Tricia's Musings

Random Thoughts about life in general, living in the big city of Toronto



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We finally fixed that dripping shower

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Ever since we moved into our house in 2001 and we’ve had problems with the shower in the basement. You see it drips – a lot!

My husband has changed the shower head and that didn’t stop the dripping. He also tried a few other things to fix the shower and still it dripped. So, since he’s the main one in the house that uses the shower he started turning off the water supply for the shower after he has a shower. For a long time that seemed to stop the constant dripping as the water supply to the shower was only on when the shower was being used. However, recently the shower started dripping again even when the water supply was shut off on the pipes outside the bathroom.

I rarely use the bathroom in the basement, but I was down there last Friday and I realized that the constant dripping of the shower head was making a very moist environment. In fact, the shower appeared to have some mold in it. So when my husband came home from work that evening I told him we had to try to do something about the shower’s constant drip.

So on Saturday my husband got busy trying to fix the shower. First he took care of the possible mold problem by washing down the shower walls with a bleach and water solution (several times). Then he tried to take the hot and cold water faucets off the shower. Maybe we just needed to put a washer inside?

Now I have to tell you that while I wanted him to fix the shower I wanted him to do so without having to spend any money on it. Our funds are very low these days and we just can’t afford to get new Moen faucets for the shower right now. Not if we can help it!

Of course things went wrong. He got one of the shower faucets if no problem, added a washer (as suggested by one of the guys at Home Depot) and that stopped the dripping for the cold water. However he had a lot of trouble getting the hot water faucet off and when he did he couldn’t get the two pieces apart to add a washer.

He decided to take the part to Home Depot to see if he could find an inexpensive replacement. I think they laughed at him! The part is apparently about 25 years old and not easy to replace. Even a specialty plumbing store didn’t help!

I started to think this was going to turn out like our kitchen tap story! Remember a few months ago I posted about how Chris was trying to take the Brita filter off our kitchen tap and ended up breaking the end … causing us to have to buy a whole new set of kitchen faucets? Yeah that was fun!

In the end we didn’t have to spend any money on new faucets or smaller replacement parts. Instead we took one of the plumbing specialists suggestions and soaked the faucet part in vinegar for several hours to remove some of the corrosion on the fixture. Then, yesterday evening, my husband used two wrenches to carefully pry to pieces apart. He added a washer, put the parts together again and installed the faucet in the shower where it had been before and ta da! It seems to have worked. No drip, drip, drip!

I really have to be careful when I ask my husband to do home repairs! It seems to always cost us more money and or frustration than we think it will!

At least the water bill should be a little bit lower now. I’m sure all that dripping was wasting a lot of water. Plus, now that the shower area won’t have a constant supply of moisture the room and shower stall should hopefully be mold and mildew free. I hope!

Have you ever tried to do what seems like it should be a small home repair only to end up spending way more time and money than you ever thought you would to fix the problem?





Perfect weekend for getting things done around the home

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Chris was busy today while I lay like a lump on the couch. Yeah, my Crohn’s is up to no good again.

We have three screen doors on our house, two at the front and one at the back and all of the handles started not working properly earlier this year. The doors just didn’t latch closed when they shut. So Chris spent some time replacing two of the handles and then with my help he rehung the screen door at the back that had been rubbing in one corner at the base – which of course caused it to not close properly.

Now that we’re starting to get nicer weather and want to have the doors open more often to let air in, it’s important that the screen doors close securely. I mean, we live on a busy street and our dog could literally push the doors open if we didn’t make sure they closed properly.

Tomorrow, if it’s not raining and if I’m feeling a bit better I have a few more seeds to plant in the garden and then we might go out shopping at some electronics stores. Our Home Theater stopped working, oh … about two years ago and we’ve tried everything to get it working again, but it just won’t work.

Every time we turn on the Home Theater system we get an “overload” message. We’ve unplugged various addons from the back (DVD player, cd player etc) to see if that helped and it didn’t, we’ve also plugged the machine into a different outlet and that didn’t help either. Then, about two weeks ao, on the advice of a salesperson at an electronics store Chris took the Home Theater apart and checked to see if the heat sink was covered in dust (it wasn’t) and checked for fuses inside the machine. We did find about 5 fuses but none of them looked blown so I guess the system is just plain blown and we’ll have to replace it.

So … maybe tomorrow we’ll go out and see if we can find a new home theater system receiver (without speakers and subwoofer since we have those) that isn’t too expensive and see if that will work. I really miss having the home theater system. I mean, we can’t watch DVD’s easily anymore and I can’t listen to CD’s unless I put them on the computer. I know I’d listen to a lot more music if we could get the home theater system working again.

Anyway, I guess since it looks like it will continue to rain on and off all weekend we’re just going to get things done around the house – mostly inside stuff unless the weather really clears up.

What are you doing this weekend? Are you going out to do something interesting or just doing home maintenance stuff like we are?

My husbands 150 dollar mistake

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Why do guys tinker with things that don’t really need fixing? Why???

