Crazy Town

Whew. It’s been a whirlwind of a last two weeks to say the least. Sanity is on the horizon and as I set down to my computer today I realized how much we have to show you to bring you up to speed. It’s been a solid two weeks of fun and excitement and baby being waaaay off his schedule.

I took a whole week away from the house and went through the 50 hour For My Life conference at our church and then Mom, she’s technically Kevin’s but I claim her too 🙂 arrived for a weeks visit as soon as the class ended. And no (as there seems to be this question a lot), I didn’t go to the conference to prepare emotionally for my mother in law to arrive! Haha quite the contrary, she is fabulous and we have a great relationship.

What you may have missed through these last two weeks are all the varying stages of Kevin’s new look:

Haha. Just kidding.

But he did rock a mustache for a solid week at least.

One of our good friends Linda had a surprise going away party where we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves and Kevin thoroughly enjoyed posing for his “facebook photo op”.

He snapped a few of me and the boy through the night too.

My scalp has apparently decided that i need to regrow all the front portion of my hair so I have bazillions of new hairs popping out everywhere. Kevin declared the other day that I am the only person he knows with a proceding hair line. Haha.

Enough about our hair issues.

Can you believe how big Noah is? Holy smokes. Where is my baby and who is this little person?

We had a great time at the party, best potluck meal we have ever had in Thomaston. Everyone went all out to make sure Miss Linda knew we were going to miss her, love her, and can’t wait to see her again soon. It was required of me by a handful of people to bring the what seems to becoming more and more famous Mac and Cheese.

Kevin has since completely shaven his face and got a spiffy haircut from his mom and is looking cool and clean for the summer heat.

Before mom arrived we scurried around like busy bees trying to get some semblance of a kitchen in order.  We had still been doing dishes in the bathtub up until she arrived and really did not want to see her bent over the bathtub washing our dishes. Because that’s what mom’s do when they come to your house for a visit. They do your dishes/help you with laundry/feed the baby/wash the baby/snuggle the baby/wash more dishes/put dishes away. It’s a love hate feeling.

Love: that someone is helping me

Hate: knowing that we have dirty dishes/clothes/babies that you are washing.

Mostly love though because I know they do it because they love us and they love taking care of us.

Aren’t mom’s great?

If you remember from a while back the sink had looked like this for several days:

The next step actually happened several days earlier. We needed to remove the old sink strainers from the sink.

Had we been thinking we would have done this before we installed the sink but we were too excited to get it in place and well, when you do things for the first time hindsight is always 20/20. Kevin got the first one off no problem:

The second one not so much. After a solid 20 minutes of trying to remove it we finally gave up in frustration and I called Dad. Thankfully he told us we could just cut the ring off and it should come off simply. Kevin broke out the dremel and after several minutes emerged triumphantly with the ring cut off and the old strainer.

I was ready to install the new drains that night when we realized that we actually needed Plumbers Putty to do that. Doh!

Back to Home Depot the following day.

By the time Saturday rolled around we were needing to get this sink functioning so I broke out the putty and got to work. After making a ring of putty I pushed it firmly in place.

Then I removed all the nuts and washers from the bottom of the strainer and pressed it into place.

The instructions said to remove the excess putty from the top and bottom. Which in these photos look like it went quite nicely. It’s amazing how you can make photos hide your errors! What really happened was mass quantities of plumbers putty spooged out all over the place repeatedly. Using about 1/3 of that amount is a much better idea turns out.

Regardless of my newbie mistake I got it in place and mopped up. Then I hand tightened the nut and washers back into place.

And Kevin helped me crank them down tight to hold them in securely. I held from the top with pliers so it wouldn’t spin while he tightened it up from below.

Beautiful.

The next task: Replumb the sink for the new depth and drain locations and add an outflow for the dishwasher.

I was able to salvage most of the pipe from what we already had which was a great little savings and we discovered that we actually didn’t need to use the PVC primer and adhesive they had sold us because everything was in pressure fittings. Those things are amazing! Just tighten down and you have saved yourself bookoo bucks.

Which apparently is a phonetic spelling of the french word “beaucoup” combined with a word starting with the letter “b” which is a slang term for money, thus creating a “fun to say” turn of phrase for a lot of money. 

Here’s the finished work: The new piece of pipe with the insert for the dishwasher drain hose.

The left sink drain pipe and the new P trap that we replaced since it was broken and we’d never noticed. Plus the scary looking metal connection that all this ties into…..sometimes you just have to draw the line at what is worth making new and pretty and what isn’t. Maybe I’ll paint it someday 🙂

After that was in place it was time to hookup the dishwasher!!

I spiffy little connector that they sold us at Home Depot made the water line a cinch. See the copper piece in the center? That little splitter screwed on to the current water line and then into the new sink, and the split goes to the dishwasher. As I was reading this post I actually realized that I hooked up the dishwasher water line to the COLD water instead of the hot water line. Woops. That would explain the soap packets not dissolving. According to Google lots of people do hook it up to the cold line especially if you want to have all your hot water accessible even while washing the dishes but Dad says its not to code and won’t actually sanitize your dishes.

Makes sense to me.

Sooo….This is how NOT to hook up a dishwasher, you want to actually put the splitter on the Hot water line.

The brass elbow was already attached to our dishwasher since it was used so all I had to do was screw it into place.

And connect the drain hose.

And all our wires are actually behind this little box that had to be unscrewed. Kevin wired it up before I could snap a picture. He’s fast!

Here we are for our test run…..and she works! Hooray for the $25 dishwasher!

We’ve got lots more to share so be sure to check back over the next few days to get you up to speed!

Have you tackled any plumbing challenges lately? Ever hooked up something backwards and realized days/weeks/years down the road it was messed up?