ome ownership is amusing, if only because you get to experience the joys of things breaking, and then have to try and fix them yourself, rather than just calling the apartment maintenance guy, as I always did in the past.  I've lived with Malaya in her condo since July 2003, and in that time we've had our fair share of things break, and I've proved a relatively capable fixer.

Stories of our home repair adventures are archived on this page, with more recent disasters on top.

January 30, 2004

After yesterday's breathtakingly boring home repair discussion, I've got a follow up today.  Don't worry, it's brief.

So I hooked up the garbage disposal without a problem, and it worked fine.  Included in that hooking up was connecting the hose from the washing machine to the outflow in the disposal, just as it was in the old broken unit that I took out.  And hook it up I did.

What I neglected to do was read the instructions for installing the disposal, which would have told me that the dishwasher inflow tube came with a solid plastic plug blocking it on the inside of the unit, since you wouldn't want a hole there if you had a garbage disposal that wasn't connected to dishwasher.

I hooked up the hose properly, and all was well, but when we ran the dishwasher on Friday, it finished and when I looked inside it had about three inches of warm water and floating food pieces inside of it.

The real tricky part was that the dishwasher has been buggy lately; not working right until we close the door, sliding back or forwards in the counter and needing me to lift or push it to get it properly seated, etc.  So we couldn't be entirely sure that the drainage problem (or lack of drainage, to be specific) was due to the garbage disposal change, rather than to the dishwasher's problems deepening.

I did some quick research online, as did Malaya, and when she went to the site for our dishwasher and read the problems list, they had a link to "did you just install a garbage disposal" and about the first thing on that list was, "did you remove the plug over the dishwasher to disposal pipe." And I read that and went, "What plug?"

Fortunately it was pretty easy to fix, and there wasn't any huge water leak from the dishwasher.  I did have to take the garbage disposal down again, after unhooking the dishwasher hose, but as I said yesterday, that's quite an easy process.  Once I had it out I looked at the garbage disposal instructions and found that Step Eight was the "remove the plug" part.  And it was illustrated with a rather funny picture; one showing a guy holding a screwdriver with the pointy end inside the tube, and pounding on the other end with a hammer. Quite subtle.

Of course the directions are like, "Lightly tap the screwdriver..." Which is um... bullshit.  I knocked the crap out of it, repeatedly, and succeeded only in scarring the very hard plastic end of the plug, until after about 3 minutes of steady banging, the plug finally broke free, cleanly, at least.

From there it was a simple task to put the disposal back in and hook the tube up, and when we ran the dishwasher again... all was well, and it drained properly.

The amusing side bonus was that when the dishwasher was first discovered to be full, I found a clear plastic lid, like for a very small piece of tupperware, floating in the water, and about 1/3 melted away.  The last couple of times we'd run the dishwasher we'd smelled burning plastic near the end of the cycle, when it was doing the "get really hot to evaporate the dishes" part. We were worried, like a cord was melting underneath it, but weren't worried enough to pull the whole thing out of the wall and look.  If we'd called one of the appliance repair places to come out and fix the disposal, we would have had them look at that also.  I'm glad we didn't, since it would have been pretty insulting to have him reach inside and pull out this lid and say, "That'll be $40, please."

The cardinal rule of broken/malfunctioning machines is to look for something obvious first.  And it's easy to remember that today, after failing to do so on two different things, less than 12 hours ago.

January 29, 2004

Our in-sink erator, AKA garbage disposal, broke sometime over the weekend.  It worked Friday for sure, I don't recally running it any on Saturday, and come Saturday night when I tried it, it was dead.  Click the switch and get a humming noise, but no grinding motion at all.  It wasn't jammed; there was nothing in it and the lower screw hole thingie was easy to rotate, but the reset button was popped out and wouldn't stay in, and after some web surfing for info and talking to a few local repair places about it, the verdict was definitely that it was broken, probably due to the motor being burned out.

Our initial idea was to have some repair guy come out and fix it, but after I made some calls and priced various repair services, we were looking at around $40 just for the house visit, and since the garbage disposal was bad, it was going to cost us the replacement price, plus whatever they charged to replace it.  Two estimates I heard were $245 and $220, which seemed a bit much, especially after one told us that the disposal itself was $150 for a high end one, and $95 for the install.  Their mistake was telling me that their disposals were from $100-$150, but that cheaper ones were available elsewhere.

