So... What are YOU doing? - Part 5

Lämmchen said:

You should try one! Where I used to live there was a race probably every week in the area! LOL

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It's been about 3 or 4 years since I did a 10k. But, I have done several races in the past

Drinking coffee, thinking about measuring my walls with a view to buying the materials I'd need to reframe them.

The room I've been working in went down to 52 overnight. The thermal images this morning show much improvement, although I noticed I missed a couple of gaps that run right through the wall, which would explain some of the heat loss. I'll need to measure the odd-shaped gap of one of the holes and try and cut a piece of concrete that's about the right size, so I can cement it into place. I may also fill the space behind it with building foam, just for some extra insulation.

Looks like I can reframe one wall using 8 pieces of 2x6 lumber, which is handy. I need to finish pulling the existing studs off the wall, which will be a challenge because the way things are nailed together is perhaps best described as "creative".

This morning wasn't very nice but this afternoon has been glorious so I went for a walk in the woods for the first time in absolutely ages. I took in one of my easier routes, it's about 5 miles with 600 feet of elevation gain in the form of rolling hills. My more strenuous route a little longer but double the elevation gain, and it all comes at once. I basically walk up the side of a honking great hill, along the top, and then back down again. The first quarter mile or so is flat, then it climbs for two-and-a-half miles without letting up, then it's plain sailing from there.

Now I'm back feeling strangely relaxed, perhaps I'll get to a bit more of my wall repair. Having removed a couple of the studs I've found more holes in the wall. Oh what fun...

I got one of the odd-shaped holes mostly patched. I had to break up my concrete block - I'd cut strips in it with an angle grinder but the blade wasn't big enough to cut right through, so I hit it with a masonry chisel and it broke up. A couple of strips broke in half, which was actually handy because I cut an extra inch or so off one piece, then cut a corner off a smaller piece. The result was kinda-sorta the right shape to fill my odd-shaped hole. I got the rectangular piece into the bottom and cemented it in, then the wedge shaped piece on top of it and cemented that in. Now the gap is mostly filled, and the rest is more or less inaccessible due to the window ledge. Once the cement has dried I'll most likely fill the void behind it with building foam.

Now I've got most of a concrete block sitting in my garage.... the part that hasn't been cut into strips yet.

I'm trying to get my notes done earlier this week, so I don't have to do them over the weekend.

Went into town with my wife to run some errands and also stop for lunch out. We haven't eaten out for a while now so figured it was about time.

I'm expecting it to be cooler tomorrow. I hope it gets cold again for at least a short time, because I want to run some thermal images inside the room I'm working on to see how my wall repairs are holding up. So far it's looking a lot more uniform, but when the temperature outside is much the same as the temperature inside it's hard to draw any useful conclusions from thermal images.

My odd shaped wall repair seems to be holding well, thermal images show that most of that wall is now a uniform color. The small section at the top of the odd-shaped hole is still a cold spot (the bit I didn't seal up yet), and there are a couple of other patches that need attention (including the block that was loose, that will need a slice of concrete cemented in beside it to hold everything together).

Sadly the thermometer in there didn't tell me anything useful, as it's been warmer than normal outside today. I'm hoping the temperature drops again before too long so I can find out whether my wall is a uniform color because my fixes have worked, rather than being because the temperature inside is more or less the same as the temperature outside. Once I've got the wall reframed and insulation panels in place it should be much more bearable come summer, when it's in the full glare of the sun for the entire afternoon.

Among the other things done lately I made flax gel for the first time. The process used was to cook (whole, not broken or meal) flax seeds (boil) for about 10 minutes until the mucous like substance just starts to form, then let it sit for 40. Once cool, pour into a container through a cheesecloth and strain out through that cheesecloth or nylon sock.

