Author Archives: The Boy

Holey concrete, Batman.

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Recently, The Girl and I enjoyed a typical POS Sunday.  We spent quality time walking up and down the aisles of Home Depot, looking for ways to fix the existing problems at the house.  Or ways to create new problems.  Usually the latter.

On this particular trip we had a specific goal: put a hole in the concrete pad outside the back door of the garage.

The Offending Area.

No, not just for the fun of it.  Our house is slightly downhill of the house next to us, which means that when it rains, the water runs toward our house.  Making the problem even worse is that there is a retention wall surrounding the door.  The retention wall keeps the soil from eroding away from the neighbor’s house, and keeps that soil from piling up against our door.  Unfortunately, it makes a nice little area for the water to pool, and pool it does.  The Girl and I have seen the water fill the area at least 8 inches high.

When the water fills that area, it has nowhere to flow, and eventually starts to leak into the garage.  It runs through the garage and to the garage door.  Because this has been happening for years, the garage door is rusting through at the bottom.  That’s another project for another day.

So – back to Home Depot.  We settled on a hole saw solution where we would drill through the pad, and then vacuum out the soil below the hole, and fill it with rocks, making a rough french drain solution.  Unfortunately, the largest hole saw that we could find had a 2 inch diameter.  I’m not convinced that this will be enough drainage, so we may have to widen the hole later, or add a second drain.

Oh man – here’s the best part.  We’ve got a few drills.  An impact driver, a standard drill, and ol’ busted drill.  None are hammer drills.  This project required a hammer drill.  YES!  So, The Girl and I walked out with a new drill bit, a drain cover, AND A NEW DRILL!

The newest member of our tool family.

With the shopping out of the way, it was time to get down to serious business.  I loaded up the new drill with the new drill bit, swept an area clean outside the door, and started to drill through the concrete.  It was a slow process.  It was hot outside.  There was a lot of concrete dust.  I would not be deterred.

The drilling took about thirty minutes, which was about twenty five minutes longer than I expected.  The drill worked wonderfully though, but I would warn anyone using a hammer drill for the first time, it’s pretty intense.

The large cylinders of cement I removed.

The extensive injuries I suffered.

Finally, there was a neat and tidy hole in the concrete, all the way through to the soil below.  Next, I grabbed the shop vac (named Snuffaluffagus) and removed a bunch of the dirt under the pad.  Then I put the drain cover on the hole, and voila!  The only thing left to do was to test the drain.

And … I put the drain in the wrong place.   The concrete pad actually seems to have a slight angle to it, meaning that the water pools in the corner, and I put the drain in the center.  Which REALLY means that at some point in the near future I will need to repeat the process, hopefully with a 4 inch saw and drain this time to allow for higher drainage.

But, for now, mission accomplished!

Sew What?

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Entertaining The Dog is a full-time job. She is not very good at entertaining herself, mostly because she destroys any toys we get for her within about eleven minutes of us handing the toy to her. Makes for expensive and very short-lived fun for her.

Recently, The Girl and I did a little “spring cleaning.” What that meant was that we pulled a box out of the closet that we hadn’t unpacked since moving in to go through it. Please don’t judge. In our zealous cleaning, we discovered behind the box an old body pillow. The Girl no longer needs a body pillow, as she has, well…me. Also The Dog. Seeing as the body pillow was just taking up space, we put it in a pile of stuff to take to Goodwill. The Dog does not understand Goodwill. The Dog understands “anything on the ground is a toy.” So, she immediately grabbed it in her teeth and thrashed it about. Right on cue, eleven minutes later, she had torn a hole in the pillow case and looked to be on the brink of killing yet another toy.

But this time, this time I would intervene. This time there would NOT be another dead toy tossed into the trashcan. NAY! I am resourceful. I am creative. I am old enough to be comfortable saying that I am in touch with my softer side (which happens to be my midsection). I would save the day by CREATING a durable pillowcase, thus allowing The Dog to continue thrashing the pillow around like a great white on a seal pup. Like a monkey on a cupcake. Like a…well, i’m out of analogies.