I'd also spent the time between calls poking around under the sink and reading about them online, and by the time I realized how easy a garbage disposal was to replace, and how overpriced the repair ones were, that option was looking better and better.

Eventually we decided to buy our own at Home Depot and that I'd put it in, and as preparation for that I took out the one we had here, and saw that yes, it really was that easy.  The hardest part was figuring out which switch to throw to cut off the power, since they were labeled inaccurately in the bedroom, and it took some trial and error.

Once the power was off to the unit (a determination that was made much easier due to the humming sound it made when energized) I unhooked the power cord, the outflow from the dishwasher, and the drain outlet, and unscrewed the unit itself.  Disposals are attached with ridiculous ease; there's basically this big threaded thing that goes in your drain, and the disposal is a circular thing that goes below that and sort of twists into place.  You can unfasten the disposal and carry it away in about 5 seconds, once you know how to twist it.

At Home Depot they had about 10 models, ranging in price from $44 to $190, going up as the horse power went up.  Ours was just 1/2 horses, so we got a replacement of the same type, which was the second cheapest/least powerful (1/3 horse was the weakest) and ran us $56 bucks.

Home we came, (I'll blog about weird Home Depot stories sometime; there are a ton of them given the odd people you see there) after about a dozen other errands I'm not going to describe here, and it took me maybe 20 minutes to install the new disposal and hook it up.  It worked fine the first try, and we were back in business.  And yes, I am going to extract payment from Malaya for the $190 or so I saved us by making extra calls and doing it myself.  Hopefully she'll offer some sort of trade.

Anyway, the moral is if your disposal breaks, get a new one and put it in yourself.  There's only three things you have to hook up, assuming you screw it into the sink connection correctly, which is quite easy also.  You don't need any tools more complicated than a screwdriver and perhaps pliers, though a couple of those little screw on plastic nipple caps that connect unsoldered wires together wouldn't hurt either.  Ours had two of those on the wiring in the old disposal, so I just saved and reused them on the new one.

If yours is clogged, use a plunger or manually turn the allen wrench screw at the bottom of it to help work it free.  You an use a flathead screwdriver if you don't have the special allen wrench that fits it (I didn't, but one came with the new unit.) and if worse comes to worst, you can put your hand down into the murky hole and pull out the carrots or cabbage or peach pits or whatever you stupidly shoved down there in the first place.

If it's broken, just get a new one and put it in.  It'll probably save you $100 or more, and it's ridiculously easy, if you've already got one there.  Then send me the money you saved in gratitude, 'cause I'm broke. 

To continue the home improvement type theme, here's something I've been meaning to talk about for a while. Cold bedrooms and leakage.

Every since winter began and it got cold here, (this occurred in mid-November) our bedroom has been freezing. We have two layers of curtains over a Venetian blind thing, and it was still freezing near the window, and through the entire bedroom. There is not central heating in our condo, just a gas heater wall unit in the living room, and while that gets the office/living room/kitchen/bathroom pretty damn warm, the bedroom is down a hallway and then a right turn away, and not much of the heat gets that far.

It was regularly in the 40's or 50's in the bedroom while the rest of the condo was 70ish, and while that's sort of nice to snuggle up under warm covers and feel the cold on your face, it was rather unpleasant when it came time to get out from under the covers and get dressed, or to try and get warm when you first got into bed and had cold feet.

Malaya was especially cold, since she often goes to sleep hours before me, and is in there with the door closed to keep out the light and sound of my tapping keys.  And if the door is closed, no heat at all is getting in there.  She'd have trouble going to sleep in the chill, and when it came time for me to go to sleep and I went in there and opened the door, it was fricking freezing.

We didn't think too much of this, just that it was cold from the lack of heat and big window.

The real problem came in when it began raining all the time, and rather than just the cold, we started to have wet in our room.  We couldn't tell from inside, since we hadn't opened up the bedroom curtains in forever, (the sun, it burnses us) but when we looked at the lower part of the bedroom window from out on the back patio, we saw condensation on the inside of the window and mold on the inside of the curtains.

