Summer of home improvement

Seems that we have been doing a bit more home improvement jobs this summer than I’d originally thought I would.  Of course, the bigest improvement that we made this year was putting in wood floors — but we’ve been slowly upgrading a number of components in the house.  Today however, was an unplanned improvement.  I had been cleaning under the kitchen sink and noticed that there was a bit of slim on the bottom of the floor.  A quick investigation showed that all the seals on the garbage disposal were shot.  But what was worst was that the disposal is a cheep one.  Plastics everwhere.  I looked around and this type of machine just doesn’t seem to be sold around here — so I decided to upgrade the disposal with a solid steel, Kenmore disposal.  This is the first time that I’ve ever pulled one of these things out and put one in — really was all the hard.  Though — we’ll see if I’m still this happy with the job come tomorrow.  When installing, I decided not to use plumbers putting when sealing the sink components.  When I pulled the old one out — the putty was rotten, wet and stunk.  So, I decided to use silicone.  I use it all the time sealing cracks around the house because its a great adhesive — so down to the hardware store I went and picked up some silicone selant specifically for kitchen work and used that for all my sealing.  I think that this will work great — but I can’t tell till tomorrow since it takes 24 hours to cure.  So, I have everything setup — have tested for leaks everywhere but in the sink tube where the silicone is still drying and so far so good.  So I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

Now, if I can just find time to do my next project — the garage door openner. 🙂

–TR