It’s about 19 degrees outside, and your furnace isn’t working.

Not a pleasant way to stat your morning. This was my reality when I awoke Tuesday morning, and being half-awake, cold, and in a rush, I didn’t really spend too much time trying to diagnose the problem. I just knew that it was only 50 degrees in my house (!), and I was expecting it to be closer to 66.

Wanting a quick fix, I just decided to try and call someone to come take a look at it and repair it, since I’ve never really played around with a furnace. Terrible idea.

Tuesday: I call. The contractor is busy, can’t come until tomorrow morning. A few hours later, no, wait, Thursday morning. Fine; I have a space heater, it’ll be ok.
Wednesday: The space heater I have isn’t great for this. I’ll get another one, different style, that is better.Oh, wait, it’s the end of the season, and Home Depot is out of space heaters. Wait, there’s one at a Home Depot a few miles away, but it’s already closed. I’ll just swing by early tomorrow morning for it.
Thursday: Awake at 6am. That Home Depot is out, too. However, Lowe’s has several! No contact from the contractor. Fine, I’ll figure it out myself; this is ridiculous. Discovery: the ignitor filament is broken. Easy fix, I’ll just replace it! Home Depot doesn’t stock those. Have to go to a plumbing supply store. Hours are 7am-4:30pm.
Friday: Awake at 6:30am. Plumbing supply store A doesn’t carry them. Plumbing supply store B does. Success!

A learning experience. Lessons:
- Home Depot is great for general hardware. Lowe’s is also good, but not a fan due issues around pulling ads from TLC’s All-American Muslim after pressure form right-wing group.
- Specialized parts, specialized store.
- Still faster, cheaper, and so far, better to do it myself.

I assume it is easier to build a new bathroom from scratch, or at least a gut renovation, rather than incremental upgrades, since you’re free to work with the space in its entirety, unhindered by drywall, and hopefully without hidden surprises.

It's not obvious, but there are issues lurking under that sink.

The new place has two bathrooms – one is in great shape, and laid out pretty well, whereas the other has some issues. By “issues,” I mean that the door doesn’t open fully because it bumps into the toilet, the linen closet across from the toilet has a bi-fold door that creates issues, and when both the bathroom door and the linen closet door are open, there’s about a one foot-wide section remaining for egress.

Beyond that, there was either a severe leak under the sink at some point in the past, or a persistent slow leak, causing the metal drawer rails to rust despite having some sort of opaque white coating, and the wood to bubble and harbor mold, as well as possibly rot. Needless to say, this situation needed to be rectified. Neither I nor my girlfriend wanted to use that bathroom.

We picked up a replacement vanity from Home Depot, which is already a huge improvement over the original vanity. I’ve seen entirely too many leaks under the sink go unnoticed because they were hidden away inside of the vanity cabinet, then go on to damage the rest of the vanity itself. This design is more open, and therefore, any leaks should be easily spotted.

This is why we decided to replace the old vanity.

Removal of the old vanity was easy enough, since the countertop wasn’t bonded to the vanity cabinet in any way, and the cabinet was attached to the way by a single concrete anchor screw – why a concrete screw, I don’t know. Removal revealed the extent of the water damage, which wasn’t entirely evident from inspection of just the inside of the cabinet. This process also revealed that the drain pipe sections connecting the sink to the P-bend were missing a couple O-rings, which were probably the source of the leak. On top of this, the P-bend was positioned in a very odd place, so replacement plumbing, like the original drainpipe connections, would require flexi-fit parts.

Replacement of the old vanity mirror/light/medicine cabinet combo was more exciting and less disgusting. I discovered that the light had been wired by bringing a line from the switch, punching a hole in the wall, leaving the debris on top of the medicine cabinet behind the trim on top of the lights, with the splice just hanging out. Installing the new light involved punching a couple more holes in the wall for a junction box behind the new light fixture and installing a 2×4 between the wall studs for support. The jacket around the old wiring had also been removed up to about eight inches from the end, so I trimmed that, put it in a junction box for safety, spliced a new section to the end, and ran the new piece to the junction box for the fixture.

Anyway, here’s the finished product.

The new vanity, sans mold and rot, plus leak-free plumbing!

Next steps: re-doing the linen closet shelving, taking the sliding door off the bathtub, and flipping the door around from being right-handed to left-handed.