Week 24 - Miscellaneous

This week has been a process of crossing stuff off my list of things to do.

At the beginning of the week, I put the cedar boards up in the closet. They went up very easily and smell wonderful. Then I put up the shelves, including a shoe shelf. A tip: when you have a collection of small items to buy, COUNT them before you leave the store. While installing the shelves I discovered that I did not have enough shelf brackets. Very annoying. However, even without the doors, and one shelf short, the hall closets are now in use.

The contractor wanted to do the garage/basement drywall, which is required by city code. In preparation for that, I needed to do at least the first portion of the phone rewiring to get all the exposed wires off the wall.

This meant combining the lines which jury rig the current phones into the outside box into one line to an inside junction box. I decided to put this line through the crawl space and into the wall itself.

This also meant replacing some of the lines themselves in the basement, and putting in a router and a wall outlet for a new basement phone. I found that the kitchen line was so old that none of it was salvagable, which means I will need to run a new line in the wall. That will happen later.

Once the wires were all moved, John from the contractor came in and put up the drywall on the basement side.

The drywall in the garage (fire-rated) is my responsibility, but John kindly put the two large pieces up for me, although I put up the other four pieces. And I still need to do the screws, the mud and the tape. I will also have to drywall between all the beams on this wall to create a fire barrier between the house and the garage.

The other thing that I did this week was to remove and replace the old concrete sink in my basement while I still have a dumpster. This involved fun with sledge hammers. It's an amazingly heavy item, but easy to break up.

The replacement sink is a garage sale purchase. It is not pretty but, in the future, I want to move the laundry room to a more convenient location, so it is temporary. It had a small puncture in the bowl, but is otherwise sound. The hole was easy to caulk, but I would caution anyone that used materials are always a risk for this reason. You must consider how much of a problem failure of the item might be for you and whether it is worth the risk. The sink is installed sideways, so that I do not need to redo any of the plumbing (the last of my cast iron).

The trim for all the office windows is painted, which was the last step before laying the floor in that room. However, I've set the floor aside for now. With the nice weather, I decided to move outside and get a primer coat of paint on any exposed wood, which must be done before the final city inspection.

The first area to be painted was the parking lot side of the garage. Since this is plywood, not cedar, it does not need an oil based primer. It was a patchwork affair since I used up about four gallons of paint that I already had in the basement. Not all the same color, but it is primer, so it will be covered over by the final coat. Obviously, that won't be enough, even for the primer coat, so the next step will be to get some of the City of Portland's recycled paint, available at Environmental Building Supply.

I saved the white paint for my porch ceiling. It brightens the whole area surprisingly. (I'd show the finished ceiling, but it's just a picture of white.) Next week -- priming in earnest.

Week 25 - Priming