Saturday, October 02, 2004

Home Improvement Saturday

Whew! Busy day for ol' Beastie today. I started out by repairing one of my dressers--one of the crosspieces that supports the second drawer from the bottom fell off, so the drawer was kind of hanging out there. A couple of wood screws and a couple of minutes with my cordless drill/screwdriver (my favorite tool), and the job was done.

Next, on to the fridge. As I mentioned on Thursday, the shelf rails for my fridge door arrived, but they were too long. So I attached the sawblade to my Ryobi reciprocating saw (my second favorite tool), measured twice (my high school shop teachers would be proud), and cut 'em down to size. It's amazing how much space I freed up just by adding two shelves on the fridge door and one on the freezer door. It went so well that I'll probably order more rails to finish out the fridge door...I've got the site bookmarked.

Last stop: my enclosed front patio. The latch on the storm door has never worked quite right ever since I bought my house, but over the last couple of months, it broke completely. It wasn't a big deal at first, but when the remnants of Hurricane Jeanne passed through here on Tuesday, the door blew open no less than five times. That was the last straw, so off I went to Home Depot to buy a new latch. A simple easy off, easy on job, right? Of course not. The spring in the catch was apparently shot for a while before I moved in, but rather than replace it (or even replace the entire latch system), the previous owners attached a block of wood to the doorjamb so that it would stick out far enough to catch. All well and good, but when I installed the new latch, it protruded far enough to prevent the door from closing. After a mighty struggle (my drill and its backup battery both ran out of juice during the process), I was able to remove it, but then it didn't protrude far enough to catch at all. A desperate search of my basement (as a last-ditch effort before a return trip to Home Depot) turned up a thinner piece of wood that I cut down to size with my Ryobi saw, and voila!...perfect fit.

I even managed to get the low-hanging TV and Ethernet cables running through my basement more or less out of the way!

So it's time for my little reward--a takeout sushi dinner (complete with a six-pack of Sapporo and Return of the Jedi on DVD. (I watched A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back last night, but was just too tired to watch RotJ.) Then tomorrow it's off to Dave & Busters in Philly with some friends to watch the Giants-Packers game. I may get cracked with a bottle, what with being in Philly and all, but I'm going to wear my Giants T-shirt. Go G-men!!

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