Nothing To Lose

A few months ago, I got a great online deal on a hair straightening iron. It was marked down from $169 to just $29 because it was being discontinued.

This is my first straightening iron and I love it. So much so that if I could travel back in time to my high school days, I wouldn't take my cell phone or my MP3 player or even my computer...I'd take my straightening iron!

I was understandably disappointed when, yesterday morning, it kept turning itself off when I tried to use it. It was fine while sitting on the bathroom counter, but would turn off when I picked it up. There was obviously a short or a disconnected wire in it somewhere.

I knew I could not get the same model anymore, and I knew I was not likely to find ANY model or brand for just $29, so I asked Shane to tear into it and see if he could find and fix the problem. He took it apart this morning and found all of the circuit board connections were fine. The problem ended up being in the power cord just a couple of inches from the body of the iron. He removed the damaged part of the cord, spliced it back together using electrical connectors and wrapped the connections with black electrical tape. You can tell where the repair was made, but who cares? No one sees it or uses it except me.

There was nothing to lose by having Shane open the iron to see if it could be repaired before just throwing it away and buying a new one. At the worst, he would have not found the problem or not been able to repair it. But because he was able to fix it, we were able to save anywhere from $30 to $170 (or even more) on a new iron and kept a good item out of the landfill. It was definitely worth 30 minutes of his morning.

Takin' Care of Busy-ness

The bathroom remodel is almost done. Shane was true to his word that he'd have it 90% finished by the end of the day Sunday. It was close, but that remaining 10% is details, and we all know that's where the devil is. All that is left to do is a little touch up painting, put the towel racks up and hang a few do-dads on the walls. Done or not, I'll be posting pictures tomorrow.

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Today Kat and the rest of the 1st Graders are having their Thanksgiving Feast, and I'll be heading to school in a few minutes to take some hot rolls and join in. I think it will be a pretty good feast, although I'm not sure how well turkey cold cuts are going to go over instead of an actual bird.

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Speaking of turkey, how long does it really take one of those things to thaw?

Every year I move it from my deep freeze to the spare fridge and come time to cook it, it's still a little frozen in the middle, resulting in us scrambling to get it thawed by running warm water in the cavity. This year, I moved the bird from the deep freeze last Thursday, allowing it a full week to thaw. When I checked it on Sunday, it was still rock solid. So I put a cooler filled with cold water on the back deck and stuck it in there, making sure to bungee down the lid to keep out any stray raccoons.

Yesterday, the water was so cold it hurt my hands, but the turkey was starting to thaw. This morning, the water is still nice and cold and the turkeys feel like their coming along. By tomorrow, I'm sure they'll be ready for Shane to inject with some yummy Cajun-spiced butter and store over night in the spare fridge again. Then by Thursday, it'll be ready for him to deep-fry. We love deep-fried turkey, and it frees up my oven for other things on Thanksgiving morning.

How are the rest of you doing with your holiday preps? Anyone else frying their turkey?

Bathroom Remodel - Stage 1

And so it begins...

When we bought this house 3-1/2 years ago, we did a lot of cleaning and painting before we moved in. At that time, the bathroom was the best room in the house, so we decided to just clean it and leave it as it was until we had the other rooms squared away.

The other rooms are more or less the way we want them for now -- with the exception of new carpeting still needed throughout the house -- and by comparison, the bathroom is now the worst room in our home. Oh, it's been perfectly functional since we moved in, but it would never win a beauty contest. The only things we did to it were to clean it well and paint the ceiling; after we had painted the ceilings in the rest of the rooms, it almost had to be done because it looked so bad.

Over the course of three years, we've slowly gathered most of the materials we'll need to renovate. We have the flooring, the vanity, the tub and shower with its surround, towel bars, towels, shower curtain, etc. We still need to decide on a mirror and/or medicine cabinet and a shelving system for the linen closet (which is inside the bathroom). We went out this morning and bought the faucet system for the bath and shower.

Shane, having redone a bathroom in a former life (and in a former relationship), was afraid the project would cause some tension between us. He thought that would be especially so if he didn't have time to gut the room and install the new stuff all in one go. (It's our only bathroom, so it has to remain functional during the remodel.)

He hasn't had a big enough block of free time to take on a project this large, so he's been putting it off. I finally convinced him to tackle it in stages. As long as there aren't months or years between the stages, I'll be fine with a semi-remodeled bath for a while.

Stage 1: Taking out the old tub and shower, then putting in the new one.

