Soy coffee creamer experiment

One of the many plant-based "schmilks" I've tried since I first gave up the moo juice is Silk Protein. Nutritionally speaking, this stuff is very impressive, with a whopping 10 grams of protein per glass—much more than most plant milks, and even more than dairy milk—and only 3 grams of sugar. And its flavor and texture are very close to the real thing, as well. Its biggest drawback is its price: typically around $5 for a half-gallon. That's far more than the $2.39 we pay for half a gallon of Lidl soy milk, our current schmilk of choice. (Soy milk's vaguely grassy flavor isn't my favorite, but I've found that in a cup of cocoa it's not too noticeable.) However, it's still cheaper than most liquid coffee creamers you can buy, either dairy or otherwise, and significantly lower in sugar. So we use the Silk for coffee, as well as for the occasional glass to accompany a cookie, and soy milk for most other applications.

Until recently, Silk Protein was available at our local Stop & Shop, just half a mile down the street. But in March, Stop & Shop closed that store. This was a problem, because this particular variety of Silk is a bit of a specialty item. It's not available at any of the stores where we normally shop (Lidl, Trader Joe's, Costco), nor at any other supermarket that's on our regular route. To buy it now, we have to make a special trip to another Stop & Shop in our area. This is doubly disgruntling for us, because aside from the extra time and gas, we hate to continue giving Stop & Shop our business after what they did to our town. But the only other chain that carries Silk Protein is Acme, and the nearest one of those is even farther off our usual route. So over the past few months, we've swallowed our distaste and made a couple of runs to Stop & Shop just for this item. 

But in the wake of our success with making our own plant butter, I started wondering whether I could also make a homemade coffee creamer that would do as good a job as the Silk Protein—perhaps even at a lower cost. Since one of the perks of the Silk was its protein content, I decided to focus on creamer recipes based on soy milk, a reasonably high-protein plant milk that we always have on hand. I'd already tried coffee with just straight soy milk and found it didn't work well at all; it was too thin and watery, so all it did was dilute the coffee without adding any body to it. What I hoped to find was a recipe that would thicken up the soy milk to something with a consistency closer to cream.

As it turns out, there are three possible ways to do this:

• Just heat the soy milk on the stove until the liquid is reduced.
• Combine the soy milk with a thickener such as tapioca starch and heat it just briefly.
• 
  Skip the heating step and just blend the soy milk with xanthan gum.

Not knowing which of these methods would work best, I decided to try all three. I made a small batch of each one, using between one-quarter and one-third of a cup of soy milk, depending on which scaled best with the recipe. All three recipes called for sweetener as well as thickener, but since I was aiming for a low-sugar creamer, I left it out. I knew that was might affect the texture, but I figured a recipe that couldn't make a thick creamer without added sugar was no use to me anyway.

The first method, relying on heat alone, was a bit of a pain. Five to eight minutes doesn't sound like a long time, but it's a long time to stand by the stove staring into a pot waiting for the contents to thicken. And if after all that time, the liquid doesn't actually thicken and just forms a skin on top instead, that's an even bigger disappointment. The second method seemed to work a little better; as the starch-enhanced soy milk came to a boil, it did indeed appear to grow a little bit thicker. But like the first batch, it also developed a skin, which wasn't particularly appetizing. 

The third method, simply blending the soy milk with xanthan gum, was the easiest, but it wasn't clear how well it worked. The liquid came out of the blender very foamy, so I couldn't easily tell if it had thickened up any. But as soon as I started pouring it into some coffee, it became apparent that the answer was no. I added three spoonfuls without making any discernible impression on either the color of the flavor of the coffee. Eventually I ended up dumping in the entire batch, equivalent to one-third of a cup of soy milk, and the coffee was still too bitter for my taste.

The other two creamers were a bit thicker, but they didn't perform much better. The second batch, the one with the tapioca starch in it, made the coffee lighter, but not much creamier in flavor. As with the blended creamer, I had to use the whole batch to make the coffee drinkable—and that was for only half a cup of coffee, since I decided to split one cup up between two mugs for the test. 

