The Quest for an Organized Freezer

Ever since Brian and I first moved into this house, I've hated the fridge. I don't have any complaints about its actual performance; it does a perfectly decent job of keeping our fresh food cold and our ice cream frozen. It's a little smaller than average, at 18 cubic feet, but that's a reasonable size for the two of us. The motor is a bit on the loud side, but not so loud as to be disruptive. And its energy use, for a machine its age, is actually quite impressive. We tested it with our Kill a Watt meter over two separate 24-hour periods, one in the winter and one in the summer, and we calculated that it probably uses about 500 kilowatt-hours over the course of a year, which is better than many modern-day fridges. (Sadly, this means that according to the EPA's Refrigerator Retirement Savings Calculator, we can't possibly justify replacing it on the basis of energy savings alone.)

So what is it that bugs me so much about this fridge? In a word, organization—or more accurately, the near-total lack thereof. Here are the major problems with it:

• The shelves are made of wire. If anything spills in the fridge, it drips right through onto the contents of the shelves below.
• Although the shelves are theoretically movable, the only place it's possible to create a space that can accommodate tall bottles is on the top shelf—which means that the refrigerator light is smack in the middle of it, so bottles are all forced to one side or the other. It also means there's no way to keep milk on the bottom shelf the way Tip Hero says you should to keep it fresh; there isn't enough vertical space.
• It has only a single produce drawer. In addition to being very big, heavy, and hard to open and close, it also causes all our veggies to rot faster as a result of being stored along with fruits. 
• It has no meat and cheese drawer. Our supply of block and grated cheese all has to be piled up toward the back of the bottom shelf, where the stacks tend to fall over and individual blocks can get lost. And if I buy a bag of string cheese snacks, there's no good place to keep it where it will be accessible and not get buried.
• Although it doesn't have one of those idiotic built-in egg compartments in the door, which are in the wrong place for storing eggs and completely useless for storing anything else, it does have an oversized dairy compartment that's too big for our butter dish and too small to accommodate anything else along with it.

Worst of all, though, is the freezer compartment. It has no shelves at all, just a big open box in which everything gets stuffed willy-nilly and won't stay put. When we first got the fridge, I tried to order a freezer shelf from Hotpoint, since they claimed to offer one; however, this turned out to be false, since the part they sent me was actually an extra shelf for the fresh food compartment. So instead, we've done our best to try and arrange the space with a hodge-podge of makeshift partitions: a wire cabinet organizer that goes only partway across, a couple of mismatched plastic bins, a Rubbermaid breadbox for storing meats, and an assortment of pint-size deli containers. Yet even with these crude organizers in place, we still invariably end up with a variety of bags and boxes stuffed precariously in sideways or upside down, constantly at risk of falling out when the door is opened. It's like Fibber McGee's closet in there.

For years now, I've had ambitions to replace this frustrating fridge. When I wrote the latest report on refrigerators for ConsumerSearch, I thought it would be a good opportunity to figure out which model would be the best choice for a replacement. Unfortunately, what I discovered was that top-freezer fridges—the most efficient, most reliable, and least expensive type—don't tend to get very good reviews. Even my Best-Reviewed choice, a Maytag that did well in professional tests, had a lot of complaints in user reviews about its uneven temperature control; owners said it was impossible to keep the freezer cold enough without freezing everything in the fridge. (It also comes with a built-in ice maker, which is worse than useless to us, since it requires extra plumbing work to install and takes up much-needed freezer space to boot.) My runner-up pick, a Haier, looked ideal except for one problem: the nearest store that carried it was an hour away in Langhorne, PA. I might actually have considered it worth making the trip, but I figured I'd wait for a sale first, and while I was waiting, the fridge disappeared from their inventory altogether, leaving us with no good alternatives at all. Given that the fridge we have now still works, there's no point in spending $850 on a replacement unless it's actually a major improvement.

