Trashing the Place - DIY Edition

How to escape a baby choke hold, by Mary Cassatt, Art Gallery of Ontario

It started with the tread stepper, which we got at the beginning of the pandemic, and have used a lot ever since. 

A short while ago, we noticed the belts had started to slip. Bruce consulted the manual to see if there was an easy fix that two amateurs (that would be us) could do on their own. It looked like there was, and we followed the instructions to the letter. About four days after that, while Bruce was tread stepping on his daily walk to nowhere, the machine made a plaintiff wail, gave up a wisp of smoke and died.

The Bowflex Customer Care centre said we had probably over-tightened the belts. They also said the machine had more than 400 hours on it and needed a new motor anyway. And new belt treads.

Bruce ordered the equipment plus a technician to attend our home and install all the new parts. 

While we waited for the technician to finally come by (took three tries), we had time to review the state of our floors. The recent painting project had scuffed and scratched the fifteen-year-old crappy laminate. We thought some floor polish would fix it up. But first we had to strip the old polish. We didn't think we needed to call a technician.

We bought a floor stripping product we found on the Internet, followed the instructions to the letter, and left the product on the floor for ten minutes, which was all the time it took for the crappy laminate to soak up enough liquid to swell, curl and blister at the joins. So we have completely ruined the floors in the kitchen and hallway. And, to add insult to injury, the product didn't lift the old polish.

Lastly, the weather has been so extraordinarily lovely these days that we have turned off our air conditioner and opened our windows, all on our own, mind you, without even consulting the manual.

So of course I broke the kitchen window (the winding mechanism, not the glass).

Sheesh.

Our management company will come by and fix the window. As for the floors, we're renovating the kitchen later this year, so we'll put down new laminate then.

Our one success, if that's what you want to call it, is that the tread stepper is once again fully operational. I can hear Bruce stomping on it even as I write.

Goes to show you what happens when you get the right person to do the job.

Thanks for reading!

Karen

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