The first batch, treated with heat only, was the best of the lot. Chilled overnight in the fridge, it thickened up to a consistency that could reasonably be described as creamy, and I was actually able to get a decent-tasting half-cup of coffee out of it. But once again, I had to use almost the entire batch to do so. I started out with a third of a cup of soy milk, and I used all of it for just half a cup of coffee. That means a full cup of coffee would require the equivalent of two-thirds of a cup of soy milk, which is...let's see here...about 20 cents' worth. My Silk Protein can do the same job with about three tablespoons, or 12 cents' worth. And it's a lot less work. 

In short, it looks like my best option for now is to stick with the commercial product. It's kind of a pain to get hold of, but it's a better value than anything I can make at home. And since it uses less liquid for each cup of coffee, it produces less packaging waste as well. But I'll continue to experiment with other recipes for vegan coffee creamer—possibly starting with one of these coconut-milk based recipes from PETA—in hopes of finding a more ecofrugal alternative.

Why I don't buy everything used

After receiving a Washington Post subscription as a birthday present last January, I also signed up for the paper's Climate Coach column. In it, columnist Michael J. Coren offers climate-focused consumers advice on everything from green funerals to bidets. His most recent column is about an interesting challenge he undertook: "For one month, I set out to buy everything used and online."

Now, I'm already a big believer in shopping secondhand when possible. But trying to buy absolutely everything this way seems like an awfully high bar. As I read the article, I mentally went through the list of items we'd bought recently trying to figure out whether buying them secondhand would even have been feasible. What about the water supply lines we had to replace in our bathroom sink? What about the new lids I bought for our Pyrex food storage containers? Are there really people online selling these things used? And even if there are, would ordering from them necessarily have been greener?

To answer this question properly, I pulled out out my spending list for the past month and identified all the non-consumable items we'd bought. This proved to be a surprisingly short list, as the bulk of our spending goes toward consumables (such as food and medicine), services, and donations. For each item, I noted where I'd bought it and what I paid. Then I did a little digging to figure out whether it would have been possible to buy it used from an online retailer instead and, if so, what it would have cost. Here's the list:

• A secondhand copy of Moll Flanders, bought for $1 at the Princeton Library bookstore. There are, naturally, loads of places to buy secondhand books online; a quick search online turned up multiple copies starting at $1, the same price I paid for it in the store. But that doesn't include shipping, which would add another $4 minimum. And besides adding to the price, shipping it to New Jersey from an out-of-state seller would have added to its carbon footprint. The copy at the library store cost one-fifth as much, supported a good cause, and required no transportation at all, since I was in Princeton already. Buying it online would clearly have been worse in every way.
• A game that I bought directly from its creator, who had a booth at the town street fair, for $26.75. Since this game is brand new, there are no secondhand copies available online or anywhere else.
• A new pair of shoes from Skechers. These sell for $75 normally, but I got them on sale for $54 including shipping. A quick search of "Used Items" on Google Shopping turned up no secondhand pairs of this exact shoe. I found one pair in a similar style on eBay for $34.37 with shipping, but with my weird feet, similar isn't good enough. If I can't try them on in a store, I need the next best thing: free shipping and free returns so I can send them back if they don't fit. So while it's theoretically possible I could have bought a serviceable pair of used shoes online for less than I actually spent, it's equally likely that I'd have paid $16 in shipping costs and still been shoeless.
• Lids for our Pyrex containers. The containers themselves are great, plastic-free and very durable, but the plastic lids they come with wear out over time and need to be replaced. I bought seven new ones directly from the manufacturer: one for our 2.5-quart mixing bowl, three plastic ones for our 2-cup storage containers, two for our 1-cup containers, and one glass-and silicone lid in the 2-cup size. (This was more expensive than the equivalent plastic lids, but I'm hoping it will hold up better. If it does, we'll gradually replace all our lids with this type.) They cost me a total of $37.31, including shipping. To my surprise, a "Used Items" search on Google revealed that there were, in fact, sellers online offering these secondhand. However, no single seller had all the sizes I needed. To buy all of them, I'd have had to make two separate orders: $13.74 (including shipping from Michigan) for the 2.5-quart lid and $17.99 (including shipping from Arizona) for an open-box assortment including the 1- and 2-cup lids. That would have cost $31.73 total, less than I actually paid—but it wouldn't have included the glass lid, and it would have included lids in several other sizes that we didn't need.
• A long-sought-after replacement for my beloved Maggie Bag tote, which was stolen five years ago. I'd tried several different replacements for it before finally settling on a similar bag from Harvey's,  but I was never quite as happy with it. It was a little smaller, so I had trouble cramming all my everyday carry items into it, and I kept losing my pen because the purse didn't have a pocket for it. From time to time I'd search eBay and Poshmark to see if they had another tote like my old one, but I never found one until this week. This bag isn't quite identical; it's black instead of grey and large instead of medium. But after my years of fruitless searching, I was happy to snatch it up for $83.14. Although the purse was technically "new with tags," I think it counts as a secondhand purchase since it came from a reseller. So this is one item I did buy used and online, exactly as the Climate Coach suggests.
• A pair of plumbing supply lines from Lowe's for $14.88. (When we replaced our sink last month, we reused the old lines, but one of them started leaking not long after, and Brian decided to replace them both just to be safe.) Once again, I was surprised to see that you actually can buy these secondhand, or at least "open box." So, in theory, I could have ordered two lines from an eBay seller for $17.14, including shipping. But aside from the higher price, doing this would have meant letting the plumbing continue to leak for another 4 to 11 days while waiting for the new lines to be delivered from California. And what if, when they arrived, we found they didn't fit (as we did with the first pair we purchased from Lowe's)? Between the ongoing water leak, the cross-country shipping, and the risk of having to send them back, I can't believe that buying these online would have been a greener choice than running out to the store for a new pair.
• Lastly, from HomeDepot.com, a new spigot for our rain barrel for $21.53. We tried to pick this up in the store at the same time we bought the plumbing supply lines, but we couldn't find the right part. This item seems like it should have been reasonable to buy from a reseller since we had to order it online anyway. But when I did a search just now, I couldn't find anyone selling it secondhand. I found one listing on eBay for an open-box item, but it wasn't the same one we bought, and it's not clear it would have fit our rain barrel. So, apparently, buying this used wouldn't have worked either.

