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.
Now that the basement wall has had some time to dry out, I decided it was time to start the patching process. I vacuumed and scrubbed the wall to prepare it for the hydraulic cement. Then glopped it into all the holes that were leaking. It dries almost immediately making it rather tricky to work with!
