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ever worked as hard
Sunday, October 3 2021
location: 800 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
Another thing I was expected to do at the cabin this weekend was a bunch of electrical work. But I'd wanted to do all that after setting the tile, so it would have some time to cure before I installed the grout. This morning while the thinset slowly cured, I did that electrical work. I started by systematically replacing all the non-tamper-proof outlets I'd installed last weekend with the kind that stand a chance of passing an inspection. I then installed three additional outlets in the upstairs bathroom. Then I could turn my attention to installing the four light fixtures Gretchen had bought for me a couple days ago. Two of these went in the upstairs loft area, one would be the upstairs bedroom light, and then there was a wall sconce for the upstairs bathroom. For some reason Gretchen had bought a pendant light for the upstairs bedroom, and it came with a lot of pendant cable. I stuffed all of it as best I could into the base of the fixture and the electrical box above it, but even with that I found it impossible to force the base solid against the ceiling.
I then went down into the basement and attached three circuits to breakers in the breaker box (fortunately, the breakers in our house in Hurley are compatible with this box). With that all installed, I powered up the generator and confirmed that all my wiring was working as intended. (Another electrician had wired both wires from the two switches I'd installed inside the bathroom door to the exhaust fan motor, but I can fix that later.)
Now I could worry again about the tiling of the downstairs bathroom. Before I could install the grout, though, I had to use a sharp object to rake all the extra thinset that had blurped up in many places between the tiles, leaving little if any room for grout. The new grout would be a totally different color, so it was important to get rid of as much of it as I could. But to get rid of that loose thinset, I would need a vacuum cleaner, which I didn't have. It turned out that the Noble Ace hardware store was open on Sundays, so that was where I went. It was raining when I set out, but the rain stopped the instant I left the Adirondacks. I hadn't walked the dogs yet, so I took them down a path I found behind a church adjacent to Noble. There wasn't much to see back there except for a mysterious species of pine that was not white pine. In the store, I bought what seemed to be the most powerful small handheld battery-powered small vacuum cleaner in the store.
Back at the cabin, I started cleaning the grout lines with a piece of scrap 12 or 14 gauge copper wire but then moved on to a thin finishing unsharpened finishing nail (of the kind used to attach molding). Unfortunately, the new vacuum cleaner was not fully charged, and I didn't want to wait around for the generator to charge it. And it turnd out sweeping with a brush was pretty good at lifting bits of loosned thinset from between the tile. Once I had the grout lines to my liking, I mixed up a little too much grout and grouted all the tiles. This part of tiling always goes much faster than I remember it. I was so good at scraping up the excess with a putty knife that, when I sponged over it later, I only had to make one or two passes before it looked finished.
It was dusk or early twilight by the time I was finished grouting, so I cleaned up the cabin, loaded what I needed to into the Subaru (including the dogs) and started the long drive back to Hurley. The weather was surprisingly warm despite the rain, and it had brought out the frogs, who were playing a dangerous game of Russian Frogger on the roadway in front of me.
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I've mentioned this before, but there's something inherently stressful about driveing a car with nearly 225,000 miles on it.
As old as the Subaru is, I'm always surprised when it makes the journey to and from the Adirondacks without incident. But yet again, it did, and the minor issue (if there was one) is a slight unwanted exhaust note from my recent exhaust pipe repair. There's a narrow gap in the big broad hose clamp I'd used to fix it, and I'd neglected to put furnace cement into that gap, so that was probably where the sound was escaping from.
Back at the house, I made myself a scotch and jumped in the tub, washing a way a weekend of cabin grime (some of it flung from a wetsaw), cleaning the many cuts on my fingers (including the place where I scissored-off a bit of skin from the end of my left thumb), and easing my many aching muscles. As I told Gretchen, I don't know if I'd ever worked as hard as I had this weekend.
The tile in the bathroom after I'd grouted it this evening. Gretchen doesn't want to use this expensive hexagonal tile in the closet (to the left in this photo). But what will I use?
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