Average Jane

Category: Home Improvement

  • Average Jane’s Old-Ass House

    Last year, I got a phone call from my next-door neighbor whose yard is sufficiently uphill from mine that she can see parts of my roof that aren't visible from my own yard. She had noticed that a big section of shingles on my garage roof had blown loose, probably during the high winds we'd had earlier in the week.

    You might think that would warrant some financial assistance from our homeowners' insurance policy, especially on a nearly 20-year-old roof, but you'd think wrong. They only offered to pay for some minor repairs that, quelle surprise, would cost less than our deductible.

    By the time this all ground through the system, numerous people had tromped all over the roof circling hail damage with chalk and generally agreeing that it was not in great shape overall.

    So, I decided it was as good a time as any for a new roof.

    However…

    I'm sure you're familiar with the concept of deferred maintenance. My house had become its poster child. And one of the biggest problems that needed to be solved before any other work could proceed was the removal of a truly monstrous amount of overgrown ivy that had crept from the side of the garage around to the front and up onto the roof. No work could proceed on the roof before we had it all taken down.

    I have a long history of thinking, "I need to do something about that" in regard to home and garden issues and I reliably let them get so bad that I eventually have no choice but to act. I already knew that the ivy had physically yanked the gutter off the side of the garage and was damaging the siding.

    My regular shrubbery guy wouldn't take the ivy removal job because he encountered one of the rat snakes that lived in the ivy while I was explaining what we needed, so I found someone else to take on the challenge. They stripped it all off the building and I cut the ivy stumps below ground with my Sawzall and poisoned them.

    Of course, once the ivy was gone, the house needed to be painted to repair the damage and of course we needed a new gutter to replace the one that came down along with the ivy. I briefly considered siding, but the cost was absurdly high and I also hate the way it looks, so nevermind.

    But before we could paint, there was another problem to be addressed. One of the garage walls had obvious water damage (and, it turned out, termite damage) that had caused it to bow outward. The door that people use to go in and out hadn't closed properly in years. If we were going to repaint, it made sense to get it rebuilt with cinderblock footings so it could withstand heavy rains without further damage.

    Finally, we ended up with:

    • A new roof
    • A rebuilt garage wall (which cost little enough that I was mad I hadn't done it sooner)
    • New guttering on the side of the garage
    • A gorgeous dark grey paint job with white trim 

    and while I was at it, I went ahead and got:

    • New garage doors.

    It all cost eleventy-bazillion dollars, half of which I borrowed. But the house looks amazing. No regrets there.

    Except that stuff inside the house keeps going bad now. Specifically plumbing.

    Since last summer we have replaced a toilet, had a sump pump installed in the basement at tremendous expense, and now the drains under our kitchen sink all need to be redone. I had the plumber out to look at it on Monday, hoping that the repair cost would be in the realm of what I could scrounge up a week before payday. But no, it was about twice that. So I literally have to wait until next Monday to get it repaired.

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    In the meantime, my sink is out of commission and I've gotten out the drain plugs and caution tape to remind myself and the spouse not to pour anything in there.

    Considering that we've lived here for 29 years, I guess it shouldn't be a surprise that there are a lot of things that need to be repaired. Heck, we also have caution tape on one of the two sink faucets in the main bathroom because it broke and I'll obviously want to replace both faucets at once…whenever we get to it.

    I know this is all just one of the frustrations of home ownership. And I guess it's outweighed by having a house that gets more and more to my liking with every passing year. (She said, averting her eyes from the living room ceiling that needs to be redone, the damaged plaster on the hallway wall, and the hardwood floors that could stand to be refinished.)

    But did I mention that the house looks great from the outside now?

  • Average Jane Starts Getting Unstuck

    Feel free to skip over this post if you're sick of hearing about my home organization project, but I can't stop writing about it because it's having such a profound effect on my quality of life.

    I am fundamentally a nester. Not that I'm a big horoscope person, but I've had people look at mine and tell me it's a wonder I ever leave the house. 

