When things don't work out

I had a really good project planned for January: I was finally going to finish the Shaker table I started way back in ... holy crap, 2014??? Um. Wow.

Anyway, that thing has been sitting in my closet ever since I brought it home from that class, waiting for me to get around to finishing it. I knew that I'd made a few mistakes during the build that would need fixing, but I figured that I'd learned enough since then that I could make a go of it.

Well, not so much. Turns out that the mistakes, while individually rather minor, added up to a real headache. You can see a fair number of them just in this shot of the front:

The main issues were:

• I'd left the top sitting too long in the corner of the closet, and it had developed a rather nasty cup. I'd have to remake it from scratch - but I didn't have enough alder left, so I would have had to use a different material.
• I had been a little bit off when I drilled the dowels to hold the top spacer (above the drawer), and as a result, it was twisted and slightly proud of the front. Flattening it woiuld have required a lot of sanding and chisel work, and I would never have gotten it quite right.
• The entire carcass was ever so slightly out of square, meaning that the drawer would have to be "fudged" to suit the carcass.
• I had messed up the drawer bottom the first time I made it, and had to drill a hole in it to pry it out of the drawer again. Meaning I would also have had to remake it.
• On closer inspection, my dovetails were TERRIBLE. Front and back. 

The more I looked at it, the more I saw that just wasn't... good enough. I would have had to remake about half of the components, and spend even more time fixing the problems on the parts I would be keeping. 

In the end, I chopped it all up for firewood. Which really, really, really hurt, but was strangely cathartic at the same time.

With the table now out of the running, I needed a new project for this month. Unfortunately, the weather (and therefore the shop) was really cold this month, so I didn't want to do anything that would require special finishing - or even any more glueing than necessary. So I turned my attention to a pair of shop projects that I'd been meaning to do for a while.

I'd made little shop cabinet a while ago to store my table saw blades and really liked the way it turned out. the only downside was that, because it was designed specifically for 10" table saw blades, it wouldn't hold the 12" blades for the miter saw. I decided to modify the original design (which I should mention wasn't mine - I got it from Jay Bates) and make a cabinet that would hold not only the 12" miter saw blades, but also the 7 1/4" blades for the circular saw. 

Having already made one of these, it was a pretty straightforward build, with the sole exception of accidentally putting the bandsaw blade in backwards while cutting the profile for the sides. Works a lot better when the teeth are actually cutting!

In progress (you can see the original cabinet on the wall behind it):

Finished!

I should also mention that the reason I picked these projects is that I really wanted to get started actually USING the French cleat storage system we installed on the back wall of the shop.

That only took a couple of evenings out in the shop and was so much fun to build that I decided to follow it up immediately with another, similar project, and figure out a way to deal with the absolute chaos that was my sandpaper drawer:

To be fair, I did have a better system of organizing it than that depicts, but it wasn't exactly convenient to use, which meant that, well, I didn't use it. So I pulled out all the stuff I wanted to have handy while working at the bench:

Then I drew up some plans and started\making dust:

Finished!

As you can see, there's still lots of space left on the cleats:

Going to have to come up with some more storage plans - and decide what we're going to keep up there!

Shop Project: Crosscut sled

I mentioned a few posts back (you're forgiven for not remembering) that a generous contribution from the Top Brass (along with some of our own hard-earned savings) had help to kit out our shop a little bit to help with future projects. And when I said that, this is what I was referring to:

That there is a Canadian-built General 350 cabinet saw with a 220-volt, single-phase, 3hp motor, right-tilting arbor, and a Delta Unifence. I bought it from a co-worker's boyfriend, and getting it over to the house and set up was all kinds of trouble, and worth every minute of it. It kicks so much ass, I can't even tell you.

But it did have a few shortcomings: for one, it didn't have a wing on the left side there because it was originally in use as a panel saw and had a walk-through contraption/roller table designed to let the operator make cuts in really large pieces of material. I certainly didn't need one of those, but to get the wing we have now with a built-in router table was a long, excruciating process with a whole host of separate problems that I won't get into because I don't feel like getting that angry again right now.

