
Good golly where does the time fly to. The holidays flew into the new year and the first week of January is history. I finally got to have a family holiday dinner in my house after 20 years of quiet holidays. It was just immediate family which is total of four people but it's a start. I'm hoping to eventually start hosting dinners when all this crazy virus stuff has been declared to be over. I'm not sure that will be any time soon.
I tackled a major project in December. The kitchen cook stove had oven issues for .... 20 years. 😮 It's a good thing I had a microwave with a convection oven and stove top burners that worked. So with determination and wild abandon I decided to see if I could fix the oven. The broiler element worked just fine but the bottom oven element would barely warm the oven. After YouTube research, I broke out the small socket set and Philips screw drivers and set out to conquer the stove. The first and simplest thing was to take out the element and test it with an ohm meter. Of course the easiest thing is never the fix for me. More YouTube research followed.
After careful consideration, I decided that the selector switch was most likely the bad part. Now as you can see this stove is not a modern day stove. The house was built in 1965 and this is the original stove. Why you might ask don't I just replace it? Because I'm a cheap skate and well .... I kind of like the challenge. So we are looking at finding parts for a 56 year old stove. That could have been the biggest challenge of all. Needless to say I had my doubts when I called up my favorite appliance place. Much to my surprise they had one but they would have to bring it in on the truck. It took a week of microwave meals and sandwiches before the day came for the part's arrival. I was hoping it wasn't a replacement part for the original but the actual original part replacement and it was a perfect match to the old part. The only modification was to shorten the stem for the dial to fit down close to the stove. The repair was a great success.


Well then there was this. Yeah, a little neglect. For the 20 years that the oven was not used. So with EZ Off Oven Cleaner and .... a lot .... of elbow grease. The oven was finally usable again. It worked perfectly for the Christmas ham family dinner and hopefully another 56 years. By then it will be some else's problem.
Now comes a real challenge. Old houses have many.
This is a drain in the laundry room. It's been totally clogged for ages. I suspect maybe at least three or four years. I've been fortunate that nothing has happened that would require a drain in the laundry room. I don't know how it got clogged but it's time to start the process. So wish me luck and hopefully in the not too distant future I'll have a free running drain.Have a great New Year.
Nebraska Dave
Urban Farmer