The Shop Floor: Installing the Tile

     So suddenly it is Friday and my Dad is here to help me with the floor.  I sort of feel bad for the man - he is a good Dad, and he offered because he wanted to be helpful, but I don't think that either one of use knew what we were getting into.  First of all, the floor was not level, and no one knew about that until I had stripped the carpet and all that jazz.  I should have poured a leveler or put a floating cement board floor underneath, but that is a discussion for a later time.  I was trying to make sure that I was ready for the help when I had it available.  Secondly, my Dad - bless his heart - doesn't always like to travel and be away from home, so when he saw the size of the room he realized that we could finish in a day and set himself to do it.  I could have, and should have, slowed things down but he is my Dad, and I just don't want to disappoint him.
      Truth be told, when it was all said and done, I was really glad that he was there helping me.  First of all, he had experience laying ceramic tile at work.  Secondly, he is a pretty handy guy.  Third, he showed me how to safely operate the tile saw, which I could do but I am had never used one before and I wouldn't have done it quite right without a little instruction first.  He helped me out a ton.  Actually, he did most of the work, grabbing the trowel and going to town.
      The first thing that we had to do was to mix the quickset.  That is the mortar that binds the tile to the floor.  We did this with a five gallon bucket and a special mixing attachment on a drill.  We used a corded, heavy duty drill that Traci's dad lent us and I was glad that we did because it would have been way too much for a normal drill to handle.  A portable battery drill would not have worked at all.  We did not measure the water like we should have, and I wished we would have.  We sort of did our best to mix it by eye, and I think that it turned out a little thin, which added to our troubles in the end.  Another tip: don't mix more mortar than you can use in like an hour or two.

Dad laying the first rows of tile. The baseline we created is at the right edge of the rows.

     So when it comes to actually laying tile, it is a fairly simple affair that is actually pretty complicated. Wait, what?  Here is the deal: it seems like it is fairly simple, but there are a lot - A LOT - of ways to do it wrong.  The first thing that we did was to set a base line.  If you are absolutely sure that your walls are straight, or if you are doing a small area, you can just use a couple of walls as baselines and start in a corner, but we were doing a big room and I knew for a fact that the walls were not straight.  So we measured to the center of the room , snapped a chalk line the long way, and we were ready to go.  I wish we would have measured the room the other way and did a baseline in the middle of it as well, but I don't know that that would have made much of a difference.  Once we snapped the chalk line, we just used the special notched trowel to put some mortar down and started setting down the tiles.

A little less than halfway through the process.

     My dad was doing all the hard work laying the tiles, and I was doing the fetching and the cutting.  Because there are a lot of crazy corners and uneven walls, we weren't measuring, we were using a different technique to get the tiles cut correctly.  When you come to where you know you will have to cut a tile, you take a full tile and lay it down on the last full tile you set.  Then you take a third tile, and set it on top of that one but up against the corner or wall or whatever.  You use a pencil to mark where the top tile ends on the middle one, and that is where you cut.  It gives you a tile cut exactly to the contour of the wall or corner or whatever.  It is hard to explain but you can see it by clicking here. It is actually a pretty cool concept.

Me working at the wet saw.  I wasn't using the guard (dangerous and stupid idea!) so my shirt got totally drenched.

     And so we went, on and on, working our way across the room, down the hall, and into the corners, until the entire room was tiled.  In some of the really complicated corners, instead of making a really complicated cuts, we cut the tile into small little pieces.  For instance - instead of cutting a tile into an "L" shape to go around a corner we would cut two pieces to make it go around.  In retrospect I wish we hadn't done this, and had taken the time and care to make it be one piece, just for asthetics.  But we did what we did.  The other thing that happened as we went along was that we sort of discarded the use of spacers.  The spacers are little plastic pieces that look like an "x" that you put on the corner of the tiles to make them evenly spaced across the floor.  We were using them for a time, but the uneveness of the floor made them somewhat ineffective.  The corners of the tiles would ride up on top of them and screw up the spacing time and time again.  Eventually they were more trouble than they were worth and we just got rid of them.

All done, except for the grout.  It looks hooker good at this point: good from 20 feet but a little rough up close.

     Soon we were done.  In fact, we finished the entire basement area in like five hours, which seemed a little fast to me.  That should have been my first clue.  I would expect a professional to finish it in that amount of time maybe, but not two guys who didn't have much in the way of experience.  Also, as we worked and had to walk on some of the areas some of the tiles began to crack almost immediately.  That should have been my second clue that something was wrong.  But we let it set and went to dinner.  Dad was leaving the next morning, and I was going to be on my own to grout once the tile had set for 24 hours.