One of its other problems is the fact that the mitre gauge it came with was a little ... not worky, and finding a replacement is really hard and holy hell expensive. Fortunately, one of the most common self-built tools (and a good way to get to know your equipment a little better, if you know what I mean) for any woodworker is a crosscut sled.

Crosscut sleds allow you to make short cuts across the grain of a piece of wood without the risk of trapping the offcut between the blade and the fence. They can be pretty complex, and incorporate all kinds of fixtures and hold-downs and stop-blocks and tracks and whatnot, like so:

But I really just wanted to build a simple one to take the place of my broken mitre gauge.

So I gathered up a few pieces of scrap, including some of the oak trim and 1/2-inch plywood left over from my bookcases, and ponied up for a good piece of 3/4" MDF.

The first step was to create the fences, which required cutting strips off the MDF and plywood and then laminating them together with lots of glue and anything and everything I could stack on top as extra weight:

Then I had to do some fancy work with a jigsaw and a LOT of sanding with the belt sander and orbital sander... none of which I took pictures of. Oops.

Anyway, while the fences were drying, I very carefully cut down my oak pieces to act as runners in the miter slots on the table. This was really damn finicky, but I eventually got them sized just right:

Then I glued and screwed them to the bottom of the sled, and cut off the overhang:

Then it was MATH TIME!

To make sure the fence was square to the blade, I used the five-cut method. Generally speaking, anything under .005" of deviation over 12" is considered really good. After only one adjustment, I got mine to .00175 over 18". I'll take it!

And my asshole algebra teacher in Grade 11 would be so proud; I can show my work:

Anyway, here she is, in all her glory:

And yes, I did add a safety block for when the blade comes out the rear of the fence. I didn't take a picture of that because Lucille thinks the safety block makes her butt look big.

And yes, I named her Lucille. Hey, it worked for B.B. King....

Fun with electricity

Well, it's story-time again here on everyone's favorite Broadmead-based renovation blog. The sunroom, which I was planning on writing about next, is becoming something of a saga here - a real saga, not a pseudo-saga like that bookcase nonsense I posted about last time. Let's just say that were I to relate ALL of the details (and I will - eventually) the sunroom saga might even fill THREE posts.

For now, however, I'd like to tell a story about how, despite all experience to the contrary, we can still occasionally be lulled into a false sense of complacency, and how nothing in this house is EVER easy.

For this particular story, I need to begin with - ironically enough - the sunroom. Better yet, we need to go all the way back to the last half of this old post, and the installation of the lights at the front of the garage for you to get the full idea...

Anyway, a few weeks ago (has it really been that long already? It has? Holy shnikies...), we were prepping the sunroom for the contractor to come and start fixing it. As usually happens, once we started taking things apart, we kept finding more things that needed to be fixed. When we opened up the wall beside the door on the greenhouse side of the sunroom, we found a light fixture near the top of the wall, and one of Frank's outdoor electrical specialties, the ever-popular "let's just run the electrical wire through an old, leaky piece of sprinkler pipe so we can get it out to the greenhouse" approach, near the bottom of the wall. While we were expecting the latter, what with previous experience and all, the former was a bit of a surprise in that, to all appearance, it seemed to be wired correctly.

Well, right up until we took a closer look at it, that is. Here's what the light looked like on the outside of the sunroom wall:

Funny thing about that (aside from the fact that it's attached to the wall with a BIG JESUS NAIL right through the fixture), is the apparent height of the mounting box. See, in that picture, the light is obviously mounted below the top of the sliding glass door. On the inside of the wall, however, the wire that was obviously supplying electricity to the fixture went through a small hole well above the top of the glass door. As we looked back and forth between the two sides of the wall, it became clear that the extraneous piece of wood on the outside of the wall was hiding... something we probably didn't want to see.

