How to secure a ladder

A few weeks ago we had our bedroom window replaced (a topic I'll cover in another post soon), and the guys who came to install the window used what seemed to me to be a very clever trick. They held a full size crow bar against the bottom rung of the ladder, and hammered the straight end into the ground like a tent peg so that the foot of their ladder wouldn't slide out from under them. 

Do you think that this is another great use for the woefully under-appreciated crow bar (see Ode to the Mini-Crow Bar), or a dangerous recipe for disaster?

Would it be better to hammer the crow bar in until the curved part hooked right over the bottom rung, or does the way that they have it work just as well?

Or should we just stick to doing things the old-fashioned way and make sure that we have a friend on hand to hold the ladder in place?

How to remove a broken light bulb from a lamp (or other fixture)

So you've found, scrounged, thrifted or been gifted a great new (to you) lamp, but there's a problem that spray paint can't solve. It has a broken bulb stuck in the fixture! 

Your first instinct may be to grab a pair of work gloves and unscrew it with them on to avoid cutting yourself, but beware of trying this solution, because if you break off the glass part of the bulb in the process, it will be much more difficult to get the bulb unscrewed.

The best solution is to get a potato that's just a bit larger than the remaining bulb parts (any type will do--it's best not to eat it afterwards anyways). Cut off one end so that you have a flat, skinless surface to work with.

Unplug the lamp, and then, holding with the cut end of the potato towards the base of the bulb, slowly but firmly impale the potato on the broken bulb, like this:

Once the potato is firmly in place, you can turn it (lefty loosey, of course) and the base of the bulb will turn with it, unscrewing the bulb from the lamp.

Put in a new bulb (of course you'll be using a super efficient compact fluorescent, right?) And voila, you have a lovely new lamp!



This beautiful lamp came to us courtesy of James' Aunt Sue!

Choosing the Right Paint Can Opener

There are two main kinds of paint can openers that are available. There are the ones with the plastic handle, like this: 

and there are the all metal ones with a loop at one end, and the opener at the other end. In my experience the plastic-handled ones cost about $1.49, and the metal ones cost about $0.49. Price aside, there is one good reason to prefer the metal ones to the plastic ones, and that is that the loop end is a bottle opener, and as James says, "Nothing goes together better than painting and beer."

Spackling Tips

With all the painting that we've been doing, there's been a lot of preparation to do too, especially spackling, so I thought I'd share a few tips that will make things easier for you the next time you have a hole to fill.

When I spackle, I'm always eager to start painting, so I'm always checking back impatiently to see if the spackle is try yet. The problem is that it can be hard to tell, and I'm often tempted to try sanding it down before it's really dry. If you've ever tried this you will know that it makes a mess of both your sandpaper and your spackle job. My first tip is a great solution to this problem.

Tip #1 - Buy the spackle that starts out pink dries white, so that you can easily tell when it's dry!

I have spackled many times over the years, and my next tip is something that it took me a long time to learn. You see, I was taught that the appropriate tool for spackling is a putty knife, and that one with a wider blade is better. It is true that a putty knife with a wide blade (at least 4") is a great tool for smoothing out the spackle, but I know of a much better one for applying spackle in the first place. And best of all, it's free!

Tip #2 - Apply the spackle with your finger (especially for nail holes and other small patches).

Using your finger enables you to push the spackle right into the hole that you're trying to fill, without getting it all over the wall around the hole. You will have to rinse your finger off afterwards, but spackle is water-soluble, so it's easy to clean off. Apply your layer of spackle, and then run the putty knife over it once to clean off any excess.

See what a mess it makes if you use a putty knife to apply the spackle? Avoid getting all that excess  spackle on the wall in the first place by using your finger!

Wait until it's dry (no longer pink!), lather, rinse and repeat. Unless it's a very small hole, it will probably take 2-3 applications of spackle to fill it so it's flush with the wall, because spackle shrinks a bit when it dries. That brings us to our next tip.

Tip # 3 - Apply several layers of spackle if you need to fill a hole more than 1/4 inch (about 0.5cm) deep.

Spackle is cheap, and that's a good thing given my next tip. Spackle that has started to dry out, or that has bits of dry, crunchy stuff (like dried plaster or bits of paint) in it is terrible to work with. The same goes for a putty knife with bits of dried spackle or other crud on it. This tip will hopefully prevent this problem.

