My Brain is Mush
You know how when you work at your job all day long and then come home and work on your house all night until you pass out and then do that for days in a row and then one morning you wake up and your brain has decided it’s not going to cooperate any more, to the point where you stand in the shower trying to remember if you already washed your hair and then wash it again anyways just in case. That’s where I’m at today. So rather than attempt to write a new post that is sure to be incoherent and filled with endless ramblings like “That corner’s been mudded. I mudded the mud that I mudded yesterday. Is ‘mudded’ a real word? Let me close my eyes and think about itzzzzzzzzz.” So, instead I’m sharing another post from the glorious day when I finally stopped putting holes in the ceiling of our house. Enjoy!
October 2007
This is an exciting day! We have floors! Or at least what is the start of a floor. It has been 7 months since I have felt a solid floor under my feet in our attic. Instead, we had to balance on floor joists when we moved around. This may not sound so bad, but keep in mind that we were moving new, 10′ floor joists around up there, as well as 25 sheets of subfloor and 60 sheets of heavy drywall. And if we lost our balance, our foot broke through the lath and plaster ceiling below us. See?
Those holes are my fault and they created quite a mess. You see, I do not have the gift of balance. A story from my youth will best illustrate this point, although I share it at the risk of sounding like an airhead. When I was little, if I balanced on one leg and then shut my eyes, I would fall over. It’s true. It was like family trick (“Let’s make Lizzie stand on one leg and see what happens!”). It was so bad that my parents actually sent me to a specialist where I practiced, yes actually practiced, things like standing on one leg or walking across a balance beam. So you can see the irony in me having to now try balancing on floor joists that are only 2″ wide, while doing construction. I don’t think I need to even tell you that the holes you see in these pictures are only a small handful of them.
We’ve since demoed that ceiling and the wall, so the holes really weren’t a big deal. Actually, me losing my balance and creating those holes was like getting a head start on the demo. It’s like I was born with a natural ability to help get the work done.
It could’ve been worse, I could’ve fallen through the space between the floor joists where there is no ceiling and landed on the floor in the room below us. Luckily, that has not yet happened. But we are not finished putting in the floor.
This is what it’s like to balance on the floor joists while looking at the room below you. That’s our hallway down there.
This captures our progress with the floor, as well as one of the three piles of drywall we have in the attic. As of today, we have about 2/3 of the floor installed.
Here Joey is installing a piece of the subfloor. It’s been a slow process involving lots of measuring and cutting to get pieces to fit against the edges of the roof line, around a chimney and so on. It’s also involved lots of bickering, but I think at this point we’re entitled to that.
Important things we learned about installing subfloor: 1) Measure twice, cut once. 2) Each end of the subfloor has to sit on a floor joist. Measure and cut accordingly. 3) There are no 90 degree angles or straight edges in an old house. Just accept it. 4) It’s one big puzzle. If one sheet is installed a bit crooked, all the rest of the pieces will reflect that. 5) If you don’t really know what you’re doing, be sure to set aside a lot of time for this project. A lot.