bkdunn.com

Woke up, fell out of bed, comb+head, found my way downstairs and drank a Coke, etc., etc. Opened my garage door and there, between the door and the grill of my truck (parked in the driveway) was a dead bird. A sign, no doubt, an omen of things to come, namely:

• There was a cop blocking the onramp for Mifflin Road, so I had to veer off onto Carson Street and was half-way to South Side flats before there was a turnoff I could use to turn around again.
• Found out it was going to cost me $5,000 to get my roof fixed.
• Ken Griffey, Jr. retired.
• Big ol’ electrical storm.
• Power went out (and stayed out for 18 hours).

Took a shower by flashlight, then I went back to bed. Today I got a revised estimate on the roof: $3,900. And it seems like I should have taken a photo of the bird.

bkd

PS, My hair’s too short to comb, but the rhythm would’ve been way off without it. Also considered using the Easy Star All-Stars variation (fingers+dreads), but figured the original would be confusing enough.

PPS, I’m sad about Griffey retiring.His bat was too slow and he should have retired at the end of last year, but he was a big part of the reason I ended up liking baseball as much as I do; he was the guy that made my team relevant. With him out of the game it feels like a part of me is, now, officially and irrevocably, washed up.

Painting preparation, the great American pastime.

Because the cat urine stench alone wasn’t enough to peel paint off the walls.

Filling holes.

It’s a metal thing nailed into the drywall that kept the tiles in.

Hadn’t realized my baseboards were this ugly.

The dropping of cloth is complete.

Lacks drama. Not edgy enough. It’s 7:12 in the morning right now. There was some other stuff not pictured. Like that one glass brick window had a couple of wood things screwed into the window box that didn’t want to come out because the screws’ heads were stripped. Had to pull them off their screws and then unscrew them with pliers. Now *that* was drama.

Not really. It was pretty normal. I’m just glad I didn’t put another gash in the drywall.

Speaking of gashes, there was a pretty good-sized hole in the wall above the fake fireplace. I tried putting one of those pre-fabricated patches on it, but the metal thing on the patch was really thick and made the patch too obvious. So I pulled it off and just put drywall tape over the hole and mudded over that drywall tape. I’m guessing it’s less likely to stand the test of time this way, but it definitely looks better. Worst case, I have to re-patch it and re-paint it some time in the future, but so long as that future date is after Labor Day, that’ll be fine. Right now I just want to get stuff done and move on and in the meantime hopefully none of my house guests decide to probe the living room walls for soft spots.

The paint in the one bedroom and in the hallway came off in sheets as pictured. Kind of disturbing. And once that paint was off, the wall behind it smelled like cigarette smoke.

Drop cloths worked better than hoped. It turns out that the two big drop cloths I got each had one of their two dimensions perfectly in sync with one of the two dimensions of one of the two rooms they were used in. So it was a pretty good fit. FWIW, I’m only working on the living room, hallway, and one of the bedrooms right now.

I need to get some window coverings so I don’t have to wake up at sunrise every morning.

Otherwise fine,

bkd

PS, WIll eventually do a floor re-finishing post-mortem, but all the “before” photos are on the laptop and the laptop is in a place called “Cranberry Township” right now. It sounds like a place where the street signs are slathered in gumdrops, but it’s not. It’s just a place. Might be a few days still for the post-mortem though.

Kind of hit a setback in the blogging department when my laptop’s video card went south on Friday night and stayed there. Laptop is currently north of here, at a shop, getting fixed. Supposedly. It might be fixed under recall — I’m pressing my thumbs in hopeful anticipation.

Here’s another thought on the kitchen. It’s sort of like the last one, only this time I’ve moved the fridge to the “east” wall as per Krik. Although I’ve sort of lost the pantry in the process (I’m okay with that) and I didn’t move the stove as much further south as recommended (because where it’s positioned here is where the existing external vent and 220-volt outlet are), although I moved it far enough to accommodate an 18-inch base cabinet, which I think was the main concern anyway.

Each square = 6 inches!

I priced the cabinets+doors out at $1,957 at Ikea. I priced out all the hardware and kickplates also, but the total sum is on my laptop, which is north of here. Getting fixed.

Still haven’t had anyone come out to estimate taking out the southeast wall as pictured above. Tomorrow? We’ll see, son. We’ll see.

bkd

Smells like… victory. Seriously.

First coat.

The finished wood doesn’t actually look as dark as this.

Now I just gotta wait another 72 hours for it to cure. Depending on the lighting, I either really like the natural wood (no stain) look or have continued misgivings about it. Natural light: looks great. Artificial: misgivings. It’s unfair to judge until it’s all settled and done with anyway.

