And The Garbage Disposal Goes Grind, Grind, Grind

Mike was on travel last week for work and flew back Friday evening before 10pm, picked up the car at the parking lot then drove straight to Payson and was there before midnight.  That is one of the wonderful things about Payson, it is close to Phoenix (but also far enough).  It is easy to make a day trip if you need something you cannot get in town or you forgot something at one house or the other.  Laurie once drove into Phoenix from Payson to spend time with our daughter-in-law's mother who was visiting Phoenix.  When she got to town, she found she had forgotten to bring the apartment keys and they both drove to Payson and then back to Chandler.  She says it gave them a lot of time to talk.  Would have required a lot more talking had we bought something in Heber or Show Low.  Mike was happy to be back from Hawaii and much happier to be in Payson.

While Mike was on travel, Laurie proceeded to put all the pantry items back on the new shelves we installed.  She found that as the shelves were loaded, some of them began to bow in the middle near the back of the shelf.  This made her be more cautious on how she placed the items on the shelves.  Due to that, we decided to add an extra support (had some leftover from the install) to the middle of each shelving section.  Mike thought he could do this without removing any of the shelf items and proceeded on the longer wall first.  After some work (and marks in the wall), he was able to get the vertical support behind the shelves.  He then realized that he had to attach the shelf brackets to each shelf and the vertical support before that support could be attached to the upper support rod.  It took quite a bit of effort (would have been easier to remove the shelf items), but he got all the brackets in place and now came the time to secure the vertical support.  As the picture shows, the support was very close to making the connection but not there (close but no cigar as the saying goes).  Mike had to get under the shelving unit and with all his strength push up on the vertical support to get it to lock in place. We then decided it would be better to do the short wall shelving unit when it was empty, especially since it has all the heavy kitchen appliances.  So that project will wait until Mike comes up again.

Vertical support with shelf brackets, they still need to be attached to the shelves

After the brackets were attached, the support did not quite make it to the support bar

With some huffing, puffing and pushing, the vertical locked in place

A friend wanted to see the pantry full, here it is with the added support

Even the drawers are full of stuff and the A/C duct box stores items too

The last part of the pantry upgrade is the installation of our new whole house water filtration system.  Mike pulled out the tanks and set them up in the pantry so he could lay out how all three pieces of the system would go in the area we had.  After he got an idea of how he wanted to make the connections, we went to Home Depot to scope out what we could use to put it all together.  The system comes with a pre-filter, a small unit with a filter cartridge that last about 9 months; a large filter tank that is charcoal or carbon based; and a water conditioner tank.  This system received really good ratings and it does not require a drain as most water softeners do.  The only issue we have with the system so far is how to connect it.  The house water line at the loop in the pantry is 3/4" and the system has all 1" connections. Not only that, but the pre-filter requires a male connection and the tanks need female connectors.  We can make the lines 3/4" throughout the whole system, but that means reducing all the 1" connections to 3/4".  Not an easy or cheap task as our four hours at Home Depot proved.  We have put the install on hold as we do more research into our connection options.

So Mike moved on to another small task on the current list of things to do and that was the installation of the new garbage disposal.  Laurie picked up a 1HP unit through a Black Friday sale for cheaper than most 3/4HP units.  We do not have one in the house currently, but Mike has replaced a few in our past houses.  While he started working on that project, he decided to also fix the kitchen faucet.  It has been dripping lately and he wanted to get new washers for it.  It is the same faucet that came with the house and we were hoping it would last until the kitchen was remodeled.  When he started to take it apart, Laurie decided it would be better to replace it with the new unit we bought on sale many years ago which has been sitting in storage.  Might as well use it instead of putting more money into the old one.  So now the project became a kitchen sink remodel.

Step one was to remove the old faucet hardware and all the current drain pipes.  Removing the pipes gave Mike better access into the cabinet as he had plans to rebuild the drain design to make it better.  Our current drain has two p-traps and there should only be one, which the disposal paperwork confirmed with a drawing for our type of sink layout.  Mike then cleaned the sink where the old faucet was and installed the new one.  The old sink had a separate sprayer in the base and this one had the sprayer built into the head.  This left a space for an in-sink soap dispenser that came with the unit.  After getting the faucet secured to the sink, he made all the water connections and ran a leak test.  At first it all seemed good, but after a few seconds he found a leak in the cold water hose near the valve.  A trip to Home Depot gave us a new hose and the faucet was drip free.

