Light it up!

At my house, I have a back deck and underneath that is another area that is pretty neat. When I moved in earlier this year I took a day and cleaned the shit out of that area. I mean powered washed all the concrete, put some furniture down there, and made it nice. There is a light down there but definitely not funky enough for this cat.

I then noticed that the length of the "ceiling" was just exposed beams that were the underneath side of the deck above.

The idea came into my head of party lights to put up down there. But not just regular white lights, of course they had to be the multi-colored ones to represent my multi-colored personality.

Luckily enough I had found a good amount of strands in the house where I wouldn't have to go out and buy any. Dope. We are cooking with gas now.

My first attempt was to put them up with little hooks that you screw into the wood. They would make it easy to replace the lights if need be. Now usually I link to things that I use, but I won't this time because they were absolute garbage and not worth the amount of effort.

Now it was onto things that do a lot of work with minimal amount of effort. A staple gun. You use it just like you would with hanging up Christmas lights. Two key things, get staples long enough to where they don't really pinch the wires of the lights. Secondly, when you start stapling try to aim it well enough to where you don't shoot a staple through the wire. Both of these things will minimize the risk of the wires getting messed up and shorting out all of the lights. 

I was all in, stapling like a bat out of hell and thinking about all the shindigs that these bad boys were going to shine light on. But oh was I a naive little soul. Because I didn't do the most basic of things that you do when dealing with any sort of string lights. 

Plug them in first to make sure that they work. 

So after I had got them all hung up, I plugged them in..........only half of them worked, and the strands that didn't were intermittent with the ones that were. 

Shit.

Luckily there were some extra strands. So as a demoralized and broken man, I took them all down and replaced them with the working ones. Afterward I was about two strands short of completing it the ceiling. 

It still worked for the most part though, and I have yet to put up anymore. I will probably wait till it gets warmer outside.

Underneath there when its dark has this really neat reddish glow. With how it's arranged in that area and the lights, my friends and I spent many a good late night hanging out after getting home from wherever we were that particular Friday or Saturday night, and that's what it's all about.

Let's see what's behind (fixing) door number 3

Awhile back I was living in a place where for some reason, for a year straight we had some really wild parties. Why a house full of three guys in their early 20s would live like that is beyond me. Always at the end of night for some reason or another one of the doors in the house would either end up with a massive hole in it or would be completely off the hinges. Now I don't always know how this happened, but I definitely know it was never my fault.

So being the person I am, I would be the roommate who would fix the doors. Now I went into this completely not knowing how to do it, and I messed up a good amount of doors getting it wrong. 

What you want to do first is get a door. Crazy right? Now the right size door is key, as one could imagine. What you can do is either measure the old door or the door frame. There aren't too many crazy custom sizes of doors. They all usually fall into a pre-cut category that you can find at a home improvement store. In addition you want to get a door with a pre-cut knob and latch hole. They usually aren't the easiest to cut and may be beyond the scope of this blog.

Now on to the worst part of this. Hanging the hinges on the new door. You have to cut an indention on the new door so that the hinge plate sits flush inside. This will allow the door to close completely on both sides and have as much seal as a piece of wood up against another piece of wood can have.

To do this you will need a wood chisel. I have this set from Lowe's. Once you have measured the proper distances the hinges need to be apart from each other an away from the top and the bottom of the door, take the hinge plate and place it against the door. Then trace around it to know exactly how it will set against it.

Now that you have your outline, take your wood chisel and make small cuts down about 1/8" apart

http://www.todayshomeowner.com

from each other the entire length of your hinge outline. Note the depth of the hinge plate as well. You want to make sure it sits flush and doesn't go below the plane of the door. This will get things all messed up and you will have to put up those retro beads for privacy. Just remember, you can take more off if it doesn't fit, but you can't put more back on. Coincidentally that was also my catch phrase back in the 1974 disco scene.

Now that you have your mortise cut you can put the hinges on the door. You can really use any wood screw longer than an inch and a half to put the hinge on. In my first attempts I was notoriously bad at measuring. It's not the end of the world if it doesn't line up right. All you need to do is take it down and either cut further up or down on one of the hinges, and move it. It may look a little janky, but hey at least you have some privacy.

Veterans Day thoughts

With Veterans Day upon us, I wanted to take some time and talk about something that isn't related to home improvement and probably not as humorous as my normal posts but is a subject pretty close to my heart. I was in the Oklahoma Army National Guard for 6 years and did one deployment to Afghanistan during that period of time. Now I'm not a big rah-rah go Army veteran type.  I only do that on job applications and in crappy pick-up lines. But I did want to write a Veterans Day post like this since I now have this outlet to do it.

