Home Improvement

To honor the fifth month since putting down a deposit on a new furnace and A/C add-on, our existing furnace started acting up this weekend by sleeping in. (This is how it should behave.) I, of course, did not notice the house was 61F, but my spouse certainly did. Thanksgiving 2016 with a dead furnace controller. Fun times! Having more than casual familiarity with the innards from my Thanksgiving 2016 experience, where the control board itself died, I thought I’d do some diagnostics before calling a professional. ...

[From mid-2008] My dishwasher’s been making a bad grinding noise that, I think, is the remnant of a broken coffee cup sloshing around in the sprayer assembly. I noticed the screws holding this on are the TORX shape. This got me wondering about the type of screws available and what their trade-offs were. Enjoy! The flathead (or “slotted”) screw is an old design, but suffers two shortfalls: it’s hard to center and it’s too easy to apply too much torque, causing the screwdriver blade to pop out and destroy the head. Thus, it’s used primarily in wood products assembled by hand. ...

The other night, one of my kids managed to spill soup into the vents on the top of the oven door, which then dripped between the two oven door glass panels. Googling around, I discovered this is not uncommon, but there were scant instructions for cleaning between the glass of an oven door. Rather, forum contributors were evenly divided among “buck up and live with it,” “sell the house,” “call a professional to repair it,” and “replace the oven” — roughly my priority of options. Since this was a relatively new kitchen remodel, my better half was antsy to have it fixed. As I’m always up for a challenge, I thought it would be helpful to document the process in case anyone else has a need for cleaning between the glass of their oven’s door ...