Odd Inspiration

We finally got around to something that was on our notional to-do list for a few years - paint the front door. The black was a faded dingy not-so-black. And the dark color trapped so much heat between the storm door that opening it in even a 65 degree sunny day was a blast from a furnace.

I've taken many walks around the neighborhood to try to find inspiration but never could settle on a color. And I recently found my inspiration in the oddest place:

A cute outfit I bought my baby last weekend in the loveliest soft blue-green immediately made me think of what a beautiful color it would be for our front door. And this weekend was the perfect time to do it - warm and cool enough that we could keep the door open and dry enough that we wouldn't have to deal with humidity slowing down the time between coats. 

So armed with a pair of 3-6 month-old pants, I set off off the paint store. We usually stick to Sherwin Williams but a few blogs I read recommended Benjamin Moore, so we decided to try them instead. I purchased a quart of Aura for exteriors after the woman at the store told me that, even though I was painting a light color on black, it was guaranteed to cover in two coats with no primer. Also bucking our usual policy of buying a few sample colors, I compared a few of the paint tiles and picked a color within 5 minutes. Can you guess which?

I went for the second tile from the left on the bottom strip, Sea Mist Green. I almost chickened out and went for the more muted, grayer Covington Blue (top right) but decided against it.

Meanwhile, D was busy removing the hardware from the door:

You can see how much the black had faded from where it was covered by the door pull:

And so the painting began. Since I usually do the jobs that requires a brush and a steady hand, D watched the baby and assisted (and took photos) while I did the work. First, cut in and fill in the panels, doing my best not to create drips:

Then the inner cross beams and then the outside. Here it is after one coat - they were not kidding when they said Aura would be able to cover up the black.

Here it is all finished the next morning with the hardware back on (even though we could recoat a within a half hour - we waited until just before bed to put the hardware back on to really let the paint dry).

The only problem is that whoever painted the door black painted the inside edge of the hinge side black as well:

See it there, with a little of the new aqua where I let the brush go around the corner?

I was planning to use a little artist's paint brush there to cover the black today, but we realized it might look weird with a little strip of aqua paint visible on the inside of the house - the black mostly looks like a dark shadow. Ideally this edge would be white, but we don't have the original white paint used on the door and we learned once before that getting the "right" shade of white is important. So we're just going to leave it black for now until/if we paint the white door and all the trim.

And so ta-dah - here's our cheery door, all for only $25 of paint and a couple hours of effort:

Our New Science Oven

Thank you, American Hustle*, for giving me a new name for our fancy new microwave. When our last "science oven" broke, we wasted no time in hunting for a new one. We did continue to use it, opening and shutting the door carefully and trying to not stand too close or directly in front. But obviously that was a very short-term solution. The following weekend, we went out to a local appliance store to see what they had (the same day, actually, that we went to see American Hustle - one has to take advantage of a baby-free day out).

We discovered right away that we did not like the fancy new dial wheel interface. So the trip was worth it just to find that out. We are apparently old fogies that want a good old fashioned number pad (much easier to enter higher numbers in than spin to them, and let's face it - if I wanted to defrost something I would just set it to 5-10 minutes on medium power and not use the fancy auto settings). The problem was that the nicer microwaves had the wheel and so we were stuck with the basic ones without bells and whistles in other areas like fancy enamel interior and powerful vent fan. After consulting with the salesman, we also decided against a convention oven because we have a convection toaster oven and it just didn't seem worth the extra price. We've done just fine without convection for years.It was $200 to deliver and install, otherwise we would have to pick it up at the store when it came in. Not too bad, but we wanted to check our other options.

It was immediately evident that Home Depot had better options. I wanted to support a smaller store but they just could not compete. We ended up choosing a GE one, PVM9195DFBB, that met everything we were looking for - easy-clean enamel interior (an upgrade from our last microwave), number pad, 4 vent fan speeds (we couldn't find how many cubic feet per minute our old microwave vented, unfortunately, so we couldn't use that to compare and just looked for a slightly higher number, 400 cfm on the one we chose vs. 300 cfm on the basic-level model). It was, of course, more money than the one we would have chosen at the local place, but that was because at the local store we would have picked the one without enamel interior, smaller interior space, and less-powerful fan simply to have the number pad.

The icing on the cake - free delivery to the house OR $100 for full install. Yes please.

And so today was the big day and paying for installation was so worth it. Two professional guys who actually knew what they were doing took about 45 minutes from start to finish, so imagine how long it would have taken us. Step one, pull out the old microwave:

It was a trusty appliance that, according to the manufacture date, was installed in 2002 or 2003, so it lived a good long life. A Whirlpool something or other that seemed to have next-to-no online presence.

