Raincharm’s Weblog

A bit past noon on Sunday.
I am already tired, and not yet done with the days efforts.
This is partly a hangover from yesterdays work as well.
I am not Carl, so I did not count the number of bags of drywall debris I wrestled with yesterday.

The architect paid a short visit last night to look at our hole in the wall.
It is even visible from the outside.
Carl could see it readily due to it being night, with light shining from the inside out.
This morning I took a picture. It is the dark area next to the bit of pipe, behind the vegetation I was too lazy to move. (Tired.)

Hole in the house

We also found another hole in the basement wall – but this one went to the space under the concrete porch.
Who knew it was hollow.
Perhaps another new storage location?

Yesterday we did succeed in getting the drywall out of the room of exercise.
But we were not quite ready to get the floor job going, but to get the wall framing down.

Closet area – wall and framing gone

So we are now down to a pile of wood on the floor.

Wood pile – next task

And electrical suspended in various places.
That is the closet light switch in the vent, the exercise room of exercise hanging in front, the 2 electrical outlets are looped over beams.

Electrical suspension

The floor is still in place, and will be the next challenge.
Carl lifted one edge, and the entire piece was coming up; tile, asbestos-laden mastic, plywood backing, frame underneath the plywood and all. We will need to figure out how to attack this next. Maybe start in the closet area which has the possibility of being separate from the rest of the room.

This is what I looked like for at least a portion of the time.
The face mask (P100 rating) was fogging up both my glasses and the goggles, so I eventually took the goggle off.
But I was not doing too much truly dusty work.

Fully attired

Oh – and I have discovered my favorite tool.
Sort of a small cats paw. It is wonderful for getting out all of those nails put in at odd angles, and pounded well into the wood.

Thanks TEd

Finally – on my trip to the hardware store (bags, broom, safety glasses) I spotted this gem.
(Even if the election is long over now, it made me smile.)

The quick update:

Carl has made real progress on the walls.
They are all down (not all of the studs, but all of the wall board).
As I speak he is downstairs breaking wall board into smaller pieces.

The closet

The alcove by the garage door

bottom of the chimney

More of the closet

My job is to go get them bagged, double bagged, and then out of the work area.

Next up will be the flooring. We will have to see how far that effort gets today.

A Review.
After getting home last night we went out for a walk (4 miles) and some errands.
One of the errands was to stop at Scarecrow Video.

The movie we got was, “Beasts of the Southern Wild.”

As this is a quick post (Carl is downstairs wailing away at drywall, and I am not) I will just say it was very interesting, and we both enjoyed it quite a bit.

Oh – and as we were watching the show our dinner included some excellent smoked salmon a friend had brought by. Caught less than a month ago I believe. Ymmmmm.

Today we spent some time at the brand new MOHAI (Museum of History and Industry).
They have just completed remodeling the Armory on South Lake Union. (There are multiple armories in Seattle.)
Their remodel was necessary because they were essentially kicked out of their old house, which will be the site of a freeway off-ramp or something.

Icons of the Area

We took advantage of a members only preview to see the new sites with a small number of folks. I took a few pictures of special bits.

The Lincoln Toe Truck

What museum trip would be complete without information about the local sewer system’s history.

R. H. Thompson’s Sewer Map for Seattle

The Kingdome

There was much that we could not see due to our relative lack of time, and Carl’s need for dinner.

He did deserve a break. He walked down to the museum after spending a good amount of time in the basement with our remodeling.

Wall be gone

Past the beast to the exterior wall

A little hole in the wood just at the top of the concrete wall

The dark stain on the wall is where the water runs down from the hole

“I’m fixing a hole where the rain gets in …”

Well, that is sort of what it looks like.

Work area plastic door

Happy taper.

Taping Crazy

We spent a good bit of today continuing to find the final bits of detritus in the north end of the basement, and then doing what we could to put up a dust barrier.

There are some big pieces that feel as though they were put together in the room to be demolished.
Mostly because they were.

So we decided to at least start with them more or less in place.
Thus, the beast of the basement. (Or how to wrap an awkwardly shaped present.)