Making the connections to the faucet

We bought this faucet not long after getting our Payson house, should have installed it years ago -  it is so nice

Laurie decided the disposal should go in the right hand sink.  She felt that would be closer for dumping food as plates came to the sink.  Mike removed the current drain in that sink and installed the mounting hardware for the disposal.  The disposal came with an easy install kit which uses a rubber gasket for the seal, but the indentation for the drain hole in the sink is so deep, Mike had to use plumber's putty for the seal.  Once the bracket was in place, Mike connected the disposal with the self-locking bracket.  He then laid out all the drain pieces we had in order to construct the new proper design.  He found he needed two extra extensions to make it all work and off to Home Depot for the 2nd time in an hour.  The extra extensions made all the pieces fit perfectly.  Now was the real test to see if the disposal worked.  We knew an outlet had been installed under the sink for the disposal and the dishwasher (one plug each).  Both breakers have never been turned on since they were not needed so Mike flipped on the one labeled disposal.  Not remembering which socket was for which appliance, he plugged the disposal in to the lower outlet and it came on.  That was strange as the dishwasher breaker was still off and the disposal switch was off.  So he tried the top outlet and nothing.  We tried again with the wall switches flipped on - same results.  It had been years since the wiring was done, we thought maybe it had not been tested and the wall switch had not been connected.  We started to go through old photos to see if we could tell anything about the lines that were run, but every picture of that area had something covering the wall and the wires.  Mike was resigned to taking all the plates off and testing all the connections when it dawned on him that we had done the final testing and what we thought were the disposal and dishwasher outlets, in reality were the opposite.  So he turned off the disposal breaker and flipped on the dishwasher breaker (both are 20A).  He then tested the bottom outlet and nothing, then the top outlet and again nothing - that is until we turned on the wall switch and GRIND, GRIND, GRIND!  Success! Laurie was so happy to have a disposal and not have to fling food into the garbage like her ancestors did. Now we have to change the electrical panel labels to reverse those two breakers.

The grandaddy of disposals (1HP) and the new drain design

The upper outlet is the disposal connection, not the dishwasher as previously thought

We had to figure out which switch was which - the one on the right does disposal

Recently we purchased extra sensors for our outdoor/indoor thermometer.  Many years ago, Mike got our original unit free through a work incentive program and it came with one outside sensor that we installed on the porch.  The receiver stays in the house and shows us the outside and inside temperatures and some minimum/maximum information. For storage purposes, Laurie wanted to see how cold it was getting in our sheds and our crawlspace. Since the unit we have will monitor three outdoor sensors, we bought two more that we can move around.  We set them up and placed them in the sheds for now.

New sensors, the bigger one records temp and humidity and will be used in our crawlspace

Enough with the house fix-ups, it was now time to make the house ready for Christmas.  Laurie found a Pinterest item for making Christmas trees from tomato plant stands.  So awhile back we bought two at Home Depot and we applied garlands and lights to make them look like small trees.  We removed the lights on the two front posts next to our driveway entrances and placed the trees over the posts.  They now look like small trees with short trunks.  We put out our thrift store moving reindeer in our front weed patch and some lighted balls in the front real trees.  Then we put icicle lights on the roof line and red lights on the railings.  Before the day was done, we had them all wired to the house outlets and on timers.  It took a little longer than expected, but this was the first year we did any serious outside decorations and we had to sift through all the stuff we brought from our Gilbert house.  Lastly, we put up our inside tree and decorated it. The Payson house is now decked out for Christmas, as are many of our neighbor's.

Our Christmas lights as seen by our neighbor across the street (picture texted to us)

Stats: 3 Home Depot trips; 0 Walmart trips
Remodeling expense 11/29/15-12/07/15: $25
Remodeling expense to date: $52,486