Home Depot does me a solid.

Cracked sink wants to hug you.

Remember when I listened to the Internet and poured very hot water down my bathroom sink and cracked it? I called two sink refinishers in town and asked about repairing the crack and refinishing the sink. They both told me that the cracking would only continue to get worse and that repairing it "wasn't worth it."

I visited Home Depot yesterday to ask for their help in locating a replacement sink. I bought the sink as a combination; it included the vanity, the sink, and the mirror. A very nice guy called and found out that it's a Home Depot brand, which means they manufacture it. And my only option is to buy the whole kit again. The kit is $399.00.

I emailed Frank Black, the CEO of Home Depot (contact info here), and Craig Menear, their VP of Merchandising and told them how frustrated I was that I can't purchase a replacement sink. I asked for help in locating a sink, since they manufacture it and all. I got a phone call within five minutes from Greg Stanford who told me they were shipping me a new combination.

I'm still shocked that they can't hunt down a sink for me, as I don't need a new vanity or mirror, but I'm very happy with the customer service. I have always gone to Home Depot over Lowe's (which is closer to my house) because their customer service is better and their return policy is fantastic. I think their associates are totally hit-or-miss. I've had some amazing bend-over-backwards help in the lighting and electrical departments . . . and then there was Gary in equipment who suggested I use a pressure-washer on my kitchen floor. To remove thinset. And then he was a dick about it.

Man, I am still mad at Gary.

But I love you again, Home Depot. Thanks for doing me a solid, even though I'm not excited about putting together another sink.

File under: good to know

I'm preparing to leave for our trip to Europe so instead of learning how to say, "Yes, I'd love mayonnaise on that" in Dutch I've been doing stupid things like cleaning out the garage in 96 degree heat. For unknown reasons I decided to take all the random wood and building supplies we have in the garage to The Rebuilding Center. I guess I thought they'd get up to no good while we were gone? Then I vacuumed the garage because home improvement isn't fun unless vacuuming is involved. And you know what? That garage doesn't look any better. It's still cluttered and full of boxes. And I still don't know how to say "cookies" in Dutch. WHAT IF WE NEED TO FIND COOKIES IN AMSTERDAM?

Because my day hadn't been awful enough, I headed to Ikea to scope out a new desk for the office. And I figured if I had to contend with slow-moving crowds I might as well go when I'm really dirty and sweaty. Maybe people would stay out of my way then? (They didn't.) I made my way home with a Micke desk and proceeded to sweat and swear my way through assembling it. This desk almost bested me.

More like BESTÅ'd me, amiright?

Also: I forgot how bad Ikea furniture smells and how long it off-gasses. Keep this in mind because I'm going to blame what happened next on glue fumes.

I wanted to clean the house before leaving so we could relax when we get home from our trip. The bathroom sink drain has been a little bit smelly and a tiny bit slow lately. At this point I'd like to remind you of the last time I decided to meddle with a drain that was a little bit slow. I ended up with a completely backed up drain and a sink dripping Drano everywhere. Because I never learn I decided to try a trick I read about on the Internet: vinegar and boiling water down the drain. Easy peasy!

As I poured boiling water down the drain I heard a deafening CRACK! but I couldn't figure out what it was. The pipe looked fine, the sink looked fine . . . except for the hairline crack that was slowly growing across the bottom. Yup, I cracked my sink. My sink, it turns out, is made of vitreous china and vitreous china cracks under high heat.

Fuck. Me. And fuck you, Internet. You're doing me wrong lately.

On the plus side, now the drain looks like it wants to huuuuugggg you!

So now I have a caulked sink (which looks AWESOME) and the possibility of hiring a refinisher to repair this thing correctly. Or I might get to replace the sink completely.

So. Scream it from the mountaintops:

1. Don't use Drano.
2. Don't pour hot water down your drains unless you're positive your sink isn't made of vitreous china.
3. Don't dye your favorite jeans purple.
4. Choose a desk other than the Micke if you don't believe in swearing.
5. Cookies = koekjes. Don't ask me how to pronounce it, though.

Be ye not so stupid!

Money well spent

Sometimes I do things that, if a girlfriend was describing them to me, I'd be like, "Girl, what are you thinking? Don't do that," but then I do them anyway.  Hiring my coworker's husband to do some work for me was one of those things.  The bathroom fan has gotten really REALLY noisy lately and I suspected that the duct in the attic had rattled off the motor body of the fan.  I made my boy go up in the attic with me because of the SPIDERS, OH MY GOD SPIDERS.

