Hardly Handy Man

Improperly covered gable vent

The reasons I'm not ready to live in a house become more obvious every time I enter a house. I burn everything I cook because for the first time in months I can walk away from the kitchen. Also, I still piss in empty milk jugs out of habit and empty them on the lawn. But most importantly I am making real progress with the details of my van. It's a closed system, you see, and it's actually possible to know everything about it and carry the tools to fix what breaks or at least understand why it broke. The van is my shepherd and teacher; every day in the van leads to self discovery and the expansion of my world view.

Houses, on the other hand, as simple as a 1.5 story brick house with 80 year old effects and a forced hot air heating system and not much else, totally confound me. It's like starting from scratch. And I only learn by doing something wrong and then fixing it but with houses that can take forever and cost thousands of dollars. So I read and read on the internet but if you don't know what to look for then you can easily read the wrong thing. A few home inspection sites gave me some good tips. For instance, what is a soffit vent? Or a gable vent? or a ridge vent? Why are they important? How do you lay fiberglass insulation? What kind of fiberglass insulation? The questions go on and on and lead to still more questions. The easy answer is ask a professional. Well, from the reading I've done the ratio of professional to fraud posing as a professional is about 50:50. A guy could come along and say, "I'm going to save you hundreds of dollars by installing vinyl siding over your out dated gable vents. It will keep you warmer and save you money. Sign here, I've been doing this for 25 years....blah blah." Well, that person will be a fraud and will cost you thousands in the initial useless procedure and then when your attic becomes filled with black mold it will cost you thousands in repairs. And it probably won't help your heating bill. That's not a hypothetical story but something that happens every day. The stories I have read are basically of people as ignorant as I am but with more ambition going around pretending to be handymen and doing HORRIBLE THINGS TO HOUSES that later cause terrible problems. They aren't bad people but they are broke and they know just enough to totally destroy your house...not on purpose but because they have no idea what the consequences will be when they cover the gable vents with vinyl siding. So, in another light, I guess they are talented at putting up vinyl siding but don't know where to put it. And to quote myself when I was building pcb boards in Los Angeles, "It takes as much work to do it wrong as it does to do it right." But what is right?

Anyway, I am a third category who doesn't know what to do and won't charge anyone to do anything but who will try to follow my instincts which have been sharpened in a 1969 Econoline van. I am starting from scratch when it comes to home maintenance and I'd be better off if I forgot everything I know and paid Tom Villa to teach me the difference between recessed lighting and a joist. I am curious about home maintenance only because I'm in a house that needs a bit of maintenance. Shelter is one of the basic necessities of life and this house is shelter but the Amish philosophy of living within your knowledge is something that Thoreau adopted with his "Deliberate Living". Self sufficiency is impossible with computers because the raw materials come from Zambia. The Amish aren't Luddites, they don't disdain technology but they know it's beyond their ability to maintain it on a farm in Pennsylvania. And dependence on Steve Jobs or a Tantalum warlord in Africa is against their ethics...so they simplify. They are masters of their domain because their domains include water wheels made from fence posts and windmills that pump water from wells. They don't use power tools. They pull their tractors with horses. I don't think they are purists because you don't see many Amish steel refineries but they are practical and live within their means and understanding. That appeals to me but with computers and houses and basically the modern world...it's not possible and is driving me slowly insane trying to understand a world that is steadily growing more complicated.

