We just moved! Not from our beloved house (which is almost 100% ship-shape after our earthquake), but to Readymade’s new Home and Garden Blog. We’ll still be keeping you posted about our new projects around the house, but we’ll also be joining fellow contributor Chris Gardner, in writing about some of our favorite house-related topics on the web.
Have you ever had one of those events in your life that everyone talks about? You know, the thing that provides everyone with an interesting or freaky story about where they were or what they were doing when it happened?
We knew that Eureka was earthquake country when we decided to move there. Garth would always joke about it being one of the worst places in the world for a ceramic artist and collector to move. There have been some big earthquakes in Eureka, but things have been relatively quiet since a 7.1 earthquake struck in 1994.
The truth is, Garth and I were out of town when the big quake hit. We were in Portland, trying to relax with friends before the beginning of the upcoming semester.
While our new town was being shaken up, we were wandering back to our hotel for a mid-afternoon nap. We flipped on NPR just five minutes after the big event and were surprised to hear the first reports of a quake hitting off the coast of Ferndale, a town about twenty miles south of Eureka.
My first thought was, “Oh my God, I hope our friends in Ferndale are okay.”
If this sounds strange it is because I am a Midwestern girl and the common natural disaster in that neck of the woods is the tornado. Tornadoes are pretty direct, they run through one town and don’t do a thing to homes 20 miles away.
Tornadoes will politely pick off one house on a block or remove every roof but one. While I grew up with these crazy storms, I had never seen actual earthquake damage. My first feeling was a touch of relief that it did not start rattling under Eureka. This was naive, and I am not actually that stupid. We were far away and it was hard to imagine the ground rolling beneath the town we now call home.
Soon we discovered that the epicenter of the earthquake was 25 miles from Eureka, and all the resulting waves of force were directed at Old Town Eureka, a path that led straight past our new house. We were worried.
Part of what we love about living in Eureka is how many awesome friends we have. Within fifteen minutes of the quake our friend was crawling outside of our house with her cell phone trying to peer in all of our windows. She couldn’t see much, but reported that our fish tank was still upright and the fish were zipping around inside. We were comforted by this, but immediately began to theorize about what we would find destroyed upon our return.
The following morning, two more friends checked on things to be sure that we didn’t have a gas leak. They reported that lots of water was running from beneath the house. They turned our water main off for us, and we drove home early.
Part of what has been so exhausting about this experience is that Garth and I were not home. You can wear yourself out trying to anticipate the worst. We had no clue what we would find when we arrived at home so we took a deep breath, held hands, and walked right in.
I don’t know if the damage is better or worse than I expected. I would say that most of the house looked as bad as the aftermath of a crazy high school party from an 80’s movie. There was no pizza on the turntable, but records and books were tossed from shelves, the television took a nosedive from its cabinet, a toy from inside of the fish tank was half way across the room and fish water mysteriously splashed all the way around a wall. Pictures were askew, the surround sound speakers tore free from their perches, half of our glassware was shattered on the floor, the pantry was opened and two jars of chili garlic sauce were exploded on the floor. The Ikea record shelf was now a parallelogram instead of a square, paint split off some walls, everything came out of our bathroom cabinets, and our good kitchen knife embedded itself into the molding on the floor in the kitchen Sword in the Stone style. These things are all messy and upsetting, but we had other damage that feels much more tragic at the moment. In our living room and parlor the plaster walls have dramatic cracks running from wall to wall (that’s NEWLY PAINTED wall to NEWLY PAINTED wall, mind you). Several pieces of our vintage china set leapt to their death, but the loss that pains me the most is that our Jeffrey Kaller ceramic sculpture was smashed to bits.
We wandered around marveling at what took a hit and what stayed still on shelves. One top shelf of our china cabinet was empty, but rows of teacups below were untouched. Some objects had long falls and lived while others were practically dust.