A lot of times when I tell people I went to Afghanistan I either get "Oh, how was that" or "What was it like" and I find it difficult to respond. Sometimes it sucked beyond belief, other times I had more fun than I've ever had. I've seen some amazing sights that many people will never get to experience. I have also seen things that I hope no one ever has to see.

The biggest thing I took away from that time was some of the greatest friends/brothers that are still in my life to this day. I am grateful that I have them to lean on and in turn, they lean on me. It's that bond that has kept us going even when times seemed pretty dark.

One of the main things I wanted to address is this- veterans in this country are committing suicide at alarming rates. In a quote from Military Times "In 2014, the latest year available, more than 7,400 veterans took their own lives, accounting for 18 percent of all suicides in America." So a group who accounts for only 7.2% of the US population accounts for 18% of all suicides in the US. That comes out to an average of 20 per day in 2014.

So I don't know exactly how people can help. I have grown very distrusting of non-profit groups that say they support veterans but turns out to not be the case. The Veterans Administration healthcare is an absolute joke. And it's just really hard to tell if former service members are suffering or if you can tell, it's even harder to get them to seek help. But if something crosses your path where you can, or if you see an avenue that would help, I would urge you to consider it.

Furthermore, with this being a Veterans Day post and this is my blog so I can do what I want, here are a couple pictures of me and my friends from the military. Partly to pay homage to our time on deployment together, and partly because I feel like I looked relatively cool back then.

At the bottom is a video that my good friend Dan took during our time in Afghanistan. He had a helmet cam and did an awesome job putting together that video.

Thank you all for reading my blog up until this point. I hope you have enjoyed reading my posts as much as I have enjoyed writing them.

-Jake 

  

Just a three pronged person, living in a two pronged world

This past weekend my roommate moved out of the house, so now it's just little ol' me all on my lonesome. Don't get me wrong, roommates are a lot of fun and I have had some great ones in all the different places that I lived. But I love having the place to myself, to do all the weird stuff I want without being judged. I mean I would do weird stuff before, but damn if my roommates didn't have to sit me down and ask if I was alright.

Alright to the point of the story. When Adam moved out, I decided to give up my basement bedroom (seductive fireplace with bearskin rug and all) to come live above ground and try to get some sunlight. However, it wasn't until I got moved into my new love bunker that I realized that all the outlets in the room were only two prong, old school outlets. This is not good, since all surge protectors have three prongs, the third circular prong on the bottom being the grounding wire. And if I can't plug in surge protectors, how am I suppose to charge all the things that keep me entertained? What am I gonna do read a book? I don't think so.

So my mission now was to replace all the outlets to three prong outlets. Now this is somewhat tricky, because to be legal and up to code, the outlets either have to be grounded, or have to replaced with a GFCI outlet. Now the good news and the bad news: you can check if the actual box the outlet sets in is grounded itself is grounded. Take a voltage tester, put one prong the longer slot and touch the other prong to the screw that holds the outlet cover on, if the indicator light turns on it means the box is grounded. But the bad part is that you will have to install a grounding wire to attach to the box. This isn't too difficult, just finicky. You can buy pre-made grounding wires with the screws already hooked on.

If the box isn't grounded, call an electrician and have them take a look. That is above my head for now.

The first step is to remove the old outlet. Now this should go without saying, but make sure the power is cut off to that outlet. As I have written about before, being electrocuted is probably one of the worst things to happen (unless you are into that kind of stuff then whatever, do it). Find the right breaker and flip it off, and double check the outlet with a tester to make sure there is nothing coming through it.

Once you remove the outlet, in the back of the metal box there should be a couple screw holes where you can attach the grounding wire. Screw it into the back and trim it up accordingly.

Now attaching the new outlet. If you recall my GFI post when I had to replace that, regular outlets work similarly in the terms of how you can string outlets together and run them off of each other. So you will see two hot (black) and two neutral (white) wires on each side. The back of the outlet should say which side the black wires go into and which side the white wires go, but a good thing to note is that one side will be brass screws and one side will have silver screws. Hot wires always attach to the brass screws. After you have those attached, attach your ground (green) wire to the green screw on the bottom, and voila! Make sure you tighten down all the screws onto the wires, and you are done.

Now the biggest pain in the ass part is jamming the outlet back into the box. Try to bend the wires so they will fold neatly. That way nothing gets messed up and you end up popping a wire off one of the screws.

Now a very important part. Go buy new outlet wall plates before you start this. The old two prong plates will not fit over a three pronged outlet. I lived for two days with exposed electrical outlets, which doesn't really give off the vibe "I have my life together".