So my inclination is to refrain from going further down that path. To empower myself to my own satisfaction in the realm of home ownership would take decades of practice at the cost of guitar practice. I don't learn very well reading about concrete aspects of homes or cars but if I get my hands dirty then I'll remember forever. But getting your hands dirty with a motorcycle is totally different from getting your hands dirty in a house. My whole van cost $1200 and that would cover the cost of 6 windows in a house which translates to $2400 after I destroy the first 6 attempting to put them in. See the problem? Hands on learning in a house is too expensive so it pays to hire someone who knows what they are doing. But that means knowing someone who knows what they are doing and there's a 50% chance you'll get someone who is good at pretending to know what they are doing. And it also means not knowing what to ask for and getting fucked over as often as not.
I go to a great forum
http://www.diychatroom.com/
 where both the people like me who don't know shit and the 30 year pros will discuss a variety of projects. The casual user can determine quickly who knows what they are talking about. And there is also a consensus reached by forum users that will narrow down the best procedure. But even there you will find disagreement. Basically, cookie cutter contractors can not afford to do a good job because A) it's not their house and B) their overhead makes such a tight margin of profit that all corners must be cut or else they paid more money than they made. So they will do the absolute minimum and hopefully it will be more or less correct. But chances are that after they are done and you have written a check for $3000 a specialist will look at it and say, "That's done all wrong."
This aggravates me because I am obsessive and after this much time with houses we still have not reached a conclusion that everyone can agree to proceed with or else get out of the way. No, there are still flim flam contractors and fly by night Mexican roofing crews who work fast and get the job done and are later responsible for a complete rebuild and head scratching mistakes that baffle every inspector. You do get what you paid for but good work costs so much that you have to be a defense lawyer to afford it. But you are better off not bothering to hire a Mexican crew to reroof your house because they'll do a shitty but cheap job.

$175 for caulking because Oggy doesn't know what to look for

Right now we're paying $175 to fix a terrible roofing job. The shingles don't go to the side of the roof and no caulking or flashing was used so the water leaked into the brick walls and ruined the plaster inside the house. I opted out of attempting a repair because we have no ladder and even if we had a ladder I don't know what to look for. A roofer come over and said he would caulk the whole area that is missing shingles. That's the simple fix. The DIY forum all said it should be completely torn apart and reshingled and new flashing etc. But that's because they are being picky/thorough loudmouths and also they aren't writing the check. So, this repair will be tested by the wet midwest winters and rainy summers with tornadoes. Will it last?*

Homes have many systems and taken one at a time you could conceivably understand them all and how to repair them. That's all I could expect of any home owner but I don't think it's in the cards for me. I only learn by doing and unless I build my own house then I won't live long enough to work on every system of a house and make enough mistakes to learn the right way to do it.

For instance, I went up into the attic and saw two big windows open to the outside. What? The house is freezing. I'll close them off. Then I read that these "windows"  are called gable vents and should never be closed off. The problem isn't the gable vents but the lack of insulation on the floor, the uninsulated window fan area and the uninsulated attic hatch letting hot air escape into the attic. The vents had nothing to do with it. Brick houses are poorly insulated, the windows leak etc. etc. Coal was cheap when it came off the river three blocks away. They kept it nice and toasty in 1940 using coal but natural gas sucks money out the windows. So my instinct cost me money to insulate the gable vents and then tear it down when I realized that was wrong. If I had left it up that could've caused real problems. So we spent $300 to add insulation in the attic and I'm hunting for something called a soffit vent because you aren't supposed to block them. Well, there are no soffit vents in this house. There are only 4 gable vents.
And that's only one tiny portion of a simple house that has me running in circles and looking like an idiot on my DIY forum.

No, if I want to play jazz guitar like Jim Hall and piano like Ray Bryant in addition to keeping my antique van running I will have to sacrifice a steady 9-5 grind job and working knowledge of a house. And since I don't believe in being dependent on the suspect knowledge of someone else for my shelter I don't belong in a house.
Maybe I'll build a yurt.

 Here are some comments from my DIY forum friends when they saw the repair picture:
*"The 1st. pic shows it was never flashed. It's still not fixed. That's also obvious by the lack of any flashing work by the door, to that chimney. More water is coming in from the valley than the gutter anyway. A crew of slobs did that make-believe roof."
"OMG! I am a painter, not a roofer, but I gotta say that's the worst repair job I have ever seen! That slopped on caulking will last maybe til the end of summer. WOW! I am speechless."

Pete Johnson - Car Wash Blues

Jim Croce wrote a song called "Working at the Car Wash Blues" about a guy who feels it is beneath him to be washing fenders with rags. "Steadily depressing, low down mind messing"
 Croce continues,

"Well all I can do is to shake my head
you might not believe that it's true
For working at this end of Niagara Falls
is an undiscovered Howard Hughes"

That's not only some nice songwriting and phrasing but he manages to use a metaphoric location and a totally absurd personal comparison. Howard Hughes? The overachieving genius? It's great songwriting but I'm pretty sure it's conjecture because Jim Croce didn't wash trucks though he did drive trucks while his talent matured.

