Patrick Madden

I’ve realized it takes a lot of time, money and hard work to be a world-class cheap ass.

For example, the faucet in my bathroom has been leaking for – I don’t know – about five years give or take a year. The cheap man’s solution to a leaky faucet is to completely ignore the problem, which I did successfully for the past five years. But recently the leak turned from a slow drip into something more akin to Niagara Falls, so I decided this problem finally needed some attention.

Now I am no plumber (unless you count the ability to clog a toilet) but after a little research on the Internet (aka the cheap man’s enabler) I saw that leaky faucets can often be fixed by replacing the “seats and springs“, which is basically a rubber gasket with a spring that sits inside the faucet’s handles.

Now the cheap man gets excited about a fix that is going to cost him a few dollars instead of the obscene amount it would cost to get new faucet, so after consuming a few Youtube videos on the topic, I jumped right in and began to take my faucet apart.

And, of course, I ran into my first problem immediately upon starting – I had no idea what brand of faucet this was.

My bathroom faucet is a nondescript item; made of cheap chrome and cheaply designed in such a way that if I had to guess, it retailed for around $5 in 1987. There was no indication of the manufacturer anywhere on the outside (probably by design since no one would want to be associated with this piece of crap) and was generic looking enough that it was impossible for me to track down even with the help of the internet.

The closest representation I could find online was this thing of beauty from Kingston Brass (although mine had different handles and was clearly an older model):

But this small problem was not enough to slow me down. I had removed the seat and spring from the hot water handle*. I could simply go to one of those big box home retailers and match up the old seat and spring with a new one from the store using my keen powers of observation.

Not surprisingly, that failed. Despite having a wall dedicated to seats, springs and various other faucet repair products, neither of the two stores in my area had seats and springs that looked anything like the one I pulled from my faucet.**

While my first attempt at identifying the faucet turned up empty, I had read online that faucets can sometimes have their identifying information stamped on the bottom. I was hesitant to completely disconnect the faucet and pull it out on the small chance that the brand was somewhere underneath, but I was getting desperate.

After disconnecting and removing the faucet, the only thing I found was about five pounds of plumber’s putty stuffed up inside it. The bottom was complete devoid of any information about the manufacturer or the brand. Or maybe it had been there at one time only to have been assimilated by plumber’s putty in the intervening years.

At this point, with the faucet completely removed, the cheap man inside of me broke down and asked my wife if we should just buy an entirely new faucet. While this idea cut against my core beliefs, my wife had been bugging me for a while to replace that faucet*** and I had just done half of the labor involved in putting a new one in.

Not surprisingly she said yes, so I ran out to the store and bought the cheapest faucet I could find, an AquaSource Two-Handle WaterSense for $25 on clearance. It wasn’t until I got home that I started reading reviews and discovered why it was on clearance – it’s apparently a leaky piece of junk.

Now I may be cheap, but I’m not a complete idiot****, so instead of installing the faucet and having it leak on me within the year, turned to the Internet again and ordered a Price Pfister faucet online that received better reviews (and sadly, was more expensive). There was one small problem, however, the faucet was a special order item and had to be ordered and shipped from the warehouse. Approximate arrival date – 4 to 10 business days.

A total lack of sink in the primary bathroom is perfectly acceptable for me (I can just brush my teeth in the kitchen sink, see problem solved), but it’s an inconvenience for most normal people, so I reinstalled the old faucet temporarily until the new one arrived. After hooking everything back up, I realized why an entire drum of plumbers putty was stuck all up in the old faucet – it leaks like crazy from the bottom without it.

Damn.

So I’m currently without the use of a faucet in my bathroom while I wait for my new faucet to arrive. And a $2 set of faucet seats and springs slowly and painfully turned into a new faucet. Approximate cost of this fix in time and money:

New faucet – $50
Plumbing materials – $4
Number of trips to the store for parts – 3
Hours spent uninstalling and reinstalling an old faucet that doesn’t work and will eventually need to be removed again – At least 2
Number of Youtube videos watched on leaky faucet repair – At least 10
Time spent researching faucet repair on the internet – Way too damn long
Number of bathroom sinks that currently work – 0

Like I said, it takes a lot of hard work to be this cheap.

