Another one of THOSE projects...

Before: Ineffective microwave

My kitchen had an old built-in over-the-stove microwave/vent fan unit that turned out to be rather ineffective at both of these things.  It neither cooked things efficiently nor vented heat and smells from the stove very well.  After multiple days of heroic effort, my dad and I managed to get rid of the old microwave and install a new Broan APE 130 range hood vent fan in its place.

Broan has long been a top manufacturer of range hoods.  My parents have had the same one in their house for nearly 30 years.  I researched several of their models and ultimately picked this one because it got good reviews from customers, had manual controls instead of digital, and had an Energy STAR rating.  I was originally considering one of their QS or QP models, but they got pretty bad reviews from customers, who complained about shoddy construction and endless trouble with the digital controls.  Apparently the controls go bad and the clocks don't keep time well (which doesn't surprise me, as my little countertop microwave loses about 3 minutes every month).  Really, though, the last thing I need in my kitchen is another overly-bright digital display, and who needs digital fan controls anyway?  The model I got wasn't one of their quietest ones, but it seemed like the number of sones shown on the product specs was only for the lowest speed setting of the fan, and the lowest setting for this fan is higher than the quieter fans, so it's sort of misleading.  The fan isn't super quiet, but it's not too bad, and it's certainly much quieter than my parents' 30-year-old fan.  I think I might be able to quiet it down further by putting some kind of sound-dampening material on the ducting that connects it to the chimney.  A lot of the noise is actually the air hitting the ducting and not the fan motor itself.

Grease, holes, and mustard yelllow

This project went the way of most other home improvement projects, in that it took about 5 times as long as we expected and produced a multitude of intermediate steps that had to be completed before we could actually install the thing.  Yep, one of THOSE projects...  First, it took us a while to figure out how to remove the microwave.  Apparently there was a release catch we didn't notice that was supposed to unhook it from the wall-mounting bracket.  Instead, after a lot of yanking, it just sort of bent the bracket until it released by brute force.  Then, a bunch of wall plaster rained down on us.  For some reason, the cabinet above the microwave wasn't installed flush with the wall.  When the electricians rewired the house, they cut a hole in the wall, and the plaster fell into the gap and was sitting on top of the microwave.  Next, we removed the microwave mounting bracket.  It had been rather crudely screwed into the wall and took a lot of work to unscrew.

After cleaning, spackling, priming, and two coats of yellow

Then, of course, there were a bunch of holes in the wall, just like there are every time I do anything in my house.  After cleaning years of grease off the wall (the top half was mustard yellow and the bottom half white), I spackled the holes.  I primed the surface (the shellac-based primer is great for preventing grease from soaking into the wall and covering up old grease) and then painted it the same yellow as the rest of the kitchen.  The tile backsplash looks a little funny because it stops partway up the wall (the wall used to be covered my the microwave), but it will look better after I add some edging tiles to finish it off.

After: New Broan fan installed

Then we set about installing the new fan.  The fan hooks up to some ducting which vents it into the chimney, and the ducting runs through the cabinet above the stove.  Unfortunately, the hole in the bottom of the cabinet wasn't quite large enough, so I had to expand the hole with my jigsaw a couple of times until we had it right.  More mess everywhere.  After a bit more jiggering, we bolted the fan in place and got it hooked up.

Finally, we had to attach the ducting to the chimney.  When I first moved in, the ducting connecting the microwave's vent to the chimney was a sorry piece of dryer vent piping that someone had halfheartedly mashed in there.  Most of the air from the vent was venting into the cabinet itself instead of the chimney.  On a previous visit, my dad had spent several hours meticulously cutting some real ducting to size to connect it properly to the chimney.  Unfortunately, the new vent fan was a slightly different size and position, so he had to repeat this exercise.  Home Depot of course didn't have the size he needed, but he was able to get some from Burgeson's Heating and Air Conditioning, a local HVAC company with a very helpful staff.