A couple tools that you will need to help out are

• A voltage tester
• Some wire strippers
• A Phillips and flat head screwdriver
• Needle nose pliers (for bending the wire around the outlet screws)
• A three prong outlet tester

Once you have everything together, take the three prong outlet tester, and stick it in the outlet. The series of lights on the tester will tell you if it's wired correctly and if not, what is wrong with the wiring. 

Once you get the hang of replacing one, the rest go pretty easily. One other thing to note, you might want to keep your vacuum handy. If the house is older  the outlet boxes may be really dirty and dusty on the inside. So cleaning them out wouldn't be a bad idea. Just remember you can't plug it into any of the outlets connected to the breaker you turned off. 

So good luck, and remember if you do it wrong you will burn your entire house down. No pressure

I walk into the club just to pipe it up

There comes a time when something falls down your sink that you don't want to. Whether it be a ring, too much grease, $700 worth of premium Columbian white lightning, etc...When this happens your best route is to remove some of the pipes underneath the sink to get whatever you need out.

The first time I had to do this was cooking and in the process peeling carrots and potatoes, with the peels landing in the sink. The garbage disposal ground them up, but they gathered up in the pipes and clogged it up. Another time I had a friend pour some grease from something that he was cooking down the sink in liquid form. When the grease hits the water, the grease congeals and clogs up the pipe. No bueno.

The one thing most every sink (I haven't seen one without it) have in common is a p-trap. It is a pipe shaped like a U that dips below the level of the horizontal pipe going towards the wall. The p-trap serves two main purposes. The first is that gravity keeps water down in the "U" shaped part of the pipe making a seal that keeps odors and gases from coming back out of the pipes and up from your sink. Nobody wants to smell what ever gross stuff you washed down there yesterday. The second is to catch debris and valuables that may fall down into the sink.

Now before you get to overzealous and start pulling stuff apart like a mad person- get a bucket. I remember this first hand because I didn't have one, and I suffered the consequences. If there is a clog you will most likely have a bunch of water in the sink. A bunch of nasty water. A bunch of nasty gross smelly water. If you take apart a pipe between that water and the clog, you will receive all that water. And it will get everywhere. When you pull apart the pipe, take the bucket it and place it underneath, and aim whatever pipe towards it when you pull it apart. Water is already probably going to get everywhere when you are working down there anyways, might as well try to minimize while you can. So get a bucket and keep it close. Or don't. I don't care.

City-Data.com

Now depending on how your sink is set up, there are a variety of ways it can look underneath. If it is a single basin sink it will probably just be a straight pipe going down into the p-trap and into the out pipe. If a two basin sink is more of your style there will
be a more "T" set up underneath. One/two "L" joints going to the "T" and then a straight pipe going down into the p-trap. But there are other configurations as well.

The "T" set up tends to be slightly more difficult since there are more places that the clog or what ever you are looking for could be. That was the case when Chef Boy-R-Jake was at the helm and I had to spend my entire afternoon figuring it out. Turns out all of that nastiness got caught coming out of the garbage disposal, and not actually in the p-trap. Whould've thunk it.

diychatroom.com

The way that the nuts and washers work to connect the pipes is by a threaded sleeve over one pipe with a washer that shaped like a wedge going underneath the lip, then the nut tightening down over top sealing the washer. You don't want to tighten the nut to tight or it will slip over top of the washer and not seal right. It's best just to hand tighten, not use a pipe wrench.

If for some reason the clog is beyond the p-trap, and you cant get to it, you can try a couple different things. you can get a drain snake. You can try your hand using drain cleaning compounds and just keep putting them down there, because as we all know harsh chemicals fix everything. Or.....call a plumber.

So good luck. This is probably my least favorite thing to do around the house, since thing can get really gross, really fast. The main thing to remember is to not put a bunch of stupid stuff in your sink to where you have to take the thing apart to get it out. But that would just make life boring, wouldn't it?

Of Mice and Men (and Snakes)

The last couple of nights have been very interesting for my roommate, Adam, and me.

We like to pride ourselves on keeping the house clean. Me being an eligible bachelor and him being whatever it is that he is, we keep our space clean to make sure we put off a good vibe to visitors of all varieties. So when we found out we had mice we were pretty shocked to say the least.

It started last Thursday when we were hanging around watching TV. I noticed my dog Sassy acting strange and I then noticed a mouse on the floor in front of her. She has a history of eating mice and a much more graphic history (in my head) of throwing them up. So we caught it and tossed it outside. No big deal, problem solved.