The person who truly was an undiscovered Howard Hughes washing trucks was a pianist named Pete Johnson. I only learned about Pete lately because I was listening to Ray Bryant's Somewhere in France album and he says he's going to play a Boogie Woogie tune and someone in the audience calls something out. I listened a few times and the person says, "Pete's Blues"
Ray Bryant said he didn't know that (probably being humble) but that he had played piano with Pete Johnson, the writer of the song Pete's Blues. Well, anyone who has performed with Ray Bryant must be good so I hunted down Pete Johnson and indeed he's a fine piano player mostly famous for his relentless boogie woogie blues. This is post stride piano and is basically a solo piano dance genre of the late '20s -1930s where the notes pour out from the right hand while the left hand pounds a repeating bassline over a blues progression. It's not my favorite style to listen to but it's in fact the only thing I can improvise on when playing piano.


So I did a little research on Pete Johnson and here's what I learned. [The wikipedia article is hardly the whole truth. A bit more accurate story is here.] He did not have a blessed career to say the least. Poor midwest kid who probably didn't get a proper music lesson in his life but knew he could play so he would do anything to get his hands on a piano. So on top of an 8 hour day hauling brick and concrete while building a church he would use his rest breaks to go inside and play on the piano. The few chances he had to play was at the cost of food and money. I watch some rare footage of him playing in his prime and believe he didn't know where he was going to sleep when the recording was over. It was the depression and no one had any money for musicians so he would play in bootleg joints for tips but this was also during prohibition 1920-1933 so he was playing illegally most of the time...which wasn't hardly enough. It sounds like he barely had a regular playing gig which reminds me of Nat King Cole's early days in Long Beach and Los Angeles where it's baffling to learn he had to hustle for work and drive ridiculous distances to play for a few dollars. Nat King Cole? Singing to a small audience of traveling salesmen who quietly tolerate his old fashioned songs? So, Pete Johnson was one of the three greatest Boogie Woogie Pianists ever and this is part of his reward in 1951 at the age of 47 and after a decade of sporadic performing, "Previous to the Piano Parade Pete took a job in a Super-Market. He was given the title of "Receiving Clerk", a position that covered a lot of back-breaking jobs: porter work, hanging and taking down huge sides of beef in refrigerators, driving truck, etc. He not only got $40.00 a week, but also arthritis and pneumonia."

But not much later, when he could still play better piano than most people he ended up at an ice cream company washing trucks from 3-11. Still later he did, "general porter work at a Mortuary. Washing cars, hearses and doing yard work."

I'm not talking about some bum here. I'm talking about Pete Johnson who played piano with Ray Bryant. And Pete ends up doing yard work for $25 a week. I would suspect he basically memorized every song and didn't read or write music or else he would have taught some students to make money. It has me scratching my head that as good as Pete was he still was destitute and forgotten when he died in 1967.

There is some lesson here that will kick me in the ass when I'm on my death bed with arthritic hands but for now can we all take a moment to appreciate the music of a gone era played by a man who scratched and clawed his way to a piano through buckets of rags and caskets and broken lawnmowers.

They say if it comes too easy it's not worth shit and some modern performers who shall remain nameless prove that point. If you are fat and content with your tofu burger and quinoa salad and hairdressers flock to your eyebrows when they get damp and your makeup takes 2 hours to perfectly expose your cleavage and your requests for the dressing room include taking all the yellow M&Ms out of the bowl then the chances are you will not be offering the public any more than lip service to artistic expression, which given the transparency of the modern public usually is enough. But if you still have grass stains on your knees from working at a mortuary clipping hedges around gravestones for 8 hours and your socks are still wet from washing ice cream trucks so your shoes squeak when they hit the sustain pedal, and your little finger is half gone from an incident with a tow rope, and you have arthritis and pneumonia and back pain and heart disease and diabetes, then you will have pondered life and will have something you have to say to the world. Either fuck you or I love you but it will be honest because men in wet shoes and sweaty ass cracks and unshaven face generally can be trusted to tell the truth on the piano. Lies and pretension were dissolved in the soap at the ice cream factory.
Rest in peace Pete Johnson. No more washing cars for you.

