Welcome to the Commenting Pixie Party!
Oh. My goodness. This was one of your funniest posts ever.
I have no dishwasher advice. Just here for the funny.
Phantom, you are Good. For. My. Soul.
Have I mentioned that lately?
Ah. I see Mr. Blue went to the same school of remodeling that his father went to. I've learned NEVER to mention that anything in the house needs fixing, because he will run to a hardware store and buy some tool that is absolutely NOT meant to be used the way he wants to use it, bring it back, and proceed to make things look much worse.
Did I tell you about his painting skill? He decided he was going to paint the windows in our bedroom, then got what looked like an oil painting brush and glopped white paint all over it. It looked like someone had gotten loose with a tube of toothpaste.
Of course, my yelling "this looks awful, this is not your strength, please don't do this" helps nothing. It makes him more determined to show me that indeed, he is a master carpenter/painter/door hanger/whatever.
The only defense against this is to go ahead and hire someone and then tell him about it afterward. Trust me -- it will save you a lot of tsuris.
PS. Mr. Blue's father just decided he was going to fix youngest daughter's window. Now it won't fit back into the frame. The bugs are headed in. There goes the resale of our house.
Yeah for a dishwasher!! If you ask me I'd just go for super jets, b/c I'd figure then you have to worry less about rinsing and second washing. I'm all about throwing anything and everything (large cooking pots, whatever fits and no matter how dirty or crusted with food) into the dishwasher. We just have a fairly low end whatever that came with our apt and it seems to work fine, but I think some extra jets would help with the top shelf sometimes. Too say the least my boyfriend and I both loathe dishwashing. I'm impressed you have gone so long with out one, you deserve it!
I totally want to visit and fix your stuff!
We have a #14, too! In our "baby's" room, too. I've been thinking (OK--for about a year now) of calling someone to fix it just so I could stop answering the pressing question "why frog on head?"* every. single. night.
*her nightlight is a frog.
Have you considered comedy writing as a career? Perhaps David Letterman is hiring? This post had me laughing so hard I had to take a break during it.
Dishwashers are good. Very good. We got one several months ago and let me tell you, I don't miss standing at the sink one bit. Ours is mid-range Kenmore and Just Fine.
Wow, this is awesome. I want to play! (Except that your post is enhanced by pictures, and I won't have that.)
Just off the top of my head, and I may elaborate on the blog once work slows down a bit and/or I pop out this kid:
1. Stucco walls and ceilings all over the basement (but different kinds of stucco--one would even call part of the walls "faux stucco")
2. Shower handle in the downstairs bathroom is upside down (which I did not discover until today, as it was the first time I showered in there).
3. In that same bathroom, carpeting. Carpeting! Car-Pet-Ing! Who carpets a bathroom, I ask you?!
4. All of our sliding glass doors? They are upside down. Screens on the wrong side (indoors), and the door locks all toggle the wrong way, or counterintuitively.
5. We have an intercom... that doesn't work.
6. Because the previous owners attempted to do some freaky wiring with said intercom and the phone lines... only one phone jack in the ENTIRE HOUSE works.
7. And the piece de resistence: In painting the house to put it on the market, the previous owners painted over everything. EVERYTHING. I mean, they painted over electrical outlets (we have multiple ones we cannot use, thanks to the Super Paint from Krypton that they must have purchased in bulk). They painted over light fixtures. They painted over window frames (making it impossible for us to open most of the windows in our house--very, very safe).
Have I mentioned that we've lived in this house for two years and I still HATE the previous owners? If I saw them walking down the street, I would drive my car onto the sidewalk and run them over.
I was just upstairs trying to help Papa Go Blue get the sliding window back on the track, after he got it off and couldn't get it back in. God help me, I'm as useless as he is in this department. Plus, of course, I started laughing. We're trying so hard to sell this house and have everything look perfect, and here was this ugly sliding window hanging off the track, with him yelling "Just push the gray plastic up" . The whole flipping thing is gray plastic, several tracks of it, so I was trying to figure out which gray plastic he was referring to. While I was laughing. I finally called our real estate agent, who started laughing and said she would come over and help us fix it. That REALLY got Papa Go Blue's goat. Anyway, he did end up fixing it.
