Micks Distractions

Well, I’m back on to paint­ing. I’m get­ting to the house still at 0500 to 0530 and work­ing until it’s time to go to work. I only have the kids rooms to do now. That’ll be done pretty quick. It usu­ally takes me an hour a room per coat, (for the walls), and on hot days I can come back and do a sec­ond coat 3 hours later.

Well, I’ve taken 2 weeks off work. The first week I’ve spent paint­ing. Heck there’s a lot to do. Every day of the week I got there at 0630 and fin­ished at 1800 — sun­rise to sun­set. Some nights I worked till 2100 and 2200. I got the whole house under­coated, and the top coat, (two), on the Kitchen, Lounge, and Hall­way areas. My neck, and arms were killing after doing the ceil­ings.
The sec­ond week, I started on the floor­ing. So far I’ve man­aged to com­plete the Kitchen and part of the hall­way, (the kitchen arrived today — just in time). The floor­ing we chose was pre-finished Cypress Pine planks. These are just nor­mal milled planks, but have been lac­quered. So, no sand­ing or pol­ish­ing needs to be done after­wards. This is ideal for us, as we are doing the floor­ing in stages.
I’ve been absolutely bug­gered these last 2 weeks. Work­ing at least 12 hours a day for the last 13 days straight is wear­ing me out. Hence the lack of an update. I’ve lost a huge amount of weight doing it as well — I’m down to 75kg from 85kg.
One thing that we haven’t had a lot of is rain. For 2–3 days it rained a huge amount dur­ing the last 2 weeks. It really tested out the drains, but heck there was a LOT of mud every­where. You can see me

clear­ing out the drains as they were get­ting a bit full of water.
Another thing I did was to re-position my live­cam to inside the house. Over the next week, I’ll cull out the high­lights.

I went out and bought a big 20L con­tainer of under­coat, this will do the walls and other bits of wood. I went there today and under­coated some remain­ing bits of exposed wood. The

front door and

bay win­dow, and other bits at the back of the house. Our orig­i­nal plan was to have nice lac­quered wood fin­ish through­out, but our bud­get caught up with us, so we’ve opted for the cheaper painted wood. Then we can get cheap pine or MDF for the archi­traves, and skirt­ing boards and paint it. It’ll still look good, and you won’t know what’s under­neath.

My wife and I were at the house today, we had ordered some Insulco Fatt Batts R3.5 rat­ing. I was going to go to R5.0, but the cost was a bit inhib­i­tive. They deliv­ered R2.5, so we rang them up, and they were to replace them today. We waited, and waited.….…
So, in the end we

cleared out the big lumps of tim­ber in the house, I

shifted the dunny, and did some gen­eral tidy­ing up. My wife under­coated the frilly bits that will stick on the house. All in all it wasn’t a wasted day, but we could have been putting in the insu­la­tion.

The

insu­la­tion arrived this morn­ing. They stuffed the order up and gave us R2.0 batts instead of R3.5. So they’re going to come by on mon­day and swap it out with the big­ger batts. I was going to spend the day insu­lat­ing ready for the plas­terer on Mon­day.
So, I did some more mod­i­fy­ing of the inter­nal frame for the upstairs room — I bought five 3.6m 140x45 pine beams to lay down on the wall frames to strengthen it up ready for the C-section steel beam. I’ll get that next week and just stuff it up there for after we move back in to the house. No time to do it now.
I also had some lads come over and put in some Cat-5e cable for me. I ran dual cables to every room in the house. They thought I was odd hav­ing cat5e run­ning into the bath­room. So? What’s wrong with that?

It had started to rain. So far we haven’t encoun­tered this as we have had dry weather up till now. I was back on site

paint­ing the win­dows. It’s fun paint­ing under­coat in a driz­zle. Try it some­time! No don’t. Need­less to say when it did start to pour some of the under­coat just washed off.