After ignoring this unpleasant reality for a few weeks, we finally bothered to pull out the curtains and remove the futon thing that was on the floor below them, and discovered that much of the wall and the curtains down below the window sill were covered in slimy, brownish mold.  Not a real joyful discovery, and neither was the clean up process, which involved liberal spraying of various mold killing bathroom type cleansers, sponge wiping, and carpet scrubbing.

Having at last come face to face with the horrible reality of our bedroom window situation, we vowed to take action. And did, after a delay of only about a week.

The windows are not your normal glass set into a rectangle of wood here.  They're all glass, with a metal frame around them, and to open the bedroom windows one turns a lever, which screws out the lower portion of the window, like a garage door lifting up. The problem is that the seal is not at all tight, and the metal fittings aren't exact.  You can push your finger in through the corner of the window where it closes, and while this doesn't matter in the spring or summer or fall, it's a problem in the winter, both for the temperature and the rain leakage.  For though the bedroom window faces the back patio and is under an overhang, rain is known to come with wind, and when that happens, the water gets everywhere.  We weren't certain how much of the water inside was from condensation and how much was from rain leakage.  We were leaning mostly condensation, at least until later events made us think otherwise.

So one fine day in early January (or possibly late December; this isn't exactly the sort of thing I get tattooed on the inside of my left retina) we set off for Home Depot, on a mission to acquire ammunition to recondition the rendition of our living perdition via precognition while remaining free of superstition.

Or something like that.

Once at the chronically-understaffed Home Depot, we eventually hunted down and asked several of the "sales associates", AKA pot-bellied guys in orange aprons who are missing so many teeth that their tongues appear to be in jail, what would be our best solution.  Their answers covered a wide range of uselessness, mostly brought on by none of them seeming to have any idea what a window without a wooden frame might look like.

There were suggestions that we apply rubber strips, caulking, thick wads of tape, or move out of town. We didn't find too many of their suggestions all that useful.

Fortunately Malaya had a better idea, and we agreed to purchase a long roll of thick black plastic, like garbage bags but thicker, and a couple of rolls of all weather duct tape.  With those we put up two layers, overlapping halfway down, and entirely covered the lower portion of the window, where it opens up/leaks.  Our hope was that this would make the room darker for better sleeping (for me, Malaya could give a damn about light in the room), and would stop the leakage.  We also resolved to open up the curtains every day, to keep the condensation from building up so much on the cold bedroom window.

We didn't expect it, but our approach was wildly successful.

Since we applied the layers of black plastic and tape, we've had zero leakage into the bedroom, no condensation problems, and the temperature in the bedroom has increased by at least 10 degrees Fahrenheit.

The temperature change was the thing we really didn't expect, since after all, how much heat/cold could a layer of plastic block?  Quite a bit, apparently, just by sealing over the opening in the window where the cold wind of winter was blowing in.  The bedroom is still cold, being so distant from the heater, but it's not frigid, and the water leakage has stopped completely.  We're not sure if the lack of condensation is due to the temperature in there not being so cold anymore, the curtains being more open, or if there never really was any condensation, and it was all just run off from leakage.  And I don't suppose we'll ever know.

And since we don't especially care, that's pretty much okay.

Home improvement on the cheap can be fun!

December 12, 2003

It was going while we were in the living room, but walking in and out of the bedroom on a regular basis.  And yes, I suppose this is technically the dreaded "leaving a lit candle unattended" but it's not like we abandoned a two year old poolside to go smoke crack or anything.

Malaya returned to the bedroom after some time, and made various "holy shit" sound effects, prompting me to come and have a look.  And this is what we saw.  The candle had gone nuts.

Either the wick got fatter and stopped shriveling off, or it went to the side at some point, or it hit a pocket of softer wax or something.  Whatever happened, you see the results here.

The somewhat vaginal photo to the top left is what the candle looked like when we saw it; the wax was burning normally again and no longer dripping at that point.  We've had the candle going since then and it's been fine and dripless.

The shot to the right is very long, but you get the idea.  It had to be that long to show the full extent of the wax trail the candle put out. It's a damn impressive one, going down about four feet from the source, and with no side tracks or broken bits.  And it's such a uniform size, almost the same width one foot down as three feet down.