The Shop Floor: Removing the Carpeting

I wish that we hadn't gotten rid of the carpet.  I am not sorry that we had taken it out of the basement, because we had to, but I wish we would have kept it and found a way to use it somehow, because it was a really nice carpet.  Really nice.  It was a little older, but it was a high quality product and it was like walking on a comfortable gym mat without all the dried wrestler sweat and shoe marks.  I would have liked to use it somewhere in some capacity or at least found someone who could have used it because it really was pretty nice, aside from the cat puke stain and paint flecks we let get on it because we knew it was going away.

     As it were, we had determined early on that the carpet wasn't totally glued down all throughout the room, which was a really good thing because that would have caused a ton of extra work.  One of the things about doing a tile floor on existing cement is that you can't have any adhesive or paint on the cement because it effects the bonding of the quickset that holds the tile to the floor.  So had the carpet been adhered at spots all around the room there would have been a lot of scraping to be done.  The easiest way to determine this is to go to a lot of random spots around the carpet and trying to lift it up.  if it lifts you are in business, and it is okay if it sticks around the edges. 

The basement before carpet removal.  Notice the painting is done and we allowed paint to spill on the carpet because we knew that we were going to remove the carpet.

     Removing the carpet was easy, okay?  Really easy.  I just started in a corner and I began pulling.  That's not true.  I actually began in the hallway because that was the one place where I needed to make a cut, and to be honest I screwed it up.  I cut with a straight edge exactly along the place where I wanted the carpet to stop and the floor to begin, which was right under where the door would be.  Wrong move.  I am not going to include this in the "lessons learned" section because it is a small thing: cut it so there is more carpet than you want, because you don't know what is underneath and you can always trim some.  In my case, I cut it a little bit short and I found out that I just missed a joint in the tacking strips, which would have been the perfect place to cut it.

The hallway: where it all began.

But I cut it.  I used a normal, everyday utility knife, what I grew up calling an Exact-o knife.  And I went slowly because I didn't know what I would fine under the carpet.

     What I found was all the signs of professional installation. The carpet itself was covering a typical carpet pad, the kind that is sort of mottled and doesn't even come out cleanly.  The carpet was held down by some of those wooden tacking strips with a million billion nails facing upward so that the carpet weave just sticks to them, and the strips themselves were nailed into the concrete with those masonry nails that are installed by essentially shooting them into the concrete with a .22.  The pad was inside of the strips and was glued down to the floor just around the edges.

A couple of images of what I found under the carpet.  In the top photo you can clearly see the carpet, pad, and tacking strips.  Below, a close up of the strips showing the heavy-duty masonry nails.  The duct tape is where there is a cut in the pad from when it was originally installed, but you can see in the top of the bottom picture that my cut missed the joint in tacking strips by an inch or two.

     What really made my heart sink when I ripped the first bits of carpet and padding up from the hallway was that the floor was painted.  It was painted with the same thick grey paint that covers the floor in my laundry/utility room, and I was not impressed.  The problem is that the quickset mortar that one uses to attach tile to a concrete floor generally doesn't adhere well to paint.  One of two things usually happens: either the mortar won't adhere to the paint, or the paint flakes off the concrete eventually so the tiles don't set right.  There are two ways to remedy this situation: lay a cement-board floor over the existing concrete, or completely scrape and sand the paint off.  I was not looking forward to that, because I didn't have the cash on had to get the relatively expensive cement board, and I didn't feel like being on my hands and knees scraping the entire basement.

The painted hallway floor, with carpeting still on the floor in the main room.

     So that is what I found, and I immediately began to remove it, and this is where I sort of have some regrets.  In order to make it easier for me to remove and haul away, I decided to cut up the carpet into squared and bind them with twine or whatever.  I wish I would have just rolled it up and found a use for it, or saved it for another time.  That is the deeply repressed hoarder inside of me peeking out, I guess.  Anyway, I cut the carpet into squares, pulled them off the tacking strips and floor, and ripped up the padding underneath.  The padding, where it was glued down, stuck.  But under the bulk of the room was a nice surprise: an unpainted floor.

In the process of removing the carpet, notice the carpet, the pad, and the bare floor with no paint.

     That was big.  I found no paint.  What I hypothesize - and there is no real way to test this - is that at one time the basement was configured differently than it is now.  Currently we have a main room into which the stairs and the outside door lead, and then looking at the stairs to the left there is a utility and laundry room where the furnace, water heater, etc. is located, and to the right there is the above mentioned hallway, which leads to a bathroom and a non-bedroom (because it doesn't have an escape window).  I believe that the "bedroom" and bathroom were later additions, and that historically the basement only had two rooms - the main finished room which today is the shop, and the a giant utility room that took up half the basement.  Hence the fact that the paint stopped at the end of the hallway.  I was relieved.
    What I did find in lieu of paint on the floor in the main room was a very evident pattern of squares - 12" by 12" - the exact size of the tile I was to be putting down.  I told Jim about it and he asked if the pattern was in a sort of yellow looking stuff.  As you can see in the photo below it clearly is.  He told me that there was probably asbestos tile down there are one point, and what I was seeing was the leftover bits of the underside of the tile and the adhesive used to adhere them to the floor.  Take a look:


The pattern on the main room floor, showing where there used to be asbestos tiles - which was common for the age of the house.



