What the house needs, it gets

You ever had to replace a garbage disposal? Me neither. Turns out it's trivial: You just unscrew the metal rings from two pipes, pull a plug from a socket, and the whole thing comes out.



There it is! One wrench to remove the connector pipe and set it aside, and you're ready for the new disposal.

Meantime, you can clean out the rest of the pipes. You'll probably find evidence of the last meal that finally killed the disposal off for good.



Mmmm, delicious! I think that's ... avocado skins?? Or maybe someone murdered Shrek.

The one that broke, and the replacement, are both called "In-Sink-Erators". Har har.



Here's some garbage disposal advice, straight from a repair technician I hired earlier this year to fix a dishwasher:

"Always run the water into the disposal when you're running it. You don't have to run it very long to chew everything up; usually just a couple of seconds will do it. There's no need to wait until it's full before you turn it on. If you want to keep the sink smelling good and clean the pipes, turn on the water, turn on the disposal, and squirt some dish soap in there. Let it run for about 10-15 seconds. Suds might come up from the drain on either side of the sink. That's good. Ordinary dish soap is fine but use Pine Sol if you want something tougher."

"A garbage disposal does not shred things, it just breaks them into chunks. I've seen people clog their pipes by putting all kinds of wrong stuff into a garbage disposal. Clothing, coffee filters, plastic or mesh bags, sponges, apricot pits, peanut shells... The general rule is, don't put anything down the garbage disposal that you wouldn't chew up with your own teeth."

"No bones. Would you chew up bones? Well, maybe you would if it was baked chicken and you were my grandma. She could eat a whole chicken down to like, a tiny pile of broken bones. But seriously, the bones people usually throw into a disposal aren't like that. Why make your disposal chop up bones, when you can just drop them in the trash? I dunno; people are weird."

"Don't put ice down a garbage disposal -- it doesn't sharpen the blades, contrary to what people on the internet say. That's like trying to sharpen your kitchen knives by putting them in a rock polisher; how's that gonna sharpen anything?"

THE MORE YOU KNOW (rainbow sound effects here)

What the house needs, it gets, part ][

This picture is pretty self-explanatory:



The question is, whatcha gonna do about it?

For a while, I explored the idea of replacing the carpet with laminate flooring. That exploration mostly consisted of trolling around YouTube for helpful videos:

Removing carpet and trim: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrULX2ofBZs
Installation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMDdYmReQw8
More installation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43b2P25CS7E
Undercutting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rGt6lxbMYk

The tools required seemed pretty simple. I already had a jigsaw. Just needed a special levered cutting instrument, sold specifically for laminate floor installation. Less than 20 bucks at any hardware store. I began looking at flooring samples:

Here's some dark laminate that sort of matches the upstairs... And here's an even closer match...
Here's the "underlayer" lining I'd need to install below the flooring, like pad under a carpet...
Here's a cheap installation kit...

Wow; I think I can actually do this!

Then I brought some samples home and placed them in the room and realized - they're all very dark, and they don't match the paint in the room, and a dark floor in a below-ground room would kind of look dirty anyway. All the lighter laminate flooring samples looked aggressively woody, so those didn't fit the room either. I wanted a subtle pattern, or no pattern at all.

The more I looked and researched, the more I realized it was also going to be a huge amount of labor to install that flooring myself, mostly cutting and fitting all those edge pieces. Why go through all that labor just to install something I wasn't thrilled about?

So I threw my hands in the air, and said, "bugger it; let's just get exactly the same thing." I cut a big scrap out of the nasty old carpet, and bicycled it over to a local carpet dealer.



In a couple of weeks they arrived with a big work van.



Then they tore up and removed the old carpet in less than five minutes. Look at that filthy stain on the underside! That's a spore factory for sure.



This pad's not much better... It's practically turning into dirt and crumbs right there on the floor...



Ten minutes later and they were laying down some nice new pad.



And on top of that, some nice new carpet, stretched over the tacks with some weird tool that looks like spare parts from a vacuum cleaner factory.



It was seven hundred bucks to do the whole room and the closet, replace the pad, and haul away the old carpet. That's a good chunk of money, for sure. But on the other hand, all the labor I had to put into it can be summed up like this:

1. Open the door and let the workers in.
2. Scrawl my John Hancock on a cheque.



It's proof yet again that I am not above throwing money at a problem, and admitting this:



Party on, dude!