Just trying to muster the mental energy to get back in the attic and start shifting boards around. It's a tedious task, the boards weigh about 30lb, they are eight feet long, and I have to carry them while balancing on the joists.
POINT OF ORDER: Everyone: If you are married, make sure your wife or husband of the opposite sexual persuasion knows about your family's finances.... checking accounts, retirement accounts, life insurance, etc. If you own a business, make sure there is a plan for someone to take care of it if you die. I'm up to my eyeballs in dealing with the death of a friend who is a lawyer, and notwithstanding the somewhat complex nature of wrapping up a lawfirm, at least he appointed me to do so in his will. As to the family finances, his wife (now widow) has no idea if he had $1 or $1million, as he controlled all the finances. She has no idea about life insurance, savings accounts, anything. This is a nightmare. Take care of business, folks.
In the process of detailing a will with notarized instructions for easy transfer to my family. No bills in the closet. Easy access to storage etc.
Got some boards laid, need to trim a smidge off the end of a few of them because one end isn't quite parallel with the floor joists. Not horribly off, just need to make some fine adjustments. Then I was all set to lay some more boards but noticed a nasty bit of old knob-and-tube wiring I wanted to get rid of first. So I got to crawl into a confined space off the back of the attic, tweak some wiring (with trips to the basement several times to turn breakers on and off), which resulted in a few bits being moved from one circuit to another. Then I got to take out something like 50 feet of nasty knob-and-tube wires. That's now coiled up in the basement, in my box of dead cable. The wiring in the bathroom is truly horrible. Bits of new cable blended with bits of older ungrounded cable blended with a couple of sections of knob-and-tube. Perhaps tomorrow's job will be to pull it all out, replace the wiring in there and maybe even go wild and replace the sockets either side of the sink with GFCI sockets. Now that would be radical.
Good call here. In this age where more and more business is conducted online and no paper statements are ever sent I wonder how much money will be lost if the account owner dies and nobody else even knows the account exists. It does seem like an awfully convenient system for the banks, where they don't send any paper communication at all (to save the planet, innit) with the result than estate executors don't even know it exists. Before I started my last project the client asked what happened if anything happened to me. They were obviously concerned about whether they'd still be able to buy licenses for my software, and wondering if they would be able to acquire the source code or similar. As I said their biggest question would be knowing that something had happened to me at all, and if they did any succession would need to be planned ahead of time. There are three copies of the source code - one is heavily encrypted on my laptop, one is heavily encrypted on an external hard drive in my study, and one is heavily encrypted on an external hard drive in my safety deposit box at the bank. Given the way passwords end up looking like someone rubbed a balloon and tried to spell the sound it made, it's hard to figure how to deal with making them available to selected people without writing them down.
Debating whether to tackle the hideous cluster that is the wiring in my bathroom. I've been seriously tempted to put a heavy duty switch in the feed as a temporary measure, which would mean I could turn it off to disconnect individual wires in turn to see what they control without having to keep going between the attic crawl space and the basement. The alternative is just to pull everything out and replace it the way I want it to be, although that could involve lots of awkward cable pulling. One thing I truly loathe about the electrical code in this country is the insistance on cables being stapled - it makes it impossible to use an old cable to pull a new cable through the same spaces. Maybe I will just pull it all apart and see where it all ends. I just fear finding cables embedded in the walls, maybe aided by cross-bars that make it all but impossible to poke cables through where I really need them to go. As the saying goes, watch this space....
Instead of attacking the bathroom I decided to rejig some ugly wiring that I'd temporarily rigged into the bathroom circuit. It was more fiddly than I hoped, not least because I had to figure out how to undo a nasty job and do it properly. The end result wasn't as clean as I hoped but the ceiling will be coming down later so I can revisit it then. For now it's done, and another light is shifted onto its own circuit and off the ugly knob-and-tube loop. The ugly loop gets smaller....
I figured out what seems like a good way to explore my wiring disaster without having to go between the attic and the basement multiple times. Today the only stairs I climbed were in my own house but my Fitbit still says I climbed 47 flights of stairs. And I believe it too....
HaHa. Yeah, Fitbit has me at 10.5 miles per shift and 18-20 staircases (catwalk). It's either preserving or killing me
Got some boards laid today. I found a nice easy way to cut them to length - for the first strip of boards I measured them, marked them, set a fence and then cut them with my circular saw. And then because the joists and floorboards aren't quite at the right angles, it turned out some were a whisker too long. So I laid the edge of another board down as a fence, figured where it needed to be, set the depth of the circular saw to cut the boards but not the joists, and in a single cut they were all trimmed. The next step was to lay the next strip of boards. All were too long (as expected) and had to be cut to size. So a spare board acted as a fence again and a single pass of the circular saw trimmed them all to length in one go. The only problem there was catching the offcuts before they fell down into the stairwell. Then I could pack more cellulose into a few obscure corners, screw down the first strip of boards and start moving things back into that area. The attic already looks a lot more spacious. I'm thinking I might replace a piece of cable I hadn't thought it necessary to replace. It's a newish piece of 14/3 with ground but it's routed in a way I'm not really very happy with. It's routed through holes drilled into 2" thick studs, so it seems like a drywall screw hitting the cable is more likely than is ideal. I'm not sure whether to replace the cable and reroute it so it's a bit cleaner, or just let it be and put some metal plates on the studs to prevent any mishaps.
A break from breaking my house. I guess yesterday took more effort than I appreciated - I slept until nearly 10 this morning. Maybe i just had a bit of a sleep backlog to settle - I really didn't think I'd done anything particularly heavy yesterday. Before long I need to get another board. The ones I have started life as 8x4 sheets that I had cut in half so they were 8x2 (lighter, easier to carry up two flights of stairs and narrow hallways). Somehow I managed to miscount. It's difficult counting as high as 10, although it's a while so it could be I decided I wanted a spare board to cover the random odd sections. The trouble is the random odd sections aren't neatly defined in terms of 2' widths, so I'm debating whether to cut narrower strips of board or just buy another board for the extra strength. I'd rather use a piece of board 3 feet wide, than cobbling together a 24-inch piece and a 12-inch piece. I'd be worried about whether the 12-inch piece would be strong enough to walk on, especially if I'm carrying stuff.
Got my piece of wire replaced. It's a hassle trying to pull cable through small holes. But it's done, and I guess that's what matters. Now I can suck up some more nasty cellulose and lay some more board. It will give me full cover over about 1/4 of my attic again. The rest of it still has the original flooring.
Got the cellulose sucked up, my new wire stapled into place and a few boards put back over it. I've got a small strip that needs to be filled with fiberglass, with a little cellulose left to clear out. I stopped working because it was just too hot in there. I'm hoping I can fix up the bathroom wiring before summer but suspecting it might have to wait until things cool down again. That's irritating, but them's the breaks I guess.
Picked up a balance bike from some friends for a deal because their kid wouldn't ride it. Turns out the back brakes weren't properly adjusted (i.e. the back tire didn't freespin at all). One brake adjustment later, kiddo has a new bike.
It's remarkable the way some people will practically give something away rather than spending a few moments seeing if it can be fixed.