20200815 – Home maintenance

Kinda feeling like a home maintenance diva right now. We’ve had a couple of things go wrong lately. Got an outside faucet with a major leak. And the air conditioning broke down. During a major heat wave.

For the plumber I remembered a guy who had worked on our water heater a long time ago who I’d been impressed with. He knew what he was doing. Thanks to the wonderful spouse we had the number of the company he worked for and he still works for him. And even though they’re only supposed to do water heaters, he’s coming on Monday. I don’t know anything about plumbing, but at my age, I’m starting to know what competence looks like.

Then the AC broke down. The spouse had tried a few places, but all of them just had message machines. I tried a few myself and got the same result. I broke down and used one of the on-line services. I hate giving people my phone number, but the prospect of no AC, temperatures in 100’s and high humidity sounded awful. Entered my info and got a call back in minutes. The guy showed in minutes and fixed it in half an hour. At a price I considered reasonable.

I totally feel like a winner right now. Hope things go as well with the plumber.

Painting the kitchen

I’m in the middle of painting the kitchen. What we really need is a remodeled kitchen. The cabinets are original equipment, circa 1975 and it’s just time. However, between vagaries of economy and employment, we don’t feel confident in spending the kind of money it would take to redo the kitchen entirely. So instead, paint, polish and few other cosmetic things to make me not want to burn the whole thing down. I hate our cabinets. First, they’re white (shh, I don’t have to tell you that I painted them white forever ago), second, the interiors are made of particle board. I can’t tell you how much I hate particle board. I loathe particle board. We had a leak under the sink and the particle board which formed the bottom of the cabinet dissolved. This is not the first place where the application of water made furniture turn to sawdust. I will make my own furniture with sticks and pipes instead of buying particle board furniture.

So anyway, particle board rant aside, I’m painting. My spouse didn’t think it was worth the effort, but I did and told him I would do it, and for the most part (things I can’t reach or are too heavy) I am. I’m tackling it in bits, a couple of hours every day after work. Unfortunately, this has left a lot of mess for over a week, but I’m getting to the point where I can put most of the stuff back. It’s still going to be a couple of days, though. Everything takes longer than you think it will. I need to wash the vertical blinds and I’m not sure how to get it done in a way that won’t leave them worse than they were before. Each job seems to expand into three more things you have to do before you can finish.

It doesn’t help that we actually use our kitchen. The Spouse makes beer, we both cook and very seldom eat out. Between us and the livestock, our floors don’t stand much of a chance. If I had known how much use that floor would get I would have gone down to bare concrete instead of using wood. But I’m making progress. A couple of hours worth a day. The bits I’ve worked on are starting to look better. I’m hoping it’ll look OK in the end.