Two Silos Farm

Lunch time – I’m pretty sore. Forgot what it was like laying across joists trying to reach into the eaves of the attic. YUCK!!!

Anyway, got the icky stuff cleaned out from over the hallway. Over the laundry room isn’t so bad, as the sheetrock is coming down too.

Here is me – I sure hate cellulous insulation.

Hubby says I do clean up pretty good.

Looks much better all bagged up.

And the attic space.

It’s about 20 degrees out. It’s getting a bit chilly in the room. After I’m done with lunch, I’ll get back to work. Hubby will need to help a bit with framing in for the access panel, but I’ll do all the insulation work. I’m still on track for having it all sealed back up before I go to bed.

Cathy

I’m taking a vacation day from my paid job, so I can spend the day working very hard at my unpaid job. It would be nice to take a day off “work” and not spend it working once in a while. . . But this needs to get done.

To catch up, last Sunday we spent the day putting in the last of the joists.

And started on the flooring.

I get confused, but think the bottom layer is the subfloor, then the underlayment (or maybe that is reversed?) and then the actual flooring is whatever is put on top that is visible. The bottom stuff is ¾” sturdy-floor plywood. About noon is when hubby realized he had the wrong thickness underlayment. Tried a few creative methods to get the desiel truck started, but he finally gave up and left that until Monday – after it could be plugged in over night.

By Wednesday night, he had most of the underlayment down. This picture shows were the walls for the half bath will go. Discovered we need more underlayement – forgot about what we needed in the half bath. It’s a good thing Menards is only 12 miles away. If you are going to do major renovating, it’s good to buy a house close to a building material supplier.

Here is a view from the other direction. And no, I don’t try to take pictures of the cats, they just have a way of following me around.

Wednesday night, after I got home from work Hubby and I worked on closing up the small section where the wall use to be. This was done seperatly, as we had to work around the braces. We’ve used these braces a lot more than we expected to when we bought them.

Thursday hubby worked on building and installing the support wall, and then he installed the door.

It’s too bad I was at work, I’m more likely to think of things four steps ahead and that helps alleviate future problems. The bottom of the door needs to be cut off – it’s installed a bit too low. Opens fine over the tiles, but not over the throw rug that is on top of the tiles. Ok, how was my hubby suppose to know there would be a rug there? It’s laying on the floor right now. All he had to do was open the door up all the way, and he would have realized it needed to be raised another ¼”.

He told me the door gave him lots of grief, and I didn’t realize the problem until I opened it up this morning. So he doesn’t know about this yet. I’ll also point out how he could have fixed the one problem he told me about. Just so he’ll know if he encounters that problem in the future.

Don’t read that as a criticism of my husband. It’s just that I’m way better at solving puzzles than he is. We work so much better as a team. Where I get frustrated is that if he encounters a problem, he will rarely stop and consult with me about it. He just goes ahead and spends a lot of time trying to figure it out without my help. With this door, he could have got it partly installed, and then stopped when he could not get it to straighten out. Then when I got home, we could have worked on it together. Then we would not have a fully nailed in door that does not quite shut right.

Things like that don’t happen all that often. But often enough that it really bugs me that he won’t stop, but will get angry and finally give up and just nail everything so firmly in place that when I get home and have a simple solution, the only way to “fix” it is to tear everything out, buy new and start over.

Oh well, it is way better than it use to be, hubby does accept that I’m pretty good at that kind of stuff – took years for that! He always said he wanted to marry a woman that was smarter than him, and I don’t think I could handle being married to someone that I believed was smarter than me. So it works for both of us LOL!!

Enough of that, after 27 years we’ve learned to work together and get along, and these other things are only minor bumps in the road – repeated bumps, but minor none the less.

It’s after 5am, and I’ve got a ceiling to tear down. Hubby left tools and stuff all over the floor in the laundry room, so I’ve got some cleaning do to first.

It’s going to be cold work – I’ll put on my coveralls and probably a tyvek suit over that. Those don’t breathe (obviously) at all, so that will keep the body heat in.

Cathy

Yesterday was one of those days where there isn’t a lot of visible progress for a day’s work. When you don’t get started until noon, that does not help things.

My hubby actually got up around 5am. He must have had a nature call, then got distracted. He spent enough time banging around building up the fire that soon I got up, got dressed and joined him. I walk into the kitchen to find him standing in front of the patio door holding his trusty Marlin 60, buck naked. He had seen a rabbit under the bird feeder, but it got scared away by a passing car (which is an unusual site that early on a Saturday also). He was waiting to see if it would come back.

Ok – it’s about 60 deg in the house, outdoor thermometer reads -10, and he was going to open the door and take a shot in his birthday suit – (me rolling eyes!)

Having missed a shot at the rabbit, hubby went back to bed and I played on the computer (I actually did a bit of real work too). About 9 am, he got back up, but wasn’t in any hurry to get back to the laundry room.

Son got up around 11, and started talking about working on his car breaks. So that provided another distraction while hubby went to the shop to move his car out, and get the heater going so the air compressor would run. By the time he got started in the laundry room, it was time for me to start working on lunch.

Hubby removed the laundry tub, and the rest of the floor.

He decided to go all the way back to the farthest joist, which resulted in him removing all the vinyl so I don’t have to scrape any of it off YEA!! Then he spent some time putting in the green treated support on the exterior wall.

About that time son had his car apart enough to know that he needed new disks along with break pads. At least he had a style of caliper that they can hone them and reuse them. His can has disk breaks all around, but the rears also have a small drum for the emergency breaks – sort of looks hat shaped. Son is currently broke, so hubby went with to pay for the parts (just into Mitchell, 12 miles away). Had a pot of chili simmering, so made corn bread while they were gone.

Finally got back to work around 2 pm, and started on the header to hang the joists off it. Don’t know if “header” is the right term – I’m not real good at remembering what is what, and hubby will get upset with me for calling a rafter a joist, or referring to something as a truss when it is not . . . I know what is needed, just not what the technical term is for it. I do a lot of the layout for our projects, and hubby does the bulk of the labor. Works for me.

Here is the thingy that the floor joists will attach too.

Then we started installing the joists. First one took some figuring, and about the time we got it done it was time to do the chores, so the horses, chickens, barn cats and dog got taken care of. Had left over chili for supper, and got a few more joists installed before calling it a night.

I stayed up on the computer a bit longer than hubby. It was about 10:30pm, and I walked by the patio door, and sure enough, there is that pesty rabbit under the bird feeder. I had all the lights off, so went into the bedroom to tell hubby. Of course, he was already stripped down and under the covers.

“That rabbit is back” I calmly told him.

“Are you serious?” was his reply – maybe he thought I was teasing just to trick him into getting out from under the warm blankets.

“Yup, he’s right there”

So hubby ended the day, standing in front of the patio door, buck naked, holding his trusty Marlin 60. This time the rabbit didn’t get away.

Cathy