Ah, when you said "new eyes" I looked back to see if you'd had LASIK or something. Lack of depression is a good thing, even if the new eyes don't yield a world that always shines.
Untypical rains and cooler temps mark the autumn season and the end of the oppressive heat, to my relief. Struggling with roller-coaster health matters but God has demonstrated a firm hand in keeping me productive. Attempts at forum participation get interrupted, mostly with travel. Can't finish what I start
I got a bit more of the base bar for my new walls cut and screwed into place. Now I need to make some more decisions, specifically whether I'm moving walls and, if so, whether they are going. Now I've got the bases for three walls in place, I just need to extend one of them once I've worked out exactly where the door to the room is going to go. It may be my best course of action is just to extend it to the point it meets the door to the adjacent room, I'll need to figure out exactly what shape everything wants to be. I really don't want to be in the crawl space over this room in the intense heat. It routinely goes over 120 degrees in that space, but if I want to replace the drywall on the ceiling I'll need to get up in there to gather up the fiberglass before pulling down the drywall. And I'll need to move a load of stuff out, to give myself space to move a ladder about freely so I can get the soundproofing material screwed to the ceiling joists. I still kinda sorta like the idea of shrinking the bathroom so the window becomes a door, replacing the garage roof with a flat roof and turning it into a raised patio for the bedroom. But that sort of thing seems to come with all sorts of code-related aggravations, which I can really do without. So the project will probably be something far less ambitious.
Shifting a big pile of recovered wood. I moved it into a trashed bedroom so it was out of the way, but now I'm working in that room it's in the way again. It's a hassle shifting it around but it's worth keeping - as best as I can tell it's 100 year old chestnut. I really need to organise the basement better. I've got lots of smaller pieces of wood stacked, which is making it harder to stack the bigger stuff. Most of what I'm wanting to store is 8-9 feet long, but of slightly differing dimensions. I'll need to pull all the wood out, stack the big stuff at the bottom and then find somewhere to put the smaller stuff so I can get at everything without playing games of toppling towers.
It's remarkable how much wood I seem to have accumulated. I don't want to get rid of it because it's 100 years old and this kind of wood isn't the sort of thing you can just go and buy, but it does take up quite a lot of space. I'm also hoping I can get away without replacing the entire floor in the room I'm working in. It has several areas that have splintered to various degrees so I'm hoping I can patch it with a sander and filling the (relatively small) dips with a paste made of sawdust and lacquer. I don't really want to be trying to finish the floor before trashing more in there, but I don't want to frame an entire wall and then find I need to pull it all out to replace the floor.
I got the rest of a wall pulled down. I needed to move a bathtub that was leaning against one of the studs, but then it was easy enough to remove it all. I had thought to move it but if I do that I potentially end up with a disproportionate amount of work to gain a few inches of room space, so I think it will end up going back where it was but with the studs turned the right way so I can put electrical boxes in the wall space. Then I think I can make quite a nice half bathroom out of the bathroom, with a shower cubicle either attached to the bathroom or possibly free-standing. It looks like it's starting to come together, which is nice.
It's easy when I'm just doing a bit at a time. The next stage is going to be ugly - I need to pull down some ceiling to fit soundproofing, but fitting soundproofing requires moving a ladder around a room where part of the floor is missing and there are two large cast iron radiators to try and keep out of the way. One of them was responsible for a caster wheel on the platform I made breaking - I have 8 of them, each rated for 50lb, and one of them just snapped clean off. I think the problem was when I tried to move the whole thing the wheel caught an uneven section of the floor and took most of the weight of the radiator in a single thump, but that doesn't help me moving it around any further. I also have an old bathtub I need to move out of the way. I'm debating whether to keep it for the next bathroom around or just get rid of it.
Yick. The ceiling part is going to be tricky, because at the end of the room the joists change direction and don't seem to line up very well with the size of the soundproofing. I think I can force things to work, I just hope I don't end up with something that's a couple of inches too short. If it comes to it there are things I can botch together but I'd really rather not be botching stuff if I can help it.
Much time spent poking holes in the ceiling, poking wires through the holes, and crawling back and forth in a Very Small Space in the attic trying to find the wires and measure dimensions. It looks like the attic contains enough overhang that the space I actually need to soundproof is about the same as the material I have. I think what I can do is stud the wall, then soundproof the wall and soundproof the ceiling up to the wall. That should make sure the soundproofing material will actually cover the space without botching anything. Now I get to clear the room out ready for more cascading cellulose insulation. I would lift it from above but it's at the corner where the sloping roof gets really low, which seems like not much fun at all. Although if I could lift it and keep it in bags in the attic I could put it back when i'm done with everything, which could be handy.
If anyone is interested in fossil pics from the Royal Tyrrell Museum: https://photos.app.goo.gl/ouVAaHxpYA9VbhpB6 Tomorrow, it's off to Banff for the day.
Fun cutting drywall on the ceiling trying to follow a green line that disappeared if I got between the ceiling and the unit projecting the laser line. For good measure having cut the drywall the rest of the panel sagged, so I put some drywall screws in it to stop it from collapsing. I don't think it would but would rather not chance it. Now I can screw the top beams into place for my new wall, and think about the next step. Curiously I found a board behind the drywall, which means no falling cellulose just yet. Hopefully there will be more boards to hold the cellulose in place, although somehow I doubt it. If I can get the top beam secured in place I can start cutting some more drywall away to see what's behind it. Then I just need to get some 3/4" insulation to secure behind my stud wall.
I got a bit more of my wall put into place. Then I decided to call a halt because the next step involves cutting drywall with an oscillating tool and I didn't feel like getting covered in fine dust again. This morning I went for a run and accidentally set a new personal best. Maybe when it cools off a bit more I can aim at a more aggressive pace and see if I can shave a nice chunk off the new record.
Got a bit more ceiling measured, cut and removed, and some more of the top bar put in place. I think I'm going to need to work with one room and then do the adjacent room separately, or I'll be stuck trying to figure how to cover a gaping hole in the floor so I can run soundproofing across it all. But who knows, maybe I'll come up with something that will work and won't present me with the ever-present game of "guess if I'll end up unexpectedly downstairs".
Ordinarily I'd agree, but this particular hole appeared when I lifted some floorboards to get at the plumbing and joists underneath. Some genius decided to put a stop valve in the pipework such that it pressed against the bottom of the floorboard, was impossible to get at from below, and so served no useful purpose at all except as a potential source of leaks. There's another hole in the floor where I took the bathtub out, just to make things interesting. What I'll probably end up doing is lifting all the floorboards in the bathroom, laying water resistant OSB down and then putting linoleum over the top of it. If it's going to be covered in linoleum what's underneath it doesn't have to be pretty. The fun bit is going to be taking down a concrete block wall between two parts of the house. It used to be the external wall so it's probably providing structural support to the roof. I haven't yet worked out how I'm going to support what's there while I take it down.
I got a strip of ceiling pulled down, and the drywall scraps and cellulose behind it cleaned up. Then I figured I had access to a space in the crawl space that I needed to fix so got on with that. I had hoped to get at least some soundproofing material installed but with everything else it wasn't to be. At least I got all the mess I created cleared up, so tomorrow I can get on with the soundproofing. Once this first strip of soundproofing is installed I can pull down more ceiling. What's above the rest of it is fiberglass so it won't make such a horrendous mess when I trash it. Then I can think about a continuous sheet of insulation against my exterior walls and can get on with framing my nice new walls. With any luck I'll be in a place to have a drywaller in before too long.