home repair

My mailman better smile tomorrow.

/ wvfurandroot / 5 Comments

My mailman complained.

HMO’Keefe gets more mail than any other private citizen in these the United States. I’m convinced of it. 99% are magazines and catalogs. Then there are the book clubs. Never mind that he can no longer read at the speed that he used to. He orders more and more. More and more arrive.

And then there are the medical bills followed up by confirmation from the insurance company. Then the banking and retirement account stuff.

You have to see it to believe it. We need a burro or at least a little red wagon to haul it into the house.

My long-suffering mailman complained. [Not the mailman that ended up in the tree – he retired. The new guy. A nicer guy you’ve never met.]

Under normal circumstances, I get very little mail. It’s been part of my modus operandi to leave the mail in the mailbox until I’m ready to sit down and deal with it. This can be a couple of days or nearly a week. When the mail comes out of the box, everything is immediately dealt with. The bills are paid. Junk mail goes in the trash. Magazines are read or put in designated magazine spot. Insurance statements filed. Yada yada.

Not as big as it looks. The barn roof makes it look like it holds more than it does.

Leaving it in the mailbox means I know where it is. You might think it a silly way of doing things. It works for me. My bills get paid on time. I don’t have to ransack the house

HMO’Keefe’s deluge of mail (bear in mind there’s another address a few miles away where he also gets mail) is making all of us a bit cranky.

The two of us also shop online a lot. Most of Christmas arrived by UPS, Fed-Ex or the USPS. All three have been delivering packages to my folks and my folks are a wee bit tired of being our mail drop.

There’s also the issue that HMO’Keefe lives for the mail. Or at least acts that way as he watches for the mailman and then bounds out the door to collect the mail which he then brings in and leaves scattered all over the place – not one piece of it thrown away. Not one advertising circular, not one car insurance come-on, not one Cigar Aficionado catalog thrown away despite his not having smoked a thing in nearly 40 years. He opens the envelope, looks at the contents, sets it aside. Wanders to another part of the house, where he opens something else. Rinse and repeat.

Did I mention I was cranky? Did I mention the mailman complained? Did I mention that I didn’t charge a single Christmas gift in part because my new-expiration-date-credit card got stuffed somewhere and nobody knew where.

For the first time in years, I had mail stacked everywhere. MY MAIL. And then there were the towers of his mail threatening to topple and kills us all.

Santa Claus took pity.

New crate?

Under the tree was a mailbox large enough to hold a body. The photos don’t do it justice. As Santa maneuvered through Anderson’s General Store in Columbus, folks moved to the side of the aisles to gape in astonishment at the mutant mailbox. One person asked if it was real.

It is. And it’s big enough to hold a week’s worth of mail and a package or two.

I went to Lowe’s to see if there was a pre-made platform available for my mailbox. Nope.

I went back to Lowe’s to see if they could sell me a piece a wood and cut it for me. I never found out because the Lowe’s guy suggested a bracket set-up that looked like it would do the trick a whole lot easier.

I thought about painting the mailbox a garish color, but decided to keep the elegant, understated black. At least until warmer weather.

I took off the old barn mailbox that I’ve hated almost since it was first put up 23 years ago. That actually went pretty easy.

The old mailbox is nestled in a pile of leaves outside the front door. I’m considering doing something with it INSIDE the house. I doubt HMO’Keefe will cotton to removing mail from one mailbox and putting it in another, but I may cogitate some more. If I could have all the mail (sans junk mail, magazines, advertising) in one place, I’d be less of a bitch.

Photo perspective is weird. This thing is HUGE.

I also removed the Herald Dispatch tube. They refused to deliver a paper to me well over 10 years ago. For reasons I don’t understand, there’s been an empty jar in the newspaper tube for years. Every time I thought to remove it, I would stop reaching just in time to avoid the giant wasp nest just inside the opening. January is a good time to destroy a wasp nest.

After removing the old mailbox, it was blatantly obvious the existing mailbox platform was inadequate even with the bracket gizmos.. The new mailbox would bow and bend and, probably, collapse if attached to the Barbie House sized mailbox platform.

Mail-related Trash

I persuaded my 72-year-old mother to play table saw with me.

