Bob Ingrassia

I swear I’m not a curmudgeon. I’ve never uttered the phrase “those kids today” without a healthy dose of cool, urban-dad irony.

Yet here I am today, in full “Get off my lawn!” mode, lamenting the never-ending proliferation of electronic gizmos aimed at kids.

I’m not squawking here about video games, phones and other such devices. Those are part of the flow of technological progress. The march of time and all that.

What gets my goat is how batteries and electronics continually creep into realms where they serve no real purpose. In fact, I feel like a many toys and games are more fun and more memorable without the circuitry.

This rant has been brewing for years. I have kids who are ages 10 and 9, so you know they’ve received scores of toys that require batteries. Many of the items are great. I love a remote-controlled monster truck as much as my son. “Dad, Dad … DAD! … Give me a turn!”

But we’ve taken in a lot of toys (mainly via birthday parties and holidays) that have no business slapping the “batteries not included” phrase on the packaging. We have a classic board game with an electronic device thrown in for no reason. We have toys with battery-powered sounds that actually thwart a child’s imagination. We have bleeping things that captivated the kids for all of five minutes before being ditched into the Forgotten Toy Graveyard under the bed.

Is nothing sacred? When I was a boy…

Oh, forget it.

Here’s my list of five toys and games that should never require batteries.

What It Is

What It Should Be

What It Is

What It Should Be

What It Is

What It Should Be

What It Is

What It Should Be

What It Is

What It Should Be

NOTE: I wrote this post for the Idea Peepshow. The original post is here.

I’ve been plugging away on the 2nd floor of our new house. I’ve wrapped up repairing and refurbishing the hardware on 11 doors, and have turned my attention to other tasks.

THE DOORS

This old house had big gaps under the bedroom doors. Why? Who knows … maybe the previous owners shaved the doors to make room for lime green shag carpeting in the 1970s.

Whatever the reason, I needed to do something about those unsightly spaces under the doors. I rip cut some 2x4s and went to town.

Before: Mind the gap!

Before: Just slide that sandwich under the door!

Giving it some good wood.

Putty

How do you like me now?

Done deal

CROWN MOLDING

I’m missing the “before” photos. But imagine thin, heavily painted and ill-fitting molding. Now, after tons of mitered cutting and a swear word or two, here’s what we’ve got.

The crown.

More crown.

Windows

I’ve got several windows with broken sash cords. Those are the ropes attached to the sashes of old-school double hung windows — they’re attached to weights in the frame and keep the window open when you want it to stay open.

I spent some time on YouTube before gaining the confidence to give this a shot. Turned out to be fairly easy. Remove the sash trim, pull out a few screws, scrape paint off the pulley and fish the new cord through the hole. Good to go!

A heavy job!

One word for this situation. twitter.com/bingrassia/sta…

— Bob Ingrassia (@bingrassia) April 10, 2013

Here are photos from the second half of my back splash project.

This beadboard was totally inappropriate. Impossible to clean.

Tools for the demo job.

Beadboard gone. Note the ancient wallpaper.

Roman fixes a hole in the plaster, using wall repair compound.

Tiling tools.

Wet saw in the back yard.

Progress. That horizontal board holds up the bottom row while the mastic takes hold.

Done!

I just completed a task that lingered on the “Honey Do” list for years: Installing a back splash in our kitchen.

We bought marble subway tiles a few months back … and I finally got some time this month to tackle the job. The first task was removing the dingy bead board that was there when we bought the house.

No home-improvement job goes as expected. The unexpected hurdle in this one was the out-of-level counter. Turns out our counter slants down about an inch from left to right over a run of about eight feet.

That meant I needed to lay a first course of tile that made up the difference. Some Googling gave me the good advice of starting from the low side with a full-width tile and then working toward the high side, making each tile narrower as needed.

And that’s what I did. So check out that bottom row in the photos below. You’ll notice the tiles on the far right are taller than the ones on the left. That’s a lot of rip cutting!

Here’s what things looked like after Day 1:

And after Day 2:

This job called for a lot of cutting. There are about 125 tiles in this project, and 85 of those needed cutting. The wet saw from Menards got the job done!