So while we wait to see whether next year's models offer any better options, I'm looking for ways to make better use of the space in our current fridge, especially the freezer. A series of Google searches on this topic turned up lots of articles featuring pictures of beautifully organized freezers, such as this one at The Kitchn. However, all the homeowners in this article started out with freezers that actually had some kind of interior organization (bins, shelves or both) to start with, rather than what we have, which is basically just a box with a door. If we could simply find some way to add a full-width shelf, that would be a good start, but when I Googled "add shelf to freezer," all I found was an article on Lifehacker that suggests using a wire cabinet organizer—which is what we have now. I have searched and searched for a better one that would cover the full width and depth of the compartment, but to no avail.

Normally, when we have a storage problem to deal with, Brian just builds a custom-fitted piece out of wood to maximize the space (like the dividers for my sock drawer and the tilt-out drawer for our kitchen sink). Unfortunately, in this case, that approach won't really work, since a thick piece of wood would take up too much space and a thin one wouldn't stand up well to freezing. So last night, we went on a hunting trip at Target, looking for some sort of kitchen or home organizers that might help tame this beast of a freezer. Nearly everything we found, however, was unsuitable in one way or another: too big, too small, or not square enough to make good use of the space. In the end, all we came home with was a little $4 ice bin, which fits under the makeshift wire shelf and helps a bit with corralling the loose bags. We also weeded out some unnecessary items like excess ice cubes, and I tried a trick for cutting down the ice cream bucket as shown in this Lifehacker video. (They recommend it to keep the ice cream fresher, but for me, the bigger advantage is the space it saves. Also, we can see how much ice cream we have left without looking inside.)

This "after" picture, however, is only marginally better than the "before," so I'm still looking for better ways to organize. And I think I may actually have hit on a possible solution, if a rather unconventional one. While browsing the Container Store (a site that one of my fellow Word Nerds would call a "panagora" of all things storage-related), I came across these drop-front shoe boxes. The larger ones are exactly the depth, and just under half the width, of our freezer compartment, so two could sit abreast on the bottom and create a complete second level that completely spans the space. We could store meats in one, veggies in the other, and the drop-fronts would give us access the to contents without disrupting the rest of the freezer. And once we'd used those to make a solid base, we might actually be able to fit in some more traditional freezer organizers on top.

Am I crazy, or could this actually work? And is it worth $20 plus shipping to find out?

DIY sitting/standing desk, version 2

After using his improvised Lack sitting/standing desk for about two months, Brian noticed a few flaws in his original design. First, the surface area of the standing desk was slightly too small to accommodate his keyboard, mouse, and monitor easily all at the same time. Second, the table was just a bit too high for him to use comfortably. The adjustable monitor, in its raised position, sat right where it should at eye level, but the surface of the desk was too high for the keyboard; he had to bend his arms at an uncomfortable angle to use it.

To fix these problems, he had two options: raise himself up higher by standing on a stool, or make the desktop lower by shortening the legs of the Lack. Unfortunately, both of these options would just create a new problem: while his keyboard would now be at the right height, his monitor would be well below eye level. He could have just set it atop the wooden stand that he made for using it on his regular, seated-level desk, but when he considered the idea of piling the monitor stand on top of the Lack table on top of the desk, it started to sound a bit too much like a game of Jenga. So he realized that, to make a stable stand that worked at both hand level and eye level, he'd need to add on a built-in monitor stand to the top of the Lack.

So, one rainy day when he wasn't biking to work, he brough the Lack table home with him in the car and hustled it back into his workshop, where he spent the next couple of hours producing assorted whirring and banging noises. His first task was to shorten the legs of the Lack. This involved a bit more work than simply sawing off the ends, since the legs of the Lack are hollow except for the very bottom bit, and he needed some way to stabilize them. So after removing the bottom 2.5 inches from each leg, he cut four 1.75-inch square blocks out of two-by-four, pressed them into the ends of the legs, and glued them in place.

