Home Improvement

We’ve had lots to do in our new house, but most of it has involved the actual move-in, deciding where to stage boxes, placing furniture, unpacking, etc. We’re still a number of weeks, possibly months, from truly being un-packed. For that matter we still have to get rid of a large dresser that is sitting in our living room. It’s very nice looking actually, but is more classic/antique than most of our furniture. So for now it is sitting in our living/dining room, preventing us from really setting up or dining table.

It’s going to be a great roadblock conquered when we get rid of that thing. We could just have Large-Trash-Pickup from Montgomery county haul it off, but we’d rather it go to someone who needs it than sending it to a land-fill. The problem is, we don’t have any way to get it anywhere. We’re looking into American Veterans or Goodwill pickup services.

In the meantime I’ve done my first “home improvement” projects. One turned out great, and the other, well, I’m waiting to see. Most exciting is that we now have the over stove microwave mounted in our kitchen and working. It’s wonderful because it isn’t sitting somewhere else taking up space, there isn’t a big hole in our kitchen cabinetry, and mostly, because we have a working microwave in the kitchen now. Hooray.

Equally useful, I hooked the water up to the refrigerator myself. To do this, I had to get a water supply line kit at the store, drill a hole in the kitchen floor, find the hole I’d just drilled in the basement, run the copper supply line, and connect it to the refrigerator and tape into an existing cold water supply. The “tapping in” part consisted of assembling and installing a “self-piercing” or “self-tapping” saddle type valve. Basically it’s a fitting that gets screwed onto the existing pipe, and then when you turn the valve all the way, a pin pierces the copper pipe, allowing the water to flow through the valve and into your new supply line.