The fact that my house has a chimney in that position tells me that there must have always been a stove or perhaps a water heater in this corner.  A capped off section goes through the wall to the back into what is now my bedroom.  Maybe there was a gas wall heater there.  The shaft also goes all the way down through the floor, as if it were meant to vent something under the house.  Perhaps this is the vent for the old floor furnace in the living room, which isn't too far away.  I need to go spelunking in the crawl space sometime; maybe that will give me some more clues.  Wikipedia seems to have a dearth of information on chimney and water heater history, but it does say that Europeans didn't start using chimneys until the 12th century.  Before that, peoples' houses were just full of smoke all the time.

My fault

An earthquake, even a little one like the one that woke me up in the middle of the night a few weeks ago, gives me a feeling of sheer terror and helplessness. If the Big One ever hits, I wonder not just what will be the practical repercussions for me but also if I'll react sensibly or just sit there frozen to the bed with my eyes wide and the adrenaline pumping while my house crumples around me and the San Andreas swallows me up.

In all actuality, this is unlikely to happen.  I mean, it's very likely that I will remain frozen in bed, but the likelihood of one's house crumpling down is far less than one's household possessions becoming flying projectiles.  Flying projectiles are a more likely source of injury in an earthquake than structural damage.  I've been researching this subject since I now live on top of the San Andreas fault.  Actually, if you're in bed when an earthquake hits, the safest thing for you to do is to stay there and put a pillow over your head.  Maybe I'll survive after all.

The San Andreas fault cuts through California north to south. Check out this map of the approximate location of the San Andreas fault.  If you zoom in to Redlands (directly east of Los Angeles), you can see that the fault traces the base of the mountain range just north of town.  This is literally in my back yard.  The San Andreas is the big one, but there are a ton of other smaller faults all over the place around here.  Little earthquakes, mostly too small to feel, are happening all the time.  You can view an interactive map of recent earthquakes from USGS if you want to feel a bit paranoid.

There are things you can do to make your house safer in the event of a big quake.  You can install expensive structural reinforcements and bolt your house to its foundation, but it's probably more important to take care of the flying projectile problem.  Don't leave a lot of nick-knacks around, or use museum putty to stick them onto the surfaces they sit on.  Make sure top-heavy furniture is strapped to the wall.  This isn't a problem for me, as I don't really have any furniture at all. You actually can't sell a house here with a hot water heater that isn't strapped to the wall.  They're not legally allowed to write you a deed or whatever.

I decided I should secure my kitchen cabinets so that heavy dinnerware wouldn't fly out of them if the house starts shaking.  This seemed simple, but of course it wasn't.  I initially purchased a package of plastic hook latches that go on the inside of the cabinets, specifically meant for earthquake-proofing.  The hooks have to be manually flexed in order to open.  If you just pull them they get caught in a little catch.  It's basically a glorified baby-proofing latch.  However, it required quite a lot of strength to push the hooks over the catches, and it was too annoying for cabinets I open and shut regularly.  I tried it for a week and decided it wasn't going to work for me.

So, I looked around online for other earthquake-proofing products.  I saw a few products that were supposed to only lock during a quake.  One had a hook that supposedly would drop down only when shaking is occurring.  It looked dubious to me because it would be nearly impossible to test, and you wouldn't find out if it worked until it actually mattered.  Also, since the direction of shaking isn't predictable, how can you guarantee that it would shake in the right way to send the hook into place?  Another product remained locked with a plastic hook until you push the cabinet door inward, and then it releases the catch.  This also seemed dubious to me.  If the shaking were strong enough and the cabinet door heavy enough, couldn't the force of the shaking press the door inward by itself, thus releasing the catch?

Barrel bolt (from the Home Depot catalog)

I gave up on earthquake-proofing products and decided to just install sturdy latches on the cabinets.  I had this brilliant idea to put barrel bolts on them, the kind of cylindrical sliding latches you see on bathroom stall doors.  By "brilliant idea", I actually mean "very Dumb idea, and poorly executed".  I decided that I should install the latch with bolts that went all the way through the cabinet door.  The cabinets are particleboard, and I figured that wood screws would just rip out if put under sufficient strain, whereas a bolt secured by a nut on the other side wouldn't budge.  Okay, that part is still brilliant.  The next part is Dumb.  I drilled a bunch of holes through my cabinet door to secure the latch in place.  I put the latch on and then realized to my chagrin that the bolts/nuts stuck out through the back of the door and hit the cabinet frame, preventing the door from actually shutting.  Duh!  So I drilled a bunch more holes higher up on the cabinet door so the bolts wouldn't hit the frame.  I installed the latch.  I tested the latch by pulling on the cabinet door handles.  The doors swung outward, and the cylindrical barrel bolt just slid right out of its catch.  It did no good whatsoever.  Barrel bolts don't work when both sides are on movable surfaces.

