Ten Days Away

Ten days, a long time away from this blog. Hmmm, my coffee cup is empty. Also the cat is sitting right in the way. Typing around a seventeen pound cat ain't easy. Been busy.

A 1979 Vaughan Model 99 Professional Rip Hammer. Sweetest balanced hammer I ever used. It's been through the wars, so to speak. It's on the fourth or fifth handle. Any carpenter or anyone who has spent at least a decade whaling away on nails always has a favorite. It gets the status of at least a beloved family pet.

Usually the Model 99 has a 13" handle. I like the reach of the 999's but not what they do to my right elbow, so a 15" handle on a 99 head. The orange hammer is sold by Sears but made by Vaughan. I use it for bashing things other then nails and de-nailing. The floor underneath is pre-finished yellow pine on my upper landing. Somewhat distressed from two years of dragging furniture, house parts, vanities, and fixtures across it.

Need more coffee..... Cat's gotta go somewhere else.


I'd much rather buy bread. But at three bucks and up for bread without HFCS*, it's not worth it. Cheaper to lay in some flour and eggs and what-not. Some rather ugly banana bread. Good though. Also a convenient way to use old bananas.

On to the Back Bath....

Staring at that claustrophobic hole wasn't working. It stayed as ugly as it ever was. The room wouldn't be so bad in layout except some super genius took nine square feet from it and used it for the hall linen closet. The vanity sits in one niche, and on the other side of the linen closet, the toilet is wedged in another niche by the tub. There is about sixteen square feet of open floor space at most. Storage is paltry at best. Note this gem over the toilet.


The inebriated illegal immigrants who originally built the place had a little trouble getting the vanity top to fit. So they cut a slot in the sheet rock. The plumber who re-plumbed the house from the original polybutene wasn't great at patching. So.......


Since I got quite a bit of yellow-board scrap, away the damaged sheet rock went.

Yes, with forty whacks, anything can fit in a box. One cast marble sink-top.


It's just not worth it to leave shut-off valves on the supply lines. I hate mutilating cabinets to get the valves through. Also, the lines are in the wrong place. No matter what side the vanity drawers will be on, a line is there. So, there will be a few 90' elbows added later.


The tile floor, one foot square tiles and the caulk is a mixture of grout and.... caulk? The tiles were laid down on a very thin layer of thin-set which in turn, was right over the subfloor which still had the glue on it from the sheet vinyl. Adhesive properties of such can be rated as non-existent. It came right up. No scraping needed.


Whack! Blam! Crunch!

A little later, I stopped right about here. One fixture left to remove.

The door had acne.

A little later....what door, what molding?

The wallpaper band...ugh.

It's going away soon.


The shower-tub is staying. It's an ugly beige relic from the eighties but it's a sturdy ugly relic. It probably has at least twice the resin and layers of a modern fiberglass unit.


* High Fructose Corn Syrup

Sloth and Indolence

Da Blog

Setting yet a new record for sloth and indolence, blog wise. I'm not planning on doing any Soviet Encyclopedia additions or deletions today. Still sitting on the fence about advertising. I despise it since most of it is un-targeted and strewn into the public space like litter along a roadside.

The End of the Attic House Project

The attic-house is done. Spent the last day in....the crawl space. Still, it is the attic house. R and R#2 did a really nice job in the crawl space. The foundation is painted with Dry-Lok, insulated, sealed and clean. B is a good guy. He tends to be craftsman like now and then as am I. This can be bad when time is of the essence.

It had more then the usual issues of a North Carolina tract house. The insulation was so poor as to be non-existent, the wiring was beyond strange and drove the poor electrician nuts. The windows are single pane and the owner wanted to keep them so the boss did the best he could. He had to re-glaze and reset them. The interesting thing is, that the builder many years ago did not even bother to nail them in. I looked into the air return duct and saw the exhaust duct going through it. Wild.

Yowza.....four days!

Yowza.....four days! I'm pooped, have been all week. The "Green" house is close to done, or so we think. I'm doing the right side of the closet door trim gap today. I was all fat n' happy until I discovered the right side of the door trim was 3/32" wider then the left. I had to rip and stain another piece. It didn't go in yesterday cuz I was chopping trim for the rear porch and then Young R and I were carrying on after the boss had to go down to the energy people for a little while. Young R makes a good cut man. I walked him through the first piece, long, short, and angles. After that, we got rolling.

He's still got to learn to clean brushes better, gave him some flack about it. My pet brush for the "Brown" house is over there now, and brushes are like towels. If I got a favorite, I keep it, even with wear and tear. The thing was as stiff as a board with paint.

My metabolism just burns too fast. Literally. It's a northern European adaption, instead of just turning food into energy, it also produces heat. I can go shirt sleeves into the 50s F quite happily, but summers are murder. I used to be able to throw a big bowl or two of ice cream at it at the end of the day to keep it happy, but since my lactose intolerance got near-total, it's been interesting looking for other sources of fuel. Pecan pie is pretty close to meeting fuel needs but expensive. Going to experiment tonight with fatty beef and potatoes. I'm not worried about cholesterol, it hasn't been above 130 ever. Yet another gift from a distant ancestor. 180 lbs, I'm in good shape, below 170, it means that it's time for refueling, below 160 (been there, ain't fun, no heft and no energy), its time to slow way down and eat and eat and eat. I envy people who can keep weight on.

After this week, it's just me, myself and anything in my fridge....... Next next week, it's me, myself, and Giovanni's Pizza, R J's Deli, Mama's Italian Restaurant (Actually Egyptian with some good stuff), The Persian place at the clock tower in Herndon, The White Palace, Pen's Kitchen, and quite a few others up in Northern Virginia, including, IHOP. North Carolina is still a bit of a wash for me, haven't really found anything that I could call interesting yet.

If the cat slept any harder, she'd wear herself out. 16 pounds, so better.

I can get the bumper and mounting kit for the work truck overnight....cheap. Neat. Think I'll order it tomorrow morning. I pretzel-ed the old one on a tree.