Here’s a free tip: Michael’s does not have fabric. None. Not even a bit. Joann’s FABRICS? Yeah – they’ve got fabric. Not like “fabric” is in the name of the store or anything. Am I resourceful, yes. Am I bright, not always.

I got duck cloth. It’s not made of ducks, it doesn’t feel like ducks, it doesn’t have a duck pattern. It IS very durable though. Seriously I spent about thirty minutes looking at all the different fabrics. Eventually, it came down to a choice between the duck cloth and denim but the duck cloth just felt a little more sturdy. And it was more fun to say. Duck cloth.

Unfortunately, I have no idea how to sew. I mean, I’ve mended a few things with needle and thread, but I was making a pillow case to cover a four foot tall pillow, so hand sewing that bad boy was just out of the question (full disclosure – I tried to hand sew it. The experiment ended with a lot of cursing and very little progress). Fortunately, The Girl’s family was coming for a visit, and they promised to bring a sewing machine. The Girl’s family isn’t quite sure what to make of the fact that she ended up with a guy who wants to learn to sew, but they seem to have accepted me for who I am. They are good people.

Here we are trying to figure out the sewing machine:

It took a while, but The Girl’s mom finally managed to teach me how to run the sewing machine.

I was the baby bird, flying out of the nest for the first time. Any success I had was due to the fact that I had an excellent coach. I managed to stitch some velcro on the inside of the top of the pillow case, then run a seam down the side and the bottom of the pillow case. After that, the only thing left to do was case the pillow and see if The Dog would go after it with as much vigor as she did previously.

Here’s the answer:

Pillow Fights are never as sexy as they sound.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, and dogs. The Boy was able to competently work a sewing machine, make a pillow case, save a pillow from being discarded, and entertain The Dog, all for the low low price of about $9 in fabric, and two hours of learning and working time.

Flawless Victory

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Bless you ReStore.  Bless you very much.  You have provided us with hours of entertainment, and several key purchases in our attempt to renovate our home.  We have tried to keep the karma flowing by donating any extra supplies that we have after a big job.  Or a small job.

SPEAKING of small jobs – let’s talk about the newly renovated bathroom.  You have read much and seen much of the work we’ve done.  However, one issue remains: the bathroom door opens into the living room.  When there’s just one person in the house, no big deal.  When it is The Girl and I in the house, still not much of a big deal.  When there is company, over-night guests, or a glow-stick, light-switch, rave going on in the house, the door presents an issue.

The door is hollow, and without getting unnecessarily graphic, a hollow door does not do a very good job at keeping sounds or odors in.  Clearly the concern here is being forced to listen to someone splash about in the tub, or having to smell someone’s aromatic candles being burned.  Ahem.

So, The Girl and I did a little Saturday morning shopping at the ReStore.  We managed to find a 24 inch wide, paneled, solid core door that was still in the factory wrapping for TEN DOLLARS.  You may be asking yourself, “self, is that a good deal?”

For comparison, here is the same door, advertised at Home Depot.  (Update:  the link to the exact same door stopped working, as I guess they discontinued it, so it is now linked to a comparable composite pre-primed door, which is actually cheaper than the unprimed slab!)

Before anyone could move our door to a more expensive part of the ReStore, we grabbed it and sprinted to the cash register.  Ok, fine – we had the store employee schlep it over to the register, while we browsed through the store for another twenty minutes.  Whichever story you enjoyed more, the point is we had ourselves a sweet door, and a perfect home for it.  On the other hand, The Girl and I were both nervous about trying to hang a door because we had heard horror stories about trying to trim a solid core door to the right size, and getting it to hang straight and level.

Step 1: remove old and busted.  Tools required: One screwdriver, one hammer, one The Girl (not included).

