I definitely prefer projects to little mundane tasks like vacuuming or sweeping or picking up after myself. Or, for instance, planning a new garden rather than weeding the old one.

How about you? Any big projects going on? Have any that you wish you could find time for?

And what would you do about that light switch, assuming you were stuck with it?

-- Anonymous, October 07, 1999

Answers

I live in a rented flat that was built in about 1920 and needs lots of work, but I am not going to spend lots of money improving someone else's property while they are in Spain on vacation, spending the rent money I pay them, on time every month, while they take weeks to fix even the smallest problem. We did put in some new light fixtures in the living room and DR as soon aswe moved in, and dimmer switches. Someone "remodeled" the kitchen and bathrroms about 14 years ago, but used the cheapest materials possible, and then the previous tenants and their rugrat children beat everything up during their tenure, so some things look pretty worn out at this point, and the appliances are on their last legs. Except for the brand new fridge which we bought when we moved in because the one they expected us to use had a broken seal and was disgusting to look at inside and out as well.

Still, I am going to work on the bathrooms a bit, try to make the tile on the floors and shower look not quite as horrid (it's the worn out grout between the tiles that's really the problem), mainly because people will be visiting in a couple of months.

And we hope to move out in a couple of years, and perhaps all the issues I've developed with landlords after 30 years of dealing with such cheapskates will be over. One can only hope.

-- Anonymous, October 07, 1999

It's great to see that the camera I sold you is continuing its mission to bring the horrors of home-improvement to the world wide web! My new camera is now bringing higher resolution pictures of even more frightening projects to the world. For example

www.teleport.com/~scowl/SunRoomDecking.jpg

is me replacing the beautiful T&G cedar ceiling/roof deck in my sun room. Yes, that is a 18x20 foot hole I made in my roof. Every last damn board was rotted to nothing. (the pretty boards I'm installing in the pic are boards I yanked out from another part of the house and replaned them myself -- $600 savings!) The roof was originally cedar shingles nailed directly into this decking on a 2 in 12 pitch roof! Insane! So people had thrown layer upon layer of roll roofing directly on top of what was left of the shingles and of course every layer leaked eventually.

Nothing beats tearing a 20 foot hole in your roof!

-- Anonymous, October 07, 1999

...I've always wanted a purple bathroom...

-- Anonymous, October 07, 1999

Yes -- to whit the series of projects I took on while in between jobs last week.

Each day I completed one "project" mostly these were clean-up projects -- organizing bookcases, cleaning/reorganizing the kitchen etc.

As for actual home improvement, these are my pet projects should we ever actually buy the condo:

1) Rip out all the wall to wall carpeting in the hallway, living room and dinette. Replace with sealed wood flooring.

2) Replace the tub/shower in br #1, retile floors, replace toilet seats, vanities and medicine cabinets in both bathrooms with white and blue stuff from Ikea (I have a set of tile and fixtures all picked out)

3) Tear out everything in the kitchen except the appliances. Put in light colored space-saver cabinetry and track lighting to make it feel less like a CAVE. Replace the hutch (chartreuse) with a white/black to match the very nice stove. Replace the countertops with dark blue or sand colored Corian, or spend the money on marble so that we can cut things on the counter. Either put up new neutral colored wall-paper or paint. At least tear down the late 60s/70s brown/amber/white paper with the words "kitchen" marching up and down it. Put in splashboard tiles above the sink. Get a spacesaver microwave to free up more counter space. Though the fridge is nice, get one of those models with the freezer on the bottom and is shallower so that it fits into the alcove made for it. The current fridge is too big and bumps out into the kitchen.

4) Make new window treatments, or get the nifty fern-leaf pattern curtains and some cast-iron rods from LLBean Home catalog and replace the Awful Iron Gray Vertical Blinds.

