The space on the other side of our bedroom. We got some loose insulation placed back in the floor, and got another plywood board down. Our goal is to clear this area so we can work on putting up my drywall on the other side of the bedroom wall.
It’s been a while since I’ve been up there, but things are just as I remembered: tons of insulation everywhere. More dust than I recalled though. I was stupid to not wear a mask, but it also shows just how numb I seem to be now, versus where I was before, in terms of going up to the attic.
After doing another pass with the lawnmower to get all the thatch picked up, I overseeded the yard with more Black Beauty grass. We’ll see how well this helps, but it’s nice to have rain coming in the next few days.
Drove out loaded up 15 bags, drove home, unloaded 15 bags, and made coffee – all before starting the work day. Not too shabby.
I shoud say: I’m less certain when it comes to electrical, and have the most hesitation towards any electrical work. I need to study up more. For most things, I feel like if you make a mistake… there are ways to workaround and patch. With electrical, it feels like you get… one mistake.
Liz and I had a house day today. The weather was fantastic, and while Liz worked outside I was on the inside clearing up a lot of the front office.
Tonight was supposed to be house night, but I ended up doing work work while Liz suited up and continued working in the basement.
Liz has been a lot more motivated than me of late, in terms of working on the house. While I had some momentum setting up the washer and dryer, I’ve since settled from that motion.
Next up was the hardest bit: removing the existing gas line. Originally, I had intended to just pop off the cap. I struggled with this a bit, and decided halfway that it would be better to remove this length of pipe entirely (which connected to the gas shutoff valve).
The laundry has been piling up. And under normal circumstances, I’d be going to the laundromat. But we’ve had a washer/dryer combo sitting in the basement for some time now, waiting to get hooked up.
We’ve punted on setting these up, choosing instead to focus on the first floor of the house. It was a conscious choice, and the bulk of our efforts have been on getting the first floor a bit more in shape, a bit more habitable.
I think that for Liz, she needs to keep active and to do things. It helps her, to keep her mind focuse on other tasks. For me, diving into ordinary chores and tasks is incredibly difficult, due to the dissonance between the mundane thing I’m doing and the world outside my window.
While there are some areas that are still wavy, the taper really did “hide our sins” in terms of some of the gaps and differences between our boards.
When we got to checking the ceiling, it was *ting* *ting* *ting* everywhere. After a minute, we decided to just let me go and review/re-hit every single screw, rather than having Liz test. Because they were almost all bad.
The last 1/2″ bit of drywall was, of course, the trickiest for us to install. We got the measurements right, and dryfitting was pretty good. But we had to lift and almost get the piece fitted from an angle. It was really awkward and stressful, but once it went in it was pretty good.
This was a disheartening thing to see: most of our work, in piles of rubble around the room. Apparently, we didn’t have a beveled edge over the door, and there were waves in the pieces we installed. So he spent a while tearing that out so we could start again.