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.

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.

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.