Merry Christmas everyone! I hope that you all had great ones!
Since last time, the insulation project has been completed! And it was just as nasty (if not worse) as expected. Yup, 2 days of black boogers. Rummaging around to find all the wall cavities was just plain awful. The end of day 2 finally brought some good luck ... the batts were the exact length of house! you would have thought i planned that. if anyone asks, lets pretend i did. i only had to cut about 4 rolls when i encountered some obstructions (chimney, etc.). that was very nice ... made finishing up quite a bit easier on the mind (i was getting really sick of being up there). in the end, it looks like a layer of new-fallen snow has descended on the attic. ahhhhhh. no snowball fights please.
The running of the coax cable was unsuccessful those days, so i moved on to refinishing the stairs. I started this a long time ago, but only got part of the first step done and never got around to working on it again. This also was a very dusty dirty project. 1 full day of brown boogers to be exact (several more to come). It was pretty tedious ... probably about 2 hours per step. But decent progress was made in my last day off and in some evenings since. In the picture you'll see a stain sample on the left side of one of the steps. I'm off all of this week so hopefully i can get this one done. One bad thing about this project ... it left most of the house (especially upstaris) coated in dust. Way way more than expected. I had tarped around the stairs, but it rose up and found its way everywhere. Everywhere. Since then, I've been working with the shop vacrunning trying to grab the dust before it floats away. That seemed to help quite a bit. I'm also having some concerns about some of the staining and nail-holes in the stairs. I hope they aren't very noticable. I think the stain is dark enough to hide a lot of it. Plus, not a whole lot of light hits the stairs ... so that will help too. We'll just wait and see.
Last Friday (after much cleanup and cooking by Chrissy) we had our annual Christmas party. Good times had by all. It was really great to see a lot of our friends (even 2 drove up from Louisville!). We'd been so busy so much of this year that time with our friends was pretty limited. It was nice to finally reconnect ... and drink lots of eggnog. After that, we headed north to spend Christmas weekend with Chrissy's family. Again, good times all around. Lots of good food of course too. I'm thinking it was a 4 - 5 lb. weekend.
I made a small purchase over the weekend also ... it's about 30" (diagonal) and made by Toshiba. Yes, we are entering the world of HDTV. Amazon had/has a great deal on this tv (even free shipping) so we decided to go for it. It should be here early next week. So, today i ventured back up to the attic for a bit. I had another idea for getting my coax up there (10' segments of 1/4" all-thread rod joined with couplers) and it finally worked. I also cleaned up, leveled, and oriented the antenna to hopefully the right direction (about 227 degrees). I was having some issues with the RG6 connectors, so i may need to re-do the connection to the matching transformer. Hopefully it will work for now though. I'll have to re-enter the attic in a couple weeks when the pre-amp arrives (its on back order) so i could fix it then i guess. Tomorrow i'm gonna try to install a wall plate downstairs to run the antenna wire. I got one that will hook up 2 cables, so i'll clean up the cable tv installation while i'm at it (currently just comes out of a hole in the gap between the hardwood and the trim).
As for the rest of the week ... more stair sanding ... and if that gets done i'll move on to getting some shoe moulding up. Maybe by New Year's Day we'll have pretty shiny new (but old) stairs!
a mighty wind (a.k.a. free "used" shed to good home)
it's been busy round here, with the holiday season(s) getting underway and all. Thanksgiving was a nice break, but busy. we actually made it to both families this year, so there was a bit more travel ... but not too bad. during our stay in Goshen we made a stop at my brother Dave's to see the latest development in his chicken operation -- 150 new hens (i believe a variety of Rhode Island Red)! he had an offer to buy several dozen eggs a day by a local grocery store, so he is ramping up operations to take advantage. in only a few months these little ladies will be cranking out 100 or so eggs a day. gooooooood eggs too. mmmmm.
about the wind. well, i'm not sure what the weather was like last Friday where you were at ... but it was a tad bit windy here. i got a call at work Friday afternoon from Tony (neighbor). i thought, oh, maybe they want to do something tonight ... that'd be fun. no, that's not what he wanted. no, he happened to notice that it appeared as though a couple of our windows had blown open (in the sunroom). he went over and 2 of them had indeed blown open, leaving a mess (and cold) inside. luckily Hazel decided to stay inside and no roaming thieves came in. great. oh, but it gets better. it went something like this ...