Honestly, things will be fine. Our stuff is just stuff, no matter how much we enjoy surrounding ourselves with it. I am relieved to own such a resilient house that has bucked and turned with every quake since 1905 and still stands strong. We already repaired our plumbing issue and now all of our readers can learn how to repair cracked plaster walls along with us.
As we brace ourselves for aftershocks (museum wax anyone?), I will leave you with this comment left on my Facebook page by one of my favorite people:
Hooooooooooly cow! Eureka was just hit by a 6.5 earthquake. The epicenter was 25 miles away, near Ferndale, but a seismologist explained that the shock waves were aimed right at our house. We’re totally fine, but we’ll have lots of heartbreaking posts with pictures of smashed stuff….a good lesson in attachment to things. We were just talking about how we needed to get some earthquake adhesive.
Our favorite antique store proprietress was just interviewed by the New York Times, and she said that next week would bring an awesome sale of damaged porcelain for the mosaic artists. We have plenty of smashed porcelain of our own, though. Any Readymade readers who need materials for mosaics should head on up to Eureka!
When we had our house inspected, the inspector was almost incredulous at the shape our house was in. The roof was new, the high efficiency furnace was new, the plumbing and electrical had been updated, but there was one thing he encouraged us to fix right away…. THE HOT WATER HEATER.
Cue ominous music. Hot water heaters are supposed to last for 10-12 years, and ours was pushing TWENTY. According to the inspector, the thing could start leaking slowly, or it could have an epic fail. I didn’t want to risk either of them.
If any of you have contemplated hot water heaters in the past few years, I think you know what I’m about to tell you. Replacing a hot water heater is an ethical dilemma of epic proportions…at least if you don’t have a budget of epic proportions.
I can compare my dilemma to an amazing chapter of Neil Pollack’s Alternadad (a crazy funny read, even if you’re not a parent or an aging hipster). In the chapter, Pollack writes about the agonizing decision about whether or not he should have his son circumsized. He didn’t have especially strong feelings one way or the other, but his wife was strongly against it, calling it “genital mutilation”. His Jewish parents, on the other hand (who weren’t even especially observant) threatened to disown him, then lined up every member of the family to harass him.
Maybe my family members aren’t lining up to disown me if I pick the wrong hot water heater, but I feel like the pressure is on, and the stakes are high.
Here’s the deal. GOOD PEOPLE install fancy, efficient, expensive on-demand hot water heaters. BAD PEOPLE who don’t care about the Earth install the same old tank models for a fraction of the price. Ed Begley Jr. shills for a super-efficient tank model called the Vertex that costs even more money than an on-demand water heater.
I want to be a good person. Honest I do. I spent WEEKS combing through the internet, doing research about my options. The internet is filled with happy owners of on-demand water heaters with reduced gas bills. It’s also full of disgruntled owners who installed the water heaters themselves, voiding warranties and creating expensive disasters. Consumer Reports recommended against on-demand water heaters, saying the total price for the unit and installation would be more than the savings over the life of the unit.
Here’s the math. A new water heater with a tank costs around $350, and can be easily installed in place of an old tank unit. A tankless water heater would cost between $1000 and $1200, and would also require entirely new stainless steel venting that would run at least $300. Professional installation is required for the brand our hardware store stocks, which usually costs about two times as much as the unit itself. In total, I was told that I could be looking at about $3000 for a tankless model.
I was seriously confused and conflicted. Help me, Ed Begley Jr.!
I had a plan, though. My parents were going to be visiting us for the holidays, and as I’ve written before, my father is a natural-born handyman. I figured that we could buy a tankless model and install it ourselves. When we wound up taking a look at everything that was involved, my Father wasn’t exactly jumping up and down. We’d have to replace all of the existing venting, replace the gas valve, and tinker with all sorts of other things.
We chickened out.