Of course, we first had to take a closer look at the fixture, and the weird and wonderful ways Frank found to attach things to ... other things. This picture shows the brass nut on one side of the fixture (which was the wrong fastener, btw - you can clearly see that it wouldn't screw down onto the bolt far enough to keep the fixture tight to the wall) and the nail someone drove right through the fixture - presumably to hold it to the board that's keeping the whole thing from being flush with the wall. Oh, and notice that the nut on the other side of the fixture did not match the one on this side... which you can only see because the light wasn't mounted at the right angle.

But wait! It gets worse!

No, really. It get worse. This is what it looked like after we took the light off the mounting bracket:

And this is what we found behind the board nailed to the wall:

Um... yeah. That IS speaker wire. I mean, it's an exterior light - it's not like anyone is ever going to CHECK it.

Anyway, as Bill Cosby might say, I told you that story so I could tell you another one.

The point of all this is that, after the lights on the front of the garage, and the light on the side of the sunroom, we felt pretty confident that we could handle pretty much anything in terms of the electrical stuff going on in this house. So when it came time to do something about the motion sensor light on the side of the garage, we went into the project expecting the worst. Which of course, is not at all what we found...

The underlying issue with the light on the side of the garage is that it... well, didn't actually work. We knew the motion sensor part of it was at least registering movement because every now and again, I'd hear it click as I walked past it. The lights, on the other hand, remained stubbornly dark.But it seemed like a logical place for a motion sensor light, and with the days getting shorter, we figured it might not be a bad idea to at least see if we could get it working.

Well, the first thing I noticed was that both of the bulbs seemed to be loose. Like, probably not actually burnt out, just not screwed in tight enough. But I took them out anyway to get a closer look at the light. It SEEMED to be in pretty good working order, and I was testing the range of the motion sensor arm to try and aim it down towards the walkway when it snapped right off in my hand. I guess the plastic was a little brittle from being exposed to the elements for so long, but still. With repurposing the light now out of the question, I took off the rest of the light and found, to my utter shock and ever-lasting surprise, a properly wired light fixture with a pancake box set into the stucco and fastened securely to the plywood backing board behind it. The wire that fed the box wasn't pinched in the hole, it wasn't SPEAKER wire, and in fact, seemed to have been installed by a qualified electrician. "Will wonders never cease?" I thought. "Just when you think you have this house figured out, they throw something done RIGHT at me. Shame I had to break the damn thing, eh?"

Anyway, off we hied to Crappy Tire and bought ourselves a new light fixture. Daylight sensor, adjustable motion range and light duration, the works. We brought it back, unpacked it, and the War Department went up the ladder and wired it up. Once she was done, I went up and carefully attached it to the mounting box. I tightened up the screw so it was good and snug, popped in a couple of bulbs, and Amy flipped the breaker.

POP!

"Huh," she said. "I've never seen blue flame shoot out of the top of an electrical panel like that."

So, yeah. Turns out that the pancake boxes are somewhat problematic in that when you have a long mounting screw right in the center of the fixture (as we did), it tends to line up directly with the wires being fed into the box from behind. Okay, so we need a new box. And, as it turns out, more wire. It seems that when they wired the original pancake box, they didn't leave any extra in the wall in case this sort of thing happened. Luckily for us, the wire was easy enough to trace because they had actually fed the wire out into the garage, and run it down the face of the drywall rather than inside the wall cavity.

So, to fix MY mistake, we had to retrace the wire back to the outlet set in the wall of the garage;

• Open up the drywall at the socket box on the inside of the garage.
• Feed the wire up through the inside wall cavity to the light fixture.
• Drill a 4.5" hole in the plywood backing.
• Cut open the drywall in the garage to access the back of the box.
• Rewire both the outlet and the new box.
• CAREFULLY reattach the light.

