From the moment my husband and I first visited the home that we bought a little over a year ago, we knew we’d need to change the colors of the walls inside our house. The hallway, living room and master bedroom were a mint green color that appears to have been original décor from the house’s early 1970s origin. The dining room and bathroom were a beige color that reminded me too much of the long line of rental apartments I’d lived in over the years. The kitchen may have been the worst. The walls were a shade of white (who knew white had so many shades?) and there was a floral wallpaper border around the top and at chair rail height. The second bedroom was the only room in the house with a nice color- a pretty, pale blue.

I actually picked up some paint chips before we had even closed on the house. But a year later, the walls were still untouched. Finally, we decided to start picking out some colors. We had seen an article in Consumer Reports that ranked Behr paints high in several categories, so we headed to Home Depot to look at paint chips. I’ve read numerous books, magazines and web site articles and watched countless television shows about decorating, almost all of them including some sort of color choice. In fact, there is a show on Home and Garden Television (HGTV) called Get Color that is completely devoted to color choices in the home.

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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.

A few weeks ago, we somehow put a pinhole in the top of our old faucet. I was out of town last weekend, so for the past two weeks we have gotten by with a faucet that was swaddled in duct tape in order to keep water from getting all over our kitchen.

This weekend, I replaced the faucet with a new one. The first order of business was to remove the old faucet and to measure the holes to make sure that I got one that fit. It turns out that I really did not need to do that, but it was good for peace of mind, anyway. I do not have a basin wrench, but there is enough room behind my sink to get by with regular wrenches and with robogrips. A basin wrench probably would have saved me about a half hour all told between removing the old sink and installing the new one, but I decided against purchasing one.

To remove the old faucet:

1. I shut off the hot and cold water valves leading up to the faucet. I needed the robogrips in order to get them closed enough that no water could pass through.
2. I cut the hose to the hand sprayer as the easiest way of uninstalling it.
3. Next, I needed to unhook the copper water leads between the faucet and the water supply. Unfortunately, the hot water lead had a few connections that I couldn’t bend in such a way that I could pull the faucet out of the hole, so I had to cut it at the base of the faucet. Luckily, I have done work with refridgerant coils in my brewing days and had a tool for just that purpose.
4. I was then able to remove the faucet by pulling the hoses through the hole so that everything was exposed.
5. Last, I had to unscrew the base for the hand sprayer and remove that.

My wife and I then took a trip to purchase a new faucet. I had one that I liked, and she had 3 or 4 that she liked. Since one of those was the one that I liked as well, we decided to go with it. We were a little worried that it would be too tall because of where our window sill sticks over the sink, but after installation we had a good ¹/₈” or so between the faucet and window sill. I also picked up some plumber’s putty and a soap dispenser, since we would not have a need for a hand sprayer and a soap dispenser would remove the need to keep a bottle of soap up on the sink.

Installing the new faucet was much easier than removing the old one:

1. Apply plumber’s putty to the inset on the faucet base. Line it up with the three holes in the sink, press it down, and then use a flat head screwdriver to remove the excess putty.
2. Set the faucet base onto the inset piece.

Ours fit right on top and had a groove to make sure that it was even.

3. Feed the hoses through the center hole and line the faucet up.
4. The next step is to screw the faucet into place from underneath. I had my wife hold the faucet in place up top to make sure that it was straight, since I do not have x-ray vision and could not see through my counter.
5. Our faucet uses stainless steel hoses, which proved much easier than the copper to line up and attach to the hot and cold water pipes.
6. Make sure that the faucet is turned off up top, and then open the water valves.
7. Before hooking the faucet itself up to the mixing hose, we had to run the hot and cold water to flush any gunk from the hoses out. The cold water hose didn’t have anything visible in it, but there was some black gunk in the hot water hose that came out within the first few seconds.
8. The last step for the faucet was to attach the mixing hose and the faucet hose. Everything was basically done at that point.
9. Since we had bought a soap dispense, we had to install that. It was a simple matter of screwing it in place, attaching the bottle, filling it, and putting the pump into place.

The only mishap that we had was that I somehow knocked the nut loose on the hot water valve, so it was leaking a little through the valve stem. Tightening up that nut fixed that problem, though.

So now, we have a brand new faucet! It took a few hours to remove the old one and install the new one, but it looks much better than the old one and so far it seems to work much better as well. I’ll write about that once I have had a chance to really put it through its paces, though.

I have no idea how she managed to do it, but my wife put a hole in our faucet. She was washing a spaghetti pot, which has no sharp angles or protuberances. The next time that I went to use the faucet, I got sprayed!

The pin hole is near the top of the faucet, so it has nothing to do with the threaded piece that you can unscrew and replace. Before she washed the spaghetti pot, there was no hole. It remains as a complete mystery to both of us.
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It has been a few weeks since we were broken into, and I have long since cleaned up most of the broken glass from the door. A friend of mine then came over and measured the door for me to make sure that I got the correct size, and told me he would be by after work the next night to help me install it. The best laid plans, however…
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I wrote about how to install a soffit extender in your attic, but I did not include a picture. One of our visitors, Fred, left the following comment:

Can you describe (or do you have a photo) of soffit extenders? A quick web search doesn’t show up much - maybe they’re known by another term?

