Minor Home Repair
Apr. 7th, 2019 10:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
billroperGretchen has been chasing after me for a while to do something about fixing the shelves in the pantry, two of which have collapsed as shelf pins broke. I carefully measured the original plastic shelf pins to see if I could get some replacements, found them on line at Home Depot, and ordered the replacements which I picked up last week.
Sadly, the replacement pins were the wrong size. Apparently, I mismeasured.
By this time, though, I had already loaded a *lot* of stuff out of the pantry. A good portion of this was junk that had been pushed to the back of a shelf, or perhaps things we might have *wanted* that had vanished on the back of the shelf (Look! The screws and fittings to assemble the bookshelf that Rolf gave me as a wedding present!). And I found enough metal pins that had fallen out but which were not bent that I could support *one* shelf of the two that had fallen.
You know, three big shelf spaces are a lot more useful that one big shelf space and three smaller ones. So I removed a shelf, we put the other shelf back on the pins, and we reloaded the pantry. The pantry is much more useful now.
*Today*, Sam and Bonnie came over for dinner and to chat and to help me with the *other* pending project that really needed to be fixed. When we had the downstairs bathroom tiled, the installer had cut a tile to cover the top half of a double switch box that he only needed half of. That tile had broken and was in danger of falling out and exposing hot wiring. This is bad anywhere, worse in a bathroom.
I finally figured out that I could install a double switch plate and put a blank in the upper hole where the switch wasn't. Except that we have raised trim and the switch plate encountered the trim. Hmm.
So after some experimentation, Sam and I made my *fourth* trip to Home Depot for this project, got a nylon switch plate instead of the brittle plastic ones that I had bought, and came back home where he carved off the top end of the plate so it would fit under the trim. A bit of fiddling around and everything was successfully assembled and looks almost like it was planned to be that way.
There are many *more* things that need to be done around the house, but let's settle for two completed projects for the weekend...
Sadly, the replacement pins were the wrong size. Apparently, I mismeasured.
By this time, though, I had already loaded a *lot* of stuff out of the pantry. A good portion of this was junk that had been pushed to the back of a shelf, or perhaps things we might have *wanted* that had vanished on the back of the shelf (Look! The screws and fittings to assemble the bookshelf that Rolf gave me as a wedding present!). And I found enough metal pins that had fallen out but which were not bent that I could support *one* shelf of the two that had fallen.
You know, three big shelf spaces are a lot more useful that one big shelf space and three smaller ones. So I removed a shelf, we put the other shelf back on the pins, and we reloaded the pantry. The pantry is much more useful now.
*Today*, Sam and Bonnie came over for dinner and to chat and to help me with the *other* pending project that really needed to be fixed. When we had the downstairs bathroom tiled, the installer had cut a tile to cover the top half of a double switch box that he only needed half of. That tile had broken and was in danger of falling out and exposing hot wiring. This is bad anywhere, worse in a bathroom.
I finally figured out that I could install a double switch plate and put a blank in the upper hole where the switch wasn't. Except that we have raised trim and the switch plate encountered the trim. Hmm.
So after some experimentation, Sam and I made my *fourth* trip to Home Depot for this project, got a nylon switch plate instead of the brittle plastic ones that I had bought, and came back home where he carved off the top end of the plate so it would fit under the trim. A bit of fiddling around and everything was successfully assembled and looks almost like it was planned to be that way.
There are many *more* things that need to be done around the house, but let's settle for two completed projects for the weekend...