Oh, and of course, we didn't have enough wire OR a spare outlet box, so there was (yet) another trip to Home Despot in there somewhere, too.

Looks pretty good, now, though:

The moral of the story?

Oh, jebus. I don't know. We don't do morals much around here. Swearing, though - THAT we got covered.

Fumbling towards fall

Well, we FINALLY seem to have gotten some decent summer weather here on the Wet Coast. Of course, it's September, but who's counting? I'm going to go ahead and use that as an excuse as to why I haven't posted in six months (or however long it's been - I'm too hot and lazy to go check).

Actually, now that I think on it a little, that's exactly why I haven't posted in so long. Not the good weather, I mean, just that I am hot and lazy.

Mostly lazy.

Anyway, just because I haven't posted doesn't mean we haven't been busy. We just haven't done a LOT of work on the house - aside from gardening, lawn mowing, cleaning up cat puke... you know, the usual. I still haven't set up my office beyond getting my desk in and my computer working (read above re: hot and lazy), but the War Department's office is looking really good - one more thing to put up that will be the subject of its own post, I'm sure - and the garage is a little more organized than it was. We even found time to clamber up the side of Mt. Doug with a friend from Toronto one particularly fine afternoon:

We also made these, which was fun:

Tasty, too.

Anyway, nobody comes here to read about our cooking (and if you do, you're probably going to be disappointed when you ask me to post recipes and then I never get around to it because, well, hot and lazy, remember?) so let's get to the meat of the post, shall we? The end of summer means that we are running out of time to do something about the horrendous state of our sunroom and get it all buttoned up before the rain comes back. (In case you forgot about the sunroom, check it out here.) Fortunately, Mike - the guy who installed our floors - has recovered from a recent bout of cancer (wish I was kidding, but hey - he's doing really well now) and was looking for some minor projects to get back into the swing of things.

As an aside, can I just say how utterly tickled I was to hear that he thought rebuilding our sunroom - something that would take us an absolute minimum of six months to do ourselves - was a minor project? No? Well, never mind, then.

Our part of the deal was that we would be doing the demo work ourselves, along with the eventual refinishing of the inside, including drywall (Joy!), paint, trim, and tiling the floor. With the windows coming in supposedly this week, it was time we got back to work and started taking out the crap.

This crap:

Yes, we've been using the sunroom as something of a storage room / project staging area. It just seems to be the place where all the stuff winds up that doesn't REALLY belong inside, but probably shouldn't get rained on. Before we could find places to store all that stuff, I had to finish ANOTHER project I was working on that was taking up most of the garage:

And before I could even START that project, I had to finish this other one.

Maybe it might be easier to just tackle these in order, eh? Matter of fact, there's probably just too much for one post, so maybe I'll just pick one topic for this one, and do up another post for the next one? Who knows, maybe it might even force me to post more often, right? Is this too many question marks for one paragraph?

Okay, forget the sunroom, forget the other project, let's back up the train and start over. Man, this being lazy thing just leads to a whole lot more extra work, doesn't it? Makes me wish I'd listened to what my mother told me all those years ago. ("What was that?" "I don't know - I wasn't listening.")

Right, so, I mentioned a while back (I think I did - I went looking for the post and wound up editing six others and forgetting what I was looking for so you'll just have to find it yourself) that we had these windows in the upstairs hall that let in all this light in the morning. Given the angle of the windows and the positioning of our bedroom, the light streams right into our bedroom door. In the winter, it's not so bad, but at certain times of the year, that light starts streaming in right around six in the morning which is too damn early - especially if it's the weekend and you're trying to sleep in. Not that we EVER sleep in. much.

Now NORMAL people could just close their bedroom door at night, but NORMAL people don't have whiny-ass cats that howl if they're deprived of our company for more than five minutes while we're at home. Of course, we could also come up with a system of curtains to block off those windows, but they're impossible to get to, and I have no idea how to rig up a system that would allow us to open and close the curtains (without use of a remote control, which would be AWESOME) once we did install them.