Of all the new items we bought in May, there's only one (the Pyrex lids) that it might have made sense to buy used and online. However, it's not clear this would actually have been a greener choice. In the first place, the "used" lids weren't a secondhand item that we'd have rescued from the landfill, only an open-box item selling at a discount. Ordering secondhand would also have required two shipments instead of one. We'd have ended up with several lids we didn't need, which we would then have had to Freecycle or throw away. And finally, we wouldn't have been able to buy the more durable glass-and-silicone lid, which could potentially eliminate the need to keep buying new plastic lids in future. Add up all those costs, and I'm inclined to think that buying new from the manufacturer was still the right move.

None of this means that the online secondhand marketplaces are useless. Without Poshmark and ThredUP, I wouldn't have my new, roomier purse or the wool cardigan I wear all winter long. The one thing I appreciated most about this column was that it introduced me to several new online marketplaces, such as Mercari and Goodwill Finds, expanding my options for secondhand shopping. Better still, it tipped me off to the existence of the "Used Items" button in Google Shopping, which makes it easy to search secondhand listings from many sellers at once.

But useful as these online markets are, I don't think they should be the automatic first choice for all my shopping. As my list shows, even when it's possible to find things used, it doesn't always make sense to buy them online. In my experience, this is particularly true for clothing. When I shop at a store, most of the clothes I try on don't fit and end up back on the racks. If I did all my shopping online, I'd most likely have to return most of the garments I bought, paying for shipping both ways—assuming returns were allowed at all. I can't see how shipping all those packages back and forth could possibly be better for the environment than driving to a thrift shop, trying on a bunch of garments, and buying only the ones that fit. (In fact, I currently have a credit at ThredUP that's been languishing in my account for over a year because I hesitate to spend it on something that probably won't fit. The site has measurements for some garments, but they aren't always accurate, which is how I ended up with the credit in the first place.)

Indeed, despite the bold headline "Why you should buy everything used," Coren admits that he came to much the same conclusion himself. He noted that with online resellers, "Quality varied. My preferred styles weren’t always available. Returns and shipping weren’t as seamless as Amazon. For low-cost items, it was sometimes cheaper to buy new than pay to ship even discounted used items." And there was one item—a replacement for a torn wet-suit glove—that he hadn't been able to find at all. 