1/4 cup of seeds boiled in about 700ml of water yielded a sizeable amount of gel. The consistency is very much like snot or mucous but I know this does not actually contribute to mucous in the body, rather, it is very healing. It is popular form of natural hair gel that isn't (by itself) flammable.
However, I wasn't making it to consume today, or for hair gel, but to use it in an experiment. I mixed it with a relatively small amount of 100% alcohol in a glass container then set it alight in a deep metal sink. LOL. The idea was to see if the gel could in any way burn or extend the alcohol mixture. I didn't get a chance to find out.

I've burned lots of ethanol lamps in glass jars with a wick and straight ethanol (sealed with a lid with a hole through which the wick is extended out) . They all get hot in the application that I use them but none got destroyed so quick. Mind, with this experiment I just set the top of the open jar on fire so it wasn't burning with a wick or lid but within maybe 20 minutes the glass jar broke. I guess it got super hot.

I also did some research and found not only could it be used for biodiesel (with other modifications) but also a form of napalm.

Oh, and as I shaved yesterday I can testify that it works as a shaving gel as well (the gel, not the alcohol gel)

During my wall mending yesterday I found a cable that comes in from the outside. I'd wondered where it would be, and should have guessed it would be in about the most inaccessible spot imaginable. It's the cable that comes back indoors from one of the outside lights, and seems to come in right behind one of the wooden studs nailed to the wall. I want to replace it with a new cable (PVC sheathed, grounded etc) and I'm hoping it isn't nailed to anything under the floor. I really don't want to have to lift two layers of floorboards just to pry a cable off the joists but suspect I'm probably going to have to. If that is the case, maybe I can run a fish tape through the cavity for now, and pry the old one off when I'm ready to lift the floor. That would be nice.

Another round of fixing drafts. I found a few yesterday when checking out an upstairs wall, and today I found a bunch more. Some of them were quite nasty. There's also a draft coming in from behind a couple of studs in the corner, and I strongly suspect I'm going to find another piece of cackhanded workmanship where the porch is concerned - it's coming in at more or less exactly the point that a beam to support the porch would come through the wall, so my guess is that I've got another case of a hole cut and not sealed.

An interesting task today was to try and cement a concrete strip into a hole that was mostly below the floor line. I couldn't get at it from above or below very well, so I put on some nitrile gloves (the ones I usually use for clock repair jobs, to keep fingerprints off the brass), and laid the cement in the bottom of the hole with my fingers. Then I pressed the strip into the cement and packed cement in around the bottom of it with my fingers. Finally when I'd filled the hole most of the way up I could finish the job with my pointing trowel, then smooth the whole lot off with the trowel. Not a fun job by any means but it got another hole filled.

Then I dug out a strip of 9" fiberglass from the attic and used it to line either side of the window frame, that was also showing up as a cold strip on my thermal images. It took more fiberglass than I expected, but now both sides are packed. Another interesting aspect is that as I fill gaps and fix walls it not only gets warmer but also quieter - traffic going past just feels like it's more distant. Hopefully by the time I'm done it will be significantly reduced.

With each day things continue to get warmer in the areas I'm fixing, so I'm obviously having some effect.

More fun and games with Cement With Fingers.

I called my friendly local travel agent but nobody was there, so I left a message for them to call me back. At 4:55 there had been no call back so I figured I'd get a call on Monday, and got back to my cementing work. No sooner had I put on my respirator (that looks like part of a full-blown hazmat suit) and mixed up a match of cement, guess what happened. Turns out they are open until 5:30. So I finished my cement work and called them again.

It's fun working above the ceiling level, with a crack big enough to put my fingers right into it, trying to pack it with cement when I can only feel what I'm doing and having to use my fingers. But I mixed up about a cup-and-a-half of cement mixture overall, and pressed it deep into the crack. Hopefully now that room will be a little warmer still. For a time I was pleased to see the actual temperature a degree above the heating set point, despite being about 20 degrees below the set point outside. It's a slow process but I'm getting there.

