Guest Post

Guest Chick: Paula Charles plus a Giveaway

The Chicks are thrilled to welcome author pal Paula Charles to the blog today. She writes the Hometown Hardware Mysteries. She is kind enough to to do a giveaway of her newest book Axe Me No Questions to one lucky commenter today. And below she shares the adventure of installing her remodeled kitchen with her husband. Her DIY talents are enviable.

 

DIY disaster

The kitchen remodel was practically done. The only thing left was to lower the cast iron sink into place and hook the water lines back up. As die-hard do-it-yourselfers, my husband and I were grinning like fools as we lowered that farmhouse sink onto the cabinet. Fools was right. Riff had measured twice and cut once to get just the perfect measurement, but the sink refused to fit.

“Alright, let’s back it out,” he said after a series of curses I won’t burn your ears with. “One, two, three.” 

On three, we lifted that heavy and less charming than it was two minutes ago sink back off the cabinet and set the monstrosity on the floor. 

“No worries,” Riff assured me. “I’m going to take the whole cabinet back out to the shop and cut it out there.”  

Despite some challenges along the way, this is the fabulous result of the kitchen remodel that Paula and her husband achieved. She is a DIY pro!

Wondering why he didn’t just make the cut with the cabinet in place, I kept my gob shut and watched as he carefully lifted the sink cabinet up and away from the wall. One final tug and….hot water sprayed five feet in the air like a geyser gone bad. Riff yelled and I scrambled for the garbage can to catch the spray while he wiped hot water off his face and frantically reached for the valve. 

With that last tug, the back cutout in the cabinet had caught on the water line and broken it off below the turn off valve. While water started to pool on the floor, I sprinted for the shop in search of larger containers to capture the geyser and Riff tore off to the basement to shut the water off at the tank. There he discovered our 1944 farmhouse had been equipped with a safety shutoff valve on the wrong side of the hot water tank, so until the tank was empty, hot water would continue to spew into the kitchen. He opened the spigot on the tank and drained it into the basement. Better there than in our newly remodeled (almost!) kitchen. By then, I’d already filled three huge plastic storage containers with hot water that were far too heavy for me to take outside to dump. One five gallon bucket a time did the trick.

One carefully measured cut, and a couple of new water lines later, and a whole lot of water sopped up, we had a fully functioning sink and a funny story to tell. 

When I decided to base my cozy mystery protagonist on my own grandmother who owned and operated the hardware store in my hometown, I knew adding humor to the stories would come fairly easily with the amount of sheer ridiculousness that happens at my own house! 

What about you readers? Have you had a DIY project go wrong that you can laugh about now? Please share in comments to be entered in the drawing for a copy of Paula’s book.

Author Bio:

When Paula Charles isn’t writing, you can find her reading and contemplating murder under the towering trees of the Pacific Northwest. She is the author of the Hometown Hardware Mysteries, as well as the Zen Goat Mysteries written as Janna Rollins. Paula is a member of Sisters in Crime, the national chapter, the Guppies, and the Columbia River chapter. Her debut novel, Hammers and Homicide, was featured in Woman’s World.  She lives in Washington state with her extremely patient husband and a gaggle of furry and feathered creatures. Find links to her social media on her website – www.paulacharles.com

About Axe Me No Questions:

Heads are on the chopping block as hardware store owner Dawna Carpenter finds herself on the cutting edge of a murder investigation in book two of the Hometown Hardware Mysteries. 

In the quaint mountain town of Pine Bluff, Oregon, fall has arrived and it’s time for the annual Timber Festival, complete with Lumberjack and Lumberjill contests, and booths serving spicy chili and creamy pumpkin pies. Dawna and her daughter April have plans to watch the logging contest together. She’s looking forward to soaking in all her favorite things about the season, which includes having a conversation with her deceased husband, who she is certain is still hanging around the house. 

But when Dawna falls over the body of one of the lumberjacks, with his own throwing axe imbedded in his chest, her focus turns to murder. With the town in turmoil, Dawna takes Chief Dallas’s request to keep her ears open as a full license to snoop. Who had an axe to grind with the charismatic lumberjack? Dawna had better stay sharp, or she might be the next one to get the axe.  

