Mostly lemon based

Category: House

Quirks of timing

Last night, as the clocks rolled on past 2, I hauled myself out of bed, jumped in the car, and took myself across the city to my friends’ house, where they were packing up their last few belongings into a pile of (14) cases and bags. Thanks to: a roofrack, enthusiasm, and a lot of tie-downs; my friends, their kids and their belongings were shoe-horned into / onto our decade old Prius and ferried to Bristol Airport (I leave it to you to decide what ended up in/out of the car).

Where I presume that they got on their plane, since I’ve not heard anything to the contrary, and are, I suspect, somewhere over the US now. Because they are also emigrating. They’ll be about 4 hours south of us, if we get a visa and land up where we want to be.

It’s weird though, I mean, I’m bad at keeping in touch with people. A few days ago I saw someone I consider a good friend – who I’ve not seen for nearly a decade. Nikki and Kate lived in the same city, and I write for Nikki’s website, and yet we’d probably see each other every few weeks at best. Despite that, knowing that they’ve gone makes the city feel a bit lonelier. It’s strange the idea that they’re not there. We’d hoped that we might manage to all get out of the country at the same time, but we’re here waiting on this visa appointment, and they’re in the air, exhausted and sleep deprived approaching the start of their new life.

In an effort to get some sleep (because I woke up at 9, having got back to the house at about 5am) and to progress the things that need progressing, I took the pile of timber I created from many pallets yesterday, and made a planter:

Which was, I felt, good progress. About an hour and a half’s work. It still needs some trim pieces attaching, and frustratingly despite grabbing what seemed like an enormous pile of wood, I’m certain there’s not enough for the tasks remaining (the other planter for the longer front section, and cladding the last few bits, plus some nice ‘trim’ pieces required for covering up the joint between the planter and the deck cladding). Obviously, were things ideal, I’d be asleep now. Rather than sitting writing this, but at the faintest sign of sleep I got disturbed by a double glazing salesman. Bah.

Anyhoo, yesterday we whipped the doors off their hinges and ran them down to the dip’n’strip place (yes, yes, we really should have done this long ago) and tomorrow I’m going to set to on the bathroom doorframe and the loft hatch (which both need a bit of prep then painting with white paint).

Also, I’ve realised I’ve got a big chunk of pine left over from when the kitchen was built that I can use to make the panel to go under the sink. It’s already varnished, so it’s just a case of cutting it to fit. Hurrah.

~~– Paint the entryway~~
– Paint the back wall (just touching it up, but there’s a lot of touching up)
~~– Remove the doors and get them dipped-and-stripped~~ (being done)
– Touch up some paint in the kitchen
– Finish the deck and the garden path
– Weed the garden and chuck down 100s of litres of bark chip
– Paint the bathroom doorframe
– Remove excess grout residue
– Make panel to go under sink

Our sort-of-deadline is Friday next week, at least to get valuations done. So I have faint, very cautious optimism at the moment.

Now, if everyone could concentrate on willing that visa appointment in our direction, that’d be awesome*.

* Of course, they might say ‘no’, in which case I dunno what the hell our long term plan becomes.

27/8/2015
Fear is a great driver

So, despite sleep deprivation from being post (very busy) nights, I hauled my sorry ass out of bed yesterday and painted the porch, the patches on the wall that needed touching up, the sink pillars…

…and the wall in the laundry room.

Today I put a second coat on the pillars and the porch, and will try and get a third done tonight.

The list I’d made before was:

– Paint the entryway
– Paint the back wall (just touching it up, but there’s a lot of touching up)
– Remove the doors and get them dipped-and-stripped
– Touch up some paint in the kitchen
– Finish the deck and the garden path
– Weed the garden and chuck down 100s of litres of bark chip
– Paint the bathroom doorframe

Of which I’ve managed none. Well, part of one. And I realised that:

– Remove excess grout residue
– Make panel to go under sink

Were missing from that list, thus making me sad.

Frustratingly, the weather is not being terribly helpful with me finishing the deck; rain drenching the entire thing persistently over the last few days. I need to go and get some more pallets, so I may throw the roof rack on tomorrow and do that, especially since I’m running some friends to the airport later this week and will need the rack on for that.

We are planning to go and see my mum this week too, but it’s come to my attention that might have to be a one-day event, rather than a two day one, because I think we might need another day for house stuff. Another week would be handy, but we really want to get the house on the market ASAP. Being scared we won’t sell it in time – that’s freaking me out a little.

25/8/2015
Productive, even with the extra work.

So, I managed to make some extra work for myself. After living with our lovely counters for about 4 and a half years, I put down the – I thought clean and dry – blender top and then discovered it wasn’t. It’d left two water stains on the counters.

(more…)

18/8/2015
Kludge of the Year

I’m not sure if I’m proud of, or fear my ingenuity.

