Day: May 2, 2012

So I finally got around to putting down the plastic sheeting, digging out the steam stripper and set to on the final downstairs wall. Well, apart from the teeny one next to the kitchen door. Now, prior to this job, on every wall (I think) the sockets had not been refitted when I was steam stripping. Whilst they were attached, they hung from the walls like alien eyes on stalks. This time, however, having had children and animals in the house, the sockets were neatly up against the wall. This is important. It is, as we shall see, Chekhov’s gun.

When steam stripping, water often runs down the wall. To avoid it pooling on our nice new floor I ran plastic along the floor and taped it to the skirting (base) boards. I did nothing about the socket. I merrily set to with the stripper (uh, err, the steam stripper) and scraped the grotty yellow paint/glue mix from the walls. Mostly it’s been done, this is a final run past before I start liberally throwing filler on the walls and sanding them smooth(ish).

The water ran merrily down the wall and onto the plastic sheet. Yay, I did say, as it pooled there.

I danced my way along the wall (as I’m prone to, when working on the house) and stripped the paint until… Click.

Oh arse, I thought, as I looked down at the socket and across at the RCD*. The water had indeed merrily run into the socket, which, positioned as it was, properly against the wall, meant that the water had actually run into the socket.

I unscrewed the wall plate and dried it off externally, blowing air through it. No dice. After some more rounds of cursing my idiocy and wafting hot air at it from the hair drier (connected to the ultra-long 15A extension lead I made a while ago), I decided to just stuff it and finish stripping the wall. I did so. I wafted more air at it. I blew in it. I waited. I tried again. And again. And finally spent even longer heating it with the hair drier and blowing in it.

It worked. Yay.

Only I actually spent more time on the bloody switch than I did on the actual stripping. Still, that said, the wall is ready to be filled. And sanded. And filled. And painted!

* Residual current device (trip switch, earth/ground leakage switch)

So, the house is actually progressing. And I did, with some effort, persuade myself to do work on Chester.

Chester, as you may recall, had a failed water pump. I fitted a new one, however, I made a pig’s ear of it. Indeed, possibly more of a dog’s breakfast of multiple pig’s ears. It leaked, not a lot, but a bit after installation. This annoyed me because it was, in essence, a fairly simple job. However, not to be defeated I took the damn thing off again this morning and found that I’d made a hash (of that dog’s breakfast of pig’s ears) of installing the gasket. Somehow, despite my care and attention, I’d managed to ruck the gasket up making a gap (which I’m astonished sealed as well as it did). So, I took the whole lot off, cleaned up the mating surfaces and replaced the gasket with instant silicone gasket. Not best practice but it saved me trying to find the stanley knives* and going to buy some gasket paper to cut a new gasket.

At the moment it appears to have worked. We’ll see, though. I’ve less faith in myself than normal, because I’m waaaay out of practice with this**. Anyhow, it didn’t leak when I refilled it. I will now spend the next two weeks checking coolant.

And then, thanks to a quick tweet to @aminorjourney I found out the height of her desk, which whilst I was dogsitting I noticed was almost exactly 1cm to high for me, which allowed me to do lots of complex calculations about how high my desk legs should be***, then to cut them (I didn’t have the energy to cut the desk supports to the right length). Having done this I sanded and primed them. I’m torn now, because I was originally going to spray them white (or blue to match the walls), but I’ve got a can of black paint sat there, which is a bit bachelor pad, but at the same time, is ‘free’.

Meh.

And now I’m going on a quest to find plastic sheeting (which I know we had somewhere), so I can strip the final section of wall and start filling and sanding in preparation for painting.****

* All of which had disappeared, again, until I finished.
** But if I’m going to build this soon, and since I’ve made a deal to buy a whopping great motor and controller, I suppose I better had, then I best get back into practice.
*** Simple calculations, but a surprising number of them, because it’s made from scaffolding and I needed to work out how much height the joints add.
**** You may be asking about my uni course. Me too. It says my module started on monday but there’s nothing on the course site, there’s no discussion from other students. I have, however, I think got clearance from my work to do the audit; so yay.