 Then they removed the mounts:

Unpacked the new microwave and installed the new mounts:

 And then put in the new one:

 Ta-dah! They even set the clock and tested the fan and light.

See the pretty enamel interior? It's supposed to be much easier to clean and scratch-resistant than the standard white interior. And failing that, the darker color will make it harder to see the gunk.

The fan sounds more powerful but the vent intake is smaller, so that isn't great. None of the pictures online had a picture from this angle. But hopefully the (at least seemingly) more powerful fan will compensate.

*American Hustle clip drops an f-bomb or two, just so you know.

A healthy dose of radiation?

OK blog readers, no lurking now - I need help. It seems in my unobservant, post-baby sleep-deprived state, I failed to notice that our microwave was cracking. D mentioned it a few weeks ago as if I couldn't have missed it. And of course after he pointed out a few small cracks, the situation devolved into major disrepair. We are holding on a piece with two kinds of tape...(actually there was only a crack part of the way through, held together with one piece of tape last time I looked - and tonight when I went to start heating something, I noticed that it must have broken more when D used it and now it's pretty much totally broken off...)

Because really, it's a microwave - pretty hard to live without (I did it once while studying abroad - it involved reheating everything by frying it in oil). And so we continue to use it. But is it safe? I can't imagine that plastic is all that is standing between us and the microwave radiation. But somehow I don't want to be in the kitchen when it's on.

On a related note - it looks like the measurements for over-the-stove microwaves are pretty standard and we could just go to Home Depot, Lowes, etc. and buy a new one. Any insights into the installation? Is it doable by us? Keep in mind that "us" involves a little baby now, so we might not be quite as able as we used to be (or at least that at any given point, one of us might have to go deal with baby drama). And yes, I've googled for this - but what I'm looking for is first-hand experience. Have you done it? Was it hard?

Please help!

Fourth Time's Even Charmier

Back in June after a slight mishap resulting in D shattering a CFL bulb, we decided to cover our exposed lightbulbs with cages. The $3 cages from Home Depot left a lot to be desired. Both in installation (we had to close the cages with twist ties because the fit wasn't perfect) and effectiveness (they were flexible plastic, so a forceful hit to the cage would probably still make contact with and shatter the bulb).

Thanks to a connection from my mom, we got access to a builders' supply company that offered much sturdier choices. So we upgraded to these sturdy metal cages that won't flex. Installation was a breeze and now we can ditch the twist-ties.

We've had these sitting in our basement since July and just finally put them up. We even got an extra to put around the exposed bulb in our walk-in closet. Not that I usually throw my clothes around violently enough to smash a bulb.

Agitator Dogs

The inserts of our pocket diapers haven't been getting cleaned as well recently. We assumed it was because we were being lazy and not removing the pee and poop-ridden inserts by hand. The inserts were coming out by the end of the wash cycle, but they may have been only coming out in the last spin cycle. After I started another wash cycle this morning, I found another potential reason - the agitator wasn't agitating. After some quick Googling, I found a lot of videos which explained the probable cause: agitator dog wear. Below is the agitator.

After pulling the top off, we can see a (scummy) cap. The (scummy) cap can be pulled off.

Now we can see the mechanism of the agitator. It's similar to a bicycle hub, where a ratchet-spline system is used to propel the shaft. After removing the 7/16 bolt in the center we can get at the individual parts.

After pulling out the inner section we can easily see the splines (tooth-looking things) of the agitator shell.

The agitator dogs are the yellow plastic bits on the photo below. On a bike hub, they'd be called ratchets. A local Sears appliance store had them in stock, so we didn't have to wait for an Amazon delivery. This must be a fairly popular product, since the women at the store knew what I was talking about when I asked if they had a "reservoir dog" in stock.

The new agitator dogs have three teeth on them - the older dogs have maybe one tooth left. Once I popped in the new dogs and put it all back together, the agitator was working very vigorously again. It was an easy fix and only cost about $20 in parts ($10 for an extender rod for the ratchet and the agitator dogs were another $10). I'm sure a service call would have cost a lot more money.

Why didn't I think of that?

One of those random so-called "life-hacks" on one of those stupid meme sites that makes the rounds on Facebook actually paid off this week. It was so simple that the minute I saw it, I felt silly for not thinking of it myself.

In literally minutes, we turned this:

 Into this:

(yes, the picture was taken the following morning, but only because it took me some time to load it up with supplies, not because of installation time)

The shelves in this closet don't go all the way to the door, providing plenty of clearance for putting something on the door without stopping it from closing. Maybe the architects anticipated something like this.

