A bit of this and that

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Today has been a day of bits. While I’d made it down both sides and as far as I can on the front of the house with the cedar, and I’d cut and painted a few furring strips for the back of the house, I’d not made enough to actually start putting cedar strips up. So I started this morning with cutting and painting more furring strips – made more complex by the need for some extra wide ones to go either side of the back door – and those needed planing down to the right thickness.

That whole process took a while, because I had to work out how many I needed – and what the spacing is going to be on the back*. It’s tricky because I’m trying to minimise wood usage, but also trying to work it so that it looks the way we want. The balance is tough.

Anyhow. The strips given their first coat I popped into the bathroom to put up a bit of concrete board. It’s not a high priority job, but the board had got a big chip out of it while it’s been stood in the hall (also, we have had to move it a few times… so why not attach it to the wall).

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(The space on the right of the wall will be a built in shelf for the shower/bath, the space on the left is an obscured glass window to let some real outside light into the bathroom).

It’s odd, and you don’t really get the impact of it from the photo, but it has a weirdly progress-feeling effect. Despite only being a bit of wall that I’ve put up purely because it’s handy to have stuff out of the way, it makes the room feel more complete – and because it obscures the view through the house a bit, it makes the whole house feel more like a house.

Anyhow, that took a little time, so then I put a second coat of paint on the furring strips. Then I started planing the strips for the back of the house… like I said, lots of bits of jobs today.

I paused to go around our trees with our arborist, who’s coming to prune them back for the winter, then ran out and grabbed lunch before heading back for the application of more cedar. It took a while, as it always does, to mark up the position of the furring strips and this was the moment when I worked out that I wasn’t fond of my proposed strip layout. Having pondered some more, I managed to come up with a plan that I think should work and so started attaching the furring strips (well, actually, I’d attached some already, so there’s a random extra strip that’ll be hidden behind the cedar).

Having cut some cedar strips I spent some time applying them. My back, knees and neck are now all killing me… hunching over to paint, plane, cut and apply them for much of the day is not…ideal

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I realised that I didn’t post a picture of the ceiling from yesterday… so here it is:

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And Arksen said they’d refund the cost of the lift, which is good. But bad, in that now we don’t have a functioning lift. I had a look at it to see if it is fixable, and I think if I take this bit, with the hideous failing weld, down to a local welder they could probably fix it.

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It is utter shit though, I mean, it’s half-assedly welded around less than half of the off-centre tube which acts as part of the brake – and which takes all of the load from the drywall from the moment it’s lifted from its endstop. I’m inclined, also, to find some *BIG* washers, so that the load is spread onto the metal arm that supports it, and the bracket, rather than just onto that bit of tube and the weld.

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So we’ll see. It’s either that or rent a better lift for the whole of the job.

* I realised later that while my plan would work, it’d end up with two joints closer than I’d like further down the wall, so ended up tweaking the positioning of the furring strips.

KateWE

Kate's a human mostly built out of spite and overcoming transphobia-racism-and-other-bullshit. Although increasingly right-wing bigots would say otherwise. So she's either a human or a lizard in disguise sent to destroy all of humanity. Either way, it's all good.