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.

The Couch

     So, as I may have alluded to on moving day, we could not fit the couch that Traci's parents were kind enough to donate to us.  Our home, unlike many in the United States, is not blessed with a patio door.  There are two regular doors, but being an older house one is thirty inches wide, and one is thirty-one.  Modern doors are usually 36" wide for your reference.  Anyway, when Jim was around on moving day he measured that the couch was 36" wide no matter how you twisted, torqued, or rammed it.  And believe me, on moving day we did it every way that we could.  So for the last week our garage has had a really nice couch occupying a portion of it.
     I was determined that I would get the couch into the house somehow today.  I had whittled my options down to two a.) take the couch apart and b.) take apart the door.  I began the day feeling pretty good about option number one, and it was my preferred option.  I wanted this option because Friday night I was talking to Traci's brother Joe, and he was talking about how his couch had velcro on the back of the fabric that allowed the delivery guys to take it apart when they moved it into his house.  His reasoning was that couch manufacturers had to have some sort of way of getting their furniture into older houses with narrower doors, so most of them had to have some sort of contingency plan built in so that they could come apart.  That made a lot of sense to me, and I was hopeful when I walked out into the garage at around noontime.
     I began by flipping the couch down on its front, on some moving blankets because the floor was dirty, and pulling staples that held on the dust cover on the bottom.  I figured that this was the best place to start because if something were to go awry, no one would probably see it because, you know, it's on the bottom.  So I began to remove staples slowly and really didn't get anywhere because there was this problematic leg that I couldn't get off.  No matter what I tried it would not unscrew, and eventually I found out that it was because they are not screw on legs.  They sort of pry out somehow.  So I pried all four legs off - with some limited collateral damage to the legs themselves but again, they are on the bottom - and then I was in business.  I was able to open enough on the cover to see the inside.

My exploration hole, complete with some of the tools of my trade for the day.

     So once I had the corner of the couch opened up and I could get a good look inside, it became painfully obvious that there was no way to take the couch apart without a Sawzall, or maybe a lumberjack's axe.  There were no bolts or anything that one could even begin with.  So I guess it was on the Plan B. 
     So I went to the door, and to be honest I had absolutely no confidence in myself.  This is what I was facing:

This is the door what would be on the operating table on Couch Day.

I know that it seems simple enough, but you have to understand something about me.  First of all - as Mike always says - everything I touch turns to shit.  And what he means but that is not so much that I destroy everything, but I usually get whatever I am trying to get done, done, but it usually doesn't go right.  Either everything gets messed up along the way, or they just don't turn out tight.  For example, let's say that I stop to help you change the tire on your car.  I would be able to get the tire off, and the spare on, but I probably will have broken the hubcap when I was taking it off and now it won't go on.  Get it?  So that was running through my mind as I prepared to start stripping the layers of moulding off my door.  Plus, I knew that I had enough tools that I would be able to do this project, but I still knew that they weren't the right tools.  So I knew I could do it but I wasn't sure if it would turn out right.
    I began at the top layer, because I didn't know what else to do.  I began by taking off the screen door because that was on the top layer and it seemed like the easiest place to start.  I mean, it was pretty straight forward - only a couple dozen screws and it was off.  I put it on the side of the house. Then I took off the moulding that was around the door, and I was a little surprised.  It was a lot thicker and attached with a lot of pretty heavy-duty nails.  But I got it off and what I found was a little astounding.
     What I found was one of those pre-hung door sets sitting in a big hole that had been cut into the house.  There was really no framing around it, and as I poked around I discovered that the only thing that was keeping the door set - door and frame - in place was the moulding and the footboard.  I couldn't believe it.  There was no other trim to take off, so I just took the whole door out and set it aside.  Let me show you:

This is what I took out of the house.  Just a pre-fab door set with sill plate still attached.

The ragged opening from the outside.  Notice all the insulation just hanging there that was stuffed in the cracks.

Looking out from the inside at the same hole.

    So it was off, the whole door and all its assembly was just gone and there was a giant rectangular hole in the wall.  You could see all the materials that were used to make the house, which was sort of cool, and you could see a piece of what used to be because under the paneling (which is awful in its own right) is a truly awful sort of drywall or something.

Imagine having to look at that business every day of your life.

And I was just a little disturbed to see what was under the sill plate at the bottom of the door.

I am pretty sure that is not good, but I decided to just leave it be.  I mean, it's been working okay all this time so far, right?

     I whipped out my tape measure, just to be sure, and I knew we were golden.  I had measured the couch at 32" at the widest part with the legs off (not including the cushions, which could be sort of smushed down to fit) and I knew that I was only needing one inch to fit through the door.  We had like 34" when the door was all taken apart so I knew it would be golden.  And other than navigating some wet and a little ice and having to haul the couch up over the fence, it went smooth.  And the couch went into the house.  Traci and I made a deal that when it came out it would be in pieces.

Notice the couch inside the house - where it will be forever more.