Still, Coren found that for many categories, buying used was the right choice. In the wake of this experiment, his shopping habits have shifted: "Instead of buying new as the default, I’m searching first for used. If I do buy new, I often buy a higher-quality item since I know I’ll either keep it for as long as possible or sell it when I’m done." 

All of this is perfectly logical. In fact, it's exactly what I'd already been doing before reading his column. And that's why this piece, despite its intriguing title, didn't prove to be a game-changer for me. It was an interesting read, and it gave me some useful info about new places to look for secondhand goods. But it didn't convince me that I should be buying everything from online resellers. Instead, it reinforced my view that my current shopping habits—try shopping secondhand first, and go for higher quality if you have to buy new—are about as ecofrugal as you can get.

Recipe of the Month: Vegan "Sausage" Rolls

Until yesterday, I thought I'd have to use Brian's homemade tortillas as my Recipe of the Month. They're definitely not the kind of veggie-centric recipe I had in mind when I first came up with the idea, but May has been so busy that we just haven't had a chance to try new dishes. But yesterday, with the day off for Memorial Day, Brian decided to surprise me with a new dish that definitely fits the bill: Vegan "Sausage" Rolls. The "sausage" is in quotes because honestly, there's nothing particularly sausage-like about it. But it is tasty all the same.

I found this recipe in a rather indirect way. Now that the weather is warm enough for grilling, I was thinking about what we could put on the grill besides veggies. Grilled eggplant, peppers, and zucchini are all lovely, but they're not that substantial by themselves. So I was searching for a reasonable meatless sausage. Nowadays, companies like Beyond Meat are making vegan sausage links that are apparently quite decent, but they're generally either Italian sausage or a bratwurst that, according to Brian, tastes nothing like any of the three kinds of sausage that can be labeled as bratwurst. What I wanted was something more along the lines of the kielbasa we used to buy at the Amish market. Several sites I consulted recommended Field Roast, but we've tried those before and they're not suitable for grilling. (They don't have a real casing, just a piece of plastic you have to cut off the links before cooking them, so they don't hold together.) And other highly recommended brands like Future Farm and THIS don't appear to be available in the U.S.

So I concluded if we wanted sausages for grilling, we'd have to make our own. We've attempted this before and it wasn't a great success, but I thought maybe it would work better with a different recipe. So I started hunting around, and I happened on a site called BGang (don't ask me why) with a recipe for what it called "Vegan Sausage Rolls." Upon examining it, I found that these weren't anything you could throw on the grill; they were more like little turnovers with a blend of tofu, mushrooms, and seasonings wrapped in puff pastry. But they looked like they might be pretty good anyway, so I printed out the recipe for future use.

I assumed when I found this recipe that we'd have to wait to try it until we could get our hands on some vegan puff pastry. According to this site, at least one well-known brand, Pepperidge Farm, is made without butter or eggs, so I figured we'd just grab a pack next time we were at Shop-Rite. But Brian was more ambitious than I was. He decided to go all out and make his own puff pastry with our new homemade plant butter. 

He made a half batch of the recipe from From the Comfort of My Bowl, but he had to modify it slightly. It called for plant butter in stick form, which was supposed to be frozen, grated, and then frozen again. But our homemade plant butter melts so easily that Brian knew even if he froze it first, it would melt if he tried to grate it. So he just scooped it into a bowl, cut it up as best he could with the pastry cutter, and froze that. Luckily the recipe listed all the ingredients by weight rather than volume, so he didn't have to figure out what volume of our light, whipped plant butter was equivalent to a stick.

We'd seen puff pastry made many times on "The Great British Bake-Off," so Brian knew more or less how to do it. You have to make the dough, then roll it out flat, layer on the shredded butter, and fold it in thirds (what the Great British Bakers call a "book fold"). Then you rotate it 90 degrees, roll it out again, add more butter, fold it the same way, and chill it for at least an hour. After that, you repeat the rolling-and-folding process twice more and chill it yet again. All this is supposed to create layers within the dough so it will have a flaky texture when baked. The recipe said you only had to go through the roll-fold-chill process twice, but you could choose to do it a third time to maximize the flakiness. Brian decided to take this option to give our vegan butter its best possible chance.