Once this was done, he assembled a little "pagoda" out of scrap wood to sit on top of the Lack. The stand itself was simple enough to build: he just cut one large piece and two smaller upright pieces and attached them together with wood screws and glue. However, attaching this new piece to the top of the Lack proved a bit trickier. He couldn't simply run wood screws up through the underside of the tabletop, because the tabletop, like the legs, is hollow and can't hold a screw in place. He could have simply screwed them up through the thin veneer of the top and into the solid wood of the stand legs, but he feared this wouldn't be stable enough.

Fortunately, a solution presented itself in the form of the leftover hardware from last month's futon misadventure. Since we ended up using only one of the three cross-dowel nuts from the hardware that White Lotus sent us, we still had two left, and these looked like the perfect tool for securing the bolt in place. Brian started by drilling a horizontal hole through each vertical support of the monitor stand. Then he drilled two long vertical holes up through the hollow top of the table and into the wood of the supports, intersecting with the holes he'd already drilled across in the other direction. Once all the holes were in place, he fed a cross-dowel nut into each horizontal hole and screwed a long bolt into the vertical hole and through the cross-dowel nut. Then all he had to do was tighten up those cross-dowel nuts to make everything rock solid. (That explanation was probably incredibly confusing, but if you look at this little cutaway diagram that Brian drew, it should make more sense.)

Here's the newly remodeled piece in Brian's workspace. The monitor and keyboard are now at the correct heights respective to each other, but the surface is still a bit small to accommodate the keyboard and mouse. For now, he's compensated for that by setting the Lack atop his desk at a slight angle, so he can lay the keyboard and the mouse pad diagonally across the top of the Lack desk. However, if this doesn't work out in the long run, you may be seeing yet another post sometime in the future about the Lack sitting/standing desk, version 3.0.

Oh, and incidentally, the cut-off ends of the Lack table legs did not go to waste. I was able to put these four little square bins to use holding paper clips and various gewgaws on my desk—a rather tidier solution than the assortment of small bins and origami boxes I'd been using before. Waste not, want not, that's the ecofrugal way.

Arugula invasion

As gardeners, Brian and I have always had a complicated relationship with weeds. Some, like mugwort, are our sworn enemies; others, like purple deadnettles, we just try to coexist with. Clover, a plant that many homeowners consider a weed, we actively encourage to grow in our yard, because it competes with the truly obnoxious weeds and enriches the soil with nitrogen. But the most confusing "weeds" of all are the ones that are actually garden crops—veggies that we've cultivated on purpose—that pop up in places where we haven't planted them. Should do we treat these as weeds to be removed, or as annexes to our main garden space?

The answer depends on several factors, such as how much in the way the plants are and how good they taste. For example, I have decided to insist on removing all volunteer tomato plants that pop up in our side yard, because (a) the sprawling vines take over the entire yard, making it nearly impassible, and (b) since they're mostly the offspring of hybrid tomatoes, they don't breed true—so even particularly tasty parent varieties, like Sun Golds, end up producing unremarkable-tasting fruit. However, the large butternut squash vine that twined its way through the side yard in 2010 was allowed to stay, because it provided us with a generous crop of our favorite squash. Contrariwise, the volunteer tomato plants that have proliferated this year on the far side of our garden plot have also been tolerated, because although their fruits aren't great, there isn't really anything more important growing there.

Often, the place where volunteer plants are most of a nuisance is in the garden itself. Last year, for instance, when our Sun Golds produced so heavily that we couldn't keep up with the job of harvesting them, the tomatoes that dropped off the vines into the garden beds produced dozens of tiny seedlings that we had to yank quickly before they turned into huge, sprawling vines and choked out all our lettuce. The year before that, when one of our dill plants went to seed, dill ended up being one of the most prolific "weeds" in our garden (though one that we could usually pull up and eat, rather than just pull up and throw away).

Up until this year, however, the problem of weed-veggies in the garden had been confined to the beds. Now, for the first time, we're having vegetables pop up in the paths. Our new garden paths have, alas, not proven quite so impervious to weeds as we'd hoped they would be; the relentless mugwort has repeatedly managed to poke through the landscape cloth and the layer of stone dust over it, and other weeds have snaked their way under the edges of the landscape cloth to proliferate around the boundaries of the beds. But this week is the first time we've spotted bits of green poking their way through the weed barrier that turned out, on close inspection, to be none other than arugula.

