Claw trimmers, steak knife -- ahh, the perfect electrical tools!

I got a surprise jolt from one of my electrical switches last week, so replacing that switch and two others (the other two just for fun) became a weekend project.

Now, I have worked a little with electrical stuff before. I've installed a couple of indoor and outdoor light fixtures -- things like that.

Things went smoothly for the first two switches. The last -- the one with the newest wiring -- gave me the most trouble. I ended up cutting the wire to get it loose from the old switch. For that I used real honest-to-goodness wire cutters (not pictured).

Ahh, but how to strip the wire. Hmmmm. How about the cat nail trimmers? (see thing w/yellow handles above) Brilliant! It'll make a nice score all the way around the wire and let me slip the covering right off.

Well, nice thought, but it turns out the nail trimmers are way sharper than my old wire cutters. They sliced through the copper wire like it was nothing. So, you now know that if you're in a pinch, cat nail trimmers can be substituted for wire cutters.

And that's when I turned to the steak knife to get the covering off the wire. It worked, eventually.

April: Tear up the House Month

Last April, I did myself in putting laminate flooring in my living room and master bedroom. It was such an ordeal that I haven't done much of anything in the way of home improvement since.

I'm finally forgetting the floor torture enough to undertake some minor projects -- well, let us hope they are minor.

Tonight is bathroom border must go night.



I actually like this border (I picked it out, after all), but it didn't adhere properly. After looking at the rolled up edges for 4+ years, I decided it was time to take it down.



I already had the removal supplies. Bought those 5 years ago when I got the house and the bathroom was an utter pink-green-the-70s-exploded disaster. It didn't take long to determine it needed more work than I could do myself, so I hired someone to re-do it and the Dif was never needed.



I take back what I said about the it not adhering properly. Ugh...



Somehow I hadn't imagined this much of a mess. Eh, at least it cleaned up quickly.

No more wallpaper for me -- not even a border.

I'll probably paint -- white, because I'm boring -- and add some molding.

The best $2.25 of the year...so far

I have short hair, but it's still long enough to cause problems clogging up sink & bathtub drains -- especially last fall when my hair was falling out at an alarming rate for an unknown reason.

In the past, I used 10 Minute Hair Clog Remover, a liquid that runs between $6-7 for the smaller size jug. That used to work pretty well, but as I said, the past few months have been pretty severe and it just wasn't unclogging the drains.

So when I saw this at Lowe's, I jumped at the chance to give it a try.



I'd heard it touted on one of the Saturday morning home improvement radio shows. And for $2.25 -- well, what the hell.

OMG! It worked like a charm. My drains are running faster than they've run in a year or more. And it took me about 10 minutes and $2.25 to achieve the result.

A few words of caution:

• This isn't a job for the queasy. You're bound to dislodge a slimy mass of nastiness.


• The plastic teeth are very sharp.


• The package says it's to be used only once, but I'm going to live on the edge and re-use. I was able to very carefully clean it with paper towels and water. If you decide to save it, keep the package for storage because -- again -- the teeth are very sharp.

Um, yeah, as you might have been able to deduce, I sliced my finger pretty good on the darn thing.

Oh yeah, about the floor...

Yikes, where has the time gone? I guess I've been in the floor time warp. After finishing the bedroom, I got the insane idea to do the living room, too. I mean, I had some tools borrowed, I could get the same color at Sam's, the house was already torn up -- so why not?

The second room was slightly larger, but it went much faster because I'd learned some tricks and also because after about row 3, I started getting really anxious about this brilliant idea to tear up another room of the house. So I channeled the nervous energy and got the living room done in a matter of a couple of evenings (dragging the huge furniture back in took a while longer).

The part I'm happiest about is that I managed to cover up the unsightly doorway between the living room and kitchen (lower right of picture). Before, it was sort of a hole with some old insulation or leveling compound or something -- I'm not really sure what. I'd had a rug over it for a year or so after I ripped out the living room carpet. It is strange to have two transitions, I know (the laminate strip transition and also the metal transition piece to the kitchen's vinyl), but this is the only way I could figure out how to do it.

Unfortunately, I've found that having the laminate flooring hasn't helped me get rid of my numerous throw rugs because I'm overly protective of the laminate and now have as many or more rugs than I used to. Also, the cats have trouble getting traction on the laminate, especially the older cat, so I have placed vinyl-backed rugs at strategic locations near windows.

If I had it to do over I would:

* Borrow or rent a table saw or miter saw. I cut all the pieces with a jigsaw, and it wasn't until I started the living room that I realized the blade had been dull throughout the cutting of all the bedroom pieces! Brilliant... But even with a sharp blade, it's impossible to keep the cuts completely straight. A table or miter saw would have made the edges a lot nicer. You don't really see this once the molding goes over it, however.

* Try to do it all in a weekend.

* Do the cutting outside. I now have sawdust all over everything in my basement. The only thing worse than a cluttered basement is a cluttered basement covered with a thin film of sawdust.

* Just go ahead and do the second bedroom, too, in addition to the master bedroom and living room. I'm not in the mood any more, so it'll be a while before I tackle the second bedroom.

Slowly, very slowly...

Originally the title for this post was going to be "Hello from Laminate Hell", but then things magically got easier, or I picked up on how these things are supposed to go together.

Now, while most people would just spend a whole Saturday or entire weekend on this sort of project, probably with someone else helping, I like to work alone and DRAG IT OUT FOREVER! Oh yes, it's much more fun that way!

I spent the evenings of last week painting the walls of the room and clearing out the junk, except for the dresser, which I simply don't have a place for.

Sunday night I started putting down the laminate pieces, and let me tell ya, it was a rough couple of days. I was in tears after the first row because I simply could not get rows 2 & 3 to go down. Every new piece I tried to put in would pop out all of the previous pieces in that row. I spent hours on just those two rows, and I had to wear my tennis shoes so I could get enough traction to push the pieces into place.

I also screwed up a couple of the cuts and got upset about that, but then I late re-used the pieces and that made me feel better about that goof.

Now that I'm about halfway done, things seem to be going more smoothly. I think I may be able to finish this part, or at least get very close, by tomorrow night. Then comes what I'm really scared of -- doing the doorways!

Here we go...

I've been wanting to do something -- anything -- to cover up the mess that is my bedroom floor. Of course, the whole reason it became such a mess was because I tried to pull a Trading Spaces and paint the floor...white. Ugh. It turned yellow within no time at all (this was, I think, the clear coat that I put over the paint). It was like yellowed newspaper on a grand scale.

I rented a floor sander to take off the paint. I learned 2 things: a) floor sanders are insanely heavy and b) it's nearly impossible to get all the paint off an imperfect surface using a sander. What I was left with -- although you can't really see it in the picture -- was an awful floor with with paint embedded in the cracks and crevices.

So, here I am with stacks of laminate flooring in my bedroom, and I'm just keeping my fingers crossed that I can really install it. I'm doing all the pre-installation work now, plus I got the late idea to paint the room, too, which has set me back even further. I hope to get this all done in a couple of weeks.

We'll see...