Category: DIY

For the Do-It_Yourself person who loves to dig in and figure out how things work, and then fix them!

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Dad Blogs DIY Family Marriage

The Things We Do for Blogs – New Paint Colors for the House

The funny thing about blogging is that once you start, everything that happens to you on a daily basis becomes fodder for a blog. Even stuff that you wouldn’t normally bore your friends with, suddenly becomes this…story that you can’t wait to share with people.

For instance:

I took off work on Friday to get some painting done around the house. CareerMom and I have been slowly covering the bare off-white walls in our house with some color, but we hadn’t come up with an overall color for the majority of the walls, until last week.

clair de luneWe picked a Behr paint color called “Clair de Lune,” which here looks really brown, but is actually in the yellow family. I’m sure it looks different on different monitors.

So everything was going well as I painted till I got to the stairwell. Thanks to high ceilings, I wasn’t able to reach about a 5 square foot section of wall that was above the stairs. I needed to get up close to the crown molding, so I couldn’t just use a roller with handle extensions, or else I’d have big swatches of yellow on the molding that I’d somehow have to figure out how to paint over. After considering my options, I concluded that there was no way around it; I was just going to have to “get up there” somehow.

I broke out my trusty ladder and put one leg on one step and then tried stacking a number of items on the next lower step so as to raise it up enough to support the other leg of the ladder. But, I could never come up with a tall enough combination of phone books and other items that offered the right mix of stabilization and height that would satisfy my fear of falling to my death, or at the very least, falling and breaking something I might need at a later date.

So, I finally gave up on the ladder idea and instead, low-teched a solution:

painting

Note that I have two paint roller extension handles screwed together and the pièce de résistance—a paint brush duct-taped to the handles.

VOILA!

Once I felt confident in leaning my full weight against the railing and settled my nerves enough to paint in a straight line, it all went like clockwork.

Now, what you may be asking yourself, and what I DID ask myself is, “Who does this? Who stops in the middle of something like painting a house, and sets up their tripod and their camera on a timer, and poses for a picture?”

Only a blogger my friends…only a blogger!

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Dad Blogs DIY Family Fatherhood Marriage

So easy, even a Caveman could do it…

caveWith CareerMom out of town again, it’s just us boys here at the house. Now, when I was single, I was a pretty neat guy. In fact, my condo was usually cleaner than most homes you find today, and I’m still pretty clean, generally speaking. However, I must say that with no estrogen-influence wafting through the house, hygiene and general cleanliness is more of an effort than it normally seems to be.

DIY has a show called, “Man Caves” and it’s basically where a homeowner carves out a spot in the house somewhere, typically a basement, for the man of the house. What the man does down in this area usually revolves around a large-screen television and a wetbar, although I suspect these are just the things publicly disclosed. Well, without CareerMom here, our whole house feels like a Man Cave.

So far, I’ve contemplated not shaving, not brushing my teeth before bed last night and I literally had to drag my butt up today and throw a load of laundry on to wash just so the boys would have some jeans to wear tomorrow should the cool weather hang around. When CareerMom is here, these things aren’t even a conscious decision; I just do them. Without her here, I have to make myself comply. It’s eerie! And this doesn’t even begin to cover how many times someone has said, “I tooted!”
I’m not sayin’ that I said that, just that someone has said it on numerous occasions. If you haven’t noticed yet, fart humor is highly prized by the “Boys under 10” crowd.

Now, in my defense, part of this has to do with the fact that when CareerMom is here, I have help–I’m not doing everything myself. So by the time I have a few minutes to myself–like now–catching up on the household chores is about the last thing on my mind.

Oh, and let me complain for just a second here: CareerMom arranged for her mom to pick up the boys from Daycare tomorrow evening to give me a bit of a break. But the catch is, I have to pick them up by 6:30.

6:30?

At the risk of sounding ungrateful…um…why bother? That’s like a whole hour later than I’d normally have them home anyway. And I’m betting there will be no free dinner involved either. Wow! What ever will I do with myself for that extra hour?

Probably the dishes.

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Dad Blogs DIY Family

The Hills are Alive…with the smell of…beneficial nematodes…

I have crap all over my yard…literally. But it’s not what you think (or maybe it is).