Once the dough had finished its final chilling step, Brian started work on the filling. This was much simpler than making the dough. The only thing that had to be done in advance was making a "flax egg"—ground flaxseed mixed with hot water—to serve as both a binder for the filling and a glaze for the pastry. Then he just had to grind up and saute the onion, garlic, and mushrooms and combine them with all the remaining ingredients: crumbled tofu, flax egg, oats, nutritional yeast, and seasonings. We didn't have the chives the recipe called for, so he used a tablespoon of chopped green onion instead. He also cut the salt down to a teaspoon and used only a pinch each of black pepper and red pepper flakes to give it just a hint of spice. Then he rolled out his homemade puff pastry, cut it into squares, filled them, loaded them with the filling, and folded them up. A quick brush with the remaining flax egg and a sprinkle of poppy seeds, and they were ready for the oven.

The finished turnovers weren't perfect. Despite all Brian's efforts, the pastry had not laminated noticeably. But it was still crisp and light, making a nice container for the delicately flavored filling. I was glad Brian hadn't used the full amount of spice, as even a pinch of red pepper flakes was quite enough for my sensitive taste buds. On the other hand, I thought using the full amount of salt—and perhaps a bit more of the umami flavors, like garlic and nutritional yeast—probably wouldn't have hurt it. But I still happily polished off two of the rolls, while Brian had two and a half (two full-sized rolls plus the itty-bitty one on the edge of the tray). Along with a small green salad from our own homegrown lettuce, topped with walnuts and a few of our honeyberries, it made a satisfying meal.

Although these were pretty good, I'm not sure they were good enough to justify all the hassle of making them. Making puff pastry from scratch is all very well as an experiment, but it's very time-consuming. If Brian enjoyed the challenge enough to want to make these again, of course I'll be happy to eat them. But as vegan recipes go, we know loads of others that are at least as good and a lot less work.

Homemade tortillas are a game changer

Last week, Brian was making some fish tacos. This is a dish we make fairly often: pan-fried nuggets of fish with salt and chili powder, served in either corn or flour tortillas with a cabbage-and-tomato slaw. Only this time, we were all out of both kinds of tortilla, and since our local supermarket has closed, we couldn't just make a quick run to the store to pick up some more. So Brian decided to make his own, using a simple recipe he found online. In a nutshell, you make a dough from flour, salt, baking soda, water, and oil and knead it for just a couple of minutes. Then you break off little balls of dough, roll each one out with a rolling pin, and cook them in a hot, ungreased pan.

These do not come out looking like store-bought flour tortillas. They're smaller, thicker, and not nearly as symmetrical. And, more importantly, they do not taste like store-bought flour tortillas, which don't really taste like much of anything, good or bad. In most recipes, they just blend into the background, like a canvas on which anything from black beans and spinach to sauteed shrimp and peppers can be the paint. They're more of a packaging material for other, more flavorful foods than a food in their own right.

These tortillas were nothing like that. They had all the flavor of fresh-baked bread, with a satisfying chew that gave my teeth far more to work on than a flimsy commercial tortilla. They weren't simply a vessel for the more flavorful fish and slaw; they were an integral part of the experience. I found myself flashing back with newfound appreciation to a story I'd read as a kid in which a little Mexican girl and her abuelita eat fresh tortillas with butter and jam. At the time, picturing the kind of flat, neutral tortillas I was used to, I didn't see the appeal of this dish, but now I got it.

The homemade tortillas are cheaper, too. The ingredients for this half batch—a cup and a half of flour, a half-teaspoon each of salt and baking powder, and a sixth of a cup of canola oil—cost less than 30 cents for eight tortillas. That's less than 4 cents a tortilla, as compared to about 10 cents off the shelf. And we can be sure they contain no palm oil.

Up until now, I'd always thought of tortillas as something that couldn't possibly be worth the effort of making from scratch. Even Jennifer Reese, author of Make the Bread, Buy the Butter—an analysis of which foods are and aren't worth making from scratch—admits that "Even though they taste inferior and cost more, packaged tortillas are so convenient I can't give them up." But after tasting just how good the homemade ones are, I don't know if I could ever go back to store-bought. Maybe if I were really in a hurry, I'd settle for the packaged kind. But it would definitely feel like settling.