Long story short, Mr. Blue is not genetically programmed to fix anything around the house. Trust me.
Hey Phantom, at least you changed that dead lightbulb!
Wait, that looks like our old house!
You cannot be expected to deal with all those little bitty things while you have children in the house. Puh-leeze.
But -- yes, I'm going to be the obnoxious one who says it -- if you ever find yourself with access to a pleasant old man with handyman credentials, you could have items 14, 10, 8, 6, and 1 fixed in a single morning, you know. I'd add four and seven and nine to the list, and expound on the fantastic covering-nasty-wallpaper products they sell (such that yes, you can wallpaper over them) but I gave up home improvements when I sold my 65-year old house two years ago.
Would you believe me if I told you that having a new house -- in which things can only ever get worse -- is not remotely as enjoyable as I expected. At least, when you go to do some work on your lovely, cozy house (I've seen the pellet stove after all), it will be for the sake of improvement, and not just a desparate clutch against the ravages of time.
Ooh, ooh, we have #5 at our house! It never looks clean no matter how frequently it's mopped. (No, mopping isn't done very often, but that is what we would call beside the point...)
Great, hilarious post!
Oh, APL -- you inspire me to compose a post in memory of the previous owner of our previous house. "That damn [name deleted for legal reasons]" was a running curse in our house for all six years that we owned it.
One more piece of advice for anyone who hates the way her/his house looks -- do NOT watch one of those HGTV homes on how you can take a not-well-constructed house and renovate it and make it look beautiful in 1/2 hour for no money. Maybe you can if you're Bob Vila, but otherwise the money and time it takes in real life will piss the hell out of you.
I would avoid Kenmore. They're quiet, but virtually useless - you will spend the same amount of time washing your dishes BEFORE you put them in the dishwasher. And sometimes they come out dirtier than they are when you put them in. Just sayin'.
We curse the previous owners of our house, too. The two most unusual things were the dead racoon in the garage and the half-full oil tank behind the basement paneling. (The second one required Paid Professionals. The first one involved ML swearing a lot.)
The bright side of such experiences is that our neighbors all love us because we are more responsible than the previous owners.
Come visit me sometime, and when you go home, you will think your house looks like something out of House Beautiful in comparison.
Imagine gangs of teenage boys playing a game of MONSTER in the pitch dark -- our house has all kinds of scars.
My solution? When we have company, I turn off the lights and put candles on the windowsills. Dim light hides all kinds of damage.
I don't have the time to actually repaint or fix anything ....
i'm dyin' -- this is the most excellent home improvement post ever!
now i don't feel so bad about our ancient light-fixtures-from-hell, the ugly aluminum-framed windows that are mold factories, the completely nonfunctional "modern" "intercom" system with boxes all over the damned place, the hideous pink bedroom carpet, or the fact that the original builder used ROPE as a kind of trim around all the ceilings, not as a "nautical" fashion statement but apparently to stop the breeze and bugs from creeping in. oh yeah, we had the same electrician, too.
about the dishwasher -- whatever model you choose, hire the guys to come install it.
My Kenmore can take off caked-with-age food. (Look, I'm a single person. I don't run my dishwasher more than once a week.)
Make sure you have one that allows a delayed start (common, saves daytime water). If your dishwasher is near where you keep your cutlery, the tray thing is good (but not necessary), otherwise stick with a bucket.
And the things that haven't been fixed -- I hate those things. They're not quite major enough to be worth fixing, but they're major enough to be really annoying. There is probably some sort of magic foam insulation you can spray into 13, for magic easy fixes.
I saw a place where the powder room was painted barbie doll pink. And it was a guy's place. He also had big red stripes painted in the living room. (I like pink. My shower curtain is pink. But that is a less attractive pink.) I also saw places where the kitchen was carpeted. I think that's worse than bathroom carpets. I hate carpet.