Anyway, our solution to this was, I believe, not only ingenious, but a pretty clear example of what sets us apart from NORMAL people.

Here are the windows in question, coincidentally enough, at about 7:30am one fine Saturday morning.

And here is not only a perfect example of the light cutting right across our bedroom door, but also the solution.

Yes, we installed a cat door in our bedroom door. We liked the solution so much, we put one in the War Department's office, too.

Anyway, it's taken me so long to get around to finishing this post that the September weather has turned cloudy and grey, and I'm not nearly so hot anymore. Still pretty damn lazy, though, so that's all for now. Tune in later this week for the saga of the bookcase!

It might be Broadmead, but it's still Victoria

It turns out that this neighborhood of ours, as awesomely fantastic as it is, isn't quite so far removed from the rest of this city as you might think. Oh, sure, we're perched up on the sunny side of Broadmead, with a view of Mount Doug and the Blenkinsop Valley. We've got a Garry Oak in the backyard and a few resident wildlife species:



On any given day, more people pass our house while walking their dogs than they do driving in their cars, and the neighbors have all, to a soul, been wonderful.

But it's still Victoria. Case in point:

We finally finished the War Department's office, which looks spectacular, thanks to all our hard work and some fantastic seamstressnessing (totally a real word) on the curtains by my mom:





Looks awesome, eh? Here they are closed, so you can revel in the majesty;



Anyway, finishing the office meant we could finally start moving stuff out of the garage, and putting it in the rooms it was all supposed to inhabit. Fortunately, nothing else had been damaged beyond repair by the mice (leave it to those little bastards to destroy the most expensive thing in the garage) and we got the last of our furniture out. This left nothing in the garage except tools, proper garage stuff, and a whole schwack of things that we wanted to get rid of anyway, but couldn't actually get to with all the other crap in the way. For example, this thing:





That's a canoe with a large, ugly patch, several small holes, and a completely rotten keel. (It also may or may not have smelled strongly of mouse pee. Maybe.) We were originally going to try to get it fixed, but the guy who was going to fix it inexplicably disappeared. Like, not answering his phone, and he doesn't appear to live/work at the address he gave us. Which, again, if you've ever tried to hire a contractor in Victoria, isn't actually all THAT uncommon in this town...

At any rate, the War Department finally decided that storing the damn thing in the (probably vain) hope that we'd eventually find someone who could fix it for less than the cost of a new one was, well, hopeless. We picked a fine Saturday morning, and started hauling all the stuff out of the garage and stacking it in the driveway so we could clean it off, identify the stuff we wanted to get rid off, and reorganize the remainder.

As it so happens, that particular Saturday happened to be the day that our neighbors two doors down decided to have a garage sale. This proved something of a distraction when I had to inform an elderly couple picking over our old hockey sticks, paddles, and a roll of carpet underlay that we weren't actually selling anything. To reduce the amount of embarrassment this misunderstanding could cause, I made up a sign that said "NOT a garage sale - sorry!" and, after holding it up to ward off another couple that had stopped their car in front of the house, propped it up at the end of the driveway.

It was right about then that it occurred to us that maybe we could take advantage of the garage sale's proximity and the increased traffic to get rid of a few things and save ourselves the trouble of loading up the truck. After all, in the old house, we had often disposed of unwanted furniture and electronics by simply putting it out on the curb with a "Free" sign attached.It's actually something of a local and well-known tradition in Victoria. Hell, before Amy and I moved in together, she got rid of a hideous, orange plaid couch using this exact method. A hideous, orange plaid PULL-OUT couch that smelled like cat pee. Students - what are you gonna do?

Anyway, we decided to test our luck, and dragged the canoe down to the end of the driveway, positioning it between the Not a Garage Sale sign and the end of the driveway. I stuck a free sign on it, and went back to organizing the garage.