Tony: looks like the neighbor's shed is flipped over. Chris: really? (confused) T: yeah, it's up against the garage along the alley. C: really? (more confused) T: wait, don't you guys have a shed? C: yes. (panic, less confusion) T: ooooooooh. i think your shed is flipped over in the alley. C: sweet. T: it doesn't look good, i don't think it's salvageable. C: sweet. C: i'll be home in a few minutes ...
so indeed, our lovely shed was flipped, turned, and crushed into the alley/the neighbors fence. luckily we mainly had only yard tools and the grill in the shed and nothing was lost. i moved what i could into the basement (had to leave the grill and wheelbarrow up by the house). i left the random doors, windows, wood, etc. out there covered with some tarps. lots of fun. so now we need to decide what to do. it's not really in the budget to build our eventual garage this year, so we'll likely just get another cheap-o metal shed to house our things. they're fairly inexpensive ($239 for 8x10 or $339 for 10x12). but, i think it'll take the good part of a day to build one ... and it's friggin cold out ... so i don't know when that will happen. Tony (isn't he a great neighbor??) helped me drag the old one out of the alley and onto the old slab. i'll just need to break it down into pieces and run it to the dump. yippee! it's sort of ironic. this week i was finishing up a project where most of the building is designed to resist an F4 tornado. seeing the magnitude of some calculations of wind loads i made the amazing pun "this uplift really sucks". well ... it does.
in less annoying news, we have a lot of our Christmas decorating done (mostly Chrissy). i think the outside is done. i managed to sneak away from work early one night last week (well, 8:30 isn't normally "early" except for weeks like last) to take advantage of the warmth before the freeze to get the front tree wrapped in lights (1000, count 'em 1000, lights). we couldn't locate enough of the snowflake lights yet to do that in the warmth ... so we waited until the next most opportune time: 10:30 - midnight on Friday. yeah, so we have strange schedules sometimes. we're pretty happy with how it turned out. first time we've really had an "exterior" to illuminate, so it was kinda fun to do.
oh remember all those projects i listed last time? well, i've started accumulating tools to do those. mmm, tools. tools are the best part of most home improvement projects. i'm pretty pleased that my stable of tools is looking quite nice. first, Menards had an amazing deal on a Delta 36-412 miter saw (12" dual bevel -- aww yeaaah). it's essentially the same as the Delta 36-422L, minus the laser and new part #. it's a roughly $400 saw ... got it for $250 (saw--eeeeet). also picked up a pancake air compressor w/ a 2" brad nailer ... the combo Bostitch CPACK1850. another awesome deal at Menards. wooooooooo Menards! that crazy old white haired dude is right "save big money at Menards." i hadn't really intended on buying a brad nailer, but you can get a good deal on the combo packages, so it worked nicely. i think i'll use it for the shoe moulding. in a good deal from Amazon, i picked up a finish nailer ... the lovely and talented Dewalt D51275K. i did quite a bit of research into all of these purchases and was very lucky with some timely sales. gotta love that. now, just need to get those projects arranged so i can use them!
in an unmentioned additional project, we're going to add some insulation to the attic. there is about 6-8" of blown-in there now, which really should be supplemented. i don't feel like hiring- someone to blow more in ... so (again at Menards) found a great deal (saved about $100) on some unface R-25 batts. i can only take about 8 batts at a time, so i paid for all 28 i need while they were on sale and am picking them up a couple at a time on my way home from work. i'm taking Mon-Weds off next week (need to use vacation days or lose them) and this will be one of my projects. before the batts go down, i'll be sealing up any penetrations into the attic (e.g. light boxes, wire holes, etc.) and the tops of wall cavities that open to the attic. it's going to be a nasty project ... working in all that old blown-in insulation is just bad news. i'll have muddy black boogers for a week. while i'm up there, i'll also be running some RG-6 (coax cable) from the antenna in our attic down to the entertainment center area. i'm hoping to pick up a cheap 30" HDTV in the near future, so i'll want to use the antenna for over-the-air HD (don't want to pay the outrageous amount Insight wants to get HD channels). the cold has also motivated us to make a draft stopper thingee for the front door. the addition of the storm door last year helped, but there is still some draftiness there. so, last night we threw this thing together (a little fabric, batting, and cat litter for weight).
oh, and Noblesville got another "award" ... top 25 affordable suburb by Newsweek.
well. this turned into a really long post. congratulations if you made it this far. you are my favorite reader. you win a prize. i'll tell you next time what it is.
And it was just as nasty (if not worse) as expected. Yup, 2 days of black boogers. Rummaging around to find all the wall cavities was just plain awful. The 
end of day 2 finally brought some good luck ... the batts were the exact length of house! you would have thought i planned that. if anyone asks, lets pretend i did. i only had to cut about 4 rolls when i
encountered some obstructions (chimney, etc.). that was very nice ... made finishing up quite a bit easier on the mind (i was getting really sick of being up there). in the end, it looks like a layer of new-fallen snow has descended on the attic. ahhhhhh. no snowball fights please.
This also was a very dusty dirty project. 1 full day of brown boogers to be exact (several more to come). It was pretty tedious ... probably about 2 hours per step. But decent progress was made in my last day off and in some evenings since. In the picture you'll see a stain sample on the left side of one of the steps. I'm off all of this week so hopefully i can get this one done. One bad thing about this project ... it left most of the house (especially upstaris) coated in dust. Way way more than 
expected. I had tarped around the stairs, but it rose up and found its way everywhere. Everywhere. Since then, I've been working with the shop vac running trying to grab the dust before it floats away. That seemed to help quite a bit. I'm also having some concerns about some of the staining and nail-holes in the stairs. I hope they aren't very noticable. I think the stain is dark enough to hide a lot of it. Plus, not a whole lot of light hits the stairs ... so that will help too. We'll just wait and see.