I’ll do some sort of floor refinishing post-mortem some time after the 72 hours are up. While I’m waiting for it to dry, I’ll probably go back into the kitchen for a day or two and see if I can get rid of the rest of the tiles and pull the sink cabinet out (the tricky part is that the pipes have grown up through the bottom of it), then it’ll be back to the living room and bedrooms. On deck there:

• Paint prep (patching, spackling, sanding, removing plates and vents, removing light fixtures, taping, laying ground cover).
• One coat of Kilz on every surface I can find that isn’t a floor or window.
• Paint ceiling (flat white).
• Paint walls (hoping to find the same green I had in NYC).
• Paint trim (white).

That should take care of next week.

bkd

It was the wackiest thing in the house, bar-none, and now it’s just a Kilz-swipe away from complete extinction. In a sense, I feel bad about destroying such a one-of-a-kind design element. In another sense, not so much. Before vs. after:

The cool thing is that if I reversed the order of the photos, it’d still look like I’d done something.

Yeah, all I did was knock the “mantle” part off of it. But still. Took at *least* 20 minutes. Prior to destruction, I showed this feature to a guest.

Her: They just painted the wall like a fireplace.

Me: Yeah.

Her: But it’s just a cold air return.

Me: Yeah.

Her: So what were they…?

Me: Yeah.

Her: Oh.

Me: Yeah.

In a few days, Kilz ftw.

Other than that, yesterday was another day of sanding and shop-vac’ing. You can’t tell me this doesn’t look like fun:

Unless you want to, then you can.

Here’s a run-down of sanding:

Drum Sander: 2.5 days.

Edge Sander: 1.5 days.

Orbital + Finish Sander: 2 half-days.

Clean-up with Orbital Sander: 2 hours this morning.

Doesn’t actually look that arduous when it’s typed out like that. OTOH, I blew my nose yesterday afternoon and whatever it was that came out was medium-brown.

bkd

Woke up late. Went to the Home Despot twice (twice!) to buy hoses for my new used dryer only to find out I got a gas leak in that system somewhere (should I shut the gas off? no, I’m sure it’s harmless). Don’t imagine that’s all that interesting. But filling nail holes with putty?

Spellbinding.

I’m also pursuing the sisyphusian, er, pursuit of filling all the edges of the floor (the part that runs up against the baseboards) so that I can leave the toe plate off. Unfortunately, this floor was laid down with the then-firm knowledge that there’d be another round of molding added to the system, so they just left gaps (you can see one in the photo above). We’ll see how it works out. They should sell wood putty in bigger tubs — I’ve been through two already and will probably need at least a couple more tomorrow.

And then, since it seems like I’m probably going to leave the floor natural (and not stain it), I’m trying to get rid of the last holdout of a urine stain in the house. I guess hydrogen peroxide is supposed to be good for that, but that it can take many days. Hrm.

Today is day two.

Fortunately, the peroxide in this bottle is topical.

I want to get these floors done. I’m tired of living in the basement like a common troll. I might pronounce this stain “light enough” pretty soon. It’s getting a little lighter. It’s about 3″ x 3″ and it’s behind the door in the big bedroom, so it’s not something that you’d likely see very often. Yeah, I dunno. We’ll see how it goes.

As for the closet — all the bedroom closets are standard 1958 in arrangement. They have a shelf with a hanger rod underneath. They’re all in decent shape, but I need more clothes storage space, so I gotta do something better in the big bedroom closet. Here are before and after the removal of hardware:

The main difference is the addition of the stepladder.

It was in there pretty good and 52-year-old nails don’t necessarily like getting pulled. You can also see “Brian’s Bane” in there — that gray stuff coming down from the ceiling on the back wall of the closet. Pretty sure that’s from water damage from some time in the (distant?) past (the plaster has peeled off the old-school “drywall”). The back wall I can just mud over, but the ceiling is pretty screwed up all the way through to the insulation. I’m thinking I might have a guy put (modern) drywall up there or something.

Bought one of those Rubbermaid closet organizers off of Amazon for it. I bought the deluxe organizer instead of the standard one. Couldn’t for the life of me tell what the difference was, aside from the deluxe one being $10 cheaper for some reason. But if I have to wait for a new ceiling, it’ll probably be a while before it gets installed (and I’ll probably move upstairs into the #2 bedroom instead of the “big” one).

I should probably get myself to back off a little, but I’m really stoked on this idea of moving upstairs soon. I’m sort of hoping over the upcoming weekend. That’s probably aggressive, but all I have to do is: plug more holes in the floor tomorrow (where the shoe molding used to go), sand the corners and the putty fill, three coats of urethane, paint the baseboards, paint the ceilings, and paint the walls.

Yeah. Maybe the following weekend.

bkd

It’s pretty easy.