5) Remove the utterly useless metal shelf/clothes-hanger units in all of the closets. Replace with homemade built-in wooden shelf units. This will allow us to ditch half of the various pieces of storage furniture that we own and free up floor space to sprawl in. Add to the shelving in the washer closet and take out the nasty metal wire shelves the previous tenant put up.

6) Get someone to clean up the mechanical closet. There's currently a broken, bent metal runner in there that is suppose to control leakage from the heater ... _I think_ I trip on it every time I duck in there for cat food.

Unfortunately, we have no money to do any of this, but I physically ACHE to fix this place up. It would be a really nice apartment if these tasks were completed.

Oh and I forgot:

7) Replace ALL of the light fixtures and put ceiling fans in the bedrooms, especially the smaller one, to help compensate for the heat generated by the computers. My window fan just isn't cutting it.

-- Anonymous, October 07, 1999

I like thinking about big projects, but I have no follow-through. We have these great plans to take out the ugly rocks in our front yard, put in a sprinkler system, repaint the rest of the house, take out the rest of the carpeting, refinish our hardwood floors...

Sigh...

-- Anonymous, October 07, 1999

I darn well better like taking on big projects around the house; our whole house is one big project. It was once the low-rent whore/crack house in a very decent neighbourhood (where I've longed to live ever since I moved to this town) so we got it for a bargain price...

Since doing so we have:
Dug three garbage bags of dog turds out of the basement (previous owner left his kill-trained Rottweiler behind, buddy was too terrified to walk same, threw the food down and ran)
Rebuilt the electrical system from scratch (mouse nests & 60 amp service, oh my!)
Ripped out the urine-and-semen stained wall-to-wall, and refinished the hardwood floors
Painted the kitchen cupboards (a stopgap; the kitchen needs to be ripped to the bone, but that costs too much right now)
Painted everything else
Built a computer-place/mini office in the library closet
Wallpapered the upstairs hall
Stripped and faux-grained the woodwork in the upstairs hall
Painted and re-floored the back bathroom (also a stopgap; that bathroom looked kind of like your bathroom, only larger, but the tub still leaks and has to be replaced)

Upcoming projects:
Wiring the attic with lights, so we can find all the crap we shoved up there
Redoing the upstairs bath entirely; the tub overflow leaks and is stopped with duct tape, and the sink is so leaky as to be non-functional. We drape a towel over it to prevent inadvertent use by guests.
Drywalling the library after that; the walls are opened to reveal the upstairs-bath plumbing (though the holes are hid by bookshelves)
Putting quarter-round in throughout the whole house - a casualty of the ugly wall-to-wall, I assume.
Putting walls in the basement to make a laundry room and workroom; building a workbench and laundry cupboards.
Painting the side/basement stairwell.
Making curtains and blinds for most of the house.
Building a shed so we can get the gardening crap and bikes out of the basement.
Building a fence so that everyone and their damn dog (but not their little baggies) stops walking over our garden (it's a corner lot)
And -- eventually, one day -- redoing the f***ing kitchen, which is so badly laid out it makes me swear when I cook anything more complicated than Kraft Dinner.

Oh God now I'm depressed.

-- Anonymous, October 07, 1999

I'm so glad I'm not the only one who has those awful halo florescent lights in her home! They're hideous! And when you flip the switch the don't immediately turn on, they "Tic! Tic! TicTicTic!" and then illuminate. I keep waiting for a whoosh of flames to come out of that thing!

The house I bought is 85 years old, so you can imagine the plaster problems (not to mention plumbing, etc.). A friend and I replaced the downstairs ceilings and one wall with sheetrock, so my heart really goes out to you, Beth. I didn't think I would ever get the sanded drywall compound out of my sinuses. Still, it's worth the trouble.

My most recent project is reglazing the windows on the 3 season porch. I'm also priming and repainting the partially dry-rotted frames.

Do I enjoy house projects? I used to. It's becoming such a chore that I long to interject whimsy into the projects, just so I won't be tempted to drown myself in primer. Having said that, turn the damn light fixture into a snake if you want to. Or a barber pole. Or a penis. Just have fun.

