Sage, Naomi – Author at Plaster & Disaster

2017 has been a productive year for both of us, one in which Naomi made serious progress in her terrifying basement and finished her dining room makeover, and Sage finally finished her kitchen renovation and made her yard significantly less ugly. Still, as we transition between projects it can be easy to focus on how much more is still ahead of us. Sometimes it’s important to take a step back and reflect on how far we’ve come, so today we thought we’d share a few of our favorite room makeovers.

Naomi

We had relatives over about a month ago from out of town who were seeing our place for the first time, and I kind of blew my mind talking about what this place used to look like. Spaces that I now take for granted or even want to make changes in used to be total disaster zones.

Take my bedroom, for example, which I was so proud to finish earlier this year but am now totally accustomed to. It used to be a dark, sad hole, and then even our initial updates left it mismatched and a little odd.

This room took a lot of work, from DIYing custom bedside tables, building a storage chest for a non-standard sized space, to finally getting around to painting the window sashes throughout my house. But it was worth it, and I remembered how worth it it was by how proud I was to show them this space.

See the full set of projects here.

But the best example of how I need to do a better job appreciating how far I’ve come is my kitchen. Now that my dining room is done I am giving this room significant dirty looks, and it’s the next major space up for a makeover. It’s hard to remember that it once looked like this:

Oh, the yellow! Put in that context, the kitchen is looking pretty good.

We opened up the wall to the dining room, put in new bamboo floors (since we were already putting them almost everywhere else in the house), and replaced the counter. Then, one of my first DIY projects was installing renters wallpaper as a temporary backsplash. That brilliant project is still standing strong to this day, and has some sentimental value since I wrote it up as a guest post for the blog Sage had before we started this one together.

Sage

One of my favorite space makeovers that I haven’t thought much about in awhile is our front hallway and stairs. We don’t spend a ton of time there, but the dark and drab space definitely bummed us out whenever we walked through it.

We put in some pretty serious time painting, transforming the closet into open shelving, installing new light fixtures, and adding color and interest on the stair risers and through artwork (recap of all those projects here). It’s never going to the the star of the show in our house because it’s still a pretty dark space, but it’s still a pretty big improvement!

On the other end of the spectrum in terms of effort, one room that often gets overlooked but is definitely the winner of “quick and cheap room makeovers that changed everything” is our bathroom. When we bought the house, it was lime green and looked like this:

I hated everything about it — the green walls, the brown tile, the tiny footprint, I could go on…. I turns out, though, that all the room needed was a new coat of paint some colorful artwork and accessories.

Somehow those small changes totally changed the space, making the brown tile no longer look so brown and the space no longer feel so choppy (thanks in part to painting the walls and ceiling the same color). Okay yes it’s not actually a bigger, better space and it wasn’t truly terrible to begin with (I know that some tile just cannot be salvaged), but I’m glad I put in a few hours of work to discover that this room was pretty easily transformed!

It’s so nice to take a pause every now and then to recognize what you’ve accomplished, rather than always focusing on what you don’t like or what you need to do next. There may still be major disaster zones in our homes (looking at you, Sage’s basement and Naomi’s closet) but at least we’re making progress! We’ll try not to take it for granted.

Lately things have been trending in a positive direction on the home front as we wrap up a productive season of hard work on the outside of our house, which is mostly a good thing but also sometimes leaves me feeling like we’re not upholding the “disaster” portion of our name quite enough. Fortunately my house has remedied that concern, with our recent discovery that the basement was full of water. Yay!

I didn’t get a photo since I was too busy assessing the flood, but I’m sure many of you have been there and can picture the scene. This has happened on occasion before when the washer outlet hose (which drains to the utility sink) has gotten misplaced by one of us and discharged onto the floor. This time, however, we discovered that the washer itself was completely full of water (not as a result of us running the machine), and since we had left the door open (to prevent mustiness when not in use) it had then overflowed onto the floor. After cleaning up the floor and emptying the water from the washer, we determined that the washer had a slow leak into the drum, though it was so slow that we’re not sure how it got so out of hand in the first place.

Sam quickly found a YouTube video that suggested it was a broken inlet valve, so he placed an order for the replacement part suggested by the video (more to come on that later in this saga….). So that was Issue #1, hopefully with resolution in sight.

