karinoyo

The floor had been about 90% done except for the last four feet stretch to the wall where the CDs were shelved, because we have too many goddamn CDs and moving them is always a hassle at least and a nightmare at worst. But if I was starting to get antsy about the incompleteness — and I can handle “it’s not done, but it’s usable” but this was just plain “not done and not even that usable” — then I know for certain CP was gritting his teeth every minute he spent in the living room. Even if he was being really nice about not saying so. Or maybe he’s just given up on fussing about incompleteness. Sigh.

So that’s been the focus, because it’s time this crap got done so it’s at least not a total construction zone. I got the iMac back from repair and haven’t even turned it on, and haven’t written, with the intent that when I get desk into planned spot I shall reward myself with the first episode of Gundam 00 and an uninterrupted half-hour of mecha glee. Ahem. And maybe a glass of wine.

But in the meantime: built temporary CD racks along the fireplace and (for once!) measuring eight times was proven correct, because all the CDs will fit in low bookshelves flanking the fireplace. Moved the living room bookshelves to the front bedroom & set them up (though CP lent a hand in a study break and moved all the books, yay). Approximately half the music remains in a temporary location in the dining room since I’ve not yet cleared out the other side of the fireplace but I’m getting there.

Finished floor, and after more research (mostly to refresh) decided to go with simple air-barrier to muffle sound between (now acoustically a bit louder) living room and bedroom. Could probably stand to be 3/4″ deep but I had a bunch of 1/2″ ply scraps that had failed the visual test for nicer uses, so I ripped those into furring strips, and today plan to attach those and then screw the drywall into that.

(End result: the wall between living room and dining room will consist of drywall on bedroom side, studs, original drywall, plywood paneling that I can’t be bothered to remove but I hate anyway, then furring strips 1/2″ thick, and THEN the new layer of drywall.)

Yeah, there are fancier things on the market — greenglue, or the sound-baffling sheets, or the quietzone stuff — but those are also pretty expensive comparatively, and it’s not like we have a television in the living room, anyway. I’ll probably save up and use the fancy stuff from the lumberyard when/if I ever choose to isolate sound from the TV-room/library or from CP’s study when he’s playing music. Hrm, anyway.

Rewired two of the outlets but decided against breaking the original outlet boxes free — for once it’s not bakelite, but metal. (I really, really cannot figure out the logic in this house’s wiring. It’s like it was done by eight different — and not very well educated — personalities. I just discovered there’s aluminum wiring in the hall’s two-way switch, and that’s only the second place I’ve found it, and I have on good authority this house has never been rewired, so why the variation? Did they just grab whatever was nearest and cheapest and to hell with the rest? Sheesh.)

I took out the nonworking motion-detect lightswitch for the hallway, which will never work as it should because of the crazy way the two-way was wired and I have no interest in completely ripping out the wiring if it works fine otherwise, but there’s a total of nine wires in that box, so it’ll be left for our patient and ultimately awesome electrical guys. May have to do the same with the second switch I wired, which I want to have the motion-switch on… except when I wired it up last night and turned power back on, when I tested the switch I got a flare of light and then ZAP… and circuit blew. Hunh. Okay, another thing for the awesome electrical professionals to do.

But I should explain that I finally took out two of the four columns, and moved one over to the other side of the dining room, and then built in a wall and extended it so now when you enter the house you’re not seeing the living room head-on, but a wall with my favoritest Ikea hack so far — inserted an Ikea Bertby between the studs. It still has to sit proud because the door’s frame requires swing-room, but it’s not as proud as it could be given that between the depth of the overhead beam is 4.5in and not the usual 3.5in.

Yeah, I know it’s for CDs but it’s also perfect for all the little things that gather dust if left out, not to mention end up looking like just a lot of clutter. Installed the last Ikea Grundtal in the top of the case as lighting. It was left over from the set I used for the kitchen. Finally! A nifty display case where small things don’t have to be seen except quickly & in passing. Yes.

