moved into a new house, plan a wedding, and plan for cutting our income in half seemed more important than getting ant traps set up. Thus, it has not happened until now. Now, though, it is finally time and finally necessary.

Over the last day or two, my wife and I have killed dozens of ants. In fact, I just heard her stomp on another one in the other room. My guess is that when we had our rehearsal dinner, some sort of food got left out to attract them in, and now that we are back from the honeymoon we are finding the results. I have not found anything yet, though.
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