 

37 thoughts on “Guest Chick: Paula Charles plus a Giveaway”

  2. My parents decided to wallpaper the living room themselves. They decided to do the ceiling, too. The first ceiling strip went up and they moved to the next. Then the first peeled back off onto the floor. I heard words that day from Dad that would have blended perfectly with blue wallpaper, but this was khaki colored. Mom then suggested that I go outside and read my book. I did a lot of reading in the next few days.

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  4. I am not handy at all. I am not mechanically inclined and a klutz to boot. So I have never been tempted to DIY anything. I drive my husband crazy because every once in awhile I mess up something on the computer that he has to fix. You can practically see the steam coming out of his ears when I insist that I didn’t do anything lol. I must point out how ironic it is that my computer fixer has no idea how to navigate Facebook. Even I have mastered that. Your kitchen is beautiful Paula. Congrats on your latest book.

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  6. Congratulations on the new book, Paula! You are more talented and braver than me. I can handle painting, installing shelves, and minor electric work (like the 4 ceiling fans I’ve put up in the house), vit I draw the line at plumbing. The thought of water getting everywhere scares the daylights out of me! Good on ya for not being a scared cat like yours truly!

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  7. Wow, Paula! Amazed at your DIY talent. Thanks for being here on the blog!

    I can’t fix anything, and I’ve been known to mess up IKEA furniture.

    P.S. Your kitchen is beautiful! Can you come over to my place and re-design everything?

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  8. Oy, just hearing your story sent shivers down my spine. We have a 1930s-era cast iron sink here in Hawai’i, and I can’t even imagine lifting the (beautiful) monstrosity up! But your new kitchen is absolutely beautiful!

    Thanks so much for visiting the Chicks today, and congrats on the new book! (That title is hilarious.) Cheers!

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  11. Paula, thanks for hanging out today with the Chicks — great to have you here! Several years ago I attempted to venture into some small DIY projects. My husband soon confiscated my glue gun. He insisted I had what looked to him like second-degree burns on my arm. I’m sure he overreacted. But I never saw that glue gun again!

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    1. Oh no! I guess he probably wouldn’t want you using my heat gun that I used to scrape 9 layers of paint off the old cabinet doors in another house, then!

      Thank you so much for having me and for all of your help, Vickie! – Paula

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  12. Welcome to Chicks, Paula! Your book sounds awesome (great title, too!). In my case, the genre would be cozy-fantasy. Never would I ever go near a DIY project. Any DIY project, other than sewing by hand (like, hems and buttons and occasional darning) and gluing with Elmer’s. That’s it, ha! Assembling my auction baskets for conferences is the height of my talent, lol.

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  13. My husband does a lot of the DIY things but he knows his limits and hires out for something that he know he can’t handle such as plumbing and electrical. This sounds like a fun series. Thank you so much for the chance at your giveaway. pgenest57 at aol dot com

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  15. Even with all your problems with the remodel it looks beautiful! We need to remodel our kitchen. Not long after we moved into this house the stove malfunction and caused a fire in the kitchen. I was determined stupidly to put it out. I ended up with 2nd degree burns but got it out before much damage was done. I repaired everything but the kitchen needs new paint and touch up. Just haven’t had the courage to try yet!

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  16. I have a friend who is so creative. She makes jewelry, sews, does glass etching, scrapbooking, etc. Anything I make looks so bad in comparison.

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  17. I definitely love your gorgeous kitchen!! It’s so homey! Axe Me No Questions sounds amazingly good! Well, hubby likes to diy most of our stuff around our house. There is one diy small project with a little hiccup. We redid the pantry cabinets with the rolling-in-and-out shelves, we turned them into “stationary’ shelves that would give us more storage room. Although with all the measurements done a couple time, hubby still got the wrong size boards! – Emily

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  18. My dad grew up as an urbanite in Boston but learned as a young husband to leap into DIY projects. I don’t recall any mishaps but can still picture him mowing the lawn of our rented house by lowering the lawn mower down the steep hill of the yard on a roap. In our next house he painstakingly laid patterned linoleum tile as the floor of the unfinished basement.

    I’m the one who goofed. Sewing a nightgown for my niece’s ragdoll I forgot to take account for three-dimensionality, just tracing the body outline, and had to go back and add gussets down each side seam so the doll could wear it.

    Thanks for running the giveaway; your new book would be an awesome prize!

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    1. Your dad mowing the steep hill with the mower on a rope really paints a fun visual! I did the exact same thing you did trying to sew clothes for my daughter’s doll years ago. Too funny! – Paula Charles

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