Studio711.com – Ben Martens

When the inspector went through this house, he noted that all of the toilets had very old gaskets that should be replaced. It wasn’t something we asked the homeowners to fix so I’ve been going through and getting them changed out. I’m far from an expert, but since I had a few issues that were solved by the Internet, I thought I’d give back some of the things I learned.

• Home Depot sells a bunch of products by Fluidmaster. They have mixed reviews about their longevity, but it’s what I’ve been going with. I recommend the model that has two chains. In addition to the normal one, another runs to the float. When you flush, it unlocks the float and lets it drop. This way if you somehow do have a leak, your toilet won’t run until you flush it the next time.
• Some of the Fluidmaster kits also include a nifty pinch valve that fits on to the bowl refill line. You can adjust how much water goes back into the bowl after a flush. I have one toilet that doesn’t need any extra water after a flush so all of that water was being wasted.
• If you’re going to take the tank off as part of your repair, just replace everything including the main gasket between the tank and the bowl. It hardly costs any extra money and then you’ll be good to go for many more years.
• Can’t get those rusty tank bolts off? Take the blade off your hack saw, slip it between the tank and the bowl and saw that bolt off. It’s way easier than trying to use WD40 or something to loosen it up.
• Don’t put your tools away when you’re done. Leave them there for a couple hours and then check for leaks. If you’re like me, you’ll need to give the tank bolts a little more of a turn. I’m always afraid of tightening them too much and cracking the porcelain.
• If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. The first toilet went smoothly, but the second one was a pain. In retrospect, replacing the filler valve to be the kind that doesn’t run until you flush again was fine, but I should have left the tank bolts and main flush valve alone. It took me days to get past all the leaks and I’m still not convinced that I’m done.
• Don’t invite your wife in to see what the guts of a toilet looks like. She won’t be amused. Ha!

We have various colors of outlets and switches in our house. I’m planning to do a full sweep through the house replacing them all with white. The big question I’m dealing with right now is should I go for the flat switches or the older style that everyone is familiar with?

Which do you prefer? Leave a comment or shoot me an email.

When we bought our house, the master bathroom had carpeting and no door. Odd, yes. There is a separate toilet room at the end of the bathroom and that part did have a door, but it’s still a bit weird to have someone watch you in the shower.

When we got our new carpet, I had them skip this room because we weren’t fans of carpet near the showers and tubs. Last weekend, I finally got around to installing a vinyl floor so we can use the bathroom.

One of my top priorities was going cheap on this project. We’re planning to gut the bathroom in a year or two and get rid of the ugly stuff in there now. I didn’t want to spend a lot of money on a floor that I knew would be going away, and I didn’t want to put anything fancy in because it probably would need to be modified. I had originally intended to find a remnant, but by ordering a new piece we got exactly what we wanted for a design and I was also able to get it in the newer “floating vinyl” style.

This floating vinyl has a pad on the back of it which keeps it from warping at the edges. It also provides a bit of a cushion as you walk on it. The big benefit is that you don’t have to cover your floor with adhesive which is hard to take up later. Instead, you cut the vinyl to fit and then place a few strips of double sided tape down to hold it in place. It’s meant to float around a bit as the floor expands and contracts.

This is the first time I can remember installing vinyl so I’m sure I made a lot of mistakes, but I’m happy to report that it’s at least functional. I’m not happy with the line along the tub and the shower. I had to fill that with caulk to keep water from getting underneath, but it’s a pretty thick line of white against the brown vinyl and yellow tub. Bleh. It remains to be seen whether I will live with that until we tear it out, or if I’ll try to come up with something better.

Next up: adding a door.

Our house came with a long list of appliances that needed to be replaced. Chelsea’s Dad, Brent, has a heating and cooling company (PMG Mechanical 206-624-5040) so I called him out to take a look at our water heater and furnace. His opinion about the water heater lined up with our inspector and a plumber that had been at the house: replace it soon. The furnace? That’s next year. Yeehaw.

Instead of just replacing the 50 gallon water heater with something similar, we went fancy and got a Takagi TK-3 tankless water heater. Tankless? Yep. That box hanging on the wall in the photo is our water heater. When you turn on a hot water faucet somewhere in the house, the burner fires up and it heats up the water as fast as it flows through the box. In theory you have to wait a tiny bit longer for your hot water, but since many of our faucets are on the other side of the house, I can’t tell any difference. The benefits are that you never run out of hot water and you aren’t paying to keep a bunch of water hot all day when you’re not using it.

Brent said that the water heater he took out was around 61% efficiency. For every $1 we spent on gas to heat the water, $0.39 was thrown away. The new system is 82% efficient and qualifies for some pretty large rebates and tax credits for being Energy Star certified.

You may notice that there is a recirculation pump in there. It’s the cheesy kind that works with a bypass value which forms a loop at the end of your plumbing run so your hot and cold pipes fill with hot water. This was on the old tank when we bought the house so I had him hook it up but it’s not enabled right now. Running a pump like this means that you’re burning gas the entire time and I’d rather just run the cold water out of the pipes myself in the morning. Also, when he set this up he added a hose bib for both the hot and cold water lines, so in theory, I could easily have hot water to wash my car!

All in all, I have no complaints with the system. I won’t really know if this saves us any money because we haven’t gotten enough gas bills to see a trend change. Brent said that for many people, the bill actually goes up because they never run out of hot water and use more of it. I’m not sure that Tyla and I will fit into that category since we aren’t in the habit of running out of hot water, but we’ll see. Hopefully this keeps our water warm for many years to come!

Before we moved in (and a little after moving in) we did a lot of painting. The living room, kitchen, family room, upstairs hallway, master bedroom, and master bedroom closet were all touched by the mad fury of paintbrushes and rollers. Thanks to everyone who helped out!

Some of these things might be obvious for those of you who paint a lot, but here are some things I learned that I figure I should remember for next time:

• The computers at Home Depot do a great job of matching colors if you have the codes available. When you decide on a color, have them print off an extra code sticker and keep it safe so you can buy it again later.
• The little $2 sample jars are great for touching up when you’re done.
• The green Frog Tape is more expensive than the blue stuff, but it works amazingly well. I was unsure when we initially picked up our supplies, but after taking the tape off the first room, I was a believer.
• If the four phases of painting are washing, taping, trimming and rolling, the distribution of work is about 20%, 35%, 35%, 10%. No matter how often I paint, I always seem to forget that the rolling is actually the quick part and by the time you get there, you’re almost done.
• Unless you’re painting a small room, you can’t have too much help. Painting scales very well. If you have four people, you’ll get it done almost exactly twice as fast as if you did it yourself. It was amazing how long it took us to do little paint jobs after everyone left.
• Radiused corners might look night but they are a pain to paint especially when you’re trying to stop a color at that corner.

Do you want to paint your house like ours? Here are the colors we used. White is the trim, gobi dessert is the “boring beige” on most of our walls, and shy violet is the color of the laundry room. I’m sure we’ll add more colors as time goes on, but it’s nice to have a small set of colors. The previous owners used a very slightly different shade in every room and left us ~40 cans of poorly marked paint in the garage.