Oh, what a tangled net we weave

Last weekend, while puttering around in the garden, Brian noticed two things, one good and one bad:

1. Our honeyberries were starting to ripen. They weren't ready to pick yet, but it looked like some of them would be within a week.
2. The birds were not waiting for that point. A hungry catbird was already on the bushes, scavenging any berry that looked remotely close to ripe.

Brian chased away the invader, but he knew it would be back the minute his back was turned. So, not even taking the time to call me in from the house to help, he hastily ran to the shed, grabbed a roll of bird netting, and threw it over the bushes. He didn't bother to wrap each bush individually as he usually does; he just covered the entire row, willy-nilly, bending the bushes as much as necessary to fit them underneath. He managed to get the whole net in place and held down with bricks just before losing the last of the daylight.

So far, this hasty wrapping job has succeeded in keeping out the birds. The problem is, it more or less keeps us out as well. So while the berries have managed to ripen without further molestation, there's no good way for us to harvest them. I managed to get a few by squeezing my fingers through the netting from outside, and then I tried removing a couple of the bricks and crawling under the netting so that I could sort of feel my way around the bush while half reclining on the slope where it was planted. But neither method allowed me to get a good grasp on the berries and give them the very gentle tug that's needed to distinguish the ripe ones from the almost-ripe. So while I was able to harvest a generous handful, not all of them were ripe enough to make good eating.

Brian thinks we can this problem by simply uncovering the berries and re-covering them more carefully, wrapping each individual bush in its own piece of netting. This will allow us to wrap them more loosely so they're not all bent out of shape. But even with each berry bush netted separately, we still won't exactly have easy access to the berries. Harvesting them will still involve removing the bricks around one of the bushes, pulling up the net to climb underneath, and re-wrapping the bush afterward. With that many steps involved, it won't really be practical to bounce over there and pick a few berries whenever we happen to notice they're ripe.

I can't help wondering if there might be a more elegant solution. This site suggests enclosing blueberry bushes in tomato cages before netting them, but I don't think that would help us much. I've never seen a tomato cage big enough to fit around the largest of our honeyberry bushes, and even if we found one, we'd still have to unwrap and re-wrap it each time we wanted access to the berries. I was thinking something more along the lines of a tent, with poles erected between the bushes and the netting over the top. We'd only have to remove the bricks on one side, the front, to get under the netting, and the pole would hold it up over our heads so we wouldn't have to bend double under it. I don't mean a permanent enclosure, which wouldn't really work on that slope, but something more like this teepee arrangement made from bamboo poles and netting. We could erect the tent around the start of May, pop inside as needed to gather the berries, and take it down once all the berries were harvested.

Hmm...Brian did see a place a few blocks away where some bamboo had recently been cut down. I wonder....

The vanity project completed

Like most of our home projects, redoing our bathroom sink and vanity took a lot longer than we expected. When I requested this as my birthday present back in January, I figured we'd have it done by February or early March, and we just finished it this weekend. This time, though, most of the delays weren't our fault. 

First, we had to wait for delivery on the various supplies we'd ordered for the project: the sink, the faucet, the sheet laminate, the sealant to apply it with, and a special tool for cutting it. (Total cost: around $220.) The smaller items all arrived within a couple of weeks, but at the end of a month, we were still waiting for the sink. I kept checking the order status online and the site kept telling me it was temporarily delayed. Finally I called up the store and determined, after a lengthy conversation with customer service, that the delivery was not in fact "delayed"; it was canceled, because our sink got broken in shipment. So we "returned" the item we'd never actually received and went to the store to pick up a new one.

After that, we had to go through several preparatory steps before we could install anything. The sheet laminate arrived rolled up in a narrow box, so before we could attempt to cut it, we had to unroll it and flatten it out by laying it underneath a rug in our downstairs room. Once we got it reasonably flat, Brian went through a multi-stage process to cut it to shape. First, he tested out his new tool on a corner of the laminate to figure out how it worked. This took some trial and error, but eventually he figured out that he had to use the sharp little point on the end to score the underside of the laminate repeatedly, then flip it over and snap it along the scored line. 