Malaya industriously picked these off and handy-vac'ed the wax crumbs up, so that you can hardly tell there was ever a spill.  We've left the wax tail where it grew, and there it will stay until one of us knocks it off with a hurled pillow or shirt or one of the kitties crashes into it.

I've done candles for years and years, melting hundreds and possibly thousands of them over that time, but I've never achieved this level of artwork.  And here Malaya did it pretty much by accident, and while she wasn't even in the same room with the exhibition. Pure, innate skill.

July 24, 2003

Some months ago, while still living in San Diego, I was selected to begin receiving a complimentary six-month subscription to San Diego Home and Garden magazine.  I have no idea why; I didn't ask for it and I don't subscribe to any similar magazines.  Whatever the reason, I found out about my special status when the first issue arrived, in early June.  I didn't open it for a few days, but when I finally did, just to leaf though it, I was pretty entertained.

It's not that there were any articles worth reading, or information I found useful.  No, I just liked the photos, ones of ridiculously glorious rooms from absurdly-expensive houses.  Some were hideous and over-decorated and mausoleum-like, but a surprising number were pretty damn nice.  Very airy and light and spacious, with pretty furniture and other things I wouldn't mind having in my own house. If I had a house.

The best rooms were always kitchens, usually ones about the size of my entire apartment, so I immediately took to calling and thinking of the magazine as "Kitchen Porn."  That was the most useful term for it, since when I described it to Malaya on the phone and used that name for it, she immediately understood what it was all about.

The first issue was pretty funny, with a "Best Kitchens of the Year" article that more than made the magazine live up to it's kitchen-porn reputation. Perhaps building on that theme, most of the rest of the magazine was filled with huge full-color ads for various kitchen remodeling contractors and home decorating firms.  And many of the ads were as good or better than any of the actual kitchens profiled in the article itself.

With that start, I had high hopes for issue two, but unfortunately it fell far short of the bar set by the first issue (my first free issue, I mean, the magazine has been going for years).  There were kitchens, and they were porn-y, but the concentration of money shots was far weaker than in the first issue.  They tried to substitute some garden porn, and even bathroom porn, but those are just not as photogenic as huge kitchens with brass accents.  Issue two tried, but it was sort of like your Penthouse subscription starting off with a 50 page exclusive full nude layout of your favorite supermodels, and then following that up a month later with a 10-page "Girls of Home Depot" feature.

After issue two's flaccid showing, I couldn't be bothered to send them a change of address card, so hopefully whoever moves into my apartment in La Mesa will enjoy it more than I did.  You may insert a joke about the cruelty of sending a designer decoration magazine to people living in a crappy 1 bedroom apartment in La Mesa.  I would do it myself, but it would be wrong.

One thing that's been a surprise to Malaya and me is finding out how damn hard it is to give away perfectly good shit these days.

I had this idea that Goodwill and the Salvation Army and other such charities were hurting for donations, and needed more stuff other than like old golf shirts with holes in the collar, or broken toasters. I had a bunch of stuff that became superfluous once I moved here, since Malaya had the same types of things, but better, or else vice versa, and my stuff replaced her old stuff.

Whatever the reason for its unwanted status, we took a ton of stuff to a long-planned garage sale at her house the weekend after I arrived here.  Lots of it sold, lots more didn't, and since Malaya had the largest truck of anyone involved in the sale (several friends of hers got in on the act) she drew the duty of taking all the unsold stuff and giving it away.

You'd think that would be easy; drive up to a Goodwill store, pull around the back, and unload your unwanted stuff.  Well, we tried that, only to be told that like half the stuff we brought was unsuitable.  I'm not talking about boxes of random rusty tools or broken dishes; they were refusing to take boxes of books, any sort of computer part, functional or not, a perfectly good box fan that happened to have some tape around part of the cord (due to rat teeth damage), and other misc boxes of housewares.

The funny thing wasn't so much that they wouldn't take them, it was how immediately-dismissive the old woman working the donations door was.  It wasn't like, "Thanks for trying to give up perfectly good things, but we have a surplus or those and/or we've found in the past that those types of items aren't what people need."  It was like, "No, we don't take those." with a "get that shit out of my sight, you fucking peasant" sort of attitude.  Coming from a 60 year old, short, wrinkled, troll-like woman working for minimum wage in the back of a thrift shop, it was a bit surprising.

