Things have slowed down somewhat. We burned the candle at both ends (and possibly in the middle) – managing to get one of the picture windows into the bedroom:
And then the next day hoped to get the wrap up for the final window.
Only the next day I had a bit of a sore throat and didn’t quite feel right. After about 5 hours I was suddenly was hit by a wave of tiredness and feeling awful. We managed to get the tricky bit of the wrap done, but didn’t finish the front… Kathryn was lovely and tidied up, watered the garden and ferried me home. But the next day I was done. It started off like a cold, but spiralled into nausea and fevers and utter exhaustion. After 3 days of laying on the sofa, sleeping and watching TV (I was so tired it took me 4 goes to make it through a Star Wars film – I just had to keep stopping and sleeping), I gave in and accepted that I was not, under any circumstances, going to make it in to work on Friday.
That day passed in a wave of tiredness – but with bonus excitement. I could stand up, I put clothes on (instead of PJs), and didn’t actually need to sleep through the day, just napped a bit in the morning.
Then Saturday we went for gold – with a trip up to Seattle to collect stuff that we’d put holds on at Second Use.
There was an expected traffic apocalypse on i5* on Saturday, so we took a very relaxed drive up the peninsula, and then hopped on a ferry. It was longer, but super pretty.
And when we got there – we managed to collect actual marble tiles!
For $20 :)
We *think* there’s enough to do the bathroom floor. Although wastage on hex tiles? Hrm.
Also: a sink, light fittings, and arranged to collect a bath on Monday…
It wasn’t exactly resting, but it was a pretty chilled day. We also got to try out the DC rapid charging up in Seattle – and it worked fine this time (unlike our last traumatic trip).
I was still knackered by the end of the day though, and even today I’m struggling. I’m not sure if it’s a cold, or allergies, or what. But I’m so tired…
Despite that, on Sunday we went for it – installing the final window. And although it took us about twice as long as normal, that last window slotted into place.
We have ALL OUR WINDOWS IN!
And yesterday after collecting the bath…
We have now returned to a couple of other jobs – the attic floor and the plumbing and the electrics. I realised I’d made a mistake when I was plumbing the vent for the bathroom. I’d tried to make it so that it didn’t run through the attic space – which worked, but was long, because we wanted to have as much attic floor available as possible.
But I’d forgotten that there’s a vent fan duct that also needs to run through that space. So, there’s absolutely no point in trying to avoid the attic, so I lopped the zig-zag section out of the pipe, and made up a new simpler, shorter one. Kathryn got more flooring down, and it meant that we could put the pipe through a hole in the floor, rather than having to do some weird long slit, too.
Kathryn’s dad also arrived to help us get the bath into the house. See, it turned out that the cast iron bath we’ve chosen is… heavy enough that the folks at Second Use declared it as being one that needed the fork-lift to get it into the pickup. And getting it out of the pickup was clearly not going to be a two person job. With three of us, it turned into just a very challenging problem. We flipped it end over end, tipped it, walked it, and eventually managed to kind of lever it into the house… It’s really heavy, but we slapped a lot of extra supports in that section of the house, so it should be okay.
What is (unsurprisingly) difficult is that being a vintage bath(tub) – and having no overflow we’re finding it tricky to locate a US bath(tub) drain that’ll fit. Since over here they generally have an overflow with a flappy little flippy thing to work the built in pop-up plug for the drain. I’m trying to find a pop-up drain that’ll work… but the size also seems a little obscure.
We’re also thinking we it might be advisable to add an ’emergency’ drain to the floor…given the absence of overflow.
We just need toilets now. More tricky, because that bathroom is a 14″ rough-in. And we’ve decided we like the look of unibody toilets. Feh.
* They were closing the motorway Northbound and reducing lanes Southbound. In Seattle. One of the busiest stretches.