    This is my "starter house" and at some point this summer I'll have lived here for 25 years. I have no intention of ever leaving. In fact, if I were to suddenly get rich, my dream would be to bulldoze this house and build a nicer, more energy-efficient one in its place. 

    Two-and-a-half decades is a long time to live in one place. My husband and I have been pretty good about keeping the super-noticeable clutter at bay and we have a habit of renting a dumpster every five years or so to make sure. However, it gets easier and easier to look past the massive amounts of smaller stuff you're keeping for absolutely no reason once you've spent that long with it.

    This weekend, I crossed one of my extra projects off the list. I'd decided it would be nice to get an enclosed cupboard with a hutch to replace the open bakers' rack we've been using as a microwave and cookbook stand all this time. Nothing screams, "I decorated this room in the 1990s" like a bakers' rack.

    Fullsizeoutput_1385I found the perfect cupboard on Facebook Marketplace. It was a great color and it had already been marked down a few times by the sellers, who were clearing out their house in preparation to move out of state. I made the deal, measured the cargo space in my car and drove the 20 miles to pick it up.

    It didn't fit. If magic were real, you could have put them where they needed to go, but it was impossible to fit the second piece through the hatch opening once the first piece was in. Fortunately, we managed to load the cabinet part and there was nothing to be done but bring it home and arrange to get the hutch the next day.

    I did that and I love the whole thing enough that it was worth the 80+ miles and hours of driving it took to finally get it all home.

    Yesterday I cleared off the old rack. You guys, there was SO MUCH STUFF on there! Dozens and dozens of cookbooks, some dating back to when I was growing up. A bear-shaped cookie jar, sans head/lid for as long as I can remember, filled with cat grooming accessories and an impressive amount of catnip. Two sediment-filled bottles of plum wine that a friend made. My gigantic stack of recipe printouts that still need to be organized into a binder. The clay jar I use to store onions. I'm sure there was more I'm forgetting. It's truly a testament to how sturdy the rack is. I don't remember where it came from, but it's a quality item.

    I got my husband to help me set up my new cupboard. The previous owners had simply set the hutch on top of the lower cabinet and called it a day, but in this house full of rambunctious animals, I felt driven to buy a pair of T-brackets to make sure the top couldn't be tipped over. I also needed to cut a hole in the back of the hutch so I could run the microwave cord behind it. That was far more of a hassle than I expected because it's very solid piece of furniture that's made of actual wood, so it required some effort.

    Oh, and I dropped and broke one of the glass panes for the upper cabinet doors while I was trying to put it in. Getting a new one is now on my to-do list for sometime in the next few weeks.

    Even with the hassles, it's been unexpectedly lovely to finally have a place for certain items like my teapots that really hadn't had their own spot up to now. Lots of the items in the upper cabinet had once been just sort of hanging out on a counter or windowsill and now they're actually on display.

    I am so glad I started this home improvement project. Just imagine what I can do next year after all of these tasks are out of the way!

  • Average Jane’s Home Organizing Project

    If you're following the saga of my self-assigned year of organizing, I can report that it is going exceedingly well. I'm trying not to over-report about it here, but there are some developments over the past couple of weeks that are changing some of my mindsets in ways I hadn't anticipated initially.

    Deliberate Donations

    I knew that this project would involve throwing away, giving away and donating a lot of items from my house, but the purge volume is turning out to be much higher than I thought it would be. At first, I was just taking everything with residual value and dumping it at the thrift store, but when I got to my linen closet, I started thinking about better ways to get the items directly to people who can use them most.

    We have a charity in town called Sleepyhead Beds that focuses on providing beds and bedding to families and children. Once I pulled everything out of my linen closet and drawers, I remembered that I also had significant amounts of bedding stuffed into big plastic tubs in my basement. I'd already bagged everything up willy-nilly, but I realized it made more sense for me to unpack the bags, match up the pillow cases with the sheets, and re-bag the items that Sleepyhead Beds will take. I'll have my husband drop it all off during their business hours some weekday soon.

