End of Summer

Well, here it is. The start of another long weekend. I always find this particular Holiday Weekend a bit lugubrious as it signals the end of Summer. However, now that I have been out of school for 30-some years, it doesn't have quite the same impact. At any rate, have a Happy Labra Dor!

We will not be working on the bathroom. We will be painting the deck. It needs it BAD! We bought the paint the other day and now we are ready to rock. There will be some scraping and some sanding but for the most part, we will be ready to roll in the morning and I expect to have it complete by Sunday.

There are lots of events we want to take in this weekend as well as completing some work on the house. There is "Pigout in the Park" downtown and the annual Labra Dor Concert in Comstock Park on Monday. Aside from those events, there will be sleeping in for three days in a row. That will be great!

Finally, I would like to announce the arrival of my latest toy. It's the Oregon Scientific Mega Weather Station 3000. It keeps track of indoor and outdoor temperatures as well a Relative Humidity, Wind Speed and Direction, and Rainfall. I will be mounting the mast for all the components on the roof tonight. I still haven't figured out where to put the actual unit itself. Susan has definate opinions concerning where it will NOT go...which severly limits the choices.

Last night the Unit was saying it was going to rain. The forecasts on TV were talking about scattered storms with lightning but they did not really say much about rain. I told Susan about the impending rainfall and she wasn't very impressed with the accuracy of my new toy. She was singing a different tune this morning when she got up and saw it had indeed rained.

I'll be looking forward to all the information I'll be getting. I think maybe I should start a low wattage Corbin Park Radio Station where I can broadcast all the local news AND weather. Radio Station KCP, or KWAV, or KBRK, or KSJB. I always liked KRAP for call letters.

LATER THAT SAME DAY: The clouds were pretty ominous looking on my drive home and all the Weather Forecasters were going nuts with a Severe Storm Warning for the early evening. I managed to get my mast up for my Weather Machine Components before all hell broke loose. Frankly, not much occured here at the house. Other parts of town got wind and hail and lightning and rain. At left is a picture from up on the roof looking west with my new anometer in the foreground. There was a little lightning so I was glad to get off the roof under my own power. The wind gauge worked great and I recorded some excellent gusts of wind...some reaching speeds of more than 10 mph.

Countdown to Deadline

As I have already related here, we will not make our Labor Day Deadline for the completion of the bathroom. We have decided that Labor Day will be spent painting the deck. Susan wants to put down the Duration Paint from Sherwood and Williams, which I'm sure is going to cost us a Pretty Farthing.

In bathroom news and progress, the wiring is complete. I do have to do a little framing to install the sconce lights that will be on either side of the mirror, but all the wiring is in place AND it works. That's always a huge relief for me when I finish a section of wiring, flip the breaker to power it up and it doesn't spark, spit, sizzle or flame.

A Time to Reflect

I am contemplative today as I celebrate the first anniversary of this Blog. I haven't done a very good job of keeping it current. I have only posted 80 times out of a possible...oh let's see...well, about 300 days. That 's less than 25%.

I got the important stuff down though and that was my goal with this thing.

I had a pretty good night of wiring. I'm not quite there but I am close. I still have to run wire for the heater and the fan and then get it all hooked up. Plus, I have to put in the lights that go on either side of the mirror.

And now for my "Construction Tip of the Day!"

When you are remodeling and you go for the total teardown gut the room remodel, you will find a number of nails that need to be removed. The most difficult nail to remove is the one fuzzily featured in the photograph above. The Lath Nail. The Lath Nail is not hard to remove. Generally, it pops right out. The problem is that there are so many of them. I have thoroughly scoured the bathroom for these little devils and I know there are still more there. We will find the stragglers when we drywall.

Attic-a Attic-a

A great deal of progress was made last night in the wiring of the bathroom. I should have everything pretty much wrapped up tonight. I have most of the wire run and I got the main light hooked up to the switch.

It turned out to be a good thing that I couldn't find my staples. I bought some yesterday and I bought a style that is much easier to nail into place. I pulled out a bunch of ugly staples and replaced them with the new bitchin' staples.

Below are a couple of pictures of the attic. I have not included any attic pictures to this point so this should be very exciting for you. If you are excited by these pictures, get a life!

What I like about these pictures is all the dust you can see in the air. That is from the insulation stuff spread around the floor. As soon as I go up there and start moving around, it begins to fill the air. If I'm doing a lot of activity up there, it can get pretty thick. You can also see all the wire we've run up there. The picture on the right even shows some of the old knob & tube wiring running along the floor.

Still though, you should really get a life!

Can't Find Nuthin'!

I wonder how much time I have wasted throughout my life because I can't find stuff. I'm not terribly organized and it seems as though I have never been able to establish a rhythym here at this house as to where things go.

I am speaking spacifically about tools. I have them in various places around the house. I have some tools out in the garage. I have some tools in the basement. And I have a variety of tools spread around the house...right now near the bathroom, since that is the current construction zone.

I bring this up because I was working on wiring the bathroom last night and I spent a good portion of the evening looking for stuff. I ran a bunch of wire for the light switches, fan, heater, and outlets. When it came time to staple up the wire into the rafters and walls, I could not find my jar of large staples.