The soffit extenders that I bought are the Raft-R-Mate Attic Rafter Vents, which are thin pieces of pink foam with a ridge down the center. It is basically a flat, U-shaped piece that sits up against your roof on the open end and against the insulation on the closed end. This insures that the air from your soffit vents can get past the insulation into your attic.

It is not very convenient for me to get up into my attic right now to snap a photo, so I included the one from their website. Click on the picture to go visit the official page. Let me know if you have any more questions!

Any day that you learn something is a good day. Today, we learned quite a few things about our house that we were previously unaware. Thankfully, we learned them because the previous owner stopped by to say hi rather than through too many things breaking.

The gentleman that we bought the house from got a Christmas letter from our neighbor which mentioned our break-in. He stopped by mostly to let us know that there is in fact a burglar alarm installed in our house. That was a nice thing to learn. He showed us where the controls are and how to operate it.

He also let us know a few tricks like where the water shut off is to the valve in the back (I had already found that) and that there was not one in the front because the shaft was long enough that you could just drain the water with it turned off and be all set. That had been driving me nuts because I could not find a shut off valve inside the house, and had given up.

Shortly after returning my neighbor’s plywood, which he lent us to cover the hole in the back of our house, I discovered that there was some plywood beneath our shed. The gentleman who sold us the house let me know that that is to cover the bushes and small trees in the front of the house from snow falling off of the roof. That’s a good tidbit to learn before we start getting significant snowfall.

It was very sweet of him to stop by and let us know about the burglar alarm and such. He misses his house; he built it with his own hands and lived here for 40 years. Him and his wife are too old to maintain a house themselves, though; she can barely move, and he is at the point where he can not mow the lawn any more.

I gave him one of our wedding beers as a Christmas gift. Merry Christmas.

After our house was burglarized, we had basically written off our tree. The only time that my wife would have had to decorate it was on Friday evening, and since the tree was coated in glass there was no safe way that we were going to be able to bring it upstairs and decorate it. We had decided to leave it outside so that we would at least have the semblance of some sort of holiday spirit; maybe the cars driving by would have reflected off the bits of glass.

Yesterday, while cleaning up the glass from the basement, I decided that I could not stand to see my wife look so dissappointed. I spent about 3 hours on the tree with the safety goggles, some good gloves, a respirator and a shop vacuum. I started at the top and worked my way down, sucking down any leaves, bird feathers, and bits of glass that I could find. When I got to the bottom, I cleaned up what had been knocked to the floor. Then I worked my way back up. I probably traversed the tree at least 8 or 9 times. I doubt that I managed to find all of the glass in the tree, but I cleaned it up enough that I only saw one piece of glass in the last 2 or 3 times up and down the tree. At that point, I thought that the tree would be safe enough to bring upstairs and decorate.

We were a couple of days late, but we were able to use our christmas tree. I saved Christmas! My wife is very happy with me now.

Yesterday, my house was broken into. The thieves broke my glass door in the basement and stole my piggy bank. This left a lot of broken glass littering my basement and whereever it happened to be tracked through the house by people walking through it.

To clean the glass up, I used a combination of a plastic cup, a dust bin, a piece of wood (that used to wedge the sliding glass door shut but does not prevent people from coming through the door) and a bunch of paper bags. I double bagged the paper bags and filled them about a quarter to a third of the way before moving onto the next one. I also used a broom a few times, but for the most part it was easier scooping with the cup and the dust bin.

After almost hitting my head on the remaining glass in the door, I decided to get the rest of it out of the frame, which left a bit more to clean up. At least I didn’t have to worry about where I stood anymore.

Once I got the majority of the glass picked up, I got out the shop-vac. My boss let me borrow the shop-vac from work, and it made picking up much easier. It worked out quite well for getting things out of the corners and for the little bits strewn about everywhere. I still need to go outside and get the piles that are outside the door, but at least the vast majority of what was inside is picked up. We will be able to get in there and safely measure the door frame now to determine what we have available for a door replacement.

What do you do when your house gets broken into? What steps should you take? How do you make sure that it does not happen again?

My house got broken into this afternoon. They stole my piggy bank. Eight and a half months into home ownership, and I have to replace a door. The worst part is that they covered my Christmas tree in glass; since the door was made of safety glass, it shattered and left a fine coat of sharpness over a vast majority of my basement. We had the Christmas tree right in front of the door to acclimate it and planned on bringing it upstairs tonight to decorate it. Now, it would be too dangerous. I will probably put it out in front of the house for a couple weeks.

My wife and I got home at about the same time tonight. We immiediately noticed the change on the kitchen floor and part of my fire engine piggy bank just inside the door. We assumed that the cat had been having a whole lot of fun. After she had been fed and went downstairs, though, we heard her crunching through something. It turned out to be all of the glass from our sliding glass door. We took a quick look around and called the police.
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