    I also ran across some towels I no longer use, so those will go to a nearby animal shelter, along with all of the cardboard trays that my brand of cat litter comes in. I have been letting them pile up in the basement out of sheer laziness, but it's a simple thing to remove the plastic to recycle along with my plastic grocery sacks and stack the cardboard trays for donation.

    Permanent Upgrades

    Cookie-sheetCleaning out the cupboard where I store my baking pans opened my eyes to the potential for getting rid of a large number of low quality cookie sheets and baking pans. I'm replacing them with two high-quality half-sheet pans that will probably serve me well indefinitely. One of my old cookie sheets is so warped that I once used it to bake a butter-heavy type of cookie, only to have the entire panful slide to one side and form a giant cookie Pangaea. 

    I don't think that will be happening again.

    Making Life Easier

    This whole project is ultimately serving to cut down on the nagging pull in the back of my mind of work I know needs to be done. A welcome side-effect is that every completed project makes some aspect of my home life more convenient. Call it feng shui or just good organization, but the upshot is that when I need to find something in one of the places I've already worked on, it's exactly where it should be.

    And One New Rule

    I'd already decided that if I did an assignment early, I could just skip that week when I got to it. Well, this was the week when I had to decide what to do if I didn't complete my weekly project. Between a lack of motivation on Saturday and a lot of other things to do on Sunday, it was clear that my task for this weekend wasn't going to get done. So I made a new rule that in these instances, I would swap the missed work project on the spreadsheet with the first one that had been completed early. That way, I get to move on to whatever was next and get to the skipped project later on.

    Why not just do it next week? I could have gone that route, but I suspected that my failure to complete an assignment might attach some psychological baggage. Moving it down the list to a logical but relatively random date helps ensure that I'll approach it with a fresher outlook. Plus, it maintains the spirit of my earlier rule by still giving me a week off – just not the week I originally would have gotten.

  • Average Jane Makes Progress

    In my last post, I laid out my plan to start tidying one part of my house every week. This is Week 3 (because I started the last week of December) and so far it's going swimmingly. 

    I was looking forward to this week because the project was to clean out the closet in my bedroom that I use as overflow storage for my kitchen. It holds cleaning supplies, serving ware, small appliances, kitchen tools, special occasion cookware, baking pans, and some odds and ends like canning jars, spray paint and a furniture dolly. 

    Here's what it looked like to start with:

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    I mean, it's not HORRIBLE, but it's definitely jumbled and disorganized. 

    I took everything out and either laid it on my bed, put it on a card table I brought in for the occasion, or set it on the floor outside the closet. I had an empty box ready for useful things that I'll take to a swap with my friends. The next one is coming up in about 10 days and anything that doesn't get claimed will get donated.

    I started another box of items to donate to Habitat ReStore – mainly cleaning products that are full or nearly full. I had a lot of carpet cleaners, for example, despite the fact that my home has almost no carpeting.

    A few things needed to be thrown away, including the two cartons of oat milk you see on the bottom, left-hand shelf that expired two years ago. I got out a trash bag for those.

    Finally, I discovered a very full box of dead compact fluorescent bulbs that I will take to Lowe's for disposal.

    The end result:

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    Voila! Much tidier. I even left room for some storage containers that are currently in use.

    I think I'm going to get some baskets to attach to the inside of the right-hand door that I can use for some of the things that are still kind of hanging out in there without a defined spot. That would be good for stuff like the ShopVac attachments you see on the floor to the right and the pile of cleaning rags that are stacked on top of other cleaning supplies on the shelf. 

    Even without the baskets, it's still in a much better place and it will definitely be easier to find things and put them back after I use them.

    One of the best things about this whole project is that most of the tasks are relatively quick and easy. Even today's project took less than 90 minutes.

    Now that I have it out of the way, it's time for me to make some pizza dough and bake cookies. 

    Hope you also had a productive weekend. And if it wasn't productive, I hope it was relaxing and fun!

