I’ll go first. Here are the options I faced tonight:
A) fix the broken toilet myself
or
B) share a toilet with my foul roommate who must have a wide-spray shower head affixed to the end of his dick.
This is not my toilet, nor is it my home, but if I wait for my landlord (a laughable term) to do it, I will be sitting in piss 'til kingdom come.
I have never done this before, but YouTube videos are going to save my ass. Literally!
You’ll be fine, it’s only ROMAN era technology.
My gripe: the big box store sold us some AMAZING tile at an AMAZING price…$42 a box on sale for $16. They do this knowing you also need a tile saw, kneepads (ha!), floats, trowels, grout, thinset, those little damned spacer things, moulding to replace the bits you destroyed, a saw for making the itty bitty cut for clearance around the door, a bit of marble for the threshold…inhale…a new sink (because the old one is now too ‘low rent’), wax toilet rings, nippers, a carbide bit for the dremel, a faucet…well, this is getting a bit long, just know it’s not a complete list.
so, I may have saved $200, but I know I spent another grand on misc. crap.
Project leading to project leading to project…
I had a new roof put on, and had the contractor put up new siding (wood) on the porch as well, figuring I’d just paint it.
Well, the new wood looked good up top, so I put new wood down around the base as well. Then decided I needed new screening. And multiple colors of paint, and a new ladder to reach the peak, and a new light, and well… Now I need new doors on the porch, and I’m looking at the deck outside and thinking “Hrm… I need to replace all the decking boards too”… And after that, the dock is looking shabby, so that will need to be replaced.
And I still have to get around to re-plumbing my house completely AND changing out the toilet in the master bath.
Cabinets. Fuck you, cabinets. Seriously.
A) Ikea evidently doesn’t use Phillips head screws for this. They LOOK like Phillips, there’s nothing in the instructions to say they are… but they’re “Posi Driv”. Well, no wonder I stripped the living hell out of them for weeks! I finally got the right tools to do the last cabinet and holy crap it’s like a dream!
B) Except for the broken hinge.
C.) 36 inches of wall. One stud. ARRRRRGH.
I’m nearly a master plumber now. Need some help? 
I have the whole flushing valve mechanism replaced, with new bolts affixing the tank to the toilet. And to imagine my “landlord” was talking about just replacing one little part (the only part she could manage to remove, cause she’s lazy like that) and somehow that was going to magically make the problem go away. Every gasket on the contraption was disintegrated to black inky goo.
It maddens me that this person is even a homeowner. I asked her once if she had money saved up or a credit card on standby if anything major like the furnace or water heater went out. She laughed. I guess I just value things that I own more than some people.
I need to exterior paint. But I need 3 days in a row w/o rain where the 1st day is one of my days off. I need to do the prep work; to tape down paper/drop tarp, tape off areas I don’t want painted, and I need about 3 5-gal cans of the thickest exterior oil-based white paint Home Depot sells. And a new wide brush. I pretty much know that there is no way I’ll get that brush clean after or the clothes I’ll be in, but the worst part is knowing that oil-based paint like that will almost have to wear off of skin.
I also need to redo the entire insides (flapper to handle) of one of the toilets. It looks easy until you actually do it and you realize that you really need ‘the touch’. A half pound of torque too tight or too loose on any fitting, and that bad boy will run like Niagara.
Do they still sell oil based paint where you live? I’ve used exterior latex and it worked just fine. It also dries much faster and doesn’t smell so badly.
You don’t want to tighten those two bolts too much. I did, and there was a snapping noise as the tank cracked in half :eek:, and then there was water all over everything. But now I know how to install a new toilet. :rolleyes:
(Tools bolded by me.)
Any chance to buy new tools can’t count as a vexation. Just ask the guys at “Car Talk.”
I already have a house and a half’s worth of tools. I’d rather buy metalworking tools or car stuff…plumbing/tiling related stuff just makes my body hurt.
I’ll mini-pit the light fixtures installed throughout our house (9! We have 9 of these in a 2 bed/2 bath) that are going out in sequence. We hoped with the first one that it was the bulb. Nope. The switch? Nope. Ugh, it’s the ballast. The nearly impossible to find (hooray internet however, for yielding results after a couple of days of contacting the light manufacturer and then various suppliers/retailers, boo manufacturers who change part numbers) ballast that cost $30 each. Replacing the fixture with a similar but newer fixture is about $48, so it still makes sense to replace the ballast, but ouch. Let’s hope this fixes it.
It’s frustrating, since the house in only 7 years old. How often will we have to replace these? We’re buying three for now, since two fixtures have stopped working and the one in the closet is flickering at the startup. I really really hope this works. I like having light. If it works though, we should probably buy more, but the husband doesn’t really want to since he has fancy-pantz ideas of buying less boring looking light fixtures, like from Lux Lighting in PDX. Eek.
