A Weekend DIY Project and Birthday Celebration



Pic 1: This happy, cake-faced boy is my great-nephew Greyson after enjoying some of his birthday cake on the occasion of his first birthday.
Pic 2: While it wasn’t the geocaching adventure I had hoped for, Alivia and I did sneak out with a friend and found this cache on an island in Mahnomen County.

By Allan Olson


There has been plenty of time for relaxing this past week. I found time for a little geocaching – just not for any big series of caches due to the foot of snow that was dumped on us. And we did take some time for a little do-it-yourself project in the house.

I mentioned last week that our one shower faucet wouldn’t turn on; well, it turns out that apparently it was never really installed correctly in the first place. This project quickly evolved from being an inexpensive quick fix to something more than I wanted to fund at this time.

Saturday morning was pretty quiet; I did some reading, some television watching, and then finally that afternoon, my wife was ready to tackle the shower problem. I did a quick assessment of the situation and we headed into town to get a few things, but as we were walking around the big box store, we quickly realized that we had no idea of what the next step was or what parts were needed to complete that step. I suggested to my wife that we head back to Cass Lake to get some help from the folks at the local hardware store. That proved to be a wise decision.
Some of the pieces of the old plumbing removed.
We arrived at the store at 4:30 p.m. and 29 minutes later we were out the door with everything we needed. The owner walked my wife (I don’t do DIY) through the process, and even got things started by crimping a couple pieces we needed. For me, the hardest part was that I was thinking (hoping?) it would be a $50 fix. It turned out that in order to do it correctly, it cost considerably more than that, but ultimately it was worth it. 
Back at home we promptly went to work by cutting an access hole in the sheetrock wall behind the shower to expose the plumbing. Then we had a setback. My wife managed to break a pipe in the process of getting a support board out of the way. I dug through my very limited (and now even more limited) plumbing supply and found one piece of pipe and one coupler, but not the adapter I needed. So it was off to town again; this time I had to go to the box store, since the local hardware was closed. Either way, it would’ve been a 50-mile round trip for a part that cost just over $1. I bought two just in case. Once back home after the parts run, it took until about 9 p.m. before everything was operational again. We turned the water back on and… everything worked! No leaks! 
Aside from the help of the local hardware store owner, the best part of this fix-it project was that my wife and I didn’t argue during the entire process. There were some tense moments, but we checked them and continued to work through the process. While the plumbing project got completed, we do still have a hole in the wall. That will be a separate project my wife and kids can handle without me, and hopefully, before this column hits the newsstands the wall will be repaired, too.
On Sunday morning I did some work on the computer before it was time to hit the road once again for the north country. This time it was for my now one-year-old great nephew’s first birthday party. It was a long way to travel for a birthday party, but that one-year milestone is a big event. It was a fun trip, but we actually spent more time on the road than at the party – the things you do for family. By this time next year he will even be a big brother, which will be the sixth great-nephew or -niece for my wife and I.
Plans for this week included a quiet New Year’s Eve celebration, just a couple friends over with plans to eat pizza and play some games and just maybe I might have stayed up until midnight. Our New Year’s Day plan was a road trip for a concert at the Reif Center in Grand Rapids. The featured act was the Okee Dokee Brothers, a pair of Americana folk singers that we originally heard in Cass Lake several years ago through a Kitchigami MN Legacy Library Program. The kids all enjoyed it then, and we continue to play their songs occasionally over the years.
This week will also be back to school for the kids, and I’m sure that my schedule will quickly fill up once things are back in the full swing of things. It was fun to take it easy for a few days, but I’m looking forward to getting back into the routine.
I hope everyone had a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year’s celebration, with many more happy days to come.

Please remember to watch out for the buses that are carrying our most precious cargo. Also, snap a photo or two to preserve a lifetime of memories. Thanks for reading, and have a great week! Feel free to drop me a line at cltimes1@arvig.net or stop by the office for a visit.

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