Turn Signal Cam

This was a project three years in the making. Mostly I wasn't sure if it ever had a turn signal cancel cam until recently. Then I hunted down the part and took the steering wheel off and replaced the cam. IT didn't go smoothly and you'll have to go to my econoline forum for the details.
 But it works, which is more than I can say for my horn. I don't care about what it looks like but it's important that things work...and in the process of keeping them working or fixing what is broken I learn some procedures.

Speaking of procedures, there is a way to wrap poles, bannisters and such with hemp but I don't think I did it right. Firstly, I read that you are supposed to wet the hemp so it will shrink when it dries. Oops. I don't think synthetic line needs to be wet. Secondly, this is merely a spiral wrap and not a knot. I wanted it to be flat without any ridges and I also didn't want to spend days wrapping the wheel.
This hemp wrap effect has stayed with me since the days on the offshore oil supply vessels in Galveston. The bannisters leading to the wheel house were often wrapped with jute twine. It would've been nice if I had remembered the word that describes the effect I was going for. It's not a word that you would use in day to day conversation since it's a novelty except among sailors. Does anyone know that word? That's your vocabulary test for the day and maybe it will make you wiser than I. I'll post the answer here in a day or two. It took a while for me to find the word and examples and tutorials. It's a good project for an unemployed freeloader like myself.

Saab 9-3 Headliner Project/Failure

This material never saw the sunlight yet it has disintegrated. What the fuck is it made out of? Soybeans?

I want to punch myself in the face right now for trying to tackle this stupid project. If you own a Saab 9-3 then you are a pretentious asshole first of all and second of all you will be living in the Nineties, specifically 1995, when these crappy, over-engineered (i.e. torx screws for everything) plastic fucking cars were cool. Yeah, fast forward to 2012 and these cars aren't so cool anymore. Someone picked this up at an auction for $200 because it was a Mexican drug running car, rode hard put away wet when the cops finally caught up to them. 95K miles of awful clutch riding. So the car broker thinks he'll net a few hundred dollars pawning this off as "his grandmother's" old car. Sure. Asshole, you belong with this Saab. Then my friend crashes her car and is in a pinch to buy something that was cool in 1995 but is now a big pile of shit. It's not worth the parts because every part will snap like brittle old turkey wings when you try to dismantle it.

At this point you think you can do it.

Keep going asshole. It will never work.

The headliners for these are classic european design because they are assembled of the most delicate crap that only could be reassembled in a factory but they are also built so poorly that they will fail most certainly before 100K miles. This means high costs of repair and guaranteed problems. Way to go Saab!

This headliner was sagging like a Cleveland stripper's ego. We used staples, glue, hot glue, prayer, duct tape and nothing worked. It sagged and sagged until finally I read up on it and decided I would have to replace it myself. Big mistake.

I just found one thread and this is one asshole Saab owner's detailed advice...

"Remove all the trim pieces, take the headliner inside, pull off the old carpet, wire brush off ALL of the foam, lay out about 2 yards of a stretchable fabric, glue down with headliner adhesive (from the autoparts store) and trim excess. Pretty easy really, shouldn't take more than a few hours."


What a pretentious and trite asshole. Typical Saab owner. This is a 17 year old beater car and everything on it is brittle plastic and every brittle plastic retainer will snap in half and none of the interior trim will stay put because the brittle retainers are all broken. Even if I spent $100 and had new brittle retainers the biggest problem is that the fucking headliner backer board is not cardboard like a normal car. No. That would make too much sense to the Swedish fucks who designed this. Instead, they used some kind of polymer glue and fiber that is molded into the shape they want. Pretty clever? NO, it's stupid. The fibrous board has a rigidity factor like an old man's cock...which translates into more over engineering. Back at the factory in Stockholm the only way they could make the fibrous board stay against the roof was with 5 horizontal strips that are glued to the board and then glued to the roof. I should mention that the glue on these black strips probably failed a few weeks into 1996 but the problem gets your attention when the fabric of the headliner starts to peel away from the foam backing (which is glued to the fibrous board so well Oggy has to scrape it off with paint scraper wearing a dust mask) So, they used material that was weaker than the glue. Assholes!