Nor is the arugula invasion (which, by the way, would be a great name for an alternative band) confined to the garden. We've seen volunteer arugula plants in several other places around the yard as well. There's a good-sized patch of it in the side yard, right around the base of the compost bin, and some of it appears to be growing up through the cracks in the driveway. It's actually kind of ironic, because the arugula we actually planted in the garden this year didn't yield well at all, and now here it is appearing in all these places where it's never been grown before.
Our best guess as to how it happened is that after our arugula plants bolted, several of them got pulled out and mixed in with a big pile of woody weeds that we stored next to the bin, waiting for them to dry out so we could strip the branches of leaves before bundling them. It must have scattered some seeds there, resulting in the present crop of arugula, which looks far healthier than the patch we actually planted this spring ever did. Then, once the bundles of brush got moved to the driveway to wait for bulk trash pickup, the arugula continued to drop seeds, sowing a new generation of plants through the cracks in the concrete.

So, bizarrely, a veggie that we completely failed to grow a decent crop of on purpose this spring is now coming up all over the place this fall. I've already picked two big plants from the garden paths, as well as one from the bed itself, and that bunch alone has probably doubled the size of the harvest we got in the spring. Add to that what's currently left in the bed, and in the driveway, and in front of the compost bin, and arugula may end up being one of this year's most profitable garden crops, completely by chance.

Like I've said before: a gardener's life is full of surprises.

Cucumber alert

A couple of weeks ago, Brian and I harvested the last, or nearly the last, of our cucumber crop, and we thought a good way to use it up would be to make the Summer Pasta Salad he invented last August. He mixed everything together, just as he did the first time, and it looked nice and colorful, but it tasted...wrong. The flavors of basil and garlic and tomato were all still there, but there was this unpleasant, bitter undertone to everything. After cautiously trying another bite or two, I managed to pinpoint the source of the problem as the cucumbers, which were so bitter I couldn't even eat a whole piece. I thought perhaps it might be possible to just eat around them, but when Brian tried his, he declared, "I'm not eating this," and he dumped the whole bowlful straight into the compost bin. It was a bit of a wrench to my ecofrugal soul to see a cheap, healthy, home-cooked meal go to waste, but I had to admit, he was right: what we had in front of us wasn't truly food. He said the taste was so bad that it seemed like it had to be bad for us—like our bodies were trying to tell us, "Warning! Don't eat this!"

Fortunately, there happened to be a new diner in town that we'd been planning to try anyway, so we didn't go hungry that night (although we had to scrounge a bit for lunch in the absence of the leftovers we'd expected to have). But the experience still left us with a bit of a puzzle on our hands. The recipe had tasted fine the first time we made it; what had gone wrong the second time?

A quick Google search on "bitter cucumber" pointed Brian toward the answer. According to a site called Gardening Know-How, cucumber plants, along with melons and squash, naturally produce bitter compounds called cucurbitans. Most of the time, these compounds are confined to the leaves and stem of the plant (which I guess explains why our groundhogs have never touched them). However, certain conditions, such as uneven watering or fluctuations in temperature, can cause these chemicals to work their way into the fruit. Eating too much of these bitter compounds can actually cause illness, so Brian was apparently right in thinking that the salad tasted like something unsafe to eat. (The amount of cucumber in it probably wasn't enough to harm us, but considering that we wouldn't have enjoyed it either, there was no good reason to take the risk.)

This answer, however, led us to another question: would other cucumbers from the same plant have this same unpleasant taste? Gardening Know-How warns that once a cucumber vine has started to produce bitter fruit, it will most likely continue to do so, and it's best to discard the whole plant. Since the cukes we'd just picked were pretty much the last of the season, that wasn't a problem, but what about the ones we'd picked earlier? Would the multiple jars of pickles in our fridge have that same nasty, bitter taste? Fortunately, Brian was able to assure me that all those cucumbers had gone into the jars long before this bitter-tasting one showed up, so there was no reason to worry about them.