A couple of days later my Adam noticed another mouse running under the same couch I was on.

Great.

We got up our courage to deal with a tiny mouse and when we pulled the couch away from the wall, it was a sight. Apparently the mice had been going into my dogs food bowl and taking it under the couch, starting their own little gypsy camp.

So we cleaned it all up, went to the store and got a plethora of traps and mouse deterrents and waged our war on the vermin. The Great Mouse War of '16.

We only saw two and that is what we have caught up until yesterday,  with no additional sightings of the mice. Mission accomplished.

But last night I got quite the shock as I got up to use he bathroom around 1:30. As I turned the corner, THERE WAS NO SHIT A SNAKE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE HALLWAY.

Now I'm pretty outdoor savvy, hunting and fishing and what not, so I have ran across snakes before in the wild, sticking to the mindset "Don't screw with it and it won't screw with you". But when it is in my house, it's an entirely different story altogether. So I did what any reasonably confident person would do and ran back to my room, jumped on my bed and called Adam to come downstairs.

Now two fun facts about my roommate. He goes to bed pretty early and sleeps really hard, and he is deathly terrified of snakes. I was fairly certain he was not going to enjoy this phone call.

We got together and after him talking me into an alternative solution than shooting it (blowing holes in the floors and the walls in the process) we set our new plan into action, he would watch while I stepped on it.

It was quick and painless for all parties involved, and after figuring out what to do with the snake  afterwards, it was over. Needless to say, however, it wasn't easy going back to sleep, much less walking around without shoes on.

Now looking back the snake was harmless, but me not being a herpetologist and constantly being in a state of sleep deprivation, I was certain that snake was going to bite me and I was going to die.

I have come to the conclusion that the snake was probably hunting mice, the same ones that had come invaded my house in the previous couple of days.

If this is the case I would try to avoid getting mice in the house, especially as the colder months come along

• Don't leaving any food out (and dog food)
• Seal any gaps in walls and floor boards ( this comes in handy)
• Use preventative traps in areas like the garage where mice would get into first

This was definitely an experience for me. After killing a scorpion in the house a couple weeks ago. and now this, I'm hoping my luck will change and cool animals will start appearing, like a chinchilla or maybe a dolphin. Dare to dream.

Where will you be when mold strikes?

Let me preface with this. I'm going to be saying caulk quite a bit, take it how you want, but I will be laughing my ass off writing this with some of the phrases I have (or want) to use.

The worst thing about bathrooms is keeping them clean. With all the moisture from steam, it becomes a playground for mold and other nasty things. This is why caulk was invented. The caulking around the tub is meant to keep moisture out of the hard to clean places in-between the tub and the wall or the tub and the floor. Over time the caulking starts to breakdown and gets really nasty. So you should probably redo it.

Here is a list of the things you'll need

• A caulk gun
• Bathroom caulk (Make sure it is the color you want. Caulk usually comes in clear and white, and sometimes other colors)
• A utility knife
• A razor blade scraper

Now this is one of the messier household projects that I've taken on. Some people have a gift for it and can get it done with relative cleanliness.

What you'll do first is remove all the existing caulking. Take the utility knife and run it first vertical along the caulk all the way around the tub, and then horizontally along the bottom. This should leave you with a long strip of old caulk that will pull off easily.

Then take the razor blade scraper and take off any remaining caulk that is stuck to either the wall or to the tub. Doing this will ensure when you put on the fresh caulk, there won't be any bad caulk underneath that prevents it from getting a good seal.

Then you take the tube of caulk and put it in the caulk gun. This link has pictures on how to do it.

Once you start to get to caulking, put a thin bead along anywhere the tub meets another surface.

Then take your finger and with barely any pressure run your finger along it to press it into the seam and to make a smooth line of caulk.

This takes a little bit of practice as you learn how much caulk to lay and how much pressure to put on the caulk to make it smooth.

And in that process, you will probably get caulk all over the place. A good practice is to lay down some plastic or something so that it doesn't get where you don't want it to. It should go without saying but wear something you don't mind getting messed up. If you do need to get it off your clothes, remove it as quickly as possible and use WD-40 to remove the remaining residue.

But once you get all the caulking smooth just let it sit and don't mess with it. The caulk will need about a day to dry to be safe. If you get any water on it, the water will get underneath the caulk and mold, causing you to have to replace the caulk quicker than you wanted to.

I hope this post was as fun for you to read as it was for me to write. And if not, you don't have to tell me I have the mind of a child, I already know.

Adventures of a woodworker

So this post isn't about a project, but it was something pretty interesting that I did this past weekend.

