Middle-Aged Man Futilely Resuscitates Blog, Despite its DNR

Nature is full of cycles. Sunspot activity ebbs and flows on an 11-year cycle. Cicadas arrive to defoliate your land every 13 or 17 years, depending on the species. Tides, comets, bird migrations, our friend the moon. 

But let’s be honest here in this out-of-the-way corner of the internetosphere. Nature is way out of whack right now. Until this week, every day in the last month and a half here in Maine (USA) has been either constant rain or sweltering 90-degree heat. These confounded (nice words only – this is a family blog, dammit) browntail moths are supposed to be on a cycle, and yet here they are scavenging our oak trees year-after-year. Even the water cycle, that staple of earth science class, is broken (https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/trend/archive/spring-2019/the-water-cycle-is-broken-but-we-can-fix-it). 

To see the full extent of how off-the-rails this world has become, look to the right-hand column of the blog. It is very clear that Playing with Concrete and Stone only pulls out of hibernation every ten years. 

Until now. 

That’s right. You have found your way back to this digital backwater roughly seven years ahead of schedule, yet another one of nature’s rhythms disrupted. You, my loyal fanbase, broke the Internet with the debut of (then titled) Learning to Play with Concrete and Stone. We laughed, we cried, we remodeled parts of the house. Then it was time for a pause. 

Ten years later, they said the magic could not be replicated, and yet the newly rebranded Playing with Concrete and Stone arrived in the depths of the winter in 2020, just when you need a blog the most to pick up your cold, depressed spirits. There were more projects to be described to those of you who did not come over to help. There were also elements of the bigger world creeping in. Looking over the 2020 entries, I am surprised at how little attention the Covid pandemic got. Writing was a nice way of getting away from that craziness. 

More importantly, May of 2020 saw the murder of George Floyd. That event hit a chord with me, my then online students, and most (not enough?) of the nation and a blog entry seemed wholly appropriate. The second season of this ongoing stream-of-semi-consciousness wrapped up with a DIY project that steered away from concrete and stone in favor of silicon and graphics cards. The computer I built in the summer of 2020 is still going strong, I am happy to report. 

And then, this blog settled back in for its decade of slumber. 

Well, I have grown antsy. It is 2023. We are in the midst of countless home renovation projects. No really, do not make me count. I cannot handle the number. Since the pandemic, we have doubled down on turning our home into a paradise homestead (read lovely place to be with a never-ending list of things to do). And I have new interests that I have not yet explored. 

On top of that, I am trying to write more. And part of writing more is wanting to share that writing more, but because this is mediocre writing, I still need to make it available at a fair price. Free. That seems fair. ALL THAT SAID, a lot has changed on the internet since I launched this ship in 2010. The way we share information has changed. How the social medias function has changed. Words are scarce. TikTok videos rule the day. Memes have replaced discourse. Don’t even get me started on replies and comments. I think it is time for a change in how I share words and pictures with you, my dozen or so dedicated followers. As a prolific writer of now 20 riveting entries over the past 13 years, I owe my fanbase the best possible content and delivery. 

Today I am announcing that this blog, this on-again, off-again blurt into the digital maw, is moving to the Substack platform. There, you will already find all the past entries. Going forward, there will be expanded opportunities for the core of this blog, DIY home projects and hobbies, along with longer-form writing, sharing of photos, and perhaps even a toe dipped into the audio world of podcasting. We will see where the spirit moves me! 

For right now, know that I am mildly hard at work getting some new content to you. Hopefully, my 14 followers here on Blogspot will make that brave leap over to https://drgagne.substack.com/. That said, three of them are blood relatives and two of them are my wife. Substack might help grow the 14 of you and the additional five or six that I know checked out every episode into a larger community. Dare I dream…25? Then I can charge you all obscene subscription rates, quit my day job, and brag about using sponsored products in every aspect of my new influencer lifestyle. You know, the classic American success story. 