After returning with a piece of wood cut to the right size and a power drill, I set to assembly. Other than the fact that I didn’t have the right kind of wood screws, it went well. I put in 4 screws. It’s kind of wobbly, but I have to stop at Lowe’s tomorrow anyway, so I’ll get 4 more screws to fill the empty screw holes and call it done.

Why do I have to stop at Lowe’s? Well everybody knows any project requires no less than 3 trips to Lowe’s. On my second trip, I bought a nifty house number thing that hangs from brackets either from the mailbox or the mailbox post. After opening it and looking at the parts, this thing had 89% chance of utter destruction within a couple of weeks. So back it goes. Along with the bracket gizmos.

Clean desk!

Since I had to tear off the old mailbox, I had to empty it of mail first. After playing with power tools, I came inside and rock’n’rolled through stacks of mail. I found my credit card. I found all sorts of stuff. I threw tons of stuff away. I have a large, heavy-duty black garbage bag nearly full with mail that has accumulated since Thanksgiving. The mail to be dealt with is down to a short-stack.

I’m feeling very virtuous.

My mailman better smile tomorrow. I told him a new mailbox was coming.

Mmmmmm Co’Cola

/ wvfurandroot / 7 Comments

There is nothing I like better than an icy Classic Coke when my throat’s as dry as unbuttered toast. So here it is after 10 p.m. and I’m sucking it down as fast as the straw will deliver.

Why am I so parched? Well. There’s a story.

It begins with bread baking.

Well, now. No. That wouldn’t be true.

It begins with the Boorish Ass (who has since gone out of business) that flimflammed me on flooring installation. It’s taken me several years to get around to undoing the travesty inflicted upon my floors.

Boorish Ass convinced me that I could indeed have sheet linoleum in places that several contractors have said no way. Foolish Me wanted to believe and plunked down the cash. Boorish Ass took the cash and then discovered he could not lay linoleum in the Barn due to the composition and construction of the subfloors. Now I had mentioned, indeed explained at length, what professionals had said about the state of the Barn’s subflooring to Boorish Ass.

Boorish Ass insisted it was doable. I insisted Boorish Ass come look at my floors. He did. He pontificated upon the improvements of flooring technology. Blah blah blah. I have witnesses.

Boorish Ass abandoned the installation with the attitude of “Listen, Lady, I told you this couldn’t be done.” [Truly, I don’t know how he got out of here alive.]

What Boorish Ass left in my house was badly installed underlayment which I have been trodding upon for way too long. Each time I look at it, I want to jump in my car, do bodily harm to him, and hang some of his body parts from my rear-view mirror. I imagine you can guess which body parts.

So, it’s pert near 2012 and this nonsense and I have co-existed way way past what any sane person would regard as too long.

Which brings us to bread. (Kind of.)

I’ve been a wee bit stressed lately. Upon the advice of myself and those in the “helping professions,” I decided to take up a hobby. There was a clear and present need for fun in my life.

Learning to make scrumptious, earthy (ahem) “artisan” bread sounded like a peachy idea. I like bread. HMO’Keefe likes bread. Everybody likes bread. It’s inexpensive (hah!) and I could do it in the comfort of my own home (whichever of the two I happened to be in).

I’m no bread-making virgin. I’ve been a competent baker for a good 30 years. However, I’ve come across one-too-many website and way-too-many cookbooks that detail recipes that take days and sometimes weeks to produce a finished loaf. In short, I took up the kind of bread baking that makes what I used to do akin to the difference between tomato plants bought at a discount store and tomato plants grown from heirloom seeds in a painstakingly built home greenhouse with strict climate control features.

[There was an interlude with “Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day” which will someday be a blog post of its own.]

The bread-making thing GOT TO BE OUTRAGEOUS quickly and after out-growing every pair of pants I own, I reconsidered this hobby. It was a peachy for stress relief, but I’m mightily stressed and three or four loaves of bread every other day or so for months, well, you can see the problem.

This led me to join the gym. Everybody says exercise is a wonderful stress reliever.

Well. It is. Sort of. But I can make bread (1) at home, (2) at any hour of the day, (3) even if I’m tired and (4) I don’t have to make polite chit-chat to dough.

Flippin’ everybody I know goes to the gym. It’s hard to smile and say, “Well! Hi! And how are you?” when you’re trying to inflict all the indignities of the day on an innocent treadmill. Or worse, while hiding unshaven legs behind a meager towel while waiting for a swimming lane.