A good friend of mine,Mike, runs a YouTube channel building modern style furniture. Appropriately named, "Modern Builds".

He does this for a living and has acquired several sponsors while doing his builds. One company that has sponsored him is a woodworking store called Rockler. So for the grand opening of one of the Dallas area of stores, Mike went down to do a meet and greet and I got to tag along to see what it was all about.

It was a great time. This store isn't like your Lowe's or Home Depot. It was s a store especially for woodworking, and it had tools for any kind of woodworking project you could imagine.

It was really neat being there and seeing all the people that were fans of Mike's channel, a very diverse group of people and also the types of projects they worked on. It was especially interesting to see how they interacted. Mike, a goofball who I have known for several years now,well-respected member of the YouTube woodworking community, with people asking his advice and guidance on projects of their own

It was also just a really friendly atmosphere. Mike explained to me that the people who follow him and people who do a lot of woodwork in general are a big community that has a free flow of ideas and tips to help everybody.

If you want to check out some of Mike's work, and I suggest you do, you can go to his website or visit his YouTube channel.

Keep your drain sharp

Sometimes weird things happen in showers and stuff breaks.

One of the most common things to get broken is the little piece in the drain that stops the water from going down.

When this happens the best course of action is to replace the entire drain. It's fairly simple, just a little bit of time.

To accomplish this you'll need a couple of very specific things:

• A drain wrench. There are several options: this, this or this

• The fist two are self explanatory, the wrench goes around the metal cross pieces inside the drain
• The third one expands when turn to tighten on the inside the drain on the walls and uses the pressure to turn it.   

• Plumber's putty
• Thread sealant 
• A tub or shower drain

First you will want to remove the old drain, if it's a tub drain all of those types of drain wrenches will work. If it's a shower drain, it likely won't have something in the bottom for them to grab onto, so you have to use the third type of wrench.

To use that one, you'll have to initially put some pressure on the top most rungs when you first put it in the drain so that the piece in side will start to expand, and once it grips, keep pressure on it, and turn until the drain is removed.

Then you take your plumbers putty, and make a small ball the size of a nickel out of it. From that ball roll a long snake-like piece out of it. It basically has the consistency of fresh Play-Doh so just imagine you're 5 years old again. Once you have that, set it to the side.

Before you continue, if there is a rubber washer around the drain that you bought, take it off. The plumbers putty replaces the stopper and works better.

Next for the drain and your thread sealant. There is a small brush on the inside of the cap, take that and rub it around the threads of the drain. The brush resembles a small cotton ball and absorbs quite a bit, so make sure its not dripping when you pull it out of the can or you'll get it everywhere.

Now take the drain with the sealant on it and screw it about three-quarters of the way in. Once you do this, take the piece of plumbers putty and set it underneath where the lip of the drain is going to meet the tub. Then continue screwing the drain in. Normally once you tighten it down the putty will squish out from the sides. This is fine, just cut off the excess.

When you tighten it down, tighten it down solid, but don't over tighten.

Now that you have your drain in one of the most parts is here. DON'T RUN ANY WATER THROUGH IT. For overnight or about a day. Something like that so everything has a chance to set.

From there the drain is set. If it is a pop up drain, screw in the screw without the stopper, and then the stopper goes on top. Most of the time the stopper screws on the opposite way, so take not of that.

ALSO- While your drain is removed, take drain cleaner or some sort of drain snake, and use it to clean out the pipes, it'll be more convenient when the drain is out.

This is your drain, and this is your drain on drugs

The way my house is set up the drive way is long and sloping down into the garage. Now this is great when the winter storms hit and I need a good excuse to get out of work, because during those, there is no way I'm driving out of there.

But turns out it’s not very good for torrential rain.

Right in front of the garage and at the bottom of the hill there is a drain that runs out to a ditch, which is supposed to keep water from coming into the garage. It works great...when it is clean and free of debris.

This I did not know.

Around June there was a crazy storm that blew through the city, I was up watching TV and my roommate had gone to sleep, but woke up to all the thunder. When he walked in we went down through the garage to look, and it was not good. The water was about to the door and ready to start coming in the basement.

We take off as quick as we can and I run to the shed to grab a broom and he runs in the house to get shoes and flashlights for us, and for the next 2 hours in the middle of the night, there we were shoveling water out of the garage like a couple jackasses.

Not wanting to experience that again, we were on a mission a couple weeks later to clear out that drain.

If you find yourself in this situation and want to follow what I did, what you'll need is a high pressure nozzle for your water hose, some zip ties and something long and sturdy but flexible. I had a spool of box banding cable with some sort of end piece riveted on the end, like this. 