Thank you to my mom and my wife for reading this. Special thanks to anyone not legally or genetically required to read it! We will see where this journey takes us! I mean, I have a plan and know exactly how this will go, of course. 

To all assembled, welcome and welcome back to Playing with Concrete and Stone.

My DIY Goes Digital

I am of the particular age that I started high school turning in writing assignments hammered out on an actual typewriter and ended high school turning in assignments created on a computer.  Okay, hammered out is a bit of an exaggeration, as it was certainly an electric typewriter, but I still recall a paper for sophomore biology where I explained the various adaptations of life in the desert and to insert graphics, I copied pictures with an actual photocopier, cut them out with actual scissors, and pasted them onto my paper with actual paste.  That experience really makes you appreciate the shortcuts of Ctrl-C, Ctrl-X, and Ctrl-V.

Computers were not always a thing in my youth.  I witnessed them creep into our personal lives one task at a time.  I cannot tell you how much I spent (meaning meagerly saved money but mostly begged at birthdays and Christmas) on my Commodore 64 system.  Computers were magical boxes.  Out of them came fun and distraction and productivity (and writing!).  Inside, they were strange green boards with parallel paths of silver tracing strange shapes from one delicately placed piece of metal to another.  You knew that electricity and something called data were running around those soldered paths, but you could not see it or hear it.  If you smelled it, that meant something was very wrong.  Aah, that burning smell of a burnt-out power supply!

At the cutting edge of all of it all, in my young mind, were the people who built their own computers.  They gathered those pieces of green board and attached various doodads that put the electricity and the data to work.  Factories can build anything, but people at home in their basement, garage, spare bedroom?  Come on…that seems crazy.

Everything boxed, except the case.  I was NOT reboxing that just for a photo.

Of the many computers I have owned in my life after that Commodore (I still have it), I was fortunate to get many of them for free as hand-me-downs from various friends.  Now, in my job, I have access to all the computers I can imagine, as nearly all new machines at the school where I work get set up by me.  I will admit that I keep my eyes out for special ones that catch my fancy.  The point is, other than a MacBook Pro that I purchased new in 2009 (and still functions, despite being castrated by Apple from ever getting another update), I have not invested a lot of money into computers.

The Commodore 64C (not the original 64), which I had, along with the newer 1571 hard drive and 1084 monitor.  At 10, I was not an early adopter.  Thanks to Bill Bertram for the photo of my childhood (as mine is stuffed in a box right now). [Own work, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=133083]

Enter the Covid quarantine.  In this difficult time, Kris and I are fortunate.  We continue to have paying jobs.  We are spared the financial concerns of so many Americans (and I will say Americans, as many other countries gave very healthy amounts of money to their citizens in this crisis) who have lost jobs or have been put in uncertain circumstances.  I have flippantly stated that our plan was to spend our way out of the quarantine.  In truth, we are taking the opportunity to invest in our own happiness and well-being, and again, we are fortunate enough to be able to do that.  Sorry, I had to get that little bit of guilt of my chest.

The idea germinated in the past few months that I could use my working knowledge of the inside of PCs along with my interest in making things.  I could essentially buy a powerful computer for less money if I built it myself.  I could be that person sitting in front of a table full of widgets and boards and gizmos masterfully weaving them all together to build my own computer!  But I am also relatively risk averse, and so I turned my learning attention to Paul, the host of the YouTube channel “Paul’s Hardware”.  After viewing a few episodes, I liked his approach and his style.  No yelling and crazy Internet flash.  Just solid information and an easy-going manner.   Oh, and the more than one million subscribers gave some legitimacy, as well.  When I saw the video titled “Building the UPDATED $900 B550 Gaming PC!” I knew he was now in my ballpark.

It's Paul!

