Homestead Day 44 STAR DATE 11032017 It’s a Friday.
I’m really having a hard time with this getting up in the morning. Every time I go to bed at night I end up sleeping 10 hours or more. By the time I drink coffee and read some news it is 10:00 o’clock. I have been accustomed to arising, since I retired last year, at 7:30 or thereabouts. Could be that I have still not adjusted to being four hours off of Eastern Daylight Time. Maybe I’ll do better when we fall back an hour on Sunday. BTW the ground was crunchy as I walked from the trailer to the house for my morning jolt of caffeine. After a couple of cups, I was back to work. I had kitchen plumbing to install.
*If you haven’t tried out PEX piping on one of your DIY plumbing projects, you are missing the boat. It is extremely easy to install, doesn’t burst when it freezes and you can thread it through walls like running wire. Anyway, I completed the kitchen end by running the pipe through an interior wall. Because I needed a 90 degree elbow at the end I’ll be doing what the previous owners did and make the home run through the base cabinets and behind the gas stove. The kitchen sink is on an outside wall and freezing plumbing is not uncommon. This old house that was built around a two room homestead cabin that was built maybe most of a hundred years ago. There are rough sawn 2×6’s and 8s run every which direction as the new house timbers (1982) did not follow the same direction as the old house. For that reason my efforts to install the new piping were greatly hindered. However, I did get the piping to the water heater. Nothing is connected as I need to run lines for the washer and the upstairs bathroom. As my late, long time and best friend, Bobby Cecil, always said as we were on the downhill side of an air conditioning job, “All we lack is finishing”. So that is where I am in this plumbing fiasco. I am truly happy that I didn’t have to silver solder every joint that I made getting from the kitchen to the water heater.
*Got tired of plumbing and even though there is still some to do, I decided that the mysterious missing electrical box must be found. After a 1/2 hour of crawling around on the floor under the eaves of the house, I decided that the only way to find the damned thing is to start ripping out sheetrock. Since I have most of the sheetrock in the house already ripped out a few more pieces won’t make a whole lot of difference in the overall scheme of things.
*Cleaned up some of the mess I’d made during the day even though cleaning up these mud covered floors is mostly a waste of time. Freeze-thaw, freeze-thaw constantly making more mud to track into the house. Certainly am glad we haven’t put any rugs or other flooring down. We will have to have a better entryway when the new floors go in.
*At last it was 6 o’clock. Time for a vodka and to catch up on the news. Summer prepared some homemade beef stroganoff but we had no egg noodles so we ate it with spaghetti instead. Still very good and pasta is pasta. Having to ‘make do’ with what you have is a skill that many Americans have lost because it’s only a few minutes to the grocery. My childhood was spent ‘making do’. This minor difficulty is just that. I really do feel sorry for these ‘Millennials’ as ‘making do’ for them means doing without the latest gadget. When their life does get tough they have no experience to guide them. Oh well.