New Water Heater

Well, there are only two major appliances in the house that we hadn't replaced since moving in - the furnace / AC and the water heater. And now, there's just one. The water heater started leaking and set off the flood detector Friday morning. We called our favorite plumber (Gus at Castle Plumbing), and he said he could come out and take a look Saturday, but that if it needed to be replaced and we couldn't wait until Monday that that likely meant getting a new water heater at Home Depot, since nothing else would be open. But the good news is that the Home Depot water heaters are made by Rheem, which has a good track record.

In the meantime, we called a national plumbing chain (I won't mention their name) and they sent someone out who gave us a free estimate of $1300, but who knows whether they would have put a good water heater in for that price? In any event, that's way, way too much, so they were dismissed.

Saturday came around and I decided that it was just too likely that the water heater had to be replaced. It was 11 years old, and I strongly suspected that it wasn't the 12 year warranty kind. One thing you can take to the bank is that an N year warranty water heater will last for about N years + 1 day before giving out. So I decided to attempt to save some money by at least starting the demolition of the old unit myself. It was pretty easy, and I managed to get the old unit out all by myself. The gas and water connections came off with a wrench. The T&P relief valve had a sweated connection that I needed to desolder before I could unscrew the rest of it. Lastly, the chimney was held on with a couple of sheet metal screws.

We went to Home Depot and bought a 12 year warranty 40 gallon natural gas heater. It was about $550 or so, but the extra-cheap 6 year warranty units were about $400, so I think that's pretty clearly money well spent.

In retrospect, I probably could have installed the new unit myself. The new unit is a little taller than the old one was, because between then and now the building code has an added safety requirement - a special sealed combustion chamber that has a spring-loaded door held open by a thermal fuse. The idea is that if the burner area overheats, the door will spring shut cutting off the combustion air flow, choking off the fire. I had Gus install the new water heater mostly because of the fear that the size difference was going to make a difference between it being easy and being hard. The worry was that the water connections were going to need to be moved, which would have involved tearing out some sheetrock in the back of the water heater alcove. But there are flexible copper pipes and there was enough flex left for the new heater to fit. The only other work needed was to trim the chimney to fit and to re-plumb the T&P relief piping.

The last advice Gus had was to keep the home depot receipt, because Home Depot has a reputation for doing anything they can to low-ball you on any warranty claims. I stapled it to the door of the water heater closet. He also said we should drain it once a year, but that didn't mean emptying it all the way - just opening the drain valve and pouring off a gallon or two is enough.

New kitchen sink

If you've been paying attention, you'll know that we've been doing some home improvement work from time to time. We were impressed when we moved in with how new and modern everything was. Well, in the time we've owned the house, we've more or less discovered or realized now that all of the work the previous owners did was all done with the cheapest, crappiest Home Depot junk money could buy. Now, we don't really have many complaints. We're not saying we were ripped off or anything. It's just that every time we've decided to redo something, we've been astounded at how much better it was after we were done. Case in point was our kitchen sink. We didn't like it because the bowls were rather small, weren't flat on the bottom, and because we had a dishwasher, we didn't really need a two bowl sink. Our garbage disposal was also very loud, and the reverse osmosis system would gurgle loudly too.

So we decided to buy a new sink. If you're going to bother buying a new sink, you might as well replace the garbage disposal while you're at it. We decided to go with an asymmetric two bowl design. The smaller bowl has the disposer in it, which sort of makes it the equivalent of a wet trash can, sort of.

This time we had a plumber come in and do the work. Not that I couldn't have done it, but it was a trade-off of time and money I was willing to make. While they were at it, we had them re-plumb the washing machine drain. It used to drain out on the lawn. Not kidding. I didn't think such an arrangement was even legal, much less good for the grass. They even added a clean-out just in case something ever clogs. We also added a proper air gap for the dishwasher.

We've had the whole set up for a few days now. There's only been one mishap. I ran some corn cobs down the disposer a little too quickly and one of them managed to get stuck in a way that blocked the dishwasher inflow. Oops. The disposer can actually take corn cobs. It's just that it's so quiet I wasn't able to distinguish between it being done or having one stuck. The disposer is actually a "compact" model, which means that it was easy to clear. One downside of it being so small is that you need to cut things like corn cobs in half before you send them down or else their top halves will spin around above the rubber drain cover and fling water all over.

So what's next?

Honestly, we're running out of easy stuff, but there are a couple left. We have some folding doors on the office closet that need to be replaced with sliding doors - or just simply removed. We could replace the master bath shower door, I suppose. We could replace the HVAC system, but I'm not sure there's enough gains to be made now that we've insulated. We could remodel the kitchen, but unless we make it larger it's probably not worth it. Then there's the "small" remodel idea (wall in the raised part of the patio as a kitchen extension), and then the "large" remodel (2nd story master suite and office).

House stuff

So last week we got contractors to come and blow cellulose insullation into the walls and attic of the house. The attic was easy, but to do the walls they had to drill holes in the outside wall, blow the insullation in, then patch the holes up with either stuco patch (for stuco walls) or bungs and putty (for wood), and that we were on the hook for painting them afterwards. Our house looked like there had been a drive-by shooting. Well, I promised Scarlet that I would paint this weekend, and I kept my promise. We had used Kelley Moore flat latex to paint the house before, and since we were painting a whole new color we were able to just go with the sample we liked best and use the name for ordering (our house is "Del Covino").

So I ambled over to the KM store in Mountain View, picked up a quart of the stuff and a narrow roller on a long handle and came home and got to work. It took about an hour, but the amazing thing is that the old and new paint blended perfectly. You can't see that anything happened unless you really know exactly where to look. This is particularly impressive given that the wood part of our house faces west into full sun, and we last painted when we bought the house almost 5 years ago.

So big ups to Kelley Moore.