Home Improvements

Dishwasher


We've had a problem in our house for the last couple of months:  it's been raining in our basement.  Our dishwasher has been leaking water whenever we run it.  The water will pool on the kitchen floor, then run across the floor, under the wall, and fall into the basement.  It is also managing to go straight down into the basement without making an appearance on the kitchen floor.  Fortunately our basement is unfinished so there hasn't been much urgency to replace the dishwasher.  We've been putting towels down in the kitchen to catch most of the water and using a dehumidifier to catch the stuff in the basement.  Curtis has tried fixing it a couple times, but it has continued to laugh at us while defiantly dribbling water all over the floor.

But soon that dishwasher will be gone.  Curtis got up at 4 a.m. on Black Friday to go get us a new one.  It will be here on Monday.  Hurray!  No more wet feet in the kitchen.  And no more getting rained on when I'm loading the drier in the basement.

Doors

The peeling trim on the old front door

We also got new doors this week.  They were the doors original to the house (1954) and desperately needed to be replaced.  We haven't done it before now since there seemed to be more pressing home improvement projects to do.  However, the tax credit for replacing windows and doors is expiring at the end of the year, and since we needed to replace them anyway we thought we should at least get a tax rebate while we're at it.  The doors were no longer square in the frame so you could feel the wind blow if you were standing right next to the door.  Our front storm door was also in need of replacement.  It wouldn't close by itself, and it had a large hole in it.  It looked like our door had been vandalized.

The gaps between the door and the frame didn't just let in drafts.  They also let in bugs.  A couple summers ago an animal found a hole in one of our garbage cans and managed to tear open one of our garbage bags.  Well, flies came and laid some eggs, which resulted in more flies.  I happened to be cooking chicken one afternoon and started noticing flies in the house.  Now this is not really unusual since about every other time we open one of the doors a fly manages to find its way inside.  I killed the ones I saw with a rolled up magazine, but after I thought I got them all, I saw some more.  I squished those too.  I thought I had just missed them when I was killing the first ones.  Well, after killing some more I decided to start counting how many I got.  I got to 120.  Yuck.  Very Amityville Horror.  And I can't even describe how gross the magazine was when I was done (it was the Ensign {a church magazine}--oops).  I was not a happy camper.  At first I thought they were coming from inside the house.  Like maybe some food got kicked behind the fridge or under the stove and a fly found it.  I was tearing apart the house to try and figure out where they were coming from.  Eventually I realized the gaps in the doors were probably big enough to let in bugs and the smell of the chicken cooking was just a big dinner bell to them.



So now we have some new doors that will keep out bugs and drafts and look nice and respectable.

Our old front door with stand-open-all-by-itself storm door

The hole in our storm door

Scary-looking knocker on the front door

A sticker we tried to remove that implored fire fighters to  "save our cats"

Our new front door.  We decided to buck the neighborhood trend and not put in a storm door since there is a substantial overhang that protects the door and it would just be another door we would have to open.

New nice looking trim

New back door with storm door.  There's no overhang here and the kids always go in and out through this door without closing it, so we put a storm door in here.

So now our front door is not the big eyesore of our property.  That position is now taken by our shed: