Wintertime a chance to tackle indoor jobs

IAlan Miller

raked leaves last Sunday when the temperature was above 60 and the grass was so green that my neighbor was running his mower.

I think he was mulching leaves, but the grass was green enough and tall enough to justify a December trimming.

And all I could think about was snow.

Where is it? When will I get the chance to break out my snowblower and ride a sled with the neighborhood kids?

And when will the weather give me the excuse I need to do work inside the house?

High on the list are two bathroom faucets that both decided to allow a drip, drip, drip at the same time. It’s no coincidence that both were installed about 15 years ago when we did the single biggest renovation project of Old House No. 2: The kitchen and downstairs bathroom and all of the plumbing in the house.

These are among the things that I avoid for a period of time with the irrational hope that they will heal themselves.

I tore into one of them a year ago, hoping to get the faucet apart so that I could replace the aging

washers and springs that keep the important parts tight and leak free.

I was unsuccessful in pulling apart the tightly packed parts, but my agitation of the parts apparently was enough to get all of the seals working properly again. It didn’t leak for a year.

But now that faucet and its identical twin downstairs are doing the drip, drip, drip

together on different floors. So I will be taking apart the faucets, or at least trying to take them apart, to do what I should have done a year ago.

My dad and I are cut from the same cloth when it comes to fixing the old to give it longer life.

I learned from him how to fix a holey tail pipe or muffler so that it would quiet down and last until a few more paychecks down the road.

He has shoes and pants with more patches and glue than original threads. They’re for work around the farm, of course, and no one

but me and a few others sees him wearing them. But they are still covering him 20 or 30 or 40 years after he first put them on.

The two of us gave up on one of our repair projects this year.

The front windows of his house, the two picture windows that provide a breathtaking view of pastures and corn and hay fields in Ohio’s Amish country, have been deteriorating for the past decade. They were more than 30 years old, and the frames were rotting.

We scraped and painted

them. Then he filled them with “plastic wood” putty and painted them. We ignored them for a while and hoped they would heal themselves.

All of that prolonged their time with us, and none of it actually fixed the problem.

So, this year, Dad threw in the towel. He called and said it was time to replace the windows.

We agreed that it was time to give up the battle against time and nature. We couldn’t speak the words, but we both knew that rot and decay had won.

By the time the leaves started to fly this fall, the new windows were in place.

As painful as it was to admit defeat, I’m happy that we have clear windows in solid frames, so that when the snow falls, I can sit inside near the fireplace and watch the world go by as I contemplate the growing list of things I should be fixing.

Alan D. Miller is the Dispatch editor who writes about old-house repair and historic preservation. amiller@dispatch.com @youroldhouse