What you do is take your hose and zip tie it to the end of the banding cable, giving it enough rigidity to go through the drain without getting caught on anything.

Once you have that, turn on the water and jam that bad boy down in there. What will mostly likely happen is if there is something blocking it up, nasty water will shoot back into your face, so beware. But after a while of running water and the hose down that hole, it will start to clear up.

You may have to get extra lengths of hose depending on how long the drain is, how far down the blockage is and how far away your spigot is from the drain.

I had the benefit of knowing where the drain ran off to, which is not always the case with these types of drains. If you do, look out the end and see when water starts running out clear, and if not, just use your best judgement. If you can pull the hose in and out with ease you should be clear of most blockages.

Several weeks after that we had another rain storm, so as I was getting myself mentally prepared to shovel some more water, I went out to the garage and sure enough that drain was slurping down water like a champ.

Hang up your towel, not your hat

This post comes about as a question that a classmate of mine had for me. At her residence a towel rack had gotten pulled out of the wall. This is a fairly common problem that has happened to me more than a time or two. It really happens fairly easily, especially depending on when it was put up and what condition the wall material is in.

There are several ways that I have gone about putting these up and back on the wall, one more frustrating than the other, and also dependent on how the wall is when it was torn out.

The first way is good if, since the towel rack is already down, you want to go ahead and move it all together. What you'll need is some sort of straight edge that is longer than the towel rack itself, a level (there are apps out the now for smartphones that will use the phone as a level), a screwdriver, a tape measure and these. I prefer to use the screw-in anchors due to their simplicity. However if you have to take them out, they leave a fairly noticeable hole. You can you use smaller anchors, but to get those in you will need a drill with a bit about half the size of the anchor and a hammer to tap it in, so just a couple extra steps.

So bear with me, this part gets pretty detail oriented.

Find where you want to put the rack. Look at what you have, on the back of the part that hold the rod, there should be a little plate

that holds the screws that go into the wall. It comes off by loosening a screw around the outside ring, either with an allen wrench or small screwdriver.

You'll want to measure the distance between the center of the plate to the center of the other.

Once you have that number take your straight edge and level, and keeping a straight line horizontally make a line longer than you think the distance is, preferably by a lot. Along the line mark the correct distance between the two centers of the brackets. At those marks, again take the straight edge and level and make a vertical line. From there you can hold up the plates to the lines, and center them on each line and mark where the screw holes are. And BAM! The hard work is over. If you went with the smaller anchors take the drill bit and drill into the marks, hammer the anchors in and then screw on the plate, put up the bar and make sure the little screw that hols the plate on is tight.

NOTE- Look at how the plates go back into the holders, if they are vertical then make the plates vertical, and if it is horizontal, put the plate  on the wall horizontal. I feel like that was self explanatory but, has to be said.

If you have the screw in anchors, do the same thing but with less steps.

And also don't forget to fill in the holes where the rack use to be with some spackle and matching paint.

The second way is by far the easiest. You simply take where the towel rack once was and put it back there.

Start by taking the plates of the back of the holders for the bar. Where the holes in the wall are you most likely want to use the screw-in anchors since the holes where the screws got pulled out are probably larger.

And once you screw those anchors in the wall you should be good to go. Just put the plate back up and then remount it.

A good practice is to do this on both ends of the towel rack. Even though it may not be out of the wall, it still may just be barely holding on. That way you don't have to repeat this process in a couple months

A GFI is a terrible thing to waste.

My garage is my dojo. AND THERE IS NO FEAR IN MY DOJO. Except there is a slight amount of fear when the garage door stops working and I can't figure out why.

To set the scene, I was working on straightening up the garage when I came across an old golf bag that needed to thrown out. Now there were several ways I could've gone about it. I could have A) just put it in my empty second trash, B) taken it to the dump on Saturday or C) cut it half with a pneumatic cutting disc. So of course the path most rad is the path most taken by me.

Everything went smooth and I cut through that SOB up like butter that had been sitting in the sun. I cleaned up and was headed inside, but as I hit the garage door, nothing happened. There is a little red light on the inside of the button that wasn't lit. This was not good.

After several minutes of freaking out and just hitting the button over and over again like that may magically help, I decided to try and find out what the actual problem may be.

Now this house was built a while ago, and the electrical is a bit dated. The breaker box is, say, antique-ish. But none of the breakers had been tripped.

AHA! It must be the outside breaker box, the one that runs the dryer and other high voltage items in the house. Nothing tripped there either.

