Monday, August 07, 2006
Have a pheasant plucking day!
It was a great weekend for me, with few stupidities at all to speak of beside a couple pre-existing conditions to replacing the lighting in my bathroom, which I'll get to shortly. I skipped the Sumner Arts Festival this year because I had a computer repair gig in Seattle to attend to (and you can only ogle home-made glass beads for so long before the thrill wears off), and I spent quality time with a couple friends along the way so I'm facing the week with a silly grin. [Peggy: you were mistaken...] The title line above was seen on a T-shirt that I encountered when leaving a restaurant; it was just the perfect sentiment for that moment and I laughed pretty hard. Sigh... Big hugs and smoochies to Matthau for dropping in unexpectedlike (why couldn't we work in a record store years ago?) and JazMama for giving piece a chance (two DVD-RWs and a 300gb hard drive later). Just when I wondered where my funky friends and crazy times had gone, there you were to remind me I'm still alive... thank you, I did so need that.
Sunday was home improvement day, and my adductor muscles are sore now but I have no idea why (I swear, I haven't done the Time Warp again...) other than from climbing up on that vanity a dozen times while replacing the light, which didn't bother me at all at the time. :) Herein were the two stupidities encountered -- first, that the horizontal beam inside the wall that is used for mounting lights is nine inches below where I want it to be; second, the crackheads who replaced the light which had been there from 1959 to around 1996 (according to the "inspected by" sticker on the fixture I removed) didn't mount that light bar correctly, and it was being held to the drywall by two short screws rather than the intended bracket.
Sucker coulda fallen down at any point, truthfully, though to its benefit the back was "painted shut". So once I got that fixture down, admired the outline of the original smaller fixture and the green paint which originally graced the bathroom walls, and cut a hole for a new utility box, I had to figure some way to mount the box since it was at least six inches from anything else. Wound up prying a couple chunks of 2x4 off the mowed-down mailbox pole repair of several months ago (the old mailbox and pole have been in a wheelbarrow since I replaced them), sawing them a bit to make a piece fit in the hole yet be tall enough to stand on the existing box/beam, shimmed it into place with another 2x4 chunk and pieces cut from a yard sign for some political race of months ago [gawd, the amount of lumber I recycle!], and then was able to mount the utility box in the hole. A bit of spackle and a mesh patch later, I had the old box hole covered; in the photo you can see where it was. I took care of the wiring and mounted the new fixture correctly -- which of course will be coming down when this wall gets repainted in a fortnight but we need light presently. The photo also shows the new exhaust fan (exciting, ain't it?).
In the future we will be redoing our kitchen, something we've talked about since shortly after we moved in (blame the previous folks' surgery on the linoleum, which made putting in the refrigerator a bit of a challenge), and this will be somewhere down the road. There's just so much wrong about our kitchen. We decided to wrangle the bathroom first as a test to see if we have the stuff it takes to handle major home improvements, which the kitchen undoubtedly will be. Also, this is a test to see if we can follow through on home improvement plans from start to finish, or in my wife's mind anyway, because she is accustomed to her family and friends starting projects then leaving them unfinished for years on end. I'm not about to leave any of the major projects hanging because the bathroom and kitchen are functional spaces and must remain fully functional, in my opinion, not just areas that can still be used despite being in disarray.
Sunday was home improvement day, and my adductor muscles are sore now but I have no idea why (I swear, I haven't done the Time Warp again...) other than from climbing up on that vanity a dozen times while replacing the light, which didn't bother me at all at the time. :) Herein were the two stupidities encountered -- first, that the horizontal beam inside the wall that is used for mounting lights is nine inches below where I want it to be; second, the crackheads who replaced the light which had been there from 1959 to around 1996 (according to the "inspected by" sticker on the fixture I removed) didn't mount that light bar correctly, and it was being held to the drywall by two short screws rather than the intended bracket.
Sucker coulda fallen down at any point, truthfully, though to its benefit the back was "painted shut". So once I got that fixture down, admired the outline of the original smaller fixture and the green paint which originally graced the bathroom walls, and cut a hole for a new utility box, I had to figure some way to mount the box since it was at least six inches from anything else. Wound up prying a couple chunks of 2x4 off the mowed-down mailbox pole repair of several months ago (the old mailbox and pole have been in a wheelbarrow since I replaced them), sawing them a bit to make a piece fit in the hole yet be tall enough to stand on the existing box/beam, shimmed it into place with another 2x4 chunk and pieces cut from a yard sign for some political race of months ago [gawd, the amount of lumber I recycle!], and then was able to mount the utility box in the hole. A bit of spackle and a mesh patch later, I had the old box hole covered; in the photo you can see where it was. I took care of the wiring and mounted the new fixture correctly -- which of course will be coming down when this wall gets repainted in a fortnight but we need light presently. The photo also shows the new exhaust fan (exciting, ain't it?).In the future we will be redoing our kitchen, something we've talked about since shortly after we moved in (blame the previous folks' surgery on the linoleum, which made putting in the refrigerator a bit of a challenge), and this will be somewhere down the road. There's just so much wrong about our kitchen. We decided to wrangle the bathroom first as a test to see if we have the stuff it takes to handle major home improvements, which the kitchen undoubtedly will be. Also, this is a test to see if we can follow through on home improvement plans from start to finish, or in my wife's mind anyway, because she is accustomed to her family and friends starting projects then leaving them unfinished for years on end. I'm not about to leave any of the major projects hanging because the bathroom and kitchen are functional spaces and must remain fully functional, in my opinion, not just areas that can still be used despite being in disarray.