In the end, I didn’t make the sexy, modern choice, but I did my research and bought a high efficiency Rheem water heater from our local hardware store that got rave reviews on the internet. We brought the thing home, and had the thing hooked up in about an hour. The gas, water and ventilation all hooked up perfectly. We even installed an emergency drip pan in the bottom, which the previous model didn’t have.
We must have installed the thing in the nick of time. After I had drained most of the water out of the old water heater, I put it on a dolly and wheeled it out to our back deck. The bottom of the water heater practically collapsed. I think the outside layer of paint was the only thing holding the mass of corrosion and rust together.
This morning, Claire and I took our old water heater to our local recycling center. We had to pay a $17 recycling fee, but I was able to leave it with others of its kind. They’ll certainly send it to the “hot water heater farm” for retirement, right? I’m trying to be a good person. I don’t think Ed Begley Jr. will stay mad at me for long.
As we continue to work on our kitchen and entertain the visiting in-laws, it seemed like a good idea to share with you another furniture makeover success.
Here is a hall stand I scored at a garage sale in October. In this photo I have half the paint stripped because I forgot to take a photo in its original state.
I loved the look of this piece when I found it, but it was completely painted a drab, streaky green (use your imagination…failed shabby chic isn’t exactly our style). Additionally, when I finally got it into our front hallway it didn’t fit where I wanted it. The seat/storage area stuck out about two inches too far. Unfortunately, most garage sales do not have a return policy. Garth and I pondered this problem and decided to just slice a few inches off of the seat. Antique surgery!
This project was accomplished in sunny October, so I was able to set up my work space in the back yard. My first step was paint removal (which you can see partially accomplished in the above image). Using a cheap three inch paint brush I smeared on some orange paint stripper. It was great to do this outside because despite the “No Harsh Fumes” promise of the label, this stuff is pretty aromatic.
Following the instructions, I waited thirty minutes and was then able to fairly easily scrape the layer of green paint off with a plastic scraper. This paint came off easily in lumpy, gooey hunks which I carefully wiped into plastic bags. Compared to the nightmare I am having getting our banister stripped, this job was a cinch. My best guess is that this was because the paint on the hall stand was applied directly onto finished wood without sanding or priming.
Once I scraped away the green goo I cleaned the entire stand with paint thinner, removing all remaining paint and stripper. This was an important step, as the wood surface was still too sticky to sand.
At this point, I decided to take the seat off the back of the hall stand before I sanded off the finish. To do this I removed a few heavy duty screws that were helping to hold the seat to the tall back of the stand and found that there were still lots of stubborn nails holding everything together. Using a crowbar I pried the seat/box area of the hall stand off the “stand” portion and pounded any remaining nails from the back of the stand.
Hinges held the seat of the box to the back of the stand so I unscrewed these and removed the old hinges entirely. I would need to cut away the part of the seat where the hinges attached later on.
Once the hall stand was disassembled, it took several hours with a hand sander to remove the remaining wood finish.
Now that the entire piece was paint and finish-free, I carefully measured in two inches from the back edge of the stand seat and marked a straight line to cut on. I did the same thing on the flat seat top.
If I had proper tools I could have very easily cut away this two inch strip from both places. I had to make do with what we had, which worked fine, but this all could have been done in moments with a better saw. I found our reciprocal saw too wild and out of control to cut an even line so I grabbed our multi-purpose tool and set to work, slowly cutting away that pesky extra two inches.
Before I finished the wood and put the piece back together, I used our shop vac to suck as much dust and grit as possible from the wood. Next I wiped and wiped every nook and cranny with tack cloth (a sticky cheese cloth you can get from your hardware store to remove dust and debris before you finish wood). Now the wood was clean, paint free, and ready to be put back together.
I used an Ace Hardware dark walnut stain on the wood applied with a big, cheap foam brush. Once again, it was nice to be outside so the fumes didn’t seem as harsh. I did this step very carefully to be sure the stain was even, thin, and not dripping anywhere. I waited a day for the stain to set and applied two coats of Ace polyurethane clear coat (with proper drying times in between). Now the hall stand pieces were ready to be put back together.
