The Toilet Incident
Fast forward to today, after work. Where I’m in the bathroom, having a little… personal time. When I stand up and flush the toilet, the tank starts hissing and letting out what sounds like a series of loud puffs of air.
Fast forward to today, after work. Where I’m in the bathroom, having a little… personal time. When I stand up and flush the toilet, the tank starts hissing and letting out what sounds like a series of loud puffs of air.
So far, I’ve been doing the cutting and Liz has been handling the main areas with a roller. We’re planning on two coats, given how much paint the joists soak up – so the work is steady, but slow going. The crazy thing to keep in mind is that we’ve already painted these joists… but the paint just gets soaked up by the wood.
We’ve been having issues with our hot water of late. I don’t usually take long showers in the mornings, but from time to time, I’ll be in there for a while. The last few months, both Liz and I have noticed the shower water getting colder, a little faster.
Spent some time after work today, painting in the back basement. Previously, we’ve put on some primer and a single coat – and tonight was just applying a second coat to finish things off.
Today for our house day, Liz and I continued working in the basement. We had a few big tasks on the docket: patch up the cleanout with cement, repair some of the brick along the baement walls, and start to bring back a few items we moved out when we cleared the basement, in December.
On Sunday, we had an unexpected knock on the door from a young guy who was a location scout for the TV show “Chicago PD.”
Apparently, they were in the area and looking for a house to do an exterior and interior shot. The director had not been happy with any of the location choices to date, and they were still looking (and hoping to get a location settled in the next few days).
On Friday, the Craftsman 41″ 8-Drawer Rolling Cabinet we ordered came in. It’s been sitting in our entryway for a few days, but we got around to moving it to the basement late Sunday evening.
While Liz was out on a big day full of errands, I worked a bit in the office – adding more insulation to the north wall.
Started to get back into more of a house night schedule, after a bit of time away. With the big push to get our basement floor epoxied, Liz and I expended a lot of energy… and have needed time to recharge.
After letting the basement epoxy dry and cure for several days, Liz and I finally went back downstairs today to take a look.
It’s begun! With the basement fully cleared and washed/cleaned (not “>once but “>twice), we hit a pretty big milestone. Today (and tomorrow), we’ve got someone coming to apply epoxy onto our concrete basement floor.
We went back and forth a bit – with Liz putting down the mixture, letting it sit for about 5 minutes, then scrubbing the areas. After that, she rinsed the area with the powerwasher as I helped clean up everything with our shop vac (a tool I’ve grown to really love, these last few weeks).
Liz, suited up and ready to work with some concreteready repair. We’re working with this stuff because it sets very quickly, and can have epoxy applied to it in a short amount of time (versus a multi-day curing time for regular concrete).
We’ve done several runs to paint stores, to try to track down the epoxy we need. And I also went back and forth to our local Ace a few times, trying to put together a MacGyver-like apparatus to enable us to use both hot + cold water for the power washer. The apparatus ended up failing, so we had to go with just cold water (which honestly wasn’t too bad).
With us having just gotten back home yesterday, Liz and I were reluctant to suit up and begin work on the house again. But after a late breakfast, some Star Trek, and a review of our Google Calendar plans… we realized we had a strict schedule to keep to.