DIYnot

The other day, we spent about an hour wrestling with the thing pictured above.  The bathtub faucet drips and is pretty outdated, so we’re going to replace the whole kit and caboodle.  We needed to see what was under there, so after removing the faucet handle ($6 is totally worth it for a handle puller, BTW), we tried in vain to pry it off the wall.  Fortunately, we knew it would be a major bummer if we broke the tile in the process, so we were careful and didn’t.  Finally, I looked at our plumbing book, which promptly informed me that this thing is called an escutcheon (pronounced ih-SKUSH-un) and that it is threaded.  We had tried twisting, but it makes a huge difference knowing that it’s supposed to unscrew.  It gives you the confidence to apply the extra force needed to get the job done.  A minute later, it was off.  My motto, “read the book,” proves once again to be the best advice.  Too bad I didn’t follow it sooner!  But hey, we learned something and didn’t do any serious damage, so I’ll call it a success.

-Kelly

When we bought our house in July 2009, the wiring was seriously lacking.  All of the electrical outlets in the house were ungrounded.  Most were two-pronged receptacles, and a couple were three-pronged (though not grounded).  One had some streaky black marks above it, which I assume to be scorch marks from sparking when plugs were inserted or removed (although I haven’t seen any sparking when using this one).  There was actually still a fuse box in the garage, but as part of our contract, the seller paid for an electrician to put in a new panel with circuit breakers.  We put in all new circuits in the kitchen and part of the living room before we moved in.

The other thing we did before moving in was getting cable TV wired throughout the house, as we had no cable.  The cable guy looked at me like I was crazy when I informed him that all the cable would be run through the crawl space, rather than being stapled all over the outside of the house.  Fortunately, this was after we had done some of the electric wiring, so our experience + cable guy’s kickass 3-foot long drill bit and glow rod + three of us working together got the whole job done in the 2-hour window he had scheduled for new installation.

For the past few weeks since Matt moved his computer from the living room into the guest bedroom / office, we’ve had Cat-5e (ethernet) cable tacked to the ceiling in the living room, hallway, and office.  The router has to stay in the living room because we have TiVo.  His computer was also plugged into a non-grounded AND reversed-polarity outlet!  Someone messed up that circuit once upon a time.  Not me.  Nothing bad seemed to happen, but the whole thing made me nervous. 

Read More →