05 February 2012
Hawking & Wonder Remodelling
05/02/12 12:37
Well, things are getting better. My cold is receding, slowly. Now after a week I feel pretty good. Oh, at night my sinuses sill try to strangle me, which is a problem. And a couple of times a day I will cough up a large jellyfish. But overall I am feeling better.
This isn’t an acute cold but it is a tenacious one. Barbara came down with it about the same time that I did and she’s still dragging along. She did visit the doctor and he recommended a couple of over the counter medications. Sad to think that throughout all of her long life they have not come up with anything better than Vic’s VapoRub for night congestion. I mean in this day and age you’d have thought they would have something better than a cream invented in 1905. Maybe something that didn’t terrify the cats with the smell.
I’ve been painting again. The downstairs bedroom this time. You remember the one. It has the totally heinous tan and pink and brown sponge effect thing going on. It had to go, so I used the leftover paint from the master bedroom and started a little bit at a time. I added 15 to 20 minutes of painting to my morning routine each day and it’s slowly progressing. Unfortunately I only covered one wall before I ran out of paint and we’ve not gotten another gallon. Now, I’m not sure if we mentioned before, but Cloverdale Paint here in Nanaimo gives a 30% discount for BCAA members. Last time by having Barbara with us we saved around $12 on a gallon. Unfortunately, because Barb is fighting the cold we haven’t gone out for more paint so that project is on hold for the moment.
I did get enough done in the room to make a discovery. I know why they did that awful paint thing on the walls. It was to hide the even worse sheetrock job. I mean really I’m not good at sheet rocking and I’m appalled. The corner tapes have wrinkles. Not little “it was wrinkled and I tried to flatten them out with the trowel” creases. No these are a quarter inch wide and high “I’ll jam the tape in the corner and if I put enough mud on it it’ll be OK” ridges. Then there’s the sheet rock itself. They did use 4x8 panels. More precisely, they used 4 x “whatever was left over after we cut it off to use in the other room” and 8 x “here’s a chunk I cut wrong but with enough mud it will work”, pieces. Apparently they thought that tape and mud would cover even quarter inch gaps. But they skimped on the mud. So the wall that’s all one colour now has these linear saddles running up and down and across it.
Honestly, Stephan Hawking and Stevie Wonder could have done a better job of sheet rocking this room.
But it is what it is, and it is going to be half painted until Barbara gets over he cold.
I’ve been enjoying the new Civic. It’s fun to drive and I’m discovering things about it every trip. One thing I’ve been pleasantly surprised with is the mileage. On the current tank I’ve been getting over 30 MPG. This is commuting about five miles each way on cold winter days so I think that’s really very good.
Here in Canada they do compute mileage strangely though. It’s metric up here so instead of Miles/Gallon they use Litres/100 kilometres. It results in a number that is just weird. For one thing it’s backwards. I know that on some level it might make more sense to have a lower number to indicate lower fuel consumption but it just feels wrong. I’m used to bragging about getting 30 or 40 or 50 mpg. Here you crow if you get a LOWER number the other guy. What’s worse is the numbers themselves are too small. 7 to 7.5 is around 30mpg, 0ver 10 is lousy, and over 20 is terrible.I just have a hard time getting used to having a car that gets 7 on the highway. I’ve never had a car that got 7. My Dad did. He had an International Travellall that got less than 10 MPG.
Funny story there. My dad always wanted a Travellall. In the 1970’s he was looking for a car and the salesman convinced him that the Travellall would get mid 20s on the highway. He brought it home and we soon found out that it burned way more than that. The Travellall wouldn’t get 20 if you dropped it out of a plane. It burned more than that parked in the garage. Oh sure you could put a full 4x8 sheet of sheetrock in the back with room to spare, but at a stoplight you could literally watch the needle on the gas gauge move toward empty. We didn’t keep that car too long.
But be that as it may, we have a car that gets 7 on the highway, a bedroom finished by the Three Stooges, and I’m coughing up soft bodied invertebrate creatures several times per day.
All and all I can’t complain.
Doug & Marsha
PIX: Pretty sunset on the mountains.
This isn’t an acute cold but it is a tenacious one. Barbara came down with it about the same time that I did and she’s still dragging along. She did visit the doctor and he recommended a couple of over the counter medications. Sad to think that throughout all of her long life they have not come up with anything better than Vic’s VapoRub for night congestion. I mean in this day and age you’d have thought they would have something better than a cream invented in 1905. Maybe something that didn’t terrify the cats with the smell.
I’ve been painting again. The downstairs bedroom this time. You remember the one. It has the totally heinous tan and pink and brown sponge effect thing going on. It had to go, so I used the leftover paint from the master bedroom and started a little bit at a time. I added 15 to 20 minutes of painting to my morning routine each day and it’s slowly progressing. Unfortunately I only covered one wall before I ran out of paint and we’ve not gotten another gallon. Now, I’m not sure if we mentioned before, but Cloverdale Paint here in Nanaimo gives a 30% discount for BCAA members. Last time by having Barbara with us we saved around $12 on a gallon. Unfortunately, because Barb is fighting the cold we haven’t gone out for more paint so that project is on hold for the moment.
I did get enough done in the room to make a discovery. I know why they did that awful paint thing on the walls. It was to hide the even worse sheetrock job. I mean really I’m not good at sheet rocking and I’m appalled. The corner tapes have wrinkles. Not little “it was wrinkled and I tried to flatten them out with the trowel” creases. No these are a quarter inch wide and high “I’ll jam the tape in the corner and if I put enough mud on it it’ll be OK” ridges. Then there’s the sheet rock itself. They did use 4x8 panels. More precisely, they used 4 x “whatever was left over after we cut it off to use in the other room” and 8 x “here’s a chunk I cut wrong but with enough mud it will work”, pieces. Apparently they thought that tape and mud would cover even quarter inch gaps. But they skimped on the mud. So the wall that’s all one colour now has these linear saddles running up and down and across it.
Honestly, Stephan Hawking and Stevie Wonder could have done a better job of sheet rocking this room.
But it is what it is, and it is going to be half painted until Barbara gets over he cold.
I’ve been enjoying the new Civic. It’s fun to drive and I’m discovering things about it every trip. One thing I’ve been pleasantly surprised with is the mileage. On the current tank I’ve been getting over 30 MPG. This is commuting about five miles each way on cold winter days so I think that’s really very good.
Here in Canada they do compute mileage strangely though. It’s metric up here so instead of Miles/Gallon they use Litres/100 kilometres. It results in a number that is just weird. For one thing it’s backwards. I know that on some level it might make more sense to have a lower number to indicate lower fuel consumption but it just feels wrong. I’m used to bragging about getting 30 or 40 or 50 mpg. Here you crow if you get a LOWER number the other guy. What’s worse is the numbers themselves are too small. 7 to 7.5 is around 30mpg, 0ver 10 is lousy, and over 20 is terrible.I just have a hard time getting used to having a car that gets 7 on the highway. I’ve never had a car that got 7. My Dad did. He had an International Travellall that got less than 10 MPG.
Funny story there. My dad always wanted a Travellall. In the 1970’s he was looking for a car and the salesman convinced him that the Travellall would get mid 20s on the highway. He brought it home and we soon found out that it burned way more than that. The Travellall wouldn’t get 20 if you dropped it out of a plane. It burned more than that parked in the garage. Oh sure you could put a full 4x8 sheet of sheetrock in the back with room to spare, but at a stoplight you could literally watch the needle on the gas gauge move toward empty. We didn’t keep that car too long.
But be that as it may, we have a car that gets 7 on the highway, a bedroom finished by the Three Stooges, and I’m coughing up soft bodied invertebrate creatures several times per day.
All and all I can’t complain.
Doug & Marsha
PIX: Pretty sunset on the mountains.