it's kind of a house log at this point...
Jan. 25th, 2004 11:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
solarbirdYesterday, again, turned into a marathon Din day.
First, I fixed the plumbing under the kitchen sink, which is to say, I rebuilt most of it. A former housemate had tried hooking up a dishwasher in a way that left things kind of a mess, and along the way, used the wrong kind of T, with the result that water flowing down either sink had to go through this maze of twisty passages not at all alike each other. And if you had water going down the right sink by itself or down both sinks, you ended up with this massive turbulence zone that probably cut drain speed by, I dunno, 70% or something.
(I'd wondered why the sinks there drained so slowly; now I know!)
Unfortunately, there's a very slow drip in part of the system that I'm honestly kind of afraid to touch, so we'll probably have to call in a plumber to fix that last part. Gluh.
I also spent well over two hours scrubbing out the refrigerator - uncleaned gooey spills everywhere - and then started with the old-style door latch sets. When taking them out, I'd noticed that the one on the entry area's closet had a nice design on the only visible part, and wondered why that one had that nice extra. All the rest are plain, and they didn't spend any extra money on stuff like that in this house. When I was cleaning it up, I got my answer: it was DEFECTIVE. The latch didn't come out all the way; it would be short enough to have problems latching in a strikeplate. And it was probably like that since manufacture. So they they probably got it for cheap and tossed it in with the rest.
Fortunately, the defect was easily correctable with a pair of ordinary household pliers, and now it works just fine. Funny how this stuff works sometimes.
Anyway, the big evening job - I was at this until almost 11pm - involved stripping paint off the doorknob plates and doorknobs. I'm afraid I'm going to just give up on most of the doorknobs; most of them have this astounding primer on them that I can't remove without hideous scraping. (The paint remover I have doesn't touch the stuff.) I did manage to clean off all the interesting doorknob plates - half are interestingly-shaped stamped sheet metal, the rest are uninterestingly-shaped stamped sheet metal - and they look alright now. The others... well... I'm going to see whether I can get matching plates to the interesting ones I stripped, and if I can, go with new. Otherwise, I'll try to get the rest of the paint off the old ones, coat them all with metal paint, and go from there. (None of these are expensive plates; they're brass-plated sheet metal, and the layers and layers of painting have pretty much removed all the brass plate.)
So I guess the only question is, what kind of doorknobs should I get? I'm still thinking about it. But since I'll poll happy lately, I'll ask here too! ^_^
[Poll #238445]
Create your own visited states map here!
First, I fixed the plumbing under the kitchen sink, which is to say, I rebuilt most of it. A former housemate had tried hooking up a dishwasher in a way that left things kind of a mess, and along the way, used the wrong kind of T, with the result that water flowing down either sink had to go through this maze of twisty passages not at all alike each other. And if you had water going down the right sink by itself or down both sinks, you ended up with this massive turbulence zone that probably cut drain speed by, I dunno, 70% or something.
(I'd wondered why the sinks there drained so slowly; now I know!)
Unfortunately, there's a very slow drip in part of the system that I'm honestly kind of afraid to touch, so we'll probably have to call in a plumber to fix that last part. Gluh.
I also spent well over two hours scrubbing out the refrigerator - uncleaned gooey spills everywhere - and then started with the old-style door latch sets. When taking them out, I'd noticed that the one on the entry area's closet had a nice design on the only visible part, and wondered why that one had that nice extra. All the rest are plain, and they didn't spend any extra money on stuff like that in this house. When I was cleaning it up, I got my answer: it was DEFECTIVE. The latch didn't come out all the way; it would be short enough to have problems latching in a strikeplate. And it was probably like that since manufacture. So they they probably got it for cheap and tossed it in with the rest.
Fortunately, the defect was easily correctable with a pair of ordinary household pliers, and now it works just fine. Funny how this stuff works sometimes.
Anyway, the big evening job - I was at this until almost 11pm - involved stripping paint off the doorknob plates and doorknobs. I'm afraid I'm going to just give up on most of the doorknobs; most of them have this astounding primer on them that I can't remove without hideous scraping. (The paint remover I have doesn't touch the stuff.) I did manage to clean off all the interesting doorknob plates - half are interestingly-shaped stamped sheet metal, the rest are uninterestingly-shaped stamped sheet metal - and they look alright now. The others... well... I'm going to see whether I can get matching plates to the interesting ones I stripped, and if I can, go with new. Otherwise, I'll try to get the rest of the paint off the old ones, coat them all with metal paint, and go from there. (None of these are expensive plates; they're brass-plated sheet metal, and the layers and layers of painting have pretty much removed all the brass plate.)
So I guess the only question is, what kind of doorknobs should I get? I'm still thinking about it. But since I'll poll happy lately, I'll ask here too! ^_^
[Poll #238445]
Create your own visited states map here!