The beast

Also managed a load to Goodwill, and more staging for the storage pen.

Tomorrow I must go back to work – at least for a day or two.

We had a pretty darn good Christmas.
Full of family and friends.

Of course, none of them were here with us, except a few friends that just dropped by.

Because there were only the two of us in the house, we slept until 8.
Thinking we were safe with a 3 hour cushion between us and the east coast, we called Ashlan around 9 AM.
She was just rousing herself to the point where she was OK to Skype.

We spent some time sharing presents long distance, and generally chatting it up.

Ashlan’s tree

Next up was Rey and the Colorado Harms.
Again, Skype is a great way to share – and better than just a speaker phone.

And finally the elder Regenstreif household, in two shifts.
Pre-dinner (theirs) we had a chance to chat with the younger, and then post-dinner the elders.

Finally we had our own dinner, and decided it was about time to work on our Project.
Dutifully downstairs we moved some more wood around and out of the way of the demolition.

[As an aside, I have never known a house to have so much unattached wood around. I know a few years ago I placed an enormous stock-pile on the curb. We have pulled out more, including some apparent fire-place logs, and a 1/4 of a trunk from what must have been a large tree. Most interesting were the four sides to a wooden crate. “Frigidaire” and “this side up” stamped along the sides, although it must have been one short refrigerator. ]

Just as we were hitting our stride, the doorbell rang.
A few friends stopped by to deliver some holiday treats.
This allowed us to finally return a sweatshirt that had been left at our house well more than a year ago.

It was good to talk, but it stopped our progress, and we took that as an omen.

We will be ready to go first thing in the morning – I promise (myself).

As we have for the past several years, we had Christmas Eve dinner with the Shannons. This year we were joined by the Steiners as well.

Since we had the three girls present, after dinner we put out our boxes of toys for them to choose from.
Several have found a new home. Horses (not the little ones with the stable – we kept those), games and puzzles. We even tempted the adults with a few pieces.

Don’t worry, Goodwill still gets a boxful, along with a bunch of clothes, and some other odds and ends.

And then it was off to Candy Cane Lane.
Always good for a holiday stroll, this year was better than most as it was dry!

The gangs all here, and some are pictured.

There is always a theme to the centerpiece – this year it is the Nutcracker.

Here are some of the decorated houses. Any time you see a sign, it says “Peace”.

Our favorite over the years. In the past this list actually had a naughty and nice side. We thought it was funny because one of Carl’s brothers name appeared on the right (naughty) side. Now they have removed the decision, and added some more up-to-date names.

We walked through, but several choose to drive through. As a regional draw, this is the normal site on Christmas Eve approaching to drive.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.

ZAPPA.

Frank is gone, but Dweezil is doing a tour of his fathers music.

We attended the concert was at the Neptune Theater last night. The Neptune was a movie theatre and has been converted for all sorts of live shows. It is also less than a mile from our house. So we walked. In the rain. (Rain = steady, wetting stuff from the sky. As compared to showers = intermittent wetting stuff from the sky.)

Carl found an umbrella recently unearthed in our cleaning spree. It worked (for one anyway). An older Mariner’s version, perhaps from Griffey’s first year. Advertising by Nalley (Nalley Valley vegetables). I am not sure if Nalley still exists as a brand.

We sat in the balcony. This was where most of the seats were located. There was a VIP section on the main floor, and the rest of the space was for standing/dancing/etc. We decided we would enjoy the show more from a seated position. The view was good, and the show was great. Notice the number of grey hairs in the audience. We were not the only ones looking for a seat.

The Neptune

Close-up of Neptune

Neptune

Neptune’s eyes watching every move from up high.

Eyes up high

The musicians were all very talented, Two in particular played any number of instruments and sang, often in the same song with barely time to breathe in between. In one song Scheila Gonzalez was playing a saxophone/flute/keyboards and singing vocals. In the same piece Ben Thomas was playing trombone/trumpet/shaker thing/tambourine and doing vocals. The other musicians were equally talented, but most kept to one instrument.

The Band

Carl and I saw Frank in person about 25-30 years ago. I think I enjoyed this concert more. I say “think” because my memory of the long-ago concert is a bit fuzzy. Carl thinks it is because they did a broader assortment of music.