    The next big issue that I had, once I started pulling up the carpet and pad, was the tacking strips the surrounded the room where the carpet used to be attached, and the pieced of pad that were still sticking to the floor.  Getting the tacking strips up was easy enough: a pry bar wedged under them with a hammer usually broke them up and they came right off.  But the nails wouldn't come out.  You can usually break those nails off right at the floor with a small sledge hammer, or even a regular hammer, if you hit them just right.  Usually.  Well, this house seems to be unusual, and I guarantee you that I wasn't hitting them right, and the first couple that I tried resulted in big chunks of concrete coming up with them.  So I just borrowed an angle grinder from Jim and ground them off - over a hundred of them - down to level with the concrete.

     The pad that was stuck to the floor came of even more easily with a simple scraper, and the scraper did the trick on the bulk of the rest of the stuff on the floor.  The scraping was the longest part, in fact.  I spent three nights after work scraping on that floor, and I still didn't get it as clean as I wanted it.  But it was doable.  The paint proved to be the hardest: parts of it flaked off with no problem, but I wasn't able to get most of it off before I ran out of time.  I decided to take the chance that the paint was adhered well enough and that there was enough of it removed that the tile would stick.  I was out of time, but the carpet was removed.  My Dad would arrive the next day to lay the tile.  But that is for another post.

The Shop Floor: Introduction

enemy (n):
1. One who feels hatred toward, intends injury to, or opposes the interests of another; a foe
2. Something destructive or injurious in its effects

                                                                              - The American Heritage Dictionary

    The shop floor is my nemesis, plain and simple.  I hate it and it hates me.  As one of the requirements of the State of Wisconsin to operate a tattoo parlor, there has to be a hard surfaced floor.  Carpeting is not allowed.  So I decided that to save money and in the spirit of fixing and improving my own home, I decided that I would lie a ceramic tile floor in the basement.  In the sense that a nemesis is one who feels hatred toward or intends injury to something, I am the nemesis of the floor because I want to break it all and I hate it every time I see it.  In the sense that is it destructive and injurious in its effects it is my nemesis because it haunts me day and night and every time I go down there.
     Now granted, I spent a lot of time, effort, and frustration over the course of many days getting a little more intimate with the floor than I would have liked to, so I tend to look at it with an overly critical eye.  I look at the floor and see every flaw, and I am sure Traci does too, and I am sure you would if you installed tile for a living, or you were looking at buying the house (which won't happen - I won't allow that house to be sold with that floor in the basement), or maybe if you were just a jerko you might notice the same things, but most of the people who come through there aren't looking at the floor, and the ones who are seem to say that it looks just fine.
    In truth, I was in a little over my head on this project.  But I learned a ton in the process, and with what I know now I would do it over for sure, or do it again in another room for sure.  But we will get into that later.  For now we will just go through the process of how I went about it (with help from my Dad since he was unfortunate enough to offer) and then at the end we can talk about what I learned and what advice I would give.  But for now we should just start at the beginning, and that beginning is with removing the carpet.

Lessons from Painting

    One of the key things about living life in today's society - well any society - is to make sure that you learn lessons from the things that you do, so you can do them better in the future.  Like when you make a pizza and it comes out more done on the one half than the other, you need to learn the lesson that your oven doesn't heat evenly and you should rotate your food halfway through.  Or perhaps when you are a caveman and you kill a buffalo you learn that hitting him with a spear in one spot kills him really easily, you need to learn the lesson that that is how you kill a buffalo without getting gored or maimed or exhausted or whatever.  That's evolution.  So let's take a look at some of the lessons I learned from painting the basement, and what advice those lessons would lead me to give to you.  Some of these things are going to seem like they are elementary to you but I didn't know them so I am telling them to you anyway.  Take that.

- Take your time and be very thorough with your prep work.  I am sort of ashamed to admit that this is one area in which I skimped when I was painting the basement, and I am paying for it to some degree.  We sort of rushed things into production and went through the prepping very quickly and as such missed some things.  For instance there were some holes that we missed filling, which wouldn't be such a big deal except when there are holes drilled in paneling there tends to be a little mound of material that builds up around the hole, and those needed to be sanded down and the holes filled.  Also, there were some areas around the window and door that once had plastic on them, and that clear adhesive tape that they use to stick the plastic to the wall was still there.  I didn't notice until it was too late, and now that there is paint there it is very noticeable if you are looking.  So I would advise to take a lot of time to make sure that your prep work is done completely and done well.  Also, make sure you take a lot of pains with your drop cloths and move as much furniture out of the room as you can.

