Document all of my home repairs- you know, the kinda crap that caused me to wait until I was 50 to buy a house ;)

I had noticed that the handle on my kitchen faucet was getting pretty loose. Sounds like an easy repair, right? As I’m sure many of you know, it seems like all home repairs turn out to be more difficult than you expect!

Because my 1959 house doesn’t have shutoff valves in most places where they would be standard now, I was hoping that I would be able to repair the worn piece without having to shut off the house water. The shutoff valves for the house water are in the crawlspace under the house and aren’t that easy to get to.

This is what the faucet looked like after I removed the decorative cap.

Photo taken 05-30-12.

I’ve known since I first looked at the house that this old water heater wouldn’t last much longer- it was built in 1985! But the timing could have been a little better…

Last weekend my sister and her husband flew in to Denver for a week’s vacation. It was kind of last minute but I was able to get Monday off so we could go somewhere camping for the weekend. We left early Saturday afternoon & got back home Monday evening.

I jumped in the shower and my sister started doing dishes from the trip. I walked into the laundry room after my shower and noticed a strange noise. Water was coming out of the water heater vent! Luckily there was a shutoff valve coming into the water heater (one of the few places in the house that has a water shutoff) so we were able to stop the leaking, but that meant that we had no more hot water. Thankfully a few phone calls later we had showers lined up at my son’s place and at my ex’s place so my sister and BIL didn’t have to go to bed all stinky from camping and hiking ;)

I noticed when I moved in that although the water pipes were set up correctly in the bathroom (with the hot water pipe on the left); the handles in the bathtub were reversed. A couple months ago my daughter reminded me of this. So I got out a screwdriver and a hammer and corrected the problem.

Not a very difficult home repair (although it was slightly more involved than I expected, since the handles were pretty well stuck on after who knows how many years), but at least I got something done on this goal!

BTW, message to ThorsDottir- is this tile kind of like what your bathroom looked like before you remodeled it? ;) It’s actually yellower than it looks in the photo.

Because things like this and this weren’t bad enough, apparently.

Last week when I got home Wednesday afternoon I noticed an empty Clif bar wrapper sitting in the laundry room where I keep some of my extra food. I also noticed that an empty milk jug had been knocked to the floor from where it had been sitting inside the swamp cooler. From the evidence it appeared that a squirrel (at least, I was hoping it was a “tree rat” rather than something like a real rat!) had gotten into the house through the swamp cooler housing on the back window. I wedged an old cookie sheet in there, hoping that that would be enough to keep the critter out. But on Thursday afternoon I could see that it had gotten in again. Not only did it rip open another Clif bar wrapper (and only ate part of it this time), it had chewed up part of a tomato that I had sitting out and it knocked things off of a couple windowsills trying to get back out of the house! I rearranged the cookie sheet but didn’t really have enough time to do much else that evening.

was prompted by my kitchen ceiling fan, which decided to just stop for no apparent reason. The lights still work but the fan doesn’t.

The outside stuff that I’m listing in this goal are the kind of projects that I consider fun, even if they’re a lot of work. But painting a room, changing out a faucet, switching out the reversed wires in my wall outlets, repairing the toilet- that’s the kind of stuff that needs to be done in my 50-year old house, but I really hate doing it. Maybe making it a goal will help to inspire me ;)