Garth and I are both tool geeks, and we owned an air compressor and nail gun before we owned a house. I need it to build panels to paint on, but the nail gun has come in handy for all sorts of in-home jobs. If you are trying to chop up a piece of furniture to make it smaller (or larger, or weirder) a nail gun can come in handy. However, you can certainly accomplish the same task with a good old fashioned hammer and nails.
I carefully put wood glue on the edge of the seat box, pressed it back into place against the tall stand and used the nail gun to nail it all together. Now that the box was affixed, I needed to reattach the hinged seat on top. This was pretty easy because the holes for the screws from the original hinges were there as a marker.
The coat hooks were returned to their original holes and the final touch was installing the mirror. The hall stand came with a mirror that was too large to fit in the mirror opening, so I took this it to our local glass shop and had it cut down to size. I would much rather pay someone to cut a mirror than to mess with the sharp edges of mirror or glass (you can’t DIY all the time).
The original mirror appeared to have been nailed into place on the back of the hall stand, but I took several small metal brackets and ran them across each corner to hold it in place.
Voila! A new hall stand!
This entire project took about two days of work during daylight, outside working hours. It wasn’t too bad, and I’m sure that I will do an even better job on the next piece of furniture I need to cut apart. Fear not! I have another one waiting in the wings!
I’m a pretentious college art professor by day. I enjoy teaching my students big words so they can write dense papers and bore people at cocktail parties. Of course, of my favorite words is PALIMPSEST, which means that a text has been erased and rewritten over and over again. During the middle ages, parchment was incredibly expensive to produce, as it had to come from thin layers of calf hide. It was waaaaay easier during the Middle Ages to just scrape off the ink and gold leaf and start over.
To tell the truth, the most fun I’ve had in our house has been peeling through 100-plus years of wallpaper. These layers of wallpaper tell the story of the house in ways the fixtures and walls themselves can’t. In most places in the house, there are only a few layers. The previous occupants even committed the cardinal sin of painting over wallpaper (making it almost impossible to remove). Our kitchen, however, was a glorious scrapbook of changing styles and and wallpaper technologies. Check out the first photo that I posted. It shows the 80’s floral borders that graced much of the house when we moved in. Unfortunately, they haven’t stood the test of time. There are a few other layers visible in the photo as well.
Claire has written about our kitchen before…it’s the first room in the house she started peeling wallpaper in. When she started tearing into the 80’s floral nightmare, she found all of the other layers, but then found out that the bottom layer was just redwood planks covered with cheesecloth. We knew that we’d have to hang drywall, so it’s taken us over three months to get around to it. The whole time, we’ve been living in a kitchen full of wallpaper scraps and exposed planks.
The very bottom layer of wallpaper is the gorgeous hand printed turn-of the century wallpaper above. I’ve enlarged a couple of flakes for texture. The wallpaper printers used delicate colors and metallic inks. I hate wallpaper, but if we had been able to perfectly peel back the others and preserve the bottom layer, I would have considered it. It wasn’t an option, however, because with each new wallpaper job, the new owners stapled through all of the previous layers, ruining the wallpaper below.
The next wallpaper in the stack is also a doozy, beautifully hand printed with random flowers and patterns. I can’t quite figure out the era…could it have come from the teens or early 1920’s?
Here’s a spartan wallpaper that must have been put up at some point during the Great Depression. We found out from the previous owners that the house was stripped of most of its gingerbread trappings during the 30’s and turned into a more severe, minimalist house. The few remaining vintage lighting fixtures in the house date from this era.
At some point after the dour wallpaper, one of the residents livened it up with these cute flowers!
Holy cow!!! At some point, our kitchen was totally Don Draper’s kitchen from Mad Men! During the 50’s, somebody put up this fabulous masculine plaid! It’s too bad that tastes changed and the 70’s happened. I wish we still had the avocado-colored stove that surely complimented the wallpaper.