So, while still going to the gym but less frequently, I returned to bread which led me to a new super-discount store (Ollie’s) in search of affordable bread pans. (Contrary to the above, bread-making is not cheap if you’re a personality type that tends to over-do.)

[BTW, Ollie’s started the whole bread-making thing in the first place when they sold me The Culinary Institute of America’s At Home Series bread making cookbook – which is riddled with errors and not much good for anything other than some nice photos.]

I’m wandering around too-narrow aisles just browsing after discovering a dearth of bread pans when I happen upon peel’n’stick floor tile that would look great in the Cow Bathroom. I pondered. I looked at the price, looked again, and hollered, “What the hell!” after ciphering it would cost $20 to cover the hideous underlayment left by Boorish Ass.

I blew another $20 at Lowe’s for various accoutrements. After a couple of hours of very easy work, I had a splendid floor in the half-bath. It’s cheap tile. It won’t last but a few years, but it makes me happy. That $40 floor did more for stress reduction than bread and squats did. I am woman, hear me roar.

After the pie-making, bread-making extravaganza that was Thanksgiving, I found myself in the flooring aisle of Lowe’s. There was this nifty peel-and-stick tile in 6” x 48” planks that offer a textured wood finish to mimic hardwood floors. I pondered and ciphered. To do the kitchen, hallway and laundry room to cover the underlayment Boorish Ass left behind was a Big Number. While it was a much better grade of flooring than the $20 Ollie’s marvel, I can’t afford it right now and I wouldn’t afford it even I could without a test run.

The floor in the master bath is an utter travesty that harkens back to the Ex’s and my days of do-it-yourselfing. This old-time era did not include professional advice, the reading of instructions, or proper tools.

I hauled out of the Lowe’s enough faux-wood plastic planks for the master bath floor. According to the instructions, I could clean that old floor, peel’n’stick and enjoy the view from my bathtub in a matter of hours. Since that jibed with the Ollie’s/Cow experience, I drank the Kool-Aid.

[I’ve been doing stuff to this Barn for 25 years. You’d think I would have learned by now. Ancient Burial Ground.]

The first thing that went wrong was the cleaning of the floor. Between paint spatters, scuffs, this and that, a heavy-duty cleaning was required to ensure maximum adhesion.

One heavy-duty cleaning was more than that old floor could take. It gave up the ghost, shriveled, unstuck itself from the subfloor (in parts) and crumbled (in other parts).  After a stream of profanity and the lobbing of a coffee cup, I resigned myself to pulling up the old flooring. Of course, only parts of it would pull up. The remainder was stuck to the floor like bread calories on my hips.  Fused.  Welded.  Married.  Not-to-be-divorced.

Out came the scraper. No good. More profanity. Out came the steam cleaner. Nope. Out came the sander. Some progress. If I peeled the thin plastic layer off the top and then scraped and sanded, the subfloor would appear.

This was very slow. And I couldn’t really get into the Zen of peel, scrape, sand, repeat, because what I really wanted was a long bubble bath with a glass of wine and the glorious vista of faux-wood planks.

I went to the Lowe’s and returned with super-duper, silly-expensive sandpaper. (And a cute, tiny shop vac.)

[I’ve left out the part about removing molding, the sides of the whirlpool, the toilet and the sink pedestal. My boudoir is one tremendous mess as well as a study in contrasts.]

At 9:55 p.m., the floor was finally removed and the sub-floor ready for the primer I bought to ensure those peel’n’sticks stick. (I do, sometimes, do the prudent thing.)

I started at noon yesterday and worked until 8 p.m. I started again at noon today and worked until 9:55 p.m. The last 7 hours of today’s adventure included me, a mouse sander, sandpaper so expensive we must import it from Kuwait, and heaps, myriads, plethoras, mountains, stacks and whirlwinds of dust.

There is dust in my hair, my ears, my eyes, my wrinkles, and wedged into the dimples of my cellulite (dimples greatly increased by bread to the point of craters.) There is also dust between my teeth, coating my tongue and wall-papering my throat.

Mmmmmm. Co’Cola.

(Provided I can stand upright, I plan on peel’n’sticking tomorrow evening.)