Tip # 4 - Never ever put spackle that you've scraped off of the wall back into the tub of spackle.

Wipe it off the blade of the putty knife with your finger or a cloth, and throw it out or wash it down the drain (water-soluble, remember?). Also, be sure to wipe off the blade of your putty knife whenever the spackle on it starts to dry, or when it gets crusty. Otherwise when you clean off the excess spackle with the knife, you won't end up with a smooth surface.

If you're patching a larger area, you may want to sand between layers of spackle to remove any imperfections in your previous layer (due, perhaps, to laziness in cleaning off the putty knife) before adding more spackle. However, following these tips will minimize the amount of sanding you will have to do, and the number of layers of spackle that you will have to use. It's still a good idea to give your spackle a quick sand before you paint it though. But, after the sanding and before the painting, there is an important step that you must not skip.

Tip # 5 - Always prime over spackle before you paint.

If you are not planning to prime a wall before you paint it, and there are just one or two little nail holes that you need to patch, you may be inclined (like me) to skip priming all together, and just get on with the painting already. You must resist this urge. You don't have to prime the whole wall, but you do have to prime anywhere you have spackled. Unless I'm painting over a dark colour, spot-priming is usually what I do for areas that have been spackled, and anywhere where there's a stain that might leach through to the next layer that I can't clean off.

If you don't follow this advice and paint without priming, when the paint dries you will be disappointed to discover that the sheen (how shiny it is or isn't) will be different where there is spackle underneath the paint. This sounds like it might not be that noticeable, but it really is, so save yourself the hassle of having to prime over the new paint and then paint again over the primer, and spot prime over any spackled areas before you paint.

Please share your spackling tips in the comments section! For tips on choosing paint colours while you wait for your spackle to dry, check out this post.

How to open a bottle of wine with a drill

We just got home from a long day of painting with two of our good friends N and C at our new house. Of course, to thank them for helping us out we were sure to order pizza, and offer them home made chocolate chip cookies some of our wine (well, we don't really make it ourselves, we just bottle it).

We have brought a few things to the new house that we thought we might need when we're over there working, like our camping pots so that we can boil water for tea, a few mugs, and some wine glasses. Unfortunately, our thinking ahead did not extend to a corkscrew. This put a damper on our much anticipated wine break, until C came up with a great idea. Why not use the drill that James had out and was using to build our new fence to get the cork out? Brilliant!

Better yet, we decided that instead of using a drill bit, which might just shred the cork, we should use a screwdriver bit with a screw attached. We had some great contractor's screws that we were using for the fence, so James drilled one into the cork. But then we had a problem. How could we get the screw and cork out?

In another flash of brilliance, we decided that a small pair of vice grips around the screw between the head of the screw and the cork would provide the grip that James needed to pull the cork out of the bottle, while I held the bottle firmly. We cleverly tilted the neck of the bottle upwards while pulling, and we hardly spilled a drop. Success!

(You could probably also do this with a screwdriver, although I strongly recommend using a drill for extra drama.)

Choosing Paint Colours

One of the first things we have decided to change in our new home is the colour of the walls. We want to paint right away both because the existing paint is old, and needs to be refreshed, but also because putting our colours up on the walls will make the house feel like our home, rather than someone else's.

Here are a few tips that we used along the way:

Tip #1 When choosing paint colours is that it's important to see the colours in context, preferably in a variety of the different light conditions that the room you're planning to paint will be seen in. Try taping paint swatches to the wall and living with them for a while to see which ones you like best at different times of day.

Tip #2 Invest in a small sample pot of the colour you're thinking of buying for about $5, and go ahead and paint it on the wall. Be sure to do two coats, so you can see what it will really look like. This was key for us in deciding which wall to have as the accent wall, and which to use a more neutral tone on.

Tip #3 Remember that you can order any colour at full strength, 75%, 50% or only 25% saturation. So if there's a colour that you like, but you think it's too dark, this may be a good option for you. 

Tip #4 When you get your sample pot, you can ask them to mix it at 50% and show it to you, and then decide whether to leave it like that, or have them top it up to full strength. That way you can get an idea of what it would look like at half strength before you commit!

Tip # 5 Did you know that any paint company can match the colours in any other paint company's swatch book? We ended up using Benjamin Moore colours, but Behr paint, which was much less expensive!