Like I said. After the 70’s, it was all floral wallpaper, all the time. you can see the floral borders from the 80’s on the first photo I posted. We tore into a lot of the wallpaper, but ultimately, since we decided we were putting up drywall, we left most of it for future owners to experience when they tear down the drywall.
Our house contains plenty of other palimpsests and riddles. One of the biggest remaining mysteries is what is under the flooring. We’ve found nice fir floors under the carpet in our living room and laminate in our kitchen and dining room. We’ve got bigger fish to fry right now, and the floors don’t bother us too much, so we’ll leave the mystery for another day. The flooring upstairs is a little more nerve-wracking…it looks like there are layers of creepy, worn-out linoleum underneath the carpets. We’ll find out soon enough what’s under the linoleum. Our inspector told us that there wasn’t much chance of asbestos, so that makes us breathe a sigh of relief.
I hope you enjoyed the wallpaper tour of our kitchen…I feel like it’s an appropriate way to honor the interior decorators who came before us.
Merry Christmas!
We are finished teaching for the semester, which means that Garth and I have had entire days to devote to house work. The magic that can happen when neither one of us has to deal with planning or grading is amazing. In the past week we finished painting in our hallway, hung and painted molding, repainted the doors and door frames and actually drywalled the kitchen. This rapid string of successes makes me feel like we can finish all imaginable projects during Christmas break alone! We will not, of course, be attempting such insanity. Instead, we decided to host our very first holiday party in our house, which has been romantically dusted with a sprinkling of drywall dust.
We planned to have a gathering at our house on December 21st. The guests were invited, the event was hyped. In the meantime, Garth and I (and a couple of other people) were slaving away in the house. On Sunday, Dec. 20 our kitchen looked like this:
We had less than twenty four hours to clean up our mess (no time for painting), get some baking done, and play host to some holiday cheer. I was beginning to panic.
I will not bore you with the details of the sweeping/mopping/dusting/box-shuffling that we rushed around to accomplish. Our party plan worked out just perfectly for the current state of our lives. We wanted to have a jolly party but didn’t have nearly enough time cook up a storm, so we hosted a Christmas Cookie Swap.
For those of you that have not attended a cookie exchange, it is a fun and fairly simple event to host. Every guest was instructed to come armed with two dozen of their signature Christmas cookies and an empty plate. The plate of cookies is added to the exchange table and the empty plate is used to collect a new assortment of two dozen cookies made by the other guests. You can be strict and have an official “Swap Time” or be more laid back (this was our approach) and let people pick their new assortment of cookies at any point. The finished plates can be wrapped and labeled and set aside while merriment with eggnog, mistletoe, and Garth’s new favorite punch proceeds. Everyone walks out of the door with a wonderful collection of holiday cookies.
For our party we provided a long table with a holiday table cloth, blank gift labels and markers (to label each cookie plate with cookie type and the baker’s name), some grown-up beverages as well as spiced cider for the underage crowd, cookies, and a small table of savory snacks. A few touches that are unnecessary but added to the cheer: an extra long playlist of off-kilter and sassy holiday classics (if you don’t have the John Waters Christmas Album, you are a fool), a constant loop of old holiday movies playing silently on the TV (A Pac-Man Christmas, and The Smurf Christmas special really get people in the mood), a can of whipped topping left unattended by the kid drink station (these kids are all under twelve, so huffing is not on their minds), a fire (or fireplace DVD), and a tree, or something tree-like decorated with lights and ornaments.
Once party is set up, it basically runs itself. The cookie table filled quickly and the early party go-ers filled their empty plates and made an exit. Those that stayed longer saw the table fill and refill throughout the night. It was great to see everyone swapping cookie ideas and stories about how they always loved Aunt So-and-So’s snowballs every holiday season. As a first house party, this felt like a great success– we may have started a new holiday tradition!