Nonetheless, I wanted to relate our experience as a warning to all you other gardeners out there. If you grow cucumbers, make sure you always taste them before using them in a recipe—particularly if it's late in the season, or if the weather has been unpredictable during the summer. Otherwise, you risk ruining a whole dish with one bad cucumber.

Incidentally, in the course of researching this problem I also found a few suggestions on ways to deal with it. About Home says that the bitter compounds tend to concentrate in the skin of the cucumber and toward the stem end, so if you peel the cucumbers and use the parts toward the middle, you "should be able to salvage more than enough for a salad." A video on YouTube offers a far odder solution: cut a thin slice off each end of the cucumber, then press the cut slice against the cuke and rub vigorously in a circle for a minute or so. This will cause the cuke to release a white, foamy substance, which supposedly draws out the cucurbitans with it. I personally haven't tried any of these methods, so I can't vouch for their effectiveness, but if you've picked a cucumber that's essentially inedible, I guess you have nothing to lose by trying them.

As for us, we'll do our best to raise our cucumbers right in future years to keep them from developing this problem again. We can't do much about the weather, but we can take extra care to keep the plants evenly watered. And next time we buy new cucumber seeds, we might consider switching out our highly productive Marketmore 76 or Calypso cukes for a "sweet" variety, since these are less prone to cucur-bitterness.

Ecofrugal Living Podcast, Episode 2: Solving Problems Without Money

The blog entry from September 25 has been a particularly successful one, attracting well above the average number of hits and comments, so I decided to turn it into my second episode of the Ecofrugal Living podcast. If you enjoy it, you might like to see the comments on the original post, as well as the post that inspired it at Live Like a Mensch.


 
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

The $1,000 Challenge: or, You Can't Trim Fat You Don't Have

This morning I was checking out some financial blogs, looking for any that might be in need of writers, and I came across a series on the Daily Finance Site called "The $1,000 Challenge." It's a series of eleven posts by financial journalist Brian O'Connor that promise to help you "cut $1,000 a month from your budget." Read that again carefully: $1,000 a month. He's not claiming he can find you a one-time savings of $1,000, or save you $1,000 a year; he says his program can save you $1,000 a month, every month, or $12,000 a year. This sounds like an impossible claim, but O'Connor says he's done it himself: over the course of ten weeks, he "cut $1,000 from my family's monthly spending, trimming $100 from each of our top 10 spending categories." He documented this experience in his "Funny Money" column for the Detroit News, and later in his book The $1,000 Challenge: How One Family Slashed Its Budget Without Moving Under a Bridge or Living on Government Cheese.

Now, that fact alone should have been a warning to me that O'Connor's advice was unlikely to be of any use to me. Just as it isn't possible to lose half your body weight unless you currently weigh twice as much as you need to, it isn't possible to cut $1,000 from your monthly spending unless you're currently wasting $12,000 a year. It's the same problem I've noted on this blog so many times before: most of the financial advice out there on the Web (and green-living advice as well) tends to focus on the easy stuff, the low-hanging fruit, and therefore isn't much use to those of us who already harvested it long ago. (That's why I always try on this blog to talk about newer ideas, or take new approaches to old ones. Instead of just saying, "Hang your laundry," I do the math to figure out how much I actually save by hanging my laundry, and then I discuss some of the less tangible benefits that make this activity worthwhile. Or I share new, budget-friendly vegetarian recipes that Brian has invented. Or I post a just-for-fun roundup of budget decorating ideas.)

Indeed, O'Connor himself concedes in his introductory post that most of his readers probably don't have $1,000 worth of fat to cut from their monthly budgets. The only reason he called it the $1,000 Challenge, he frankly admits, is "because it made a good headline"; a more realistic goal might be anywhere from $50 to $500 a month. So at this point, I knew two things about this author: 1) he used to be slack enough in his spending habits to have $12,000 worth of excess to cut, and 2) he doesn't care overmuch about accuracy, since he has no scruples using a deliberately misleading headline to get users to click on his article. Neither of which makes him sound like a great person to be taking financial advice from.