That’s meant the front side (door-facing) has been enclosed & mudded & even painted (adding another color to the house’s scheme, too, this time a light blue-purple) but the back half has remained open while I figure out what I want to do with the wiring. There’s a switch at that corner that will now be buried half-behind the planned new wall, and the switch only controls one outlet.

That switch-to-outlet stuff annoys me, but I’m not going to rip out paneling and original drywall so the pigtail must remain… and then a second pigtail from the incoming line to feed the new switch/light in the display case AND a second set of outlets on the back side of the wall. I want to move my desk to that corner, so I’ll need the outlets. Wiring them isn’t hard — well, relatively, because bending copper does make the hands hurt after a bit, especially when out of practice — but the final say will have to be the approval of yet again the most awesome (and did I mention patient?) electrician.

Mr Knight is also the reason I’ve got to figure out how to adjust the junction box so it’s not blocked by new wall, since he lectured me thoroughly that all junction boxes must be accessible from the ceiling or covered by faceplate if set in wall. Yes, sir. Which is why I also built a small inset box that will get its own door (ask me how, later, when I’ve figured it out) so in the future we can access the control/switch box for the display case’s wiring — maybe even add more lights, down the road. Uh, not sure what for yet, but whatever.

Oh, and also finally completed the baseboard moulding along the foyerwall into the dining room, though I’m still waffling over the best way to handle the threshold between tiled floor in foyer to laminate/wood floor in dining room. It’s wider than most threshold openings — about 3″ or so — but only about 3/8″ deep, though fortunately the new floor and the tiles are about the same height, so there wouldn’t be one of those tricky and constantly-tripping-over slightest height changes. I don’t have a way to rip a board to 3/8″ depth, though, which means for now it’s staying as is. Might use some 3/8″ ply as a stop-gap (literally, I guess) until I come up with something sturdier.

Also did baseboard into dining room and around the base of the shelves that back to the fridge. Revealed that at some point the front facing of the shelves got pushed slightly out of true and ugh, now there’s a gap between wood of baseboard-cap and the shelves. Must deal with that later.

Finished grouting/adhesing (if it’s not a word it is now) the stones used as threshold between kitchen cork floor & dining room floor, and again between mud-room tile, kitchen cork, and dining room laminate where all three meet by the oven. Whew. Must scrub off the last of the grout, get rid of the haze, and then seal, and I don’t care if it says “sealing not required,” it’s grout, it gets sealed. Considering what I track back and forth from the garage all the time…

Incidentally, there are no pictures because right now it is all A MESS. Besides, pictures will be yet another reward once I have my desk/pretty-screen computer back in some kind of order, instead of plunked awkwardly and temporarily in the corner with piles of moved-and-not-yet-moved-back stuff.

What else? Decided against carrying the wall-moulding (I want to say plate-rail height or maybe it was picture-hanging height, whatever) and took down the trim I’d had up as test. Repaired the resulting damage (ugh, more mud, more primer) and repainted the foyer’s right-side wall, now a dramatic royal blue with a deep purple-blue glaze. In daylight, it actually looks just flat and dark, but at night you can see the purple. Odd, that, but I really like the results, plus I took a few hours and rehung all the pictures from the hallway into a grouping on that purple wall so now I can see them from where I sit in the living room. The black-frames and white-mats combination do pop nicely against the dark wall color.

Except now I must make note to save up for getting more of those frames, since the pictures with standard and/or older-style frames look really… bleah. Plus, I realized we’re lacking pictures we should have, like the fact that we don’t have one of HF & LF, or one of K1 & GRH, and we have two of the peanut but none of Jaz, and that’s just not right. (Dad, I don’t think the picture of you racing that MGB in Chicago, I think it is, really counts as a ‘formal’ portrait.)