My dad was the original tree hugger, only without the politics or the VW van (and the weed). He grew up in the North Carolina mountains and from the time I was able to talk, he would point out trees and tell me what kind they are, and how to tell them apart. Then, of course, we had a garden growing up where I got to learn the joys of kneeling under five-feet-tall okra stalks as ants dropped onto my naked back, and how picking cucumbers and squash in a short-sleeved shirt is a HUGE mistake (it stings!).

So, I’ve always felt a kinship to the earth, but I’ve never really been a conservationist. I wanted to be, but like so many of us, it just hasn’t been convenient. Well, our new neighborhood is part of a recycling program, so I’ve become a lot more “green” than I ever was before. Even if you’re not especially green-oriented, the peer pressure of seeing stacks of recyclables next to your neighbor’s driveway is enough to motivate you to rinse and recycle.

Taking it one step further, I’m trying to go eco-friendly in my yard too. We live on a slope with a nice little creek at the bottom of the hill, so anything I put on my lawn eventually ends up in the creek. So rather than use the highly effective, yet economically disastrous nitrogen-based synthetic fertilizers in my yard, I’m using human waste.

Not my own of course, but that of the good people in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. See, the water treatment plant in Milwaukee also makes an organic fertilizer called “Milorganite” (Link complete with video goodness). This fertilizer is nothin’ but good old recycled and sterilized human waste. And it smells like it too.

The net benefit to nature is both in the runoff that won’t kill the fish, and in the fact that it actually promotes beneficial buggery in the soil, as opposed to killing off the beneficial buggery like synthetic fertilizer does.

The downside to this organic fertilizer includes the smell (ugh!), which supposedly fades in a few days, and in the fact that it takes a LOT more fertilizer per square foot, even though the price is similar.

Once again, doing the environmentally right thing, costs more money than doing the easy thing (electric cars, insulation, etc.) but it’s worth it right? Now, how to keep all the neighborhood dogs away from the yard until the smell dissipates is another thing entirely.

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Dad Blogs DIY Family Marriage

It’s My Christmas Present and I’m NOT Sharing It!

I took last Friday off to stay at home and pull old yucky wallpaper off as many rooms as I could get done in one day. I managed to remove the wallpaper in our main master bathroom common area and one of the sink/commode areas in the boys’ jack-n-jill bathroom setup. I also got a skimcoat on both to fix those massive gouges I put with my scraper and to replace any sheetrock paper that came off with the wallpaper.

An interesting note: where the steam from years and years of showering has reached the wallpaper, the wallpaper is much more resistant to removal efforts. It took me nearly as long to do the boys’ bathroom tiny area as it did to do the master bathroom area which is 5 times as large. Darn steam!

Anyway, now instead of mind-numbingly unnatractive wallpaper in our bathroom area, we have mind-numbingly stark white walls with no paint on them. And the real question is, how long is it going to take me to finish it all?
Which brings me to my blog topic for today. We’re not talking about just schlepping some paint up on the wall and calling it a day. Nossir! We’re talking about a full-scale, all-out assault on redecorating, which means:

  • new light fixtures (2)
  • new fan
  • new towel rack (beause OMG what was she thinking buying that crappy silver towel rack at Target that shows the four honking screws in the front and doesn’t match our gold fixtures? 
  • new paint for wall
  • new trim paint
    and of course…
  • new linens and such

All this adds up to mucho $$$ and even more time that I don’t generally have. And with fall coming up (any day now…hello?) I’ll want to be outside, not cooped up inside.

But what’s really bringing me down is my wife’s idea to pay for all this; “Seriously honey, this can be my Christmas present; I don’t really need anything.” And before I knew what I was saying, I responded with, “Mine too!”

Wait! What? Did I just say that out loud? What the F*? No, I don’t want my Christmas to consist of pretty red towels and hours upon hours of electrical work trying to figure out an outdated wiring code. I want clothes and…stuff!

So I’m kinda bummed about that. I mean, we did set ourselves a small gift limit to spend on each other so we will still be getting each other something, but still… What this at least does is free up money in my Christmas savings account to put directly towards the project. Hey, now we can afford the fan! Only 10 more things on the list to go!