Fiber Dreams

While Dave’s dad was here he (Bill) wanted to help us get a few things done around the house. You know, those projects that never seem to get done.

The oven

First on the list was the oven. For some reason, it decided to work just fine on the morning of the ides of March, but it didn’t work at all that evening. It decided that instead of heating up so we could bake our nicely thawed whole chicken, it would beep incessantly, and give an odd message about the probe (which we weren’t trying to use). Our only recourse at the time was to flip the circuit breaker for the fool thing, and make dinner on the stove instead. Bah. And no, turning it off at the circuit breaker, waiting fifteen minutes, then turning it on again had no affect. First thing next morning, Dave and Bill took the thing apart. Dave pulled the oven out, pulled the probe receptacle and cleaned it, and looked around a bit. On top of the circuit board was a fine layer of dust. Dust. How’d it get in there? I wonder. Hm. They vacuumed up the dust, put things back together enough to test, and turned the circuit breaker back on. Ta da! Works. Yippee! We have an oven again.

The shower

That done, they moved to the guest bath. The one where the spigot had fallen off in Dave’s hand some months ago. The plan was to carefully remove the tile from the wall, fix the plumbing, repair the wall, replace the tile. Sounds pretty straight forward, simple to do, right? Wrong. First off, the tiles are so close together that a normal grouting tool won’t fit between them. They tried all sorts of things, including resorting to jerry-rigging “new” tools from other tools, bits, and pieces. I don’t know what all they did. They did manage to remove the grout in this nice little square around the spigot, well, where the spigot is supposed to be. Will the tiles come off now? No dice. What they discovered is that instead of there being sheet rock or a normal thickness of concrete board behind the tiles, there’s a 1-1/2 inch layer of concrete. Egads. The upshot is, the tile will have to be destroyed to remove it from the wall, which means that new tile will have to be purchased to replace it. Sigh. That won’t be happening for a while.

Powder room sink

The faucets on this sink have driven poor dear Dave mad for the last nine years. He has simply not been able to fix them. Mainly because, even with his heroic strength, he’s been unable to loosen the bolts on the worst of the two. It took the combined efforts of the two men, each armed with a large wrench, to force the thing open. In the process they loosened the sink in the counter. I love this shot of the sink sans handles. The handles stayed in the kitchen over night in a vat of vinegar to loosen years of mineral deposits left by our incredibly hard water.

Dining room window

Bill was intent on getting the big old hole plugged up, so that was the next project. (The saga of replacing the window can be found in the archives for last May and June. If you just want to see a picture of the hole that was just repaired, it is here.) I was only around for the end of the process, so didn’t get to watch them making the small hole larger, but here they are, father and son, working on getting it back together. The new neat rectangle of sheet rock has been installed, and the first layer of mud has been applied. Bill’s putting some screws through the corner bead to hold it in place.

Here’s the patch. Much better than having a gaping hole, isn’t it? I sure think so. Bill agreed.

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