Last weekend Chris was in the basement cleaning up our tool area when he found our old Brita “on tap” water filter. The one that we had on our kitchen faucet had been leaking a little bit so Chris came up with the great idea that he’d just put the old Brita filter back on. (of course I think we replaced the old filter because it was leaking …)

I think that Chris thought something was screwed into the end of the faucet so after removing the first Brita filter and trying to replace it with the old one (which didn’t work) he started prying away at the end of the faucet. I think he was doing that so that we could put the end cap back on the end of the tap – if he could find it in the basement where I’m sure he put it when he took it off so that the Brita Filter could be added to the tap.

The next thing I knew I heard swearing. Chris had somehow broken off a piece of the end of the faucet!

Chris’ tinkering of course meant that we needed to replace the whole kitchen facet! Why? Well when we turned on the water it pretty much sprayed all over since the end of the tap was broken. I guess it’s good that we aren’t totally broke, but it was an expense that we certainly didn’t need!

It was about 7 pm when we decided we needed a new tap so we rushed off to Home Depot. We had to go fast because it was closing at 8 pm! Once there we picked out a Moen facet – chrome to match our double sinks. It was something like $126 for the faucet, plus we bought some plumbers tape and putty to prevent leaks – all in all with tax it came to just under $150!

It’s one of those that have a long arching tap and a single levered handle to control the stream of water and temperature of water. Similar to our old one, but much nicer. The old facet was a very cheap set that the previous home owners must have put in when they “cheaply” redid the kitchen before selling.

I like faucets with a lever handle. Maybe it’s the nurse in me liking to keep things from getting contaminated, but if your hands are dirty you can just use your wrist or the side of your hand to flip the water on – that way the handle doesn’t get contaminated with whatever is on your hands that needs to be washed off.

The next day when Chris went into the basement to continue cleaning up the tool area and to try to clear out some of the clutter in the basement (we’re having our oil tank replaced in April so the basement needs to have some space to move around) I told him to stick to his work and not find things to fix or that would distract him from the job he was supposed to be doing! God know we don’t need any more expensive mistakes!

Guys! Geesh!

Grilling in my kitchen

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Earlier this evening, when Chris came home from work, I suggested to Chris that we get a Foreman Grill. I’d got a notice from a department store in our area that the G 2 EZ Broil grill was on sale.

We’ve been eating a lot of boneless Skinless chicken breasts lately and I’ve been getting kind of tired of baking them in the oven so I thought the grill might be a great addition to our kitchen appliances and I was fairly certain that I’d use it just about every day.

So when Chris got home from work I told him about the grill. I’d also looked up some reviews on that particular model to see how others liked it and it had good reviews, so we went out to the store to get one. We also stopped by a grocery store to pick up some salad making supplies and some hamburgers.

After getting the new grill out of the box and setting it up we grilled two hamburgers on it. man is that thing fast! Only five minutes and our burgers were done. Yummy!

Along with our hamburgers in Pita buns we had steamed veggies (carrots, broccoli and cauliflower) and I made a salad with baby mixed greens, grape tomatoes (none of the regular sized tomatoes were ripe enough in the store), cucumber, green pepper and a little feta cheese. We haven’t actually had a salad with our meals for quite a while so it was a very nice addition. Plus I made us each a big salad so it was filling too.

I already have some thawed chicken breasts in the fridge, so tomorrow we’ll have grilled chicken. Sunday perhaps we’ll have some of the Sole Fillets I bought last weekend. Hopefully everything cooks nicely on the grill!

Now if only I’d remembered to look for compact flash cards while we were in the store earlier I’d be set. I need a new one for my camera. Oh well … we still have the rest of the weekend.

I’m tired of freezing when I go to bed

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I’m starting to get sick and tired of our bedroom being freezing cold when I go to bed. Our master bedroom is the coldest room in the house in the winter. Changing into my PJ’s each night is quite the experience as I end up covered in goose-pimples! LOL

We live in an older house. It was build in 1927 and as a result it’s probably not quite as warm as newer homes. Our bedroom is upstairs at the end of a long hallway so that likely makes it harder for the cold air that builds up in the room to escape. Remember cold air goes down (as in down a staircase) and warm air goes upward.

When we moved in we had some duct work done including adding a cold air vent in the master bedroom. I’m sure this has helped to make the room warmer than it would have been without the cold air return vent, but it’s still pretty darn cold in the dead of winter.

We did have an electric heater that we’d use in the bedroom for the first hour or so after we went to bed, but it stopped working in early December and we haven’t replaced it yet. After suffering through a very cold January (February has been warmer here, but it will get colder soon) I think it’s time to buy a new heater.

I’m going to watch for an electric heater to go on sale and hope that I can get one for a good price soon.

Our last electric heater was a tall standing one that oscillated to move the warm air around the room, but I’ve been look at this Honeywell Cool Touch heater and it looks like it might fit the bill. The description says it will heat a large living space so it might be too powerful for our small master bedroom.

What we’d normally do with our old electric heater would be to turn it on when we’d come upstairs to use the washroom and wash up before bed so that it would take a bit of the chill out of the room before we’d have to go in there to get changed. It also had a timer on it so we could set it to run for only an hour or so. That would ensure that the room was warm as we were trying to fall asleep, but we usually didn’t need it to run all night. Not once the bed was warmed up anyway.

Do you find the the upstairs of your house is a lot cooler in the winter than the rest of your home? Do you use a heater in your bedroom or do you just suffer the cold?

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