Hear Me Roar

I’m a girl who likes a good project.  I’m more than happy to paint, garden, even run the table saw from time to time.  But this being here without Russ is putting me in the situation where I have to step up and handle things that I normally would have passed off to him.  I’ve paid a handyman to take care of  some things—things that are truly outside of my skill-set or require a long ladder on a high roof.  Others I’ve done on my own and I’m proud of it. 

Item #1—the dvd cabinet.

Our dvd cabinet isn’t fine furniture, but it is functional and we already own it.  (It will also need to be painted now that someone put a sticker on the front of it…but that’s a different conversation.)  As we were moving things around in the early packing stage we realized that the screws on one side of the bottom support had ripped out.  Russ helped me turn it upside down but he just never got around to fixing it before he left.  I’d like you to know that I glued it up and attached the new braces (the silver ones), and all without going outside to get the drill.  (I’m trying to make that sound more like noble and less like lazy!)

Item #2—the toilet.

Russ hadn’t been airborne for longer than 20 seconds when the toilet started making a dripping noise.  Drip, drip, drip.  Morning, noon, and night.  It was making me crazy, and I didn’t figure that it would make a great impression on a potential buyer.  My handy neighbor tried bending a piece but that only helped for a few hours, then the drip was back. So I fixed it.  Myself!  I replaced the guts of the toilet.  I’m still kind of impressed.  This was more than a step above brackets and screws.  And not a drip since.  (This is the new toilet guts.)

#3—window molding.

Our house had shutters when we moved in.  Every window in the front of the house and all of the kitchen windows too.  For the most part we took them down fairly soon—they were all very off-white and I wanted to paint the trim white, and I knew (accurately) that they wouldn’t survive our house full of kids.  Here’s a picture of Alisyn & Rachel with  shutters in the background.

We had taken the shutters out a long time ago, but there were still some pieces of the shutter assembly left in the windows.  I made sure that Russ took them all out before he left because I knew I was going to be painting the windows.

One day the handyman pulled me aside.  Did I know, he asked, that my windows were all missing the stop molding?

Since I had no clue what stop molding was, it was easy for me to express complete and total ignorance.

It turns out that on the inside of a house, windows are held in place by what is called stop molding.  Except that some of our windows didn’t have any stop molding—the exact windows that had had the shutters.  I realized that the shutters had served 2 functions—they covered the windows, but they were also holding the windows in place in the frames.  Sure enough, I could see that it would have been pretty easy to pull the windows right out of place.  When I was painting the windows I had been surprised at how raw and unfinished this part of the window was.  I didn’t have time to sand it down nicely, so I just painted it white.  But now I knew—there was supposed to be some molding there.

I asked the handyman about fixing it.  Because I am already sensitive to the fact that we have old windows, and it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that they would look better with this molding on them.  He told me he could do the front 4 windows for $100.

Well.

Well.

Well.

Over the next few days I thought about it and thought about it.  I figured that if I could make a picture frame, I could surely cut some molding to fit into these window frames.  I tracked down the right kind of molding –thankfully the guy at Home Depot sent me over to the local lumber yard, an amazing place.  And I bought enough stop molding to fix ALL 14 of the molding-less windows for less than $100.

They’re not all done yet.  It took me a while to figure out exactly which way to cut the miters.  But I have the windows in the front of the house done, and I’m working on the rest.  Me and my chop saw and my air compressor and my brad gun.  (Sorry, Russ, they can be yours when you and they share a residence again.  Until then, I’ve got custody.)  Lots more fun than mopping the floor.

#4—toe kick molding

While I was at the lumber yard getting my stop molding, I was waiting and looking at their molding display.  I saw the little quarter round stuff and right next to it something called “toe molding” and it brought another thought to the forefront of my mind.  A couple of years ago when we had carpet installed we had new vinyl put in the laundry room.  I’d noticed the day I was cleaning it out before it was painted just how bad the vinyl looked around the edges—it had nothing holding it down but glue, I guess, and around the edges it had all curled up.

Sure, it wasn’t something that would probably catch someone’s first glance.  But if it caught their 2nd, it would look pretty bad.  So I decided right then and there that it couldn’t be too hard to put in some toe molding to hold those vinyl edges down, and I ordered 4 8’ pieces.  (A total guess which turned out to be remarkably close, with only a few feet left over.)

If anyone had been watching me cut the molding in the garage they would have laughed.  I had a little diagram of the room with measurements on it, and as I prepared to cut each piece I would hold my arm in the direction the cut needed to go, then move the chop saw blade to that angle.  It was very effective—I think that out of all the cuts (and it’s a room with a lot of corners) I only miscut one.  I ended up needing to shorten most of the pieces about 3/8”, so I still have some things about molding to figure out, but I consider it a great success.

Here is how it looked after I nailed the molding in,

And then after the caulking.  Doesn’t it look great!

Here’s a before & after:

#5—filters

Tonight I changed the water filters under the house.  In the crawlspace.  Me.  They were all wet and very gross, and there are no pictures.  But I did it.

 

The truth of the matter is that I’ve done far more whimpering, whining, and flat-out sobbing than roaring in the last few weeks.  I offer a  heartfelt thanks to everyone who has listened without telling me to get over myself and pull it together.  This post will help me to remember that I had at least a few “roaring” moments too.