Tools needed:

• Scraper/Putty Knife (3-inch or so).
• Small Wonder Bar/Pry Bar (6-inch or so).
• Hammer (normal variety).

Step 1: Jam the scraper between the shoe moulding and the baseboard and wiggle it loose. If you’re lucky, the shoe moulding will come off completely.

2. If you’re less lucky (this is usually the case), you’ll have to pry it off the rest of the way. Position the wonder bar over each nail and pry the shoe moulding back until it becomes un-attached at the nail (the nail may stay with the shoe moulding or it might stick with the baseboard). Keep going until the shoe moulding piece is removed completely.

3. You’ll probably still have nails attached to the base board, but they’ll be too low to the ground to get your hammer claw around them. So work them looser with the wonder bar (they *might* come out with the wonder bar) and get the heads up off the ground so you can get the claw on them.

4. Remove the nails with your hammer.

And, just like that, your shoe mouldings have been removed. Well done. Well done.

That’s about as uninteresting a blog post as I can muster. Now to see if it works as search engine bait…

Ominously,

bkd

PS, I probably should have taken these off before using the drum sander. I didn’t. The world turns even still.

PPS, FWIW, I’ve decided not to put the shoe mouldings back. It’d take work, I’d have to get a finish gun, and I kind of think they’re ugly anyway. I’ll just have to wood fill the few places where there are gaps between the baseboards and the floor boards.

The good news is that I’m now completely done sanding my floors I still have a lot more sanding to do.

In the meantime, here are ten infuriating things about the edge sanding experience:

1. I don’t think that thing has more than a square inch of actual sandaper-meets-floor surface on it.
2. The pig tail cord came out constantly.
3. Running that thing within the confines of a 2′ x 3′ coat closet left my ears ringing.
4. This position for a day (plus a few hours):
   
5. The dust-catch bag kept falling off (which resulted in the thing shooting dust straight into my face).
6. Sometimes it doesn’t want to go in the direction you’re pushing it.
7. Left some really nice circular divots in the hallway.
8. The inflating dust-catch bag was always in the way.
9. Sometimes it catches something and goes shooting off in a given direction, banging your knuckles against a wall.
10. When you’re done, it doesn’t look like you accomplished all that much.

Yesterday was probably my least favorite day I’ve had since I quit Toshiba. Granted, the competition for that designation has been less than stiff (yes, edge sanding my floors was less fun than rafting down the Tuolumne, hiking in Acadia, and fishing in Minnesota — shocking), but still. I mean, it’s been 11 months. Worst activity in 11 months!

I was thinking on Thursday that, no matter what I did Friday, I wasn’t going to do more sanding. And then I got to the Home Despot on Friday and figured that since I was there (at the location with the tool rental), I might as well just rent the edger and finish up the rooms. How hard could it be? Yeah.

Nemesis:

Parked at the corner of Sanded and Unsanded.

My guess is that Home Depot’s edge sanders might not be the best specimens, but it’s what I had available. And now I still have to clean everything up with my orbital sander anyway. It won’t surprise me to find out that the orbital sander would have been better than the edge sander in the first place (at any rate, I know all 3.1415*(2.5^2) of surface area do work on my orbital). Then I probably have to hand-sand the deepest corners. It’ll be arduous. It’ll be back-breaking. It’ll be bloody (unless I wear gloves).

C’est la guerre.

bkd

I’m done with the drum sander. Could take it back this afternoon, but I paid for it through tomorrow morning at 10:46, so doggone it, I’m keeping it until tomorrow morning at 10:46. Plus I’m lazy and my back is sore.

I think it’s more sore from manhandling the washing machine by myself than from the sanding. I’ll do an A/B test next chance I get.

Before and after:

You can still see some darker areas if you know to look there, but I think if you don’t know, you won’t notice. You’ll just think the wood has character. And imho, now that the crappy hunny-colored stain is gone, the wood is kind of pretty. It has some actual character (not just “character”) and some cool reddish color to it in places. I mean, yeah, I’m just going to cover it back up with a different shade of stain than before, but it’s sort of nice to know that the wood was decent-looking to start with.

A couple dust photos:

I’d say it looks like a “golden shower”, but I think that might imply something else.

If it weren’t for the dust, you might not even know an angel was hovering outside.

Bullet points with relevant (?) thoughts:

• I’d been told to expect the dust storm to end all dust storms. It wasn’t that bad.
• For instance, sanding drywall mud in a basement home theater is much, much worse.
• I used a respirator — the kind for painting. It helped keep sawdust out of my nose and mouth.
• The dust never spontaneously combusted. Sadly.
• All the DIY websites make floor sanding sound difficult. As mentioned, all the DIY websites are stupid.
• Actually the websites are fine, it’s the people posting on them that are holding down the bottom of the bell curve.
• I used three different papers: 36 grit (x2), 60 grit (x3), and 100 grit (x2). The 60 grit created the most dust.
• In order to get those urine stains “out”, I probably took off around a quarter-inch of wood.
• The house no longer smells like cat urine and tile glue. It now smells like sawdust.