Standard $10 over-the-door shoe rack, trimmed to fit (they seem to all be 19'' but our door is so narrow that we cut one column off), hung with nails using a molly bolt (there wasn't enough clearance at the top to put the brackets over it and we needed a molly because the doors are hollow inside). 20 minutes or less.

We aren't putting some things in there that are particularly heavy or anything that specifically makes sense under the sink (like dishwashing detergent, stove cleaner, etc.) but all the lighter weight cleaning supplies now live here. I didn't take a "before" picture under the sink, but trust me, this is a huge improvement:

New-found Basement Space

The new freezer and resulting basement rearrangement got us thinking about other ways we can reorganize the basement. We had to move the laundry shelf over near the furnace, to make room for the chest freezer. We wondered what other areas could use some shelving.

Answer - the empty space near the utility sink, under the wood shelf unit that was attached to the wall. It's behind our cat litter boxes, but as long as we put things there we don't need regularly, it was a lot of valuable space. So we went to (of course) Ikea and found OMAR, which was a near perfect match, size-wise, to the space we had.

The idea was that we could move the paint cans there, since we were keeping paint supplies up above it anyway, and that would clear out the space where the paint was currently residing, giving D a place to put all of his bike tools, which had taken over the whole floor. Plus the plastic shelves weren't really equipped to hold so much weight and they were starting to flex a little.

So last Sunday we got to work moving things back and forth. We had company, of course:

(Yes, we finally are posting a picture of our baby).

In the end, we got all the paint moved to the back corner of the basement, and even sorted it by type on each shelf (primer, ceiling paint, colors).

The other side isn't exactly neat, but it's a big improvement - I can see the floor again!

It definitely pays to reevaluate a space every few years. We thought we had no more free space in the basement but we have managed to put in a chest freezer and new shelves just by giving up the extra expandable drying rack (that can get set up in the middle of the floor or in the finished part of the basement, if necessary).

A Post about a (Lamp)post

Back in May, we had a electrician come give us an estimate on how much it would cost to fix the severed wire that led to our lamppost. And the answer was - not cheap. His price of $380 did not even include digging up and then re-burying the wire, just the electrical work and putting the wire into a PVC pipe to reduce the chance that we would cut it again. He sweetened the deal by agreeing to throw in an electrical socket at the post, which was pretty enticing since we don't have any outdoor outlets for holiday lights. We agreed to call him in the fall, once our lawn and garden were dead - no sense in tearing up a trench during the one time of year our yard looks nice.

And we did. We tentatively scheduled him to come in early December. And so, in what I hoped would be labor-inducing work, I used a little trowel to try to find the wire. I started in the garden area, since I was almost certain that was where the cut was (the light used to work - it stopped working sometime around when we dug up all the invasive grass, though we'd seen the wire at that time and tried to be careful).

And I was right! On both accounts. I found the cut in the wire in the flower bed AND I went into labor that night. So the project was on hold for a little while (during which we hoped no one would break their ankle in the trench on the way to our door).

Then our fabulous electrician friend, P, told us we'd be crazy to pay the electrician so much for the work and offered to do it himself. We originally planned just to fix up the wire right where it was severed, but P suggested that we should still go through with the original plan to re-run wire all the way to the post and put in a socket. In fact, why not install TWO sockets - one at each end.

Friends are awesome.

And so I cancelled the electrician and one sunny day in December, P and D got to work.

Step one - buy supplies, including PVC pipe that doesn't quiet fit in the vehicle:

Step two - finish digging the trench (we'd stopped once we found the cut wire, since we thought we might just be able to fix the isolated spot). This goes a lot faster with giant shovels and lots of help - and not being over 9 months pregnant (actually, I didn't participate at all, just watched while everyone else did the hard work).

 Step three - run the new wire through the pipes:

Step four - install electrical boxes. This turned out to be more difficult than everyone expected, because our lamppost is cast iron and broke several drill bits. There was a lot of magical electrical work going on too, but that part is beyond me, so I'll skip over it. This is definitely not a true step-by-step guide here.

With fancy new electrical boxes installed onto the lamppost and the house, the wire laid enclosed within PVC pipes even at the corners thanks to the PVC elbows, and a quick test to make sure everything worked, our team even buried everything back up -

And the grass is looking so sparse this time of year that the covered trench is barely noticeable. We just have to remember to throw some seed on there before spring.

In total, $100 in parts, some beer, some hard work, and it's even better than if the electrician had done it. And a lot cheaper. And more fun, since I got to hang out with good friends.