More on repairing a faucet leak
Video on how to fix a leaky faucet

***

*It was a two handle sink and the hot water side was leaking, which apparently is the more common side to start leaking first.

**This is the point where I could have went to a plumbing supply shop and begged for help if there was one in my area.

***In her defense, it is a butt-ugly faucet that was leaking.

****Just a partial idiot.

With the kitchen behind us, it was time to move on to a few smaller house projects that could be completed in less than a weekend. One of the fun things about being married is the ability to disagree on nearly everything, including the tiniest, most insignificant things in life. Our house was no exception. In general, the things that bother me and that I want to fix are completely different than the things on my wife’s list.

Take our bathroom floor. It was a puke-blue colored* linoleum that – if I had to guess – was original to the 1970′s house. I hated it as much as anything in the house. On the other hand, it didn’t seem to bother my wife all that much. At least in relation to all the other things she wanted to fix.

But since it was a relatively easy project, I decided I was going to update the floor. I should have gotten a good picture of the old floor, but all I have is the out of focus one below.

I could have, and maybe should have, replaced the floor with ceramic tile. But I was a hesitant because I’ve never done tile before, so I instead went with vinyl floor tiles that mimic the look of ceramic tile. On the positive side, they are inexpensive, easy to install and look pretty good out of the box.

According to this old house, vinyl tiles come in two varieties: glue-down tiles, which are set into a bed of mastic, and self-adhesive tiles which are a peel-and-stick. I bought the peel-and-stick kind which literally meant peel off the backing and then stick to the floor. There were a few tricky cuts around the edges of the room, but the tiles can easily be cut with a razorblade, so even a non-flooring expert like me had the entire floor down in less than a couple hours. It really was one of the easiest things I had done to the house.

Here is what the finished floor looked like.

While my decision to go with vinyl tile was primarily based on 1) ease of installation, and 2) cost, one of the nicer things about vinyl compared to ceramic tile that I’ve grown to like is that it has a slightly warmer, softer feel under your feet (which is a very good thing during cold, Maine winters). It was very easy to install and in the 3+ years since we’ve put it down, it was been very durable.

Since installation, the largest negative thing about the tiles is that they have yellowed over time (well, all except one tile, which makes the floor look even stranger. So my slate colored floor now has a distinct yellow hue to it. I’m not a fan of the color change, but it still looks way better than the old puke-blue stuff.

Overall, I’d recommend vinyl tile. It’s not going to fool anyone into thinking you have actual tile on your floor, but I personally think the look is step up from traditional linoleum sheets. I’m not sure what’s up with the staining of my tiles – maybe it’s the brand or maybe I should try cleaning up after myself once in a while – but it’s not so bad that it’s a deal breaker.

*Puke-blue: It’s a royal blue base with flecks of brown, silver and orange in it, like someone puked all over a royal blue floor…. coming soon to a Crayola box near you soon.

We are finished in the kitchen except for one minor thing, actually getting the refrigerator to fit into the space that we have for it. From our kitchen floor to the bottom of the cabinets is 64.5 inches (which is ridiculously small by today’s mcmansion standards). After much pain and suffering, we found a fridge that was exactly (and I mean exactly) to those specifications.

However, when the fridge arrived, we found out that our definition of 64.5 inches was apparently different than the manufacturer’s definition of 64.5 inches, as back of the fridge was about ½ inch too tall to slide underneath the cabinets. Maybe that’s how all fridge measurements work, I don’t know. That was the first fridge that I’ve had to order. And based on the experience, I wouldn’t mind if it was my last.

At that point we could have 1) destroyed the cabinet about the fridge, 2) returned the fridge, or 3) carefully cut ½ inch from the bottom of the cabinet without destroying the entire thing.

Time to cut some cabinets…

I’d advise not being a douche like me and actually taking the dishes out of your cabinet before you cut into it. At the very least, it will prevent a lot of annoying rattling.

Fortunately for us, our cabinets have a piece of wood below that hangs about an inch below the cabinet door (referred to as a ‘rail’ if my cabinetry vernacular is correct). So, the good news is that we could cut into this wood overhang without having to cut into the door or otherwise destroy the cabinet. Using my trusty sawzall, I cut the wobbliest straight line in the history of straight lines. A pre-schooler would have been embarrassed by this line I cut. But while I got no points for style, it worked and we were able to get just enough additional clearance to slide the fridge into its spot.