I have skipped all previous comments so if I repeat them, forgive me.
I feel your pain, living in a house owned by the church which is a very very fine house, but it needs some things fixed, and I have no control over it and very little input...but I won't go into all that here.
I don't have much in the way of home-repair skillz but I do know how to fix that hole in the dry wall, and I'm quite good at it (b/c elder son was quite good at putting holes in dry wall!) Just need some spackle and a a spackle knife thingy (don't you like my technical jargon?)
AND the dishwasher--yes get one! Yes it's worth it, and I am of the opinion that you get the best you can afford b/c a dishwasher that is just so-so is a pain in the butt but a dishwasher that works well---ahh...it makes life so much easier. I had a top of the line Whirlpool that was awesome in my house in VT, and now I have a Kitchen Aide that is pretty good.
This blog is so great! When you're overwhelmed by the need for house repairs it's easy to feel like everyone else already has a completely renovated house. I'm blaming HGTV again.
I'm sorry. I'm sorry. My bad! My bad!
Tonight after we buy the new dishwasher, LG, BB and I will start looking at some new houses. And we'll have just enough time to get ice cream before LG's bed time. Of course, then I'll take BB out for three more hours. I do have a few other strengths though, don't I? I know all my Thomas the Frickin Tank Engine trains. And what about the backup power system for the apocalypse? Ah! I'll spend the rest of the day in quiet desolation. With a frickin bag over my head.
Don't worry, Mr. Blue. Mr. Obscura is about the same way.
Ask me sometime about the time he decided to teach himself to fix a periodically-running toilet for the first time, the night before I was fixing my first holiday meal for his entire frickin' family, in the house we'd bought from his parents which meant the house he and his sisters had grown up in, which was like no pressure on me at all, nope, no sir. And he had the freakin' Bellagio Fountains goin' in the hall bathroom. 10 years before the damn hotel was built, even.
Oh PS dear -- I think we need to turn this one into a photo meme.
Oh no, Mr. Blue!
We have a Kenmore Ultra Wash. It's eight years old and works fantastically. I don't consider a dishwasher a luxury. I consider it a functional necessity of modern life. I also want to make the case that you would not consider washing your clothes in a washtub.
Mr. Blue, you're fantastic.
And man, I'm kind of jealous of y'all for getting a dishwasher. My last apartment had one, but not my current one.
I'll have to do this meme when my new computer comes...
Oh, Mr. Blue, she talks about your other strengths all the time, enough so that I show this blog as a "how to" to my husband!
Our flat here in Scotland it pretty, uh, filled with character. Aside from the fact that its dimensions are 20x40 (total), there are:
-the doors (all of them) that must be propped open with *two* doorstops each, all the time, or they slam loudly closed.
-the fact that hot and cold water come out of two different taps on opposite sides of the sink. Choose- scalding or freezing?
-The windows that do not seal on (inexplicably) any of the four sides.
-the 50 y.o. water heater that can't be adjusted.
-the fact that the shower system is different from the regular water heater, so you have to walk to the hall closet to turn on the shower system switch before you can turn on the shower.
-for all electric switches, down is "on" and up is "off"
-no heater in the bathroom
-bathroom light switch is outside bathroom
I could go on and on. This place is very challenging, to say the least.
You, Grandma Blue, and APL pretty much fulfilled my laugh quota for today!
Don'tya wish there were a home-improvement show called, "This Frickin House"? Y'all would be on it by next Saturday.
:0)
By the way, how do you post flickr photos on your blog? I am electronically challeged, and the on;y way I know how involves copying your code, so it probably isn't right.
Don't get a kitchen aid dishwasher. we have one, it works OK, but it takes fouor hours to run. I kid you not. And we have had to replace the rubber seal thingy twice in two years.
As for the painting issues, if you invite me over and give me some bread, I'll fix them for you ;-0. Paint I can do. Electrical, not so much. We have no working outside lights right now. And haven't for a long time. Every once and a while M will stumble in in the dark and mutter that we should really do something about that, and then promptly forgets.