-- Anonymous, October 07, 1999

I live in an apartment, and therefor can't/shouldn't take on big projects around the house, but that doesn't stop me from planning all the big furniture items that I "need" (the plantation style canopy bed, the armoire):-) So far, I've just been collecting blueprints, DIY websites, and advice from the building-stuff experts in my life, but my goal is that as winter forces me into staying home out of the snow, that I'll have the time and energy to commit to my not-quite-yet-works-in-progress.

Sadly, all the lightswitches that I've seen are too cheezy to be mentioned. So I won't.

-- Anonymous, October 07, 1999

Not particularly; fortunately, we bought a house built in 1920 so there are hardly any big repair projects needed... wait a minute...

See, there's this bathtub. The previous owner of the house fancied himself a fixer-upper type, and he fixed up the kitchen (doing a fantastic job) and the back deck (again, fantastic) and converted the third floor (attic) into a *huge* loft apartment (really fantastic; skylights, dormers, balcony), and then he seemed to basically have shot his wad at that point.

Then he fixed the bathtub.

I think it was pretty badly beaten up and he couldn't figure out how to get it out of the house without breaking windows and things, so he broke the bathtub up and took it out in pieces, without giving much thought to how he was going to get the new bathtub in without breaking it up, too.

So he looked at this huge pile of leftover plywood and moulding and fiberglass insulation and thought ah hah! and built a bathtub out of plywood, lined it with fiberglass, and painted it with waterproof (boat) paint.

It's about 6' long, very narrow, and 2' deep, so a normal person can lie in it full-length and float; however, you can't turn around without smacking your elbows against something.

Oh, and it leaks.

We have hopes of Doing Something sometime, but we're faced with same problem the previous guy had: how to get the new bathtub in without pulling a Tim-the-Toolman-Taylor solution and taking out a wall.

-- Anonymous, October 07, 1999

I looked at the pictures of your bathroom today, and thought, my God, there is someone else in the world with terrible bathroom problems. My husband and I bought a condo and moved in last week. The people who lived there before us seemed really nice, but in reality, they were filthy, disgusting pigs. The bottom of the tub looks like it has not been scrubbed in years. A friend ambitiously attacked it with bleach and some other cleaning products our first night there and all it did was take off the top layer of grime. We bought a bath mat to cover it all up. There appears to be lime deposits and other various creeping crud on the sides of the shower that we have not identified yet, but they seems to come off with a sponge and some Comet (once again proving the sheer laziness of the former owners). There are cracks around the drain in the sink - all I can think is, were the standing in it or what? So that needs to be replaced, too. They painted one part of this bathroom a dark blue, which wouldn't have been a big deal if there were windows, but since there aren't, it's like showering in a closet with very dim lighting. The other part is badly covered with ugly wallpaper which is peeling off. This was just the bathroom alone. The rest of the house - well, I'd be here all week describing what we need to do to it. I don't think we paid too much for it(I hope not), and we knew about the big problems going in...but your entry cheered me up a little, so thanks :)

-- Anonymous, October 07, 1999

My boyfriend, Ken, and I are going to be renting a condo down here in Concord as soon as the guy who is living in it now moves out. The landlords (our friends Russ and Shari, who/whom we are living with now) have evicted him and he is supposed to be out on Monday. Keep your fingers crossed.

When we go through and check for damage we are going to measure the walls and room space for painting purposes. We have been given full permission to do pretty much anything we want to it as long as it doesn't take away from the resale value. I have big plans. And I haven't even been in the upstairs portion of this condo before.

I am going to paint the extra bedroom a pool table ball purple. That is where Ken's and my computers will be. (Ken and I are MAJOR computer nerds and we need a place just to keep all of our excess parts and software and extra computers) I thought purple would be cool because this is also where all the mismatched pictures/posters and catboxes are going to go.