It is pretty clear to us that pink isn't the right colour choice for our bedroom, and that we don't really love shiny ceilings, deciding which colours we do want to live with from here on out is more difficult than deciding which ones we don't like.

The very pink master bedroom in our new house.

In our last home, a condo in Austin, Texas that we sold last summer before moving to Toronto, we did a lot of painting, and we were really happy with the colours we ended up choosing. So, we seriously considered just using those colours again, since they worked so well the last time.

 Here's our old living room painted in Behr's Yacht Harbour.

 

Here's our Austin kitchen with 

cabinets in Behr's Pollen Grains.

Here is our old bedroom.   

The colour is Behr's Green Tea.

On the other hand, we felt that it would be nice to have a fresh start in our new home, and that these colours (especially the blue) were cooler and so better suited to a warm climate like Austin. 

Since we decided to go back to the drawing board, we thought that consulting with James' design-savvy Aunt Sue (who used to be an interior designer) would be a good place to start. She consulted her colour book (which happened to be from Benjamin Moore), and came up with some really out-there colour ideas for us, including Cool Aqua, Turquoise Powder or Bahaman Sea for the kitchen, Pale Avocado for the living room and accents in Marblehead Gold, Concord Ivory, orange, brown and purple.

Here are some of those colours: 

Cool Aqua

 Pale Avocado

Marblehead Gold

After thinking about it, we decided that these colours were a bit too bold for us at the moment, and that we wanted colours that would coordinate better with our stuff (since we don't have extra money for new furniture right now). So we went back to Aunt Sue with a request for a more subdued palette, and she had some great new suggestions including Benjamin Moore's Golden Harvest and York Harbour Yellow for the kitchen, Nantucket Gray or Georgian Green for the living room, Dunmore Cream for the foyer and hallways, and Copper Clay for the banister.

Here are some of those colours:

Golden Harvest

York Harbour Yellow

Georgian Green

Dunmore Cream

Copper Clay

Feeling better about these ideas, and having checked out the colours online, we headed over to our local Benjamin Moore store to check out the colours in person and to pick up some swatches to take over to the house. We discovered that the ones we liked the most were part of the Historic Color collection. So, we decided to see if we could get all of our colours from that collection. 

Here are the colours that we settled on after that trip:

On the left you have Bryant Gold, which we decided to use as an accent wall in the kitchen, along with Dunmore Cream for the non-accent walls. Because we really wanted the house to have some unity, we decided to use Georgian Green for three walls of the living room, and Dunmore Cream for the fourth. The accessories that we already have are navy blue, dark red and chocolate brown, so I think they'll go well.

We chose Georgian Brick, which is the red in the centre, for the banister, and Monterrey White (which Aunt Sue also suggested) for the banister spindles. The three colours on the right are the ones we're considering for accent walls in the upstairs bedrooms. They are Kennebunkport Green, Buckland Blue, and Hawthorne Yellow. We haven't made a final decision about the upstairs colours yet, though.

Before making a final decision, we used tip #2. We went to Home Depot and bought $5 sample pots of each of the colours we were considering for the living room and kitchen, which we wanted to paint first. 

We used tips #3 and 4 when deciding on the Georgian Green and Dunmore Cream. As soon as we saw the sample pots of these colours at half strength, we knew that the Georgian Green looked too pastel for us at 50%, and had the sample bumped up to full strength. The Dunmore Cream looked better at half strength, since we wanted to use it as a nice bright neutral colour to offset the saturated accent walls, so we left it that way.

Deciding which walls to use the accent colours on and which to paint the more neutral half-strength Dunmore Cream took some time and some thinking. We used the sample paint to try out some ideas, and in the end we will be painting over some of the walls that the sample colours ended up on, since we changed our minds about which would be the accent walls. I'm glad that we tried it out though, because it really gave us a good idea of how each colour would look in context.

We painted the first coat on the living room ceiling (just plain flat white ceiling paint for that) and walls yesterday, and will be putting up the second coat this weekend. It's looking great already, and I can't wait to post photos for everyone to see.

Do you have any tips on how to choose paint colours to add to the list? I'd love to hear what techniques you use to feel confident that you'll like the colours that you've chosen once they're up on the walls, and see photos of the results!