Now, before I say anything else, let me say this: I am not going to use any hyperbole, exaggeration, or overstatement. This is absolutely, positively, 100% true:

The canoe was gone - GONE - in less than twenty minutes. I didn't even have to help load it.

This town, I swear.

Saying farewall to an old friend

There comes a time in every relationship where, whether through death, fate, or ennui, it comes time to end it.

Oh, might be a good time to mention that I'm NOT talking about us - or the kitties for that matter. They're fine, if you can call yelling at us all the time and barfing on the rug every other day "fine", and I'm sure they do.

Where was I? Oh, right, the end of a relationship.

This particular relationship started way back in 2005, even before we began the renovations at the old place. It ended last weekend and to be honest, I'm not sure we're really over it yet.

One of the first things we had to do to the old house was replace the furnace. At the time, it made a lot of sense to also replace the unbelievably crappy stove that came with the house, and so the War Department forked over her ENTIRE bonus cheque (that she got when the company she worked for got bought out) and bought us the most wonderful gas range. Here it is on the very day they installed it:



She's a beauty, eh? Five burners, flat cooktop, convection oven, warming tray, all the bells and whistles.

We loved that stove from the moment we turned it on. We loved that stove when we cooked our Christmas dinners in it. We loved that stove to make quick meals during the week. We loved that stove so much that when we bought our new house, we specifically excluded it from the list of appliances that were to be included in the sale of the old house. We even paid for a professional gas fitter to come over and disconnect it, and wrapped it in blankets so the movers wouldn't scratch the finish. They loaded it carefully into the truck, and just as carefully unloaded it into our new garage.

Where it promptly sat for twelve months.

Oh, we shunted it around from one corner of the garage to the other, always moving it carefully and taking great pains not to scratch the finish. There wasn't much we could do: the new house didn't have gas service, and what with having to do the roof and everything else, the new gas line wasn't in the budget right away. So our poor, beautiful range sat in the garage while we cursed and hated the piece of crap that Frank left us.

Well, as I mentioned in the last post, we FINALLY had enough money to get the gas line put in. So after a fair amount of back-and-forth between and with Terasen and the local municipality (you'd think they do this all the time, but it just seemed like everything we were doing was the first time anyone had ever brought it up: "Natural gas? To your house? I've never heard of such a thing! Oh, wait, here's a form. Well, I'll be...") we finally got the gas line run. We even had some pictures of the process, thanks to our Crazy Neighbour™ who monitored the whole thing for us while we were at work.

Which I seem to have misplaced... oh well, they'll turn up.

Anyway, the gas line was installed, the fireplace was installed, and all we needed to do was install our old friend the gas range and we'd be - in the inimitable words of my friend Steve - "golden". Only one small problem.

Well, probably more like a half-a-dozen or so small problems. Small, brown, furry, problems.

You see, one of the side... er, benefits? of having so much wildlife in the neighbourhood is that some of said wildlife wants to live inside with you. Where it's warm. Failing that, they'll happily live somewhere sort-of-inside, where it might not be as warm, but where there are no predators and there's a good source of food. Like, say, a garage. Where there are bags of birdseed and peanuts (oh, someone PLEASE ask Amy about the peanuts), and nice tight crevices where they can build their nests. For example, in the side cavity of a crappy old freezer, or a beat-up old chest of drawers, or, well, a very nice stove.

Yeah. We had mice.

We actually had an exterminator come in a month or so after we bought the place, and he laid some traps in the attic (none of which were ever sprung, so THAT was good news) and in the garage. The ones in the garage were quite successful at catching little mouses, but not so much at not killing them, which upset the War Department somewhat. So we took the exterminator's advice and let the cats out into the garage once in a while so they could rub on things and leave the smell of a predator. It must have worked, at least a little, because the last trap never did get sprung, and I figured the mice had probably found a less-cat-infested home.

