Painting or repainting a room is a good old fashioned skill, and one of the very first steps in the process sometimes gets folks bogged down. Math and stuff, you know.

The Damsel understands this deeply. There’s more than one reason she majored in music–one reason being you only have to count up to four, most of the time. She knows her strengths.

So if you’re going to paint something, you must face the chore of figuring out how much paint to buy. There are two easy ways to avoid a paint-calculating migraine.

Way #1. Measure your room. Write down the measurements, go to a paint store, and put yourself at their mercy.

Way #2. Measure your room, and plug the numbers into the handy calculator found at this website: Paint Calculator

This site will even help you figure out weird shaped rooms, sloping walls or other headache-inducing variables.

Way #2 is especially good if you have paint hanging around you’d like to use, but you aren’t sure if you have enough. The Damsel approves of using up paint from other projects. Grandma would have said, “use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.”

So you can feel extra smug about using the paint calculator for this purpose. Go ahead. The Damsel says it’s okay.

How embarrassing.

As a matter of fact, she most commonly heard the word “hone” in the phrase “hone your skills” rather than in a knife context.

Apparently, honing is what you do to maintain a knife’s sharpness. If you don’t do it often, you’ll need to resort to the much more drastic sharpening.

The following video shows the process quite nicely, and now the Damsel actually understands what that long cylinder steel thing is for. Humm.

The Damsel now wipes a tear away, since the baby-sprog in this picture, so pleased to be smeared with chocolate, is now 11 years old, the one in the red is a senior in high school and the oldest is a missionary. They clearly have no regard for their mother’s diabolical plan to keep them little forever.

The sprogs that have graduated from high school are caught chucking stuff out of windows less often nowadays, but the Damsel suspects they secretly still harbor this unnatural desire. But they’ve wreaked havoc with the window screens. They tried to push their sock bombs or what-have-you out the window whether there was a screen blocking the way or not. Hence rips and tears in the screening.

One of the Damsel’s most favorite things: autumn breezes blowing through her home. One of the Damsel’s least favorite: mosquitos and flies. This means holey screens Cannot Be.

This method isn’t for patching a little hole, but for one bigger than, say, the Damsel’s heaping helping of garlic mashed potatoes. If you have a screen with a still-decent frame, but the screening has a large rip, this is it.

Examine your screen. There should be a ditch around the edge where the screening is held onto the frame with something called “spline.”

Spline looks like thin, rubbery rope. After prying it out of the ditch in one place, you should be able to pull it all out, all the way around, with your fingers.

Check it out. Is it still pliable and in fairly good shape? If so, save it to reuse. The screening will come right out now.

Go to your neighborhood hardware store and buy a roll of screening and a special tool called a spline tool. It looks like a cute little pizza cutter, with wheels at both ends. It’s cheap…the Damsel grabbed one for $5. If your spline was brittle or messed up when you took it out, buy some more at the same time.

Lay the empty frame on a flat surface and unroll the new screening over it. With an exacto knife or box cutter, cut the screening to roughly fit the frame. Don’t fuss. You’ll be trimming after, so don’t measure, don’t get too fancy.

Lay the spline on top of the screening and press it into the ditch with the spline tool, making sure the screening doesn’t get ripply.  You’ll see one end of the tool works better than the other…it has a channel in the wheel that fits over the spline. Just press and roll. The Damsel discovered this is quite a bit easier if someone else is holding the spline taut for you, and watching to see that the screening stays nicely smooth. Her dad dropped by at the right moment, and she tricked him into helping. Thanks, Dad!

Once you’ve rolled the spline in all the way around, trim off the extra and tuck the ends in. The Damsel was surprised that even though she used the original spline, there was extra when she finished. She shook her head at that weirdness and pressed forward.

Trim the edges of the screening close to the spline so everything looks nice and neat. The screening cuts easily, a fact the Damsel was unprepared for.

The finished screen. The picture looks freaky, but in real life this is a perfectly normal, reality-based screen.

You’re done! Flies, forget about it.

Put down the screwdriver and walk away. It’s not gonna be good to keep grinding at the thing. The Damsel understands you want to get this over with, but you must stop the madness.

Here’s something to try first. It’s simple enough that if it doesn’t work, you’re not out much, and you can still escalate the situation to the supervisor.

Heat the screw by touching it with a soldering iron or a hot glue gun. (Without glue) That’s it. Just hold one or the other on the screw until it’s very hot. The Damsel doesn’t want to hear about you doing this if you’ve already drenched it in something flammable.

Once the screw is very hot, try again with the screwdriver. Apply firm, steady pressure. Hopefully, the sudden expansion of the hot metal has dislodged the screw from whatever is gripping it.

If the screw still doesn’t move, your situation has exceeded the scope of this post. Tell yourself congratulations because this means you have the right to pitch a fit without guilt.

Removal became necessary.

How does a 6’7″ Knight in Shining Armor cram himself into a tiny cabinet? There were words, and they weren’t “Forsooth” or “Lo here!”

The Knight got his big hunky self under there. The Damsel clapped, praised, and offered brownies.

To remove a faucet carcass, you must:

Turn off the water supply (there are normally taps to twist off under the sink).

Carefully remove the u-shaped piece of pipe. Just so you know, it will be full of water. And possibly diamond rings or contact lenses.

Remove the pipe connected to the bottom of the sink.

This will allow you to take the drain ring thing out. Oogie warning.

There are supply lines that run from the water supply taps to the faucet. They might be gray plastic. They might be white plastic. They might be braided metal. In any case, you have to undo those at the faucet end.

Disconnect the thingy that raises and lowers the drain plug.

Now you can raise the whole apparatus and lay it to rest.

Because this bathroom has a double sink, the Damsel regrets to show you what happened next. She desires that you briefly glance at this picture and then forget you ever saw it. That is her wish.

The Damsel doesn’t want to discuss how this hole got there. Let’s just say it had something to do with barbells and move on.

This method is for kinda big holes. First, take a scrap of sheetrock and cut a square/rectangle that’s slightly larger than the hole. Simply score the sheetrock and then break it (pop it with the side of your hand)  along the score mark, then trim the sheetrock paper.

Hold it over the hole and trace around it with a pencil.

Cut on these lines with a small saw. Careful! The Knight wants you to know in his line of work (when he’s not dragonslaying) he has seen some sad instances of people cutting into pipes and wires.

The Knight cut three sides with his little saw, and then cut the fourth side by scoring and breaking the sheetrock, because wires were behind that cut–thus avoiding cutting into hidden  house guts like electrical stuff.

Take a piece of wood, like a 1×2, and cut it about four inches longer than the hole. Position it inside the hole so two inches or so  lap over on the inside of the top and the bottom of the hole.

Secure with long screws. Make sure all your screws are set well in–you want them flush with the surface, or even a little bit indented. Repeat with another piece of wood as necessary for your size hole.

Now fit in your cut piece, and secure with more screws to the wood you’ve inserted.

Get out your roll of mesh drywall tape…

and cover the four sides of the square.

Trowel on some drywall compound.  Mud, they call it.

When it’s dry, sand it smooth. The Knight says you may want to smooth on a little more mud at that point, and then sand again, for a really nice, invisible mend.

Also, tell your teenage son that the basement stairwell is a weird place to lift weights.