I have three (3) hacksaws. I was sure I had a hacksaw, but I got home and couldn’t find one so I figured, hey, maybe I lent it out? Gave it away? Dropped it into an interdimensional hole? So I go to the store, buy another hacksaw, get home… yeah.
I changed the elements in my water heater this weekend. It’s been tripping its reset every two days or so, and I’d already drained the sediment out of it, but it kept tripping, which to me says the elements are either 1) corroded, or 2) so covered with calcification that they’re overheating. My dad said I’d need to replace the whole unit, but I said, “how about I try the $40 fix, before I go to the $300 fix?”
The job was actually really easy; on a 1 to 10 difficulty scale, it’s a 2 or 3 at best. It’s just time consuming, what with switching it off, waiting for it to cool some, draining the tank with the incoming supply off (which takes an hour to an hour and a half), then finally replacing the elements.
So far, it’s working like a champ. Man, those old elements was nasty.
So you drain the tank first? (Don’t ask. We all make mistakes. I was able to mop everything up.):smack:
As to a caulking gun not qualifying as a tool–you’re just not doing the right shopping. My caulking gun has a built-in tip cutter, a built-in hole-puncher-for-the-tube thingee, a smooth shaft (no little ratchets) and the whole body rotates so that I can align the angle of the tube cut anyway I want. Yessiree.
But, there’s an electric caulking gun made by Ryobi that uses their 18 V battery pack… Which opens the door for the rest of the tools that use the same battery pack…
#Interrogative Tim Allen Grunt
Uggh. Frakin wallpaper.
Wallpaper CAN be fairly easy to remove. IF the wall was prepped properly first before they put up the paper. I’ve had to do a couple of bathrooms and a large bedroom where they just slapped that crap up on the bare dryboard. Honestly, I think it might be faster and easier to just put up new dryboard rather than get wallpaper off of it and fixing all the damage to the old dryboard.
This doesn’t fill me with glee. After putting it off for the past five years I really HAVE to replace our 1960s-era kitchen this summer. Which means ripping out the old one totally, and moving the plumbing. Which means redoing the floor. And as we’re doing that, why not tile right out into the hallway? In which case it makes sense to remove the doorway altogether, in which case…
Yeah, it’s not going to be cheap.
Why can I not keep track of the damned measuring tape? I have five of them in various places around the house and garage, but every project starts off with me wandering around for 30 minutes trying to find on of the things.
Obviously i need to buy a few more and just scatter them around.
That’s what I did with flashlights. There is now one in almost every room, squirreled away someplace. My wife thinks I have CDO*, but I can illuminate behind the fridge, under the bed, in the pantry, etc. within a couple seconds of wanting to.
*= CDO is like OCD but in alphabetical order the way it belongs.
This used to happen to us with screwdrivers since I think my husband eats them. Now, I have a multibit heavy duty one in my underwear drawer that only I am allowed to use.
I think he has snuck it out of there a few times in an emergency but he is smart enough to know the wrath that he will endure should it not be there when I need it.
+1
Which explains why I have 3 caulking guns…
Every. Single. Project. And then I find three of them together, on my dresser where I would never have a reason to put even one down, having a tape measure reunion. If I put one down during a project … yep, it’s gone. Turns up a week later in the closet or something.
Used to be the same problem with flashlights until I invented the Holy Flashlight station in my closet. It never, ever leaves that place unless I take it and I always put it back. Or else.
And you shut off the power too!
Don’t ask me how I know that but I do happen to own a 2 inch long screwdriver that at one time was 10 inches long.
I’m so glad to hear that’s it’s not just us (check out that sweet concrete cutting blade for the skilsaw! Now check out our OTHER concrete cutting blade for the skilsaw!) In our defense, we did move in between the two purchases, and we are getting old and feeble of mind.
I was going to say mine was screwdrivers, too - I don’t know how many multi-screwdrivers we have in the house, but they hide as soon as I look for one.
Doing one little home reno project is like cleaning a spot off a wall - now you can see how dirty the rest of the wall is. 
My Dad had one of those too. Was the best damn magnetic screwdriver we ever had.
I’ll bet that was exciting for a few seconds! 
When I was renovating my house, I discovered that if a tool costs under $10.00-$20.00, it’s vastly cheaper to buy several of them rather than spend hours of useful construction time searching for a hammer, tape measure, or drill bit. I suppose painting everything blaze orange would have helped too.
That’s when it’s time to get out the pipe cutters and just put new valves on. Of course if the plumber didn’t do that, there’s probably more going on then I’m aware of.