HOWLING! It's so funny because when in your house, I have never noticed any of these things. Just keep the cute kids around and nobody would ever see the stuff.
Mr Blue, never fear. You can make it all up to your beloved very easily. Just march right up to that dishwasher salesperson tonight, and say one word, just one. And magically, all will be forgotten, and your home will be transformed into a mystical palace forever.
And that word, my friends, that one word, is BOSCH.
OK, now I'm scared. Cos we just bought a 110-year old house. I just know it's gonna have a million things like this. And I know that we will be way to lazy to fix them.
Wallpaper is doing of the devil. People pick such...weird...stuff to put on their walls. And in about two minutes it goes out of fashion! ugh. Hideous to remove too. So NO ONE SHOULD EVER wallpaper, EVER!
Postscript: OK, OK, in order to pay for it, you might have to lease out your kids to the infamous salt mines... but hey. They'll be bilingual, and your dishes will be caressed to cleanliness by tiny angels.
mr. blue, you are OK. just don't go thinking it's a good idea to fix one of the ugly bathrooms by tiling it yourself! mr. a did a fine job, only it took almost an entire year, during part of which the bathroom in question had a large hole in the floor, after he discovered the floor rot from the stupid secretly leaking toilet. and then there was the wall thing. nevermind. it is a lovely bathroom now, except we shoulda replaced the damned toilet altogether while everything else was torn up.
ahem, i mean -- onward and upward! sink fixtures are easy to replace! spackle and paint cure most evils, and they are hard to mess up!
I'm laughing so hard I can barely type. But I agree with everyone who said that you MUST get a dishwasher. And I had a Kenmore installed in my last house that just ATE the crud off my dishes. I have heard that Bosch is much better, but not being a millionaire, I don't know that for a fact.
P.S. I feel so much more a part of the human race.
P.P.S. Can we start whining yet?
My first thought was: how did you get into my house? Okay, we don't have the faux black and white brick (??!!) but the rest looked awfully familiar...
Good call on the dishwasher: in addition to saving you lots of time, if you always run it full, it'll save you water as well. Our Maytag is several years old but awesome - we never have to rinse dishes before putting them in, and most of the time I run it on the "light" setting and it gets everything spotless in less time.
Oh, and wallpaper? You can paint over wallpaper. The people who own your house 50 years down the road will probably curse you for it, but in the meantime it'll look a lot better.
PS? Your house and my house seem to be pretty much of a muchness in decrepitude (and nonfunctioning dishwashers). I am tempted time and time again to suggest that we level it and build anew.
But that would be serious work. *sigh*
You'd feel right at home in this house, PS - suffice to say, we are a few steps ahead of you, because we got the dishwasher, but it's been sitting there broken for about a year, waiting to be repaired.
Next time a broken tap or cracked / missing tile shits me, I'm just going to take a photograph of it. Take that, fugly interior decor!!!
Poor Papa Go Blue decided we should replace the casement windows around the house, which are indeed old and don't fit, so that cold air comes whooshing in during the winter. So, since neither of us knows anything about replacement windows, we went to a Pella store (because I was insisting that we should only get wooden window frames). HAH! $700 a window before installation. Right about now our old windows are looking pretty good. And we'll just jack the temperature up (can you say "Ridiculous oil bill"?)
You know, if we approached the right reality TV producer, we could probably get all our homes fixed up (my apartment has those things, too), as long as we agreed to provide plenty of drama, laughs, and general kookiness.
I think we could provide them with more than enough.
The doorknob hole is not hard to fix! I just made a doorknob hole, bursting into my middle boys' room to tell them not to wake the baby. Because yelling at young children is exactly the way to teach them to be quiet and respectful of others' needs, you know. Um, anyway...
Get thee to a home supply store and they will direct you to the mesh patches made for repairing drywall holes. One side is adhesive. Cut it a little bigger than the hole, stick it on, and spread it with spackle. When the spackle is dry, you can sand and paint. Or you might find that the wall looks enough better without the hole that you can get to that...someday.
