Fix It Saturday

    The general program in my life since I have bought the house has been that I am not to sit down on the couch after work until I have completed one project.  That enables me to get a lot of small things done during the week, which leaves a lot of the big or bigger or potentially more time consuming projects for the weekend.  This weekend, my big project was to put new lights on the outside of the house.  But the weather was supposed to be bad on Saturday (and it was, at least in the afternoon with heavy, wet snow) but today was supposed to be at least precipitation-free.  So I did a bunch of small projects on Saturday, but I didn't want to go into a ton of pictures and detail about them.  So here they are in sort of list and short blurb form with just a couple of pictures of each.

- I strung a cord for my engine block heater.  My car is a pretty nice car, but it is a stick shift and sometimes it takes a long time on cold days for the engine to heat up and then to heat up the transmission fluid and parts so I can go.  So I am determined to use my engine block heater this winter to cut down my warm-up time in the morning.  I once read an article about engine block heaters that said they heat up your engine over 30° in the first two hours they run, and then less than 1° per hour for the rest of the time, so I figured that I would hook it up to a timer that you just feed electricity to the thing for a couple of hours.  Since there is no outdoor outlet on that side of the garage, and I had to factor in the timer, I ran an extension cord from an indoor outlet across the garage, through a hole drilled in a window sash on the lean-to, and curled up on the side of the garage.  The electricity will click on every morning, whether or not the heater is plugged in.  Should work pretty slick, even if it isn't the most professional of installs.  I used the little clamps they use to mount coaxial cable to the side of the house to keep the cord in place.

- I put some hardware on the garage windows.  I came to discover the other day that two of the windows in my garage were just sort of held in place with some bent nails and hopes and dreams, and the wind would blow them in and out about an inch or so.  But I thought it would be cool if they could be held in place a little better, AND be able to open should we desire.  So I put some hinges and latches on them.  Not perfect but certainly functional.  That is the project of which I am most proud of.  Well, second most proud of.

The windows that were to be replaced

The flash didn't go off, but as you can see the windows are hinged inward now - because I couldn't hinge them outward due to the way the trim was installed.  No big deal.

Looks normal now, but it didn't before.

-  I reversed the kitchen faucet.  When the home inspector came through the house to do his work before I bought the place, the first thing that he told me was that the faucet of the kitchen sink was on backward.  And it was.  The handle faced the wall/window, and you had to pull the handle towards you and down instead of pushing it up and away to get the water to come on.  The hot and cold were on the correct sides, however, which mean that I couldn't just turn the handle around, I had to disconnect the water lines and unmount the entire faucet to turn it around.  And I did it with no troubles and no leaks.  I don't know who put that in, or why they thought the manufacturer would put a mounting screw on the front of the faucet and their logo (it's a Moen faucet, just in case you were wondering) on the back, but they couldn't have been more wrong.  So now it is fixed and it looks right and most importantly is working like it should.  Thank goodness I didn't have to take the faucet itself apart - that would have been disaster


- I did the same thing with the handle on the storm door.  They did the same thing here, so I assume that the handman they were using was a little dyslexic.  From the outside, you had to lift UP on the handle to open the door, which is very unnatural and difficult with your hands full.  So that is fixed up too and all is right in the world.

-  I hung some shelf brackets in the garage.  You don't get a picture of that one, because it is ridiculously easy, but I should note that there is no shelf on the brackets.  Traci's snowboard lives on them, upside down of course so the wax doesn't get messed up.  It looks good on the wall with the cross-country skis and snowshoes.

So those were my today projects, and I am pretty proud of where I got for a day that was mostly rain and snowy.  A lot of little things for sure, but they are done and out of the way, and they really do make a big difference.  Check in tomorrow to see how my first attempts at playing with electricity went.