We found this.

They actually make clamps to hold ducts together and I believe they're quite inexpensive.  But why waste $.60 when you can just duct tape everything together?  When I had the vents put in the roof my coworker's husband, who works as a licensed contractor, set up the duct for the bathroom fan. He apparently decided this was the correct way to do it.

We pulled off the failing duct tape and put new duct tape in the same place. If it's good enough for a licensed contractor, it's good enough for us. What's the worst that could happen?

Design on a Dime, eat your heart out.

Sometimes home improvement is really cheap.  To wit:

I finally got around to shimming the bathroom door.  It was really hard to get the lock to latch and you had to lean your body into the door to get it to close.  I used a cardboard box, cut to spec, as a shim:

A shoe box, to be specific.

Then I removed the door and installed the cardboard behind the hinge hardware.  Now it latches like a pro and I got to yell at myself for not taking the five minutes to do this a year ago.

The toilet was still rocking, even though Bill and I had changed the wax ring on it.  Aren't you glad I never documented that?

I bought toilet shims but they were so fricking huge that I couldn't use them.  All I needed was a single dime in the back. 

How good does that look?  I know, I should loosen the floor bolts and wedge that dime under the toilet all the way, but I can't get those stupid bolt caps off.  It's funny because that's precisely why I bought them.

But! The toilet doesn't rock.  FINALLY.

For my next trick I will update my kitchen using nine pennies!

Finishing the bathroom

I hit a couple of snags while I was finishing the bathroom, mostly because I’d never done it before.  It wasn’t anything major, but it slowed down my progress.  My bathroom vanity finally arrived one afternoon and I thought (honestly!) that I would just install it after work.  No big whoop.

I got the thing unpacked and staged in the bathroom.  It was pretty.  I somehow came to my senses and realized that I wouldn’t be able to put it together after working ten hours.  I should eat dinner, drink wine, and play with the dog instead.

I should also go back to Home Depot because I hadn’t purchased the correct plumbing materials.  Grrr.

The following Friday I put together the sink, which required installing the faucet and the drain kit.  In retrospect this would have been easier with a second person.  I had the sink cradled in my lap while I blindly tried to wrench things into place, all while keeping handles and spigot pointed in the right direction.  This is harder than it sounds.  It’s not anything that requires a professional but there is a certain finesse to doing it.

I chose a faucet one step up from the "builder’s special," which is what they charmingly call the cheapest faucet available.  I didn’t want to spend a ton of money (faucets are surprisingly expensive) but I didn’t want to cheap out, then buy another faucet in a year.  I chose brushed nickel, which seems to be really popular right now.  Do you remember how everything in the 80s was brass and how outdated it looks now?  I hope that doesn’t happen with brushed nickel.

It will probably happen with brushed nickel.

Once the faucet was installed I put a thin bead of caulk along the base and set the sink on top of it and then the weirdest thing happened: the sink was no longer flush with the base.  It rocked a little bit.  I shifted the sink around a little, and still it rocked.  I have no idea what changed but I just hoped the caulk would magically fix the problem.  And you know what?  It did.

My major problem with getting the vanity installed was a shelf installed inside.  It was just high enough that it interfered with the P trap of the drain.  I thought, “Well I’ll just remove the shelf!”  Who needs a shelf?  I removed the screws only to find that the shelf was glued in.  Really tightly.  I tried to fudge it and install the plumbing anyway, resulting in a bit of uptilt of the P trap, but this made the drain leak.  Ultimately I borrowed a jigsaw from the North Portland tool library and cut out a little spot for the pipe to hang.  It doesn’t look that great, but nobody should know but me and my roommate, right?

It took me about a week to stop checking the drain to see if it was leaking every time I used the sink.  I still check every once in a while, sure that my work will fail.  My friend Keith came over and taught me how to change out a light fixture and I hung some artwork.  

I think I like it even better than the pedestal sink I had planned.

Day 7: Painting

My very tall friend Garbear came over to help me paint.  Painting with tall people is the best.

