This is why I’m glad I’m not a plumber. I like looking into people’s beautiful homes, or even their slightly messy homes. But I am not EVEN about going into someone’s filthy home.

And this one takes the cake. EnglishRussia.com has the story that the man collected garbage and put it into his apartment. Eventually, a pipe burst in his home and he had to have plumbers come in. The pictures are what the plumbers had to face. Dis. Gus. Ting.

Now that it’s nearly spring, let the exterior work commence! One of the things I’ve been needing to get to is to clean the exterior brick on the outside of my house. It’s gotten kind of funky over the years and it needs a good scrub. I usually just use a scrub brush and the hose, but if you’re looking for a more detailed how-to, here’s everything you need to know from Doityourself.com.

I promise, I’m not turning this into the abandoned places blog, but when something as beautiful as this catches my eye, I need to post. It’s an abandoned apartment building that looks like a castle. The thought of someone abandoning a lovely building like this blows my mind. I wish I knew the story behind it. For more pictures, check here.

I have a friend who just got granite countertops. This one’s for you!

This post in abandonedplaces on LiveJournal makes me wish I had a ton more money so I could go restore this house and live in it. Check it out, there’s lots of cool pictures of the inside.

Source: email

My ex-father-in-law is a heating and air conditioning man. He also does a ton of other repair work, which is handy if I ever need something fixed. He works inexpensively and comes quickly. It's fabulous. I had decided to get a programmable thermostat installed at my house and he made me a deal that he would install it really cheaply if I'd do the programming, since he hates that part. No prob, I thought. How hard can it be?

Well, it turns out it's not hard at all to program a programmable thermostat, if you're clearly paying attention to the directions and understand the difference between a conventional 1 heat 1 cool system and what I have, which is an electric heat pump. That's 2 heat, one cool. I was unaware, even though my ex-FIL did tell me that while I was in the middle of programming the thermostat. See, it helps if you actually listen.

After 24 hours of no heat during a miserably cold late-winter snowstorm, it was 55 degrees in my house and I called my husband sobbing and insisted he come home and make it work. He breezed in and within 5 minutes, had the heat working. "Sometimes," he said, "You need a man's touch." And as much as I wanted to punch him in the nose and tell him he was wrong, it did take him to fix it.

My consolation is that the kids were all too busy shivering under 50 blankets to bug him while he was doing it, not like when I was programming it and had kids, dogs, and cats all running around everywhere. Sigh.

Photo: Honeywell