Unfortunately, the damage had already been done, and they had made themselves a nice little home in the insulation in our beautiful gas range. Well, okay, we thought, we'll just have to clean it all out and replace the insulation. And when we called around to ask for parts, and looked online for advice, it seemed we certainly weren't the first people to have mice in a stove. So we ordered new insulation for it and once it (finally!) arrived, we asked our good friend Mr. Awesome to come over and give us a hand - he used to fix appliances, and was willing to work for beer; I call that a win-win.

We started taking the stove apart on a chilly Friday night a little more than a week ago, and it quickly became apparent that the damage was more extensive than we thought. The first few panels came off easily enough, and were put aside to be wiped down later.

Once we got the cooktop off, however, we found out just how bad it was:



And then it got worse:



And worse:







And then we found out that the idiots at the part store where we bought our replacement insulation only gave us enough insulation to do the top and sides, and not the back. So we left the carcass of our poor stove surrounded by its pieces, and waited until the next morning, when we could start calling around and hopefully find another piece of insulation.

Well, the next morning brought good news and bad news. The good news was that the War Department talked to an exceptionally knowledgeable and helpful person at West Coast Parts (not, unfortunately, the place we had ordered the original insulation from or we might have saved ourselves a lot of trouble). The bad news was pretty much everything the guy told her.

You see, mouse pee is really, really, REALLY stinky. It's also pervasive, and mildly corrosive. The end result is that the smell is really difficult to get out - especially if the afflicted appliance were ever to get hot. You know, like a STOVE. Essentially, the only way to get the smell out - even from a metal panel - is to soak the part in a strong solution of janitorial cleaner (bleach doesn't work, apparently) and then let it dry for up to two weeks.

To cut a sad story short, after speaking to the technician and re-evaluating the extent of our infestation, we came to the reluctant conclusion that there was just no way we were EVER going to get the damn thing clean. The mouse pee was all over the electrical components, the burners, the gas lines, everything. It had seeped into the welds in the frame and the back of the box, and even onto the heat deflectors INSIDE the oven.

I think if it had been an electric stove, it might have been different, but we had to take all the gas lines off to get the panels apart, and there would have been no way to even test the thing without putting it all back together and installing it.

And so it was with a heavy heart and a great deal of reluctance that I loaded all the pieces (except for a few that I forgot, damn it) into the back of the pickup and hauled it all up to Hartland where it went straight into the recycling bin.

Yeah. Top of the line, and not even six years old. Finished. Talk about your expensive lessons. Anyway, I'm still too verklempft to continue. Throwing out that beautiful, wonderful, awesome stove really, really, really sucked.

(I think the worst part is that now I have to clean the burnt stuff out of the crappy old stove that I spilled turkey drippings in over the holidays. Stupid delicious turkey.)

Tune in next time for pictures of our next project (which we've already started)!

My very first hardwood floor (part two)

Weren't we discussing something about a floor?

When last we checked in on the progress of the flooring, we had successfully completed hiring someone to successfully complete our floor. Sweet. Of course, we told them we'd take care of the trim ourselves, and we're still working on that, what is it, six months later? (Six months? Holy crap. You'd think we had to plan a wedding or something.)

But we've been banging away at it since Christmas (off and on), and it looks really really good, and I'd especially like to thank my brother, who helped with quite a bit of the trim in the last week before the wedding - if only so he could actually spend time with me because I was otherwise too busy to pay attention to him and his new son (cute as he was). I'm a terrible brother and a rotten uncle. (The jury is still out on what kind of a husband I'll make, but if I were you, I'd bet the under.)

(Man, this post got off track in a hurry again, didn't it?)

Anyway, remind me to post some shots of the finished trim in the dining room, kitchen, and hall, would you? Actually, if you could remind me to TAKE some shots of the finished trim so I have some to post, that would be great.

