They took the precious away today, so I can no longer arbitrarily choose to throw away any object I own. It’s very sad for all of us. There has been a distinct slowdown in the pace of work around the house today, very likely due to both of us finally and thoroughly running out of steam. I did manage a couple of projects, though: I cleared all of the books from my Chicago classroom library out of the basement, some to the dumpster and some to donation and a small number that will be brought to my classroom on Monday. And we put this together:
Bek got some touch-up painting done in the bedroom, too. We still have baseboard to deal with, plus making the garage usable again (mostly an organization/putting everything away project; that cabinet is currently empty) and installing a couple of things in the basement, plus restoring the basement to its former glory as a mostly-unused workout room. The bedroom’s not quite 100% yet either. It’s 5:30 right now; we had an appointment at 3:00 that took an hour and a half or so; I’m hoping that one of those projects gets done by the end of the day. Just one more today will be enough.
Maybe one more update tomorrow. I have a couple of reviews I’ve been sitting on that need to get written, and sooner or later I’m going to have to admit that I’m going back to work in a few days. For right now, the PS5 is calling for the first time in a little while, and I’m going to answer it.
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.
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:
Strip the bed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Order two new nightstands that are more functional than the ones we have; they’ll be here Wednesday.
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.
Clean the floor again a few more times.
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.
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.
That slight pinkish hueis how we know that the drywall compound hasn’t finished drying yet; this needs another sanding before it’s ready to paint, but considering how it looked a couple of weeks ago this represents significant improvement. We meant to get this done last weekend but neither of us were feeling well so it got put off to yesterday and today; I capped off that loose wire and stuck it into a box (It meets code now! It’s even straight and flush to the wall!) and we both pitched in on the sanding. Bek did the mudding. Hopefully next weekend we’ll get to throw some furniture around, and then there’s a dumpster coming for the first few days of Spring Break, during which I will have to be restrained from throwing away everything we own. Do we need a dining table? The oven? Come on, let’s just put ’em in the dumpster.
Seriously, we have like half a dozen projects planned for Spring Break (most of them involve destroying stuff, which is exciting!) plus a handful of contractors and other specialists coming out to either take care of other things we’re not smart enough for or give us estimates for them. If we get more than half of the shit we’re thinking about taken care of it’s going to be a very successful Spring Break.
My other project today was … filling a hole in front of the house, which may be a post all on its own. I never realized that it was possible to be bad at filling in a hole, or to fill in a hole incorrectly, but I appear to have done both of those things. One way or another the current phase of the Fill The God Damn Hole project is complete; the only question is whether we need to move to Fill The God Damn Hole, Phase 3: In Which I Learn to Pour Concrete, Because Fuck This.
We have been on a hell of a tear around here lately; the boy’s new loft bed isn’t finished yet and the mattress won’t be here until Monday anyway, but we tore apart his old bed (storage, with a storage headboard as well, so it was quite a job) first and moved that into the garage. Today also involved reinstalling the trim I removed yesterday so that the new refrigerator could be moved in, then putting the door back, then hanging up some smoke detectors that have been in the Wrong Place for literal years, so we got all kinds of stuff done at the Siler homestead today. Tomorrow I’ll put the desk together and add the stairs on the side and then the bed will be done, and sometime in the next couple of days there’s going to be some painting in the living room. Also, now that I’m an electrician, there’s a really good chance that our front and back porch lights are not long for this world, because I’ve never liked them.
I know I promised a pillow review. Probably not tomorrow, since I’m sure I’ll be posting “after” pictures, so let’s say Monday. I promise soon, though.
The boy’s room is done! All we need to do now is get all of his shit out of my room and my office and put it back in his! And that’s his problem! Hooray!
The final project was to get the curtains up; I’m going to be honest: I was scared of this, as getting things that require drilling multiple holes and using drywall anchors straight, level, and even is not something that I’ve ever been very good at. I’m not gonna promise that this is contractor-quality measurement but neither of us can see anything wrong looking at it and frankly that’s all I care about.
The other corner, with a couple more of the trees. We bought him a new bed– I managed to destroy his old bed frame, don’t ask– but it won’t be here until September so for now the box springs and mattress are just on the floor.
CONTROVERSIAL DECISION: we decided to leave his door and the closet door alone. While neither of us liked the yellow in the room, with everything repainted I actually like how they look, and since they would have been a pain in the ass to paint anyway we decided to stick with the original color. I don’t love how it looks next to the white furniture but whatever.
We need to get him another lamp today, because the room is a bit darker than it used to be, but that’s the last touch.
EDIT: I have been informed there has been a decor change since I’ve started typing this.
Each of the six trees now contains a Porkachorp. I feel very bad for this one, who only wants the little birdie to be his friend:
As it works out, this is the one you’re looking straight at if you’re standing in the doorway of his room looking from the hallway, so I can look forward to this haunting me for the rest of the time I live in this house.
(Also, my wife and I have both noticed that our cameras are having a hell of a time with the green color; the best look at what it actually looks like is the brighter corner of green in the top picture. If the room is dark, the darker leaves go blue, which is *fascinating*.)
The view from the doorway. Still some cleaning and straightening to do, obviously, and the books need to go back on the shelves, but:
There is a cat in this picture, by the way:
So that’s that, for now. There was some fun with archaeology the way there always is when you do any kind of renovation in an old house, as the little nook in the back appears to have had some built-in architecture removed at some point– there were tack strips nailed down across the middle of the floor and some weird traces of paint and one bit of wall with missing baseboards. The floor is otherwise undamaged, though, and as you can see it looks great.
Oh, and we just pulled up a corner of the carpet in our perfect rectangle dining room to reveal ordinary subflooring underneath, and I said the words “This would be the easiest hardwood flooring job ever, if we wanted to try it.” I don’t know why I said those words.
…and a new mattress, to be completely specific. The wife and I spent part of the afternoon looking at mattresses, and discovered something interesting: despite the fact that we cannot agree on a mattress in a store, generally because she wants things too soft for me and I want things too firm for her, when we actually went to the Sleep Number place our preferred Sleep Numbers were only about 5 or 10 apart.
I cannot explain this. Our current mattress, which we’ve had for seven years, is starting to need rotation far too often, and while a new bed isn’t a huge priority right now it’s bubbling up a bit more often than it used to. I would like to stop having to take ibuprofen before bed, although that’s less for the jimmylegs than for strictly mattress-related stuff.
Thing is, Sleep Number beds are a bit on the expensive side, especially when you’re dealing with a King-size mattress, which is what we have. I don’t want to drop that kind of money without at least a couple of people giving me first-hand commentary.
Anybody out there have a Sleep Number bed and want to share about it?