I want to eventually turn the downstairs bathroom into a darkroom for me (it has no windows) and since we can paint the place whatever we want Ken and I have to start deciding what colors we want everything to be. Actually, Ken doesn't care, so I guess it is up to me.

I have been watching this guy, Christopher Lowell, on the Discovery Channel, who you may want to check out. He is very flamboyant, but has great ideas and I want to incorporate a lot of those ideas into the condo. His motto is "You can do it!" He also does makeovers and answers questions online at the Discovery Channel web site. Check him out. I am on his mailing list. He hates "white walls". Color color color. Great show. It comes on at noon and 3pm everyday. I am going to have to start taping it. He also sells videos from the web site. Like I said, he has some really great ideas for rooms and walls, and bathrooms too.

-- Anonymous, October 07, 1999

We bought a house last spring, so we have a lot of big plans. We haven't followed through on most of them, though.

We have two bathrooms which, thank god, are not as bad as yours. In the one with the shower, the shower head is very low. We're both 6'. I got a thing that you can screw on to make it taller, but we can't get the old one off. A childhood friend of Pat's is a plumber so he keeps saying he thinks he can get Mitch to look at it, yet Mitch never has any time. I'm all for paying somebody to just come look at it. I shower at work after I use the gym and dread weekends when I have to bump my head a million times while I try to wash my hair.

Pat and his father have this bad trait of diagnosing problems they don't really understand. So, his dad said that the toilet in the other bathroom was broken and would need to be replaced. Pat agreed. I was unclear about its symptoms and kept asking for more details. Fiknally the diagnosis changed to "something is in the drain" and I called Roto-Rooter and they pulled a felt tip pen out that the previous people had dropped down there. Now it works fine.

Pat's doing the same thing with the shower. "Can't be fixed." Look, there is nothing that can't be fixed. Maybe it can only be fixed with a lot of money being thrown at it, but hey, it would be worth it to me.

The other big project is a new fence. We are debating paying someone to build it and doing it ourselves. He assures me his brother in law will be glad to help. Probably he will be, but still, how long will it take?? I just want it done soon.

I don't know what I'd do about that light switch. yuck. and I hate those fleurescent lights.

-- Anonymous, October 07, 1999

I once bought a house that was 15 years old, and although the house was in good shape, the previous owners had never ever really cleaned it! It was so gross. The range hood was thick with grease underneath from cooking. The kitchen floor (which I thought was dark brown), actually turned out to be brown and gold. I had to use industrial-strength degreaser on every surface in the kitchen, including the fluorescent bulb that was under the cabinet and illuminated the cabinet. In addition to the kitchen, the tracks of the windows were all mildewy and thick with years of dead bugs. UGH. It took about a week to get the house cleaned. It's amazing what a good coat of paint can do too.

After that, I took on a bathroom project. The master bath was UGLY UGLY UGLY!! The mirror over the sink was oval and had this really wide ugly, very ornate, frame. That had to go. There was this double -swag lighting fixture that hung down on either side of the mirror. Again, silver chain and some funky-ugly glass globe things. Blech. The vanity top was blue and the cupboard underneath had tan plastic louvered doors, same with the cupboard over the toilet. The tile was chipping and just in really bad shape. Whoever laid it didn't know what they were doing. The hardware was all antique brass.

SO....I wanted some color in that room, but I didn't have a lot of money. I couldn't change the vanity top, so I had to leave that blue. But I got a really pretty oak tri-fold medicine cabinet to replace the mirror, hung a three-globe bar style victorian-looking light fixture over that. I painted the tan cabinets white, and took the doors outside and spray-painted them. I spray painted all the hardware bright brass. I got these gorgeous towel bar and toilet paper holder things that were white porcelain and gold. They were really the only expensive things.