Yesterday was supposed to be a day to make great progress on the weekend project.
As it turns out progress was made elsewhere.

I think the physical nature of the previous day made me look for a slightly less physical aspect.

Toys became our main focus.
We chose some that will stay, and many more that will go.
This was more mentally taxing, with a bit of physical thrown in.
There are so many memories with some toys, and yet they don’t really need to live with us any longer.
We did tend to save classic, or just special toys.

And I got to play with a few while making sure they were still whole and operational.

As we get to spend part of Christmas Eve with some of the younger set, we are planning to have a “hand-me-down” Christmas, and let them make as many choices as they want (or their parents allow) from our to-go pile.

Hopefully this will be enough, because there is plenty to choose from.

Today was garbage/recycle/yard waste day.
We filled our garbage and recycle bins with detritus from the last few days, and then proceeded to fill 3 neighbors’ recycle bins and 1 neighbor’s garbage. We also tipped these service people as they were tipping our bins.

So this is the long weekend of our project.
Whether or not we complete our project this weekend remains to be seen, but we did make what I call significant progress. I think this will be one of those things where the set-up takes three times as long as the “project” itself.

We made the obligatory trip to the hardware store for supplies.
I think most people do their last minute shopping at other than hardware stores so we had plenty of attentive workers to help us find our supplies.

Brought them all home and they are down in the project area – still in the bags.

The room to be removed

You can see a few big things left in the room. Along with the bags full of supplies.

Once home we set about cleaning the area around the project, which is supposed to generate copious amounts of dust. Carl had made a dent in moving pounds of basement debris upstairs. Toys in particular.

toy room

The study has been transformed into a toy sorting room.
Some will stay, many will go.

I think these made the cut.

little figures

They grew up playing baseball, card games, made up games, and hanging out in Lego lands.

Back down in the basement, things got shoved away, moved here and there,

Basement – floor visible

If you have been in our basement before, you might notice that you can see the floor, and there is a fairly open pathway.

I, on the other hand, see a bunch more stuff that needs to be gone through, and a lot of it flung (or donated).

cleared out – at least a bit

Another view, with the exercise equipment working its way out of the room soon not to be.

And the Pope wall, with the actual Pope wall part removed. Ready for tear down – almost.

The pope wall

And, for those that care, the Pope was saved from the recycle bin.

Not much new today – work, chiropractor, dinner, repeat.

So, here are a few links that made me smile.

First up is from the Tennessee Smokies.
Rey makes an appearance at about 1 minute.

Smokies Christmas

Second up is a link that I was led to by a facebook friend.
Maybe it is the stress at work, or just the need to let loose every now and then, or maybe it really is just that funny. Goodness knows I have had my share of mistexts.

Sorry there is not more tonight.

The last two weeks of December are always a bit different from those the rest of the year. And this year is the same. That is to say – different. And perhaps more so than usual.

Monday was a 10.5 hour work day. But that was mostly due to an early start care of taking my carpooler to the airport for an early flight.

Tuesday was an 11 hour work day. Trying to get things done that need to be done, and a few that would be helpful to those trying to beat end of the year deadlines.

Wednesday was a day to relax – at least a bit. Only 8 hours.
And since it was also the day of our holiday work lunch, there was a bit of a long lunch. And as part of the set-up and tear-down crew this year, even a little less work work than most.

During the set-up the fire department arrived for their monthly blood-pressure and blood sugar monitoring. (110/80, and 99.) The blood-sugar test ended with a band-aid on my ring finger.

After lunch I decided I had enough sustenance that I could spare a pint of blood. As it happened the Sammamish City Hall was hosting a blood drive, so I set off to do my good deed for the day. Unfortunately, after two attempts to pass the iron-test, I was found to be lacking. Iron that is. And sent packing. With a middle finger and pointer finger swabbed in band-aids as well.

Maybe tomorrow will be a “normal” work day.
Tonight – well I am trying to finish some planning for our proposed weekend activities. We will have to see how well I do, or if it slips into tomorrow.