Turns out there’s a pipe in old-fashioned (“big ol’ tank”) water heaters that brings fresh cold water in through the top and down to the bottom of the tank where it is to be heated. It should then rise (recall your grade school physics lessons) to the top where it enters the hot water pipes supplying the house. The way water heater makers get us to buy new water heaters every ten years, now that tanks don’t rust out as reliably as they once did, is to make that pipe out of a white plastic that starts breaking down just a few months after the ten-year warranty expires.
Recently a friend planning an Elfa closet system asked if I had any tips, since he knew I’d built three Elfa closets after our big hardware flooring project this summer. Do I ever! The Elfa system has worked out really well for us, but I do have a few tips about designing, purchasing, and building […]
We made that mistake, too, and here’s the first installment of pictures and a heap of words to document the drama. We’ve been wanting to get rid of the beaten-to-crap, never-was-very-good-in-the-first-place carpeting in our house for a long time, and this summer we finally decided to do it. We got quotes for putting in more […]
We had our furnace installed and working by about 5pm last night, and when we left for my Oakland East Bay Symphony concert at 7:20, it was still cranking away on full blast. (This fancy-schmancy furnace has a big burner and a little one, and two fan speeds, so that it can do little fires […]
For those who missed earlier episodes of “Fun with V and E: The Great Indoor Winter of 2007,” our furnace started gasping its last breaths late last week, just in time for a week of record low temperatures. (You’ve probably heard that the California citrus and avocado industry is expecting a $1B loss, and the […]
Last week our furnace began to bite the dust. By the time we got back from a weekend away, it had bitten the dust. So it’s 48 in our house today and 41 in our driveway. I’m frozen despite being dressed in winter fleece pants over long johns, ragg wool socks, winter boots, a turtleneck, […]
Our furnace is kaputt. We can either spend a few hundred on a quick fix or else several to many thousand on a replacement that’s probably long overdue. Since it’s 40 degrees indoors, both of them seem appealing. Fortunately it’s supposed to warm up to 60 outside by Sunday, so we can probably tough it […]
I like cooking and do a lot more of it than most people in my generation or the several generations before and after mine. However, at lunch time or when I’ve got nanoseconds before I need to run out the door to a gig, I cut corners. Unfortunately, I’ve been cutting corners more than usual […]
Sorry about that broken link to the Deck: Before and After, Jr. photo collection. It’s fixed now. It’s bloody hot here–too hot to think clearly or accomplish anything. I need to cobble together some kind of swamp-cooler for the baking kitties.
After Jon and George and Russ and the guys finished my kitchen, way back in the fall of 2004, George tore out the rotten, ugly, hideous, cheap-ass deck-facsimile that had been his route for supply-hauling and so on for the five months he’d been slaving on my kitchen, and he built me a beautiful redwood […]