So, with that that, the kitchen is basically done: new appliances, new sink and countertops, new lighting, and everything repainted to look new(er). Here is what the kitchen looks like now:

And here is where we started:

>

The old fridge, hiding its shame behind pictures

That did not leave us many options other than a kegerator or possibly a giant block of ice. But after a good amount of searching, we found a 21 cubic foot fridge that was exactly 64.5 inches tall for sale on the Best Buy on their website. Not surprisingly, it was a special order product since most people aren’t in the market for ridiculously-sized refrigerators.

That advice sounded strange on its face, but I took the supervisor for her word and ventured to the local brick and mortar Best Buy. There I spoke with the customer service department and quickly discovered that, yes, the customer rep from the phone had indeed given me stupid advice. The local Best Buy store didn’t know anything about my Internet order and to resolve my problem I needed to call the customer service number provided on my fridge invoice. Now it was official: I’m getting the runaround.

So, I decided to write a rather scathing email to Best Buy using their online help thing. To their credit, I received a follow-up call a few days later from (I’m guessing) the manager of the local distribution center, telling me that they had my fridge and setting up a time when it could be delivered.

A day before the delivery date, I got another call from the distribution center, saying there was some kind of mix-up and they didn’t actually have the fridge I had ordered. It was going to be another few weeks before they could get it.

“Great, cancel my order”

A couple months had passed now since I originally placed the online order for the fridge and the only thing we had to show for it was a lot of wasted time. The stove we had purchased at the same time from Best Buy had already been delivered weeks ago without any problems.

So, fridge-less, my wife and I went down to our local Sears store and – while looking through their internal catalog – found a fridge similar to the one we had tried to purchase at Best Buy. We ordered the fridge and it came in a couple weeks later without any problem. Well, actually there was one problem. The door handle was on the wrong side. But fortunately, Sears just sent a replacement door with the handle on the correct side and had one of their technicians switch out the door for us.

So, the result: A couple low-end stainless steel appliances, a little over 1k overall. The stove was ordered and delivered in less than one month, but Best Buy screwed the pooch on the fridge, gave us the runaround until we canceled the order and found a similar model at Sears. Overall timeframe to get the fridge: about 3 months.

The next project: Actually getting the fridge to fit (it’s far from over).

***

You might be asking yourself, why didn’t we just knock down the cabinets above the old fridge, creating enough space to install a normal-sized refrigerator? Yes, hindsight IS 20/20. If I had known all the trouble we would end up going through to get this damn fridge, I would have definitely done that. At the time, however, we were just being strung along one day at a time.

>When we purchased our house a couple years ago, our very nice sewer inspector (who, in my opinion, loved his job more than was physically possible) informed us that the house’s 30 year old septic tank and leech bed was no longer functioning properly and would have to be replaced ASAP. That led to a couple questions:

1. What the hell is a leech bed and why does it go bad?
2. Can the seller put in a new one before we buy the house?

As far as the first question goes, a leech bed (or leech field or drainage field), along with a septic tank, forms the sewer system for houses that are not on public or private sewer lines. A septic tank is typically 1,000 to 2,000 gallons in size and is made out of concrete, fiberglass or plastic (ours is concrete). It’s installed underground and is connected to an inlet wastewater pipe coming from a house. Waste flows out from the house into the septic tank. The tank provides an “anaerobic bacterial environment” and decomposes the waste that is sent to the tank via the house’s toilets, sinks, and showers. Mmmmm.

The basic gist of a septic tank and leech bed
Of course, a 1,000 gallon tank would fill up quickly if the water running from the house didn’t have anywhere to go. So, excess waste water is purged from the tank and cleaned via a leech bed. The purpose of the bed is to:

…remove contaminants and impurities from the liquid that emerges from the septic tank. This is typically done by burying perforated pipes in trenches and allowing the liquid to leach out and the surrounding soil absorbs the unwanted waste.”

If treated with love, septic systems generally have a life expectancy of 30-50 years, although a number of factors can lead to their early demise.

