I’m not going to talk about the US’s hideous slide into fascism because – what am I going to say? I’ve been harping on about it – as have most queer folks for ages and lo, SCOTUS decides to rip up precedent and rewrite the laws for a oligarchic theocracy. Quelle surprise.
We knew the Trump administration had installed a bunch of right wing apparatchiks on the court. The dems did sweet FA to fix it and now we have…what we have. Fuck knows what we do now, but the future isn’t looking terribly rosy for the US long — or even medium term right now.
Anyhow, to finish off from the last post – it turned out that the belt I installed on the record deck was, in fact, too small. Replacing the ~20″ one with the 21.4″ one seems to have cured – or at least massively improved the horrendous wow/flutter, although for some reason my speed sensor doohickey was being incredibly difficult to work with yesterday, so I’m not wholly convinced I’ve got the speed set right.
Getting the belt changed over was about as crap as I was expecting – it is fiddly as all fuck, and requires you to feed the old belt out through kinda looping it through this tiny gap. It has an access plate you can remove to help with getting the belt over the motor, but I can see no possible way of changing the belt through the access plate, so I end up taking the main cover off and partially stripping down the drawer. I get why no one wants to fix these benighted objects!
Still, it’s entertainingly fun, and having got it working I’m enjoying the ridiculousness of it. Although connecting it through my cheapie preamp it has a hell of a lot of hum. So I’m gonna need to work on that. The HiFi would be really high-end at various points in time. I guess late 80s? I mean, I’m not sure when the RP-119 was introduced (I should have looked for some date codes while it was in bits), and the DA-1000 CD player is early 80s, but they were still pretty freaking expensive in the mid 80s… So, yeah. Just like our spice drawer would wow a medieval person, if I could travel in time a Hi-Fi buff would be super impressed by the pile of archaic crap I have collected.
Does make me a little sad that I got rid of my laserdisk, and my CED player. Should have kept them… mind, there’s no space for either. In fact, the record whatsit is going to have to undergo a redesign to shuffle these around. We need more space for vinyl (no? really?) and I would think the Hi-Fi stuff may have to live in a narrower shelf up above.
The house progresses. A little bit ago we got a heat pump installed to reduce our gas usage, add cooling, and have a more flexible answer to heating the house when the temperature keeps swinging wildly outside. We’d decided last year that a heat pump was going in, but this is the first job we’ve let someone else do, and I’m super grateful for it, because the weather has suddenly got very warm the last few days (30° c) which had previously made the house very, very warm. And at the moment it’s pretty pleasant in here.
Unfortunately, we hoped to go with an in-ceiling unit which would have been less… offensively plastic lump on the wall, but it turns out they have to be installed flat (who knew?) and we don’t have anywhere flat that it can go. So instead it’s at the end of the dining room.
I mean, it’s above eyeheight, and it’s white, so it kinda blends more than it could. But next time? Next time we’re going to think this bit through more.
Of course there’s a next time.
We’ve also crept closer on the bathroom – it’s almost entirely grouted (really annoyingly I missed one groutline that I thought I’d done before where it goes from the floor to the wall. I could have sworn I grouted it, but apparently not. It’s only about a 1.2m long, but… yeah, I’ll have to do that this week.
We spent a bit of time yesterday installing the sink onto the wall.
The salvage – unused sink that we bought probably 3 years ago goes pretty well in our bathroom and, pleasingly, I managed to locate the blocks of wood I mounted in the wall when we did the framing, so didn’t have to come up with a mounting system for it on plasterboard. In fact, that went pretty well. I still need to plumb it in, which is my least favourite of jobs, but at least it’s just the one bend that I need (a 45° where it comes out of the wall, then it should — should attach to the drain from the sink).
That being in we spent a big chunk of time today trying to find a tap that we liked, and having realised that our medicine cabinet really doesn’t go very well in that bathroom we also spent a chunk of time looking at medicine cabinets. Us being us it took quite a while, but we eventually settled on an Italian design from the 70s (we actually like the 60’s version better, but it is marginally wider than the 70’s one, and the 70’s one was sliiightly cheaper).
The tap ended up, of all places, coming from Ikea.
I also took a brief look at installing the shower. I think I’m going to have to do some gnawing at the tiles to make the connector fit, but I’m thinking I might attack that this week. Then it’s just a final clean, seal, and it can go into service. Although I’d also like to get the trim in around the door, too. That’s a fairly complex job which I’m not… entirely looking forward to. I spent a few minutes sat down with bits of wood, and I now at least think I have a workable plan for how the trim will work.
I’d always known it would be a problem with the floor in the bathroom being significantly higher than the floor everywhere else (thanks to needing the concrete for the shower basin). Again, one of the joys of renovating rather than starting from scratch.
Still, I *think* it’ll work, I just need to grab hold of some motivation to finish it. Although I guess the SCOTUS ruling should be enough motivation, with them making very clear that the right wing already having started villainising and slandering trans folks, attempting to make us social pariahs and outcasts and remove us from public life, and doing so fairly successfully with their base in right wing states, they want to bring that to the whole of the US now. So fucking yay.
Anyhow, perhaps that will be a bit more motivation to get the house finished.
