Category: Around the House

Sometimes working from home allows a person to get other, miscellaneous tasks done while taking 5 from work.
For instance, doing laundry – it doesn’t take long to throw in a load or move it to the dryer. While that sounds great, sometimes I can get distracted.
For instance, when it smells like lint in my basement.

Well naturally, I thought, “Hmm… ‘dryer duct’. Maybe I should use duct tape!
So my 5 minute break turned into a 15 minute break. Not a big deal.
Two or three loads after I tape it, I go to my basement and think, “I’m inhaling lint again – time to tape.” After typical guy solutions (which usually involve duct tape, wood glue, 3M Command Strips, or a combination thereof) don’t work, five or ten times, and I don’t have a good real (permanent) solution, I do what every young man does when he wants to figure out how to do something right.
After calling my dad, he told me of a product called a vent clip:

This was a relief, since I was ready to drill holes and bolt on the duct.
Put the clip on the duct and tighten around the dryer – seems easy enough.
As I was holding the duct in place with my shaky left hand, tightening the clip with a screw driver held at an awkward angle by my right hand, precariously balancing myself forward so I could get to everything, and balancing the phone I was using as a flashlight on my foot so I could see, I thought to myself:

I am not mechanically disabled; I think I am misabled

.

Well, this is “handy-ish”, but it’s more along the “crafty” sort of thing.

I had several sewing repaid kits scattered throughout my travel bags, nightstand, ironing board-type area, etc. I decided to buy a sewing box.
In the store, much to my dismay, all the sewing boxes were, well, not manly:

So I improvised:

Next came the whole reason for my domestic distraction:

I had no idea what to do. I just did what I always do: make it up!

Let’s see. I’ll just do a simple stitch:

And Voila!

Next story is how I cleaned my chimney….

Just kidding – I called someone for that 🙂

 

My kitchen faucet stopped working at some point in the middle of tax season. I was doing dishes by using only the sprayer, since my dishwasher hooks up to the faucet, and while I typically do them by hand, it’s tricky when you have no constant running water.

I was too busy to do dishes anyways.  The short term solution was to use paper dishes and silverware (something I’ve never done, even if I have guests on my patio, everything is washable).

So I changed my faucet.

Then I figured, “hey, while everything is cleaned out of the under-stink cupboard, I should clean the cupboard floor because it looks awful.”

When I scrubbed and scrubbed, I got no response.  Technique one is try to clean a mess.  Technique two?  Cover it up!

So I tape off the edges, when I noticed there was a big gap on the left side.

So I bought latex caulk to fill in the gap and white enable paint to paint the rest.  While I usually use my local hardware store (I bought what I could there, of course), when they didn’t have a small sized white enamel paint, I went to Menard’s (it’s ok because I saved BIG MONEY).

I ended up doing two rounds of caulking and three coats of paint.  It doesn’t look perfect, but 1) it’s a big improvement, and 2) it’s just the cupboard under the sink – no one will ever see it because it will be full of boxes of assorted garbage bags, a fire extinguisher, a bag full of nice-ish reusable bags (like Target, not cheap-felling ones like Cub), and wonderful chemicals.

That’s my adventure of manual work for the moment.