Happy dishwasher day!
jane dark is onto something. i'm sure "this frickin house" would catch the souls of more people than those pathetic money-heavy makeover jerks at "this old house." grandma blue looks to be a good spokesperson, too.
I love the idea of "This Frickin' House"!
Hooray for a new dishwasher! My only suggestion is to try to get a quiet one so that you can run it during a ballgame and still hear the calls.
Well it appears that I'm the only person in the world who has had a bad experience with Kenmore. Figures. Maybe I'll use that as my whine for this week.
This is hysterical!
And was thinking the exact thing JM said.
You crack me up.
Mosaic tile on the bathroom floor! We have mosaic tile on a bathroom floor. It is the worst. Impossible to clean all that grout around those tiny tiles. I hate it that stuff.
We have a basic black Kenmore dishwasher. It works fine. I don't know about super jets. It is not as quiet as advertised, but who cares? It's doing the dishes and I'm not.
Can I submit my ugly bathroom?
I have no picture of the whole thing, but be assured it is tiled in navy-blue *plastic* tile, except for the tub, which seems to have been retiled in order to sell the house (it was a rental for 10 years) in Landlord Neutral Cream.
ANyway, I think the fixtures are original 50s items.
http://www.deathstar.org/
~svanlo...al_IMG_3712.jpg
You can see the navy tile and beige tub surround (with original large white tub) here:
http://www.deathstar.org/~svanlo...album=16&
pos=11
We have Neutral Landlord Vinyl in the bathroom. And a 50s wall-mounted sink, with limed-up fixture. And no outlets in the bathroom at all. Also a ceiling light/fan fixture that does not actually vent to a vent outside, but blows wet air straight into the attic if actually used!
However, I do *own* it. Or at least, I own about 5% of it. Unless the crashing market means I own less than that. And someday we will gut it and redo it.
When we do, by the way, we will not be using any of this grout:
http://www.suburbanbliss.net/
sub...grout_only.html
You guys are all teh funny. Sara, I will post more complete pictures of my upstairs bathroom on Thursday, and I promise that afterwards that you will weep with gratitude at the beauty that is your bathroom.
Laura, maybe you should call the washing machine repair place to get it fixed?
P/H, thank you. That will be my first line of defense someday when Baby Blue is old enough to complain about her room. We'll paint it! (Correction: I'll paint it! Then when it looks awful I'll only be able to blame myself.)
Jamie, I have my marching orders thanks to you -- now I need only the will to march. Mesh patches! Spackle! A spackle-knife thingy! I think I can, I think I can!
chichimama, if I am ever so lucky as to be able to persuade you to come over, I'll give you bread even if you don't paint anything. Perhaps you'd like some blondies to go with the bread?
Jeni, in MA it's code that bathroom light switches HAVE TO be outside the bathroom. Don't ask me why; I don't know. And the switch on our upstairs bathroom is inside, anyway. But pretty much everyone who's ever used our downstairs bathroom has taken at least a minute to find the light switch for it.
(Also, for Flickr, I just select "All sizes" and use the lovely code that Flickr writes for the size I want. Cut, paste, rinse, repeat.)
Mykal, we ended up getting super jets because *LG* insisted that was what we needed. Yes, my five-year-old is apparently in charge of making big-ticket appliance purchasing decisions. Well, that's what happens when no one else in the family can be reliably expected to, you know, decide something.
APL, your list gave me stomach pains from laughing. The upside down doors!
Love it, love it, love it. Perhaps we could make this a meme? I'll go around my house in the next couple of days and tkae some pictures of the things I hate about it.
I am loving the bathroom! Perhaps I will take pictures of MY pink bathroom and we can compare!
MB is a saint, he has many many other strengths.
Oh! And after this baby comes, I will come exchange time with your wonderful company for wallpaper stripping! Or repainting! As long as you give me parenting advice and LG entertains the babe.
This post is hilarious! I'm with Julie, though: it makes me wanna come up there and fix some of these things for you.