  • Average Jane Makes A Plan

    StarIt's a little early for new year's resolutions, but I got an idea earlier this week and decided to run with it.

    I was thinking about all of the things around the house that need to be done but get skipped over because procrastination is a way of life. Some are large and some are small, but there are a LOT of them in my house (and probably in yours as well).

    So how do you ensure that you'll get to them? My mind went straight to spreadsheet.

    What if I made a list of every area of the house that needed tidying, put them on a spreadsheet and associated each one with a weekend next year? Breaking the work down into bite-sized chunks with two days every week set aside to get them done seemed more than reasonable, especially for smaller jobs.

    I opened Excel and pasted in the dates for every Saturday in 2020, marking off the weekends when I would be out of town or busy with a holiday. Then I started thinking of every drawer, cupboard, cabinet, closet and shelving unit in the house that needed to be reorganized. I put in a column for the room the problem area was in, another for the specific location that needed to be addressed (e.g. "upper drawer to the left of the sink"), and a notes column for more complicated projects.

    As I began adding projects, I developed some rules. One was that if I got something done early, I could either take off the weekend I had assigned to that task or use it to do something else early. As I was making the list, I kept thinking, "I should do this or that sooner!" Which sounds great, but without the list and the assigned date for accountability, history tells me I wouldn't get to those things ever.

    There's a pretty wide spectrum of difficulty and effort associated with the 47 weeks of projects I eventually listed. They range from cleaning out a single drawer to renting a roll-off container and cleaning out the garage. There are only 3-4 large projects on the list that will probably take an entire day or weekend. I tried to limit the scope of the assignment to tidying, rearranging and cleaning, but in one instance there will be a little light reconstruction under one sink.

    Only one thing made it on the list twice and that's organizing the closet in my bedroom, which is arranged as an overflow pantry. It gets out of control pretty quickly, so I thought I should tackle it once in the spring and once in the late fall.

    Now that I have the list set, I'm considering adding another section for additional projects outside of the original scope. For example, I have a couple of rooms I'd like to re-paint this year and I need to cut down some trees in my yard. Some general to-dos like taking the mower in for maintenance would be good to add as well.

    To kick the whole thing off, I gave myself two relatively small assignments this coming weekend. One involves cleaning out and throwing away an old side table so I can be ready to rearrange my bedroom furniture when the headboard I got for Christmas arrives next week. 

    I'm pretty pumped up about this whole idea. Next on the agenda is to print out the spreadsheet and hang it someplace where I'll see it every day. Heck, maybe I'll even get gold stars to mark the completed items.

    Have you ever tried something like this? Leave a comment and let me know!

    Photo by Jessica Fiess-Hill, cropped, used under CC by 2.o

  • Average Jane Decorates Her Porch

    There was cinnamon-infused grapevine wreath on my back kitchen door until earlier this week when its hook gave way. The cinnamon smell had dissipated a long time ago, so no big deal. I put it outside for a bit while I was trying to decide what to do with it, and today it occurred to me that I could hang it on the nail above my porch.

    A whim like that doesn't drive a person to do something as logical as take out a ladder. No, I figured it would be relatively easy to throw it up onto the nail, ring-toss style.

    Throw. CRASH!

    Throw. THUNK!

    Throw. SMASH!

    Throw. Catch! But my hand is bleeding now.

    Throw. BOUNCE. CRASH. Hey, it has a boxwood branch stuck in it now.

    Throw. Slide. Bonk.

    Repeat, repeat, repeat – way more times than I'd like to admit.

    Then throw: Success!

    I may not have my dignity, but I have a wreath over my porch, dammit.

    Porch-wreath

  • Average Jane Has Her Work Cut Out for Her

    My husband has been running his recording studio for quite a few years now and his persistence has finally started to pay off. He's had a busy year and he's starting to look around the studio and figure out how to optimize it for more steady business.