Still, it enabled some progress on the deck. I was nearly very sad, because it quite upset the LiIon battery from my Makita drill, but after it’d chilled out (literally, I put it on the big block of concrete that is our fireplace) it charged okay.

Thankfully, my drill doesn’t have the ‘digital’ batteries with the intelligent controller (apparently, once you’ve hurt them they don’t recover).

I had a good go at the deck though, put lots of trim-type bits on it and worked out how I’m going to clad some more of it. Unfortunately, I’m going to need more pallets. It’s an endless pallet consuming device.

I also deadheaded the roses, did a teeny bit of weeding, did the foodshop, sold my valve amp, and listed a whole bunch of stuff on gumtree.

Oh, and finished the second season of Halt and Catch Fire. Brilliant.

Colour me pleased with myself.

11/8/2015
Absence of skill never prevented me before

I am not a brickie. Not by any means. My first attempts at laying bricks – namely the pillars on which the sink rests are fine. By which I mean, they’re two pillars. Not that they’re fine. They’re more or less upright (but not exactly totally vertical, if I’m honest). I’ve done better since – I spent a lot of time on the pillar that supports the deck, and it’s pretty neat. It actually is vertical, and the joints looked nice when I’d finished. I was quite proud of that. You can’t see it, but I’m quite proud of it.

But it takes me a long time, and I can’t say as I enjoy it. However, there was a need for me to break out the mortar again. See, the sink has spent the last, err, four years, being not quite level. The problem is, it’s a Belfast style ceramic sink that weighs approximately 80 billion tons, and it’s resting on those two brick pillars that I built. But that didn’t take enough account of the fact the floor is vastly unlevel. I’d ignored this problem because it’s got enough of an internal slope that it drains just fine, but it’s bugged me forever that it’s not level with the worksurface. And I thought it looked bad, and therefore should be fixed before we sell the house.

So I’d bought a bag of ready-to-mix mortar (yay, lazyness!) and steeled myself for the task. I lugged my 2 ton car-jack up to the house, along with a big plank to stand it on, and a pile of scrap timber to stack on it to lift the sink up. I mixed the mortar, plunked my spirit level on the back of the sink, jacked the thing up, after some terror of it wobbling I got it settled at only 1mm out across it’s entire length (as opposed to about 5mm).

And then I remembered how much I hate dealing with mortar.

Look. I have quite a few strings to my bow. On a good day I can plaster, I can paint, I can plumb (many depths), I can do basic electronics, I can fix a morris minor. I’m not without skills. Today, for example, I stripped my laptop down to remove the dust bunnies which I’m hoping were the cause of its overheating. But being a brickie is not one of those strings. After a process which involved most of the mortar spending some time on the floor, and ending with me applying it with gloves on and discarding my trowel in disgust (and surprisingly little cursing) I finally ended up with it all ‘sorted’.

I now just need to wait for it to dry and then I can paint the whole thing white. Which might cover up the awfulness a little.

I also need to make the panels to go under the sink to cover up the plumbing and make it less crappy looking. I think. I may not do that. We may just remove all the stuff from under the sink, but I feel it’d look better if I did make something.

Given that things were going so ‘well’, and that I had a big pile of left over mortar (this was sort-of-planned); I decided to tackle the top few bricks on the falling-down wall in the garden. Realistically, the whole thing needs to come down, the mortar’s gone strange and is no longer holding the wall together very well and the bricks have been frost-eaten and are disintegrating.

On top of which, it looks like it was pretty appallingly built to start off with.

Never mind, though, because what I did was remove the completely falling-off-loose bricks, clean it up a little bit, then throw some mortar back in. And now it’s appallingly built and hopefully going to stick together a bit longer. Really it needs so much more. But hopefully it’ll do for the next people for a while.

9/8/2015
Monday’s not the day

But in my head it feels like the day.

There’s no particular reason that I shouldn’t get a visa for the US. I’m not a terribly naughty person, beyond my ownership of a rather high number of MZs and my two soviet era watches, I don’t think I harbour enormous communist sympathies, and I’ve (so far) not been kicked out of the US on my trips there.

I’m a reasonably well educated person with a fair potential for being a productive member of US society.

And my health is pretty good. Yes, I’ve got a bit of a crap liver, but apparently something like 20% of people have a fatty liver – probably more – because most people never find out. Just that routine blood tests before an operation in my past picked it up. I now eat more healthily, exercise more, and that seems to have at least fixed my blood results… So I don’t really think that there’s a good reason to deny me entry on health grounds.

But Monday is the medical.

Which means that I get to trek to London, have the deep joy of going through my medical history, then hopefully at any point in the 6 weeks after that I might have a visa in my grubby little hands.

Obviously, we still need to sell the house, two cars, a bunch of non-usefully-exportable tools (like, say, my drill-press, which I used once, or the shredder, which I did use, but got fed up with it being so noisy), clear a million books, make a container to transport my vinyl and gramophones in… pack everything, organise the shipping of the piano and some of our nicer bits of art…

…Rebecca needs to go to JLH for the expensive repairs and modifications to get her back roadworthy.