Then you won't believe what I did. I read in a decorating magazine about using bold colors in a small space for dramatic input, so I painted that bathroom PINK. And I mean it was like Pepto-Bismol pink, only maybe a little darker. Then I put up a pink, white, and blue floral wallpaper border. I put down white carpet and burgundy throw rugs.

I hated it. Everyone else loved it. Supposedly it looked classy and elegant, but I thought it looked like a bordello. I always wanted to go back and paint the bathroom white. But I moved after a few months and it wasn't my problem anymore. HAH!

-- Anonymous, October 07, 1999

Oh, I love big projects. The bigger the better. I'm moving in two weeks to a beautiful townhouse with a wrap-around view of the mountains and lots of trees. It's llike living in a treehouse, all dreamy and romantic. The only thing is....the walls are white white white. Should I keep them that way? Plus the living room and master bedroom boasts high cathedral ceilings and I'm not sure what to do with the walls, anyways. It's very dramatic. We're buying carpet this weekend (yikes!)and we want to put down an oak hardwood floor in the kitchen and entry way. I'm wallpapering the kitchen and bathrooms, changing fixtures, ordering wood blinds, buying new furniture.....In case your wondering we made a tidy profit on our condo. I'm in home improvement heaven for the next six months.

-- Anonymous, October 07, 1999

That's a big job you have ahead of you, Beth. Want some help?

-- Anonymous, October 07, 1999

From the looks of all the long posts, it looks like you have touched a nerve. :-) So I'll add mine in for good measure.

We've been building our own house for the past 8 years... I would never do it again. I think i'd rather remodel than build another house. I mean, remodel a *different* house, this one doesn't have a straight wall. It doesn't have a bathroom door, either, which is only a problem when we have company. We don't get much company. The door hole is an odd size, too, since we were going for a "custom" look. The door is supposed to match the bedroom doors (of which there is only one) which are custom built to look like those "Z" barn doors, since our house is shaped, well, like a barn with the gambrel roof line.

It wouldn't have been so bad if we didn't have three kids whilst building.... they kinda messed up the floor plans (loose as they were).

The last major thing we did was insulate one short wall in the living room (and we're in Canada even!), and put chipboard over it. Isn't the pice of sheetrock outrageuos these days? The only room large enough to cut the sheets was the kitchen/dining area, and the sheets themselves were in our son's bedroom. So in an empty house it would have taken an afternoon, but for us it took two days, mostly becasue we had to shuffle stuff around!

The really bad part is we don't have previous owners to blame things on... One day my husband was looking at the septic system and he turns to me and says. "Why'd I do that?" He's asking me???

This winter we are supposed to get some work done on this house, since Ron won;t be working so much. We're also going for the get-it- done-cheap look instead of "perfect". Its much faster that way.

As far as the lght switch, a paint job will do wonders for npow, but I'd stud in a new wall....

Our next project is the toilet... seems it is plugged and a snake won't work, so we have to take it off this weekend.. and hubby is awya and I may have to do it by myself.:-(

-- Anonymous, October 08, 1999

I always like the idea of projects, but I fear them. My best project so far has been to put more shelves in the pantry and paint it. I learned lots of great things this way. First I learned that fancy shelf brackets are expensive. I got some anyway, but just for the end near the doorjamb where there's no wall (just a doorjamb). (These are narrow shelves that are only one can deep, but they still help.) For the shelves, I tried this fake wood made out of plastic. It's cheap and supposedly cuts and stains just like real wood. Wrong--the circular saw melts it a little and you collect a thin layer of plastic goo on your saw blade. I'll never use that stuff again. Then I learned that there were no decent places at all to put nails. Ah, that's why the shelf supports for the other shelves stick out so far--it's so they could find wooden posts to nail them into. So that's when I realized that the pantry never used to be a pantry--it probably just used to be a broom closet. Which explains why you have to go from the kitchen through the dining room to get to it. The original house plan just didn't have enough storage space. It's fun to learn more about the history of a place.