Despite the fact that I bought a sample of this paint color and painted a large swatch, it still ended up different than I wanted. The swatch was gray with a purple undertone; it was perfect. When we actually painted the entire room I got lavender.  It's pretty but it's not exactly what I wanted.

For all my work, it still sort of looks like Easter ralphed in there.  But it's clean and fresh Easter puke.  And man, painting the ceiling is the coolest trick in the world. I will never ever paint a room without painting the ceiling as well (except for the dining room, but I was really tired!).  It makes the room look so clean, so crisp, so brand-spankin' new.

Garbear then painted my bedroom ceiling, the bedroom closet, and the insides of the built-ins.  A funny thing happened, though.  At some point during the day one of us filled his pan with flat paint.  Then at some point I filled it with semi-gloss.  Then who knows what went in there.  It was the exact same color (MetroPaint's Mountain Snow) but in a different sheen  Imagine the tiny bit of shininess you see here:

painted in great swaths across your ceiling.  It looked terrible.  Until I figured out the sheen mix-up (and I'm going to blame MetroPaint for mislabeled paint, not the beer we were drinking. BEER DOESN'T MAKE BAD THINGS HAPPEN.) I was thinking that Garbear was a spectacularly untalented painter. I assumed he was pressing harder with the roller or something, which doesn't make any sense.  I wish I could say that this was the last time I made this mistake, but after three months in the house I'm realizing that half the bathroom door is shiny . . . and the closet (which I hit with a second and third layer of what I thought was flat) has some shiny spots where I accidentally touched up with semi-gloss.  AGAIN.

Seriously, keep your semi-gloss and flat paint in different zip codes.  Or maybe ventilate better than I did?  Addled brains do not lend themselves to good decisions.

Day 3, 4, & 5: The bathroom

I'm pretty sure this wasn't original to the house. I knew I wanted to rip this vanity out, even as I was walking through the house for the first time with my realtor. Yep, I knew this house was mine even then. The question of the hour concerned the tile and whether it would continue under the vanity. My realtor and I were betting it would, but you never know.

I loved the floor tile in this bathroom. The shower tile (which was not original)? Not so much. And the color scheme they chose in here was puzzling, like Easter threw up.


I disconnected all the plumbing and turned off the water at the wall. I removed the countertop first, separating it from the wall where I discovered they had used 1/4" of glue. I don't do this for a living, but this seemed like an excessive amount of adhesive. I curse whoever made this decision.


I couldn't see where they had screwed the vanity to the wall, so I just pulled for all I was worth. Many things I do, not with brains or brawn, but rather out of stubbornness. It turns out that vanity was indeed screwed to the wall, but I just pulled that mothereffer right out of the wall. My back realllly hurt that night. But I had won! Take that, ugly vanity!

The technical term for this is "icky."

My spidey sense had told me I needed to pull this vanity out, and I'm glad I listened. There was mold, lots of dirt, hair, and dust. It was a respiratory nightmare, so guess what I did? I PUT ON A MASK. Go me.


Some bleach and elbow grease later, and I had all the grime taken care of. The thick layer of adhesive? I spent four hours chipping that stuff off. I gouged the hell out of the wall, too.

My friend Maura told me, after the fact, that there's some sort of product you can get at the hardware store that will melt this stuff off. But where's the fun in that? It's not like I had anything else to do in the house. Ahem.


It's sort of fun to see the old layers, the paint choices made by people 50 years ago. People back then were COLORBLIND.


I bought a Kohler pedestal sink on craigslist for $40 and was so excited to install it. Once I started digging around on the Internet I found out they call it "the graduate school project of DIY." It turns out you need to open the wall and install a crossbeam into which you can bolt the top part of the sink. It's tricky and there's a chance that you can crack the sink if you have something a few millimeters off. I firmly believe I could do this, given some help and lots of time, but I didn't have a lot of time, and I had many other projects to do. So I decided to let the pedestal sink go and install a new vanity. Of course, the one I wanted wasn't in stock so I had to order it. I was still awaiting delivery when I moved into the house, which meant I got to brush my teeth in the kitchen sink for two weeks.

I spackled all the gouges and holes in the walls and primed the bathroom with a gallon of Kilz. Then I scrubbed the hell out of the bathtub and toilet. Future plans included painting the bathroom, recaulking the tub, and replacing the wax ring on the toilet. I'm ambitious. Or dumb. One of the two.