I generally pride myself on my mechanical aptitude, but perhaps I should reevaluate.  Ah, whatever.  I blame it on The Dumb.

Spring-loaded hook latch catch thingy

After thoroughly investigating all my other latch options, I finally settled on some spring-loaded hook latch catch thingies (there must be an official name for these) like what you would see on the outside of a toolbox.  I drilled some more holes in my cabinet door and installed one of them.  It was perfect!  It's easy to open when you need to, but it won't open when it's locked.  My plates and bowls can fly around inside the cabinets as much as they like, but they won't be able to escape and decapitate me.  I secured the latches with bolts that go all the way through the cabinet, and I used lock washers to hold the nuts in place so they don't loosen up over time.

One of my cabinet doors has a bunch of holes in it, and my kitchen is ugly!  But it isn't my fault, I had to drill the holes to keep the cabinets shut. It's The Dumb's fault that they didn't work in the first place. But the San Andreas made me drill the holes to latch the cabinets to keep me safe in the first place...second place.  It's your fault!

Dispenser of happiness

I haven't done any major work lately, just a lot of little things to improve my quality of life.  None of these things are particularly interesting.  I was going to write one interesting thing related to each one, but I got distracted reading about the history of toilet paper.  So, I'll give you the list of dull but life-improving things I've done and then write about toilet paper for a while.

• I put up a fluorescent light over my kitchen counter.  This was super easy and makes it much easier to see when I'm cooking.
• I put up a more convenient towel hook in the kitchen.  Yay.
• I installed a better rack of hooks in the bathroom.  This simple project went the way of other simple projects.  I took the old rack of hooks off the door where it was hung and discovered that the door had been painted around it and that there was a hole in the door behind it.  I spackled the door and painted and put up the new hooks.
• I finally patched the bathroom ceiling around where the new vent fan was installed.  I ended up using the same method I used for the walls, and it went fine.
• I got a new shower head in the bathroom.  I didn't like the harsh spray from the old one, and it was so gunked up with minerals that an hours-long vinegar soak didn't help it.
• I installed a better toilet paper dispenser. 

Old Dumb toilet paper holder

New non-Dumb toilet paper holder

My toilet paper dispenser replacement falls under the category of "Dumb reduction" in addition to "quality of life improvements".  The old toilet paper holder was one of those fancy designer toilet paper holders that's shaped like a ring and only has one connection to the wall.  The toilet paper roll slides onto the ring.  However, the single point of connection with the wall means the thing is doomed to always unscrew itself and spin on its axis.  Mine ended up kind of upside down at one point.  Also, it was just screwed into the wall plaster, which is kind of precarious for something that is pulled, bumped, and jostled so often.  I decided it had to go.  I bought an equally nice-looking non-fancy non-designer toilet paper holder of the traditional kind for about $4 and screwed it into the hardwood window frame. It's so nice to not be annoyed every time I go to use the toilet.

Toilet paper was used in China as early as 1500 years ago.  Toilet paper as a commercial good in the United States was introduced in 1857 and was sold in packets of flat sheets.  Rolls and dispensers didn't come about until later.  Unsurprisingly, Americans use more toilet paper per capita than people anywhere else in the world.  More surprisingly (to me, anyway), people in other developed countries don't use toilet paper at all.  In parts of Europe, people commonly use bidets to wash with water.  My family in Greece have bidets in their bathrooms, but I could never really figure out the mechanics and practicality of how one was supposed to use them.

Of course, throughout the ages, people have used a wide variety of things for cleaning themselves after going to the bathroom.  Things like leaves, sticks, hay, moss, seaweed, wool or fur, hemp, rags, corncobs, fruit skins,  rocks, sand, sea shells, snow, sponges.  Sears catalogs were popular for this purpose in rural America.  The Wikipedia article on anal cleansing is actually quite fascinating and well worth a read.  It's an age-old problem, and toilet paper isn't the only solution to it.

