Anyone foolhardy enough to get me into a conversation about DIY will already know the stories about various bodge-jobs and shortcuts I’ve discovered, perpetrated by a past owner of this house.
Yesterday I replaced the ageing heating thermostat (a rotary-style Honeywell) with a nice shiny digital one – a Horstmann Centaurstat 7, in fact. It has quite a sophisticated built-in programmer (more so than our existing programmer, at least) and will hopefully prevent the over-heating problem we’ve had here since we moved in. I found that the old thermostat was calling for heat at a higher temperature than selected (3-4 degrees higher), causing someone (me) to turn the thermostat up in the morning, causing someone else (Charlie) to complain in the evening when it became too hot.
I am slowly coming to accept the fact that seemingly simple tasks are never quite as simple as they should be. I’m mainly talking about DIY, and home improvements.
The latest ‘quick job’ that turned out to be anything but quick, was replacing our side gate. We haven’t used it since we moved into the house back in mid-2007, mainly because we didn’t have–or couldn’t find (or, probably more accurately, didn’t look for)–the key. We assumed that since we couldn’t open it, neither could anyone else (without breaking it down), and it was therefore as secure as a side gate could be expected to be.
For quite a few weeks, the left-hand wing mirror on my car has been making a rather unsettling clicking/knocking noise every time it folds out.
And at lunchtime today it decided it was finally going to give up the ghost. It folds in, but doesn’t fold out. Repairing it shouldn’t be too difficult, or so I thought. It seems as if the linkage between the motor and the wing mirror joint has decided to become dislodged, or broken at worst.
So, armed with my trusty Torx screwdrivers, and a few other choice items from my toolbox, I went out to change its mind.