Okay, my turn.
Shortly after moving into my house, my electric garage door opener stopped working. After a few days of doing it by hand, I finally had some time to tinker with it. Got out the meter and found it didn’t have any power. Started working my way down the line and found out the dumbass who installed the outlet it was plugged into wired it into the porch lights. Really? WTF? So, for the next two years, I kept the porch lights. Kept telling myself, I’d rewire the outlet, but because the garage is attached, that was going to mean ripping out drywall to run a new wire. So, one day, I finally, decided that I was sick of having the lights on all the time and that it was time to get this project over with. Before ripping open drywall I figured I should see if anything in the garage was hot all the time. I knew none of the outlets were, but I’d never checked any of the boxes on the ceiling. Very close to the outlet where the door opener was plugged in was a light bulb. I pulled the cover off and noticed that the romex that came from the switch had two conductors. One for the light (switched), one just hanging there, unused. Popped open the switch, there was the other end. 10 minutes and a foot of wire later and I had a garage door opener that worked independently of a the porch lights.
My guess for this is one of two things. 1)The last homeowner wired it in himself. He did a lot of creative things. Or more likely 2)After the electrical rough in, the painters came though (with sprayers), you can tell because when you open electrical boxes all the wires are painted white. My guess is the some how, due to all the wires being painted white, someone didn’t notice the extra wire and assumed the wrong romex (1 hot instead of 2) was used. Then grabbed the juice from the porch lights to make it work to pass an inspection.
Who knows?
See now, if you still lived in Redondo Beach, you could just call Thomas and he would have come over to help you fix it. 
That’s quite the jump!
Then you don’t want to read what I’m about to type. . .
$60,000, plus appliances.
BUT, it started out looking like this, when we bought the house. We demo’d it down to the studs. And it ended up looking like this (though we changed the paint color from gray/blue to pale yellow, and we still need a real kitchen table).
My mini-rant is also a Public Service Announcement.
Not all blue tape is painter’s tape! Make sure if you’re having every wood floor in your house refinished, that your flooring contractor knows this before they tape plastic sheeting to every wall in your house, then pull chunks of paint off when they remove it, necessitating repainting rooms you hadn’t planned on painting. :smack:
We have a bathroom that’s needed some work ever since we bought this house almost ten years ago. It’s a tiny little room with a full-size tub, a wall-mounted sink, a toilet, and just 25 square feet of floor space. My beloved younger daughter is in her senior year of high school, I work for a middle school, and we’re on spring break this week, so we figured we’d just go ahead and knock out this little home-improvement project in a couple of days and then enjoy the rest of our break with a newly renovated bathroom.
We started Sunday. It’s now Thursday, and we still have to get the baseboards in and a wall cabinet mounted. We’ve realized why the former residents of the house gave in to the impulse to tile the floor from the tub to the wall rather than starting in the middle and cutting tile on both sides of the room, but we didn’t follow suit. We’ve also discovered that someone with more enthusiasm than ability did the plumbing. However, we now have a lovely little bathroom with nicely laid floor tile, a small vanity where a person can set her toothbrush without fear of it rolling into the toilet, and, God willing, tomorrow we’ll have enough storage in the room so that my daughter doesn’t have to carry her things back and forth as though she were living in a dorm.
The kitchen needs new floor tile and new cabinets. After this experience, I’m thinking I’ll just buy a lottery ticket and hope that I’ll be able to hire someone else to do that job.
Blue? 
OK, add another checkmark to the list of “things which you’d never think vary by location”: all the painter’s tape I’ve ever used was a sort of parchment color. I recently had to explain to Mom how to distinguish between painter’s tape, electrician’s tape and packaging tape, followed by out-of-the-blue questions for several days; a couple of weeks ago she called me because she wasn’t sure which one was which, but at least she remembers there is a difference…
I have screwdrivers in each of the toolboxes (big one, small one and car), plus a flat one and a phillips one and a set of allens in the bottom drawer of Mom’s desk (in her house), plus another set (flat, phillips, allens) in the cutlery drawer. Tape measures: one on my computer desk (sitting beside the pens pot), one in the cutlery drawer, one in Mom’s desk (she also has a seamstress’ tape in her sewing box), one in each toolbox. For anything else: if it’s big enough (the BnD, the stapler) it’ll have its own box; otherwise look in the big toolbox first; if it’s not there look in the small toolbox; if it’s not there call Middlebro to make sure he didn’t borrow it and forget to mention it; if he doesn’t have it, buy one. Am I organized or what?