Maintaining: Cordless Phones

We had some nice cordless phones, but finally the batteries wore out and they wouldn't charge very well anymore and one of the phones only worked for us hearing the caller and not for the caller hearing us, which, even for callers who do most of the talking, still isn't ideal because they can't tell that we are listening.

So I did some research online and found a well-reviewed set of phones with high sound quality, good durability, and no answering machine (because we'd rather keep the phones and answering machine separate).

When I put the phones together, I was very happy to see that the new phones had ordinary easy-to-replace batteries. They are AAA re-chargeable batteries. I had never thought to specifically look for phones with easily replaceable batteries. Who knew there even was such a thing?

A couple of weeks later, I looked up whether there were any place to recycle my old phones and found that Best Buy claims to take cordless phones and recycle all the parts and they even promise that don't really just sell the parts to poor countries without confirming that the parts really will be recycled.

You're supposed to pull out the batteries so they don't leak into the phone, so I did that. The old batteries were definitely weird-looking batteries.

A couple of weeks after that, after I had already recycled the box the phones came in and the recycling had been taken away, I decided to research just how hard it would have been to replace the batteries on the old phone. Just a quick google search brought me to four companies. You just enter the brand and model number of your phone, which is printed on your main phone, and they pull up your batteries.

Replacing the three batteries at
Batteries Plus: $59.17
Z Battery: $22.23
Battery Mart: $26.84
emtc: $17.85

Wow. So easy. Then I decided to look up the cost for batteries for my new phone.

Batteries Plus, LLC: $17.69 (4-pack)
Z Battery: [can't find]
Battery Mart: [can't find]
emtc: $17.85

Ha! Harder to find! But at least not more expensive!

The cost of my new phones: $62.95

So, my second blog post is a big FAIL! But at least now I do expect to keep my current phones for as long as I want landline phones. And, instead of recycling my old phones, I'm going to donate them along with a note about where to find replacement batteries.

Customizing: Shower Curtain Liner

Most bathtubs have walls at both short ends, so you can install a shower curtain rod between them and hang a standard shower curtain.  Not mine.  It has only two adjacent walls with an L-shaped shower-curtain rod.

So, what to do about shower curtains?

One thing I like to do when I see houses in my neighborhood that are for sale is to look inside and see if I can get any good ideas.  Many of them have the same bathtub design, but I've never seen them with shower curtains.  They all have the L-shaped curtain rod.  And most of them have some extra support, like a string holding the corner up at the ceiling.

We put a standard shower curtain and and shower curtain liner on the long side.  Then we cut a shower curtain liner in half for the short side.

But recently, I decided I wanted to switch from plastic curtain liners to nylon ones, which I've read can better resist mildew.  But you can't just cut them in half, they'd unravel:



So, I hemmed the side.  I folded the fabric over twice and took tiny stitches:



Normal people would use a sewing machine.  But I did this in front of the TV, so it took a while, but didn't use up much time that I wasn't already wasting anyway.

At the top there was some extra stiffening thing that didn't fold well, so I cut a little extra off before finishing the hem.