    So all that was left was to put everything together again, and I am not going to bore you with a lot of pictures of that process.  But I will admit that it didn't all go super smoothly.  First of all, I started putting the moulding on the inside in the wrong order.  I should have done the sides first, but I tried to start with the top.  Once I got that squared away though I was good.  On the outside I did it wrong again.  I should have done the top first, and then the sides, so I had a lot of trouble getting the top piece to fit like it should.  I also had some trouble because all the nails on the outside had to be pounded out through the wood, which broke a lot of the wood around the nails.  There was also a little collateral damage from when I had to remove the moulding with the wrong tools. 

You can see some of the paint and wood damage in this photo.

Some of this damage occurred when I removed the moulding, some of it occurred when I had to remove the nails from the moulding, and some of it occurred during re-installation.  It is sort of a potpourri of damage here.

 In the end, however, the damage was nothing that a little wood putty and a coat of paint won't be able to conceal, and since we are planning on painting the house and trim in the spring or early summer, it is no big deal.  It looks hooker good - good from twenty yards away but a little rough up close - and for now that is good enough for me.  Here is a shot from said 20 yards afterward.

The after photo.  Looks a lot like the one above, except it is much darker so you can tell it is later in the afternoon.

     In the end I am pretty happy, because it went a lot better than I was expecting things to do, especially knowing me.  And to me the small amount of damage that occurred is acceptable and will be fixed without too much trouble at some time.  And most importantly, the couch is in the house.  And boy does it feel good to lie on.  Until next time, take care.

The Pocket Door

    I suppose that you could call this my very first home improvement project in my new house.  Replacing nails on the board that boards up the broken window on the dilapidated lean-to attached to my garage doesn't really count, but I do think this does.  While Traci worked on unpacking the last of the pictures and knick knacks (oh, and finding the mysterious lost box of kitchen items - which she did) I tasked myself with fixing two doors in the basement.  See, the basement is partially furnished, with a living room and a bathroom and an office (read bedroom that can't legally be called a bedroom).  There is a narrow hallway that connects the living room to the bedroom and on one side of that hallway there is a giant closet that was missing a door, and on the other side was the bathroom, accessed through a pocket door that had come off of its track and was stuck in a sort of half-closed position.
    Now pocket doors are a wonderful thing.  Instead of swining open like a conventional door, they slide into the wall and allow one to put a door in places where a door might not always be able to go.  So that is what I was dealing with in this situation, only it had some twists.  First of all, it was an ancient and heavy pocket door, that wasn't as well engineered as current ones generally are.  Second, it was in a very home-spun wall that didn't make a whole lot of sense.  But we will deal with that a little later.
     So I decided that I would begin with the closet door, because it was going to be the easiest I knew and I figured that I needed a little bit of a boost before I began.  So I grabbed the door and walked it over to the closet and stuck it in and it went wonderfully and perfectly.  I was a success at my first bit of the project.  That was cool.  Both doors slid past one another like butter and it was even on the right way.  Now on to the pocket door.
     I knew that the pocket door was going to be a lot, lot harder.  I messed with it a little while and looked into the situation.  There was a track that was installed WAY UP in the ceiling for the door to ride on, and there were some sketchy looking wheeled hardware that ran on it.  The problems that I immediately saw were two: 1.) I had to pull the door out of its normal line of travel in order to get the wheels back on the track, and 2.) I couldn't get my hands on either side of the door to remove it from its spot.  See, the door, when closed, was excatly the same size as the opening it was meant to cover.  So I couldn't get my giant Mickey Mouse hands around it to pull it outward from the bathroom.  Wonderful.  My gaze immediately turned towards the wall.

     It was going to have to go.  At least part of it was.  I began with the trim around the door and along the section of wall in the hallway.  I gently pried around the areas where it was nailed in and it began to give way in a couple of different ways.  Some of it came out like I wanted it to, where the nail came with the trim.  Good.  In some instances, the nails actually pulled through the trim and I had to remove them from the wall behind.  Anyway, what I found was not encouraging. 



This is the inside of our wall.  As you can see it is not a pretty sight.

   Yeah, it is. not great.  You can see the shower to the left, and the things sitting in the basement to the right.  The "bedroom" is behind the camera.  The paneling is pulled away from the wall and you can see all sorts of supports and studs inside the wall, none of which I will point out are 2x4s 16" on center.  But I digress.  That is the area in which the pocket door slides, and I had hoped to be able to pull it out there in order to get it on its track, but no suck luck.  There are too many supports, etc.  So I decided I need to deconstruct a little more.  The painted trim piece in the foreground would be the next to go.  In the next two photos you can see the offending door, now removed from its pocket, and a view of some of the trim pieces scattered around.

The offending door, now removed and put in the hallway.  Just off the top of the door is the sketchy hardware that is used to hold up the door and allow it to slide along the track.

You can see all the assorted trim pieces lying about the bathroom.  Notice too the super cool decor in the bathroom.  Lots of off-pink, if that's a color.

