Well, my mini-vacation is over. And not a moment too soon. I spent much of it (including Christmas and New Years Day) hanging drywall, taping, mudding, caulking, and painting. By the time yesterday rolled around I was feeling as if I’d been sent to purgatory to spend 1000 years finishing the inside of a closet. Maybe not 1000 years, but close. I’m still only about half-way done. You wouldn’t think completing a simple, smallish bedroom would take so long. It’s just a 10-ish x 11-ish box, after all. But it’s that closet that’s the killer. That and all the “interesting”…
Category: Home improvement
Happy Sunday-before-Christmas morning. Is everybody getting a nice extended holiday this year? I’m drywalling, mostly. But I thought I’d pop in with some links, too. First (courtesy of JW), the inimitable Selco talks from experience about Christmas when the S has HTF. Then here’s the story of how NORAD became Santa’s official tracker (and the Pentagon has reaped propaganda hay ever since). Borepatch and Joe Diffie bring us “Leroy the Redneck Reindeer.” Law enforcement grinches steal one couple’s green Christmas. As usual the story the cops relate smells higher than the cannabis. And in California, victims of those horrendous wildfires…
Astronomers are taking a closer look at interstellar space object Oumuamua. Might it really be a probe from … out there? I usually dismiss such claims as media and true-believer overreaction, but this is definitely an odd one. Like Wendy McElroy, I’m glad Roy Moore lost yesterday. Whether he’s a pedo-predator remains unproven. That he’s a theocratic demagogue is fact. A Vice investigation reveals that shootings by cop are far more common than previously reported. Now it’s a matter of distinguishing righteous shootings from the activities of Officer Thug and Officer I Am Scared. How “smart” do you want your…
Home improvement marathon yesterday after a slow start. (The Wandering Monk does not do either mornings or Mondays.) In two sweaty hours we insulated the attic above the kitchen and living room — me running up and down the ladder with 12-inch thick fiberglass batts and the Monk putting them in place. Normally my lungs and throat object to fiberglass even when I’m properly masked. But for some reason both the Monk and I both did okay. Any day I can handle insulation without hacking and gagging is a good day. It’s noticeably warmer in here already. After insulating, we…
You know how Joel writes so entertainingly over at TUAK about those days when everything goes haywire? When mad bulls charge into his yard while he’s lying in the mud fixing busted plumbing and his homemade bread is in the house caving in while packrats are eating the wiring on his Jeep? Those days. Joel days. So I closed the computer earlyish this morning, pledging to work on the new RebelFire story. But of course I can’t write until the house is clean. So I start cleaning. And organizing. Which reminds me that since my second backup heat source is…
I said this morning I’d be drywalling all day. I was, sort of. I finished a second wall of the bedroom, but ambition to cover the longest wall got derailed by my ambition to do it right. That wall was the exterior wall of the original 14 x 24 cabin. Presumably the blocked-off doorway was the back door. But shortly after Jim Beam and Jack Daniels built the “big chicken coop” (as the builder’s great grandson, who works at the lumberyard calls it), they added the bedroom wing, covered all that over, and I never knew what to expect until…
Drywalling today. Ugh. Far from my favorite job, especially when I’m working alone. I’d have given anything to have help lifting that top piece into place and holding it flat while I screwed it down. But I know this is a job I can do on my own. I’ve done it before with bigger pieces than this on higher walls than this. I will not allow some silly bit of gypsum and paper to defeat me, even if it does seem to outweigh me today and even if I am feeling old, weak, and wimpy. First I dragged that bookshelf…
… especially when that house is Ye Olde Wreck, the infamous creation of Jim Beam and Jack Daniels. Yesterday I was depressed. It was sunny and mild (in November!) so why I should have been depressed, I don’t know. Well, I do know. It involved writing. And the seemingly hopeless task of getting a vital message across to people not likely to pay attention. So the cure: quit damn writing and go hammer on something. The house’s one-and-only bedroom is this winter’s project. I was going to work on the walls, but that meant first tearing off a slab of…
Yes, a woman’s work is never done. But sometimes it moves ahead at a satisfying pace. Here’s the weekend’s big accomplishment: The ceiling of the bedroom-to-be. It’s just under half done, since yesterday afternoon. I’d have made it farther, but I’m only good for an hour or two at a time hammering overhead. This very thin tongue-and-groove pine isn’t meant for ceilings; it’s for walls and wainscotings. But it’s working fine. Before I committed to putting it on the bedroom ceiling, I nailed a few pieces up on the ceiling of the screenporch where it held up well for a…