Paint Covers a Multitue of "Sins"

Finally, after nearly 40 years (!), I've managed to put trim around this dormer window. It was a bear cutting all the individual pieces to fit around the existing roof structures. Thank goodness for siliconized caulk.

 

EDIT (2026/10/27):

These photos are of the west gable, intended to show what it looks like as of today, now that I have (most of) the trim up for the pediment piece (currently painted white).  I still need to put up a piece of trim below the left side of the pediment.  But, as is probably clear, the scaffolding isn't close enough, and I'm not about to try doing that from a ladder, not at my age.

The pediment piece is from the same long-since demolished house as the porch pillars.  The roof of that house wasn't as steep as mine, so it doesn't fit properly into the gable.  Fortunately, some of the PVC trim I'm using was wide enough to hide the gap.  I like how it turned out.

When I put the pediment piece up all those years ago, I had painted it vibrant colors, which you can see in one of the photos in this old post.  But, with 30+ years of west-facing weathering, the pain was in sad shape. So, for now, I just painted over the whole thing with "elastometric" roof paint to protect the wood from further weather.  As I'm hoping to get the scaffolding down and stored away before winter, I'll have to re-assemble it next year to paint the pediment with colors.

 

There's a Hole in my Ceiling, Dear Liza

Today, civilization ended at my house, and it was awful.  More prosaically, I had to turn the water off for most of the day.  It was after 8 PM when I finally turned the water back on. But, to be safe, I'm going to turn it off when I go to bed.

Several days ago, the refill tube in one of the toilets gave out, and so the valve would spray water wildly inside the tank when flushed. And, as it turned out, a small part of that wild spray was escaping the tank and pooling on the floor.  So, I had to buy a whole new ballcock valve because one little piece of plastic got stressed-out.  

I hate that in Current Year nearly every thing contains at least one very small, very cheap, but very crucial, and usually non-reparable, part/component made of plastic.

After replacing the ballcock valve inside the toilet, I discovered that the shut-off valve below the tank was now leaking.  After a few attempts to tighten up its parts, it was still leaking.  No problem, I'll just replace it.

Also, for a long time now, I've been meaning to replace the main "house side" shut-off valve, as I stopped working properly many years ago.  So, to do this, I had to close the other main valve, the one on the "city side" of the water meter.  No problem.  Until ...

It was no problem until I tried to connect the new valve to the two pipe-ends where I had cut out the old valve.  The length of the old valve plus the pipe-stubs was longer than the new valve, thus I couldn't get both ends seated properly.

It required a visit to all three "big box" home supply stores (probably close to two hours in total) to eventually find a coupling fitting that might solve that problem.  The fitting I used says it's for use with CPVC tubing, implying that it's not for use with copper tubing; but it seems to be working OK. 

So, on to replacing the toilet's shut-off valve.  Ugggh.  Double Ugggh -- 1) it turns out that the valves in the basement to shut off water to the second floor don't work: water still flows even when they are shut (or, at any rate, the cold water). So, I had to again shut off the water for the whole house.  And, 2) the old valve wouldn't unscrew from the CPVC stub-out. Instead, the stub-out, and the fitting it was glued into, broke ... inside the wall.  

No problem, I'll just break through the wall from the other side, from the inside of a cabinet in the other 2nd floor bathroom, and cut out the broken tubing from that vantage, leaving no visible damage to the finished walls.  

But, it was a problem after all.  Just as I had almost finished cutting the tubing, it shattered again; perhaps due to internal stress: as there was so little space to work in, I'd had to flex the tubing (this was fairly rigid CPVC tubing). 

With this second breakage, there wasn't enough tubing above floor-level to work with, and even less flexibility to attempt to cut out the break  So, NOW I'll have to cut a hole in the kitchen ceiling to get access to the tubing from below.  And, of course, I had to make another trip across town to get the fittings I'd need to put everything back together.

The plumbing is now back together, and the coupling above the kitchen ceiling joining the old CPVC tubing to the new PEX tubing seems finally (!!) to be properly seated, and not leaking.  I'm still going to turn the water off before I go to bed, just in case.

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When I was in 8th grade, I was compelled to perform "There's a Hole in my Bucket, Dear Liza" with a girl whose name was Liza. For the performance, I was 'Henry'.

There's a Hole in my Bucket, Dear Liza