So, on to the upstairs. The carpet throughout the upstairs of the house was the same as the crappy stuff throughout the downstairs. Only worse. Dustier, dirtier, and more off-putting for the War Department's allergies. Which is why we were sleeping downstairs in the "family room" for the first few weeks. She couldn't spend more than a few minutes near the carpet without breaking out in sneezes or hives or whatever it is allergy sufferers have to deal with. (What am I, a doctor?)

The War Department is also apparently allergic to popcorn ceilings - or at least, so she claimed. Which meant a couple of successive evenings on top of the stepladder misting and then scraping a whole whackload of cellulose off the ceiling. Oh - but not right away. I had to get it tested for asbestos first. After the vermiculite in the attic of the last house, I wasn't taking any chances.

Good thing, too, considering what an unholy mess this job turned out to be.



I have to say, though, once we started scraping it off, I could see just how unbelievably dirty it really was. I mean, it was absolutely covered in invisible cobwebs, dead bugs, dust, and whatever else happened to be light enough to float up there and stick to all the little protrusions.

Anyway, once we'd scraped off all the popcorn, it was time to call our old friend Tony, the drywall artiste. It took him three trips, but he got the ceiling looking like it was brand new.

Oh, while he was here, he also took care of a few minor things downstairs in the living room. The ungodly mess over the fireplace, for example, that was left when we tore off the old, ugly, shabby-ass mantel.

This piece of shit:



Before Tony's magic:



After:



(It's a different color because it's still wet.)

Now that we have the workbenches set up in the garage, I can start maybe thinking about how to build a new mantel for there.

What's that? Oh, yeah, we spent last Saturday (ALL of last Saturday) taking everything out of the garage, organizing a bit of a workspace, and then stuffing it all back in again. Okay, so some of the eighteen brazillian boxes of books went into the house itself, but most of it just got reorganized and stored in the garage.

When we started:



After what felt like 12 hours or so of moving the same box four hundred times:



Wow.. so much for staying on topic, eh?

Anyway, once Tony was done working his particular brand of magic on the ceiling, it was time to paint:



And once THAT was done, it was time to break out the screws and some levelling compound and try to get the floor as flat as we could before actually laying the flooring. Which was right about the time I started thinking seriously about how to actually attach the floor to ... the floor.

I mentioned in the last post about the floor that the flooring we bought was tongue and groove. Rather than float it, I figured we should staple it down - mostly because we could, and its preferable to floating. Only problem was, well, I'm not the world's fastest floorer. (Not a word, but oh well.) So renting a tool would most likely be cost-prohibitive, as they say. Fortunately, Mr. Awesome had a compressor we could borrow, so that was no problem, but he didn't have a stapler, or a nailgun that used the right gauge of nails.

So, once again, it was off to Home Despot, where we were lucky enough to find this little beauty on sale:



As the tool salesman told us, it's not exactly professional grade, but would easily hold up for the 800 or so square feet of our project, and at a price that was only about two-and-a-half days worth of renting a similar stapler. So we bought it.

And it turned out to be a good purchase, actually, as we shall see in the NEXT installment of My Very First Hardwood Floor! But now, it's time for another edition of our new feature,

This Week In Mayonnaise!

Way back when, I pointed out that Frank (the previous owner) had a rather haphazard approach to electrical, particularly when it came to running lines to his various fountains and outside outlets. I believe I mentioned that he used leftover sprinkler piping to run the "wiring" (I use the quotes because I refuse to refer to the use of speaker wire and leftover bits of extension cords as actual wiring) from within the house to the outside outlet. This was accomplished by the simple expedience of drilling holes in the outside of the house and then attaching his "wiring" to the nearest electrical outlet. Here's an example (note that this is the only one where he used actual electrical wires):



Now, Frank wasn't so stupid or senile to be completely unaware of the dangers of mixing water with electricity, and (you can see where I'm going with this) the idea of running his "wiring" through a sprinkler pipe must have fired off the right neurons or something, because he took it upon himself to carefully seal the joints in his sprinkler pipes.

Three guesses what he used to seal those joints, and the first two don't count: