Tag: home improvement

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!

Hectic Weekends

Last weekend was a kitchen furniture building pre-fab marathon that left me sore and exhausted and with some sweet new looks in the kitchen and dining room.

Yesterday didn’t involve putting together pre-fab stuff but it did include moving a lot of really heavy stuff, some of which went outside for a junk pickup service to haul away. The living room doesn’t look terribly different, but the changes we made make it feel completely new. It’s weird that way.

Now what? Well… now comes the biggest job of all. The cellar. We have someone coming this week to replace the lights, then someone coming to take down what’s left of the panelling on the walls and replace it all with wall board, including a new paint job. After that we’re getting new flooring installed.

Then what? Furniture, mostly. Nothing is set in stone yet, but we’re thinking a mini-living room space and maybe a pull out couch or something that can act as a guest room. Like everything else we do, the more time we have before it happens the more complex the plans get. We’re thinking of maybe upgrading a few things in the living room (not the TV, our TV is gigantic and amazing and it’s staying right where it is) and moving the current things to the cellar.

Jen came up with this plan, and it’s a good one that I wish I thought of, to have a space in the cellar where I can go to ride out my post-surgical recovery period. I could stew in the living room all day, but she’d be working in the next room and I’d be afraid I was bothering her. If we have an alternate living room space in the cellar I could go there and moan and groan in my post-op agony without worrying about being heard on her conference calls. I imagine the first few days are going to be spent in the bed room, but as things (hopefully) lighten up for me I will probably go into the cellar and maybe binge watch all of the Marvel movies or something. Assuming we stay on schedule and everything is done by May 4th.

As for this moment in time… holy shit does my back hurt.

Changes

First, along the wall with the TV, we have new end tables, the bookcase moved and was replaced with the cubby hole table (that’s a technical term) and the record player.

The bookcase traveled to the other side of the room and was loaded up with legos and cool keepsake thingies. Also, DJ Roomba is hiding over there now. Also the router now lives in that corner instead of the opposite corner.

Finally, the piano moved from in front of the fireplace to the opposite wall and the DVD racks that have been with us since the duplex have been removed.

We also shuffled some pictures and stuff around and found new homes for the PS4 and the Switch and the HomePods.

This has taken all day and my back and my legs don’t work anymore.

IKEA Can’t Defeat Us… Mostly

Yesterday was tough. We had one huge cabinet to put together and then hang on the wall. I was dead set against having us hang it ourselves because I knew the end result would look amateurish and Jen would be disappointed. When push came to shove though I said fuck it and we did it. Jen’s folks came over to help but something much more important came up and they had to go and take care of it. That left us flying solo and we got it done.

It took ALL DAY. We were up at 5:00am and we weren’t finished until after 7:00pm, but it’s done! We stood up to the IKEA challenge and we survived!

Except…

We have another big piece of furniture to work on today, and we are both seriously hurting after yesterday. My back and my legs are in really bad shape. Jen has a legitimate bad back, whereas mine is just me being fat, and she is in major pain. It hasn’t gone out on her though so we’re babying it as much as we can.

We’re going to start putting together today’s project. We may not finish it, but we’ll make a good dent.

Wish us luck in our battle against the Swedish* pre-fab menace.

*I couldn’t remember if IKEA was Swedish or Swiss so I Googled it. Apparently they are currently based in The Netherlands! Who knew? Bellana can go visit their headquarters!

Don’t Spoil Me

I could have watched the new episode of Star Trek Picard this morning but I chose to do other things, like clean up some of the stuff that was displaced for the kitchen/dining room fix up. We had these huge ass canvas tarps covering the furniture. That had to go somewhere. There are so many cardboard boxes everywhere from ordering new pre-fab stuff.

I took some time to straighten a couple of little places up. That’s why you can’t tell me what happened in Star Trek Picard season two episode four. I expect I’ll get to it before I sleep tonight though so it won’t be too long before you can talk to me about all of it.

The last contractor is here. Hopefully we’re just minutes away from having a kitchen again. I hope so because not having a dishwasher or a kitchen sink has been a kick in the nads, I tells ya.