Now, the fibrous board is hanging down to start with and then the material starts to hang down lower and neither one can be reattached to the roof of the car so I took the whole thing out with so much cursing and sweating and breaking every plastic retainer in the whole interior and I scrape the foam off and clean the fibrous board. Already I could tell this would never stay up and that I'm going to have to be upside down in the car trying to glue the board back to the horizontal strips that are still glued to the roof. I know that will never work.

Furthermore, the fabric is $20 and the spray headliner glue is another $20. That's $40 in materials alone for a car that I wouldn't take for free. Bullshit.

But I'm committed because I'm an asshole so I glue the new headliner to the board. Then I install it into the car and it's a train wreck from start to finish. The interior trim is what holds the board in place but the retainers all broke so nothing stays in place. I basically flood the top of the board with glue, spray glue on the strips glued to the roof, reach around to move the cable harness (it laughs at me) on top of the board and then use my back to hold the board in place by standing on the back seat doing a half squat for twenty agonizing minutes. If the board was cardboard or had any rigid qualities the ceiling mounted handles and sun visors would hold the thing in place. But no, it droops like a wet noodle because the Saab assholes decided to make it flimsy (lightweight) faux board made of glue and paper. It's lightweight but it is still affected by gravity and unless I can glue it to the ceiling then it will always fall down.

This is a horrible job and it would cost hundreds for a shop to do it. ($380 is a loose estimate) And only a shop could do it because they have all the retainers ready for when they break. Saab was really using their heads for that. In fact, some of the retainers are a one time use item that is designed to break when you remove the trim. You push the broken tab into the metal and then insert a new one. They can't be removed without breaking them. And the contact cement they must use on the ceiling is the only thing that will work. It's one thing to glue the headliner to the board but you must also glue the board to the ceiling and that is not the case with most headliners since most headliners are rigid and hold their shape and will stay up when the sun visors are installed.

Speaking of sun visors, these are so brittle on your 1995 Saab 9-3 that they will literally break in half when you remove them. The brackets will also break. And the interior ceiling lights will only fit inside these fragile aluminum frames that can never be installed correctly without a machine press because the fibrous board will tear when they are taken off. Another award for the Saab assholes.

broken sun visor on shitty saab 9-3

From what I have read there are vehicles that this job will go off without too much problems. It will be difficult but the interior was made to disassemble. Saabs are not one of those vehicles. 1995 Saabs are definitely not. These are shitty cars with bad designs from overpaid engineers. They are not practical. This Saab I'm working on runs worse than my 1969 Econoline. Because Saab engineers never heard of snow and ice this thing has rusted out, the shock mounts are gone and I actually used one of the struts to hammer the interior trim back in place since the strut pushed through into the trunk and I took it off. The brakes suck. The engine components are plastic crap and nothing can be replaced. The parts that fail the most often will be the hardest to reach and the easy to reach parts will all break when you move them to get to the hard to reach parts. The rotor was baked onto the distributor shaft when I replaced it last year. It shattered. And every screw will cost $29 to replace.

new headliner with broken trim

If you need to ask how to repair the Saab headliner then you should not replace the Saab headliner. I say that because it's designed badly and your attempt to fix it will definitely lead to more repairs and probably won't fix the sagging headliner. Furthermore, the cheapest fix is too much money for this piece of shit car and the most expensive fix would buy you another piece of shit Saab without a sagging headliner.

This is as good as it gets.

There are two alternatives I want to talk about. Upholstery screws are these corkscrew type things for couches and if your headliner is sagging because the fabric is falling away from the foam then these screws will be a good temporary fix for $5. They will lift the fabric off your head and back onto the foam and outlast your shitty engine with ridiculous Air mass meters that are heat sensitive so the engineers placed them next to the exhaust and the engine will randomly cut off dead with no warning.

Bullshit interior. Headliner is attached to fiber board but fiber board isn't glued to roof.

However, if you own a shitty Saab and the whole fibrous backing board has come loose from the roof then you are in trouble. There is no way to get up there to glue it back up without taking it down. You could cut a window open in the middle of the fabric and board and then spray and push the board up and then glue the window closed. Who cares what it looks like? Your Saab is a piece of shit beater car. It would be better off recycled into a Kia or Ford Focus. Believe me, any vehicle with a throttle body as fuel delivery system is not worth fixing. Take it to the scrap yard where it belongs.

