Home Improvement

The living room AC cabinet is done!

Today was unseasonably warm – it got up to 48° which meant I could spray paint the 4 remaining door panels for the AC boxes – HOORAY!!!  Painting the 2 green ones by hand was tedious and took hours and made my hand cramp up from jabbing a dry brush into every single hole to make sure no paint was stuck.

Currently 2 of the 3 AC xox frames I made last March are wrapped in plastic to keep the cold out.  I never knew how much air blew in through our [in-wall] ACs until last week during the bitter freeze.  Brrrr!  It made me realize we need insulated AC doors asap so between yesterday & today I built all 3 sets.

OK.  I realize there are many situations where 4 hours can feel like 14:  a really bad first date, a half day meeting at work, shopping.  But today I’m talking about cleaning the basement.  I hauled heavy shit into the “dump pile”, I cleaning off shelves that haven’t been cleaned in probably 20 years, I vacuumed cobwebs off the ceiling, and I cut up more than 100 boxes for recycling.  O.  M.  G.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!
I put this post together 11/3 and totally forgot I had it set to publish automatically tonight. Oops! I wasn’t ready, but now it’s done 🙂

For a few months now, half the basement has been dark.  There are 4 sets of fluorescent ceiling lights down there, but 2 had burnt out.  Unfortunately the half that’s been dark is my neighbor Kathy’s – her cage is in a separate room of the basement and been basically pitch black.  I knew I needed to get replacement bulbs, but I’ve been sick for so long and so exhausted that I kept forgetting. 

About 6 weeks ago, after being sick for 6 weeks [I’m finally starting to feel better, although I’m still way too tired] I decided I needed to do something DIY-ish.  Birdie was having a love-hate relationship with her litter boxes and usually left me daily “presents” on the girl cave floor.  Turns out it was the litter not the box, but I didn’t know that then.

To be fair, this was my first attempt using caulk where the results have to look “nice”.  I caulked the storm windows a few years ago [and made a mess], and caulked a few seams in the basement cage last month [and made a mess].  But last weekend I tried to caulk the kitchen counters and… made a mess.

We have 3 cats. And 6 litter boxes, which we empty and scrub each week. 2 litter boxes are elevated for Birdie, the rest are on ground level for Darwin & Bonkers. You would think 6 would be enough. But no.

At the end of June I’d finally had it with our basement cage [aka my workshop] flooding every time it rained.  I discovered that the gutter on the corner of the house above the leak was pointing straight down at the foundation so I crafted a gutter extender, then sealed the basement wall with hydraulic cement, silicon masonry sealant, and 2 coats of Drylok masonry waterproofer.