And the guest tub seriously needs regrouting, I’m worried in fact that water may have got down in it and wonder if we should pull the whole tub to be safe, or if there’s mold and we regrout/caulk over it, will that magically keep us safe from it? Will it be obvious when we take out all that old cracked caulk what needs to be done?
And our fancy doublehung windows don’t slide easily in their tracks, but do seem to let in cold air when the wind blows hard.
Still have to fix the burst pipe in the workshop. $7k for new solar batteries, and we need to find someone to fix the “spare” whatchamacallit, the master/slave thingy that controls the lot. And the well pump leaks every once in a while when it’s cold, but thankfully hasn’t burned out. Yet.
Waah, waah, the joys and freedom of home ownership and offgrid living.
Honey, I love you and will do any house project you want but did you have to wait until the wallpaper was up before you told me you wanted the light fixture moved two inches to the right? Easy to do before the wall paper, very hard to make right afterward.
I don’t know about the rest, but I think you can rent a tile saw.
Huh. I’ve been working with Microsoft Caulk for a couple of weeks now. Why do I call it Microsoft? Well, because it’s apparently necessary to live in our world and is good, useful stuff, but Jesus Hashimoto Christ is that crap a pain in the ass.
And I’m only doing baseboards! And they’re already installed! All I have to do is fill, sand, fill, sand, tape, caulk and paint. Only 245 linear feet. Gah. And the only tool I got to buy was a freaking caulk gun, which does not count as a tool.
Our walls have that knockdown texture, which means that you just can’t get caulk (or anything else, actually) off the walls, so I’ve had to do a LOT of taping off. Plus I don’t want to mess up my new hardwood floors, so I have to be - gasp! - careful with all my stuff.
I’m almost done. Just some touchups. Well, a lot of touchups. I should be done by Christmas.
I tape first, then caulk, smear it with a finger, then take the tape off while the caulk is still wet. Perfect straight caulk lines.
Of course this is of no help to you now.
I’m so badly tempted, if but for the smell alone. Outside paint smell up close is the Worst, and well worth the price of those one of those foam-nosed paint respirators.
“Its…one small brush-stroke for Man. One giant brush stroke for neighborhood resale value…”
Dear Boss:
I don’t have a problem with being “off project” (translation: unemployed) for a month or two - but by Og’s sake and if you know who your mother was, let me know soon enough that I can use that time to call in the electrician and the painter! Those guys do not come at the drop of a hat, and I could do the painting myself but the electrical stuff needs an authorized contractor.
Those popcorn walls and that electrical mess are the two things I’ve wanted to fix about my flat since I bought it - I’d love a chance to fix them, but I need advance warning damnit.
Well, it can when you’re in the DIY store and think, “Oh I need one of these tools as well,” and then you get home and find three of the same tools, two of them unused, hanging in the shed.
The converse of this, of course, is when you think “Oh, and I’ve already got one of those tools, I bought one last time,” and then get home and look in the garage and find that you don’t, so you have to drive back to the store before you can begin the job.
Then, on finishing the job, you will look in the shed and find the three identical tools I mentioned earlier. And so the cycle repeats.
We decided to update the kitchen. Called the guy who did it ten years ago- he came out and said he would upgrade us for under $5,000.
Never heard from him again. Sought another kitchen place and he quoted- great stuff and great recommendations. However, the floor (polished jarrah) could be done while the kitchen cabinets are gone. My wife loved the corian tops. If we are spending that much we will get the taps and appliances we want…
So far? $25,000. Plus appliances.
Shortly after I moved into my house I decided to replace the bathroom faucets (one in the guest bath and two in the master bath), so I went to Lowes, found one I liked that wasn’t too expensive. A few weeks later I finally got around to trying to install them, but when I tried to remove the old faucets I couldn’t figure out how to disconnect them from the water lines. I’d replaced faucets before, but there didn’t seem to be any sort of screw-off connector. I was getting sufficiently frustrated that I finally gave up and left the old faucets in place, planning to try again later.
A few months ago I had a plumber in to fix a leaking pipe under the house, and I asked him what he would charge to install the faucets for me. The price he quoted seemed reasonable, so I told him to go ahead. He starts to disconnect the old faucets, and he’s having trouble. Finally he tells me that whoever had installed them had glued the water line to the faucet instead of using a standard connector, and I was going to have to replace the water line. In addition, the water line was something called Quest, which his company didn’t use, so he’d have to charge more to replace it, but if I wanted I could go to Lowes and buy the line myself.
When I went to Lowes, the guy in the plumbing department told me that Quest was no longer used because it had been found unsafe (which is probably why the plumbing company didn’t use it, and that I’d have to buy an adapter to mate the existing line with the new faucet. I decided to put off buying the adapter until I knew for sure exactly what I needed, so I still haven’t replaced the faucets I bought over two years ago.