Let me cut to the chase.  Actually, can I even claim that when I am already 600 words in?  Never mind.  The video was a few weeks old when I ordered Paul’s list of parts two weeks ago and prices had floated up a bit.  I also spent a little more money to get a more efficient power supply, but I essentially grabbed his suggested nine components and put them together.  Total cost to me:  a pinch under $1,100.  The cost of computers with similar capability already assembled:  roughly $1,500 and up.  Some of you are thinking the $400+ difference is the labor, but I saw it as an opportunity to play!

The parts arrived in dribs and drabs.  I ended up ordering a few items from Paul’s sponsored links on Amazon when those prices were the best ones.  I am happy to support how he makes his living in return for his expertise.  Other items literally went out of stock while in my Amazon shopping cart as I compared prices elsewhere.  In the end, I found parts from Amazon, NewEgg, Office Depot, and Best Buy.  I will list the parts at the bottom, but first, I want to walk you through the assembly process of my very first DIY personal computer!

Step one, take a photo of all the stuff assembled.  This is completely unimportant unless you are writing a blog.  Step two, unbox everything.  Optional step three, take another photo.  Step four is to follow Paul’s how-to-assemble-a-PC video.  Just do what he says.  And since he is the expert, I will not bore you with the details pretending that I came up with all of this.  I will throw a little step-by-step in the photo captions if you are interested.

All parts present and accounted for.  Time to begin.

Here is the amazing thing to me:  I gathered only nine pieces.  Nine?!  In my childhood mind, this process was akin to open-heart surgery without the need for malpractice insurance.  In 2020, no soldering skills were needed to make those fancy silver paths of conductivity connect to the components.  I used one Philips head screwdriver for all the assembly.  No spanners, socket wrenches, micro tweezers, or magnifying glasses.  Actually, that’s not fully accurate.  My old age now demands that I employ reading glasses for doing about anything within arms-length of the old eyeballs.  But nine pieces?  A lot of people could make their way through connecting nine things together.  I do not know why this fascinates me so much.

At the end of the process, which took place on the kitchen island, Kris was sitting by reading a book and glancing my way often enough to acknowledge my excitement.  When the big moment arrived, I plugged in the power, turned on the power supply, and asked her if she was ready for the big moment.  Without saying a word, she may have looked over for a moment, but clearly was not getting her hopes up.  I went ahead and pushed that power button anyway and…and…nothing.  It’s like she knew.  My heart plunged.  “Okay,” logic said trying to push past the woe-is-me feelings like a salmon headed upstream.  “Let’s figure this out.”  What could cause the entire computer to not turn on?!  “Maybe we narrow that down,” logic encouraged.  What could cause the power button to not work?  My clearing mind immediately went to the two tiny plugs that connected the power button to the motherboard (the one big board that distributes power and connects all the components).  The optional connector seemed a little hinky (a technical IT term).  I removed the unneeded piece of plastic and directly connected the tiny one-pin connectors. 

Take two saw no dramatic drumrolls or pleas to the audience, but this time, the new computer fired right up!  Fans spun, one red LED light emanated from the motherboard, and, well, that was about it.  This machine is quiet.  It is also unassuming.  Gaming computers now-a-days often employ dozens of LED lights across the whole rainbow adorning the board, the fans, even the memory.  Serious digital bling.  None of it is required.  All of it seems garish to me, like the nerd version of adding dual glasspack mufflers to your jacked-up pickup in the 80s and 90s (and probably still today in places I do not frequent—a quick Internet search proves this to be correct: “5 Best Glasspack Mufflers of 2020”).

I survived the first little scare.  The second came before I even had a chance to install Windows.  In searching through the BIOS (the most basic of settings for the motherboard itself, even before an operating system is installed), I found the setting to change the speed of the RAM.  I do not know why RAM can operate at different speeds.  I do not know the purpose of the various speeds.  I do know that my AMD Ryzen 5 3600 CPU (central processing unit – the beating heart of the computer) feels most at home when the 16 Gigabytes of RAM chug along at 3600 MHz.  Installed, they only manage to make 2133 MHz.  This cannot be!  Well, I clicked on that setting and voila, everything changed immediately!  And by changed, I mean the computer went off and would not turn on again.  NO MATTER WHAT I TRIED. 

