Allow me to reintroduce myself

I've been pretty busy for about a month. In the interest of staying on topic, I will make a brief summary of excuses and move on. Weekends are my bread and butter when it comes to finding time to get things done around the house, and the last four have been either booked or hijacked.

I had to work (at work) one weekend.

I got a surprise visit from Katie one weekend -- housework was gladly suspended.

I went to Spokane to help my mom pack up her house one weekend. Man, I hate Spokane.

I spent a Saturday at Josh & Megan's, helping them jackhammer out their walkway and remove a couple of fences in preparation for the landscaping of their yard. I think Josh estimated that we hauled off about 4.5 tons of debris.

We worked late enough that we missed the deadline for returning the hauling truck, forcing another day's rental. So despite all of us having worked ourselves into oblivion, they came over on Sunday and helped me haul away all of the debris in my house -- 850 lbs worth. The ceiling is gone, the huge pile of crap in the laundry room is gone, and all that crap I hauled out of the crawlspace is gone. Ding dong, the witch is dead!

The major work to be done on the godforsaken living & dining room, which I had merely intended to paint, is plastering, particularly around the new electrical boxes, where I damaged enough of the existing plaster getting the old boxes out to require repair. The problem is that all my new boxes are remodel boxes, which have to grab onto the wall. I can't mount the box if there is no wall around it, and I can't plaster wall around it if it's not mounted.

My first swing at solving this problem seemed to work all right. I cut a rectangle of wood about the size of the box and glued a dowel in it. So I hold the jig in, plaster around it, and pull/cut it back out before the plaster has set too much. Par example:


Plastering jig


The jig in place for a wall socket box

So this weekend was pretty unglamorous, just plastering around the boxes so the coverplates won't have giant holes peeking out from either side.

Plaster is really messy and basically a huge pain in the ass to work with. I know it is a skilled trade, but I just don't understand how I'm supposed to be getting better at this. Maybe I don't have the right tools? I am currently just using a variety of scrapers to apply it.

Josh loaned me this sanding bong thing, which is a bucket with a place to attach a shop vac and a hose leading out to a sanding screen. You put some water in the bucket, and the vacuum sucks up the dust as you sand, where it is trapped in the water. Once I have finished the boxes, I hope to use this thing to do some sanding without the dust explosion that happened before.


Light switch plastered in...maybe too well

Also, I still have to run real Romex to a few of the outlets and figure out how they're supposed to get to the panel downstairs. I can't just keep splicing the old knob & tube outlets onto the same new circuit, or like 70% of the outlets on the main floor are going to be running on the same breaker.

I've been having trouble getting stuff done on weekdays because by the time I get home, it's dark outside and it makes me tired. To combat this, I'm going to try to set aside a specific block of time, say 1 hour each night, to accomplish something small. Plaster this outlet, run that circuit. Hopefully that will get me back to my former level of productivity, which I was very happy with.

Still other tasks loom. For the last month I have been doing laundry and deciding I would fold it "later". It has finally come to a head:


I have to fold all this laundry

Finally, being back to working on the house means being back to baking bread, the ideal background task for working on one's home, if you ask me.


Prosciutto ring

This bread has cracked black pepper and pieces of prosciutto mixed into it and it is glazed with butter before and after baking, one of the best loaves I've baked yet. Word to Rose Levy Beranbaum, the patron saint of baking.