By this time, though, he'd managed to pique my interest. Even if I knew there was virtually no chance that his plan could actually save me $1,000 a month, I was still curious about how it had managed to save him $1,000 a month. Where had he managed to find that much excess to cut?

So I went ahead and read the next article in the series, which O'Connor calls "cleaning out your financial 'junk drawer.'" Just as most of us have a junk drawer in our homes, he says, in which we toss all sorts of odds and ends and then forget about them, so most of us have "odds and ends that pile up, unseen or at least unconsidered, usually on credit cards or via automated checking account debits." He says when he went over his family's monthly statements, he discovered several automatic payments of this sort. The worst of the lot was an old email account that he'd meant to keep open for just one year in case any of his old clients tried to use it and had ended up leaving open for over two years, at $25 a month. And then came the line that really boggled my mind:

If I had been getting a bill in the mail every month for that e-mail account, and had to sit down, write a check, dig out my nifty return-address labels (I know they're around here somewhere), then find a stamp, I would have cancelled that account ages ago. But the charge went directly onto a credit card, where it was easy to overlook.

Easy to overlook?!? How could you have a $25 charge on your credit card bill every single month for over two years and not notice it? When I get the bill for one of my credit cards, I don't pay it until I've gone through it line by line to make sure that all the charges match the amounts on my payment slips. (I actually had a minor dilemma last month over whether to call the company to dispute a charge of $25.76 at a restaurant, because the slip said we'd only paid $24.76—$20.76 for the bill and $4 for the tip. I only let it go because Brian said he couldn't be completely sure he hadn't written down different amounts on our copy and the restaurant's.) So if there were a $25 charge showing up every month for a service I was no longer using, I would definitely notice it was there. For O'Connor to simply "overlook" this charge on his bill, he must not have been checking his statements at all; he was probably just automatically paying the total (or worse yet, automatically paying just the minimum) without even bothering to look at the individual charges. His bill could have been loaded up with charges that were not only unnecessary but completely fraudulent, and he'd never have noticed they were there.

Reading that one line was enough to convince me to read no further. Knowing that this guy had been careless in his spending habits was one thing, but once I'd learned that he didn't even check his bills before paying them, I knew I wasn't about to trust his advice on anything money-related.

So, for all those who were hoping that this post was going to kick off a series on how I embarked on my own $1,000 Challenge, I'm sorry to disappoint you. I don't think I'll be cutting $1,000, or $500, or even $100 a month from our budget, and for a very good reason: because we don't have it to cut. If we had $100 worth of completely unnecessary spending in any particular category of our budget, I'm pretty sure we'd have found it and cut it already. But even if there actually are some hidden expenses lurking in our budget—some clever cost-cutting strategies that we somehow haven't heard about yet—I feel very confident that we're not going to learn about them from Brian O'Connor.

DIY Lessons

When we first started planning our guest room redo way back in April, we figured this would be a good sort of starter job for us to test our DIY skills on. Since we knew we were bound to make some mistakes, we figured it would be best to make them on this small, seldom-used room, so we'd know better by the time we started working on our most-used living spaces. And for this purpose, I must say, the remodel is shaping up to be a remarkable success. We've only been working on it for a week, and we've already made enough mistakes to learn several very important lessons about this kind of DIY job. So I'm now planning to share them here, in the hope that maybe you can learn from our mistakes without going to the trouble of making them yourself.

Lesson 1: Plan for the unplanned.

When we first started planning this job, we figured it would probably be a fairly quick one, since it was a small room and didn't need any major changes. All we had to do was pull some nails from the wall, patch the holes, prime and paint, and then bring in some new furniture and artwork. How long could that take?

Hah.