In the meantime we wanted to figure out how to turn the water off to the washer to avoid further leakage, so we set about trying to do that. But of course it’s never easy. First we found that the washer connects to the utility sink through this very old and rusty shutoff valve:

But it was so corroded that we couldn’t get the lever to move. So instead we searched around for the sink shutoff valve, assuming that if we could turn off water to the utility sink then the water to the washer would stop too. Despite a lengthy hunt around the basement looking for the elusive shutoff valve, it was nowhere to be found — so we returned to the washer shutoff as our only option. With the help of some banging and some WD40 we finally got it to turn off, success! But then of course it started leaking. And thus Issue #2 was born.

I had never seen anything that looked like that same valve before, but by googling “really old washer shutoff valve” I was able to determine that it’s a Watts Washing Machine Shutoff Valve. Folks online said it’s not uncommon for it to spring a leak once it gets pretty old, so I was hopeful that I could replace it and put Issue #2 to rest. And fortunately I was able to find a replacement on Amazon for just $39 (affiliate link – read our policies).

We still wanted to turn off the water though, since now we had a leaky washing machine and a leaky shutoff valve. Some additional research convinced me that there probably wasn’t a local shutoff for the utility sink unfortunately (since it would have been right under the sink, which is obviously the first place we looked). Yay, Issue #3! That meant that the only way to stop the water flow would be to turn off water to the whole house, which seemed a tad bit inconvenient given that it would still be a few days before the replacement inlet valve and Watts shutoff valve arrived and we like to use the water in our house to like drink water, shower, flush the toilet, etc. So we just put out some buckets and crossed our fingers that the leaks would stay relatively contained.

Fortunately they did (which still makes us wonder how the initial flood got so big), so this weekend once we had the parts in hand we got to work.

Inlet valve

Shutoff valve

To solve everything we had to work in reverse order: Solve Issue #3 (turning off the water), then Issue #2 (leaking shutoff valve), and then finally Issue #1 that started the whole thing (leaking inlet valve in the washer).

We started by trying to turn off the water to the whole house. I say trying because we did successfully locate the main water shutoff valve to the house, right near the water meter:

I had a moment where I was confused because there’s a line coming from the electrical box to this same pipe (the line coming from the left of the photo above), but then I remembered that the grounding for the electrical box is often a conductor that is clamped to the main plumbing line. Look at me putting my learning to use in understanding my house.

Anyway, I succeeded in turning the main shutoff valve such that water was no longer running to any of the fixtures in our house. Except the basement utility sink, which continued to have some water coming through. Because why not.

We renewed our search for another shutoff valve because where the hell could this water be coming from, but were unsuccessful so we decided we had to give up on fully solving Issue #3 and take the plunge to replace the Watts valve while there was still a little water running. We cleared the area of anything electrical, figured out our plan of attack, and then executed as quickly as possible.

First we loosened the big screws connecting the old shutoff valve to the plumbing from the side of the sink:

They did not want to turn, but with some more WD40 and my power drill we got them loose. As predicted water started coming out (hence the break in photos), but it was a pretty manageable quantity with a bucket in place. We quickly got the new valve in place, determining that our setup did not require the threaded connecters that came with it:

These remove easily, though, and then you can just slip the valve over the pipes and attach them by tightening the big screws. There are little black plastic washer things you should be sure to slip over the ends of the pipes to create a nice tight seal. Once we had the screws tightened we flipped the lever and the water stopped. Success! Then all we had to do was connect the washer hoses to the other end of the valve and we were in business.

Yay for resolving Issue #2!

With the exciting ability to fully shut off water to the washer, we embarked on fixing Issue #1, replacing the leaking inlet valve. We followed the instructions in the very helpful YouTube video to take the top of the washer off:

Then disconnect the old inlet valve and install the new inlet valve. And that’s when we realized that the new part we’d bought was not identical to the old part, and would not work.

Uncertain who to blame for this, we revisited the YouTube video and determined that the part used in the video was the correct part, and the part number listed on the video was actually wrong. We scrolled through the comments and towards the bottom noticed someone else calling this out over two years ago, but the video owner had still failed to update the video to note this issue. So on balance, I’m not a huge fan of this YouTuber.

We will have to return the original part to Amazon and eat the shipping cost because it wasn’t their error, and now wait for the correct part to arrive before we can resolve Issue #1 (assuming that a broken inlet valve is the problem in the first place…). But at least in the meantime we can turn off the water to the washer when we aren’t using it with our trusty new washer shutoff valve! So even though this whole thing hasn’t exactly been a resounding victory quite yet, I’m pleased that we now have a way to reliably turn water off to the washer *and* I feel like I learned a lot about how the plumbing in my house works. I hope you learned a little something today too that might be helpful if you’re ever trying to fix washing machine plumbing! And no matter how much we spend on parts and shipping, it still won’t cost nearly what having a plumber come out would, so that feels good.