Builders Share

The Good, The Bad, and The Ikea

Several months ago we combined a trip to visit with relatives with a trip to Ikea in Stoughton MA.  Over the years Ikea has served us pretty well with the occasional bookcase or desk, so when we renovated the kitchen, we decided to include them as a possible source for cabinets.  We checked out several different cabinet makers and used Consumer Reports as a guide to help narrow our choice once we had decided on some acceptable styles within our price range.  Ikea cabinets outranked many more expensive brands in terms of durability, and they had more styles that fell within our tastes, so we decided to go with them.

It's been a couple of years since I built and installed the kitchen cabinets, and they've served us well, with no complaints.  We like them so much in fact that we recently decided to add one more 15" cabinet to the end of the peninsula that divides the kitchen and dining area.  There's plenty of floor space available to make the change and the addition also provides us with that much more counter space.

So our trip to the Stoughton Ikea, back in July, was for getting this additional cabinet, a futon couch for the guest room, and a couple of light fixtures.

It wasn't until last week that I got around to building the additional kitchen cabinet. Putting it together went well, but this time Ikea let us down in terms of service.  First off, they gave us a base cabinet with the wrong interior finish: white when it should have been birch.  Since the interior is only visible when the door is open, and only minimally at that, I decided to go ahead and use this cabinet instead of trying to get a replacement.

But that wasn't the end of my problems with the  cabinet order. The Ikea clerk, or associate, or team member, or whatever they're calling their paid help, neglected to include hinges for the cabinet door.  Now, I know it's up to me to check my order and make sure everything is correct and we have what we need before leaving the store, but the paid help that works in the kitchen department should have been more on the ball in making sure we had a complete order.

Trying to correct the order over the phone has been a nightmare.  I finally decided to place an order through the website, but that seems to have been lost in some internet limbo. I received an email last week that told me there was a problem with my web order and a customer service rep. would contact me within 24 hours. (I'm still waiting dear.)

I'm not ready to give up on Ikea as a home furnishings source, but my latest experience has me thinking  they expanded a little too quickly and haven't kept up with the customer service that I was used to in the past.

Handyman

Working for Heat

About 4" of snow fell today here in central New Hampshire, and though the winter solstice is more than a month away, the cold weather is with us.

We've been enjoying our wood stove and its carbon-neutral, if somewhat uneven, heat since mid-September.  The house has an oil-fired hot air furnace that works just fine, but since wood is plentiful and relatively cheap here in the state that insists on having the first primary, we've decided to do our bit to combat global warming and limit the amount of oil we use while saving some money at the same time.

Wood heat is very cozy but it also takes work.  Even if you pay somebody to cut, split, and deliver your wood (which we do, though we usually have to split the wood even smaller than its delivered size), you still have to stack it and move it into the house from where it's stored outside.  You also have to be willing to deal with cleaning up the bits that fall off the wood, and the ashes that escape the stove always seem to find a way to smudge your hands and face.  To put it simply, heating with wood is labor-intensive and sometimes messy.

The heat provided by the stove, however, has a great quality.  It all comes from one spot and cooks the room to a toasty 80 degrees with little effort.  When the temperature outside is below zero, there's nothing quite like coming inside and standing next to a 400-500 degree wood stove.

A drawback of its heating quality is that the rooms farthest from the stove can be as much as 10 degrees colder.  When you walk from an 80 degree room to a 70 degree room, the 70 degree room feels downright cold.  So one of the popular indoor winter sports here in the north is trying to equalize the temperature in a house heated by a wood stove.

There are various ways that you can try to move the air around the house to even out the heat, the most common being small fans mounted in the upper corner of a doorway.  Another way is to use a special device that operates the blower on your hot air furnace independent from the furnace itself.  This causes the warm air from the wood stove to enter the furnace return ducts and be sent to other parts of the house. The best way to heat a house evenly with a wood stove is to design the house with an open floor plan where the stove sits in the center of the main floor and near the stairway to the upper rooms.

