We had a succession of plumbing problems. Things have stopped dripping and leaking for now. But…
The A/C is out. And I’ve got to call the Gutter Man tomorrow to clean out the gutters. :smack:
Thanks for the help and motivation, VOW. I doubt the fridge has been cleaned underneath since the Big Crow’s previous wife passed away seven or eight years ago. There’s probably an entire cat’s worth of hair under there, considering how much ours sheds. Not to mention other (Ugh!) stuff.
Glad you like the sig line. Heard it somewhere and knew I had to steal it, at least for a while.
This. And I wish more people understood the rigors of home ownership. I have a good female friend, age 65, who has never been a DIY person. Never. Her financial picture is fair, but not spectacular. Six months ago, living in the Los Angeles area, she decided to become a homeowner and purchased a place in a small Oregon coastal town. I visited a month ago. I thought the place in pretty good condition, but for three days all I heard was how much something cost, how poorly something was done by contractors, and how would she ever be able take care of the place? Poor me!
Some people should not be homeowners.
Sometimes I think of everything we’d have to do if we wanted to sell our house. UGH! Our house isn’t falling down around us. We keep it up nicely, but there are things that we’ve ignored that will bite us in the butt someday. We have 2 bathrooms. The one on the second floor doesn’t have a shower, just a tub. The house was built in 1936 and the tub is original to the house. There is a leak somewhere in the piping that would require us to take out the entire tub and/or the floor which is above the kitchen. We don’t ever use the tub since we only take showers, so it’s something we’ve just put off doing because it would be a major repair.
Our huge backyard is slowly being taken over by creeping charlie. We’ve put off doing something for too long. Now I’m sure it would cost a fortune for a professional to come out and fix it. The big problem is the backyard has 4 acres of woods behind it with all manner of weeds. So if we do spend a lot of money getting rid of the yard weeds, it won’t be long before they’re back again.
Our basement leaks from a corner whenever we have a big rain or if the ground is still frozen when it rains. Another major repair.
And I can’t forget about the painting! We have 4 rooms that should be painted 
Right now there is an excavator parked in my back yard with its claw poised over a great dirt pit.
There was an aging in-ground pool in my yard when we bought this place twenty years ago, and I have spent the past two decades tending it carefully, fixing the pump every couple of years, replacing the motor a few times, replacing the liner, monitoring the chemistry, endless cleaning, and many other things that are part of pool ownership.
It brings a tear to my eye to remember how many children learned to swim in that pool, but it brings me great joy to see it gone!
It occurs to me that there is a nonzero possibility of the workmen finding bones while they are moving dirt around to fill in the hole (apparently when it was built forty years ago they dug out the pit and used the the 100 cubic yards of freshly dug dirt to raise the whole yard a bit around it.)
I have been imagining one of those police shows with the narrator saying “Mr. Jones’ wife disappeared in 1980 and he told her co-workers she had gone to care for a sick relative…but some didn’t believe that, and some were suspicious of Mr. Jones’ new pool. Four decades the new owners were demolishing the pool when…”
Last month my water heater broke. Dealing with my warranty company, it took something like three weeks to get it replaced. On the first full day with a working water heater, my air conditioning system broke. In the meantime, I also had to get a plumber in to clear blockages in the kitchen and bathroom basins. Two of my windows won’t close properly. My back door has soaked up the humidity and won’t budge.
Fuck home ownership.
When we first moved into this fine abode the previous owner had installed dropped ceilings in the upper bedrooms, and one of them had a ceiling fan in the middle.
That might not have been a problem except that the dropped ceiling was 7 feet high (213cm in metric land).
Even though the fan was bolted flush with the ceiling, the blades came to forehead height on me.
That was fixed in the first wave of home repairs.
By the way, if you ever see a dropped ceiling in a home, you absolutely must ask yourself “what are they hiding”.
I own a four-plex, so I have four water heaters, four stoves and refrigerators and showers and washer/dryers. Thirty-two bloody doors (I hate replacing doors), something like 88 outlets. I’ve got it running pretty smoothly now, but the prior owners if they “fixed” anything they did it so shittily I had to fix their fix.
At least there’s income from rent, but it doesn’t cashflow. When something does break it can be a big hit. But hey, I’m a much better handyman now.
Update.
Bought a new ceiling fan and commenced the install, but not before telling myself “this is not going to go smoothly, it never goes smoothly, there is always a problem”.
Sure enough, after pulling the old fan I was very unhappy to see how flimsily the electrical box was mounted. It wiggled like a baby tooth ready to fall out.
So I need to get that box out and install a new box with a brace. Ordered a nifty looking one from Amazon that does not require attic access.
We’ll see how that goes.
It never goes smoothly.
mmm
When I encountered one like that I sprayed fireproof expanding foam in the cracks around the box, locking it in place within the ceiling.
Check your fridge’s owner’s manual (online if necessary). Our says, rather nonchalantly, that the fridge may make strange noises while still running normally. I wish they would put THAT on the signs in the store, so you know before you buy.