#14 is so totally easy to fix, that I promise you can do it. It's not even electrical. Turn off the power at the circuit breaker to be safe. Take out the night light and unscrew the plate. There are two screws holding the outlet into the junction box. Unscrew those. Don't even take any of the wires off, just twist the box so it's right-side up and put the two screws back in. Screw the faceplate back on.
#7 is even easier and can be improved on, if not fixed, for 50 cents or so. Get a white faceplate and put it on. Then you won't notice the switch anymore since it doesn't do anything. We've got three or four of those switches in the house that I don't have any idea what they do. But the one time we had a handy-dandy guy here doing some electrical work, I asked him about one of them and he just removed the switch and capped the wires. Turns out, I'm pretty sure, that it went to the junction box where a ceiling fan had been and when I installed the fan it won't work anymore, and I can't bring myself to try to mess with figuring out the wiring for the switch.
#10, as others have said, is pretty easy to get better, but not especially easy to make perfect. I fixed a hole in the wall like that for my mother-in-law a couple of years ago and it was so easy and turned out beautifully. So, full of confidence, I put a bunch of holes in our bathroom wall pulling out old towel racks and such. I never could get the patch to come out just right and spent forever trying to get the spackle just right. It looks OK, but you can definitely still see where I patched it now.
#1: I think you can get a replacement handle for about $2. Just undo one single screw (you can see it in your photo), put on the new one and screw it back in.
We've got all kinds of screwy electrical things in our house. Some previous owner went around and tightened all the screws holding outlets into the boxes so firmly that they all snapped. So all the outlets hang loose and threaten to break off when you pull out a plug. I've replaced a couple of the boxes, but it takes time and there are a lot of boxes in the house.
In my house, previous owners decided they HAD to have a circular staircase from the main floor into the basement. For some mysterious reason, they chose to put it less than 10 feet away from the normal staircase to the basement, in a place that means you would have tripped over the railing or fallen down the stairs on your way from front door to kitchen.
Someone between those people and me did remove the staircase. Unfortunately, they filled the hole with a chunk of plywood raised almost to floor level. The rest of the floor is 2-inch wide red oak hardwood.
I'm guessing the same people who filled the hole with plywood are the ones who tried to fix squeaks in the hall using nails with 1/4" diameter heads. Lots and lots of nails were used because the boards are only 2 inches wide. The floor still squeaks.
You all are too funny, and Mr. Blue and his parents are precious.
My parents recently learned that their furnace was set up in such a way that the entire house could go up in one big fireball. How long had this danger existed? About 80 years.
Maybe instead of Pixiefest 07, we should have our own version of Extreme Home Makeover at the Scribbler-Blue manse.
In MA it's code for bathroom lightswitches to be outside the door? Really?? None of mine are, and I have 3 1/2 baths. Hmmmm....
Oh, and on the subject of switches that don't do anything...
we have one in our hall. Our home inspector actually knew what it was for. There's a switched outlet on a support beam in our attic, so you can plug in a lamp and have some light up there switch-onable before you go up.
I agree the outlet thing is realatively easy. Even my INCREDIBLY UNHANDY DH was able to do outlet boxes before we moved in, after my dad showed him how. None of our outlets were 3-prong grounded outlets, and now all the ones in the living room and kitchen are both grounded AND GFI (Kitchen, anyway). Yay!
Wow! You really are as cool as I thought! I would need a whole series of posts to cover all the things messed up in our house (and we did major renovations 2 years ago, before we moved in)!! You know, you could always ask around for a dependable high school/college kid who would be willing to fix those things for a reasonable fee! Heck, if I lived near you, I'd offer to do it!
Congrats on the new dishwasher! I already KNOW I want one when we start having kids!
You are the funniest! My vote is to not change the orientation of the outlet in #14. We have the seemingly upside down outlets and my uncle (professional handyman extraordinaire) said it was beneficial to leave them that way -- basically a safety issue. With the outlets "upside down", the ground (ie, the prong that doesn't carry the current) is at the top; if anything falls on or touches the outlet as a child is plugging something in, no fires are set and no shock is incurred. Though you must teach those butterflies to fly upside down.... Cheers!
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