The first little scare was no big deal.  This time, I was instantly worried.  An image of a brick floated into my panicked brain.  “Bricked” (another technical IT term) refers to a fatal computer problem causing it to no longer function.  It then reverts to being something heavy that can do little else.  There are mysterious things you can do in the wrong moments that can brick a computer.  I thought I had stumbled into one.  My brand-new machine (it didn’t even have a name yet!) had not completely booted up yet and it was already clinging to life by a thread.

That thread, that one hail-Mary that I had left, was to pull the tiny little battery that keeps the memory of the motherboard alive.  Essentially, I had to perform a far-less dramatic version of astronaut Dave unplugging the HAL-9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey.   Without even humming a bar of “Daisy, Daisy…” I popped the small, quarter-sized battery out from its position on the motherboard and waited the requisite ten minutes for all signs of life to stop. 

Okay, that is a little dramatic.  What really happens is that the motherboard loses power, forgets anything that happened to it, and resets to its original state.  After pretending to work for ten minutes, I gingerly slid the battery back into its enclosure, gritted my teeth, and pushed the power button one more (one last?) time.  Once again, I was greeted with the understated hum of three fans quietly getting to work.  The screen lit up the announcement that my Aorus B550 Elite motherboard was resurrected and ready to begin life anew!

And that was the last exciting moment, to be honest.  What followed was hours of setting up drive partitions, installing Windows 10, running rounds of updates, downloading Microsoft Office 365, and installing various software.  Occasional mouse clicks and password entries followed by minutes, even hours of watching green progress bars slowly fill.

This Sunday morning, I sit in my office at home typing this very episode of Playing with Concrete and Stone on said machine, now christened “Kairos”, a Greek word for time that “signifies a proper or opportune time for action.”  I have a reason for the name.  Maybe I’ll share it eventually, but not yet.  Everything is set up and running smoothly.  World of Warcraft, the all-encompassing online fantasy game that occupies a healthy (some might claim unhealthy) chunk of my time and imagination, looks amazing with the graphics cranked literally up to 10 (sadly, there is no 11).  Even the things I do for my IT work are running more efficiently.  My life, as I currently have it arranged, is better.  What more could I ask for in the middle of the quarantine? 

If you are in need of a new computer, and want more for your money, head over to Paul’s Hardware!  On his YouTube channel, he tackles DIY computers from the least expensive starter PCs to the beefiest graphics-intensive machines.  My little gem comes right in the middle and perfectly meets my needs and my wallet.  Paul will help you set yourself up.  Or, if you like, I will gladly assemble those nine parts for you.  It was a load of fun and took far less time than the shed (is taking, more on that soon).  See you next time, and thanks for reading.

List of the computer components that I purchased.  No software is included here.  The rest of the photos are below.

The heart of it all.  My AMD Ryzen 5 3600 3.6 GHz 6-core processor (simply, the CPU) about to be installed on the Aorus B550 Elite motherboard.  Soooo exciting!

Screwing down the Cooler Master Hyper 212 cooling fan on top of the Ryzen 5 CPU.  This is a beefed up cooling solution that is superior to the smaller fan that ships with the chip.  Air from the interior of the case blows through the radiator under that silver plate and then out of the box through the fan at the right, the rear of the case.

In my hand is a Seagate BarraCuda 2 TB mechanical hard drive for extra storage.  Already installed below is the ADATA 512 GB solid-state hard drive for Windows and the most important software.

The is the muscle in a gaming computer and was the most expensive single piece, an EVGA GeForce RTX 2060 KO video card.  Yup, it works so hard, it brings its own radiating fans to the party.

