First of all, thank you to everyone who has offered comments on the alarm situation. And if you haven’t, there’s still time to help us figure out what in the heck’s going on! We’re open to any and all suggestions!

On Tuesday, Hubs and I made a late-night trip to Home Depot for supplies for a project and ended up purchasing something I’ve had my eye on, generally speaking, since about October.

Here’s the back story: One of the caps on our porch railing was missing when we bought the house.

We were meaning to replace it. Then, I happened to see one day at Menards that they make caps that include LED, solar-powered lights. I liked those a heck of a lot better than the plain ones, and since they were only about $10 each, I figured that would be a nice way to update them and solve our missing cap problem for relatively cheap. Here’s the black version, online:

 

Again, we kept meaning to get them, and I even put these little guys on our Christmas list this year, but the didn’t end up under the tree. Then, while we were wandering around Home Depot this week, we spotted their porch railing section and that they just happened to have white, solar-powered porch railing caps on sale for $4.88. Score!

We picked up two (we were replacing both caps, not just the one that was missing) and headed home.

The next day, I set out to install them, thinking this was an easy, no-Hubs-needed project.

I managed to get them out of the boxes and in working order relatively easily.

I even tested them, successfully.

Everything was going great.

I went outside, screwdriver in hand, feeling triumphant that Hubs would come home to new, installed-by-his-awesome-wife post caps.

I removed the old cap (which had bird poop on it)…

…and then, the problem hit. The caps were too small to fit on our posts. Darnit!

I guess the problem is that these lighted caps were for 4×4 nominal posts. Our posts were actually 4×4…which means the caps could rest perfectly on top of our post, but wouldn’t fit over them since they are designed for “fake” 4×4 posts. (Similar to how 2×4’s are actually only like 1.5×3.5. It’s a crazy world. I don’t understand life sometimes.)

See how it lines up perfectly, but won’t go down over the top?

Darnit, darnit, darnit!

I had pretty much given up at this point, assuming we’d have to take these caps back to Home Depot and look for something else when Hubs got home and came up with a plan. Don’t you just love a man with a plan? And power tools?

Anyway, stay tuned for his upcoming DIwYatt post about how he made these work, for no additional cost!

Ever have a “no-husband-needed” project that turned into a major bummer or even bigger “husband-please-help” project? That happens a lot more than I’d like to admit around here, but luckily, I married a fellow DIYer! Tell me about your projects that don’t go as planned!