Today was a bit of a tough day. I’m not sure why. I think something about the headspace I was in. Something about our car being broken (now allegedly fixed again), and the inordinate amount of time wasted on travelling up and down to Tacoma to get it fixed… I dunno.
This morning progressed okay. I put up some more furring strips (two more left on the back, five on the front, and that’ll be it), planed and put more cedar up on the back.
There’s just one more full 12′ stretch and then I’m on to the bit by the back door. Then the other side of the back door. Then the front porch (which is, to be fair, a painful one with a billion nails and a complex pain-in-the-arse L-shaped bit that has to be installed (almost certainly) as one piece. Anyhow, that took up my morning, then I broke for lunch, and then feeling somewhat chilled from the morning of mizzle, I decided to put up some bathroom concrete board.
That actually went okay, although the edge by the door is a bit rough (it doesn’t like being cut with a drywall saw).
By the time I’d finished there’s just the bottom strip around the back and right side of the room to do, and a couple of bits on the sliding door. It actually looks like a room (or perhaps, a large cupboard, or what it is: a very, very small bathroom). At any rate, when Kathryn arrived we were able to start on the laundry room ceiling. However, the minor mistakes I’d made in the morning were not quite so significant as the ones I made in the afternoon. I’ve still not quite got the hang of the roto-tool which cuts around the outlet boxes. I still don’t have any real feel for when I’m correctly following the box, or when I’ve wandered off into space.
And the first box I wandered off into space.
After a monumentally ridiculous amount of grumping on my part, we managed to continue, whereupon I promptly cut the hole for the fan in entirely the wrong place. I thought I had hit the inside edge of it, hopped a bit across and then realised I’d actually started on the outside edge, and was now cutting an enormous hole in our just put up drywall. We haven’t bought any extra of the special mould-resistant, fire resistant ceiling drywall, so Kathryn hatched a cunning plan to use some offcuts to do the job. Which we’ve done. Because frankly it’s going to get slathered in joint compound and smoothed down afterwards, and hopefully we can hide that shoddyness, and if not, it’s the fracking laundry cupboard.
At any rate, after the mistakes, that was all that we managed to get done. Well, I precut the tiny bit that goes above the pull-out-pantry. But other than that… Which didn’t feel like a lot. But given that we actually did it twice…
See, a good friend recommends that if you make two mistakes, that’s when you should stop. Which I try to stick to, or at least, switch activity. But today we didn’t…and that was an error.
But still.
This:
is now this:
It doesn’t smell of cat urine, or of some sweet smelling stuff to cover up the scent of cat urine. It’s not rotten and the hot-water system is not about to drop through the floor. The dryer vent actually exits the building, and the plumbing does not (at least does not appear to) leak (touch wood). The electrics are all new. The windows are actually attached to the building. The drains run downhill.
Progress has been made.