This is the least glamourous finished product photo ever, and frankly I'm disappointed in myself.  BUT, that feeling is outweighed by the lack of desire to move everything and take a sexy photo all unplugged.  Here is the computer, now called Kairos, under the desk looking like it looks at this very moment while I type this final caption, and while my wife waits for me to stop messing around on my new computer and get outside to split and stack some firewood that is in the way (can I draw this sentence out a little longer to buy myself some time--probably not).  So, that's it.  Off I go.  Now.  Okay, now.  Bye.

Bathroom Renovation Phase One: Five out of six ain't bad

One of Kris’s long-term goals has been the renovation of our bathroom.  Over the years, our appreciation of the knotty pine motif has steadily dwindled, as I mentioned in our last episode.  Late winter, when Kris came upon the perfect vanity for the bathroom, was the moment the bathroom renovation graduated from the Collection of Dreams and Grand Plans to the already crowded Active To-Do List.  If there is one thing my attention span likes, it is a shiny new thing.

That is not to say that I jumped onto this project immediately.  The February arrival of the very handsome white vanity with two sinks and marble top and backsplash was quickly followed in March by the upside-downing of the world.  What had once seemed like a restful March break turned into one where I worked every day on the effort to transition our literal brick-and-mortar school to an online academy.  Adjusting to teaching history online went on for weeks.  That handsome vanity began to blend into the background as it filled our upstairs hall area.  By mid-June, with the school year successfully ended, it was time to me to take a couple weeks of vacation and see if I could make a dent in that Active To-Do List.

Hair by quarantine.  Reading glasses by Grasshopper Shop.  Elizabethan-era powder face makeup by sheetrock mud and 220 grit sandpaper.

An important part of any bathroom renovation is the plumbing work, and I have been forbidden by Kris to take on any plumbing work beyond the skills needed to brush my teeth and take a shower.  That meant, we needed a professional, and who knew how busy or not busy plumbers would be during the pandemic?  Kris called up our favorite, Ron Brown Plumbing, and were quite surprised to hear that they could send someone as early as the following week!  The minor demolition of half the bathroom moved from last in on the Active To-Do List to next up, just like that. 

So what would this job entail?  On the checklist were the removal of the old vanity, patching up the tile floor, opening up the wall for the plumber, patching various places where sheetrock tape had failed and pulled away from the wall or ceiling, covering up an ancient water stain around a ceiling heat vent, and testing out a new paint color in anticipation of the second half of this renovation project.  As mentioned previously, the whole renovation has been split into two phases, with the installation (and first the design) of a new shower, new tub, and potentially new tile falling into the second phase to come in the medium future.  So sheetrock taping, mudding, and sanding, taking things apart, and painting – these are all things I actually enjoy, and off we went.

Post vanity removal.  I forgot to take the full "before" photo.  Rookie blogger mistake.

Tearing things apart is fun, there is no doubt, but it gives less immediate satisfaction to carefully disassemble in hopes of reconstitution later on.  In the strange timeline employed by this blog, you can look back but one episode and find the delayed, though elevated level of satisfaction that does come when the productive destruction is redeployed for service in a new capacity. 

This poor piece of sheetrock could not believe that his time was up.  Sorry buddy.

While removing the trim boards framing the lower shelf, we made one of those exciting time capsule finds that sometimes happen when you renovate a home.  Such archeological discoveries always give exciting clues to the age of the house.  When renovating the Bethel house (built in 1860), we found all sorts of strange goodies from the pre-Civil War era, including a local form of currency called “Nails” (not kidding), empty bottles of prescription opium, and various household trinkets and doo-dads.  At my childhood home in Saco (built prior to 1800), we found things from various eras of previous renovations, but the one that sticks in my mind actually came out of a garden near the house:  an 35-pound cannonball.  It is basically a small iron globe that I, of course, have hauled all through my life for the past 20+ years as one of my prized possessions. 

