Adventures In Lunch

I spent about three hours last night cleaning up the cellar with a deck brush, a garden hose, a shop vac, and a spray bottle of Simple Green.  It’s probably the cleanest basement in the county.

It looks dirty because the concrete is stained but trust me, you could just about eat off of it.

The guys at Conleff Plumbing Supply on Lafayette are awesome!  They had exactly what I needed!

The guy didn’t even have to think about it.  I said I needed a laundry drain trap and standpipe and showed him a picture of the existing fitting, and he went into the back and returned with the correct item almost immediately.  He apologized that it was expensive at sixty bucks, and I suppose I should have pretended like I cared.  Honestly though I was so happy to have the right part that I probably would have paid a hundred bucks for it without complaining.

Don’t tell the sales rep I said that.

You may notice that the stuff in this picture looks crooked.  It is.  The little pipe on the bottom is the water heater drain, so it’s sloped on purpose.  The standpipe is tilted because the existing elbow is a little bit out of plumb, which is not on purpose but seeing as how it’s sixty years old and doesn’t leak I feel no need to try straightening it.  The water will drain just fine and no one will ever see it behind the washing machine anyway.

Wow, no posts since last Tuesday!

Okay, so the termite tent is off of the house now and I’m fervently fixing stuff up so that I can move in.  I had previously planned to work on the barn this weekend but Saturday was rained out.  Consequently I spent the weekend working on projects around the house instead.

By “projects”, I mostly mean painting what will be my bedroom.  Painting wouldn’t seem like a high-priority must-do item, but the walls were really dingy.  I felt like sleeping in there was going to make me depressed.  If there’s one room that I want to feel comfortable in it had better be my bedroom, otherwise I won’t get any sleep.  So I painted.

In case you don’t do a whole lot of painting, it turns out that most of a painting project isn’t actually painting.  You spend an inordinate amount of time putting down tarps and taping off things that aren’t supposed to get paint on them, and I also spent several hours washing and rinsing the walls and ceiling.  It’s surprisingly exhausting work.  By the time I actually started putting paint on the walls it was about 6 PM and I didn’t get done until midnight.

While I was doing all of this, we had two good rain showers.  The first one lasted for a while and the second one was short but it was absolutely a deluge!  I climbed up in the attic to check for leaks while it was coming down but happily I didn’t find any.  I had expected there to be a couple because the roof is quite old but I was pleasantly surprised.  I did find a cracked collar tie that needs reinforcing though.

On Sunday I put on a second coat of paint, but it went much faster than the first coat.  I generally don’t go all the way to the very edge for the second coat unless a spot really needs it, and the edges are what take the most time.  If you have new smooth walls then you can use masking tape to control the edges, but these walls and ceiling are bumpy and uneven.  That meant I had to spend hours painting around corners and door molding by hand.  I mean, really hours, it seems like it takes forever.  I’m pretty happy with the result though.

A tricolor bedroom

I also did a few other items today including replacing the front porch light and doorbell button and putting lamps in the floodlight in the back yard.  It turns out that the floodlight is on the same switch as the utility room light and the switch next to that one appears to do nothing at all.  I’ll have to open up the junction box and figure out what’s going on there.

UPDATE:  The second switch that I mentioned above is a 3-way for the cellar light.  That’s a good idea in principle, except that you can’t see the light at all when the door is closed.  So really, if you are unsure whether or not you turned off the light in the cellar then having this switch won’t help you very much.  I’ll see if I can add a pilot light to it.

My garbage and recycling pickup day at the Bestor Street house is Thursday.  I’m posting that little nugget of information not because anyone particularly cares, but because I always forget what day it is at my current address.  Maybe if I write it down here I’ll remember it for a change.  🙂