-  When painting paneling, sand the paneling before you paint.  I am serious.  I know that they do wonderful things with paint chemistry these days.  I really do.  But the bottom line is that paint - no matter how technologically advanced - still needs something to adhere to.  It still needs some sort of texture to bond itself too, and paneling is just too smooth.  I would advise at least lightly sanding and paneling that you might have to paint and then making sure you wipe it clean before applying paint.  I did not do this, and as a consequence whenever I scratch against the wall the paint just comes right off and you can see the paneling underneath.  The layers of paint adhere to one another just fine, but the first layer just can't seem to stick to the paneling when under duress, and it has lead to some annoying repairs and ugly marks.

-  Beware the grooves.  The grooves on the paneling cause a lot of problems.  First of all, they are deep so you can't get in them well with a roller.  Second, they are textured when the rest of the paneling is not, so it takes more paint to get in there and get a nice even coat than it does to do the rest of the wall, and it makes it just a pain in the ass.  Also, it is really easy to miss parts of the grooves or paint the grooves unevenly, which leads me to...

- Don't divide the work.  I know this sounds stupid, but hear me out.  Because the grooves in the paneling are such a different animal, it is really tempting to assign one person to paint them all in and another to swoop around with the roller.  That is what we did.  What happened then was that I went with the paintbrush putting a heavier coat of paint in the grooves and giving it a brush texture while Traci went the other way around the room with the roller doing the surface of the paneling with a roller texture.  What ended up happening was that I had by necessity laid a thicker coat of paint than she did and the wall ended up being striped when you look at it very closely, especially because we used a light colored finish coat.  If you want to divide up the work, make sure that the roller person follows immediately behind the groove painter, because the roller will even out the paint and give it an even texture.

- Tape.   I know that taping sucks, because it takes forever, it doesn't always work right, and sometimes it takes off the paint underneath.  I get that.  But it is important.  We decided not to tape and even though I used a straight edge the lines aren't always straight, they certainly aren't even, and there are places where the trim paint got on the walls.  So take the time and make the effort to tape, especially when you are doing painting inside, because it is probably going to get more scrutiny.


-  Don't brush too much.  I have a nasty tendency to get a little overexcited with the brush or roller, and all it does is thin out the paint and make it uneven.  When it looks good just stop.


-  Slow down and pay attention.

     So that is about it.  That is mostly what I learned, and I will definitely put those things into practice when I do my next painting, which will be some trim around the baseboard (because of a floor project that we did) and eventually the outside of the house.  If I could do it all again I would and I would definitely use what I learned.  But we live and we learn.  And I hope you did too.

Painting the Basement

      I know that it has been a while, but I have been busy with the holidays and a number of projects, the first of which we will chronicle here today.  Traci and I have been busy attempting to presto change-o a basement living room into a fully licensed, fully functioning tattoo parlor in which she can work, with mixed results.  She received her license to operate the shop earlier today from the Vilas County Health Department, so I suppose that in the long run it was a successful renovation, however it didn't quite go as planned.  The first order of business was to paint.
      Part of the reason that we decided that we needed to paint the basement - hereafter to be called the shop - is because regulations require walls with a light surface, and the 70s or 80s era paneling that adorns all the walls of our home just don't fit the bill.  Since we are operating on an extremely limited budget, we decided that the best course of action would be to paint the paneling.  The room began looking like this:

The original basement...as brown as brown can be.  Notice some furniture just scattered about.

     As you can see...it was not very exciting.  Brown paneling with like a sandy pinkish-brown trim.  I am not ever sure how to describe it, but it wouldn't work.  The ceiling is actually just about white and the carpet is more green than it looks in this photo.  But that is the space that we were working with, in addition to a little hallway that is off to the right of the photo.  There were lots of holes in both the trim and the walls from removal of the trim where nails pulled through, or from pictures and other things being hung on the wall.  So we filled those areas with wood putty and sanded them down.

That is me putting putty on the trim in the hallway.  I need a bigger shirt or a judicial robe I guess.

Some of the repairs where the walls had been sanded.  I know, it's a little hard to see.

    Now they make special paint that is made just for going on paneling, but it is expensive and can be hard to find.  I can't attest to how it is supposed to work, because we didn't have it.  What we did have was some Dutch Boy primer AND some Dutch Boy paint that was supposed to be self priming, which we thought would be enough.  I briefly, on the night we were preparing to paint, considered sanding the paneling to rough it up, because the main problem with painting paneling is that it is completely smooth and shiny and there really isn't anything for the paint to adhere to all that well.  But I decided to put my faith into the paint and off we went.  The other problem with painting most paneling is those stupid grooves, because they are deep and they are textures so they soak up paint like it is going out of style.