So what did we discover stuffed (or accidentally lost) behind the wooden vanity?  I know the suspense is killing you.  It is difficult to draw out a moment in a blog because you could just skip down a line or two, but I’m trying to do it anyway.  Still with me?  Feast your eyes on this:  a basketball card of small forward Bernard King playing in the twilight of his Hall-of-Fame NBA career with the Washington Bullets.  Yeah, this gem really does give a clue to the age of the house.  The early 1990s seem a lot less exciting archeologically than the Revolutionary or Civil War eras.  So it goes.

Basketball, the one place that slaps a "small" tag on men who are 6' 7".

The doubling of sink capacity meant opening up the wall so that a professional plumber could make the proper changes to our infrastructure.  That’s not too rough.  Find some studs, cut into the sheetrock with a utility knife, and remove the screws.  No saws-all as I had no desire to also saw through copper water pipes.  The plumber wasn’t coming that soon.  Also, I think that is the first time I have ever written or typed the word saws-all.  It looks fall less angry and capable of chaos in text than it does when you hear the word.  After the very professional splitting and redirecting of our water and drain pipes, I was left with an interesting couple of pieces of sheetrock to install.  This led to one of my favorite tasks in all DIY work, drawing up a plan.  Like all good lists of materials and on-site plans, it was created on a building material, in this case, the sheetrock itself.  Measurements were taken (twice of course, to follow the old adage), pipe locations were noted, and the shape of all the cutouts were determined.  I can say that was one of the more intricate pieces of sheetrock I’ve had to install in my time.  Like so much of renovation work, it is problem-solving.

I do love a good sketched schematic.

Because the tile floor was installed after the original vanity, it was installed around the original vanity.  Fortunately, we had kept the extra bathroom tiles that were passed down through generations of previous owners (okay, like two owners).  The tile install was pretty simple.  Only two small hurdles cropped up.  The first was finding out that my score-and-snap tile cutter was in a scoring slump, and really only break tiles.  That meant the tiny one-inch channel of tile would be filled in by not one but two pieces salvaged from it failed attempts.  No big deal.

Filling in the missing tile.  This is underneath the new vanity, so no one will see it anyway.

The second hurdle was realizing that while the previous tile installer had graciously left a bag of tile grout mixture with a handwritten note that read “This is your tile grout,” they did not think to include the mixing instructions for the grout.  “But you have the Internet!” you just exclaimed to your screen before you remembered that A) this is a blog and I can’t hear you and B) I am describing things that already happened.  Oh, I tried the Internet.  Without a brand name or any product identification (but thanks for the authentic “This is your tile grout” proof of ownership), I was forced to rely on the generic ratio advice of the DIY experts of the internet, and they did not come to any consensus.   

Fine.  I began with a 1:1 ratio of powder and water and proceeded to adjust from there, using precise measurements.  The area I needed to grout was small, essentially around one and half tiles, so I only used a cup of water and a cup of powder.  The Internet advice that I like best was more outcome-oriented.  You want the grout mixture to resemble a cake batter in which your stirring utensil will stand up on its own in the mixture when it is the right consistency, proclaimed one DIY blogger.  She wasn’t sure her advice was going to be very helpful because she was unsure of how many tile installers also baked cakes.  What a very peculiar thing to ponder.

Perhaps the best tool for mixing powder and water?  Probably not.

After making scientific measurements of materials that would have made Tricky Dick Parker, my high school chemistry teacher proud, the consistency was quite watery.  I carefully measured more powder, added it to the mix, and kept stirring with my bare hand so that I could squish the little pockets of powder apart.  Not much changed.  More powder.  More stirring.  Repeat.  By the end, I was just pouring straight from the bag into the bowl.  Ratios were blown out of proportion, scientific conciseness was out the window, and my small mixing bowl was filling up.  Each time, the powder would stiffen up the mixture only to have it return to liquidity with ample stirring.  “Dude, you are only filling like six cracks!” you exclaim out of frustration.  This time, I heard you, though your message had to travel back in time.  Yes, eventually, I just gave up trying to stand a putty knife up in my not-a-cake mixture, scooped it out with my hand and slapped it down in the cracks.  After a few minutes with the grout float, the job was done.  Mixing was by far the longest part of that job, far longer than even searching the basement for the surplus powder.

