Remember a couple of months back when I broke the faucet in my tub so the plumber had to tear apart Mom's bathroom wall to fix it? Yeah, well, Mom decided that since I already had to patch the drywall, I should paint the walls. And while I was making the walls, I should re-grout the tile walls in her shower. And since I had to mix grout anyway, I should replace the tile floor. And since I was going to have to pull up the toilet to replace the floor, I should replace the toilet. And that's how we got here:

The only hitch was -- surprise, surprise -- the bathtub faucet. I removed it to clean it and get at the tile behind it. However, when I put it back together... drip, drip, drip. I really should have known better. Fortunately this repair was as easy as replacing two small gaskets and applying some elbow grease. Which is good, as I had already repainted the walls.

Overall, I'm happy with the work. The shower tiles still look an uneven mess, but I couldn't correct that without re-tiling the shower entirely. There's only so much that one man can do in two weeks. I do have to get my 10 hours of sleep a night, you know.

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For Valentine's Day, my mother gave me a sexually suggestive greeting card featuring Batman. In return, I flooded the guest bathroom.

The diverter, that little knob that sends the water from the tub spout up to the shower head, wasn't doing its job in my shower. So I did what any semi-competent handyman would do: I decided to fix it. All I had to do was unscrew the spout from the wall and replace it, right? What I didn't recognize at the time was that was the premise for every episode of Home Improvement.

A 4-hour visit from a plumber and 685 dollars later, I have a brand new, fully-functional spout and knob. The water pressure is great! Plus, I still get to do some diy work because I now have to replace the giant square of drywall and 2-by-4s that had to be removed to get to the pipes I broke.

So that's how we do Valentine's Day in my house: wet and inappropriate.

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After the last two weeks of plumbing disasters, I think I'm going to have to swear off bathroom repairs once and for all.

Last week: I took it upon myself (with no small amount of prompting from my mother) to fix the slow drip in my brother's guest bathroom. Despite all of my might, the stupid Moen Posi-Temp 1222 cartridge embedded in the tub faucet would not budge. Not with the official Moen replacement tool, not with a wrench, not with a hammer. I know when I'm out-matched: rather than risk breaking the pipes permanently, I called a plumber.

At least it wasn't just me. When the plumber arrived -- at 4:45PM the same day, a Friday! -- he admitted that it was the most stubborn sink cartridge he'd seen in at least 15 years. I'm sure he said that to soothe my ego, and it worked. It turned out that some knucklehead had overheated the pipe when soldering with the cartridge already in place, causing the rubber gaskets to fuse to the pipe walls. I'm certain that Moen doesn't cover "installer stupidity" in their Lifetime Guarantee.

[For the record, wriphe.com 100% endorses Tom Donnelly Plumbing. If you're in Dublin and your tub has started floodin', call Tom Donnelly.]

Yesterday: while trying to make my father's bathroom more handicapable following his foot surgery, I tightened the tank bolts and replaced the wax ring below his leaky toilet. Trying to maneuver the toilet back into place in the cramped space, I managed to spill toilet trap water all over my shoes and the floor. Of course, I promptly slipped -- Jerry Lewis would have been so proud -- dropping the toilet and breaking the base of the intake valve. This necessitated a third trip to Home Depot on the day to buy a replacement valve, a trip during which my car window motor broke in the down position. Grrr.

Finally, at 10PM, I got the toilet into place and turned the water back on, only to discover that the new intake valve stem and the existing water line don't play well together. So in the end, I replaced a leak at the base of the toilet with a leak at the tank. Truly a worthwhile endeavor.

[For the record, wriphe.com is 100% opposed to Oldsmobiles. If your car's AC is running hot and its electrical system's not, you're driving an Oldsmobile.]

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Before:

After:

This and a kidney stone pretty much sum up my July 2011. What did you do this month?

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After my mother chewed me out for my niggardly approach to home repair, I got off my bum and tore the cabinets out of the kitchen. This necessary work had been much delayed, party because I'm lazy, and partly because it was really a two-man job. If you've ever read any of my other DIY exploits, you can probably begin to guess where this is going.

The kitchen cabinets were low-quality to begin with, and over the years they had begin to come apart. More than one cabinet door had fallen off over time as the hinges succumbed to metal fatigue. When a shiftless computer programmer rips a cabinet door off its hinge, either the last Coca-Cola in the house is behind that door, or it's time to replace the cabinets.

Trey had helped me take down the first two cabinets a few months ago. That operation had taken a considerable amount of blood and sweat, and had resulted in a pizza-sized hole in the wall. Alone, I was determined to be more careful with the 6 remaining cabinets and keep the walls intact. So the first thing I did was scratch the kitchen floor while moving the island out of the way for the safety ladder.

It quickly became apparent that the remaining cabinets weren't going to come off any easier than the first two. After 20 careful minutes with a drill, packing knife, hammer, and pry bar, I finally had a cabinet off the wall with no major structural damage to the wall, the cabinet, or me. The next cabinet was no easier. The third harder still. So much caulk had been used on installation, these suckers were practically glued to the wall. Mistake number one: never trust anything that was installed by someone who uses caulk like glue.

The fourth cabinet was potentially dangerous. It hung over the stove and had live electrical wires where the wall-mounted microwave had once been. (That microwave had died years earlier and long been removed to the garbage dump.) I carefully taped off the wire and unmounted the electrical box that had been installed inside the cabinet. I also removed the sheet metal screws holding the stove's exhaust vent in place. However, I still had to access the crawl space behind the bathroom upstairs to gently remove the exhaust pipe without damaging the exhaust vent on the roof, a vent which only last month I had repaired from leaking in the rain. No sooner had I fully dislodged the exhaust pipe than I heard a tremendous crash below me. I was holding the pipe, but someone should have been holding the cabinet.

