You would have thought that with a three day weekend, that I would have found the time and energy to update this site.

Shows what you know.

The sun came out today and the temperature rose about 50 glorious degrees Fahrenheit. It’s about time. Sometimes I lie to myself about the cold. It’s not that bad, I tell myself. But then it warms up and I remember how much I truly dislike the cold.

I’m buying a house. Did I tell you that? I didn’t think so.

Don’t worry, I won’t be asking you to help me move. I’m not going anywhere.

We, the wife and I and my parents, are going to buy a house as an investment property. Who am I kidding, we’re going to be slumlords. It’s nice little 2 unit house, that only needs a bit of cosmetic work. We’ll try this out and see how it goes. If it works out well, we will start building our slum empire.

As an added plus for me, this will give a chance to practice on some home improvement stuff, with out having to risk screwing up my house. One of the first things I’ll have to do is replace one of the windows. This is cool, because the windows in my house really need to be replaced also. And this will give me a very good idea of whether I want to try to do that myself.

The one apartment is lacking a refrigerator the other is short both a stove and refrigerator. As we discussed whether to buy new or used appliances to address this, I couldn’t help but think about my 15 year old, builder grade stove and refrigerator. Why would I buy new, if cheap, appliances for this property, when I really could use some new appliances myself.

Of course, this logic led my to Lowe’s and to know ones surprise we picked out a new stove and refrigerator for ourselves. And now we have a decent used stove and fridge for the one apartment.

The fancy new fridge came with a automatic ice maker. This requires a line to be tapped into my plumbing and run to the refrigerator. A simple do it your self kind of job. Except of course, when it comes to me and plumbing nothing is simple.

We got a saddle valve to ‘vampire’ into the cold water line under the sink. I drilled a hole in the cabinet, and ran the copper tube in. I fastened the copper to the valve on one end and the fridge on the other. I closed the valve, which pierced the the cold water line. I opened it back up and water flowed in to the copper line. Water was also slowly beading up where the copper line joined valve and where it was connected to fridge. I tightened the shit out of them and figured I was good to go.

I pushed the fridge back in to the wall. At this point, I should mention that I live in a townhouse and even though I bought the smallest Side by Side refrigerator they had to offer, it is very big in my kitchen. It just fits between the wall and the cabinet. When I pushed it back, it crimped the copper line. I didn’t drill the hole far enough back. I tried to pull the line out, but it was crimped to hard. It snapped.

I closed the valve and pulled it out. I drilled a new hole. But the tube had been flattened where it was crimped. I couldn’t fit the tubing into the fittings to fasten it. I won’t tell you how much time I spent trying to bend that copper tube back into shape, but I will tell you I didn’t get enough sleep last night.

Today on my lunch break, I picked the tool that is designed to cut copper tubes and went home. I trimmed the tube and fastened it. And now we have ice.

It never fails to amaze me how much easier it is to do this kind of thing, when you have the right tools.