Whatcha doin????

Unexpected excitement today. A friend called to ask if I knew anything about plumbing. He had a fountain in his basement that wasn't supposed to be there. So a trip to the hardware store later, and he no longer has a fountain. Now I can get on with my staining.

 

Shouldn't that read "So TWO trips to the hardware store later..."?

 

My boards are sitting with stain on them waiting for it to soak in before I wipe them clean and let them dry. They are looking really nice, particularly the red oak.

In the meantime I'm debating whether to dump my internet "service" provider of two months' standing. In two months I've noticed five outages, and that doesn't count issues that may have happened that I didn't notice. They recently retired and transferred their customers to a new provider, who promptly introduced another major outage when we had no phone service for most of yesterday. It finally came back on in the evening only to go down again today. None of their customer "service" numbers gets through to someone, they just play endless hold music. So after two months I'm seriously considering what I'd previously considered unthinkable, and that's going back to CenturyLink.

Quick tip - if anyone is feeling like getting service from Zito Media I'd strongly suggest taking an aspirin and lying down until the feeling passes. It's hard to imagine wishing I'd never left CenturyLink but these people have made it happen in two days. Looking at their reviews they are mostly one-star and from what I've seen of them so far it's easy to see why. I don't even have a bill for this month's service, and can't get through to them to even ask for a bill.

 

Thankfully this only required one trip to the hardware store, although two trips to his house. One to see the problem and take things apart, then to the hardware store to get something that matched the threads, then back to his to put it all together again. And in due course there will be another trip to his house to enjoy a beer or two....

 

Plumbing with water that's at least mostly clean is something I'm happy with. Plumbing relating to taking away the nasty water is less fun. The worst I've had to deal with is clearing the drain from the bathroom sink when it got clogged with hair. That was grim enough, I don't know I'd maintain a lot of interest in anything more unpleasant than that.

 

Studying is overrated

I've got more boards drying in my work room. For the next room I rebuild I need to figure a better way of laying boards out to stain them. It's really tedious only being able to work with a few at a time because I'm spending more time waiting for stuff to dry than I am doing anything useful. I think what I need is a decent sized tarp to keep any drips off the floor, and then some long pieces of wood to hold my work pieces off the tarp so they don't stick. Then perhaps I can stain and lacquer all the baseboards and all the trim for windows and doors in one go.

 

Finally managed to get the motivation together to run some lacquer over my boards. I figured a way to do them all at once, which is handy. Getting both sides of the window sills was tricky but only part of the underside needs to be lacquered so it wasn't all that hard to coat the undersides, then flip them over and rest them on offcuts so I could lacquer the tops. Now they look really nice, although I'm wondering if I should have stained them a little darker.

The window trim will be done when the lacquer has dried. I may run some 220 grit sandpaper over the window sills and give them another coat, given they may be used as a shelf at some future time.

 

I decided to put a second coat on the window sills. They are really nice now. I'll need to seal a few seams between the windows and the window frames and then unless I missed something I can start reassembling stuff.

 

Back for a short vacation at home with the family. Heading back out on the 16th. I've got a pretty good cut to my thumb knuckle a week ago that's going to take a while to heal - a rock slipped and sliced it open. Trying to bandage a thumb with one hand is not easy! And mapping in the mountains (i.e. cliffs) should probably be left to the younger crowd.

 

My window sills have sweated some of the stain. It's a bit weird seeing a dark droplet that managed to get through the lacquer. They wipe away easily enough but I'm thinking I'm going to leave them in the sun until they stop sweating and then run another couple of coats of lacquer over them. I've never seen this happen before - it's just the oak of the window sills that has sweat - the pine side pieces haven't done anything unexpected. I did a bit of reading on Google and apparently it can happen with oak. Note to self - remember this when working on the oak downstairs.

The sills still look beautiful, they just want another couple of coats of lacquer on them.

 

Sadly, many things should be left to the younger crowd, but they don't have the experience to do them...

Be safe, Rockhound.

 

Truth be told, I've not done very much field mapping at all in my geo career. It was like going back to school the first few days out there. But it's all good.

 

And to demonstrate how small our industry can be, the chief of the contract geophysics crew is the guy who hired me for my first field job 25 years ago.

 

All together now...

"I feel the earth.... move... under my feet, ..."

 

I am absolutely staggered.

Regular readers of my endless comments about breaking my house may have observed I'm not very happy with the guy who fitted my windows. Until a couple of days ago it seemed he had cut every corner it was possible to cut when fitting them. However, in a stunning demonstration of the importance of not rushing to conclusions, I found a corner he could have cut but apparently didn't. It seems he may have put sealant between the window frames and the house. I fear that may be the only corner he didn't cut but sadly I now need to qualify my comment that he cut every corner imaginable.

Having established I didn't need to remove the window frames in their entirety (which was a welcome development, I have to say) I've replaced the fiberglass he poked into the spaces around the frames with a proper sealing foam to make sure there's no air leakage around them. It was disconcerting a couple of years back to find the blinds moving visibly when the wind blew - you don't put new windows in only to find the wind blows around them - but it turned out that was related to a totally different corner he cut. Apparently $50 per window for fitting didn't include sealing around the window trims.

Now my foam gun is loaded with the foam for sealing around windows and doors, so I can press on with doing much the same thing with the other windows in the house. I can see myself having a decent sized bag of fiberglass to get rid of at this rate.

 

Back in camp. We have internet access, albeit a bit slow.