Month: September 2016

Okay if you live in one of these fabulous old Boston area houses you probably have an original equipment mortise lock on your front door.  I had one of these on my apt in Jamaica Plain.

This was a fancy one.  It had a deadbolt above and a latch below.  The two buttons allow you to make the latch lock the door when closing it.

So I managed to remove it (btw “mortise” refers to the deep pocket carved into the door)

I took it over to a local locksmith and they took a look

The spring that pushes the latch outward had broken.  Amazingly, Kenny’s locks in Dorchester figured it out and had it fixed within an hour.

Before putting it back in I decided I had best clean things out — oh my goodness, 100 years of dirt was hiding in there.

all fixed!

 

 

So a very nice lady called me and asked if I could do (as is so common) a long list of little fixes around her house. So I went over and did all kinds of things, including removing a most annoying beeping smoke detector, assembling a storage box from IKEA, re-attaching a drawer knob, making her phone answering machine work, it was quite a list.  Finally, she asked me to do a plumbing job.

She is an avid gardener, but her hose bibs are towards the front of her house and she really wanted to be able to access water with a hose bib in the back yard. A previous handyman had put a rather bothersome jury rig together, running a garden hose to the back yard and attaching it to a hose bib valve and mounting it on a wooden stake.

This was not very elegant– In this pic the valve/bib is gone, but it gives you a sense– the hose ran straight out the back into a post.

This would have been okay except he didn’t attach it properly– hose bibs are standard plumbing threads, and garden hoses are entirely different, they don’t mate/ match. So my predecessor had just forced the hose into the back of the valve and layered on lots of Teflon plumbing tape, and of course it blew up within a week.

So long story short, I decided a job worth doing is worth doing well. I went to Lowe’s in Framingham and picked up all the parts I needed, which included a pressure treated 2×4, an adapter from garden hose to MIP (Metal Iron Pipe), an L joint (so the hose would go straight down, not stick out the back), a little extender, and a new hose bib.

Again, being a handyman I do not generally do plumbing, but since this was outside there was no major issue if I screwed it up. I cut the 2×4 in half, drilled a hole to mount the pipe, fitted all the pieces together with Teflon tape on the threads, and also added a snap on adapter so the hose would be easy for the customer to remove.

I dug a hole, sawed a point onto the 2×4, and mounted it at a proper feng shui angle in her back yard and at last, she has the water source she needs to take care of her garden.  Please excuse the not yet rolled up hose etc.!