    More drums than any man needs.One of his hobbies is trading music gear. That makes sense in this economy because no one is really buying much musical equipment. Trades allow musicians to get new (to them) gear to play with without any exchange of cash. However, he's done a few too many trades of small things (snare drums, guitars) for large things (drum sets). So now the studio is almost literally wall to wall drum kits. They're stacked up, but they still take up a ton of room and they need to be moved somewhere else.

    This morning, my husband announced that he was going to get a storage unit for his drums. Now I've seen enough episodes of Storage Wars to have a strong negative opinion of the idea of taking a bunch of your valuable stuff and leaving it in someone else's possession. Not only does the expense add up, but the risk and sheer hassle factor are high.

    Seriously, if you're going to spend $840 a year to store drum kits, you might as well just give one away every year until they're gone.

    I countered that he should store his excess gear in our basement instead. That's where all my music gear resides. It's secure behind two sets of locked doors, a consistent temperature year 'round, and we have a dehumidifier running 24/7.

    The only problem is that the shelves are currently occupied with a bunch of my dad's old business records and outdated printed materials. The majority of it can be discarded now, but it will need to be shredded, preferably on-site or in some other secure fashion.

    I'm sure you can see where this is going. We've netted out with me agreeing to get the shelves cleared off within the next month or so. 

    I really do think that the basement is the best option for this. It may need a little visit from the exterminator first, just to keep the spider levels to a minimum, but otherwise it's perfect. Or it will be.

  • Average Jane Does Something Resourceful

    LightThere's a fluorescent light fixture on our kitchen ceiling that started to be rather unreliable about producing light last year. I had the switch replaced (more because it had a tendency to shock me than because I thought it wasn't working), but the decline continued and eventually the light stopped turning on at all. It was safe to say this meant that the bulb had burned out.

    The problem was that I couldn't figure out how to get into the thing to access the bulb. I had an extra bulb on hand, but it didn't do me any good if I couldn't get it in there. No amount of standing on a stepladder fiddling around with the light fixture was doing any good, so I had to temporarily give up.

    It seemed ridiculous to call an electrician out just to change a light bulb, so it occurred to me that I might be able to track down some information online about the light fixture and how to open it. 

    I starting searching my Gmail account and quickly found the receipt for the two light bulbs I'd bought to go with the fixture. That nailed down the purchase date as late November of 2006. The email receipt for the fixture itself did not include the search keywords, though, so I had no choice but to look through all of the emails from that month until I figured out where I'd made my purchase.

    It turned out to be Home Depot. The receipt did not link to the online product page, but the store name at least pointed me in the right direction. I searched their site for indoor fluorescent light fixtures and found out that the one I had was made by Hampton Bay. Narrowing the search, I found my fixture and, lo and behold, within the product description was a link to download a PDF of the installation instructions.

    This morning I applied what I'd learned, got the fixture cover off, replaced the round fluorescent bulb and (kinda, mostly, almost) put the cover back on. So I might have to go back and make it more snug later, but it stayed up and I didn't need to be making that much screeching metal noise with my husband asleep in the next room.

    Then I put away the stepladder, flicked the switch and…LIGHT!

    So now I know that the five-year life promised by the bulb packaging is fairly accurate. I also know that it's not such a big deal to replace the bulbs after all. Sometime soon I will know exactly how to slide the cover back on so that all the clips hold, not just some of them. Baby steps.

  • Average Jane Gains A Room

    Guess where I slept last night? If you guessed "in my bedroom," you're right! Yesterday I finally got the painting finished and moved the furniture back in. All that's left is to get some shades, which I might just go ahead and do tonight once our three trick-or-treaters have come and gone.

    Here's what it looked like around midnight last night. Forgive the horrible photography:

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    I woke up early both days this weekend to start painting. On Saturday I did the second coat on the walls and the first coat on the trim. On Sunday I finished the trim and it became quite obvious that I didn't have enough paint left for the closet doors. As long as I needed to buy paint anyway, I decided to go with an accent color:

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    Orange makes me happy. That's probably why we now have three rooms in our house decorated in various shades of orange.

