Embarrass much?

It's precisely for this reason that I sent my parents the URL when I started this blog.

Apart from certain ex-girlfriends, I think my worst-case readership scenario already exists.

I Support Home Depot

I am starting to believe that I personally provide a large fraction of Home Depot's revenue stream. Whenever I'm in Home Depot to buy something simple (like sandpaper) I suddenly think of another small improvement or repair that I could carry out in five minutes. For example: caulking the crack in the fireplace wall. Or gluing the kitchen tabletop panel back down. Or replacing an ethernet wire with a plugin so we can use variable lengths of cable.

So I buy the supplies I need for that. Then I come home, put the bag of supplies on a shelf in the basement, next to 1,000 identical bags each containing a small quantity of home improvement supplies. I take the sandpaper (or whatever it was I went to Home Depot to buy in the first place) and use a 3" by 3" square to sand the one thing in the house that needs sanding. And then I repeat the whole process a week later.

Yesterday I decided to actually execute a few of these projects. In the process, I learned several valuable things about caulk:

1. Caulk guns are so cheap because they are in fact disposable.
2. When, on the tube of caulk, it says "break seal", they mean with the seal-breaking tool built into the caulk gun which is about 6 inches long. They do not mean with a 1" finishing nail. That will not work.
3. If you rachet the caulk gun 5-10 times and no caulk is coming out the tip, but caulk is coming out the back and getting onto your hands, perhaps you have failed to break the seal.
4. It's hard to wash caulk off your hands. Wear latex gloves when caulking, especially when caulking with nasty exterior-capable caulk which outgasses ammonia.

That was about it from the Caulking project. I am pleased to report that the draft coming from the crack between the masonry wall and the wood wall is greatly reduced. I have now discovered that the primary source of the draft was the crack between the concrete/asbestos tile floor and the masonry wall. This crack is too big to caulk (I know: I tried), so I will have to jam some weatherstripping into it before caulking. And buy another tube of caulk. And perhaps another caulk gun -- though I think I got enough of the caulk off the moving parts.

And then there was the project that I was actually buying parts for -- repairing the humidifier duct. There are two furnaces in our house, one for upstairs and one for downstairs. The upstairs furnace has a humidifier, controlled by a humidistat, and it routes hot dry air through the humidifier before blowing it upstairs. Unfortunately the duct between the humidifier and the main vent is an old vinyl piece of crap, and therefore it fell off sometime during the summer.

Several months ago, I went to Home Depot to buy a replacement duct. 4" vinyl duct, 20 feet long. Great. Thanks. That and these clamps, caulk, caulk gun.

I brought it home. Too small.

Thursday I went to Home Depot to exchange the 4" duct for a 5" duct. 5" aluminum duct, 10 feet long. Probably long enough. Thanks. That and this caulk, these boxes, these ethernet jacks. Thanks.

This morning I got up early to go replace the duct, while my wife and our daughter slept upstairs. Then I started reading back articles of instapundit. Bad idea: after an hour of that, my wife called me upstairs: "Are you done with the duct yet?"

No.

"The baby hasn't slept the entire time. You take her and let me get some sleep."

So we went downstairs, the baby, me, and my 5" duct. You know what happens next, right?

Too small.

Apparently that's a 6" duct. But that's OK -- that's what duct tape is for.