I've never been much of a shower person, but I love my hot baths. I also like to read in the bath sometimes. I'd love to relax in a nice, clean, wide bathtub. Our current tub is a dingy almond color, has unexplainable scratches in the fiberglass from the previous homeowners, has rust stains in the bottom that won't come out with any amount of chemicals or elbow grease, and is a little narrow. It's a one piece unit, but it's coming out of the house in several pieces, so that we don't have to remove the toilet, door moldings or door jambs during this stage.

Here are a few photos and I'll be adding more as the day wears on.

9:30 a.m. Before shot from hallway.

9:30 a.m. Rust stains in old tub.

9:30 a.m. - Old shower head.

10:00 a.m. - Faucets and trim board removed.

10:30'ish a.m. - Shane was going to cut it,
but he actually ended up breaking it into pieces.

11:30 a.m. - Tub on end and ready to be carried out.
Shane took a short break at this point and declared the time as "beer-thirty".

3:30 p.m. - Not much visual progress since this morning. Made UTTHD #1 (Unplanned Trip To Home Depot) at 12:30. Who knew the drain insert and overflow cover plate didn't come with either the tub or the faucet set? Made UTTHD #2 for copper fittings at 2:30...the new tub fits differently , so all of the plumbing has to be moved a couple of inches. The upside is that we'll gain a couple of inches of floor space. That's a lot when you're trying to squeeze in to clean the floor between the toilet and the tub.

7:30 p.m. - Starting to see progress again...after UTTHD #3
for more copper fittings.

9:30 p.m. - After 12 hours, the tub and shower are in...

and I made Shane call it a day.
It still needs some fine tuning, but Stage 1
will be complete by tomorrow afternoon.

Inexpensive Cat Tree

Three of many important things to know about Shane: He loves our cats, he enjoys building things, and he likes to save money. It's no surprise, then, that after shopping around at pet stores and online, he decided to make a cat tree for our cats instead of buying one.

He built this simply-designed tree on Sunday. He had a few thoughts about how he wanted to make it, but no formal plan or blueprint. The uprights, flat trays and base are made from PVC pipe and plywood, attached to one another with wooden discs that fit inside the pipe. We already had all of these things in our garage. The carpet remnant was purchased at a local carpet store and the sisal rope that was wrapped around and stapled to the PVC pipe was purchased at the hardware store.

Shane plans to add a few more "options" to the tree, such as hanging cat toys and maybe a bed on the base. But it is fully functional as it is now. I like that it's fairly lightweight; I can move it anywhere in the house by myself.

Other simple flat tray trees like this one can cost $150 or more at the pet stores. Ours cost just $48. Of course, there were several hours of work involved, but tinkering is a hobby for Shane -- a way to relax -- so he doesn't usually factor his time into the costs of small projects like this.

Saving Money on Chicken Breasts

Warning to vegetarians, the squeamish, and my daughter: Graphic raw chicken pictures ahead.



















One way I save money on chicken is to buy bone-in, skin-on chicken breasts when they go on sale for 99¢ per pound, then fillet them myself.

Filleting a chicken breast is easy. (Taking some of these pictures with my left hand was a lot harder.)


First, cut or pull the skin away from the meat and discard it.

Then insert the knife along one edge of the breast meat.

Cut deeply along the breast bone...


until you are able to separate the meat from the bone.

As you can see, could have taken care to get even more meat off the bone.


I'm not particularly careful, though, because I'll wrap and freeze the meaty breast bones. I'll simmer them at a later time to make enough broth and meat for chicken and noodles, chicken pot pie or any other recipe calling for broth and cooked chicken.

Some people may wonder if filleting chicken breasts at home is worth the time involved. Maybe you, like my daughter Jeanne, are grossed out at the idea of cutting up chicken. Maybe you really don't mind paying for the convenience of pre-cut chicken. I'm not judging; I'm just sharing a "how to" here. Only you can decide if it's worth it for you.

Because my curiosity got the best of me, I timed myself filleting five chicken breast halves (about four pounds total) the day I took these photos. They consistently took less than 30 seconds for each one. Just for an easy reference, I compared them to the boneless, skinless chicken breast fillets at Sam's Club, which were priced at $2.29 a pound. So, in less than three minutes, I saved about $5.20 compared to the same amount of chicken fillets from Sam's Club. (And that's not counting the meat left on the bones for another meal or two.)

When I consider that the $5.20 I saved would buy us another five pounds of chicken, I'd have to say that yes, for me it's worth it.

Your mileage may vary.