Crank up the heat... Fixing A Broken Dryer

So, you ran a load of wet clothes through your dryer for an hour and they came out wetter than when they went in. Besides the obvious disregard for thermodynamics, you've got a problem. Thankfully, I had the same problem and I can help you fix it or at least rule out some things before you call a pro or buy a new one. I should point out now that I understand not everyone has the same brand and model of dryer as me, so make sure you get the manual or parts diagram from your manufacturer's website and check YouTube for videos about working on it.

That's... a lot of warnings.

Fixing Our Leaking Toilet...

One of our toilets started leaking recently. It was headed downhill rather quickly and it pretty much needed to be gutted out and have everything replaced, so I decided to pick up a HydroKit Dual Flush Kit instead of going with the standard parts.



In hindsight, I probably wouldn't use one of these kits for a smaller tanked toilet like this one again, but the other two toilets in the house are 50 gallon per flush monsters, so they should have no problem with one fitting. It definitely went over the 10-15 minute install time advertised on the box, but I can chalk that up to it being my first time putting one in and the alterations I had to make to get it to fit.

I still stand by my recommendation of getting one for larger toilets, but I have to knock my overall opinion of the product down a bit because of the lack of warning about smaller tanks. I can't imagine how many people have bought these kits just to get halfway done and find out it won't work on their toilet.

Thanks for reading!

Layin' It Down: Part 3 - Grout and Mistakes/Excuses

Finally! The grand finale that I've avoided for so long. In this post I'll take a quick look at grouting the tile we put down, then I'll talk about some of the mistakes we made along the way. So, let's get to it.

Looks deceivingly good, doesn't it?

Layin' It Down... Part Two - Tile

And now we're back for round two. Sorry for the long gap between posts. I'm sure life has been miserably incomplete since you finished part one and I feel your pain. Sadly, I've also decided that I will probably need to do a part three, so we'll see how long that takes as well.

Layin' It Down... Tile Part One (Subfloor)

Before Pic

Other Side Before

Well, I avoided it for as long as I could, but I'm finally back to post about tiling the kitchen floor. Why so long? Well, while the floor still looks great, it didn't exactly turn out perfect and I wasn't exactly thrilled to share. Some things I can live with, but others will need fixed in the future, but we'll talk more about that later, so let's start at the beginning.

Not Exactly Plug and Play...

Only real men can use a Hello Kitty lamp as
a test light. My mommy even said so.

As promised, I'm back from the holiday craziness and back to work on the house. If you remember  my last post, I mentioned that I would be installing a new USB outlet in the basement for the computer. Naive as I still am about the new house, I figured this would be pretty straight forward and boring. Turn a couple screws, twist a couple wires, and badda-bing I'm done, right? Wrong!