Preparing for little visitors
Jun. 16th, 2021 12:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dreamsharkWe have just 6 days left to get the house as toddler-proofed as it's going to get. And since they crawl around on the floor and under furniture and such, it needs a little deep-clean love. So I've been vacuuming around the furniture, moving the boxes of stuff that are stored under there, vacuuming the dust out of those boxes, and shuffling them into the back room or porch or wherever they fit. That would be easier if there wasn't so much junk on the front porch, so now would be a good time to recycle all those paper bags, and maybe drop off that box of electronic detritus at Freegeek. And so on. Which is why a simple goal like "vacuum" takes several days.
And then there's deferred projects like fixing the attic door, which has been swinging free on the top hinge for an embarrassingly long time. Thorin helped me remove the door, which involved the usual pointless arguments about the best way to do the most straightforward thing. Not only does he not know how to fix things around the house, he always feels the need to argue about what he doesn't know. No, you don't unscrew the hinges from the door - you just lift out the pin,. No, I KNOW the hinge pin is not painted in place because we have removed it multiple times to get things up and down the stairs. It's hard to get out because the entire weight of the door is hanging from it. Just LIFT UP THE DOOR, please, so I can get it out.
Okay, now the door is off we can tighten up the screws in the top hinge (which fortunately is still in pretty tight) and see what a mess the wood is under the bottom hinge. A little plastic wood should fix that up. All our plastic wood is dried up. Okay, off to the hardware store. Only one of the three screws can even be found at this point, so I guess I'll need some new ones. Maybe I'll get two more the same size and 3 more slightly larger, just in case. Wait, maybe I'll bike to the hardware store. That will give me a nice short trip to check and see if my sciatica thing has healed enough to make biking okay. And that's why simple projects like this one take so long.
I'm so glad that the tropical heat wave has broken. Lena is really excited to see the refurbished attic with the little hidden "bedroom" under the eaves. But last week it was so hot that even two air conditioners could not cool down the attic enough to be usable, even with all that super-insulation. Now it's fine. But I wish I'd gotten around to replacing the missing and broken pieces of window. Every window has at least one layer of glass (or some reasonable facsimile) but it would be a lot more weatherproof with two layers. *sigh*
And then there's deferred projects like fixing the attic door, which has been swinging free on the top hinge for an embarrassingly long time. Thorin helped me remove the door, which involved the usual pointless arguments about the best way to do the most straightforward thing. Not only does he not know how to fix things around the house, he always feels the need to argue about what he doesn't know. No, you don't unscrew the hinges from the door - you just lift out the pin,. No, I KNOW the hinge pin is not painted in place because we have removed it multiple times to get things up and down the stairs. It's hard to get out because the entire weight of the door is hanging from it. Just LIFT UP THE DOOR, please, so I can get it out.
Okay, now the door is off we can tighten up the screws in the top hinge (which fortunately is still in pretty tight) and see what a mess the wood is under the bottom hinge. A little plastic wood should fix that up. All our plastic wood is dried up. Okay, off to the hardware store. Only one of the three screws can even be found at this point, so I guess I'll need some new ones. Maybe I'll get two more the same size and 3 more slightly larger, just in case. Wait, maybe I'll bike to the hardware store. That will give me a nice short trip to check and see if my sciatica thing has healed enough to make biking okay. And that's why simple projects like this one take so long.
I'm so glad that the tropical heat wave has broken. Lena is really excited to see the refurbished attic with the little hidden "bedroom" under the eaves. But last week it was so hot that even two air conditioners could not cool down the attic enough to be usable, even with all that super-insulation. Now it's fine. But I wish I'd gotten around to replacing the missing and broken pieces of window. Every window has at least one layer of glass (or some reasonable facsimile) but it would be a lot more weatherproof with two layers. *sigh*