…it’s not like our move will be superquick once that visa’s here.

But it’s making it very real and quite scaryexciting.

And yes, yes, I know people do far more scaryexciting things. They go and live on deserted islands, or near volcanoes, or they move to some place where they don’t speak the language. But this is big for me. I, like most people, have never lived outside the island (country) I was born in. So it’s big.

On the plus side, my friends Nikki and Kate will already be in the country, in their nice new house. Hopefully just a month and a half ahead of us.

8/8/2015
I have done stuff

So we’ve been away. I’ll tell you about that later (summary: Norway is awesomepretty).

Next week is my USA medical.
6 Weeks after that I might have my visa.
Which is terrifying and exciting and scary.
Work know, now. Because they asked me to apply for a more senior position, and I had to explain that I can’t because…I’m planning to leave.

Which means that the house needs to be ready like yesterday to go on the market. Which it’s not. It’s nearly, but it’s not. Today I ran around and touched up the paint in the kitchen using paint which, thankfully, has not merely survived in the garage but actually it’s pretty much invisible when used as touch-up paint. Some of it needs a second coat because I managed to yank it back to bare plaster with the masking tape, but it’s looking pretty much okay. The bit around the where the worksurfaces were installed that I filled…when they were installed… that’s looking much better now it’s been sanded and painted. It’s kind of odd to have put up with this stuff being not quite right for so long, and then to fix it in minutes. (I’ve updated The List, incidentally).

Next up is the mortar under the sink and the render at the back of the house. Which means going and getting some ready mix mortar (for speed, I think that’s wise). Which I’m trying to coax myself into doing now – but having just come back from Norway I’m feeling that things are financially a little tight.

A feeling compounded by talking to Jonathon at JLH who advised me to get the gearbox I’ve got rebuilt (or buy a rebuilt one – and then suggested getting a much higher spec one given the torque available from the electric motor…) and get the axle similarly treated – which did painful things to the price of the work on my minor. I fluctuate between option A of getting all the bits for the EV conversion installed now, so all we need to do is, essentially, battery pack and motor when we get there, or option B of putting in a recon minor gearbox – but the cost of a really good gearbox that’ll tolerate the fast-road cam’d engine is pretty close to the cost of a type 9 ford box, and then…well, it just seems foolish to not do the rest. Feh.

4/8/2015
Ignoring the urge

At some moments I want to cut corners. I want to get the house finished and done and ready for the market and so we can actually just sit and enjoy it for 5 minutes before we go.

But I’m not very good at that. It’s more that I opt not to do a job than I’m willing to do a job to a poor standard. Or at least, I still do things to a standard I’m willing to tolerate and that doesn’t wind me up too much rather than do a job too quickly.

And so out came the fridge…

Filled, caulked, prepped, masked, sanded and painted, despite the fact no-one will ever see it for more than a few minutes.

It’s quietly pleasing to me to know that lurking behind our fridge (which we’re planning to include in the house sale) is a short stretch of skirting that’s neatly painted despite the fact that no one but me cares.

Of course I managed to pull off a bit of the paint from the wall, which is less pleasing. But since I’ve got a whole bunch of areas to touch up – and that’s the next job after finishing the tiles in the laundry room and replacing the tiles in the hall, well… I’m less upset about that than I could be.

It’s also in a not terribly visible place.

In other news, prep for our Norway holiday continues – we’ve dug out the road map of Europe, we’ve dug out the tent and [other camping gear]… It’s starting to feel like an actual holiday approacheth.

9/7/2015
I have a total guilt complex

No matter that I was awake for 25 hours before I went to bed for 2 hours.

No matter that I worked hard last night.

No matter that my job is emotionally draining.

I still feel insanely guilty that I’m not working on the house / prepping for the NCLEX / etc today.

7/7/2015
‘s odd

So we’re starting to approach, with at least some semblance of it being real, the point when the house is, for all practical purposes ‘finished’. The List is looking better; much more manageable. And I was contemplating things and had a moment of “Oh my god, what am I going to do when it’s finished, how will I fill my time?”

It was quite weird, this sort of unnerving foreshadowing of what it’ll be like when I retire. And then I paused for a moment and mocked myself mercilessly.

I spend most of my time going “Oh, I’d really like to do [thing], but I should work on the house”. My Morris Minor, my photography, my music, my reading, my electronics stuff, dinking more thoroughly with computers? It’s all been put on hold for 9 years as we’ve renovated one, and then a second house. In addition we’ve got business planning, and moving planning, and gardening… and all the other hobbies.

So that was odd.

The other odd thing was actually feeing some pride. Just standing in the hall and going ‘This is us. This is our house and we made this‘. Christ knows how bad I’ll be if we do ever get to build our own house.

2/7/2015