Bin a while.

Haven't blogged in about a month, can't really give any reason other than laziness.

I have been working hard on the townhouse but it's mostly been boring mechanical stuff, no real changes to be seen.

Have been working hard on HVAC stuff. Ran new duct-work into the small front bedroom, and the new master bath. Repaired a lot of other ducts including the one that fed the dining room (when my brilliant BIL installed the new laminate floor he just covered over the duct.) Moved the main air return from the living room to the dining room (I didn't like where it was) and added a return vent for the second floor. Believe it or not but the furnace didn't have a filter so I added one of those.

Mostly finished the plumbing and electrical rough in, just a few little things to do like runs for ceiling fans and dishwasher.

We are close to being ready for drywall and coming to end of the first phase of work. Then I will start posting pictures again.

I need more money and time so anyone who has extra of either please send it my way.

Squirrel Porn

One night Mary and I were coming home from the casino and she saw a sign that said "squirrel corn." Well I thought she said squirrel porn so I naturally said wtf is squirrel porn? We got a good laugh out of it and every time we drove past the place that sold squirrel corn we would laugh again. We used to laugh a lot.

Well tonight I drove past that place and I laughed and I had good memories about Mary for the first time in a long time. So that gives me a little bit of hope that someday I can forget about the way she has treated me and get past it all. It's gonna take a loooooooonnnnnnggggg time but maybe someday I'll get there.

A Confession.

I have a confession to make.

When I was young I was a Democrat. I voted for Jimmy Carter, I was even a precinct committeeman for a couple years.

I know, I know, please don't hate me. I was young and stupid and under the influence of the Warrens.

But there is good news. I grew up, got smarter and changed into a Republican. I can proudly say I voted for Ronald Regan.

Haunting memory

When I was young I used to drive all over central Indiana fixing copiers. I knew where all the best places were to take a pee and use the payphone. The Ramada Inn at the airport was one of those go-too places.

This is what happened to it.


From the Indy Star today..

I used to spend a lot of time in that lobby and was in it a couple days before. The accident haunted me for years and I still get chills when I drive by the spot where the hotel once stood.

This Star article brought back those memories.

Floors, plumbing and scammers.

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Holy situation.

Floor, floor, floor, every time we work we are repairing bad floors.

The leaking bathroom upstairs caused by the bad support of the floor joist created a cancer that's affected the floors on both levels. I knew that we would be replacing flooring but I had no idea how much.

The good news is that we have gotten pretty good at tearing out bad flooring. One more spot in the living room and we should have all the cancer removed.

More good news, I got $299 for all the scrap copper pipes that will go a long way towards paying for the new piping.

Today (besides fixing floors) we put up the new walls for the half bath on the first floor including a sweet wet wall. Finally turning the corner from demo to new construction.

Finaly New Wood

Finally after doing nothing but tearing out stuff we finally got some building done.

We setup a temporary support wall to hold up the second floor and then removed what was left of the old load-bearing wall. Then we secured our new 2x10 beam on the good side by the stairway and used a bottle jack to lift the beam in the middle.

When the beam was level we had brought up the bad side of the second floor almost an inch and made it level with the other part of the wall.

Those beams were so poorly supported I'm surprised the second floor hadn't come crashing down. But now we have nice solid support and the space is opened up nicely just like we wanted.

Speaking of the second floor, we got the sub floor fixed and can walk upstairs again without worrying about falling through a big hole.

We also tore out all of the old DWV and water supply pipes. Had a bit of a nasty surprise (besides Tim's shower in old sewage) the main stack took an unexpected turn and that will complicated my design for the master bath. Just some of the fun of renovation.