So we gave away what we could, got a receipt for the tax deduction, and headed on our way.  Right across the street was a Salvation Army store, and we were going to try to dump the unwanted stuff off there, but they had no one staffing their deliveries entrance, and a big, "No donations!" sign to boot.  Bleh.

Several days later we went by a SPCA (Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) charity store and were able to unload two boxes of books and one other box of misc stuff, but even they wouldn't take the computer parts.  I wasn't even aware that SPCA ran donation or charity stores; I thought they just busted illegal chinchilla ranches and rescued dying diseased kitties from crazy old ladies who had like 300 of them.  So upon hearing they had a store, and subsequently being driven to one by Malaya, I expected it would be mostly... pet stuff.  I mean people are donating them dog food or bowls or old leashes or something.

Nope.  The only sign in their entire junk store that they had any affiliation with animals was an old aquarium with a homemade lid selling for $10.  They mostly had glasses.  Several long shelves near the front of the store with hundreds and hundreds of mismatched glasses, most selling for about $1 each. The main insight I took away from the SPCA thrift store was amazement at how much ugly designers can fit into just six inches of drinking glass.

As for the computer stuff, we're still toting it around in the back of Malaya's truck. No one seems to accept old computer peripherals, but she refuses to just give up and chuck it into a dumpster (as I did with my old computer stuff pre-moving) since she's hell-bound to get some sort of charitable receipt for it so she can take it as a tax deduction.  The quest continues.

It's not like we've got a box of broken silicon; we're talking about perfectly good keyboards, a tower, a working mouse, and other stuff that plenty of people pay good money for.  It's even Apple computer stuff, which I'd think would be in shorter supply.  The charities that reject it just do so matter of factly, without even considering what you've got or whether or not it works.  It's not like they come look and say yes or no.  They just right up front say no way, no computer stuff of any kind.  You could go buy a brand new $2000 state of the art machine and try to give it to them, still in the box, and they'd turn you down. This confuses me.

Don't poor people want computer stuff for free?  Some hand me down computer that cost $2000 three years ago and is worth nothing now, plus $8 a month for cheap dial up and you can obtain endless amusement.  Certainly better than watching movies or TV, two things that all the charities are quite eager to take in as donations.

I don't really have a conclusion or analysis to all of this, and perhaps there are perfectly-valid reasons they don't want old computer parts. But it seems weird to me.  Goodwill was weird about books too.  They'd take paperback fiction, past best sellers and such, but had no interest in any trade books or text books, and didn't want the non-fiction stuff either.  It's like they're happy with people wasting their time on garbage like TV and movies and pulp fiction, but don't want people to actually learn anything or spend any of their time productively.

Or perhaps their goal is to get stuff for free that they can turn and sell for a small profit in their stores, and therefore they don't give away anything anymore?

June 19, 2003

The Great Toilet misadventure!

One fun event in Malaya's condo the last few days involved her toilet.

Now you're probably thinking, "What's fun about a toilet?" and you're right to think that, since there's nothing fun about a toilet.  I used the word facetiously, since her toilet began to drain very slowly and became relatively useless a couple of days ago.

It wasn't overflowing or anything, it just wouldn't flush completely.  Evidence remained, if you see what I mean. And while she and I are horny enough to overlook pretty much anything at this point; seeing your beloved's poo circling a toilet bowl full of blue water is a bit of a mood killer.

The toilet there has been odd for a while, mostly in that it fills up very slowly.  Like you flush it, and there is silence from the top basin for some time.  Only after a few minutes does it begin to fill, and then it fills very slowly, I'm taking like water flow that wouldn't overwhelm a drinking straw.  It takes probably 10 minutes after a flush to refill completely, and it won't flush again until it's almost completely full.

We couldn't figure out why it wasn't flushing, though we did try a plunger, with no obvious success.  Since I was the last one to make doodie before the flushing mechanism really began to have problems, female suspicion fell on me and the dubious product of my bowels.  I assured Malaya that I hadn't been eating rocks or peach pits or coffee grounds or any of the other nasty things that tend to clog up drains, but she remained skeptical.