And now, I'm off to bed, after a quick trip to the potty.

Thermostasis

I got a programmable thermostat!  This is one of several easy quality-of-life improvements I've made recently.  More on quality-of-life improvements another time.  For now, here's a long, rambling post about thermostats.

Prior to 1996, my house had no central climate control system.  There was a large gas floor heater in the living room and no other heat, even in the bedrooms.  I think there might have been a built-in wall AC in the kitchen, since it's obvious that the wall above the kitchen sink has been patched in a big square shape, and there was a 220V outlet up there.  It must have been really hot in the summer and pretty chilly in the winter.  I have a pretty high heat tolerance, but the apartment where I lived before I moved in here would get up to about 95F inside during the summer if I didn't use the AC, and that's a bit much even for me.

The lady who bought my house in 1996 did a lot of work, including modernizing the kitchen and bath and installing the central heating and cooling system.  I'm not overly fond of the forced-air heat.  It blows a warm hurricane of air into the rooms when it gets cold but doesn't heat evenly and dries out the air terribly.  If I had an infinite amount of money, I would hire a commercial plumber to install a hot water radiator system.  Still, forced air heat is much better than no heat, or uncontrollable heat, which is what I had in my old apartment.  Controllable heat is a good thing.

Thermostats were invented during the scientific revolution.  The earliest known one was from the early 1600s and was used for a chicken incubator.  They didn't really become common until they were needed for textile mills in the industrial revolution.

The thermostat that was here when I moved in did its job, but it wasn't programmable.  You could set a temperature, and it would stay there, but you couldn't set different temperatures for different times of day.  My thermostat is in the living room, which is generally chilly.  At night, the heat runs and tries to warm up the living room.  Meanwhile, it is pumping more and more heat into my bedroom, which stays warmer because it has fewer windows and less exterior wall space. I would go to bed freezing, but then it would get warmer and warmer and warmer as the night went on, and I would wake up sweating at 4am.  This was neither comfortable nor energy efficient.

Additionally, the old thermostat seemed overly eager to keep the temperature exactly at the temperature you set.  It would turn on, heat for 5 minutes, and then go "I'm hot!" and turn off.  Then 5 minutes later, the temperature would have dropped a small amount, and the thermostat would go "I'm cold!" and turn on again.  It would cycle on and off frequently, which also isn't very energy efficient.

I researched different types of programmable thermostats quite a bit, trying to find the right one.  There's a popular model on the market right now called the Nest, which is a highly-computerized thingy that programs itself based on how you set it during a training period.  I read very mixed reviews of it and ultimately decided it wasn't for me.  However, my aunt and uncle had been given a Nest as part of a solar panel installation, but they absolutely hated it and generously offered to give it to me.  So, I ended up with a Nest after all.

Swapping out my thermostats went pretty much the same way my other house projects have gone.  I took the old thermostat off the wall and discovered that there was a sizable hole in the wall where the thermostat wires come through.  That's not good because then all the cold air from under the house pours through the hole onto the thermostat's temperature sensor, so it doesn't get an accurate reading of the temperature inside the house.  Also, when the living room was last painted, they painted around the thermostat.  Of course.

I spackled the hole and did something I thought was rather clever.  I got a plastic thimble from a sewing kit I had, cut a hole in the back, and used that as a sheath around the thermostat wires.  I spackled the thimble into the wall so that there's only a small hole for the thermostat wires, but something they can easily slide in and out of.  Smart, eh?  Then I painted the wall.

The Nest thermostat hooked up easily.  The digital user interface is easy enough to use, but it connects to your wi-fi network so you can control it from your computer or mobile device.  The control panel is simple if somewhat glitchy.  I really like that it shows you how much the system was in use, including the total number of hours per day it was running and a breakdown of exactly when.  I don't know if this information is terribly useful, but it's fun to look at.

I gave up on the training period after a few days and just programmed it the way I wanted it myself.  Overall, the Nest strikes me as overly engineered.  Really, I don't need my thermostat to learn my habits when I can just tell it what my habits are and what I want.  It has a motion sensor and puts your heating system into "away" mode when it thinks you aren't around in order to save energy.  However, since the thermostat is in the living room, and I still don't have any living room furniture and consequently don't spend much time in there, and since I don't move around the house when I'm asleep, it thought I was never home and always turned the heat off.  Thankfully, it lets you turn off the motion sensing function.