Next, he made a template out of brown paper in the exact, complicated shape of the vanity top, with all its weird little corners and cutouts, and dry-fitted that into place to make sure it was accurate. And finally, he traced that pattern onto the laminate and cut it out with his new tool. He actually goofed up the first time he attempted this, putting the template down on the laminate wrong-side up and ending up with an exact mirror image of the shape we needed. But fortunately, the laminate came in a four-by-eight sheet—much more than we needed for this project—so he had plenty left over to cut a new piece in the correct orientation.

At this point, we were ready to start the actual installation. Unfortunately, the weather was not ready for us. When we swapped out our original can of contact cement for a nonflammable version, we assumed that we'd be able to use it safely indoors, even if the heating system was still on. But when the new can arrived, it turned out that even this safer version came with a lot of warnings in boldface capital letters about how toxic it was and how we'd poison ourselves if we used it without proper equipment and ventilation. So while we were no longer in danger of blowing up our house, we'd still have to wait until the weather was warm enough to work with the windows open.

This turned out to be much later than expected. After an unseasonably warm period in February and March, the weather turned cold again in April and stayed that way into early May. So it wasn't until this weekend that we finally had a chance to tackle the job. However, we were a little bit worried about whether one weekend would be enough for the whole project. The new, safer contact cement takes at least  an hour to dry after each coat before it's ready to stick, and we knew we'd have to go through that process at least three times throughout the process. So, just to be safe, Brian took Friday off from work to give himself an extra day to get the job done.

First thing on Friday, he set about pulling the wooden facing strips off the front and side of the vanity top. He was hoping to reuse these, but he wasn't sure if he'd be able to get them off in one piece. To his surprise, they did come off cleanly—but they took the laminate off the old vanity top with them. Apparently, the glue he'd used to attach them was more secure than the glue securing the laminate to the underlying wood. There was even a little bit of laminate sticking past the end of the wood strip, showing where the original vanity had overlapped with the door frame. Apparently, the vanity had somehow been installed before the door frame was, and the frame had been cut to fit over top of it.

This got Brian thinking about his plan for the rest of the vanity top. His original idea had been to remove as much of the paint as possible from the surface, sand it to rough up the surface, and apply the new laminate right over top of the old. But after one bit of the laminate came up so easily, he wondered if perhaps he could just remove all of it, giving himself a fresh surface on which to lay the new laminate. When he tried prying up one corner, the top didn't come off in a single neat sheet like the front bits had, but he did break off a large chunk of it. Well, after that, he had no choice but to keep going, and eventually he managed to get all the laminate off the top surface. (He didn't attempt to remove it from the backsplash, instead just sanding it as he'd originally intended to do with the whole thing.) In the process, he discovered that the vanity top itself wasn't particularly well fastened down; as he worried at the laminate, he found himself at risk of prying the entire thing loose from the wall. So he added a couple of screws to get the top of the vanity properly secured to the base before moving on to the gluing phase.

By Saturday morning, we had the whole area stripped down to a blank canvas, and it was time to start adding to it. Brian decided to reinstall the wooden strips first, thinking they would help him fit the laminate top more exactly. With the cats temporarily sequestered in a bedroom and a desk fan stuck sideways into the bathroom window for added ventilation (since it was too narrow to accommodate our window fan), he applied a coat of our new sealant to the front of the vanity top and another coat on the backs of the facing strips. Then he left those pieces in the bathroom for an hour to dry (with the door closed so we could release the cats from captivity) and stuck them back on.

Next, we started working on the large top surface. For this stage of the process, Brian brought in a card table and set it up with two of its legs in the bathtub so he could lay out the laminate sheet on that while he applied the sealant to it. I worked alongside him to apply it to the wooden vanity top so we could get both pieces done at the same time. I was glad we'd followed the instructions about ventilating the room while doing this; the fumes weren't overwhelming, but they were certainly noticeable, and I think they could have gotten pretty unpleasant if we'd been trying to work in an enclosed space. It was a relief to get out of the room and shut the door behind us, leaving the pieces to dry on their own.