We didn't have the luxury of reconfiguring the house to suit the wood stove, but we were able to position the stove so that it heats the living room, dining room, and kitchen well, and the rest of the house less so.  I installed a small fan to move warm air into the other two downstairs rooms, and this helps some, but in the near future I hope to install a larger ventilating fan with ductwork to move the warm air near the stove to some of the more distant reaches of the house.  Stay tuned....

handyman

Stove Cleaning

Around 10pm the other night, after burning wood in the wood stove almost all day, the smoke alarm went off in one of the rooms adjacent to where the stove is.  The smoke alarms are all connected so this caused an awful din throughout the house while I ran from room to room making sure this wasn't a false alarm. (Six year-old Ramon slept soundly through the whole ordeal--scary thought.)

I suspected that the alarm was set off by smoke from the stove.  There's often a little that escapes whenever you open the door to feed it, and because I had closed the damper some to make it burn slower there was less of a draft to speed the exhaust through the chimney.  Nevertheless, a smoke alarm that goes off in a house with a wood stove is cause for concern.

There's a strange pull that occurs between saving your family and getting a smoke alarm to shut up, but I went with the former before the latter, and once I was satisfied that there was no fire in the chimney or anywhere else, I was able to concentrate on getting the blasted alarms to stop sounding. (Ours includes, besides an incredibly loud beeping, an urgent woman's voice shouting "FIRE! FIRE!"  She shouts "DANGER! CARBON MONOXIDE!" if she senses that. What a dear.  And despite her urgent tone, she somehow manages not to be shrill, though this could simply be relative to the ear-splitting beeping.)

Well, the fact that there was enough smoke floating around to set off the alarm meant that I better give the stove and chimney a good inspection and cleaning if necessary.  So today, I relied on the oil furnace to heat the house, and kept the stove cold.

The first step to cleaning the stove is shoveling out the ashes, (which we usually have to do twice a week anyway). Then you can remove the inserts and plates as needed depending on your stove.  This allows you to clean up debris that's found its way outside of the firebox.  With my stove, a Jotul F100, you need to remove all the inner plates if you want to inspect and/or clean the chimney.

With all the inserts out of the way, you can then take a bright flashlight or task light and shine it around while looking at the outside of the stove to see where light might show through.  Use furnace cement repair leaks where old cement has degraded, and replace any cracked parts.  If you do spot leaks, it's time to get a user/service manual and follow the manufacturers recommendations.

You can also use the light and a mirror for inspecting the chimney.  Or you can do the wood stove limbo and stick your head in the stove while facing upwards. (I prefer the mirror method though it takes patience to get the light and the mirror working together to actually view the inside of the chimney.)

If soot has accumulated in the chimney to a thickness of a 1/4", you must get the chimney cleaned.  In order to tell how thick the soot is, you'll have to reach up and wipe the inside of the chimney.  Many people simply  get their chimney clean every year to stay on the safe side, and if you're not interested in getting dirty just to find out whether the chimney needs cleaning or not, I highly recommend that you get it cleaned once a year.  I cleaned my chimney at the beginning of the season last year after two winters of use.  On inspecting it today, I'm confident it doesn't need a cleaning now.  If I wasn't working alone today, I might take the half-hour to go up on the roof and get busy with the brush, but it's not critical.  I'll inspect it again half-way through the season to be sure.

You can check the door gasket by closing a dollar bill in the door and then pulling it out.  If the bill slides out with little resistance, you should replace the door gasket.  Perform the test in several places around the opening.  I you're rich, and it makes you feel better to use a higher denomination, feel free.

I did find a place that needed attention.  Where the chimney meets the stove, the installers failed to line up a screw properly which caused the sleeve to be misaligned, leaving a small crack where smoke could escape.  This is probably what caused the smoke alarm the other night. Especially with the damper half closed, the smoke would be even more likely to leak.

I was able to straighten out the sleeve and get the screw properly aligned so now there's a tight seal at the base of the chimney. Hopefully I won't be faced with the moral dilemmas posed by smoke alarms with computerized voices anytime soon.

handyman

Feline Digression

Getting ready to leave town for the weekend and I realized I hadn't made arrangements for someone to come and feed the cat.  The cat is a recent addition to the household so we don't have all the feline necessities in place, like the automatic cat feeder.

There's no pet store nearby so with the hour I had before having to hit the road, I thought I'd try, in the best DIY tradition, to make my own automatic cat feeder.

I remembered the basic principle of one that I owned many years ago which was a container for food that emptied out into a dish.  When the cat eats dry food from the dish, the food that's in the container fills in to take its place.

