I had planned to do some more work on the house today but after church I went for a run and then took my wife to a local brewpub instead. The run was a good one - I was going to do my regular 10k loop but noticed I needed 7.3 miles to finish off a monthly challenge, so went for my 8-mile loop instead. I know there's more time left in the month but the forecast for the next several days is for lots of wet days.
A bit more wrecking today. I finally got to the ceiling I've been waiting to pull down. The plaster is down and bagged up, and today I pulled down the laths and all the cellulose insulation behind it. The cellulose took up four bags and part of a fifth, and I also finished filling a contractor garbage bag with a combination of plaster scraps, wood scraps, and emptying the bucket from my separator as I cleaned up. Then I found my shop vac had very little suction, so the bag from that went into the garbage too. Now I have a nice clean space under the missing ceiling, a shop vac that works again, and nice fresh fiberglass in place between the ceiling joists. I still need to figure out how to remove a section of stud wall without wrecking a nearby finished wall but it should be easy enough. Then I can fit the soundproofing to the ceiling, rebuild a new stud wall to separate the space from th adjacent room, rest my drywall panels back in place and then I won't need to keep the cat out of that space any more.
Went downhill skiing with the kids today. It was puking snow the whole day, probably about 8" worth of powder.
I have one, with blades that will cut through just about anything. The trouble is I need the nails taken out too rather than leaving stubs of nails all over the place. In my house even floorboards are nailed down with construction grade nails and those things are hefty. Some studs are held in place with small nails that pull out with almost no effort, others are held in place by things so robust I have to use my body weight to pull them out. The banister beside the stairs to the attic was held in place with nails so strong I had to bounce my entire body weight on a wrecking bar to pull them out (and that was before I took up running so there was a lot more body weight to bounce!). I'm also trying not to do too much damage to the studs as I take them out. Although I'm planning on putting in fresh studs I want to preseve the existing ones. A friend has a house nearby of a similar age and from what he says it sounds like my wall studs might be 100-year old chestnut, so I'd rather keep as much of it as I can so I can use it for something else. I'm not yet sure if I will try to put it on a lathe and turn bowls or vases out of it, or maybe make a desktop out of it, but it would be good to do something with it other than simply building a wall with it. We have cheap spruce for that... I got the wall out yesterday. Now I can get at the laths of the wall behind and perpendicular. This job has grown larger than I hoped it would be (no great surprise there) but so far there haven't been any specifically nasty surprises. It's mostly gone as I expected, more or less, aside from the scope of it growing.
I need lots of luck with this project. Sometimes it feels like the only way to proceed is with the liberal application of expletives. But this afternoon I pulled down the next section of lath and plaster wall. Now my shop vac has suction again (it's amazing what replacing the filter bag can do!) it was easy to clean up afterwards. My separator really does a good job of separating now - I can hear the chunks of plaster rattling around the hose and then rattling down into the separator. It makes a nice change from hearing them clatter around the hose and then fall out as soon as I turned the vac off. Now I have something like 14 bags of plaster waiting to be taken outside, so I guess that means something in the region of 4-500lb of trash. Since my neighbor takes it now I've lost count of what my total is. I took a total of something like 3000lb of it to the landfill before I found out my neighbor could use it. He's taken at least 500lb of it so far, and counting. I also have another pile of laths I need to carry out. The next suitable burning day will see me occupied for a while getting rid of them all. If nothing else it's good to have my mojo back and a clearer picture of the way forward. Once this next room is done I can move stuff from another room into it and work my way around upstairs.
Disposal day today. I managed to get a lot of stuff burned - a big pile of cardboard ceiling tiles and a good portion of the pile of scrap laths is now reduced to ash in my burn barrel. I would have liked to have done more but we're only supposed to burn until 12 around here and I figured I might as well leave the last of it until the next time I burn rather than brazenly flouting the local rules. Chances are nobody would care but I wouldn't have cleared the pile without burning well after 12, so it's not even as if I could have fed a pile of stuff into the fire at 1230 and claimed it had taken longer than I expected to burn down. Now I've got some cabling in place ready to reroute a couple of cables. When I installed them I found a hole in the joists I could use, but recently noticed the hole is far too close to the bottom of the joist, which means that having drywall fitted runs a substantial risk of a screw piercing the cables. So I get to pull them out and reroute them through a new hole I drilled for a different cable. While I'm at it I'm going to rejig that section of cabling, which will mean one less cable routed above the ceiling than before. That will be handy. I'll also recover a piece of 14/3 cable, although I'm not sure if that actually gains me anything useful as yet.
Sorry I missed IMINXTC's messages yesterday. I usually find them both intriguing and convicting! Saw "Jesus REvolution" at the theatre this weekend. Wept.
I just picked up another role. On Maundy Thursday the Drama Ministry at our church is doing a Living Last Supper in which I'm playing James. On Good Friday they are doing The Stations of The Cross. In that I'm carrying a spear. I'm one of the mob yelling crucify, etc.
Maybe today I'll finally get to the wiring job I've been wanting to do for a few days. Yesterday I pushed it out a day because it was cold in the attic and I had some computer code I needed to finish for a paid job. I'm also wondering where my second ladder has gone. I need my wife to help me hold some sheet material against the ceiling so I can screw it into place, which means she needs a ladder to stand on while I use another ladder to hold the other end and secure it.
I got the wiring work done yesterday. It was a bit tedious, I planned to reroute cables and figured I'd rejig the wiring while I was at it, so I took the switches off and then noticed that replacing the back box was going to create extra work with little extra benefit, so I put the switches back how they were. I did get to put longer screws to hold the switches into the back box, and got the cables routed through a more suitable hole, so it wasn't a total waste. Just some of the work I did turned out to be a waste. Then having done my wiring work I went for a run. It looks like my tracker challenges will include a 15k run more regularly - it showed up for this month so I figured I'd hit it early on and ticked it off yesterday. Surprisingly my legs don't hate me today. They don't seem to like me much, but they don't hate me.
Had an appointment with an eye specialist yesterday. Ironically it was with an office I had been to in 2005 but didn't remember, but they had it on their computer. Found out I have the START of macular degeneration in one eye. I have been taking a vitamin for my eyes but they suggested a better one that I will start taking. They said they will see me again in a year.
I managed to get a very inaccessible hole in my wall filled. Looking at where the hole was I had no idea how I was going to be able to get at it to fill it. But a local utility company is working in the area and they were willing to help me out. So one of their guys made what was probably the easiest money he'll see in a while, and it still cost me significantly less than trying to rent the kind of equipment I'd have needed to do the job myself.
Our Drama Ministry had its first meeting for The Living Last Supper tonight. It was mainly a costume meeting with pictures. Jim, our director, decided that things have gone smooth enough that he canceled the upcoming planning meeting. We still need a few people as some have had to drop out.