1. Food disposals are a huge no-no (our inspector was all over this – telling us in great detail the horrors of disposals at least a half a dozen times). Basically, disposing of food into septic tanks can quickly fill, clog, or overload the system.
2. Oil and grease from cooking or other activities have a nasty tendency to clog drains and ruin the ability of the soil to filter waste water.
3. Flushing non-biodegradable items down toilets (I’m sure you can think of a few – although alligators probably count as biodegradable) can fill or clog a septic tank.
4. Similarly, the anaerobic bacteria in tanks really don’t appreciate pesticides, herbicides, or stuff like paints and solvents. That stuff will greatly reduce the tank’s ability to decompose waste.
5. Tree roots and other structures can damage a tank or the leech field.

But even with the best care, oils and bacteria will slowly enter and degrade a leech bed and its effectiveness to drain and clean waste water. Eventually, the drain pipes in the system will become clogged, which can lead to sewage backing up into the tank and (if you’re really unlucky) backing up into the house itself.

An actual sewer system installation

While we left the installation of our new leech bed to the professionals, with the proper skills and equipment, it is possible to install one yourself. Here is a forum discussion from someone thinking about rebuilding their leech bed. And, if you’re really adventurous, here is a site that goes through installing a sewer system yourself, down to every last dirty detail. Of course, I only made it a few paragraphs into the article (soil classifications? What?) before my brain starting hurting.

Want to know even more about sewer systems? Who doesn’t? Check out Wikipedia or the EPA.

With the kitchen beginning to enter the 21st century after a couple projects (see the first one and the second one), it was time to replace our old – dare I say original to the house – white and green Formica countertops with something a little more… ummm… not out of a 70′s sitcom. Here you can see the original countertops:

The original white with speckled green Formica, after the cabinets have been painted white.
When people talk countertops on home improvement shows (my favorite of which being Flip That House) the conversation usually starts with granite, with possible mentions of other materials like ceramic tile, engineered stone, or even concrete. In real life, our conversation didn’t seriously get much past laminate, pretty much for cost reasons.

Our original plan was to go with the ready to install pre-fabricated laminate countertops that get screwed into the bottom cabinets, but do to a “quirk” in the house (and I use the nicest word possible), the top of our cabinets – to which the Formica was glued on top of – was simply a piece of plywood nailed into the sides of the cabinets. At that point, we could a) rip the plywood off the cabinets and likely destroy them in the process, or b) peel the Formica of the plywood and leave the cabinets intact. To make things easy on ourselves, we went with the second option.

Demo time. The old Formica was glued down pretty well, but ultimately, it was no match for hammers and a little elbow grease. After sanding and puttying up some holes, we were left with a blank canvas.

Going from pic 1 to pic 2, you may have noticed that we had already ripped off the laminate backsplash and painted the wall green.
So, instead of going with the pre-fabricated laminate counters, we switched gears and bought two 8-foot laminate sheets at Lowes, which looked something like this (although they weren’t white).

Researching the topic, I was excited to find out that laminate sheets can be cut with special utility blades and a utility knife. Perfect! I didn’t any electric saws at the time, so that was a nice break.

However, I found out a valuable lesson after giving the utility knife thing a go. Unless you are Hercules, or a descendent from another deity, it is damn near impossible to cut laminate with a knife. After making a few weak scratches in the sheets, I gave up, measured everything out, brought them to my father-in-law’s house, and had him cut it all to size with his table saw. 10 minutes later, that was done.

The next step was to glue all of the cut sheets onto the plywood base with something that smelled like triple-strength airplane glue. It is potent. It also bonds on contact, so it’s important not to screw it up. I’m a screw it up kind of home improvement guy, so this worried me a little, but with some clever use of dowels and a steady hand, we were able to get the sheets glued on almost straight.

Not my house, but this is what you can expect from the gluing process.

After the sheets have been glued and have dried
Next step was to cut a hole in the laminate for the sink, which was right in the middle of the countertop pictured above. Easy? With the right tools, probably. Instead, the best thing I could get my hands on was an old, rusty jigsaw. As this thing tore through the laminate, sending cracks for inches in every direction, all I could think about was ruining all of the hard work we put into this project so far. Fortunately all of the cracks stopped before they got to where the laminate met the plywood and I was able to get a clean hole for the sink.

