New Garbage Disposal Unit

We replaced the garbage disposal unit last night. Conforming to my master plan to massively over engineer every aspect of the house, we jammed in the biggest one we could find.



The old one (above) has been broken for a while. We’d been holding off replacing it, because we have better things to spend money on, but its not pleasant coming home each night and having the food scraps in the garbage can smelling out the front of the house. We finally caved on the weekend and went and bought one from Home Depot.

One of my pet peeves is when you put too much stuff down one of these things and they jam up. The old one couldn’t pull the skin off custard. I don’t think that’ll be a problem with this one. It’s rated at 1hp, auto reverse with thermal cutout, and gas powered vortex waste burner.



OK. I made up the bit about the waste burner. Sure would be cool though…….

Stripping the porch II

We’re pretty much done with stripping the paint off the front porch. Its funny, I keep telling myself that it will look better when it’s done. It does look better without the paint, but it’s a shame how damaged the bricks are. Hopefully, after they’ve been re-mortared, they’ll look a bit more presentable. If they don’t we’ll just paint them again :)



The next porch project is to re-mortar the bricks. We’ve got about 3 different generations of mortar. The oldest (I think) is almost black and quite soft and gritty. You can see little bits of stone in it.



The next is quite sandy colored and more doesn’t look too bad.


This last shot is what most of our mortar looks like.


Not pretty. When you say “I’m going to replace the mortar” in your head, it doesn’t sound all that bad. I went up to Lowes and bought a cheap angle grinder and a diamond blade and started cutting.



I spent an hour or so on Sunday afternoon. This is as far as I’ve got. Its dirty, tedious, and exacting work. Looks like I’m going to spend my upcoming weeks vacation “on the bricks”

Speaking of vacation, my sister is coming to visit. She’s going to stay with us for a few days and has offered to help work on the house. Silly girl. The cool thing, is that she’s very “arty” and when the time comes to do the fun interior stuff (like stencils, friezes, art glass etc, she’ll be perfect. I’m not sure how she is with brick though. Oh well, maybe we’ll just go to Magic Mountain and ride roller coasters :)