What else?  Well, the rest is relatively mundane.  As our vintage 1991 house approaches 30 years of service, things are starting to deteriorate.  We recently had to replace the roof (with longer-lasting shingles).  We refinished the soft pine floors in the kitchen and dining room.  Sadly, they have already been refinished once and are now thin enough that we no longer have the option to do it again.  So it goes.  The other 25-30 year issue rising up is sheetrock tape is beginning to separate.  In various corners and walls and ceilings, you will see the telltale cracked line that says, “Uh, I can take it no longer, the forces of the age are tearing me apart!”  Tape seams are a bit dramatic.  That said, they are unsightly.  Of course, the Internet was there to suggest the perfect tool for the job, the Tape Buddy Drywall Taping Tool!  Of all the silly looking tools that show up for sale, this one actually looked like it might work.  And if we have had one strategy for surviving the quarantine, it is spending our way out of it (spoiler: see the next episode of this very blog entitled “DIY Goes Digital”).  The Tape Buddy sounds like it is only sold in late-night TV ads, but I will vouch for it.  As advertised, it lays a perfect layer of mud onto strips of sheetrock tape.  You just pull, cut, and place!  I feel like I could record my own late-night ad.  I actually like mudding and sanding sheetrock, but taping is a pain in the ass.  No longer.

Roll of tape in the back, compartment in the front filled with mud, and the tape comes out the front with a thin schmeer.  How much would you pay?!  Sadly, I did not get a photo of it in action.  A second rookie blogger mistake.  You should probably stop reading this digital rag.

The final big task was painting the ceiling and half the walls.  Half because we will tear out one of the walls of the current shower in phase two.  A project that I can leave half-finished?  My kind of job.  No sense in going crazy just yet.  There is enough of the new paint color on the walls to make the bathroom feel fresh and new, if you stand in the right place.  After days of pushing the very heavy vanity back and forth in the bathroom to set up the ladder and work in the various corners of the room, it was time to set the vanity in its final working position.  I was assured by the plumber that it was going to be easy to reconnect the two cold water lines, the two hot water lines, and the two drain pipes.

Now I think five out of six is pretty good.  In baseball, that’s a solid day at the plate.  In Powerball, that gets you a cool million.  In a half-renovated bathroom, it is less than thrilling.  In the process of building out the wall, the vanity had been pushed roughly a quarter of an inch further from the wall on the right side.  The two drain pipes are PVC, unstretchable and immovable.  The left side hooked up just fine, but I could not pull that quarter of an inch out of the PVC no matter how hard I tried.  It looked like I was going to get a chance to do some plumbing after all!

After a quick chat with Mark, whom I now consider my personal plumbing consultant, I knew what I had to do.  I was off to Freeport Hardware for a rubber no-hub pipe connector.  The idea was to cut the drain pipe where it runs horizontally out of the wall and then connect those two halves back together again with this connector, thus yielding the quarter inch.  Despite the rumors of my past plumbing failures, on this day, I triumphed.  One hundred percent of the water that splashed gloriously into the new sink exited down the drain, around the bend, and through my tightened connector.  I am back, baby!

The extra quarter inch came from installing the connector to the right near the wall.

 

Does a hack saw and a six dollar connector restore one’s faith in my plumbing ability?  Kris and I may disagree on that, but hey, if you need a medium-sized plumbing job done slowly, I’m your guy.  I’m not sure I can promise you odds of success anywhere near five out of six, however.  For that, I’ve got Mark’s phone number.  Thanks for reading.

The almost end result.  Still hunting down the right mirror, towel rods, and clearly a toilet paper holder.