Despite my wife’s cries to the contrary, last year we turned the heat on earlier than we did this year. Last year it was September 29, this year we lasted until October 5. Though it probably helped that I was out of town all weekend. And yes, the temperature downstairs did reach a chilly 58 degrees this morning, about where it was at last year when we turned the heat on.

Hard to believe it’s already that time of year when our energy bill will double, triple, even quadruple. As much as I like fall, I’m not a fan of that energy bill.

The big crazy IKEA store opened in the Twin Cities today, and I had the, uh, pleasure of being there. We didn’t really plan on going opening day, it just sort of happened. If you know nothing about IKEA, it’s basically a giant, Swedish, assembly-required furniture store. The place was absolutely packed with people, and oddly enough I’ve never seen so many pregnant women in one place at one time.

Despite the massive crowds, the big blue IKEA lives up to its reputation. I found myself drooling over the $250 couches (yes, “some assembly required”; though the sofa-in-a-box I saw didn’t look much smaller than the assembled couch) and quality bookcases as cheap as $15. OK, when I say quality I’m not talking solid oak, carved by hand, but I am talking several steps up from the Target/K-Mart/Wal-Mart variety.

I especially fell in love with the Lenny office chair and the Poang chair. I’ve always wanted a good, comfy reading chair, though not something as sleep-inducing as a Lazy-Boy. A glider rocker would be ideal, though the prices are brutal. The Poang is ideal, and nice and compact. And I know the Lenny looks kind of frumpy, but when you realize how adjustable it is and how comfy that makes it, it’s a workhorse of an office chair. It’s no Herman Miller, but it’s peeked my curiosity more than any other office chair I’ve looked at.

So as you can imagine Abby and I will be thinking of ways we can maximize our space and all that. Or replace our frumptastic couch. Yikes.

Thankfully I’m off to Sonshine for the next three days.

This beautiful flowering weed thing is growing next to my house. The leaves are kind of spindly and ugly, but the flowers are beautiful.

Unexpected surprises. Yet another reason why I like weeds.

So guess where I spent 85 percent of my Memorial Day holiday? That’s right, in the bathroom. Thankfully this wasn’t a nightmare of the gastrointestinal variety, just the home repair type.

The bolts holding my toilet’s tank and bowl together started leaking because they’re old and rusty and it was a federal holiday. So I got up by 9 a.m. and figured I’d fix those bolts, fix the jiggly handle thing we’ve been having to do lately, and it’s such a nice day out maybe I’ll mow the lawn, too. If I’m lucky I can be done by lunch. Famous last words.

Of course the bolts were old and rusty, so they wouldn’t come out. The first one came out with a minimum of profanity, but the second one called for a whole new class of swear words. Not only were the bolt and wing-nut rusted together, but this bolt was against the wall where you really couldn’t get at it. I went to Sears for a bigger screw driver. No luck. I beat on it with a hammer (and any other tool I had lying around). Nothing. I tried a hacksaw. Not a chance. I tried WD-40. Nope.

Finally I decided to just drill the bolt out. Of course my cordless drill is of the wussy variety. The batteries were also dying, so that didn’t help. I borrowed a friend’s much less wussy cordless drill and that did the trick. Bolt popped out, tank came loose.

Now I just had to put everything back together. Turns out the water shut-off valve didn’t quite shut off right. Or it shut off too well. Now when I turn the handle nothing really happens. The toilet keeps filling at the same incredibly slow rate, and I can’t really flush. If I manually fill the tank with water it works just fine (so I know I fixed everything), but I think my shut-off valve is broken. All that after a good 8 hours of work. On what should have been a 20-minute job.

So today, rather than readjusting to work like everyone else does the day after Memorial Day, I’m going to be replacing my shut-off valve. Hopefully this doesn’t turn into an 8-hour ordeal. Thankfully a friend is coming over to help. He’s done plumbing work before and is actually installing a second bathroom in his house. My only experience with plumbing is yesterday when I forgot to wear a belt and had to keep hitching up my pants.

This is what being a homeowner means. Every three or four months you have to sacrifice an entire day off a 20-minute project. In this case, two entire days.

UPDATE: (Wednesday, June 2, 2004)
You may flush at will. The second day of fixing my toilet went without a snag, and everything seems to be flushing fine now, thanks. I even learned a tiny bit about plumbing.

And yes, thank you Abby for mowing the lawn on Monday.

Nothing like being subtlely chastised by your neighbor about your creeping charlie and then spending your entire Saturday working in the yard. I planned to get up and skip a shower, then mow the lawn early and shower afterwards so I could get on to some real work. So much for that plan. I didn’t get that shower until 6:30.

And now my arms hurt. And I’m sunburnt. But my yard looks nice.

Stupid neighbors.

Today I finally got around to tinkering with the snowblower my neighbor is letting me borrow this year. She broke her wrist a while back and has never been able to start the thing since, so it’s just been collecting cobwebs in her garage. She said if I could get it started I was more than welcome to use it this winter. I’m all about free stuff, so I took her up on the deal (and offered to snowblow her driveway and sidewalk if necessary).

