Tag: home improvement

Noisy Delayed Gratification

It’s almost 7:00pm. Dinner is almost cooked. We will watch the new Marvel show (maybe?).

While we do that we will be wishing we could go down stairs to see the progress. We can’t though because the two wall board guys asked if they could keep working until 9/9:30 tonight. The hammering and drilling and sawing is really loud, and so is the music they are playing, but it’s okay, stay as long as you need.

Even though we both really want to go down there and check it all out.

Progress!

More Changes Coming Today

Are you sick of hearing about our home improvement odyssey? Would it bore you to hear that the drywall guy is coming today to start walling up our cellar? Drywall->paint->flooring->finishing->furniture. That’s the to do list as it stands now. I’m sure you’re sick of hearing it.

Are you also sick of hearing that I am watching Marvel movies? I bet you’re all really sick of that one. Fed up, indeed. Turns out The Incredible Hulk is on HBO Max. I’m sneaking in the first 20 minutes before I have to sign in to work. Bore-ing, am I right?

At least I am not boring you all with guitar playing posts, right? You’ve got that going for you. I haven’t played at all since March 19th. That was 18 days ago. I need to play.

Okay. Time to punch in to work. Here’s hoping the stress level goes down a notch today. Fingers eternally crossed.

Oops

I wonder if our new friend the handyman will be interested in fixing the clothes dryer that I just broke.

I had to move the washer and dryer away from the wall for the wallboard guy. That required disconnecting stuff.

I was barely pulling on the dryer’s exhaust hose and it just ripped in two.

Oops.

Shit.

Today is Insane

I’m stressing out, bro.

There are so many people here. A three man electrician team, our regular contractor, his drywall subcontractor, and a landscaper team with at least four people. Talk about a perfect storm. We knew the electricians and our regular contractor would be here. Everyone else is a surprise.

The old cellar lights with the big fluorescent tubes are gone. The last of the drop ceiling framing is gone, the last of the un-insulated cellar walls have been insulated. The front and back yards have been cleaned, including the litter that the wind and the squirrels put into the edge of the woods. Most of it at least. They didn’t do the best job there, but they did a good job everywhere else.

As we speak, the new cellar lighting is being installed and wired up, and the wall board that is going to be installed starting tomorrow is being loaded into the cellar.

From a Covid safety standpoint, everyone is masked and everyone is entering the house through the cellar bulkhead. The cellar is a big open space so everyone can stay as distanced as they need, and no one has to walk through the main floor to get in and out.

Still… It’s stressful. It’s also loud. Lots of banging and hammering and crashing and cacophony and super loud leaf blowers and all of that stuff. It’s making it difficult to work.

Oh yeah, speaking of work. Insert frustrated screaming here. Nothing too terrible, but lots and lots of little things that are piling up and making me want to hide my head under the covers.

So yeah… stressful as hell kinda Tuesday. I’m ready for bed.

Less Than One to Go

On February 3rd, two months and one day ago, I was told to lose 5% of my weight in preparation for the weight loss surgery. I weighed myself this morning. I have 0.4 pounds to go. I would do the math to figure out what percentage I am at with 0.4 pounds to go but then you could use that to figure out exactly how much I weighed on that first day and I don’t want to let you do that.

I just drank my morning protein shake and had my morning vitamins and supplemented it all with a fist full of Tylenol because holy shit my back is killing me. I don’t know that my back has ever hurt as much as it does at this moment. Oh my shit, my back hurts.

Today’s plan involves going to my parents and picking up my mother and taking her to a doctors appointment. We’re going to get the results of her last blood test and see how her cancer numbers look. They’ve been pretty much perfect for the last year-plus and I am very optimistic that those results will continue.

After that I will come home and find some demo happening in the cellar. First on the list is the grid that until recently held the drop ceiling. After that it’s the rest of the ugly paneling on the walls. Most of the paneling came down during the flood clean up last year. You might recall me bitching about the paneling in the dining room recently. Suffice to say that the paneling in the cellar is 100 times uglier. Tomorrow the electrician is coming to replace the existing fluorescent lights that don’t really work anymore. There used to be six banks of lights with two tubes each. Only two of them still work, (it’s not the bulbs, I replaced the bulbs and the lights stayed dead) and one of those two only works some times. It’s been good the last week because it knows its end is coming and it wants to stay alive, but more often than not it doesn’t work when I flip the switch. Replace ’em all!

On top of that there is something going on at work that I am not going to be around for and I am feeling pretty shitty about that. I feel like I am dropping the ball. I don’t think anyone else feels that I’m dropping the ball, but I do so that’s that. Hopefully it will be quiet today. Fingers crossed.

Did I mention my back was hurting?

0.4 pounds to go. Oh yeah, and the surgery happens one month from today. Yikes!