Turns out, the answer to this question is "A lot longer than you expect." Because no matter how simple a job looks on the surface, there will invariably be bigger, more complicated jobs hidden below the surface, which won't come to light until you actually start getting your hands dirty. Like, for example, the chunks of the wall that are actually made not of intact wallboard but of crumbling filler, which you can't see until you start pulling nails out and find large chunks of the wall coming with them.

Sometimes, it's true, these hidden problems turn out to have fairly quick fixes. For instance, one of the two windows in the room had a seriously wobbly windowsill, and Brian feared that the wood might have warped due to water incursion or maybe suffered insect damage. However, when he actually pulled off the windowsill to examine it, he found that the wood was mostly intact; one of the two pieces had a crack in it, but nothing that couldn't be fixed with wood glue. It was the wallboard behind the sill that had mostly rotted away due to water damage. Fortunately, this was a problem Brian already knew how to fix: just cut out the damaged parts, cut some smaller pieces of wallboard to fit the hole, and screw them into place. So we dodged a bullet there by not having to attempt to build a whole new windowsill from scratch. But it could just as easily have turned out the other way.

So the lesson we've learned here for future DIY jobs is always to allow more time for them—a lot more—than it actually looks like they should take. When the time comes to redo the bedroom, for instance, I'm going to assume that we'll need to set aside a full week for it just as we did with the patio last year—and that we might still be sleeping in the guest room after that week is out.

Lesson 2: You cannot remove just a small patch of paint (at least not from a wall that was never properly primed).

In the picture I showed you last week, we had a large, irregular, vaguely map-shaped section of paint peeled away underneath the soon-to-be-removed windowsill. At that point, I thought we'd peeled all the paint we'd need to peel in that room. But nope, turns out it's like potato chips: you can never stop at just one. The more nails we removed, the more sections of paint came out with them, and as we peeled at each newly formed loose edge, larger and larger sections of wallboard were exposed, and the peeled-away areas joined up with each other, until we ended up with more wallboard uncovered than covered. Unfortunately, there wasn't always a clear line of demarcation between spots where the paint was well adhered to the wall and spots where it wasn't, so one minute I might be peeling away a big sheet of loose paint from the wall, and the next minute, I might find myself tearing a chunk of paper from the wallboard because there was one little spot in the middle of the sheet of paint that had managed to stick to it. All of these spots will, of course, have to be patched before we can get started on priming and painting.

The moral here, I guess, is to try as much as possible in future jobs to minimize the amount of paint we disturb. And the best way to do that is to heed the next lesson:

Lesson 3: Don't pull out a nail that you could push in.

The main reason we did so much damage to the walls in the process of pulling out all those nails is that in some cases, nail heads that appeared to be bulging out of the wall actually turned out, once the paint was scraped away, to be buried pretty deeply in it. I thought perhaps the best thing to do would be to simply spackle over them, but Brian pointed out that if they'd pushed their way out of the wall once, they were bound to do it again, because they obviously weren't well secured to it. So at that point we figured the only way to avoid this problem was to pull them all out—which often involved gouging out big sections of the wallboard to expose the edge of the nailhead so we could get the pry bar under it—and replace each one with a wood screw.

Now, this worked, in the sense that it got the walls secured back in place, but it was a lot of work, and it created a lot of big holes that would have to be filled and sanded later on. It was only after we'd done this with about three dozen deeply buried nails that we figured out that we could simply add wood screws without removing the nails first. That would fix the wallboard in place so it wouldn't bulge out, and once it was secure, we could just pound the nails in to hold them down. Oops.

So, that was a lesson learned the hard way, and one that left us with about three dozen holes in the wall, but at least we figured it out now. Next time we tackle one of these bedrooms, we won't bother pulling out nails; we'll just add screws next to them, and then bang the nails back into place.

These are the first three lessons we've learned from this remodeling job, but I'm sure they won't be the last. We've still got a wide array of tasks in front of us—mudding, priming, painting, replacing the windowsill, replacing outlets, painting the heater covers—and I'm sure each one will have its own lesson, or set of lessons, to teach us. But at least with any luck we'll learn them all now, and we'll have them down by the time we tackle our next room.