Still going

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We are still doing shit around here.

Got up at six. By 9:00 I was downstairs wrecking these shelves. They were in the way. I forgot to take a Before picture but I imagine you can imagine.

Then the electrician showed up. The electrician installed all new LED lighting in the basement and tore out a bunch of ballasts that were starting to fail and, in one case, melt. It is astonishing how much friendlier the basement looks now:

(Our basement goblin isn’t completely moved out, so some of that stuff is hers.)

I should find an older picture of the basement with the old lights. My God.

We took my wife’s old desk apart and threw it out:

I built (and by “built,” I mean “put together according to the instructions”) my wife her new desk:

Cable management is coming, I promise. It’s making me twitch too. That desk is adjustable, a sitting/standing desk, which is absolutely ideal for my wife because she’s only 5’ tall. See that little panel on the right there, that you use to adjust it?

Those are the icons for “adjust to standing height” and “adjust to seating height.”

The current state of the dumpster. They’re coming to collect it tomorrow, I’m not exactly sure when:

Oh, we also threw away another old shitty end table and my old desk from when I was a kid, which we were using in the garage. I’m fully expecting the guy to complain that the desk is an inch too high for the bin and to have to cut it in half at the last minute.

Not pictured: I threw away all of my CDs— several hundred of them– which have been sitting on a shelf in the basement for fifteen years. I strongly suspect a lot of them won’t even work any longer and there isn’t a single device in the house that even plays CDs any longer other than some similarly-ancient electronics in the basement that are getting taken to e-waste tomorrow or Friday. I only discovered one CD that I didn’t have an MP3 copy of— a recording by the jazz musician ex-husband of a friend who is no longer alive— and I decided that I didn’t need to go to the trouble to find a way to rip it.

Other tasks today: I beat the bedroom 90% into submission; most things are where they are going to live now, and my leather chair and ottoman have been moved into the library, which is now a little more crowded than I like, but all three of us can sit in there at the same time now. I also reinstalled the rack for the wall shelving that we had to remove when we tore the wall down. And, somehow, more vacuuming. Apparently at some point we ran an extremely busy pet grooming business for like a year, never cleaned up any of the fur, and never noticed until this week. Also I went to the comic shop. It’s Wednesday, after all.

In other news, I am about 120 pages from the end of the 1,232 page book I’m reading, and I’m going to either finish it tonight or die. Not sure which.

Tomorrow: one last frenzy of throwing things away until they take away the dumpster, put together the new cabinet for the garage, a little bit of touch-up painting in the bedroom, install the last bits of baseboard in the bedroom, clean clean clean, organize the garage as much as we can stand, a little more work in the basement, and go visit a showroom for the next bathroom project.

Yeah. There’s another fucking bathroom project. I’ll tell you later.

Still doing stuff

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Let’s start with something I didn’t do. Or, at least, I didn’t do much. I hired a man to come dig up the pole. I did not dig up the pole. I’m a job creator now!

Here is the hole:

I gave this wonderful human $120 for about an hour of work and it is the best $120 I have ever spent, because he not only dug that fucking thing out of the ground but he also beat the shit out of the concrete with a sledgehammer until it broke off the pole. Here is the pole:

You see that shit? They sunk a giant steel pole into thirty inches of concrete, triple reinforced with rebar, to hang up a wood birdhouse. The pole is also completely full of concrete after about a foot past what I had cut off. Like hell am I doing that job. That is absolutely what money is for.

Speaking of overdoing things, we used to have a workbench in the basement:

and also:

See that piece on the left? That’s a four by twelve. That’s a fucking ceiling beam, is what that is. And some crazy bastard decided to repurpose it into a workbench and absolutely overengineer everything. We were going to take the cabinets out too but my wife decided against it, so at the moment, they remain. There was also a quarter-inch thick steel plate, maybe 18” x 72”, as part of the workbench, but I didn’t get a picture of that. It’s in the bin, though!

It’s in there, I promise. You can see part of it in between the closet doors on the lower right there.

Anyway, that’s Day 2 of What I Did On My Spring Break. There are a couple more minor tasks to be done tonight but they don’t involve destruction. The garage cabinet arrived today; we might get around to throwing my wife’s old desk into the bin tonight or we might do it tomorrow. We’ll see.

