Little Ms. Fix- It...and other homeowner stories

I'm ready to rock and roll! 

I have a pretty extensive arsenal of tools.

 I have just a quick post about the some of the goings on at the Pretty Old Rowhouse. As you homeowners know, there’s always small random things to fix or spruce up.  A prime example is in the bathroom. The main bathroom upstairs is yellow, black, and white. I love it, but I didn’t love the previous owner's’ choice of yellow toilet seat for the commode. I see what they were trying to do from a design standpoint, but the seat was dingy-looking and stained. It wasn’t the most welcoming of sites for my guests, so I vowed to change it!

Yeah it matches the floor, but it's not the cleanest look

I’d never changed a toilet seat, but I figured it would be pretty simple.  Boy was that an understatement! It took me literally 5 minutes to pop off the old one and screw on the new one. One problem I had was that I didn't tighten the bolts all the way, so a couple of days later the seat was wobbly. Other than that, I’m super pleased with how it looks now. So much cleaner!

Small changes can have a big impact.

I was also contending with a broken shower head. There was already one of those hand-held showers installed, but one of the holster pieces was broken so it would always turn and spray water directly on the shower curtain. This was another easy fix. I found a new handheld shower that I liked, removed the old one and the pipe tape, and put the new one on. On the first try, water sprayed everywhere! I found that I hadn’t tightened everything up so after doing that, the shower worked perfectly.

A small but important piece had broken off.
This meant that the shower had a mind of its own and wouldn't stay in place.

I work so hard.

Other random things:

During the major snowstorm we had, one of my gutters got so heavy with ice and snow that it broke and part of it fell off the roof. Because of the way rowhouses are built, my gutter was partially on my neighbor’s side. I was a tad embarrassed that a piece of my gutter had fallen on their porch, but they were cool about it. I had a good church friend come out and fix it for me. After he finished, he told me he would come back out when it got warmer to reinforce it so it won’t fall off again next year.

The broken gutter.

We had a very heavy thunderstorm a few weeks ago with tons of lightening and heavy wind and rain. I was nervous (as I usually am about these things) that I would lose power or have some other significant damage. Everything was going fine until I heard dripping. It was raining inside my storm door! I freaked out, because it had not done this before in other heavy rains since I've been in the house. I attributed it to the fact that the rains were REALLY heavy. It finally stopped leaking once the rain let up so I was thankful for that. Other good news: no flooding!

Hard to see, but there's water drops coming in there.

Had to soak up all that water before it got on my wood floors.

Another issue related to this is that my front porch is uncovered, so I've been brainstorming creative ways of covering the porch either partially or in its entirety. Most Baltimore rowhouses use metal awnings to achieve this. Even though they're incredibly functional, I'm not a huge fan of these awnings from an aesthetic standpoint. I'll have to design something that's architecturally pleasing and not too expensive. This addition would be part of my 5-year plan since it's a pretty major change.

I’m also in process of making some big design changes to my upstairs, including building out my walk-in closet/dressing room and finally adding some paint colors and furniture. I can’t wait to show it to you!

Somebody went paint shopping!

What could this possibly be? Stay tuned!

Thanks for reading!