Holy crap! Christmas in your own home is awesome. I’m writing this from our living room on a dreary December evening. The pellet stove is blazing, a glass of egg nog is on the table, and hipchristmas.com’s audio player is supplying a steady stream of Christmas cheer. Claire is going to write more about her amazing holiday decorations and our impending cookie swap later in the week, but I thought I’d show off the Christmas tree we put up in our goldfish tank.
The video above is an introduction to Gargle and Grybowski, our spoiled goldfish. I got them a little over five years ago at a pet shop as 10 cent feeder fish. They were tiny, and lived in a tiny tank in my kitchen, but they grew and grew, eventually moving with us from Atlanta to Huntington Beach, California, and eventually to our new home in Eureka.
The fish have a prominent place in our living room. Their 55 gallon tank is located so they can see who comes in the front door, as well as keep tabs on us as we hang out in the living room at night.
Claire found this great ceramic Christmas tree lamp with lite-brite-style plastic pegs in it. It’s almost identical to one that I grew up (ask my mother about the year toddler Garth ate all of the plastic pegs… they were all eventually “recovered”, washed and put back on the tree). We removed the lamp from our tree and put it in the fish tank so the fish could join us in our holiday cheer.
Now I’ve got to help Claire get ready for our Christmas party, which will be our first party in the new house. Stay tuned for more Christmas fun and a full-fledged tour of the 100 years of wallpaper we discovered in our kitchen before we put up the drywall.
Before I talk about a project we have tackled, I really want to thank everyone for all the paint removal advice that you shared last week. I now have several new plans of attack and I will let everyone know what I find to work best (when I get back to the banister, that is).
Garth and I have been out of town and don’t have too much new work to report this week, though tomorrow we begin our assault on the kitchen– the project that has kept me tapping my fingers anxiously ever since we moved in. As we are looking to start a new mess I thought I would point out a something we have accomplished (this is partially for my own mental health).
Several posts ago I took you on a tour of the furniture we have acquired and explained some of our plans for the furniture. I already showed you the five dollar chair I re-upholstered, so let’s look at another successful furniture makeover that we have accomplished.
We hauled this fifteen dollar hutch home from the thrift store before we even bought a house, convinced it would be a great piece of furniture in our new home. Garth and I love the curving lines on it and decided it was the perfect size to house our T.V., etc. We removed a shelf and moved the remaining one down low to accommodate the television. Sliding glass doors were also removed from the upper display area of this hutch. The back of the upper portion of the hutch was lined in mirrors, two of which were broken. We rearranged the mirrors so that the missing two are in the center of the arrangement, which is now not visible as our television sits in front of them. Because we selected a bright green for the walls in the room this piece of furniture would occupy, the decision was made that a golden yellow would add to our bright color scheme. The hutch was hauled to the backyard where we sanded and painted it. We also replaced the original drawer pulls with simple black ones from our local hardware store.
I love this piece now– it sits brightly in the living room, the mirrors reflect green behind the TV and we can hide all of our DVDs and extra electronic mess in the drawers and cabinets below.
There comes a time in every person’s life when they have to swallow their pride (and disgust) and tackle a nasty clog in the sink. I’ve lived in apartments all my life, and I was always able to call the maintenance person or a plumber to deal with sink malfunctions. Now that I’m a homeowner, the golden pipe wrench has been passed to me.
Sigh.
Last week, we made some great Thai food… I made pad thai, and Claire made green papaya salad. Claire tried her usual trick of running the squeezed limes through the garbage disposal (it helps get rid of odors and makes the kitchen smell nice). This time, the limes overwhelmed the garbage disposal and lodged themselves somewhere in our pipes. Water started backing up in the sink.
Thankfully, all of the plumbing in our house has been updated, and the galvanized pipe under our sink has been replaced with PVC. God bless PVC. I grabbed a bucket and started taking the little pieces of pipe apart to hopefully find and defeat the clog. I was betting the clog was lodged in the little elbow under the sink.