We have one more full day with the bin and they come to take it away on Thursday. There is a slight chance that we might have them bring us another one. Stay tuned.

FULL SPEED AHEAD

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The precious arrived this morning.

The very first thing we did was pull down the cabinets in the garage, revealing pristine pegboard behind them:

I was fully convinced that there was going to be a massive hole and perhaps a live possum behind those cabinets, so the fact that it ended up being more usable pegboard is a huge plus. We tossed the cabinets into the bin and then threw out a bunch of stuff from the garage and the back yard that has been sitting around for way too long, plus an ancient end table from inside the house that we’ll be replacing soon. Then we ordered a garage cabinet from Lowe’s that will be here tomorrow. Among the things we threw away: a roof rake that we inherited from my in-laws easily ten years ago if not longer that has never been out of the box it came in. My wife, who I love dearly, tried to keep it. We just had fourteen feet of snow and felt no need to rake the roof. We’re never using that Goddamn thing.

I have been told that she will very much enjoy the I Told You So moment if it comes next winter. Me, I’ll just buy a new fucking roof rake. (I won’t. This will never happen. I find the entire concept of roof rakes ridiculous.)

Then we tried to cut the post down again:

You may notice that it looks shorter than last time. The reason is I tried to cut it off at ground level using the same reciprocating saw and a new saw blade and it absolutely would not bite, so I tried again from higher up, taking off a foot and a half or so more, and it cut through clean just like it did last time. At this point what’s left is full of twigs and soil and, we’re pretty sure, at least one dead baby bird, and I’m pretty sure the bottom six inches or so is full of concrete, which is why my saw wouldn’t cut through it. I refuse to dig out whatever blob of concrete this thing got sunk into, so I threw a post up on Craigslist offering $100 for anyone who wants to come tear this thing out of my lawn and got six responses within ten minutes, so we have a guy coming over tomorrow to do that. If he flakes, we have five more in line, so somebody is going to do it. Just not me.

Then it was time for the bedroom. Which is much bigger than it looks in this picture, our bed is just huge. There’s also plenty of space behind me, which is where the bed used to be.

The order of operations:

  1. Strip the bed.
  2. Pull the made-of-fucking-neutronium mattress off the bed and lean it up against the wall somewhere. This was easily the hardest part of the job.
  3. Lift the metal frame off from around the mattress and base, Tetris it across the room into its new location. Get the chair that was sitting in the corner being in the way out of the way.
  4. Shove the adjustable base, also heavy as fuck, into its new location, lifting the frame up and out of the way to slide the base underneath it.
  5. Wash and clean the floor. Wonder how we have been living in the immense amount of filth that was under our bed. Discover things that should not have been under there.
  6. Tetris Thor’s Mattress back on top of the bed.
  7. PIVOT!!!!!
  8. Move the dresser from its old location (where the bookshelves are in this picture) to its new location to the right of where I’m standing while I’m taking the picture.
  9. Take all the books off both bookshelves, move the bookshelves. Resolve to throw one of them away as soon as possible since it’s falling apart.
  10. Look around for a bookshelf solution; Ikea is getting so much money from me in the near future, but nothing has been ordered just yet.
  11. Order two new nightstands that are more functional than the ones we have; they’ll be here Wednesday.
  12. Put most of the books back. Throw some away and put some in a box for Goodwill or whoever takes old books that nobody wants.
  13. Clean the floor again a few more times.
  14. Upon the wife’s declaration that we’re hiring someone to redo our closet (behind me) soon, tear the old doors off the closet and throw them into the dumpster.
  15. Holy fucking Christ how do we live like this???? Vacuum the shit out of the floor— again— and the old tracks for the closet doors. The closet doors were almost never closed anyway, so seeing our clothes inside the closet isn’t that big of a deal.

Meanwhile, while I was tearing down closet doors:

See that wooden trellis, back against the fence? Bek tore that down. We still need to fix the fence. That’s on the list for tomorrow, along with starting work in the basement, possibly putting the rest of the shelving back on the wall in the bedroom, and watching as someone takes five minutes to tear that post out and still gets a hundred dollars of money from me because I don’t want to do it. Also, I have a dentist appointment, scheduled before I knew about all this shit.

