DIY Loser Update

This post was first published as DIY, The Denton Beach House and Losers on Technorati.

After six months, I finally stumbled upon my latest twist in life’s little turns. Blame it on my teensy-weensy brain that thought it was great idea to help my daughter buy a house instead of paying rent while she attended the University of North Texas.

It all seemed like a good idea at the time. With interest rates still low and a depressed housing market, why not scoop up a bargain and help stimulate the economy? As an added bonus, I could enter the world of Do It Yourselfers (heretofore uncharted territory) and launch into my next “Outside Looking In” project.

Let’s call this little endeavor, “The Denton Beach House.” (Those of you familiar with geography will see the irony in all of that because this house is nowhere near the beach. In fact, it's about 600 miles away, but by the time I'm through with it, I probably could have had a real beach house.)

I wonder if I can sue all those HGTV and DIY home improvement shows that make all these renovations look so darn tootin' easy. I want to know just where in the Sam Hill is Scott McGillivray when I need him? Or how about Ahmed and the yard crashers when we had to tear down the shanty shed? And, is it really too much to ask for a little bit of Ice, Ice, Baby! Come on Vanilla, I thought you were from around these parts.

Although I did get my BFF to help me with this latest endeavor, we almost had a Thelma & Louise moment last week. Driving off a cliff seemed less painful than our attempts to find tub faucets that fit.

After no less than five trips to home improvement stores, we finally found faucets that would fit the existing plumbing on our 1949 house. Along the way, we met some pretty nice, helpful people and some not-so-helpful people.

We also learned a lot more about plumbing than we really wanted to know. Things like faucet packages have letters of the alphabet denoting which faucets fit what types of threading.
Now that would have been a handy thing to know four trips earlier.

Our package, of course, was marked with an “L”

L, you know, as in "Loser."