Well, meanwhile, I was devastated that my shelves were going to have to be even crappier than theirs, and I was about to give up. This is what I most fear about these projects is having to give up in the middle. But then my sister told me about some plastic doo-hickies you pound into the a drilled hole in the plasterboard, and then you can put a screw into this and have a nice, stable attachment. So my shelves don't look so bad after all. I painted the walls bright yellow, my favorite color, and the shelves and ceiling white. The floor is white with black bits on it. I know everyone else hates yellow, but it's just a pantry, so no one has to care. Most of the walls are covered up with soup cans and whatever, so it doesn't really matter.

I know what my next project is. I have to pay someone to cut down a big tree that's destined to break in half and fall on the house. Then, since I live in the south, I will need something new there to cast shade. I shouldn't plant another big tree, like I want, because there are overhead powerlines. So, I'm thinking some kind of open structure that I can grow vines on would be good. I'll plant perrenial vines on one side (long-term) and start with annuals vines on the other (short-term--quick-growing). I'll put benches underneath.

The project I'm most looking forward to is making a rolling kitchen cabinet with a tile top to put next to the stove. I'm waiting until I discover the perfect tile.

All my friends bought pretty new (or brand new) big houses with no problems in them; this list has made me feel much better about my well-designed, well-built house from 1955, even if it is small (1000 squaure feet) and the kitchen counters are orange. (I put black, peach, tan and white wallpaper border at the top of the orange backsplash where it meets the cabinets, so now people think of it as peach-colored counters. Also, when I moved in there were dark orange curtains with white pinstripes in the windows--I took them out and put in white lace valences. So that further reduces the orangy appearance.) Now I actually kind of like the orange/peach because it makes the kitchen seem warm and cheery.

As for your light switch--I'm all for the snake/barber pole/penis idea. Any way you can think of to make a horrible negative into an interesting positive, where visitors wish they had tubes in their house, is an excellent idea. I'm trying to think of other tube-shaped things that are cool. Well, you could paint it brown and attach fake vines all along it. You could have a parade of cheap plastic toys glued to it. You could paint a wise saying along it. Um, okay, so I'm not coming up with cool tubular ideas, sorry. Once when I had a big pipe (maybe 5 inches in diamater) I covered it with postcards.

The switch sticking out looks unfinished. I see three options: 1) Make it look like it's supposed to stick out. You could paint it to look like a bird house or something. 2), build a wall out to the box, thus shrinking your bathroom even more. Or 3) just build a box for it. At first I thought of papier mache. Then I thought of stretching a big circle of fabric over it with a hole for the switch--staple the edges of the fabric to the wall and cover that with some decorative thing. But building a box seems more professional. You could make the box bigger than necessary so that it also has a hole for kleenex or so that there are shelves above and below it or something like that--try to turn it into a feature.

Too bad you can't just turn your bathtub in the other bathroom into a shower and just use this room for storage.

-- Anonymous, October 08, 1999

Well, that would cause us to violate my rule of perfect couple happiness: Never share a bathroom. We do intend to put a shower in the other room, but first we need to have my parents' claw foot tub refinished, and redo the floor in that room. The current bathtub is a horror. (Okay, it's not that bad, but it's not a claw foot tub and I'm a spoiled brat, bathtub-wise.)

But now we're talking about possibly walling in the electrical conduit and switch box after all. It will make an already tiny room even smaller, but it's only a matter of a couple of inches, and it would dramatically improve the look of the room. And now I'm thinking that if we knock out that wall and redo it to enclose the electrical line, we might as well replace the shower stall while we're in there. And now I remember why we weren't doing this bathroom; we were going to do the other one first, so we'd have a shower while this one was nonoperational.

These things just grow and grow, don't they?

-- Anonymous, October 08, 1999

When we bought our house we redid every blooming inch of it, starting at the outside and working our way through the public spaces first and the private spaces second.

