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

[NewCreation435]

Watching Judge Judy! She's a blast!

I didn't realize she was still on television. I don't get to watch much afternoon weekday television anymore.

 

[Lamb]

Watching Judge Judy! She's a blast!

That's one of my favorite shows!! She's very clever!

 

[tango]

Lazy afternoon.... went out for lunch with my wife. Now sitting in my recliner. Maybe I'll fiddle with the house a little later on, but I suspect not...

 

[ImaginaryDay2]

Thinking of starting a new thread - the "Yuh-huh! - Nuh-uh!" thread.

 

[tango]

As expected, I did precisely no work on my house today. It's nice to take a break.

Tomorrow morning I've got a few bits of wood to screw into place, and maybe I'll get busy chopping up insulation boards to put them into place.

 

[Krissy Cakes]

Eating/browsing/listening to music.

 

[NewCreation435]

We are getting a wintry mix of weather today. Mostly rain but a little sleet and snow. We went out to lunch today and came back and I took a nap. Nothing else to report

 

[tango]

Mostly restful day. Had to pop out to the church to get the hall set up for a family who booked it, which was pretty simple. Then ran a few errands, went for a walk in the sunshine with my wife, and then figured I'd take the chance while it was warm and sunny to squirt some building foam around the beams supporting my porches but from the outside. Fiddly to get at where I needed to be, but got there in the end. Then I used the remainder of the foam to seal behind the wall studs in the room I've been working on. I still have cold patches, and I think the cold air is getting from the attic behind the wall studs - there are only so many places it can be getting in given the amount of work I've done fixing gaps in the walls and stuffing fiberglass into cavities.

Maybe tomorrow morning I'll get to see if it stayed any warmer. It's hugely better than it was, but still has a few more places where improvement is possible.

 

[Lamb]

Getting ready for church and hoping it doesn't snow as I travel there.

 

[tango]

My room under construction went down to 54 degrees overnight. The previous two nights it was dropping to 52 and 50, so it looks like there's at least some improvement there. I still have a lot of places to seal with the foam, and haven't put the insulation panels in yet. It seems a lot quieter in there too, which is good.

Today's task after church is to knock out a small brick entirely. I don't know how the builder did it but there's one brick that's not well placed. FRom the inside it protrudes such that getting insulation panels around it is impossible and from the outside it's slightly recessed. Not so bad you'd see it if you weren't looking for it, but causing me problems. Much of the mortar around it has perishe anyway, so I'm going to chisel all of the mortar out, remove the entire brick, and cement around it. That's assuming the weather stays warm enough, if it stays in the low 30s I'm not going to be making holes in my exterior wall!

 

[tango]

Definitely making good progress on my room. The temperature outside looks like it's not even as high as 30 degrees so the fact the room held that little bit warmer (with the door closed and all the heating turned off) is definitely a good sign.

I'm thinking I should be buying shares in the company that makes the building foam. I wonder how much more of it I'm going to go through before my work is done...

 

[tango]

I ended up not taking my troublesome brick out entirely. I tried to chisel away the mortar around it from the inside and found that the brick was starting to break up, so figured that if I continued there was a significant chance I'd end up with lots of pieces of brick. That seemed like a suboptimal outcome so I reconsidered.

I decided to fix the mortar on the outside, which had partly perished. I didn't have to tap it very hard with my chisel before it crumbled away completely, leaving me with a gap about 1/2" wide right through the wall, so I mixed up some cement and packed the newly opened hole. From the inside I could see it had pushed right into the gap, which was reassuring. I was going to take my angle grinder to the inner face of the brick but figured I could try and just chisel what was left of the face away, then cement in a strip of concrete. It turned out that was fairly easy. So I cut myself a strip of concrete (more fun with the angle grinder) and got it cemented into place. Now it looks a whole lot better, and is also flush with the rest of the brickwork which means I can put an insulation panel in the space.

While I was mixing cement outside I took the opportunity provided by a nice sunny day to fix up a couple of other parts of the wall that needed attention. There are still a lot to do - I'm going to need to get my ladder out and go over the wall closely - but I'm slowly working my way through them.

 

[Lamb]

I went to Wal-Mart to pick up a few things...$63 dollars later I return home. Oh my. It's all useful stuff and they had a 2 pack of Contigo water bottles for $5 so I couldn't pass up that deal!

 

[tango]

Went out back to burn a couple of old boxes. Normally I wouldn't bother burning for the sake of so little but one of the boxes had had moldy vegetables in it so I wanted it gone before it got any more unpleasant. Then I figured since I had the burn barrel active I might as well burn the box of wood offcuts I'd accumulated, so took those out and burned them too.

Now I'm debating whether to stay in my manky work clothes and cut some more insulation panels, or get cleaned up and do some more other stuff. Maybe I'll cut a couple of panels and then get cleaned up.

 

[tango]

I cut some pieces of a panel only to find they weren't even remotely close to the size they needed to be. I was puzzled as to how I'd measured so badly wrong, then realised I'd cut one dimension correctly and the other from a previous list. Which was more than a little annoying. Thankfully they were for the spaces between a couple of wooden struts that I could move, and a leftover piece was just about exactly a size I could use. So I had to move the two struts, put two pieces into place and cut an inch off a third piece. Then I ended up with a different offcut.

Now I'm looking at routers trying to decide which one to buy, with the usual considerations of balancing not wanting to spend a fortune on it but not wanting to buy cheap and end up buying twice.

 

[ImaginaryDay2]

Had a few minutes before I needed to get ready this morning. I'm going to see family for Easter weekend. So I'm on here and listening to the upstairs neighbor's cat scratching at the basement door that separates the suite. I wish I could let him in

 

[Krissy Cakes]

Waiting for Jordan so we can go to the store. :faint:

 

[tango]

Updating spreadsheets that I should have been keeping up to date for the last few months. It's tedious but got most of it done now. I really must get in the habit of maintaining them better.

Once that's done I've got some fiddling to do with a web site. Tomorrow if I've got it all done I want to run a new electrical cable so I can pull an old one out. The new one will be temporary but will mean a socket is wired to 12-gauge cable right back to the breaker, rather than nasty knob-and-tube.

 

[tango]

Found some more ugly brickwork. I figured it was about time I pulled down a couple of parts of wall I've been studiously ignoring for a time and, sure enough, gaps right through to outside. A bunch of cement later they were blocked. Some of them were behind wall studs so I used a can of building foam to fill them as best I could. Now it's set I can cut away the surplus that's oozed around the wall studs and maybe squirt a load more foam in to fill the last few gaps.

What was very reassuring was that I'd turned the heating off while I worked, and left it off all afternoon and all evening. By the time I went to bed the temperature hadn't budged from 59 degrees, so I left the heating off all night. This morning the outside temperature was in the mid 30s and the temperature in the area I'd been working had dropped from 59 to 56 degrees. I'm feeling pretty pleased with that. There are still a few gaps in the brickwork but in places I can't physically get at just yet. In time I'll get to them but they involve pulling down walls in a closet that is currently absolutely loaded with stuff, so it won't happen for a while...

 

[Confessional Lutheran]

Still studying for my Entry Level Competency Exams. I took my GRE last Tuesday and I'm going to take Concordia's online test later this month.