I bet wrong.
I got all of the pieces apart, and other than being covered in a little bit of slime and some ground up pad thai noodles, the pipes under the sink were free and clear of debris. This meant the clog was further down the line. It took me a while, but I finally figured out how to put the PVC puzzle pieces back together. Of course I managed to spill water (and Thai food debris) all over the kitchen floor in the process.
We actually had some drain cleaner under the sink from our previous apartment. I don’t exactly like the stuff, but I was desperate, so I gritted my teeth and poured some down the sink and waited.
Of course, nothing happened…or not much, anyway. The drain cleaner seemed to open things up a little bit, so that at least the water would drain out of the sink, but it would back up when I turned the faucet on again. I tried running the disposal over and over, but it never seemed to dislodge the clog. It was late, and we decided to let the dishes sit in the dishwasher and take a trip to the hardware store in the morning.
At the hardware store, I spent $6 on a “snake” for our plumbing. I had seen other people use a snake for drains…in fact, plumbers always make the things look faintly like sorcery. The hardware store offered all sorts of different varieties, including ones that hook up to a drill, but the friendly hardware store guy told me they all do basically function the same way.
Basically, you’re supposed to feed the snake into your pipe until you find the clog, then rotate the thing until it powers through it, dislodging whatever goo is blocking the water. By now, you all know that I love gadgets, so I was fairly bursting with excitement to roll up my sleeves and defeat the evil clog when I got home.
I unscrewed the PVC puzzle under the sink again and got out the snake. I started feeding the thing into the drain pipe, and it was definitely not as magic or easy as the plumbers had made it look in the past. I pushed and cajoled the thing past bends and twists in the pipe, but I was only able to feed in a couple of feet of the snake. I twisted the snake just like the instructions said, and brought out a whole load of disgusting pipe goo. I prayed that I had gotten the clog and reassembled the PVC pipes.
I ran the sink. Nothing.
The clog was as strong as ever, so I tried again. And again. All in all, I tried the snake three or four times, scraping my knuckles and deforming the snake as I tried to force it down the pipes, each time reaching a bit farther and dislodging a bit more goo. Still, the clog wasn’t going anywhere.
At this point, I was getting desperate to try anything. I could take apart and reassemble the PVC pieces under the sink blindfolded like a Marine with his rifle.
I was ready to make another trip to the hardware store so I could try the crazy CO2 blaster that uses pressure to dislodge clogs. I decided to try my own version. We don’t have a plunger yet (I know, I know), so I covered one side of our double sink with a drain plug and tried creating some pressure in the pipe as I ran the disposal. I was actually able to use the drain plug to get some decent pressure on the pipe.
All of a sudden, the clog dislodged, sending water spraying out of the sink in the process. Victory.
I still don’t really know what I did, but the clog had been defeated. I could walk into my own kitchen with my head held high. I learned a little bit more about plumbing, but more about the necessary ingredients for prevailing in a plumbing emergency… tenacity and dumb luck.
Garth Johnson and Claire Joyce are a pair of artists who live in Eureka, California. They just bought a beautiful old Victorian house that was originally built in 1905. In Keeping Up With the Johnsons, they'll be sharing the whole process that took them from dreams of home ownership to the sobering reality of remodeling and renovating. They'll cover house hunting, loan options, bidding on "distressed properties" and the 1001 projects that will keep them busy for the foreseeable future.
Keeping Up With the Johnsons is an exercise in 21st-century home renovation. Claire and Garth would like to hear from you and learn from your triumphs and tragedies. They would also like to share their joys and frustrations in order to help you learn from their mistakes.
If you'd like to learn more about Garth and Claire's lives when they're not working on their house, you can see Claire's amazing glitter paintings here. Garth's musings about art and craft can be found on his website, Extreme Craft.
To answer your most burning question..... yes, they've seen that old Tom Hanks/Shelley Long movie "The Money Pit".