    It also gave me the opportunity to switch from eggshell to semi-gloss for the doors, which will help them withstand wear-and-tear a little better.

    While I was on my way to the hardware store for paint, I got a text that one of the volunteers from my animal rescue group was dealing with kittens that someone had dumped at one of the stores where we display our adoptable cats. They'd been left outside the store in a lidless crate with a note, so the store employees rounded up the two kittens they could find (we have no way of knowing how many there were to begin with) and gave them food, water, a litterbox and a blanket for snuggling.

    I called A Librarian to see if she'd be willing to foster them at least temporarily and she agreed, but was on her way to work. I went and picked up the kittens (friendly little orange tabbies, probably 5-6 weeks old), installed them in a cat condo in my friend's garage, and went home to get back to work.

    Part of my afternoon was taken up with a fundraising event at Veronica's Voice with my Soroptimist Club, but I changed back into my painting clothes as soon as I got back and did my two coats of orange paint on the closet doors and the panels of the inside of the room door.

    Oh, and I spilled some of the orange paint at an inopportune moment that allowed Xena to track through it and get it everywhere. So now there's an orange cat footprint on my pillowcase for all eternity. Thanks, Xena.

    The one thing that isn't finished is the inside of the closet. I did a stunningly poor job of patching the hole in my closet wall and caulking the huge crack along one corner seam. (Big thanks to @WordofChris for giving me drywall screws for the project.)

    I'm going to paint the interior of the closet white, in part because it doesn't have a light. I predict that my husband will be able to move his stuff back in no later than next weekend.

    It was a long, two-month process but it was SO worth it! We love the way the bedroom looks and I cannot wait to start entertaining again now that I have a living room.

    Man, I'm tired.

  • Average Jane Almost Has Her Bedroom Back

    DjWe've been sleeping in our living room since early September and it looks like we'll finally be moved back into the bedroom next week.

    The ceiling and floor have been finished for a while, but we were waiting for two replacement windows to be manufactured and delivered. In my town, you have to have a building permit to put in replacement windows, so I've made two trips to City Hall and paid $33 for that privilege. With that out of the way, we're on the installer's schedule for next Monday afternoon. Woohoo!

    Now I just need to smooth the plaster repairs and patch the big hole in our closet wall where some random plumber once accessed pipes that no longer even exist in that location. After that I'll caulk around all of the window and door frames, paint the walls, paint the trim, door and closet doors, and then we'll be set to move back in as soon as the windows are in place.

    Well, almost set. First I have to stick felt pads to the bottoms of all of the bedroom furniture. The floor was in such bad shape before that I'd never bothered. THEN I can move the furniture back.

    One detail that's been overlooked is blinds for the room. I keep telling our blinds guy (yes, we have a blinds guy. Don't you?) that I need to have him come over so I can place an order, but that hasn't happened yet. I'm guessing we'll be hanging blankets over our windows like college students for a little while.

    I cannot tell you how nice it will be to get our bed out of the living room. First of all, it's incredibly awkward when someone comes over. Beyond that, it works out very poorly with my husband's and my opposite sleep schedules, especially since the open kitchen doorway is only about ten feet away from the foot of the bed. He makes a sandwich at 2:00 a.m. and I wake up. I use the blender for my breakfast shake at 7:30 a.m. and it keeps him up. Any time the awake person does anything at all in the main part of the house, the dog gets up to see what's happening.

    This is the last home improvement project we'll be doing for a while. It really wasn't in our budget at all, but circumstances aligned to get it started and we just kind of ran with it. I certainly don't regret it at all. For years our bedroom has been so unsightly that we've kept the lights off and closed the door anytime we had company. It will be refreshing to have a room that doesn't have to be hidden from passers-by.

    I'm not going to mind spending the weekend painting. It's my favorite home project to do (except for the taping, which I'm sure everyone hates) and I am really looking forward to completing the room's transformation. I'll post pictures when we're moved back in. I can't wait!