I sketched a drawing on the back of an envelope and began cutting up a cardboard box, making marks for folds and flaps.  Adjusting the design on the way, I was able to come up with a reasonable solution.  Of course I won't know for sure if the feeder worked until we get home in a couple days.

Ramon helped with the problem and came up with his own design that I've included here...

handyman

Shotgun Bulb Planting Recipe

My friend Shannon In the Country (as opposed to my other friend Shannon In the City) gave me an armful of tulip bulbs that she couldn't find space for in her yard.  She has been working steadily at getting her bulbs in before the frost, and I've been saying "no bulbs for me this year, too much else to do" for a while.  But I can rarely turn down a free offer, even if it's going to cost me work.  When she offered to give me her leftovers, I couldn't pass it up.

The problem was, where and when to plant them.  I decided to use the shotgun approach, and here's the recipe I devised:

Ingredients:

-about a 75 tulip bulbs
-crushed cardboard boxes
-shovel
-wheel barrow
-shotgun
-rocking chair
-dusty cowboy hat
-cigarettes

Lay out flattened cardboard boxes along a 1x12 foot planting bed. Using the shovel, scrape 6" of topsoil off the top of the  bed and place it on the cardboard. Toss the bulbs into the bed and spread them out. (Don't go nuts about whether they're right side up or not.  Remember, it's late afternoon and you don't have much light left. Think shotgun. Think nature--it has a way of working stuff out.)  Shovel the topsoil back over the top of the bulbs. (Aren't you glad you used the cardboard?)

Now, take the wheelbarrow and go out to the corner of the yard where you've been dumping leaves for the past several years.  Dig down through the leaf pile until you reach the composted mulch.  Fill the wheelbarrow part way with the mulch.  Then go to the place where you've been dumping fireplace ashes for the past few years.  Add a couple of shovelfuls of ashes to the wheelbarrow.  Maybe you have a little manure left over from your summer planting. Throw some of that in too.  Now mix it all up and then spread the mixture over the top of the planting bed. 

Position rocking chair within 15 yards of the planting bed.  Don hat. Load shotgun.  Light a cigarette. Squint your eyes.  Sit in rocker and wait for squirrels to come sniffing around. Fire when ready.

Okay, the final step of the recipe can be eliminated if desired, but be prepared for the rodents.  A couple of alternative squirrel deterrents I've encountered are: cover the bed with chicken wire, invite cats and dogs to play in your yard, or feed the squirrels liberally with something else like peanuts so they'll be too fat and lazy to dig up your bulbs.

handyman

Cleaning Up Is Hard To Do

This weekend I spent a lot of time cleaning up after myself.  I've never been good at putting things away. I usually convince myself that I'm going to need that "whateveritis" soon enough so why bother putting it back where it belongs.  I should just keep it within reach.

That kind of thinking catches up with you after a while.  Soon you've got everything within reach and can't find anything.

One problem of course is having more stuff than you have space for.  Many of us are afflicted with the "I know this will come in handy some day so I'm not going to throw it out" sickness.  Again, the problem with this thinking is that soon you have so many things that might come in handy that you can't remember what they are or where they might be when you want to get your hands on them.

So for all of us pack rats and dis-organizers, there eventually comes the day when we must clean up and clean out.

(I'm only sharing "before" pictures because I haven't quite reached the after stage yet--really, I'm going to throw a lot of this stuff out.)

Most of what I was faced with was organizing my tools and left-over materials from several of the tasks I've been working on. Professionals know that cleaning up at the end of the day is as much a part of the job as any, but for some of us DIYers, cleaning up just seems like a chore that's tacked onto the end of the day, and if we want, we can choose to put it off until tomorrow.  This is an easy trap to fall into when you're working on a task right up until bedtime.

It often happens, though, that the task you were working on the night before is not the one that demands your attention the following day.  Without having set aside cleanup time the night before, your tools are still at that work site (say the upstairs bedroom) and you need them at the new site (maybe the basement).  So you go grab a few of the tools from the first place to use in the second place, and before you know it your tools are in one of three places: the first place (upstairs), the second place (basement), or the place where you're supposed to keep them when they're not in use.

Does this all sound like I know what I'm talking about?

Maybe I can make an early New Years resolution and start putting things away in their proper place every time after using them, and more importantly, giving myself permission to stop work early enough to clean up.

handyman