I have been talking about these cascade chains of housework in bits but I feel like I ought to lay it all out (or at least... as much of it as I remember) just so there is framing context for the whole My Office situation, because it's not at all just my office.
Two precipitating things have led to the development of two parallel but not quite unrelated massive house projects.
One: we were getting some electrical modernization done, including moving an electrical panel from inside the linen closet to the hall where it can actually be accessed safely and sanely. (This is just doing a 'flip from one side of the wall to the other', but still permitted work.) In the process of doing this work we discovered that one of the upstairs circuits was on aluminum wiring. Aluminum wiring is not up to current code and in fact considered a hazard, which means we couldn't get signoff on the permit while there was said wiring in place. We tracked it down to the space that I refer to as my office.
"My office" is ... basically I have a stupidly unreasonably sized bedroom that divides sensibly into two conceptual parts, so one of them is the bedroom and one of them is the office. The office had my grandmother's desk and a papasan chair and a number of Very Full Bookshelves and another attempt at a desk that was really kind of a disaster but anyway while there had been an 'it'd be nice if we could paint/revamp in here' in play it was sort of Too Much Work To Consider so it wasn't going to happen. Except that putting the large computer in the office with aluminum wiring (previously used to run, maybe, a table lamp) was Nope, Not On, hence the whole Despair Boxes thing, and everything got repacked into a Tetris corner in the basement.
Two: I do not remember the timing on this, and I think it was in play before the Despair Boxes were a thing. But: we got a special loan for environmental efficiency modernization, where the guy we are working with gets paid (by the gummint) basically based on how much our blower door test improves. So we made sure to attach the Giant Fan to the door that wasn't the front door (a strange one-and-a-half sized door system which![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
artan has commented one could fit a ferret under, and which has long been taped shut with a sign reading "This is not a door" affixed to the outside) because obviously if we could improve that it would make a big difference to how much air blows through the house like the harrowing cries of spirits in the void. Our plan for using this loan was to do more insulation improvements, replace the bay windows in the front of the house with double-panes that don't fog up internally in the winter, and replace the front door, with some miscellaneous other stuff as possible.
The door replacement necessitated the demolition of the stone veneer on the front of the house, which is a complicated thing: the stone is ... weird. It's basically pumice/lava rock in black and red, or was before the fuckwits we bought the place from spraypainted it beige. The chimney remains the same weird rock, but at least not spraypainted beige. This made me sad; while I despised the spraypaint bullshit, I had felt that Weird Lava Rock Front Of House was the closest I was going to get to living in a nice stone house and I actually quite wished I could live in a nice stone house. But replacing the front, now necessary, with stone, was Expensive.
So. We have these two projects running semi-simultaneously. This necessitates dealing with: the people who did a previous round of house siding for much of the external stuff, window men, door men, electrician, insulation guy, plasterer. I think. There might be another little man in there somewhere but I have probably lost that part of things.
Work is initiated, then... lockdown.
Now, project #2 is on something of a timer, something like 'you have a year from when we sign off on this loan to complete and test the work', and Insulation Guy is the project lead on #2. Insulation Guy has an immunocompromised wife. Insulation Guy shuts down for a while on availability while trying to figure out how to manage things.
Electrician finishes up the electrical upgrades in early lockdown, including replacing the aluminum circuits in the now spookily empty office with something code-acceptable. He will be back later.
We pick out a very nice door to console me for replacing the front of the house with siding. I get quotes from several masons on how much it would cost to do the work, just to get emotional closure; one comes in Just Barely Out Of Our Budget and because we need other things done we decide not to stretch.
The office becomes a perpetual font of quiet despair because it was just going to be a bit while we got some work done and the timeless void of the quarantimes consumes all faith in the possibility for change. We do remove the wallpaper, as best as can be done given that it has been sort of skimcoated with some sort of paint/spackle layer over top. This is about as exciting as it sounds but it turns out that three out of four children enjoy aspects of wallpaper removal.
House siding people have their mason come around to demo the front of the house. The rubble from this gets carted around to the back to be an improved backstop for the archery range, and attracts a weasel. (We hope the weasel was not frightened off by the rest of the rock pile being moved back there.)
After some dithering we decide that we want to try stone after all, and start working with the house siding people to get quotes. This is a long, terrible process of asking questions, getting responses that aren't responsive to anything we want to know about, and having the quote go up by $1200 or so each exchange. Assume this is continuing in the background from here on out.
As a consequence of the front demo we discover that the sill beam running the length of the front of the house has started to rot. This necessitates the demolition of the front stoop, as previously mentioned, which had not been helping the whole rotting procedure by being basically glued to the front of the house with patchy cement that was doing an excellent job of creating moisture packets up against the beam.
Because the house siding people are useless,whispercricket, artan, and I take a few field trips to masonry supply places to look at fake rocks, rocks, and Very Large Rocks Suitable For Usage As A Front Stoop. Some decisions are easy; some are not; price quotes are very exciting.
The government decides that ha ha whoops they're "losing" a lot of money on this environmental improvement program so they're going to shut it down RIGHT NOW, turn in your results by July! Insulation Guy spends several weeks having screaming arguments with them and pointing out that we have a contract that says we need to have this stuff done by October, what the fuck. A compromise is reached: the blower door test needs to be done by the end of August. We nervously look at the Door People and wonder if we are going to have a front door in time.