I would not trust that in this case. The house was built in the 1950s and the electrical box was designed to hold a light, not a spinning 50 lb. fan.
mmm
Our electrician says one of his most dreaded service visits is for the Handy Homeowner who decides to hang a ceiling fan all by himself from an unsupported ceiling electrical box.
Mr VOW’s handy days are over (Parkinson’s) but he said even HE knew better th
An that!
~VOW
The previous owners of my home had rather incompetently installed a ceiling fan by mounting it to the electrical box, which was sitting on the top side of the drywall unsecured to anything.
This thing basically expands to grip the ceiling joists and allows you to(IIRC) move the box to correctly place it for your hole.
My fan’s rock-solid and doesn’t move/wobble at all even when on high now.
That is exactly what I ordered from Amazon. I went to plan B, though, when I could not remove the old box from below
Put another way, I bought the “old work” brace thinking I could avoid accessing the attic. Once I knew I had to (to remove the existing box), I decided to go the the Depot of Homes to buy a standard (new work) brace.
What fun, crawling around in a blistering hot attic rubbing up against and breathing in insulation.
Anyway, the job is done. The only question now is what’s going to break next?
mmm
When I first became a homeowner 25 years ago, my line was, “now I never need to go looking for a hobby as long as I live.” And it’s still true: the needs of the house will fill your spare time.
There’s the routine tasks, of course: mowing the lawn, trimming the shrubbery,shoveling snow in winter, etc. that are Somebody Else’s Problem when you live in a garden apartment complex. But then there are the things that break down and need to be fixed or replaced, as y’all have been discussing in this thread.
Lately we’ve been on a roll: the clothes dryer died, right after its 5-year warranty expired. I gave a couple of tries at fixing it, and the fixes only kinda sorta worked, so I said the hell with it, and we bought a new dryer.
Then one day I noticed some water around where the drain pipe goes through the basement floor on its way to the septic tank. Smelly water. Fortunately just a few ounces’ worth, but I was on the phone the next morning with the people who pump out our tank every 3 years. It had been only 2 years and 4 months since the last time it was pumped out, but I figured better to have them come out 8 months early than run the risk of shit backing up into the house.
I’ve been having some minor back problems, and our queen mattress, which we’d had long enough that we couldn’t remember when we’d bought it, was clearly a contributing factor. So after reading what Consumer Reports had to say about mattresses, we bought a new foam mattress that they recommended. Bought it via Amazon, and even though I don’t have Prime, it was there two days later. So far, so good, right?
Two things: (1) a foam mattress is heavy. Shipping weight 143 lbs, in our case. A few pounds of that may have been the cardboard box and plastic wrap, but the rest was all mattress. And of course, ordering it via the Web, there aren’t any friendly installers; there’s just you. I was up to wrestling it into position - just barely.
(2) The second thing was, the damn thing reeked when we first unpacked it. Consumer Reports didn’t say anything about that, and neither did the manufacturer, whose materials said it was ready to use the moment it arrived. Bullshit! It had been delivered late in the evening, so I dragged the mattress into another room, and pulled the old mattress out of the basement where I’d already moved it to, so it would be out of the way when the new one came, and put it back on the bed. While I was wrangling mattresses, my wife did some Web research, and apparently “off-gassing” is a common problem with new foam mattresses: it seems that ideally, you should give them a few days to air out before you cover them up with sheets and blankets, and you might want to sprinkle baking soda on them, leave it there for a few hours to absorb the odors, then vacuum it up. so we gave it a couple of airing-out days, and did the baking soda thing both days, and after that, a hint of the smell was still there (still is, a week and a half later), but not at a bothersome level. But the mattress sleeps great, and my back is a lot happier, so all’s well that ends well.
Until the next thing that breaks or needs replacing, of course. 
Oh, did I mention that all of that has been in the last month or so? Yeppers.
I definitely would go the safest route, and MMM is the one “on scene” so if it looks sketchy put in a solid brace.
I did three fixtures in my home, with the first two using that gadget you ordered. Those are rock solid, and I would trust hanging anything on them. The ceilings are sloped, but that doesn’t matter, they still hold solid on the angle.
The third was a slightly wobbly box that I was pretty confident was well attached. There were complications such as a textured ceiling and no attic that made it much more difficult to replace the thing, so I filled the space behind the box with foam and the wiggle is gone forever. Had that box been about to fall out, I would have opted for the spreader gadget for that one too.
A familiar tune!
Ours has an interesting twist: the old owners finished half of the basement, leaving the laundry side “in the raw”
The door going to the laundry area is 24” wide. Most washers and dryers are 25” or more wide and deep.
This means that every time a washer or dryer dies I need to remove the door frame to the rough opening, and replace after the job.
I always replace those machines in pairs.
Or, you know, you could put in a proper 3’ door.
I understand why many live in rentals. I could never do it.
Way too much effort for little return, when someone puts in a 24” door it’s because something was in the way, such as a pole.
I’m pretty good at pulling the door frame apart and putting it back every five or ten years.