I recently visited my parents in sunny Phoenix, Arizona and took the opportunity to spend a day working with my Dad at the local Habitat for Humanity chapter.  Even though I spend a huge amount of time working on houses, I rarely get the chance to help build one.  Habitat for Humanity offers volunteers the chance to learn basic carpentry skills while working on all phases of home construction.  On this day there were over one hundred volunteers working on five different houses.  Some volunteers were re-nailing the exterior sheathing, others were painting soffits, and I got to help install corbels which are decorative beams attached to the front of the house.  The greatest thing about volunteering at a Habitat build is the combination of working with other volunteers and the tangible result that gets produced at the end of the day.

I often get hired to repair walls near showers or tubs that have been damaged due to water leaks.  This picture is typical of the damage that occurs.  While it is important to repair the damage to the wallboard, it is useless to fix it if the source of the water leak is not located and repaired.  In this situation it was necessary for me to remove the baseboard on the short and long wall, rip out the wall board about twenty inches up and about  six inches over.  Once I did that, I needed to rebuild the wood behind the corner, replace the wallboard and corner bead and then cover the entire area with  three coats of joint compound.  Once it was sanded, primed and painted I replaced the baseboard and started to solve the leak problem.

As my dad and I were getting ready to leave for the airport last week for his trip back to Phoenix, he solved one more nagging problem for me.  Two or maybe even three years ago a hinge on one of my kitchen base cabinet doors broke.  It was the door to the dog food cupboard, so it was used frequently, and I believe abused! The metal piece that sat on the face fame broke right off.  I scurried around to Home Depot and the local hardware stores, but no one carried a similar hinge.  This hinge is between twenty and twenty-five years old and didn’t work like most of the newer hinges I have seen around.  For reasons I still do not understand, it never occurred to me to look for the replacement hinge on the Internet.  That brings us back to Romeo.  As he stood looking at the hinge with his 79 year old eyes wearing no glasses, he noticed some writing stamped into the metal.  The word “blum” was on one side of the hinge and a set of numbers was on the other side.  We raced into my office and Googled “blum” and the part number.  Sure enough, there it was.  For about five dollars,   I could buy the updated version of my hinge.

I am sure you have been waiting with baited breath to hear the final details of my work with my father, so I apologize for the delay in writing this entry.  I put Romeo on the plane Wednesday afternoon with a little less sadness than usual since I will be visiting him in Phoenix in a few weeks.  He spent seven days with me and we worked on projects for five of the seven days.  When he was resting, I continued to work so as to maximize the impact of his visit.  Here is the list with a few clarifying details!

My dad and I have been busy for several days now and have made a real dent in my “list.”  One of the greatest things about the work I do is helping my clients take care of “the list.”  The look on a woman’s face at the end of the day when we have successfully completed and crossed off every item on her list is priceless.  For some women “the list” has been growing for several years and for others “the list” is written quarterly or bi-annually.  I have one client who has me come to her house in the spring to get her ready for summer and I return in the fall the get her house ready for winter.  Today I am working with a woman who has a list of items needing to be hung including a mirror that has been leaning against a wall for 3 years.

My Dad is visiting from Phoenix.  Why is that a big deal?  It would be like me going to stay with one of my clients for a week.  Think of how much work would get done at that house in that week.   When my Dad comes to visit we work on projects together.  He is not the kind of visitor that likes to go see tourist attractions, or needs to be entertained.  He likes to work and be well fed.   I can take care of both of those things.  So this year before he came I made a list of some of the outstanding projects waiting to be done at my house;  hang a large pegboard in my shop, replace rotted window trim, install trim around the air conditioner in my husband’s office, put in the last piece of stair rail in the same office, install a bidet attachment on my toilet, etc….

Have you ever heard the saying “take my advice, I’m not using it”?  Well, that applied to me this past week.I am famous for saying that it takes more time to apply masking tape than it does to paint slowly and carefully. In my book, Marie’s Home Improvement Guide, I specifically lay out the appropriate times to use masking tape on a painting project.  For some reason, I decided to forgo my own advice and relearn, painfully, why it rarely pays to use masking tape.

As the rain pours down once again here in Massachusetts, I am thinking about, what else, gutters!  Some people do not believe in gutters, seeing them only as an item whose downsides out way its upsides.  I feel just the opposite.  Nothing does more damage to our homes than water.  So, anything you can do within reason to move water away from your home is a good investment in time and energy.  I hate cleaning my gutters, but I do it at least three times each year.  I have driven by many homes over the years and seen plants growing in the gutters.  I am tempted to stop and tell the home owners that the gutters are not planters!  And, they cannot do their jobs if they are full of leaves, twigs, soil, etc…

I just can’t emphasize it enough.  At the first sign of damage from water to wood on any part of your house, DEAL WITH IT!

Yesterday was fun as I traveled between two house that were just a around the corner from each other.  In the first house I was repairing a hole in a textured ceiling made by the foot of a large teenage boy when he kicked the ceiling during a nightmare.  (He was sleeping in the upper bunk.)

I made a 2 foot square patch out of wallboard and traced it on the ceiling.  I then cut the hole to match my patch with a keyhole saw, put in some strips of wood cut from old plywood so that I would have something to attach the patch to and then inserted the patch.  After screwing it in place I covered the edges with self-adhesive drywall tape, and spread a thin layer of joint compound over it all.