C-O-D-E-R-E-D

Posts Tagged ‘Home living’

Is it no small thing,” the poet Matthew Arnold asked, “to have enjoyed the sun, to have lived light in the spring?”7
Certainly gardens are a green infrastructure of ecological and spiritual prosperity that inspire healthier more livable communities. Your garden is also a private sanctuary where you can indulge your own sense of connection to the earth. Here you can find tranquility and plant elements of surprise—and did you know you can do all that without spending a fortune or moving a mountain?
Begin by documenting your wildest dreams. Have you yearned to create a butterfly haven? Do you long to grow an exotic kind of rose or to build a lily pond where you can sit every evening at twilight?
Prioritize these dreams and divide into the number of years you expect to live at your current residence. Just have fun with this; nothing about it is set in stone.

Once you have a new wall around the tub, spruce up the entire bathroom. Doors on medicine cabinets break, and interiors get rusty. You could go to all the trouble of sanding the cabinet to remove the rust, repainting it, and putting in new doors. But why? A new medicine cabinet is inexpensive and easy to install. Usually, only four screws hold the cabinet to the wall, so you don’t have a major project on your hands.
Installing fancy towel bars, soap dishes, or tissue holders takes little more effort than medicine cabinets. (Some mobile homes don’t even come with bathroom accessories. You have to install them yourself.) Measure heights carefully, and get towel bars level.
You can hang very lightweight accessories on hollow walls, but fasten towel bars to studs. things.) The tools you need are a hand drill, anchor-type screws, a carpenter’s rule, and a screwdriver. Home-supply centers stock a wide variety of bathroom accessories. You might even find new cabinet handles to complete the decorative theme.

When the wallboard around your bathtub starts to bow, as if often does, it’s time for new. Rent a power drill, a reversible screwdriver bit, and a hand jigsaw. You’ll find using a power screwdriver faster than removing and replacing 18-dozen screws by hand. Measure the walls. Remember, this board goes all the way to the floor behind the tub. Then buy replacement panels.
Remove mouldings and plumbing fixtures. Take down the old wallboard. Measure and cut holes for the plumbing fixtures in one new panel.
Bend a back panel slightly and slip it into position behind the tub. You may find it a tight squeeze; it should be. Once the panel is in position, fix it flat against the wall with a piece of duct tape while you fit the other pieces in. Fasten them with tape too, while you attach the mouldings.

Start with the moulding at the back corner. Fill the cracks behind and under the moulding generously with bathtub caulking. Don’t be stingy. Plenty of caulking here, now, heads off the majority of leaks. In this way, apply mouldings all around the tub. Clean off excess caulking compound as you tighten each moulding strip. Don’t tighten the screws so much they strip out the holes; that leaves the mouldings loose.
Reinstall the plumbing fixtures. Allow the caulking to set up before you run any water or step into the tub. You now have a new bathtub wall.
The caulking for bathroom wallboard needs yearly refurbishing, just as the caulking for ceramic tile does. During your spring housecleaning, remove the mouldings, scrape out driedup caulking, and recaulk all the joints.