After a while of sulking and trying to figure out how I'm going to pay for an actual electrician to come figure out what is going on, I talked to my grandfather and he gave me the idea to check out the GFI outlets.

For those that don't know a GFI outlet is made to trip when the electricity is going through an unintended path or in excess. Basically, when your spouse throws the toaster in the bathtub with you, it trips so that they're not able to cash in on your life insurance.

In addition these outlets are made so that they can take a load going out of it. Essentially saying a normal outlet can be run out of the GFI and trip it, shutting off current to the normal outlet. Which is why in a lot of bathrooms you see one GFI and one regular outlet.

So my thinking was that the garage must run off a GFI somewhere else in the house (foreshadowing- it was).

There were two places I thought it could be linked through, either off the back deck, on the same terminal that the sprinklers were attached, or in the basement.  As I went outside to check the back deck outlet, it should've dawned on me that the sprinklers were running at the time, so it obviously couldn't have been that one. So off to the basement, aka THUNDERDOME

Now this part is strange to me because this is the only time I've ever encountered this type of problem. The GFI had been tripped but wasn't resetting, meaning then you push the reset butting, the tiny light that was supposed to come on didn't and the test button that was supposed to pop out but didn't.

In my head, this could've either meant that there was no electricity going to the outlet, or the outlet itself was bad. Hopefully, the latter of the two since the first would've been a massive problem to deal with.

One particularly funny tidbit to the story. I talked about how the breaker box was quite old, and the outside one was pretty new. But neither were marked with what breaker went where. Now one of my least favorite things to happen to me is to get electrocuted. 1/2 out of 5 stars is what I would rate it. So there is no way I'm going to let it happen. As I'm trying to figure out what is wrong, and where, I have to run to the first breaker box, shut off the main, then run all the way through the house to shut off the one in the backyard, then run ALL the way back to the basement and try and work quickly before anything that was supposed to be running gets messed up. About 4 times that happened.

Now a GFI isn't a terribly hard thing to replace (it's the realizing that's what you need to do is the chore), there are just several things you have to keep in mind. Think of it like your cable box. There is electricity going in and electricity going out. If you put in the cord to your TV in the "IN" and the cord from outlet going to the "OUT" it's not going to work, the only difference is that your TV probably won't have the potential to start an electrical fire.

www.checkthishouse.com

Most of the time the wire are large gauges. So a pair of needle nose pliers work the best to wrap the wire around the terminals on the outlet. 

On the back of a GFI there is a spot for "LINE" and "LOAD". In addition, on the bottom there will be a spot for the grounding wire. The LINE is where the hot wires go into and LOAD is what goes to the next outlet. A very important trick is to mark the wires as you take them off of the old outlet. That way you know what goes where, and then from there, black goes to negative(hot) and white is positive(neutral). Don't forget to connect the ground, usually a green or completely stripped wire, to the terminal on the bottom.

POOF! The garage door was back online, and everything was well with the world. I mean, it probably wouldn't have been too much of an inconvenience to just open it by hand. But dammit I live in the 21st century and until SKYNET takes over, I'm taking advantage of every piece of machinery available to me.

Fixin' ain't shit but holes and tricks.

https://www.truevalueprojects.com/

One home improvement problem that I had to deal with on occasion at different places I lived, was repairing the drywall.  Every once in awhile something would happen to where there might be a hole in the wall about six inches in diameter and around chest height. No telling where it could've come from. After trying my luck at it, I actually became pretty good at getting it done. Below is a list of items that you'll need.

• Utility knife
• Drywall tape
• Spackle
• Putty knife 
• Extra piece of drywall
• 1x4 board 
• Drywall screws

Now this is one of the more frustrating and messy tasks I've ever had to do. Mostly because it has to be aesthetically pleasing by matching the rest of the wall. If you are trying to match the texturing, good luck. That part is beyond me.

There are two ways of going about this depending on the size of the hole. The reason is that with smaller holes you can simply take one or two pieces of drywall tape and place it over the hole. After placing that over the hole you take the spackle and smooth over it with the putty knife, let it dry and voila! Now you will never have to explain to anyone again about the time you threw that empty wine bottle at the wall because your audition tape for the Bachelorette didn't make the cut.

But bigger holes are a little more difficult. These are situations when the extra piece of drywall and board come into play, and you get to use that sick utility knife.

http://workshop.lifehacker.com/

First, what you want to do is draw a box as evenly around the hole as possible. Then cut out said box. Then comes the tricky part, you have to cut the extra piece of drywall almost the exact same size as the hole you cut out, but slightly smaller so that it will nest inside. With drywall you have to make sure the blade in the utility knife is extra sharp; If not it will crumble the drywall along the cut.



