Lots to Report
By Joe at 17 December, 2008, 11:18 pm
It’s been a while since the last update, but we’ve been getting home late a lot and doing the work takes precedence over writing about it, so this will be one long catch up post. We went to Gretchen’s parents for the weekend, but before leaving I wanted to put the deadbolt we’ve had sitting around for a couple of weeks in the front door, even though this house apparently hasn’t been locked for 50 years. I was a little apprehensive about drilling a big hole in the door because of how awesome the old door is, but I decided to just go for it and be careful. Sorry for the blurry pictures, taking photos was an afterthought.
1. I taped the template around the door in order to line everything up appropriately
2. I marked the door through the template at the center of both the deadbolt and the part the key goes in.
3. Drilled the first hole through the front of the door, using a 2 3/4 inch bit. I drilled halfway through, then drilled through the center with a smaller bit and drilled back through the other side to keep it from cracking through. Unfortunately, it still did a little bit. I then drilled the deadbolt hole using another small drill bit all the way through to the bigger hole. Then I took a nail and put it through the hole from inside the front of the door so that I could close the door and mark on the frame for where the bolt would go in.
4. I then had to cut a small section out of the ancient weather stripping, and drill a hole into the frame for the bolt entry.
5. The last step was to trace around both the frame and the side of the door where the plate would go so that it could be chiseled out. For some sadistic reason they make the plate with rounded corners, which I tried to maintain in the chiseled area, but it didn’t last long and soon turned into squared corners. After that it was a quick assembly process to get the whole thing together. At some point, I hope to fix the small scratches in the door with some matching stain, and stain around the plate so that it doesn’t look quite so out of place.
Once we got back, I finally did something I’ve been meaning to do since we first moved in. The heater in the bedroom makes noise all night and keeps me awake. I read up a little on how to fix this and read about “bleeding” hot water baseboard heaters. I was a little nervous about doing this because I couldn’t find an exact matching “bleed valve” on the internet as we have, but it really wasn’t too bad. Just keep some towels around to soak up any water that comes out once the air is out of the pipes and you’re good.
1. I took the plate off of the heater and found the bleed valve. All it took was a small wrench to loosen it slowly and air came out. Once water started leaking out, I shut it off. Simple enough.
2. I also read that when the heater comes on, the square metal plates that diffuse the heat move around a little, and part of the noise could be them tapping on each other. Which would explain the “ping” noises as well as the banging. So we straightened all of them out either with our hands or a pair of plyers. They bend easily.
It seemed to help some last night. There still was some noise, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as it had been. It sounded like Neil Peart in there at 3am.
The last update is that tonight we finished taking down all the wallpaper in the bigger living room. That’s one more room down. The place is starting to look entirely different, and we’re getting psyched that it appears we may finally be getting our living situation together!
My next challenge is to go back and finally finish the kitchen. It needs at least one more layer of joint compound and some sanding, and then a coat of paint and it’ll be done! Until we start taking the cabinets down.
Here’s the Pandora station we’ve been listening to while scraping wallpaper for 2 nights:
Flaming Lips Pandora Radio
And here are our two supervisors:
“This is Top Chef, Not Top Scallops!”
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