Homestead Day 47 Monday 10/06/2017

Got up this morning to 18 degrees. The temp in the trailer according to the electric heater was 45. Not too bad for a single 1500 watt space heater. Got dressed, walked over to the house, had my usual 1/2 gallon of coffee, cut some firewood, fed the dog, walked the dog, read some news and stoked up the fire all in about an hour.
* Back to sheetrock. Because the house isn’t level, I’ve been laying it up with a fairly wide opening between sheets to allow for some movement. Cut a couple holes wrong in the attempt to get the switches and sockets through the rock. They were nothing that a good tape & mud man can’t fix though. Sheetrock man, I ain’t. It took me most of the day to get up the five sheets with all of the cutouts. Some of the problems are structural anomalies like curved walls, studs not centered on any particular number and walls that are just 4 or so inches taller that a sheet of rock. Made the mistake of not pushing the sheets to the ceiling and putting the patched in strips at the floor. Dumbass mistake, but I’ll interject on my own behalf that “I don’t do this for a living”.
* Tomorrow we’ll try to get down some 1/2″ plywood sheathing on the kitchen floor. This will give us a better surface to which we intend to apply vinyl of some sort. Yeah, I could tile it but the house moves winter and summer and this is an earthquake zone. Tile would just split and crack in the first year. I’m kind of liking the new stick down vinyl tiles that look remarkably like wood. They would flex a bit and stay in place for most of the house movements so anything short of a major earthquake is unlikely to effect them.
* Hauled a few more things from the trailer to the POD.
* Wasn’t feeling it so I stopped the lifting and toting and went back into the house to scrape up vinyl tile squares that have likely be down since 1982. They look like 1982. The tool of choice is a scraper for removing shingles from a roof. As manufactured it was probably good enough for shingles. 35 year old vinyl tiles are another matter. I sat down with it and a file and sharpened it to the point it would almost cut paper. This modification was remarkably good at removing all but the most recalcitrant tiles. Like that Southern Bell lineman told me long ago, “The difficult we do today, the impossible takes a little longer.” I was only dealing with difficult today. Got up enough tile so that we can start putting down the sheathing and set some cabinets and appliances. This ain’t my first rodeo with cabinets and appliances. I remodeled a kitchen at our home in Clearwater. It came out pretty good even if I do say so myself.
* After a bit Summer showed up on scene, fresh from the struggle of reassembling her bed. Now she would not be sleeping on the mattress on the floor. She is now a happy non-camper, at least, as far as her sleeping arrangements go. She’s still cooking on a 2 burner Coleman camp stove and using the small shelf in the wood stove as an oven. Am going to attempt to make the current cooking facilities redundant tomorrow.
* We both worked so late that we had a box of Stove Top, candied carrots and french cut green beans. The only semi-major production was the candied carrots that were grown right here in Alaska. Everything else was done in under 5 minutes. And yes, I had a couple vodka sevens before toddling off too my trailer bedroom where the temperature was about 30 degrees.