I finally gave up and decided to buy more staples today, as well as wire and a couple of boxes. Of course, when I get home tonight, the missing staples will be somewhere right in front of me.

The good thing about my search was that I found a couple of other things I had been looking for. My wind up Emergency Radio/Flashlight was in a cabinet that I never use and my coffee from Sunday morning was down in the Laundry Room.

Two Weeks to Deadline

I do not believe I am going to beat the Labor Day Deadline for completing the bathroom. We have a long way to go and a lot of money to spend.

I have had a slow week in the Bathroom. I got a little wiring accomplished but nowhere near what I wanted to get done. I guess my biggest accomplishment of the week was figuring out the circuits that I will put the lights, outlets and heaters on.

I also put a call in to my Radiator/Boiler guy but he never called back. I'll call him again today. I am trying to decide whether to keep the pipes to the radiator and use them for a towell warmer or just cap them off. I have gone on-line to find towell warmers and they are available but they are incredibly over priced. The thinking must be that if someone can come up with the concept of putting a towell warmer in their bathroom, they must have a crap load of money to throw away. The most basic model costs $1,200.00.

Did We Get Screwed?!

The Plumbers have come and gone and we are now $1,200.00 poorer. I have talked to a few people who think I was hosed. One was Mark, who recommended these guys. Another was Phil, who has been helping us with all the technical building procedures that I cannot do...like swinging a hammer. Here are a couple of before and after pictures.

Anyway, I have no idea what this should have cost. Twelve Hundred does seem kind of high for an Under-the-Table kind of job but it is three hundred dollars less than the worst case scenerio bid he gave me at the start. I know Plumbers get paid a lot. I didn't bother to get other bids because I thought these guys were going to give me a deal. And still, I don't know that we didn't get a deal.

Anyway, we put the sub-floor in yesterday and now I can mostly walk around in the bathroom without fear of falling through the Living Room Ceiling.

I would like to add that I have the most recent Skunk Report. The accuracy rating is at plus or minus two skunks. I counted five of them Saturday night. That Accuracy rating is wrong right off the bat cuz I know there is not a minus two skunks. There are five! There is one large "Mother" skunk and four smaller utility skunks, also known as "the Kittens."

I really need to trap these guys and re-locate them, but they really haven't been a problem. I will get the occassional skunky smell in the yard but other than that, I would not even know they are there.

Back in the bathroom, this week I will be working on getting the room wired. We will also do a little framing around the shower.

Clean Up & Plumbers

As you may recall from my last entry, I have this area to clean up in the back corner of our property. If you compare this picture to the one in Tuesdays entry, you can see that I have accomplished almost nothing in cleaning this out. This picture shows 1,200 pounds less of detrious material, but it sure doesn't look like it.

My problem is that it costs too much to dump this at the Waste-to-Energy Plant. There's too much non-detrious material mixed in to make it good compost, so I am charged the garbage rate. I have been calling around about fill dirt but I'm not having much luck.

The Plumbers are coming on Friday. I think I'll wait around for them tomorrow morning to get everything started and make sure they know what they're doing and where they are doing it.

I still have to buy a shower fixture. I was hoping to get something cool and fancy with body sprays and oscillating rotors, but one needs a second mortgage to afford those things. I'm going to get the basic chrome single handled fixture and up grade the shower head later.

How I Spent my Day of Rest

The Bathroom is on hold until the Plumbers show up. I hope to hear from Craig the Plumber today. I hope he will be telling me that they will be in today. More than likely, he is going to tell me, "Not Today!" Then I will pout and furrow my brow and quiver my lower lip.

So I worked in the yard on Sunday while Susan did her cleaning thing in the house. That Bathroom Project is creating more dust than the Floor Sanding Project ever did.

This was one of the items I planned to accomplish on Sunday. This was a footing for the old Wheelchair Ramp. I had to dig down about two feet.

This was the other project I wanted to accomplish. I didn't even come close. What you are looking at there is a pile compost composed of leaves and grass that was left by the previous owner. That's YOU, Dave! The pile was much worse when we first moved in. You couldn't walk through that space. The pile has been there, decomposing for at least five years...probably longer.

It actually is very clean fill dirt. The problem is that there are chestnut hulls that are mixed in, along with bits of plastic, your occassional shipping peanut, rocks big and small, twine, parts of old toys, a pipe or metal fence post, and a former lawn chair.

I over loaded the trailer by about 300 pounds and it cost me $77.00 at the dump. I have to find a hole somewhere.

Gutted Shell

I was talking to my neighbor, explaining what I found in the bathroom with all the cement, and he said that was a Mortar Bed. They put that down so the tile had a good solid foundation to rest on. So, there is that question answered.

The bathroom is now ready for the Plumbers to come in and spend a lot of our money.
Here is a dusty shot of the bathroom as it stands now. We vaccuumed out a bunch of plaster and plaster sand that had fallen down between the joists, as well as about 90 years of general crap. You can also see that we have removed a portion of the wall on the left. We hope that creates the feeling of a larger space. I could not of course, remove the whole wall because of the Plumbing Stack that goes up through it.

This weekend will involve general cleaning around the house and a few loads to the dump. I am trying to clean out an area next to the Carriage House. Once I have that area cleaned up, my next job is to evict the skunks.