Traci putting the first passes of the roller to the wall.  We started in the middle because that is where she happened to be standing when we started.

In the process of putting on the first coat of primer.

Traci applying primer under the watchful eye of our job supervisor...Felix T. Cat.

     Traci went with the roller, while I was assigned the job of filling in all the cracks with the paintbrush, and for whatever reason we went in opposite directions.  Tomorrow we will talk about the lessons I learned while painting and why that was a bad idea.  But anyway, we made okay time and got most of the room painted with primer in one evening.   As you can see from the middle photo above the paneling was really showing through the primer, with stripes where the grooves were, so we decided to put a second coat of primer on to try and even out the base, since we were using a light color for the finish coat.  We also chose not to prime the trim since we thought the paint would adhere to that with no problem.  Below is a picture of the room after the primer was done being put on.

First coat of primer.

Second coat of primer...it looks much more even.

     Now you may have notices a couple of peculiar things in the above photos.  First, if you look very closely in the second photo you can see that we splashed lots of primer on the trim.  We would continue that trend when we did the top coats because the trim color was a little darker so we thought it would cover it up with no problem...and we were right.  You might also notice that there are no drop cloths on the floor to cover the carpet.  That is because the carpet would be going when we did the next project so we weren't concerned about keeping it nice.  To be honest I sort of regret that decision because someone would have taken that carpet off our hands if we had kept it nice.
     Anyway, with two coats of primer on and a couple of days to dry we were ready to start with the top coat.  We made up our minds early on that we would do two top coats to make it even and make it last.  The color was a sort of blue-gray-ish off-white.  I am sure there is a name for it that only females and interior decorators know, but I don't, so I choose to call it be the most hyphenated name of all time.  Blue-gray-ish off-white.  It is a light color though, and gives the room a much lighter feel.

Putting the first finish coat on the walls.  You can see it looked good over the two coats of primer.  We would eventually put a second coat of finish on as well.

     I am not going to bore you with a bunch of painting pictures, because you have all either a.) painted or b.) seen someone painting.  Besides, it is pretty boring.  But I will tell you that I also painted the ceiling, which sucked because it involved me standing below it craning my neck and arms upward for like three days.  And the results were hard to see:

If you really try you can see the color change in the two photos, with the new color on the left and the old on the right.

And I will show you a picture of the room once the top coat was on:

The painting really changed the look of the room...didn't it?

And it met with the approval of my supervisor.

I really think he was just there to huff the paint fumes.

     Anyway, it was onward to the trim.  For the trim we had another blue-gray type color, but it was a little darker.  I will warn you that in the pictures it is kind of hard to see the difference; it is much more noticeable in person.   The painting of the trim took forever because there are so many trim pieces all around the room.  This is because of the paneling, which necessitates trim on every corner, whereas with drywall they can just mud it nice.  The painting of two coats on the trim went pretty much like the other painting did, just with a lot more attention to not getting it on the rest of the walls.  It also included painting all the doors, which we had taken off their hinges or tracks with the exception of the infamous pocket door.  There were two sliding closet doors, one louvered door, one side of the bedroom door, and one side of the pocket door.

Painting the trim without primer.  Notice the subtle difference between walls and trim colors.

The doors sucked up a ton of paint, and the louvered door (leaning against red cloth) was especially difficult.

      Painting the trim actually took a long time.  It was two coats, much of it was up high, and there was a lot of it.  But in the end the paint job looked okay.

We left the closet doors off because we knew we would be tiling the floor soon.  They would normally be covering the shelves at the left of the picture in the hallway.

     Except it didn't quite look okay.  I wasn't happy.  Now I know that you can't see it in the pictures, and that the average person won't see it, and that I have an overly critical eye towards the paint job because I am me and I spent a lot of time down in the shop staring at it.  But that is not the point.  I can honestly say that I could have done better.  And should have done better.  There are a lot of spots where I got some trim on the walls, like right around the edges.  There are also a lot of areas where there are drips on the walls from uneven application of paint.  You can also see stripes along the grooves in the right light at the right angle if you are really looking for it.  There are areas on the trim where the old cantaloupe yellow is showing through the two coats of paint I put on.  And, to top it off, there are areas on the doors and walls where the paint has scraped or rubbed off and you can see the paint or paneling underneath.  And we will talk more about those problems and how I would have stopped them in the next post.  But most people won't ever see or notice any of those blemishes, which is good.  So I guess you could say it looks hooker good - good from 20 feet but a lot scarier close up.  HAHAHAHA!  But seriously, it is done and it is serviceable, and it is time to move on to the floor.  But that is for a later time.  First we have to talk about what we have done and how we would have done it differently.  Until then, we hope all is well.  See you next time!

Upcoming Events

THE FIX IS ON!  Kind of.  Sorry for yelling at you everyone, but I just sort of felt like that is what I wanted to do.  I know that there hasn't been a whole lot going on here the last month or so, but that is because we began our first major project and it went a little awry.  We have been making preparations to turn the basement living room into a tattoo shop for Traci to work out of.  Aside from getting the equipment, etc, there were three major things to be done before we can get our license from the Vilas County Health Department: paint (not a requirement but Traci didn't like the paneling and that was the least expensive option), remove the carpet and install a hard floor of some sort, and install a sink in the area where she will be working.  Well, over the last month or so we have been doing the first two, which would explain the recent silence.  Neither went particularly well to be honest, but we live and we learn.  We will start with the painting and then do the floor in several parts.  All the while behind the scenes we I will be working on getting the sink installed.  Fun times, no?
     Also, if we don't see you before Christmas time, Happy Holidays to all you and yours.  Here is hoping everyone has safe travels.

The Guest Bedroom Light

     No pictures here today, folks, but I just want to relate to you a little story concerning the light in the guest bedroom.  Traci's mom - Jeri - decided that the existing fixture was unable to stay in the house.  I am not sure if this had something to do with the fact that it sort of looked like a lantern from the 1849 California Gold Rush, but I am wondering if that had something to do with it.  So she was nice enough to go out and purchase for us a pair of half-dome lights that would roughly match the one in the kitchen.  They were pretty standard fare, and there was one for the guest bedroom and one for the bedroom in the basement.  Pretty nice, huh?  Well, it ended with me texting the following to Traci while she was down in Rhinelander: "You know I love your ma but she is hereby required to come over and gaze admiringly at that light for a term of no less than 1 hour."  Let's take a look at what happened.
       It should have been a pretty straightforward and simple installation.  It really should have.  Hook the bracket up to the screw holes on the electrical box.  Connect the black wires to the black wire, white to white, and bare ground wire to the green screw.  Then drop the two hangy screws through the holes in the light fixtre, tighten it up and you are good to go.  It did not go quite as planned.
      First of all, I made a bit of a fatal mistake right off the bat.  When I took the old fixture off, I saw that there were screw-style connectors covered in electrical tape that were used to install the existing fixture.  That is how mine was going to look when it was done if all went as planned.  I also noted that the electrical box was not flush with the ceiling, it was about five or six inches up into the ceiling, and it appeared that an access hole had been cut in both the present ceiling and the ceiling that was there before that one.  Uh oh.  This is where I made my fatal mistake that I was talking about.  I cut the wires leading to the wiring nuts right above them, and when I removed all the isulation and whatnot I discovered that I had an extremely short wire coming out of the box.  I could barely get to it to access it.  In hindsight I should have unscrewed the wiring nuts, but I had no way to know.  I was able to get in there enough to strip the wires but pretty soon the black one broke off in my hand - I had bended it one too many times.
      That is where things really got tough.  I couldn't access the black wire enough to do anything with it.  Even once I was able to get a little bit of copper liberated from the insulation that surrounded it, I couldn't wedge the wire I needed to connect it too AND wire nut in the space provided.  There wasn't enough wire sticking out through the electrical box to allow the wiring nut to grab.  I didn't know what to do.
       I actually had to take a break from this project several times to gather myself and to let me frustration and rage sort of settle down.  In the end what I had to do was to fashion some short connectors from the wires in the box to get the length I needed to connect the fixture.  So the end result is that there are four connections in the box then there should have only been two.  Oh well, they all fit thanks to the extra space.
      Speaking of all that extra space, I have to say that caused a little bit of a problem as well.  First off, it made it hard to access the box and get the extra wiring and space that I could have used.  Secondly, it necessitated a strang way of hooking up the whole thing.  I had to use the extra long screws that had been used for the old fixture, and this is what I did:  I screwed the screws into the appropriate holes on the electrical box, so the heads were dangling downward.  Hanging from the heads I had the mounting bracket.  This was per the instructions that came with the light.  Hanging from the mounting bracket in the same manner were two more screws, with heads pointing down.  The idea was that you slip the heads of this second set of screws through some holes in the light fixture, and then you tighten everything down and it is hunky dory.
     This system probably works well when your fixture is mounted flush with the box which is mounted flush with the ceiling.  I, however, did not have this luxury.  My mounting bracket was dangling from the heads of two screws, and when I tried to get the shorter screws through the light fixture it just wasn't working.  What was happening was that all my extra wiring was getting fouled up around the mounting bracket, pushing it upward into the void so that I couldn't get the screw heads through the fixture.  It took a lot of perseverence and a ton of luck before I finally had both screws set in the fixture, and even then it was only because God had begun to pity me a little.  Once I tightened them down it was all good and everything sat like it should have, but boy was it a process.
      I was also scared to death when I went to flip the breaker on, but nothing happened.  All the other lights and fixtures that were connected to that breaker seemed to work okay.  Then I flipped the switch and I was honestly expecting to hear a ZAP! and see the entire house go dark.  But it didn't.  It seems to be working.  Now woe is the poor guy who has to go up there and mess with it in the future (I know, it's going to be me), but for now it is working great.  It really makes a lot more light in the room.  And it even looks much better to boot.

The Porch Lights

   Back on moving day, in our many futile attempts to get the couch into the house, we managed to break one of the outdoor light fixtures - what I will refer to from now on as the porch lights - right in half.  It was wonderful.  So there it hung with the base still attached to the house and the actual light and glass hanging by the wires.  That is not good, and it is certainly not safe.  So I decided to replace it.  It was the fixture by what I will call the front door - the door that leads to the living room - and I was going to replace just that one because I really liked the fixture that was outside of my back door (the one that you come to first and which leads to the kitchen).  It was one of those old jelly-jar style lights and I really liked the look of it.  But Jim got it into my head that I needed to do both so they both looked the same because you could see them both from the driveway, so it was off to Menards to get some replacements.
    First, let me give a note on the weather.  Normally this would have been my Saturday project, but because it was supposed to be rain turning to snow and then continuing to snow for most of the day Saturday, I decided to put off the work until Sunday, since I thought today was supposed to be nice.  Well, it was "nice" if 20° and cloudy is what you consider "nice."  I don't mind weather like that, but then you are outside for hours holding metal tools in gloveless hands, then it gets awfully cold awfully quick.  But it is done.  That being said, let's get started.  Here is what I was going to be installing today, twice over:

Colonial-style...that's ritzy, I know.

So I decided to start with the back door.  Let's take a look at the scene as it stood before we got started.

The scene, including toolbox, snow, and super slippery step.

Up close.  I really liked the look of this light.  Notice the pretty bow.  And yes, I know the paint is peeling...

      I had the switch to the light and the breaker turned off, because I don't know if you knew this but I am totally afraid of working with electricity.  I began by taking off the pretty green bow, and then the lens on the light.  Normally these are held on by having a ridge on the lens, and two or three screws that screw in under the ridge to keep everything in place.  Little did I know as I loosened the first screw, but this one was only held on by one.  I was amazed that the lens did not break when it dropped about 8 feet to the freezing concrete below.  They don't make things like they used to.  Next I removed the screws that held the base on. 

The dark area behind the mounting bracket is not a hold, it is just unpainted, ancient wood.

   The instructions for mounting the new lights had talked a lot about mounting the brackets to the existing electrical box, so I sort of had to make due when I pulled my old porch light off and found that it was connected directly to the wood siding.  So I did the same with the new one, ditching the included screws and just using some wood screws I had in my toolbox.  Once I got that mounted I stripped the wires, which were really old and were not even braided.  They also seemed to be encased in cardboard instead of plastic like modern romex.  You can see the mounting bracket attached and wires stripped in the next photo.

Black and white wires are hot, and the ground will attache to the green screw, which you are supposed to attach to the house ground, but in this case there is no house ground so it will just attach to the metal bracket.  The gold screws on the edges will be for mounting the actual light to.

So far so good.  Now was the time to attach the wires, and it was pretty easy because the new light came with screw-type electrical connectors.  So I just screwed them together and put the ground around the green screw.  The problem that I had was that for some reason the black wired connected really easily, but the white wouldn't grab the wire from the light.  I had to try it three or four times before it finally held.  All I had to do once the wires were connected was to wedge the wires inside the base of the fixture (no easy feat since there was no added space in the form of an electrical box) and attach the fixture with the little gold fasteners from the photo above.  Once the light bulb went in it was time to test it.  I touched nothing but the switch and made sure to be wearing rubber soled shoes.

Ready to test.  It doesn't look bad as far as I am concerned.

It works!

All done.  A little high because the old fixture hung downward, but it looks fine to me.

      Everything worked just fine, and to be honest I was just a little surprised that was the case.  I was sort of just waiting for the "ZAP!" and nothing working anymore.  But when the breaker and switch were turned on there was light.  I put the top on the light fixture, and was all done.  Except one thing.  I need to caulk around the base of the fixture to help keep water and ice out from where the electric connections are, but you can't caulk at 20° so that part will have to wait until the temperature is a little warmer for a day.  It should be watertight for now as it is generally protected from the worst of winter winds and precipitation.
     Now, if the light doesn't look the same as it did on the box, there is a reason for that.  There is a decorative, long, slender piece that hangs down below the light that is a sort of optional add-on, which I chose not to add on.  I could, and I have kept them in case we ever want to, but for now I did the optional installation.  So that accounts for the difference in look.
     With the first light on and working, it was time to move to the light by the front door.  This was the broken one.