   Well it went, and the structural support part of the wall behind it too.  I use the term structural support loosely because it wasn't supporting anything more than the paneling and trim pieces, but it was still supporting something. So that had to come off too.  All so I could get the stupid door on the offending track that was way, WAY to high up in the wall.  Wanna see a picture?

Look at how far up into the wall this track is mounted.  How the hell was I supposed to get the door up in there.

     The good news, however, is that through perserverence and a large amount of luck I was able to get the door mounted onto the track.  I am not totally sure that it is mounted correctly, but it seemed to be the only way that it could go on, and it is traveling somewhat smoothly and is working.  So that was the good news.

The freshly remounted bathroom pocket door.



The door in a working condition.

 Now all that was left to do was to go ahead and put the trim pieces back on, oh, and replace the parts of the wall that I had to remove. 

In the process.  You can see that the trim pieces along the ceiling and the right hand side of the door have yet to be re-installed, but the trim along the floor (below the bottom of the picture) and at the end of the hallway are back.

All done.

    So what did I learn from my little project?  Let me put it in list for for you:

1.)  I am going to hate that pocket door, since I am pretty sure that it is going to fall off again sometime next week.

2.)  Always plan for twice the amount of time that you think you will need for any project.

3.)  There is a critical shortage of nails in my house.

4.)  I am going to find messed up stuff every time I do a home improvement project in this house.  I am pretty sure.

I also learned one bonus thing.  I was in the unfinished part of the basement using the concrete floor to straighten some nails (see #3 above) when I saw this:

The leg of the laundry tub.  That is the sump at left, with the ancient galvenized pipe.

That's right, one of the legs of the laundry tub in our basement is being held up by a hinge.  Bold strategy.  Luckily it is too rusted and painted to ever actually swing, plus it is mounted to the floor somehow, so I am just not going to mess with it.  You have to pick your battles sometimes, and this one just isn't worth the fight.  But the good news, however, is that things are fixed up in terms of the door.  I tested it this morning and it works just fine, you just have to be a little gentile with it.  So I term it a success.  This weekend we try again to get the couch in the house.  Now that should be a trip.

Moving Day

      So, moving day is over.  Sort of.  I apologize for the lack of pictures with this post, since I intend to make this a picture-intensive blog, but right in the middle of moving day I thought to myself "I should be taking pictures of all this but I don't know where the camera is located."  So no pictures of this one.  Moving day was pretty typical as moving days go, although I will admit that it was not the smoothest.


Our U-Haul looked just like this one and it was
pretty much full, although we had some space to
stack more things on top of other things.

       First off, it took a lot longer than I thought it would take.  Twelve hours from when we started was when I finally sat down and took a load off in a meaningful way.  Honestly, most of the reason it took so long was because we weren't as ready as we could have been, and we weren't as ready as I thought we were.  Traci did a fantastic job of getting things packed up, but I know for sure that I could have done a little more to help us be ready.  Also, as it turns out, we have a whole lot of shit.
      Second, we didn't have as much help as we needed for as long as we needed it.  I failed in my quest to find people to help us move, because many hands make light work.  But everyone seems to have been working or out of town or busy with something.  So for the first few hours I was doing what I could to get things into the truck while Traci worked inside.  That being said, I have to give HUMONGOUS thanks to Rachel and Jim who did come help with the moving.  We would still be working on it two days later if it weren't for them.  So thanks, guys, you were life savers.
       So it took forever to get packed up, and truthfully the last of our things didn't get moved out until Sunday when I went to clean the old apartment, which was the day after actual moving day.  Sometimes it just goes like that, and thankfully it wasn't a super long distance cross-country move that we had to make or we would have been in a heap of hurt.  But the moving things into the house went well until...
      Until we tried to move the couch.  We received a new-to-us couch from Traci's parents, which was very nice of them, but it is a sort of overstuffed affair and there are no patio doors on our house.  In fact, there are really just old 30" wide doors, and no matter what way we contorted or moved or flipped or wedged that couch it wasn't going in.  So for now it is living in our garage, and our options are a.) take apart the couch, b.) remove a picture window and take it through there or, c). remove door jams until it can fit through the door.  I am currently leaning towards options a or c but we will figure it all out eventually in one way or another.  That was by far the biggest snag.
     There were a few small casualties, that is for sure.  We - and by "we I mean "I" - broke a mirror that was a sort of specialized, one-of-a-kind sort of thing.  It was Traci's, and thankfully it wasn't broken too bad.  The load shifted in the back of the truck and it sort of wrecked one of the bed stands, but not so badly that we can't get it ship-shape with a little wood glue and some screws.  We lost one framed map that was not put away correctly, and we got a dent in the microwave.  Oh, and I accidentally took out an overhead extension cord at Traci's parents when we went to pick up the truck.  And one of the hoses on the dryer wasn't long enough to hook up to the water supply.  And we took out an outdoor light fixture with the couch when trying to wedge it in.  But nothing terribly tragic.  And it is done, which is the most important part.  We are almost totally unpacked too, but there will be more about that later.