Plumbing

While we were replacing the countertops, it seemed like a good time to install a new stainless steel sink and faucet. The sink was the same size as the original one (according to the dimensions on the box). As it turns out, it was ever so slightly bigger and required a little extra cutting and muscle to squeeze it into the space. And it was 8 inches deep instead of 7, giving us a little extra room to do the dishes. I was surprised how easy the sink went in and hooked back up to all the plumbing. Man, plumbers have it easy.

A new sink and facet (second attempt). I’ve spared you the plumber’s shots of myself under the sink.

Oh wait, maybe plumbing isn’t that easy. The sink started leaking and, surprsie, surprise, I had forgot to seal the strainer basket to the sink with plumber’s putty. Attempt 2 to install the sink was more successful.

The Finish

Finishing the job went smoothly and was the most fun (i.e. only fun) part of the project, probably because I had the correct tool for the job. My parents had given me a router tool for Christmas and it was my first chance to use it. After running the router over the edges, the corners actually looked professionally done. Between the table saw, jig saw, and router, it was a good lesson on how much easier things can be done with the correct tools. Here is the finished countertops with the sink:

This was easily the most difficult home improvement project I’d done to date, but I was really impressed with the results. If you’re looking for a how to on laminate countertops like this, the best one I found on the internet was this one from Ace Hardware.

With the kitchen beginning to enter the 21st century after a couple projects (see the first one and the second one), it was time to move on to updating the kitchen cabinets. Again, here is a picture of the kitchen after buying the house.

Those are fine cabinets, say, for a cabin in the woods or on the side of a mountain, but not so much for a modern kitchen. But, instead of spending thousands of dollars putting in all new custom cabinets (which would have no doubt looked great if we had the money) we went cheap and decided to see how they looked if we painted them white. The first step in the process was to detach all the doors and hardware. After giving them a sand and a putty (or was it the other way around), it was time to use the one home improvement skill I have: Painting.

Can’t forget to paint the actual cabinets as well. Look at that happy painter…

Man that guy never smiles when he’s doing house renovations. Using a bit of strategery on our part, we were able to paint the front of the cabinets without removing any dinnerware. Brilliant! And only a couple of plates ended up white.

After two coats of paint and some new handles and hinges from ACE hardware, and we’ve got some pretty decent looking white cabinets.

One note about the hardware. If you have the old school wrap around hinges like you see in the picture above, and a wife, it becomes vitally important to exactly match the color of the handles to the hinges. In that case, don’t make the mistake I did and buy non-returnable aged pewter color handles before buying any hinges. As I quickly discovered, hinges generally come in three general colors: brass, nickel, and aged bronze. None of those come all that close to matching the color of aged pewter. After scouring the Internet and about 8 different hardware stores, I finally found one type of hinge that matched the color of the handles. Total time that we were without cabinet doors: 2 weeks.

>With the kitchen painted, it was time to move on to the lighting in the room. As you can see in the “before,” the entire kitchen was lit with a single 60-watt light bulb.

Yep, that was the only light in the kitchen. Look carefully at the back corner of the countertops and you’ll see a severe lack of brightness, which made using sharp knifes a kind of interesting carnival game.

To add additional light to the kitchen and save or fingers from a horrificly painful accident in the future, we decided to add a set of four six-inch recess lights above the fridge, stove, and sink. To make the job easy, I’d recommend you do what I did and marry into a family with a couple of professional electricians. Alternatively, you can blackmail one. They did all the hard work, such as cutting holes in the ceiling, running the wire up in the attic, and installing the lights, while I deftly managed the broom.

It’s harder than it looks, trust me.

After they carefully measured where the lights were going in the ceiling, they simply traced out a circle using the light casing and cut out a hole using a sawzall. The next step was to head up in the attic to run the wite and install the casings*. Finally, they installed a new dimmer switch and hooked it up to the new recess lights. With a couple of professionals, the lights went up about an hour and were simple to put in (which is easy for me to say). Four 60-watt light bulbs later and here is the finished product.

Total cost: Light casings and trim: $90, Wire: $10, Labor: free (suckers)

*Our house was built in 1972. At the time in this area, if you decided to go with electric heat for your house, the electric company would come in and blow a whole bunch of insalation in your attic for free (as I understand it, I could be wrong since I wasn’t around in 1972). Anyway, our attic contains about 3 feet of 35-year old blown insalation that has combined with dust, dead bugs, and a host of other stuff that makes you want to dry heave. My brother-in-laws were none to happy to have to crawl through that to install the lights and they won’t let me forget it.