There are so many things things that are wrong with this picture, mostly the ugliness and brokenonsity.  Yeah, I just made that word up.

I had problems with this light immediately.  I couldn't figure out how to get the glass off so I could extract the light bulb.  So I went ahead and just started by removing the entire fixture from the wall.  This, too , was harder than expected because when it was installed it had been caulked like it was supposed to have been, so I had to scrape and remove a lot of painted caulk.  Once it came off I figured out how to remove the light bulb, and I was happy to see that there was an electrical box hidden behind where the fixture was located.  The blurry picture below was taken before I even snipped the existing wires.

This is roughly what one should see behind their fixtures.

Once I got the light removed, I snipped the wires and began to take apart some of the existing mounting hardware from the inside of the electrical box, and to clean out all the pine needles, cobwebs, etc.

Traditional black and white wires can be seen here.  The building ground in the v-hook looking thing at the bottom-left of the box.  It would be looped around one of the new bracket mounting screws.

     Once the existing stuff was all gone, I went ahead and mounted the bracket for the new light to the box using the hardware they gave me, because there was actually a box.  I don't strip the wires until the last minute if I can get away with it, because even with all the connections severed I still want as little exposed wiring as I can until the last possible minute.

The box with the new mounting hardware installed and wires stripped.

Once the wires were stripped it was as easy as attaching black to black, white to white, and the bare ground wire to the green ground screw.  I then left the light dangling from its wires so I could take a photo, because I am classy like that.

Almost looks like a professional install, doesn't it?  Just wait, it will get a lot more homespun real quick.

      Everything was going generally swimmingly up until this point.  This is where the problems began.  The biggest problem that I had was that the electrical box was mounted in such a way that the top of the box was even with the bottom of a course of siding.  This was apparently no problem with the old fixture.  It was, however, a problem for me, because my light was a little bigger around and couldn't fit in the space provided with the way the screw holes and mounting hardware were designed.  So I had to shave away some of the siding above the light to get it to fit, and I didn't have a saw.  So I was stuck with using a cold chisel.

The picture is fuzzy, but that is okay because my chisel job really looked bad.  It will be alright, however, because it will ultimately by covered by fixture and caulk and painted.

Once the wood was hollowed out, I was ready to try mounting the light again.  I actually had a lot more trouble getting it mounted with with the system and hardware that the manufacturer provided.  I had to try a bunch of different methods and hardware before I could finally get it to stay like it is supposed to stay.  I will actually feel much better once it is caulked because this installation has a bit of a gap, and plus the caulk will help hold the fixture in place.  In the meantime, however, it is still not going to go anywhere.

     So another successful home repair project for me, at least for now.  No zapping, both lights work, and the house hasn't burned down so far.  I will definitely caulk around both fixtures as soon as the weather will allow because I can envision all sorts of ice forming around electrical connections, or tons of bugs and animals going in there because it is sheltered.  But for the most part we are done and successful.  Now we can be safe and welcoming in the nighttime, and look relatively good doing it.  I think I have earned myself a cookie.

Growing Up

     When I was not too much younger than I am now - just a couple of years - I used to silently roll my eyes at my mom as she was taking hundreds of paint samples around with her and viewing them in every conceiveable light and season as she was picking out siding and trim for her new house.  And I used to give dirty glances at the couple that was standing in the lighting section at Menards or Home Depot discussing endlessly exctly which outdoor lights they are going to put on their home.
     Well, I have to admit that I was faced with that exact same situation last night at Menards, and I would like to think that I did pretty well as compared with some.  I was momentarily stunned by the giant wall of outdoor light fixtures that stood before me and I immediately thought to myself "Holy shit how I am I supposed to pick one from all these."  But I was quickly able to discard many as options because they were not the right type or they were way over the top gaudy to me.  After some quick discussion, and a question to the clerk (the pair I really liked the most were on sale but were a closeout and only available in white I was told, and I did not want white light fixtures on my brown on brown house) we walked out with ones that we were able to agree on.  Nice and easy as far as the fixtures go.  And Traci was able to settle on a paint color for the basement without having to lug around samples for a year, so I am really proud of her.
     On Saturday, I am going to attempt to install said light fixtures, as long as I have figured out which breakers are which (the box is brand new but not labeled).  I know how electricity works, and I know that I can just turn off the switch and I won't get zapped, but quite honestly I am scared to death to work on anything electrical.  When everything you touch turns to shit, you very easily envision yourself lying on the ground convulsing with a wire in your hand.  So the breakers will have to be off.  Besides, they need to be labeled anyway, right?  So look for that this weekend.  And be careful at the home improvement store: it might get you.