Before we even moved in we repainted the trim and porch because they were dreadful. The house is now resplendent in a coral-sage-beige colour scheme that replaced the previous owner's dark grey-forrest green-beige scheme that made the place look like a haunted house year round. We replaced the front door, the porch railings, all the windows, put a stained glass oval into the front window to replace the milky white thing that was there before, and put a moulding around the edge of the porch roof.

Then we went inside. We got rid of the ugly dark grey (the previous owners had an attachment to that colour, clearly) wall-to-wall and stripped and refinished the lovely wooden floors we found beneath. We gutted the kitchen entirely, pulling out sheet linoleum and boring white Sears appliances, installing ceramic tile flooring, Corian countertops, and custom chrome appliances and a huge work island in place of a center located table (what a waste when there's a breakfast room!?!)

We completely redid the basement, creating a mini-apartment for my brother and/or guests (should he ever move, not that we want him to) a family room, an office and a space for the hot tub.

Then we redid all of the bathrooms, putting in completely new floors, redoing walls, and replacing all of the fixtures.

Then we moved in.

I can't imagine doing any kind of replacement (especially of a bathroom) while you live in the house. It would drive me bonkers.

Beth, you're in my thoughts and prayers!

-- Anonymous, October 11, 1999

Wow! It appears everyone has some project! Like you, Beth, I am doing a temporary clean-up and fix-it. Mine is my 12 x 20 family room. First it took a month to pack the contents of 5 tall bookcases, another tall semi-bookcase thing with pull-down desk.....chock full of old bills and junk mail...and all the cupboards and drawers of the two side-by-side entertainment centers. They were full of mysterious wires and gadgets for purposes unfathomable to me. I finally got the loose stuff out and piled in my living room in boxes and am working on this room in sections. I have torn up 25 year old orange shag carpet gagging all the while, rolled and tied it up in nice 3 or 4 ft. bundles and put some out each week for the garbage man. The dark paneling has holes in it in two sections from a prior termite infestation. I'm going to move a wall of bookcases from the stone wall and place them in front of the termite-eaten wall. Eventually, I plan to have drywall put in and a real wood floor sealed against cat pee. In the meantime I have painted the paneling with Kiltz (a lethal mixture which causes brain and nerve damage) while having all the fans I own plus the air conditioner on full blast. I have now painted two walls with the nice cream paint and most of the ceiling. Under the carpet I found a vinyl floor very badly damaged in one corner. They tell me I have to buy two 66 dollar cans of something called "Embossler" to fill in the grooves in the brick design of the old vinyl before I can lay the new vinyl tiles I plan to buy. Instead, I am going to risk it. I bought a $5 box of something I mix up to a pancake batter consistency and pour over the damaged area to bring it up level with the rest of the floor. Hopefully the tiles will stick to this stuff and the old vinyl flooring for a 2 or 3 years until I save enough to do it right. I'm doing self-sticking tiles so I can lay them myself. When I get to the TV, VCR, and all that equipment I hope to pull it over without unhooking. Since my husband died, I would never get it back together again if I move the pieces. I've already messed up my cable connection. It's only one wire, so hopefully I can figure out where it dropped out of. Bought a new ceiling light to replace a truly ugly one. I will get an electrician for that chore though. My biggest accomplishment this weeekend, though, was getting a 7 1/2 foot couch which is 34 " wide through a 33 inch door so I can throw it away! Don't know how we ever got that thing in there!

-- Anonymous, October 11, 1999

I avoid household projects as much as possible. My landlord is great and he does stuff for me, like install a new a/c (which he bought for me) or paint the kitchen for no apparent reason.

Are any of you into decorating? I find it such a bizarre thing.

-- Anonymous, October 11, 1999

Dreama: I assure you we would not have undertaken this project had we not had a second bathroom. Or more to the point, we'd have done this before we moved in, or not bought the house at all.

I can't tell you how many times this week we've commented that we're so glad we painted the interior before we moved in. I can't imagine doing it now.

-- Anonymous, October 12, 1999