Tag: demolition

Still going

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

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

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

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.

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.

The most exciting thing that happened today: Saturday edition

On By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

One:

Two:

Three:

Patching, repainting and putting the trim back in place is gonna wait to next weekend, and rearranging the room until the weekend after that, but that job was a lot easier than either of us thought it was going to be.

TERRIBLE DECISIONS: The Destructioning

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

I am in a hurry, as something that I thought was at 6:30 is at 6:00 and I need to buy a card and a gift between now and then, so have some pictures, which I don’t think need a whole lot of context anyway:

What was behind the weird patched part of the wall? An unused junction box!

Broken tile!

Broken all sorts of stuff!

They were not prepared for the amount of insulation we have in the attic. Apparently this was “chest-deep” a few minutes before I went to investigate all the coughing. Sorry about the lung cancer, guys.

You can get an idea of how deep the blown-in was from this picture. We’ll have to reinsulate once the new ceiling goes in, but that’s the biggest problem we’ve encountered so far.

You can see from the dots on the wall (paint, sprayed through the pegboard) where the old closet was. The new shower is going to be nice.

Probably no pictures tomorrow, as they’re just doing electrical and some plumbing, but we’ll see.

On being dumb and confused, in that order

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy2 Comments

IMG_7041Take a look at that there can of Mountain Dew.  Just take a second and look at it.

Oh, wait, I’m sorry, I meant “Mtn Dew,” since the company decided that a weird abbreviation instead of a perfectly normal word was how they wanted to be known from now on.  I assume trademarks are involved somehow and either way I think it’s stupid.

If you follow me on Twitter or on Instagram (and if you don’t, why not, dammit?) you may already be aware that I discovered a truly epic splat of bird shit on the door of my car when I left for work this morning– fully four or five inches wide, big enough that I have to assume it came from the bald eagle that’s been spotted around here recently, because normal birds don’t shit this big.  I mean, hell, it was a big enough splat of bird shit that I took a picture of it and put that picture on the Internet, and I don’t feel bad about it, because you would have done the exact same damn thing.

But anyway.  That huge splat of bird shit meant that I needed to hit a gas station on the way home to clean it off.  Also for gas.  And also, as it turned out, for caffeine, since as soon as I got to the gas station I realized I needed Mountain Dew.

And then I saw that can, and I saw the flavor– for Christ’s sake, crafted green apple kiwi, which is absolutely guaranteed to not be anything I want to drink, and with a word in the name that does not belong there at all to boot– and, for no clear reason, I bought the can, because the can looked so good, and despite knowing that it wasn’t going to taste very good I spent money on it anyway.

This is a gatdamb miracle of marketing over my own good common sense, and I knew it at the time and did it anyway.  And then discovered that the beverage itself was a poisonous-looking green in color, not far off from the pull tab at the top, and the color that we used to use for things like antifreezes to signal that they shouldn’t be consumed, and of course it tasted like ass.  But Mtn Dew has my money, for something I didn’t want and knew beforehand I wouldn’t like, because yay cool can!

Sigh.

Just over a year ago I wrote this post about a shitty, shitty house full of shitty, shitty people near me that I noticed had been foreclosed on by the bank and sold at auction.  The house was purchased and torn down nearly instantly, and is currently open green space.  What I left out, because it wasn’t relevant, was that there was a second shitty house not far down the road from the first shitty house.  These folks didn’t raise my ire because of the lack of white supremacist symbols on the house, and in fact it appeared to be abandoned anyway– but it must have been a terrible place to live in, because each and every time it rained, no matter how small of a rain, the entire front yard would flood.  Heavy rain could leave puddles in the yard for weeks.  I can only imagine the mold that must have been inside that house.

I drove past it Saturday night on the way home and the whole house was gone, leaving behind evidence of what sure as hell looked like an explosion.  Today, with better light, I stopped and took a couple of pictures.  Does this look like the results of a deliberate demolition to anyone?

IMG_7038

This would have been where the house was and, I think, a bit of the back yard.  You can see what looks like a piece of siding in the middle of this picture, but I promise there used to be a whole ass house there.  The picture is taken from a distance because the place is surrounded by a fence.  In particular, look at that tree on the right, and look at how it looks like the big branch bisecting that tree seems to have split the entire thing in half.  What the shit happened here?

The house behind it, by the way, appears to be fine, and there’s no visible damage to any of the trees or the grass or anything on their lot.

IMG_7039

This is a view of what would have been their front yard.  None of that looks like construction or demolition debris to me– it all looks like exploded tree.  I don’t even see anything that looks like a foundation anywhere– the house doesn’t have a footprint any longer at all.

I can’t find any news articles or any references to anything having happened there recently.  I feel like if there had been a big fire or something there would have been an article about it– but nothing looks burned.  Anybody have any theories?

I was, by the by, unable to fully clean off the birdshit.  It’s gonna take a rainstorm.

TERRIBLE DECISIONS: Today’s agenda

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

Got a lot done yesterday, including averting/dealing with one major setback when the floor didn’t turn out to be quite what we thought it was.  Ordered new underlayment for the tile today that ought to be here by Friday, so we didn’t lose much time over it.

Anyway, here’s what’s happening today:

  • Pull out the old sink and vanity
  • Get rid of the rest of the wallpaper
  • RedGard and mud the piece of cement board we put in yesterday
  • If time allows, dry-fit the floor tile

That’ll be a day, I think.  Whee!

Terrible Decisions: why not, one more

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy4 Comments

1497796_10152070199098926_1379738575_nI’m done for the day– nails pulled, tub swept, vacuumed, and cleaned, 99% of the drywall out of the way.  There’s a half-inch gap between the wall on the left and the back wall, and there’s still some drywall in the corners that I’m gonna have to use a chisel or something to get out, but it’s not something I feel like I have to worry about at this exact second.  We can bathe the boy tonight, and that’s the important thing.  I even clipped the dead wire and moved it out of the way so there’s no electrocution worries.  (Yes, I know you can’t electrocute yourself with a dead wire.  Still don’t want it dangling where my two-year-old has a chance of getting to it, especially if he’s in the tub at the time.)

Next step: rebuild.

Which is terrifying.  🙂