Tag: drywall finishing

July 15, 2025 – Summer Projects 2

July 15, 2025 /

I had a great idea for my wife’s 50th birthday. It has taken 32 years for her to warm up a tiny bit to firearms. I have never been involved in any crimes and nobody has gotten injured when I am around. She has finally come around to recreational shooting can be a lot of fun. I thought that I would buy her a really nice looking 22 rifle. That is until she wanted to redo the bathroom to the tune of $2000 for her birthday. How can I deny that?

The bathroom wasn’t exactly the bathroom. It also included replacing all of the light fixtures in our bedroom. We had a free day during the weekend of the fourth, that is hard to believe so I took on the task of replacing the fixtures.

I really didn’t want to do it, my hand and arm are still hurting quite a bit. The fixtures we replaced a week earlier, I tried to instruct my son and wife on how to do the job. I am sad to say that he ran off saying that it was impossible and I ended up doing at least half of the job. I decided that I didn’t need the aggravation of trying to get help. It was more pain than my arm.

I definitely won’t argue that the the old fixtures were dated. They were stamped 1999 and they had a Victorian brass look. They had already been updated once by replacing the globes from Victorian flowers to clear. Despite the fact that these new fixtures do look updated, every single one we have replaced has been a downgrade in light the fixtures put out.

My son’s fan went from four full sized lightbulbs to two small base bulbs. The sconces in the living room went from clear glass to shaded. An now the fixtures in our bedroom went from full size bulbs to small base bulbs. I guess that this is the only thing that bothers me is that fixtures are purchased by how they look and not by what they do. But, if this is the only problem then I will just put up with it.

At least a victory I can celebrate is that my wife agreed with me that it would be best to wait until the winter season to do the dry wall finishing from the rot repair and new window that was installed. I think that it is prudent not to spend a bunch of time repairing when I am not 100% confident that the leak is resolved.

I don’t know that I would call this a project but I recently purchased new wheels and tires for my pickup. I have needed new tires for quite a while. The problem was that the wheels were chrome coated and the chrome is what seals the inside of the tire. Over the years, that chrome has started to crack and therefore leak. It is very slow no doubt, about it but it causes the tires to be run on low pressure and wear the tires out prematurely.

I have had the local tire shop seal the inside of the wheel but they said that they have done all they can do. It is not an expense that I really wanted to make but this old pickup deserves some love. I have done very little in the 22 years I have owned it and things are starting to wear out. Now that my son will be gone in the fall, I plan on taking it out hunting this year as well. That is not to mention that I am also going to need it when I go get dirt for my fall season platers.

End Your Programming Routine: With summer ticking by at a breakneck pace, it is time to be buttoning things up as much as possible. There is still plenty to do for sure but if I gauge my progress I think that I am on track to get everything done. That is good because checking things off of my list makes me happy.

July 2, 2025 – Summer Projects

July 3, 2025 /

For the last couple of weeks, stuff has been piling up in our foyer. The reality is that a lot of these projects are not really necessary but as my wife is fond of saying, ‘happy wife, happy life’. It doesn’t say that much for me, but the optional things are relatively easy. It is the necessary ones that are going to be a lot more work.

We have lived in this house over 20 years. That entire time, we have had a heat pump downstairs but no air conditioning upstairs. We had our bedroom upstairs for at least 13 of those years and the truth be told, I only found a handful of days a year to be too hot. Nevertheless, we are having house guests in a couple of weeks. My wife wanted to ensure they were comfortable.

I suppose where it finally cracked, my son’s room is south facing. I won’t lie that it does get hot. But, over the years he has declined the offer for air conditioning. Our exchange student was staying in my son’s room and he spent several nights sleeping downstairs in May when we were in the 90s. Now that he is gone, we are cleaning up the remnants and my son is moving back into his room. It is the perfect time to get the new AC unit installed. I have a second one to install in the upstairs family room.

Speaking of my son’s room, he is also getting a new ceiling fan. My wife says that it needs to be replaced because it is old. What? Remember ‘happy wife, happy life’. The truth is the pull string has been broken pretty short. The reason is the kids would jump off the bed and pull on it breaking it. I know because I have caught them doing it.

This could be repaired for a couple of dollars; I have also done that before. But, it is best not to fight it. I have to say it does look new and more contemporary. The new fan is significantly inferior to the old one. This one has two lightbulbs where the other one had four. Also, the access to remove the globe requires you to reach your fingers up and over the metal fixture, inside of a channel.

The worst part is that I had to completely take the whole fan apart twice. Once because the blade was rubbing on the switch. After that was fixed, I found out that one of the supply wires was rubbing on the fan motor. That is done now.

Now that we have had the dry rot repaired and the new windows are installed, that has spawned two projects. The first is all of the replacement work has to be painted on the exterior. The second project is that I need to do drywall finishing on the inside.

I guess that because those are separate trades, then that is why they do them. It does seem like for two days of work and $5000 in labor that I would have a week’s worth of effort to finish. They did do the initial mud and tape job and it was pretty sloppy, so they did me a favor by stopping and not charging me more.

But wait, there is more. For my wife’s birthday (and anniversary) she want’s a new vanity and light fixtures in the bathroom, bedroom and dining room. This definitely makes my shopping easier but I already had a plan for what I wanted to buy. Now, I am going to have quite a bit of work to get all of this work done. Keep using the phrase ‘happy wife, happy life’.

I think that is enough to do this summer. As I have already stated in my podcast there is still plenty going on in life the summer as well. I am assuming that I can complete all that in the summer time frame. You can expect that there will be periodic updates on all of the work. The fan and AC are done now, at least my foyer is clear of boxes at this point for now.

End Your Programming Routine: We are currently in a holding pattern for cancer treatment. There have been some mixed results on the testing and so the doctors want to wait and retest in a few months. My wife really wanted to wait until the fall to get started anyway, looks like there will be no choice now. Hopefully, I can get the projects finished before my life is turned upside down again.

June 15, 2021 – Am I in a rut?

June 15, 2021 /

Trying to come up with new things to talk about in a meaningful way everyday is sometimes difficult. It is not necessarily that I don’t have ideas but I am weaving this endeavor into my day and it takes a level of prep to do good work. I need supporting photos and videos ready to go when I sit down to start writing.

Sometimes when I get ideas, I queue up article stubs and then when I am looking for something to write about I go to the well of things that I have already put some effort into. Sometimes I have the week entirely planned out before I start. Not this week.

A large part of the reason is that I am focused on the drywall finishing of my office. It is not something that you casually pick at. It requires blocks of hours at a time if I ever want to get this project finished. Another analog is like painting with a roller. Once you get paint on the roll, you are committed to going until you have to stop because it takes so much effort to clean a roller that it is not a casual start and stop process.

Hence, it feels like I have hit a rut here. Monday some sort of opinion, Tuesday is a project update, Wednesday is a grab bag, Thursday is Tacticool and Friday is the 1984 analysis. I am definitely planning on not keeping it this way, but it is convenient for the moment while I am pre-occupied.

This project has grown more refined since I started. Originally, I wasn’t going to finish the drywall. I also wasn’t going to cover the ceiling or the ductwork. One reason that I did it was that it is going to be dark in there and wanted as much reflective surface as possible. In terms of cost, It added may $30, it is more the time that it is going to take to finish the project. I am still on the fence about molding, The cost is again minimal but it is more time and time is something that is pulling at me.

End Your Programming Routine: I should probably set a date to toward and be finished. So, I will arbitrarily pick July 1 to be moved in. If I feel like it, then you probably do to. For now, I am going to power through and keep going.