So, okay, by USian standards it wasn’t Long. And actually, even by UK standards it was a perfectly acceptable drive. However, the loading of all the offcuts of drywall from the house* into my father in law’s pick-up, having borrowed the pick-up from his house (the other side of Oly), then driving up to Tacoma to the drywall recycling place** (which it turns out is the far side of Tacoma, not this side of Tacoma), then off-loading the entire truckload by my lonesome tod (Kathryn’s away ’til tomorrrow), then driving across to the masonry supply place in Lakewood (which it turned out didn’t have the kind of sand we wanted) – although he did give me a couple of suggestions for places that might, then we had a chat about Lime (and how it’s actually cheaper to get the non-fluffy stuff from feed supply places – and apparently it works fine, but needs a lot more mixing). So I bought the fluffy (easier to mix) Lime this time…
….[breath]
…then driving back down to Olympia, dropping off the bag of fluffy lime (we’re going to try lime plastering. Yes, really).
…then dropping off the truck, picking up our car and driving back home.
It felt like a long f’kin day.
And who knows if taking the drywall on a 40 mile journey to recycle it is better for the environment – let’s say 20mpg? So around 14 litres of petrol, or 4 gallons… for the round trip? *Shrug* Ballpark figure. I dunno, let’s ask Google:
So, a drywall sheet has an embodied energy of 3.5MJ/kg.
We recycled 1300lbs -> or about 590kg – or material with an embodied energy of 2000MJ.
Random internet site says that 1 gallon of gasoline takes 22MJ to refine (which I suspect is low, and what does that include anyway? Does that include the energy to drill, and ship it to and from the refinery? Bah). So that’s, what 44MJ, for what we used today.
1 litre of petrol releases 34.2 MJ (about 470MJ for the 14 litres we burned (ugh))
So, the petrol used embodies around ~510MJ.
So I think it was worth it? I mean, obviously, energy is also used in turning the drywall back in to usable gypsum. Which I’m not including. But seriously, these are the kind of things that run through my head.
Ah well.
In other news, our door is now grey (en-route to being green).
And I think I’ve done nearly all the bits of joint compound filling that I can do from the ground (until we clear the other bedroom). We’ve also come up with a solution to our floor – at least, we hope. It’s a not-quite-so cheap, but much quicker solution and it resolves the concerns we both had about the nice floor finish we’re planning to use cracking.
Our floor now goes:
From the Top:
Microcement
Crack isolation membrane
3/4 ply pipe guides (in the straight bits); Thinset (in the bendy bits); 3/4 hydronic pipe
Existing 1/2″ ply
Car decking
Insulation
We don’t talk about what’s under the house, because it’s hideous.
This is iteration 8743 of the plan for the floor. At some point we’re actually going to be at a point where we can install the floor, and then we’ll have to settle on one. This is my favourite so far – the ply does the straight sections of the pipe guides – which also helps to stiffen the floor – but rather than cutting curves for every single bend in the pipe, we secure the pipe down, throw thinset over it, and then separate that whole damn lot from the microcement topping with a crack isolation membrane.
Hopefully it’ll work.
* Well, not quite all. I mean, some went in the bin and I concluded that discretion was the better part of valour when faced with the two soggy wet bags of mouldy micro-small offcuts. They can go to the tip.
** Y’know what’s slightly horrifying? I arrived and while I was offloading my moudlering pile of offcuts to be ground down to powder and then turned back in to drywall, I watched as a truckload of not-to-spec drywall (apparently usually it’s “off-square”) was dumped to be recycled. Given that our entire building was off flipping square, there’s got to be a better use for the drywall seconds than re-milling it to reuse it. I mean, I get it if it’s got lots of massive bubbles in it, but… ugh.