Now if the hole is close enough to a stud (the boards in the frame the drywall is already attached to) when you cut out the hole you won't have to use the board and can take the screws and drill right into the stud. But if it isn't, take the board and finagle it into the wall. But for the love of everything don't drop it, or you either have to find another one (and might as well give up for the day) or cut another hole in the wall at the bottom and have to fix that later as well, and ain't nobody got time fo dat.

When the board is in the wall and you haven't dropped it and you have your shit together in life, take the drywall screws and screw the board on both the top and bottom, from there you take the piece of drywall and secure it to the board. When you do, be sure that it matches the depth of the rest of the wall. Meaning that you don't want to have a big crater in your wall where everyone can tell you had to patch it. After the extra drywall is in there securely, tape and spackle around the edges, let it dry then paint over.

That's my fix if you ever find yourself needing to repair the wall after a long night of dance fighting to Alanis Morissette's greatest hits. Or whatever normal people do to end up with jacked up drywall.

It's going down, I'm yelling Timber?

If you hadn't heard or don't care about pointless things like I do, this year has been one of the worst for webworms. If your friends are like mine you might be the butt of some jokes if you walk around spouting off that information, so be careful. Now one tree in my backyard got covered with especially bad with webworms and after spraying and spraying the little devils, I couldn't keep it from getting dangerously close to dying without taking down most of the branches. Seeing as it's close to pointless to have a tree with no branches, it was time to break out the chainsaw and cut that bad boy down to the ground. 

Now I take my weekends pretty seriously when it comes to how I spend my time. A quarter of it is spent at places where you have to be over the age of 21 to enter, another 50 percent of it is on the level of laziness that would make a crippled sloth look productive and the rest is spent actually accomplishing something or kicking myself for not getting more done. So of course I slept in most of the morning that Saturday, which didn't let me and my roommate start till 1pm, right when the sun was kicking Oklahoma in the face with some good old fashion scorching humidity. But hey, no biggie, we have a chainsaw and it’s going to be easy peasy lemon squeezy!  

Wrong.

About two minutes into cutting the chainsaw broke. That left us with a handsaw meant for cutting boards, a pick-ax and some pretty sour attitudes.  I can't remember the specifics of what all was said for the next several hours, but I know it would've been a shame if any small children were present to hear it. But finally the tree was down, next up was the "easy" part: digging up the stump of a tree that was roughly 30 years old, out of the Oklahoma dirt, and in the middle of the F@#$%*! summer. 

Another hour or so later, we had it dug up cut up and we were done. The hole was filled in and we were finally over the chore the ecosystem of outer-suburban Oklahoma had dealt us. After another forty-five minutes of standing in front of my freezer with the door open, I was back to my normal routine.

So if you ever find yourself need to do some amateur lumberjacking of your own take these tips to keep you sane.

• Make sure all your equipment is working
• Don't wait until the afternoon to get started
• Make sure the ground is saturated around the stump, will make digging up the ground around it easier.

But the main thing is to try to be proactive. It's never really fun to lose a tree that’s older than you just because of some damn worms. So next summer I'll be starting early spraying all the trees for a more preventative approach.

Welcome

I moved into my current house earlier this year. My grandparents moved in to it in the early 80's with my mom and uncle after my grandfather was stationed at Tinker AFB. Since then most everyone in my immediately family has lived there at some point. Several years ago, after my grandmother passed away, my parents moved in when my grandfather bought a new house. But as soon as they moved in they were on the look for somewhere new to live and I had my eyes on that sweet, sweet casa. After some unfortunate timing on my part (having JUST signed a lease on another house) and an unexpected bid that was accepted on a new house my parents made, there I was looking for someone to take over my lease and quickly moving my things in as my parent were slowly moving their things out.
I'm currently renting the house from my grandfather, with my goal to buy it sometime in the near future. But, while I still have a "landlord" to help (somewhat) with financing repairs on the house, I need to take advantage of fixing everything I can up before I fully commit to going down the rabbit hole of home ownership.

Now an important part to mention is that while I have some experience in home improvement and repair, I mostly learn by mistakes that I make, which are pretty numerous. My current roommate and I have grown up together, and for some reason any project we have started on together, some part (or most) of it goes wrong, making us go back and figure out some new solution or some way to cover up and make whatever it is look good at least. Hopefully my readers, after reading the posts and seeing what goes wrong, will be able to do the same things, but limiting the screw-ups. Also I'm probably going to be including random pictures of my dog for, ya know, therapy purposes.