Coury's Column 8/3 - Learning to do it MYSELF

I'll admit, I'm not exactly handy or knowledgeable about fixing up stuff. There's a lot of stuff I probably should have learned growing up when it comes this sort of stuff, but I tend to place the blame on that my parent's divorced before I was even a year old and growing up in a house with a Mom who worked two jobs to make ends meet limited the opportunities. You would think that a situation like that would force me to learn handy stuff like that, but the reality was if something broke then either my Mom would call someone to fix it or her Dad would come and fix it. Why didn't I sit in and learn more while my Grandfather built a deck onto our front porch during a summer? I don't really know, I was just too self absorbed and I didn't realize the how useful learning those processes and methodology would have become in my adult years. 

Last year I overcame a fear of learning to solder. I'm still not the greatest with it, but I can do some basics as its needed. I think standing up to that flipped a switch in my brain of "I can do this stuff, I just need to put in the time to research and learn how to do it properly" that has slowly crept into other facets of my life in the past year. YouTube provides literally endless examples of how to fix stuff - some of it really good, most of it terrible and wrong. So, I've found the key is to just not limit yourself to one video. Watch several and compare how each person does something - and for better or worse, read the comments. I think the general sentiment big creators have is to "not read the comments" because of negativity. In some cases this is true - other times, there's nuggets of information about a process you might glean that wasn't present in the video. 

When my family moved to a new house in January, I had this sense that this could be our "forever" home. So I really wanted to take the time to do things the best I could - figure out how to do this right and be as thorough as possible. Combine that desire with a pandemic that keeps a person home a majority of the time and suddenly you're learning to fix up things that you never expected to.

Sure there's the whole game setup down here in the basement, but a major milestone for me in March was to learn how to remove and replace all of the innards of a toilet tank. Yes, it took me almost an entire Saturday because I put some stuff in the wrong spot and water leaked all over the floor when i hooked it back up... but I was able to do it. 

Doing this gave me the confidence and basic bed of knowledge to completely replace a toilet in another bathroom. From detaching the old toilet and cleaning up the wax that was around the pipe, to installing the new toilet this whole thing took two days. And it came out good!

Next, I ran some ethernet lines to different places in the house. This one wasn't quite as involved since there were already some run, but they were all coming down from the attic and most of them were CAT5 lines, not 5e which limited speed quite a bit. So I ran changed those out while running some extra lines from a ethernet switch i put in the closet here in the basement. I then ran them up to the first floor between the walls, and cut a hole and installed a receptacle where I wanted to put it.

But honestly, this was all lead up to last week. In the closet where the previous mentioned ethernet switch was, there were no power outlets. I had to run a long extension cord to power it and while that was fine, i really wanted to see if I could install a power outlet in there. 

See, electric wiring already ran through there, but no receptacle. There wasn't enough wire to simply cut the line an run it to a new outlet - i had to install two for it to work. Cut the line, run one end of the line into a new outlet, daisy chain that to a new outlet closer to the other end of the cut wire and then connect said wire to the second new outlet. 

It took awhile for me to really get up the courage and skills to do this. I had swapped out a couple of outlets in the basement previously and sometimes it was smooth sailing... other times it, not so much and I had to learn to "pig tail" lines to make them a little longer.  

I finally committed to doing the new outlets last week. How I went about it was probably a bit more organized and methodical than I would have been if I'd done it before I was ready. I wired up and installed everything I needed to do it before actually turning off the breaker and cutting that existing wire.  As a result, I was surprised it only took a couple of hours total. 

SUCCESS!

Believe it or not, I'm actually finding this sort of stuff fun now. I'm thinking more and more about what tweaks and improvements I want to do to the house. I never thought I'd be here, doing this.

Until next week!

Coury