After a call home to dad, a trip to the hardware store, and about three other trips to get the oil, gas, and a gas can (not in that order), and about 45 minutes of tinkering, the Toro Snowpup started. I’m pretty inept when it comes to motorized stuff (the guy at the hardware store showed me where I could adjust something with a screwdriver, and I asked what that actually adjusted, knowing full well that I wouldn’t understand what the carburetor does anyway), so I’m pretty proud of myself. I didn’t even have to swear.

That’s two handyman projects in three weeks. Not to shabby.

The other day I moved my office into the smaller extra room in our house, paving the way for a more useful home (guest bedroom, library, study, and eventually — no, not anytime soon — bedroom for our first born). I figured I’m better off getting used to the smaller office now.

As part of the whole move, I decided I needed a small table to make better use of the corner under my slanted ceiling. I opted to build the table. $11.76 and a full day later, it’s in place and ready to go. Never in my life have I had a building project come together so easily and be so free of flaws. I’m just a regular Bob Vila. Check it out:

We have heat. We finally turned our heat on today, after the temperature in our living room dipped to a chilly 58 degrees Fahrenheit this morning. I had somebody scheduled to inspect our boiler this morning, and I wanted to hold out for them before turning it on. It’s not that I expected any problems, I just wanted to be safe. And I’ve never lived in a home with radiator heat where I was responsible for the boiler. It turns out the system was low on water and I needed to vent the radiators, so it’s a good thing I waited (though I don’t know how bad that would have been — probably just inefficient.

Of course we did pay the price. My wife and I (and Speak) have been absolutely freezing for the past week. This weekend was really the worst, though it hit rock bottom this morning. For a while things were worse than when I stay at my mom’s house, where her frugal heating approach means 62 degree nights. However, my wife and I have a down comforter, and that makes all the difference.

I didn’t mean to tear my porch apart. It just sort of happened. Trying to stop the hose from leaking lead to filling in a mouse hole which lead to ripping boards off my back porch. Soon I had exposed the rotting underbelly of my porch, launching an all-weekend project.

My name is Kevin Hendricks, and I have home repair syndrome. I am somehow able to ignore all responsibilities for the day and launch into a project, no matter how large. What amazes me is that other times I can completely ignore a project, no matter how simple the task. Several weeks ago we bought new smoke and carbon monoxide detectors. That’s a pretty easy job. They’re still sitting in the package. Yet finding one loose board enabled me to rip out several others and redo my back porch.

Fortunately, I’m almost done and life can return to normal. I still have to do some painting and cut and install the actual threshold, but the hard part is behind me. What did I actually do? I replaced a rotting board that was serving as a threshold, a rotting floor board that was, well, rotting, and installed some fascia and flashing to protect everything from the elements. I also added a new board to the whole threshold structure so I can actually have a threshold. Now all that’s left is to add the aluminum threshold that will cap everything and make it look nice.

In the process I also learned more about the construction of my porch than I wanted to know. Though my house was built in 1910, the back porch appears to be a later add-on. It looks like a do-it yourself job, and it’s probably been shored up a few times. I did my best to shore up what I could without ripping the entire porch down — which was an ugly option. At one point I could see the dirt-floored crawl space below my porch, and the three floor joists supporting my porch. The outside joist was rotting away, clearly offering little support. A true handyman would have ripped half the siding off, jacked up the porch and removed this faulty beam. But I’m just a simple man. I gouged out what rotted wood I could and built a concrete block support for the corner to keep things from getting worse. Not exactly the best solution, but a solution I could handle.

Of the other two floor joists, only one appeared to be supporting any weight. This board looked rather weathered as well, and it had additional support beams tacked on to each side. We added a short fourth board so we would have something solid to drill into. Someday I fear this porch is just going to be a pile of old boards. But as long as the pile of crap is level, it should be OK.

Aside from the floor joists, I could also examine the crawl space. It looked OK, except for the daylight coming through on the far side. Under my deck there appears to be a break in the foundation wall. I don’t know if that was an access point at one time or just a hole, but someone forgot to fill it in. There was no evidence of animals living down there, but who knows how much water seeps through that hole and into my basement. Lifting deck boards will be the only way to address that problem, and I’m not going there now.

I’m no expert, but the other bothering part of my porch construction was the walls. After removing a few boards, it was pretty clear that my walls had been anchored to the floor boards, not the joists. There wasn’t even an attempt to secure them properly in any sense. So at this point my walls were hanging free. Again, a true handyman would have known what to do: rip the wall down and start over. But I’m just a simple man. I looked the other way. In owning an old home, I’ve found that’s really the best defense. There’s only so much you can do, unless you’re somehow paid full-time to work on your own home. And if that’s the case, you only have to face the fury of your wife.

So the downside was I spent most of Friday, parts of Saturday, and a good chunk of Sunday working on my porch. I’ll probably be spending a few hours of my Monday or Tuesday finishing up. On the plus side, my porch threshold is now weatherproofed and slightly more stable.