Despite these flaws, it's working very well, and my house has been much more comfortable since I installed it.  I hope to see a decrease on my gas bill as well, but the weather's been mild, so it will be hard to compare.

Revisiting The Dumb: false drawer front panels

Recall that there exists and all-pervading force in the Universe called The Dumb which constantly seeks to exert itself.  It commonly manifests in the design of mass-manufactured products.  You know those fake panels in front of sinks that look like drawers but are actually just fake panels?  Yeah, those.  Those are surrounded by a huge and infectious cloud of Dumb.

The first thing I did when I got the keys to my house was to walk around and do a thorough inspection of everything.  I opened up every closet and cabinet and drawer.  And, of course, when I got into the kitchen and approached the false drawer panel in front of the sink, I succumbed to The Dumb.  I pulled the darn thing right off.  I knew it wasn't a drawer, but I still yanked on the drawer pull that was on it and ripped it out.

Further inspection of the panel showed me that it was actually supposed to open (so having a drawer pull on it wasn't necessarily completely Dumb). It was supposed to pivot out from the top so you could store sponges in a little pocket inside.  Dumb Number One: Eeew!  Why would you store sponges in an enclosed plastic pocket that would get all slimy and where you can't reach them when you need them?  Dumb Number Two: The springs on the pivot mechanism were too strong for the particleboard that makes up the panel, which is why the mounting screws just ripped right out of it. Dumb Number Three: The panel wasn't mounted using all the screw holes anyway.

Dumb reduction - false drawer front panel installed

I tried to put the thing back together and remount it, but the particleboard was too damaged to put the screws back in.  I tried epoxying it, but it didn't hold.  So, I decided to forgo the spring pivot mechanism and mount it permanently in place.  I didn't want the Dumb sponge pocket anyway.  I tried to use L brackets or corner brackets, but there wasn't enough space to reach a drill up between the sink and the panel, so that didn't work.  I went to both Home Depot and Lowes to ask for what hardware I should use to mount the stupid thing, and nobody at either store had anything useful to say.  Some internet research finally yielded the way to do it right.  They make some little plastic clips that you glue or screw to the panel.  They flex enough to pop the panel into place, and the catch holds them against the counter.  I have no idea why they don't carry these at home improvement stores or why their employees don't know about them.  It seems like something everyone with a kitchen would need at some point.

Sponge holder

Anyway, once I got my clips in the mail, I stuck them on and popped the thing in place in about 15 minutes.  No more hole in my cabinetry!  Oh, and I have a little wire rack sponge holder that sticks inside my sink with suction cups.  My sponge can dry out in the open air, and it doesn't leave a puddle next to the sink when I set it down.

Spectrophotometer

Bassoon room patch - light green

Living room wall patch - red

This weekend, I touched up the wall paint in the areas where I patched the holes cut by the electricians during the house rewiring.  My house's previous owner told me that she researched colors that would have been used in a Craftsman-style bungalow in the 1920s and had the colors she picked out custom mixed.  She chose a deep red for the living room walls.  I don't think I would ever have been bold enough to paint it that color myself, but I actually really like it.

Custom-mixed colors can be problematic when you need to match them for touch-up painting.  It used to be very difficult.  However, these days, paint stores can match paint color samples electronically using a spectrophotometer.  It shines a white light at the paint sample and measures the wavelengths of the reflected light.  The detector has a bunch of filters that let through only light of a very specific wavelength.  It tries all the different filters and measures the amount of light reflected from the paint sample that is able to pass through each.  This way, the computer knows how much of each wavelength makes up the color.  The computer then calculates the mix of paint pigments that would replicate the color.

I didn't get to use a spectrophotometer for this project, though.  Maybe I'll do it just for fun some day.  For this project, conveniently, I found all the right paint colors in the garage, left by the previous owner.  Some of the paint was still good, but the red living room paint was all chunky and gross.  I just took it to Lowes, where she bought it, and they were able to replicate the custom color using the numbers from the sticker on the can.  Their numbering scheme presumably has to do with the relative amounts of each pigment, as well as the type of base paint and the shininess (eggshell, satin, etc.).