Tomorrow we're having friends round for dinner and he has a lot of construction experience, so hopefully he will give me a couple of pointers of anything I need to avoid if I'm going to just reframe the entire wall. Currently it looks like I've got regular flooring joists supporting a suspended ceiling but for some reason the ceiling tiles are suspended on a lattice of 2x4 beams. Not sure why someone thought that was necessary, but it looks like if I pull down the ceiling tiles and the beams I not only produce a load of spare 2x4s that I can use for something else but also gain a bit of height on the ceiling. I'm debating whether to pull down the ceiling tiles - they are a bit 1970s - but pulling them down makes more work, more mess, and more work to put up a new ceiling. On the positive side, it will give me a lot more access to get at areas of the wall and to run new cabling.

The two rooms I've been working on lately are interesting. The one upstairs held steady at 55 degrees for 24 hours, although it was in the low 40s yesterday evening and I guess it would have gone lower in the night. The room directly below it, with air gaps between the two since walls are pulled down in both rooms, was holding at 63 degrees, which was nice given the thermostat for the area is in that room and set to 61. Obviously enough heat is getting through from the rest of the house to keep that room warm, even if the room directly above is several degrees cooler.

I've got one more large gap I need to address up there, but to get at it properly I'm going to need to pull down more wall. The trouble with that is that it means I need to move more furniture around, and I'm running out of places to put stuff. I may end up having to move it against wall I've already pulled down, then look to reframe it all later.

For good measure there's another issue I'm trying to figure out. That corner of the house has been extended and I'm not sure just how the joists that support the corner of the floor are suspended. There's no sign of anything being set into either wall, so I'm wondering if they've done something like nail a joist extension into place. Whatever they've done seems pretty solid - I had a heavy dresser there and stood right next to it so it can obviously take a good amount of weight - I'm just curious what they have done. I need to work it out because I don't want to cut through anything downstairs and find that upstairs just lost its support. And I need to cut through a stud downstairs because I think there's a nasty hole in the wall behind it. Maybe I'll borrow a friend's jack, support the corner with the jack while I cut a section away, fix the hole and then secure the section back into place.

Just another aspect of my project that turned into more work than I expected....

Today's job was relatively easy, clearing up a load of pieces of drywall and running my shop vac to clean up the mess I made yesterday. It's nice and clean in there now. I've got 17 bags of trash, two boxes of assorted trash, and a good pile of pieces of drywall to get rid of. Soon it will be time to go to the landfill again.

A few weeks ago I participated in a raffle at work. I have never ever done anything like that, I have never gambled and I dont buy lottery tickets, but obviously someone at work needed help getting ahead financially so I joined in.
The raffle was for a $950 Samsung Note 8 brand new.
I drew the number 35 and had to pay $35 (1 through 45, 1 = $1 etc...)

So any who guess who won the phone?
[emoji2]

Its too much for me so im still deciding if I should keep it or sell it. My tax return went straight to the government for a school loan I owe and they take 100 from me a month so I could really use the cash.

Anyway GO ME!

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Just had friends around for dinner. Because I'd cleaned up the building site I could show them The Project

He was interested in what I was doing. She was fascinated at the fact that I had my bags of rubble neatly lined up ready to be taken away... as she said she doesn't think of neatly stacked bags when she thinks of demolition.

I went to the gym this afternoon and did 40 minutes on the treadmill and leg exercise machines and now I'm back home.

ImaginaryDay2 said:

You're already on a phone plan? KEEP IT!! Are you going to up-load a video of the un-boxing?

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I just made a deal to sell it lol
It's way too much for my simple mind to enjoy if that makes since. A friend of mine really wants the phone and I gave him a good deal 450 that im using towards buying a decent computer. Win win, mind you if I bought the phone and sold it I would have asked for the total value, but 35 bucks is what i paid. He was the first to ask and i wanted it to be affordable for him.
Now my eyes are set on a pc for mastering and mixing down my music... that i will kindly share here

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