Impedimentia:

It looks like they’re having a lovers’ quarrel. The shop vac is the guy and he’s rolling his eyes, trying to think of somewhere he can go so he doesn’t have to deal with this crap. (OTOH, for a short fat guy, he did pretty well for himself.)

It looks like I’ve wallpapered my kitchen walls with ancient papyri.

Gonna hold off till Monday before getting the edger to finish the job. I’m also gonna try to fade out those stains a little more by bathing them in peroxide until I’m ready to start staining. I hear it might work. Tomorrow? Maybe I’ll find me a clothes dryer or something. Could probably stand to take all my doors down and vents off. Should also finally get rid of the sink cabinet in the kitchen. Plus there’s glue left to chisel and tiles left to scrape. And there are some gaps in the floor that need filling. Haven’t started the bathroom yet at all. Just got a new universal transponder I should install on the garage door opener. Need two new external doors and a new storm door, that could keep me busy. Have to replace all the light switches, not to mention map the circuits on the electrical panel. Gutters ought to be cleaned out. Kitchen floor needs to be pulled up. Still have to mud/spackle in the kitchen wall gouges.

Or maybe just play RDR all day. Mal sehen.

bkd

Nice guy, actually. I think I probably overpaid for the washer by $45, but there just aren’t many used washers available on the Pittsburgh Craigslist right now. I should probably have waited for the semester to be over, but I haven’t been able to locate a laundromat that isn’t in a scary ghost town part of Pgh and — yeah.

The seller:

• Grew up in Brookline (a part of Pittsburgh).
• Went to the Catholic high school because he didn’t want to go to the Pittsburgh public high school.
• Put himself through high school making $0.50/hour doing odd jobs for the school.
• His father always wanted to move the family to Lincoln Place, but his mother wouldn’t let him.
• He bought his truck from a transit authority employee who lived in Lincoln Place.
• He thinks Lincoln Place is the best part of Pittsburgh city (although he might have just been being nice).
• He’s on disability.
• Before that, he did HVAC systems.
• Although when he first got out of high school, he did masonry work.
• His high school was a college preparatory school, although he had no intention of going to college — he just didn’t want to go to the Pittsburgh public school.
• Any time a teacher seemed unlikely to pass him, he told him/her that he couldn’t study as much as he wanted to because he had to work odd jobs in order to afford to go there.
• He got mostly C’s.
• He kind of thinks he might like to go to college now, although he’d prefer it if the classes were mostly three hours once a week, rather than three times a week at 45 minutes a pop.
• He went to a trade school to learn HVAC and that was all right.
• He has two daughters, both of whom attended Robert Morris (University).
• The one is brilliant and if you have her read 40 pages of something, she can recite it back to you.
• The other one takes after her father and if she reads those pages 40 times, can’t remember a thing.
• The younger one got talked into living on campus for her last 3 1/2 years by one of her professors who was concerned about her being otherwise unable to have the “full college experience”.
• As a result, she racked up $60K+ in student loan debt (her parents live about 15 minutes from campus).
• She only made three friends during college (= $20K/friend). Only one of those three still lives in Pennsylvania.
• She’s not very outgoing.
• The other daughter was smart enough to talk the school into allowing her to take night classes for her undergraduate degree because, she told them, she was poor and had to work during the day. She wasn’t poor — she just preferred having class once a week and at night.
• Now she wants to get a PhD, but he’s not sure she and her husband can afford that.
• Whenever boys would come pick up his girls for a date, he would tell them that if he smelled alcohol on their breath when they brought the girl home, they would end up being buried in the backyard.
• Although he and his father-in-law made their own wine and, when his kids were old enough (high school?), they were welcome to drink.
• He always invited their high school dates to come in and have a drink of wine, but none of them ever wanted to.
• His wife has seasonal affective disorder in the winter time.
• He’d kind of like to move to Florida for the weather, although Pittsburgh weather mostly affects his wife, not him.
• Plus, he doesn’t want to move because his daughters still live in the area.

The other fifteen minutes of the discussion was mostly about weather.

Here’s the washing machine:

As it gets slowly walked back into position.

The water hoses that came with the house leak with great ferocity, so I have to go out and buy new ones. As a consequence, I had to raid my old suitcase for more underwear and t-shirts. “Clean, Dry Clothes by Friday!” is my new mantra.

bkd

PS, Yes, I got the drum sander and started on the floors last night — will update on that later. Also got Red Dead Redemption and got started on that yesterday afternoon.