The first step was pretty simple.  No major issues, no power tools necessary, just pop the pins from the bottom of the hinge (I used a hammer and a nail to do it), and then remove the door.  Then unscrew the old hinge from the door frame.

Step 2: make sure the door frame is square.  Tools required: wood shims, level.

Fortunately, our door frame was more or less square.  We needed a little bit of shim work to make it right, but most frames should be in better shape than ours was.

Step 3: fit the door and measure for the new hardware.  Tools required: arms and a pencil.

Can you spot The Boy?

We started by fitting the door from the bathroom side, and putting the new hinges into place.

Then we lifted the door, still in the frame, so that the top of the door fit how we wanted at the top of the frame.  We made marks on the door where the hinges needed to be attached, and then took the door back out of the frame.  Then we opened the hinges to 90 degrees so we could screw the hinges to the door.  We lifted the door back up so that the lines that we just drew lined up with the hinges, pre-drilled the holes for the screws to keep the door from splintering, and attached the hinges to the door.  (This whole process required four hands, thus no pictures.)  Then it was time for the moment of truth – closing the door.  Imagine our surprise when the door closed, smoothly, and lined up perfectly with the door frame.  It’s not supposed to work like this.  It NEVER works like this.

Step 4: drill the hole for the door knob and the door latch.  Tools required: 2″ hole saw, 1″ wood drilling bit, power drill, and power router.

Scary part.  So far, we hadn’t actually altered the door.  Anything that went wrong up until this point was pretty fixable.  Now we would be putting holes in things.  Putting holes in things is easy – fun even.  It’s much more difficult to do it in a precise manner, knowing that if you mess it up then the door is ruined.  Pretty sure I was mumbling Queen’s “Under Pressure” while I gathered all the tools for this step.

Side note: in most jobs we tackle around the house there is some measuring and mathification.  I’m pretty good at math.  I like to do long division in my head during boring car trips – no joke. But, despite my best efforts, I’m not a calculator.  And measuring isn’t necessarily my strong point.  I do it, and I get it right most of the time, but I have much more fun cutting stuff and screwing stuff together and sanding stuff, so I tend to spend less time and energy focusing on the measuring.

So, there I was, measuring and mathificating in my head:  “The old hole was only 1 3/4 inches wide, and the right edge of the hole was 1 inch away from the edge of the door, so if my new hole is 2 inches wide, then the center of the new hole should be 1 7/8 inches from the door frame.  But if the OTHER train leaves the station ten minutes later going twice as fast, when will they meet?”

I took two Aleve and started over.  Ten minutes later, I was sitting on the ground inside the bathroom with The Girl intently staring over my shoulder as I drilled the 2 inch hole into our very pretty and very square door, praying that I wasn’t screwing it up.

When I was finished, we had this:

Can you spot The Boy?

Then, I had to use the router to cut out a section for the latch plate.  The latch plate has to be recessed into the side of the door for it to work properly.  I have regularly told The Girl that the router is PROBABLY the most dangerous power tool we have because it’s a spinning blade, without a safety shield of any kind, and it’s hand-held.  That being said, we set the depth of the bit by using the old door as a frame of reference, then I sat down with the door between my knees and very slowly cut out the recess for the latch plate.

The last step was to use the 1 inch wood-boring bit to drill sideways through the door until I hit the other hole that was cut for the door knob.  The only concern here is to make sure that you drill as straight as possible because there isn’t much room for error on either side of the door.  If you start drilling at an angle, there is a good chance you will come out of the side of the door, or that the hardware won’t line up with the door knob.  In our case, I managed to drill the hole in a relatively straight line through the side of the door.  The planets may never align so perfectly again.

Here’s the door with the knob and the latch assembled and installed:

It’s pretty dang pretty, and it is almost perfectly level, and it closes AND opens.  Here is The Girl pre-drilling holes for the latch plate screws:

Unfortunately, those folks in the living room area will no longer get the benefit of hearing bath splashes, or smelling the burning candles coming from the bathroom, but The Girl assures me this is a good thing.