Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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got that wrong
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   listening to political podcasts again
Sunday, February 12 2017
I spent most of the day working on the basement door project. The first task was to unpin the south end of the door jam from the house's structure, slice through some of the spray foam, and jack the door jam up about an eighth of an inch. The goal here was to get the door jam perfectly square. It seems, I'm embarrassed to say, that the other day during the installation, I'd spent so much time worrying about plumbness that I'd neglected to pay attention to levelness, and so had installed the jam slightly out-of-square. I'd assumed for some reason that the slab beneath it was level, though of course it wasn't. Today's tweak fixed all that (and also made the door operate better).
After re-foaming newly-opened gaps, I turned my attention to making a "surround" to provide a piece of plumb wall for the door in the parts where the wall it penetrates slopes away from it. This was necessary because otherwise the screws for some of the hinges actually stuck out into the room. I decided to make the surround from two-by-threes, thinking they'd be easier to rip into long, skinny triangles on the bandsaw. But the bandsaw didn't have the juice for that task, so I had to use the table saw. It required so much power that at one point I tripped a circuit breaker. But eventually I had my triangles. They were long and wavy along their hypotenuses, but they were good enough (since the hypotenuses would be hidden inside the wall).
Meanwhile, it had been snow since late morning. By mid-afternoon, Gretchen decided to close the bookstore and come home.
[REDACTED]
By this evening, I had the door all surrounded and solid, and I was ready to put the wall back together. I decided to abandon the idea of folding-back the hinged pieces of drywall I'd left earlier. I cut all those hinged pieces away and removed all the drywall back to the nearest stud (only a few inches beyond) and cut strips of new drywall to make wall. I then used spray foam to fill in the gaps between the drywall. After giving the foam a chance to expand and cutting away the excess, I then taped the gaps and did a first round of spackling.
There was also an issue with the glass doorknob I'd bought; it seemed to require a differently-shaped door hole. So I managed to cobble together a different system from parts in a "bucket of doorknobs" I keep in my laboratory. This solution wasn't perfect, but it was good enough for the time being.

I should mention that as I worked, I mostly listened to political podcasts. This was the first time since the election that I'd been able to do so. Until Trumps administration revealed itself to be an ineffective dumpster fire of incompetence, talking heads nattering on about political matters had been too depressing to experience. Now, though, I have some hope (tempered, of course, with considerable fear; incompetence is also a very bad thing when it characterizes someone with a lot of power).


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?170212

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