(The plunger purchase would make a story in of itself, but suffice to say that it involved much wandering around a True Value hardware store and much fingering of shinies, as well as hilarity-inspiring floor adhering suction tests of the various plunger models.)

The plunger, once obtained, did nothing, so amateur plumber theorizing followed in short order.  My initial theory was that too much water was coming down the drain, and filling the bowl too quickly for it to all drain out in time.  Lots of water was draining, and some things would go down each time, mostly stuff that wasn't floating, but sample squares of toilet paper would remain floating even as they spun about and were nearly submerged.

So, eager to test out my theory the morning of day two of the "don't crap in there yet, damnit" period, I dug two old 7/11 plastic movie promotion Big Gulp cups out from the dusty top shelf in the kitchen, filled them with water, and put them in the tank in order to take the place of some of the water flow. I also jiggered with the float valve thingie, to make it cut off while the water was still lower in the bowl.

Test flushes with these additions proved spectacularly unsuccessful, and insult was added to injury when Malaya got up shortly afterwards, and began to emit high-pitched shrieks of woe at the sight of the 7/11 souvenir cups being so defiled.  The layer of dust of disuse not withstanding, she harbored a sentimental attachment to the cups, despite the fact that one was a promotional relic from the first Tomb Raider movie.  Tragically I couldn't even promise to wash them off real good, since while they'd only been in the top basin of the toilet, they were floating in turquoise water of dubious chemical content, courtesy of a dissolving 2000 Flushes tablet.

More online consultation followed (If you want to learn far more about toilet clogs and slow draining drains, search around some via Google. *shudder*) eventually leading me to a plumber's advice page that would at first look seem absurd heresy.

We've found that those blue drop-in tank tablets will slow the flush badly enough to where the water will build up to the rim and just swirl around. If the tablet is placed just right in the tank, the water will hit it hard enough to over saturate the blue stuff. When this happens, the water becomes "thick and heavy". The trap in the toilet was designed to have clean clear water running over it at a calculated speed. The blue stuff gets thick enough to slow the water rushing over the trap thus causing the siphon action to never fully develop.

We see this problem every week. I've had customers swear to me they need a new toilet and tell me "that sounds crazy" when I tell them about the blue stuff. So, I put on my rubber glove, remove the tablet, flush 5-7 times and guess what, the toilet is as good as new!! You wouldn't believe the looks on their faces, especially when the realize they almost forced me to install a new toilet.

At a lack of other solutions, and noting the vivid presence of a quickly-dissolving block of the blue stuff, I got an old plastic dish (Yes, I checked with Malaya first before I ruined it. *cough*) and used that to scoop out as much of the blue stuff as possible.  That wasn't a real easy task, since it had dissolved into a semi-solid goo, and was broken down to a sort of gooey sludge in coagulated puddles all across the bottom of the toilet basin.

But I scooped as much as I could, and then began flushing.  Since the toilet takes so long to fill, we had to use an additional water supply to fill the basin or I'd still be standing there waiting for it to fill .  Plus just dumping in pails of water was a good way to stir up and break up and dissolve the remaining blue goo.  And let me tell you, you haven't had fun until you stand next to a toilet for an hour, filling a square cleaning bucket with water from the bathtub faucet and pouring it into the back of a toilet, measuring your progress solely by the gradual decrease in blueness of the partially-flushing water.

This story does at last least have a happy ending.

Courtesy of my dozens of practice flushes, I eventually noticed that the toilet flushed almost perfectly, once the blue was mostly gone, as long as the basin was completely full.  Or at least full to the water line, which was near the top and just below the top of the overflow pipe.

Since I didn't realize this until the water was almost completely blue-free, and we were not about to go through all that shit again, I can't say definitively that the blue goo was the cause of all the trouble.  However the toilet had been slow to fill all along, even when the water was blue, but had been flushing properly.  Perhaps some critical mass of blue goo-ness built up and was enough to upset the delicate mixture of water rushing down?

Whatever the cause, once the water was back to a sparkling clear shine and we had figured to let the basin fill entirely before flushing, all was well.

Which was a good thing, since by then it had been like a day and a half, and I was about ready to cop a squat in Dusty's litter box.

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