When I extricated myself from the crawlspace and rushed downstairs (accompanied by my repeated and inventive profanity-laden exclaimations), I found what I expected: the cabinet had crashed down onto the range. It turns out that the exhaust pipe had been the only thing holding the cabinet in place. The caulk that had acted as cement for all the other cabinets had been destroyed by the now-repaired leak in the roof. The one cabinet that could really damage something if it fell had fallen and damaged something.

The glass range top was smashed, and the oven, the one large appliance in the kitchen that worked perfectly was now destroyed. Fortunately, the electrical wires weren't damaged in the fall. I could begin cleaning up without worrying about electrocution. And while I did immediately proceed to slice my finger open while cleaning up the mess, it wasn't on a piece of giant jagged glass, but on a small rusty nail. So thank goodness for that.

Naturally, the two remaining cabinets were the hardest of all to remove. I even had to smash the final cabinet above the refrigerator into its component pieces with a hammer to separate it from all the caulk and stripped screws holding it place. By the end, I did not for a minute worry about saving the wall.

If there is a moral to this story, I suspect that it's this: never do what your mother tells you. Either way you'll doom yourself to a future of cold dinners, so you might as well just avoid all that work.

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The rubber flush valve on the toilet upstairs rotted to the point that it wasn't actually keeping any water in the tank anymore. Naturally, I decided to fix this. That was mistake number one.

Taking the toilet apart revealed that the toilet was older than I am. An executive decision was made to replace the toilet with something more modern and water efficient (Happy Earth Day!). That was mistake number two.

That seemed like a good idea until it turned out that the new toilet's footprint was smaller than that of the old toilet. Rather than being installed underneath the toilet, the linoleum on the floor had been cut to fit around its base. Now several inches of raw wood were visible with the new toilet in place. This required a new floor of peel-and-stick vinyl tiles plus some leveling compound to fill the old hole. That malfunctioning valve flap was becoming an even more expensive fix!

Of course, like any tornado, this project spun off several other whirlwinds of trouble. In the crawlspace where the water shutoff valve was, I accidentally dislodged the stove exhaust pipe and created a leak in the roof. (I didn't discover this until the next spring thunder shower that sent water cascading through the ceiling down onto my electric range.) Taking advantage of the water being off for the toilet, I investigated the dripping bathtub faucets to discover that they, too, needed replacing. And, of course, I still had to caulk and paint the trim that I had to temporarily remove to repair the floor.

Repairs were completed several days ago to the floor, toilet, tub faucet, stove and pipe. Turning the water on revealed a new, slow but persistent leak somewhere around the toilet. So it looks like the toilet will have to come back apart for further repair. Coincidentally, the fire alarm just outside the bathroom just broke. I'm afraid to ask "what next?"

Do things like this happen to other people?

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The instructions for installing my mother's venetian blinds noted that the required tools included "safety glasses." However, nowhere in the directions does it tell me how or where to use this "required" tool. I suspect that I should use the glasses when I use the required "pencil," but I would have liked to be sure. I'd hate to lose an eye while writing something; that would be so inconvenient.

The instructions also state, "Assembly time: 27 minutes." That's an oddly specific time. How do they know that? That's more specific than the cooking time for any recipes in my kitchen. More importantly, is the assembly time affected if I skip some steps? In other words, can I gain some time if I just don't use the required glasses? Inquiring minds want to know.

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I've been busy this past week installing a fence at my brother's home in Dublin, GA. I've been calling it a cyclone fence, but you probably know it as a chain link fence. Turns out that cyclone fence got that name from the Cyclone Fence Company of Waukegan, IL, a trademarked brand now owned by U.S. Steel.

So I've been committing the same error as people who call a copy a Xerox, facial tissue Kleenex, a hook and loop fastener Velcro, and soda Coke. (For those paying attention, the grammatical error of substituting the specific for the general is called a metonym.) Worse, Cyclone Fence was initially a northern brand (though the concept of the chain link fence was invented by the British), so I have unwittingly been using a Yankee word! I apologize to ya'll for this error and will try to correct my usage in the future.

P.S. I'll post a picture of Trey's fence once I've developed my the pictures still in my kodak.

[UPDATE 08/03/10]: Pictures. Note the DirecTV dish in all three pictures for site reference.

Start of Day 1: It doesn't look that big, right? Next time you shovel the concrete.

Start of Day 2: I lost track of how many fence posts after I was attacked by the fire ants.

Start of Day 3: Another day, another $12.74 worth of rebar to fix what we did wrong on Day 2.

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Oops. Just after flushing the toilet, I opened my Marvelâ„¢ The Amazing Spider-Manâ„¢ Complete chewable vitamins and accidentally dropped the lid and several vitamins down the drain. To my great surprise, this seemed to clear my toilet trap, though the sewer drain may be another matter entirely.

From this point forward I live each day in fear. I know that this incident will come back to haunt me. Which will strike first: an impassible child-proof pipe blockage or a vitamin-powered sewer crocodile? Only time will tell.

UPDATE 07/16/10: First strike goes to blockage. The top got stuck sideways in the toilet trap. So I've just dismantled the toilet, cleaned the trap, and put everything back together. Still I live in fear of the sewer monster powered up on Incredible Hulkâ„¢ multi-vitamins. I promise I will never watch Dreamcatcher again. (Though mainly because it is a terrible, terrible movie.)

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I called my brother and said, "come over to my house and help me put up some curtains."

"Hanging curtains is for women," he said.

"No," I said, "I mean we've got to install some curtain rods."

And he replied, "Oh, ok. Installing curtain rods is manly."

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