Another solution I just thought of and should patent is a miniature cup that you push through a hole in the backer board and fabric. You glue the cup directly to the roof using contact cement and then you have this fixture that you can use to either affix some kind of cheap Chinese star shape that snaps into the fitting and holds the headliner board against the roof or else you could have long slats that connect to another glued on fixture and the horizontal slat would hold the headliner up. You only need a few months until the transmission fails on your shitty Saab 9-3. Or buy some wood trim and cut it into strips and wedge it into the side trim and then the other side trim so the torsion will push up. I'll try that tomorrow because I know it won't stay up long. And then a trip to the junk yard for a sun visor.

Under no circumstances should you attempt to replace the headliner itself. The last option would be to simply tear the headliner and board off, glue the lights to the roof and drive around with no headliner. Who cares what it looks like? You will be the last owner before it is scraped and made into new Volvos so ignore it.

Note: About 5 months after this project the headliner collapsed again. About 1 year after this headliner project this Saab clutch failed. The car couldn't move...the shocks were ruined, whole rear end was rusted out. the foolish waste of money and time all came to a head and it was sold for scrap. My feeling was confirmed that this headliner was pointless....pearls on a pig. My advice is to tear the headliner out and throw it away. Your Saab will soon be scrap.

Four year old Girl forced to...

I've found myself gratuitously reading the news on CNN even though it's never informative and almost always upsetting in an irrelevant way. George Clooney is open to marriage? Who gives a fuck? Amanda Knox gets $4 million to write a book? So what? Whitney Houston dies? Boo hoo. It's all stupid and pointless. The experience is probably not much different than reading my blog...ha ha ha.

But seriously, someone asked me if I have a fairy godmother. I said no, but I have an uncle I'm keeping a close eye on. ha ha ha.

I'm here all week...try the veal.

Tip the bartender, he touches your drinks.

(I've been listening to Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis jr. performances from 1954. Those are the kind of jokes they tell while singing "Lady is a Tramp".)

The subject of news is a constant source of displeasure to me. I understand that no one can report on the millions off 4 year old girls who wake up and go about their culturally accepted day without incident. That's what blogs and facebook is for. So the news can only mention 4 year old girls who stray into the abnormal and freakish. And that includes girls who can sing like the dead Whitney Houston and girls who are chained to a water heater and forced to fellate their brother so the father can sell the footage to voyeurs in Russia. CNN reports on both of that class regularly and the Onion has a laugh at their expense. The only sensible thing to do when confronted with a headline "Girl forced to..." or "Girlfriend Found in...." or "Cow Gives Birth To..." or "Woman's husband used broomstick to..."* is move on. Don't read the story. Ted Turner is a manipulative motherfucker when it comes to news. CNN website is a masterpiece of the pseudo experience. He and Murdoch must give each other handjobs at night because they shill the worst kind of puerile crap and make millions. Don't feed his ego.
Better yet, read the comments only. Here are a few from a story that I don't have the heart to explain to you....

LydiaMae

FetusAborter** - where do you come up with "Christian Americans should be ashamed that they are practically condoning this type of behavior?" What does that have to do with the price of tea in China? There was no mention of religion in the article. 

DamnDesert

How about we just put them all in a cell together and throw away the key. She'll be screwed up for life

• delsam

  This is just sick.  The father, the brother and the step-mother, and not one of them was normal?  Twisted.

JohnnyNoname

I think some cattle prod treatment is in order before tying the anchor. 

jessica1229

Calling these people "crazy" is an insult to those of us who live every day with mental illness and do not commit criminal acts. As a person who lives everyday with Bipolar Disorder and manages to do so without breaking the law or harming others... these people are straight up evil.  

A history of Oggy's Madness

You can just imagine what they are commenting on. It's like "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" reenacted every day somewhere in Arkansas. I'm going to write a song using these comments as lyrics then go get drunk. Tip the bartender.

* Let's have a contest for who can write the most disturbing lead that doesn't actually say anything but implies the worst. It also has to be so alluring that you want to read the rest even though you know it will not edify you at all. Here's my submission: "Murder weapon was gift from..."

**Yes, this person's CNN username is Fetusaborter. Don't you love America?