Over the past couple of weekends we have accomplished dealing with a couple nagging projects. Feels good to get them done, of course. More on the list, but two down!


First we had to deal with some problems related to our lawn sprinklers. It looked like we might have to tear out the entire system of metal pipe and replace it with plastic, but a few strategic repairs seem to have addressed the current leaks or failing components.

No doubt it would be much better in the long run to install an entire new system, but that's a whole lotta money or time, so we opted to take the easy way for now. The real saviour here was a pipe threading kit.

This let us (read Shelley) take care of some problem spots without much effort in the end. We had thought such tools cost a lot more than this, but because that turned out not to be the case things are fixed (for now) and it will be easy to address future piping failures.



Our second effort addressed our set of six dining room chairs. Before we bought our cats a scratch tower they clawed up our furniture, especially the chairs' padded seats. We put off fixing them because we figured it would mean either a big repair bill or quite a lot of time figuring out how to re-upholster them ourselves.

Well it turns out that the chair seats come off easily, and it's both simple and straightforward to take off the cloth covering the foam that makes up the cushion, cut new cloth, and re-cover the foam and put the seat back on.

Thus, after pulling out more than 225 staples per chair, and choosing some new fabric and stapling it back on, we have finally got some nice looking chairs once again. This project took only a few hours and not much effort so I guess it's a lesson learned.



The old and the new.