After another hour of drying time, we were ready for the fiddliest part of the job: sticking on the top. The instructions I'd found online said to place dowels about eighteen inches apart on the bottom surface, lay the laminate on top, then remove them one by one and press each section  down with a roller. This was a bit awkward to do in such a small space, but we managed it. And fortunately, the odd shape of the vanity top worked to our advantage here; Brian's carefully cut piece fit so exactly into its spot that there was very little risk of anything slipping out of position. We pulled out the dowels and pressed the top firmly into place, using our heavy stone rolling pin and, in the places where that couldn't reach, our hands. At that point, I broke off to attend a Zoom meeting, and during that two-hour period  Brian applied the smaller strips of laminate to the front and top of the backsplash by himself. He also touched up the paint on the walls, which had gotten damaged when he removed the old surface.

Up until this point, everything had gone much more smoothly than we'd expected. But the final phase of the project, installing the new sink and faucet, proved more complicated. Or, to be more exact, installing the sink and faucet went fine; the difficulties came in when we tried to reconnect the plumbing pipes. The hole Brian had cut in the laminate was a little bit bigger than the bowl of the sink, and it turned out he'd put the sink just a bit too close to the wall for the pipes to connect to it. So he ended up having to shove it from underneath to shift it forward. Fortunately the silicone sealant hadn't dried yet, so this wasn't too hard to do. Once he got the pipes hooked up, he re-caulked the sink to secure it in its new position. This contretemps left a bit of goop on the new laminate, but he scraped it off on Sunday morning and applied a little bit more to the places where the edges didn't meet perfectly. 

And with that, the vanity project is complete. We now have a sink that is, frankly, a lot more presentable than the rest of the bathroom: clean and new, without so much as a water spot to mar the surface of the new faucet. Fortunately, there's no real risk that this small improvement will eventually drive us to redo the entire room, the way replacing our closet door did with the office. We might go on to replace a few more small items, like the grungy shower head or the old, stained toilet. But we're not about to go replacing the old tub and tile—a job that would certainly cost thousands of dollars and make the bathroom unusable for weeks—when it's still in reasonably good shape.

Pest protection upgrade

When we built a deer fence around our garden last summer, we decked it out with streamers that we cut from the plastic bags our weekly shopping fliers come in. These had the advantages of being lightweight, waterproof, and free. It seemed like a perfect way to put a waste product to good use.

We can't say for sure how effective this line-and-streamer fence has been. On one hand, no deer have intruded into the garden since we built it, but on the other hand, there's no sign that any deer have come into our yard at all during that time. So it's not really clear that the fence deserves the credit for deterring them.

But one thing we know for sure is that the plastic streamers didn't hold up very well. In the first place, they didn't stay put. They were so light that they slid along the fishing line with every breath of wind, so they tended to end up all clumped at one end rather than evenly spaced along the line. We tried just repositioning them every so often, but then they started to come off altogether. I'm not sure whether it was wind, rain, or birds that damaged them, but one way or another, the ends of the streamers kept tearing off and leaving only the little knotted bits sliding about on the line. There clearly wasn't enough up there to make much of a visual barrier for the deer.

Our first idea was to replace the damaged plastic strips with some metallic ribbon, which we thought we could pick up at our local dollar store. When they turned out not to have any, we figured we'd try Michael's the next time we happened to be in that area. But when we had to make a trip to Lowe's for a washer to fix the leaking spout on our rain barrel, I decided to look there for something that might work on the deer fence. And lo and behold, we found a product designed for that exact purpose: Mylar flash tape. Right on the package it says, "Scare critters away!"

The instructions say to cut this stuff into strips 2 to 3 feet long and attach them by a 6-to-8-inch length of string. This is supposed to "assure maximum rotation and reflection" to scare away wildlife. But when Brian tried attaching a streamer this long to one line of the fence, it dangled down and got tangled up in the line below. So instead he went for 15-inch lengths attached just a few feet apart. He used most of the roll this way and is thinking of tying the remaining strips to the branches of our plum trees, in hopes that they will offer at least a mild deterrent to squirrels.

So far, the streamers are simply tied to the fishing line by lengths of additional fishing line. We'll keep an eye on them over the next week or so to see how well they stay in place. If they slide around like the previous ones, Brian plans to add a dab of epoxy to each one to hold it in its proper place. But one thing we can definitely say for the new ribbons is that they're much more presentable than the plastic ones: neatly cut and shimmery, rather than flimsy and tattered. I'd say they were almost worth the five bucks we spent on them for their aesthetic value alone.