Oh! And I also finally removed the beaten-up, rusted, and basically useless (attached with only one screw doing any holding and the others mismatched and only for show) intake vent in the living room. Found a new one that almost — but not quite, of course — fit the opening, and for which teh cover flips down to allow filter inserts. Dog hairs, never again will you gather in the underside of the furnace vent! That did necessitate going at the wall with the sawzall and building in a new vertical because the new vent is slightly taller and six inches shorter than the old, but I didn’t want to deal with a special-order.

Then I drywalled over the paneling and mudded, and primed but haven’t broken out the new living room color to paint it up yet. Still not sure what I’ll do about the baseboard, since I wanted the intake to sit above the moulding but couldn’t find a filter-holding vent that would let me do that… so it still sits right on the floor, grrr. That means the moulding will have to abut it on either side, and I’m not sure how to finish it nicely. Guess it’ll be another bit of scrap-wood and test cases.

And somewhere in there, I also spent two days doing not-much-at-all, after Balto got a bit excited and landed with his usual unerring accuracy, this time right on my pinky-toe. It hurt, and still hurt the next morning; shoes were out of the question and for a bit I feared it broken. Spent two days with my feet taped together and griping every five minutes, but as long as any task could be done while standing on one foot, I was mostly okay, though slowed down. Either it was a break and healed fast, or just badly bruised and almost healed now, I dunno and frankly it hurt enough that I don’t care to have the alternate experience just to compare. Damn bulldozer dog.

Which leads me to the last major change: the new dog door. Well, it’s not a dog door. It’s a… eh, I’ll leave that one for when I have pictures. Let’s just say sometimes I can really see my Scots heritage coming to the forefront. It’s not Yankee ingenuity, because that would be coming up with a creative solution; it’s pure Scots frugality because it’s a solution created solely by the reluctance to go spend the $100 or whatever to fabricate a longer-term solution. Besides, it works for now, the dogs come and go (as does Kiku, now) and I don’t have to go to the door to let someone in or out — or to let someone just STAND THERE with his HEAD HANGING OUT THE DOOR for several minutes — and Balto can do his regular Lizard Check business without bothering me.

On the plus side, it means Sachi now flees to the patio (because Real Dogs chill out in the grass) rather than run to the bedroom when I start slinging large sheets of drywall or running the orbital sander or whatever. Balto attends her because “hey, we go outside now?” and then he comes right back: “what’s going on here, and why was I supposed to head outside looking so unhappy?” That is, when he doesn’t return bearing a tennis ball — a grungy, dirt-covered, yard-used tennis ball — and drop it right on the spot where I was about to step. Cripes. CP’s observation is that Balto is not just Boy, he’s also 100% Dog. Dirty tennis balls, chewies tasting best when seasoned in the yard, etc.

Speaking of which, apparently everything is better when it’s taken into the yard. Both monkeys, and the bear, have been retrieved numerous times from where Balto has carried them outside. Not outdoor toys, I keep telling him, and then he’ll grab the toy and carry it out again. I gave up on the frog; he carries it outside and runs around going squeak-squeak-squeak-squeak-sq-sq-sqeauk in rapid succession, with much joy and utter glee. Especially at about two in the morning. I mean, until Balto came along, our night-time sounds consisted of frogs and crickets, the spring-time coyote pups up the creek, maybe a huffing deer, random bird song, distant highway traffic, those bizarre lizard/gecko things that sound like bad sound effects from an old video arcade (ping! zip! ping! zip!)… and now, it’s all that AND sudden lengthy stretches of a plush squeaky-toy frog being squeaked within an inch of its life.

That, and when he barks, he sounds like he’d like to manage Sachi’s (surprisingly deep-throated) danger!bark, but he’s got too much beagle in him. There’s just enough bay in his barks that he always sounds just a bit strangled. I’m not sure whether to laugh or feel sorry for him.

Yes, pictures soon, but first, must finish that wiring, and then I can start getting the drywall up. Progress!

Tagged: design, electrical, flooring, storage