Bedroom patch - darker green

Kitchen patch - yellow

My wall patching is officially complete, and I would say it was highly successful.  The patches blend right in.  You can still see them if the light is right because the texture doesn't match the rest of the wall, but you wouldn't notice them if you weren't looking for them.

(Note that the colors in the photos here aren't very true to the actual colors on the wall.  My phone doesn't take very good pictures, but you get the idea.)

Patching lath and plaster wall holes

One of my wall holes, with new wires

As you might recall from my previous post about Wiring and The Dumb, I had my house rewired immediately after I bought it.  The electricians had to cut some small holes in the wall in order to run the new wires.  I have now (finally) successfully patched those wall holes.

Prior to the popularization of drywall in the 1950s, interior walls were made of lath and plaster.  The

Lath and plaster wall, from Wikipedia

lath (thin wood slats) formed the wall, and the plaster was placed onto the lath. The plaster kind of oozed between the cracks in the lath, and when it hardened, the oozed part helped hold the whole thing up.

Naturally, my walls are lath and plaster and not drywall.  This post is about how to patch holes in a lath and plaster wall.

The procedure goes like this:

1. Clean the hole to remove loose wood shavings or bits of plaster.
2. Glue some sort of backing behind the hole.
3. Mix up some plaster material and put it in the hole on top of the backing.  If you didn't manage to get the hole all the way filled, you will need to do another coat after the first is dry.
4. Sand down the patch to be flush with the wall, if your trowel work was suboptimal (mine certainly was).
5. Prime paint the new surface.
6. Apply the top coats of paint to match the rest of the wall.

You need to put a backing behind the hole so you have something for the plaster to stick to.  They make special screen material for this purpose, or you can do what I did and just use some paint stirrers and glue them in as a sort of artificial lath.  Home Depot and Lowes give away paint stirrers for free (yay!).  I cut the paint stirrers to the correct sizes for each of the holes.  I even wrote my name and the date on them in case anyone deconstructs the wall at some point and bothers to notice the patches.  I drilled two little holes in each of the sticks.  This was to help me hold them in place while I was gluing them to the inside of the walls.  I set them into place on the wall's interior surface with some wood glue where they were to join the real lath, threaded some brass wire through the holes, and tied off the brass wire around some pencils to hold them in place while the glue dried.  It worked very well, and the wood glue dried quickly and very solidly.

When all the holes had their backing, I had to do the plaster.  At the recommendation of the guys at Home Depot, I went with Rapid Set® OnePass® Wall Repair and Joint Compound.  This stuff was pretty easy to work with.  You just mix it with water (trying not to breath in too much of the dry powder, which isn't good for you), and then daub it into the holes with a trowel.  I didn't have a lot of luck with my trowels.  I think my trowel work needs some practice.  The holes were kind of deep, and I found that the plaster would sag at the bottom of the hole and hollow out at the top, so I had to do two coats to get it flush with the surface all around.  For mixing this stuff, up, an old aluminum pot worked really well because the chemical didn't eat it, and if you don't use all the plaster, it will harden and then break off, so you can reuse the pot (obviously not for cooking).

Drying plaster patch

After sanding

After priming

The OnePass package claimed it would dry in 20 minutes, but I wasn't convinced that it was really, fully dry until the next day.  It didn't matter anyway because I procrastinated another month or so before I got around to doing a second coat and then sanding it down.  At least the holes were plugged. They had been contributing massively to cold air drafts.   But, after applying a second coat, I sanded them down to get them truly flush with the wall surfaces.  A power sander was invaluable here.  It would have taken me ages to do it by hand.  Wear a dust mask, and be ready to spend a lot of time cleaning up dust afterwards.

After the sanding was done and I wiped up all the dust, I prime painted the new surfaces.  Note: Don't use the disposable spongy paint brushes with shellac-based primer because it's so watery that the spongy brushes just swell up and become useless.


The next step (when I get inspired) will be to do the top coat of paint.  I don't know the exact paint colors, so I will have to see if they can be matched.  Stay tuned for a post about paint color matching technology at some point.

Oh, and there are still some holes in my closet and bathroom ceilings that I have to fix, but that's a project for another day.