>You know how they say a picture is worth a thousand words? Here is what the kitchen of our house looked like when we bought the place:

That’s more like 10,000 words. 10,000 bad words. Notice the nice fruit border on the top of the wall on the left. It’s all well and good if you’re an eighty year old woman. But for us, the first and easiest step to update the kitchen was to remove that border and paint the wall with a color that wasn’t cream. Unlike our previous (and really horrible) wallpaper experiences, the border came off without a fight.

Bam. That was easy. Because the living and dining room of this house open to the kitchen, we tried our best to match the crazy yellow coming from those rooms. Green seemed to be appropriate (if possibly a little too punch-you-in-the-face bold). We also painted the doors white to match the white doors in other parts of the house. After a half a day of work, we made baby steps towards moving the kitchen out of 1977.

>Our dilemma: How do you create a bedroom, or at least the resemblance of one, when you don’t have any money?

Since our house only has one bedroom, and it is kind of funny that someone would build a one bedroom home, we felt it was a priority to create a second bedroom for guests… and possibly for me when I got in trouble. Unfortunately, this was just after we purchased the house and money was tight. So we got creative. There was already a room in the basement that the previous owner used as a sewing room. It was completely framed out, dry walled (including the ceiling), although the floor was cement and it didn’t have any closets. The room was also covered in some fugly wallpaper that contained different kinds of fruit on it. Unfortunately, I didn’t take any “before” pictures of the room and that crazy wallpaper.

After our previous wallpaper experience in the living room, this time we decided to forgo chemicals and rent a steamer from Home Depot. The steamer cost a little cash money to rent, but the wallpaper came off so fast with it compared to that DIF crap, we got the whole room de-wallpapered in a couple hours. Here is the first picture of the room I have with the wallpaper down.

After experiencing the joy of scraping off tiny little pieces of wallpaper for hour after hour, the steamer was worth every penny it cost to rent. This is the other wall with all the wallpaper removed.

The walls were old, uneven, and bumpy, so our choices were to: 1) paint it as is and let the room look like it was built as a kindergarten class project, 2) rip down the old dry wall, put up new dry wall, and paint, or 3) (ugh) put up new wallpaper and hope it covers up the small imperfections. I’m not an option (1) kind of guy and (2) was a little expensive, time consuming, and since I’ve never put up drywall before it could end up looking just like option (1). So, despite I hate all that is wallpaper

To make sure that we covered up all the bad looking walls, we (read: my wife, the one with actual design ability) bought some grass cloth wallpaper from Sherwin Williams. Grass cloth is quite thick and has the texture of woven dried grass – perfect for those walls. It requires special glue though – glue that you have to paint on with a roller or paint brush. Because of that, the wallpaper install ended up taking the remainder of the weekend. If you do ever put up grass cloth, the most difficult thing for us was that you only have a limited time to adjust the wallpaper on the wall before the glue bonds. Maybe 5 to 10 seconds. Also, since it’s so thick, bubbles want to form in the middle of sheets when you’re putting it up. Have a roller ready to smooth the bubbles out before the glue dries. Here is the wallpaper finally up.

The splotches are from the camera, not on the wallpaper

After the wallpaper was up, we bought some pre-cut carpet at a discount store and cheap white trim at Home Depot. I “installed” the carpet myself, which basically consisted on me cutting it to size (not an easy job since the room is slightly crooked and I didn’t have proper tools). I laid foam and then the carpet in the room without actually securing it to the sides. As you can see in the picture below, the carpet was a cheap fix and it will be replaced when we refinish our basement. It looks alright for a temporary thing.

Since we didn’t have a lot of money at the time, our goal was to cheaply create a room that looked like and could be used as a bedroom. Also, the room doesn’t have any closets yet, but we plan on adding them when the basement is finished. That story will come later, but until then, for about $250, here is what we ended up with.

Final Costs:
Steamer Rental: $35
Grass Paper: $120
Glue: $15
Trim: $20
Carpet: $50
Miscellaneous Supplies: $10