Dripping Delta Bathtub Faucet

I have an old bathtub with builders grade hardware. It's probably 24 years old (same age as the house). It's ugly. It's copper (fake). It was dripping. A lot. It would easily fill our 1 gallon humidifier bucket in 30 minutes or so. Very annoying.
So what do I do? I went to Home Depot. Where else? I spoke with one woman in the plumbing / bath area, but I think she was from paint. She was super nice, great personality, but I don't think she was 100% sure on what she was telling me. Basically told me I needed to just replace the whole external units. Then she got called to the paint department, and found the real plumbing guy. He was very knowledgable, and I'd like to hang out with him as much as I'd like to hang out with a pet rock. He spoke a little more than a pet rock, but not much. YET he knew exactly what I needed, based on my 'stupid homeowner' description of my dripping. Basically, there's one reason a Delta tub faucet drips, and he grabbed the teeny $4 plastic box of parts. It consisted of 2 springs, 2 rubber 'things' that looked like bullet casings, and some instructions. Simple enough.

So I brought them home, and here's how it went:
You need to remove the center piece from the knob. Easy enough. Use a small flathead screw driver or pliers. Once that's off, you need to remove the large metal looking piece in the center. I used my large locking plyers. Once unscrewed, it slides straight off like a sleeve.














Then this part just slides out of the middle. Put it aside, you don't need to do anything to it here.


















It's probably hard to tell from this picture, but there are 3 holes in a triangle layout. Two horizontally aligned on top, and a center aligned bigger one on the bottom. The top two have the pieces we need to replace in them. They're the springs and bullet casing that needs to come out. I used a small screw driving to kind of gently pry that out. Needle nose pliers would probably have been a little better, but it worked.











This is what they look like. The spring is smaller at one end, larger at the other. The end sticking out is the large one. My assumption is that the reason it was leaking is because the spring got too compressed and wasn't supplying enough pressure to the rubber casing. As I usually do, I gave the spring a little tug to make it slightly longer. In my brain, that will help it apply a little more pressure on the inside of the rubber thing. I'm probably wrong, but it's something I always do.











Then, it's reassembly. Put it all back together. Careful not to drop the new spring/casings down the drain. That would suck.

Kitchen Renovation

We decided to upgrade out kitchen after living in the house for approximately 18 months. I had saved up some cash in order to replace the cabinets, countertops and floors. In an effort to stick with the tune of this blog, I'll just talk about what I did. I took out the appliances, took out the cabinets, the sink, countertops, flooring etc.
That alone was a pain in the butt. Pulling up vinyl flooring is tough since the luaun is so freaking heavy, especially when it comes up a full sheet at a time. One small staple is easy to pull out, but pulling up a board with hundreds of staples holding it down required a log of leg strength.

Anyway.. here's how we started.

The fake butcher block laminate countertops, the built in place particle board cabinets, the terrible green on the walls, etc. That's our kitchen.
So the first step, working the bottom up, was to remove the appliances, then the bottom cabinets. They came apart fairly easily with a pry bar and a sledge hammer.



The bottoms came out relatively easily. It was the tops that were a pain. They were built in place, so the sledge hammer really came into play here.
but we did it, piece by piece.



That was the big part. As you can see in the next picture, it went from empty to a full cabinet/countertop/sink install! Yay!! Someone else did that. We had a great contractor do it, here in Richmond, VA. If you want to know who, shoot me an email. They put the sink in, but I plumbed it. Go me. you can see the crappy linoleum floor kind of. It sucked.


So, after the pro's put in the cabinets et al, I ripped up the floor as I alluded to earlier. Check out what was left underneath:


Then, almost the last step , here's the new floor. Again, put in my a pro, it's too detail oriented and it took them a day and a half, how long would it have taken me?!

Custom Corner Mounted TV

Anyone can strap their TV to a wall using a wall mount bracker from Circuit City or monoprice.com, etc. Drilling a few screws into some studs is a no-brainer with the proper tools and time. The worst part in my experience, is picking up the TV!

I had a different challenge. I recently replaced an aging Samsung 32" CRT HDTV with a new (awesomeness) Sony KDL-40V2500. It's a sweet 1080p LCD TV, weighing in at a whopping 43lbs. Ha, 43 lbs vs the 155 or so lbs of my Samsung, and at only 4" deep, this fits wherever I want it.

I got my TV, and loved it. Hooked it up to my upscaling DVD player, and my Verizon FIOS TV connection. TV had never looked so good, and with HDMI through and through, my connections were a breeze. My room is a weird shape, It's about 12 feet wide, and about 30 feet long. So it's really really narrow. Unfortunately, as you can see in this picture, the window across from the couch is in the place where I wanted to hang the TV. The other option, above the fireplace, is just WAY too high for me to look at.



Looking at this picture, you can see I have a cramped room in that corner. It's situated nicely, but not perfect. Since I had no flat wall, I needed to do something to get the TV up. Planning on this project was a lot more difficult than I thought. My days of geometry and angles have long since past, and even when I thought I had my math right, I was way off on my angles to cut the wood. So instead of using math and graph paper, I tried to use a new "template" on a piece of peg board with masking tape. This allowed me to make my angles, and layout my wood. Worked out pretty well. Except my saw couldn't cut the angles deep enough, stupid circular saw. Oh well.



Alright, now I know how to cut my wood. That's the easy part. The next part is hanging it on the wall. I had zero interest in allowing my TV, that I spent too much money on, to fall from the wall, breaking, or possibly hurting someone. So, what I did, was found the studs on my wall (obviously my stud finder sucks, so I had to perform exporatory surgery to get a good location on them).



Then I held the wood up from the wall, drew lines on it how to plan the holes for my lag bolts, and put it on the wall to make sure it was level. I marked my spots for the holes (thank goodness for kids and crayons, they were handy). Drilled the holes, then hung it on the wall. These little insulation hangers made it like having a second set of hands, without having to explain to someone that I needed a second set of hands!



From here, it was a breeze. After I put the lagbolts in (1/4 inch width, 5 inch long lag bolts from Home Depot). This sucker isn't going anywhere. It held me up for a few seconds without so much as a groan.



Then I mounted the backside of my TV bracket from monoprice.com.



Then I put the TV up! AWESOME!



There are two remaining issues, and this blog will be updated when I'm done.
I need to cover this ugliness:



and I need to add a wall power outlet and a wall HDMI outlet (can I do that?)