Between Patching and Painting

The past few days haven't revealed to me any particularly interesting new job opportunities. I spent a few hours researching one possibility but, other than that, have only pursued a couple of Elance freelance writing projects. I heard back from one but can't get my hands on a presentation I did so I'm figuring out where to go from here with that one.

My current obsession with patching wall cracks and painting continues unabated. At least it doesn't require using a sharp knife, so I'm pretty safe. Other than going up and down the steep, narrow basement stairs repeatedly for forgotten items.

There was a big hole in that wall.

I don't even need to climb a ladder; the original owners created the "basement" when the wife insisted that her husband get his model train sets out of the living room. I looked at original building permits some time ago and discovered that our garage initially had a 14 vertical foot clearance. They split that baby in half to create the train room. I've never measured the ceiling height down there but know that our seven-foot bookshelves didn't fit when we moved in.  I'm only painting a couple of walls, so I'm taping the ceiling without having to be on tippy-toes.

A horizontal crack ran across that wall, a vertical one from top to bottom by the light switch.

I like painting the walls because they are easier and faster than the detail I encountered painting the bathroom.  How could I make it complicated enough to entertain myself? Find more cracks to fix!

We've long ignored the basement. We refer to it as, "The Dead People's Room," a probably insensitive as hell acknowledgement that it contains, besides a quarter room of electronic waste, items and boxes retrieved after the deaths of my mother and Maureen's sister. It is hard going through that stuff and many boxes sit largely unopened. There are  boxes and file cabinet drawers full of old work paperwork. That's just flat out boring to sort through to see what needs to be shredded. So there it all sits.

Maureen's old La-Z-Boy and chair from her dining room set, with my personal book collection in the background. I built the bookshelf in the shop at Malmstrom AFB, Montana. Way long ago.

Then there's the downstairs bathroom. We paid good money to get the sink and toilet working after years of our disuse. The house was built in 1968 and we think the downstairs not long thereafter. It means that parts for such things as plumbing are hard to come by. It is a dinky thing, the bathroom, that still needs a lot of work, including probably replacing the shower door.

The plumber said the toilet is probably one of the original silent flush models; same with the pedestal sink.

We know the shower leaks but, hey, it has a full-flow shower head. The wall next to the show had pulled away so I patched that. The shifting that accompanies this winter's storms (keeping fingers crossed on that account) will show whether that patch holds. 

Not easy putting sheet rock mud in that narrow corner.

Oh. Replacing six burned out fluorescent tubes made the whole room brighten up. Funny how that works.