Best Spring Break evar.

Pause

On By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized3 Comments

My intestines exploded again this morning for no clear reason and I’ve been asleep all day. It’s 7:00. Did I miss anything?

In which I shove stuff around

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Not pictured: the chaos behind me, involving our bed, everything we had to move out of that corner, and a ton of stuff that we used to paint/patch/repaint/prime everything and haven’t moved back into the garage yet. You can see where the wall used to be on the right there; the seams range from, well, that, to nearly invisible depending on the direction and amount of light in the room. It’ll be fine. That missing baseboard in the back corner was already missing and has been since we bought the house. We threw furniture in front of it and didn’t worry about it; the fact that it was literally hidden behind. a wall helped. We assume there used to be some sort of ladies’ vanity there or something like that. Anyway, we cannibalized baseboard from the half-wall we removed to extend out to that point and are going to have to go to Lowes to see if we can get something similar to fit in what’s left of that corner.

Tomorrow we have to figure out how to Tetris our king-sized bed frame, absurdly heavy mattress and adjustable base up against that wall, then start moving everything else to where it’s supposed to be, cleaning years of dust off the floor as we go. My wife has a plan. I am just doing what I’m told. I have, like, two other very minor projects in mind for tomorrow; we can get those done when we get annoyed at moving stuff around in the bedroom.

Also, mental note: find a rug. God, I hate that floor.

In which I destroy stuff

On By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

We have a dumpster coming next week, and I have never been more excited about anything in my entire life. We are going to be tearing apart or taking down all sorts of shit that has been slightly annoying but not annoying enough to actually deal with during the fifteen years we have lived in this house. This metal post in the back yard has never had a birdhouse on it. You can see the rotten remains of it on the top part of the post on the ground back there, but we never bothered to do the work to tear the thing out because it’s cemented in place. It’s just been sitting there being an eyesore. Well, I cut a couple of chunks off of it today in preparation for either cutting it flush to the ground or digging the cement chunk out next week— I wanted to make sure the blade for my reciprocating saw would actually cut through the thing, and it looks like the answer’s yes.

Meanwhile, the size of modern cars means that my Kia and my wife’s car only somewhat fit in the garage, and these cabinets have been in my way for years. I tore the doors off today and we’ll take the cabinets down tomorrow. To the garbage with you! We’re going to order a standalone cabinet or two from Lowe’s that will use the space better and actually allow me to get out of my car without turning sideways.

There’s a workbench we’ve never used in the basement that’s going to go too, and we’ll finally repaint the bedroom tomorrow and start rearranging in there. We’ve got electricians coming in for new lighting in the basement, too, and we might tear down some paneling down there too just for the hell of it.

Soooooo psyched.

Victory

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

I have made it to Spring Break. Certainly not the hardest year to do so, but I started my last three classes of the day with the words “your job is to make sure I don’t go to jail today” anyway. My official observation last week turned out literally perfect, and the guy who was in my room for the disaster lesson on Tuesday was back yesterday and everything went beautifully.

I even made it through April Fool’s Day without any particular nonsense, although one of my students did attempt to convince me she’d passed out, sticking to it until I stepped over her prone body and pointed out to the whole room that generally when human beings pass out they fall backwards.

“I guess she could be dead,” I said. “If that’s the case, someone needs to drag her into the hallway. There’s no dying in here. Y’all know the rules.”

One of the boys actually got up and that’s when she abandoned the joke.

And yes, I really do have a rule that no one is allowed to die in Math class, and I really am like this, and I guarantee if you ask my kids to name one rule in my class, about a third of them will mention that they need to stay in their seats and the rest of them will say they aren’t allowed to die.

Anyway, I’ve been playing video games all evening, and now I’m going to go read until I decide it’s time to go to bed. Hooray!

Monthly Reads: March 2026

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Book of the Month is the most excellent The Black Hunger, by Nicholas Pullen. This was kind of a bleh month overall, but Slewfoot and Trad Wife were pretty good too.