Little men come around to change out the windows and discover that it is not merely that the windows are fifty years old that they are drafty: when they remove the trim they find that there is no framing wood, just a hole. They go to get wood to frame out the fucking windows. We have new windows. It is much less drafty.
Insulation Guy, done arguing with the government for a bit, replaces the sill beam, because that's outdoor work and he is glad to have work that doesn't require that he talk with humans. He also fills the trapezoidal spaces under the bay windows with insulation because they were basically voids that were desperately trying to equalize with the outside air, and insulates front of house downstairs. And, miracle of miracles, he decides he's okay with venturing into doing the upstairs insulation. This requires punching fist-sized holes into the walls upstairs so that the insulation can be blown in, between each stud. This is many hole. Many hole stretches around two sides of my bedroom, one side of two bathrooms, and the front of the junior monkeys' room (which was just recently painted, so argh, but at least we still had the paint in reasonable condition).
Finally we have return of plaster guy, who has, since we last hired him, gotten a union gig and doesn't really do plastering anymore but is happy to pick up money on the side to do weekend jobs for amiable people who pay immediately. Plaster guy and a friend turn up and patch most of the holes, replace the office ceiling (had I mentioned my office ceiling was falling down? No? Okay so we had black mold when we got the place, a chunk of the ceiling was ripped out and replaced, and the plaster job we had done after that was... not lasting).artan repaints the juniors' bedroom wall.
We miraculously obtain a front door in time for the new deadline. (Door people also replace a screen sliding door broken by children.) The electrician punches holes in the new wall for the installation of new lights and doorbell, which process reveals that one of the walls next to the front door contains a concealed, mysterious door which probably does not go to Narnia. This is the source of massive bafflement ("was this a closet that got demoed but they left the door for some reason?")kaifu suggested that it might be an abandoned pocket door and that suddenly explained everything, including the fact that the doorway adjacent has random planks tacked up against the trim and painted white which would cover pocket door tracks.
artan reminds me that I need to design the shelf/desk unit that is being constructed for the office space. After substantial brain fog, I do so, so he can go get wood for it.
Insulation guy comes back, insulates around the front door, and performs the blower door test. We have improved the air seal on the house by 40%. (We needed 20% to max out the benefits on the loan, I think.)
The office! Makes progress again! With the holes from the electrician and the insulation guy patched, it can now be sanded, primed, and painted with the paint we got for it nearly ten years ago! Which, when it's up on the wall, has people approaching me with, "This is a perfectly good color but is it really you?" because - oh, I'd forgotten that I had put my foot down on the repairs in the living room, that if we were going to paint the wood trim I demanded that we paint the room an interesting fucking colour because my taste in interior decorating at the architectural level is somewhere between "colonial" and "Victorian". So the nice misty blue was, well, maybe you could do something more to your taste? Which I appreciate, and so I fought out of the 'I'm so tired could we just get something done' to pick out new paint. (My office is now approximately blue jay colored, or that summer sky blue that you only get one or two days a year when there are no clouds even thinking about being in the sky.)
After another alarming round of "We don't answer your questions and the new quote is notably higher now" from siding folks we determine that some of the front of house stuff can be done by Insulation Guy, and contact back the mason we had reluctantly not hired before (and get quotes from a couple others just to be sure) to ask him if he can requote and fit us in before frost.
We move all the furniture from the bedroom half of that room to the office half of that room. Small children are recruited to work on the wallpaper stripping on the bedroom side. The nice built-in shelves thatartan had put up, which I had filled with all my shrines and stuff that normally live in the office, have to come down. Despair Boxes are iterated.
Then the plasterer could come back, fix the holes on that side, fix the holes around the new front door (and an incidental bit of ceiling over the dining room table from a slightly oversized light fixture hole), fix the holes in my bathroom, and by the way smooth the ceiling on that side so it matches the office, which does not have weird swooshy decorative plaster. This takes him two weekends because doing the ceiling is fucking hard work and he says "This is why I don't do plastering anymore!" cheerfully as he takes our money.
keshwyn drops by to help artan cut wood for a) my office stuff, b) a project of keshwyn's, and c) a shelf thing for jenett. Being at opposite ends of a sheet of plywood is appropriate social distance. keshwyn helps me finish a Pokemon Go quest.
artan sanded the bedroom, with a mild assist from me reminding him we have an air filter for my studio (my studio being the space currently full of my office in Despair Boxes). People were making a Container Store order and I determined that there is nothing that would fix my Massive Issues with the bathroom. (These issues are basically a 'remodel the bathroom' problem, taken in toto, but I could get by with shelving.) I rant about shelving. artan builds shelving out of scrap wood and moves it up to the bedroom so he can just prime it when he primes the bedroom.
The bedroom has been primed, as of today. (Also the bathroom shelf unit.)
Remaining to do: Trim outside. Actual fucking front of house. Front step. Lights and doorbell install. Paint bedroom. Clean bedroom floor and do touchup work. Put bedroom stuff back in bedroom. Clean office floor and do touchup work. Finish constructing the office furniture (happening in bibs and bobs around other things). PUT MY FUCKING OFFICE TOGETHER.
I... think I got most of it.
Two precipitating things have led to the development of two parallel but not quite unrelated massive house projects.
One: we were getting some electrical modernization done, including moving an electrical panel from inside the linen closet to the hall where it can actually be accessed safely and sanely. (This is just doing a 'flip from one side of the wall to the other', but still permitted work.) In the process of doing this work we discovered that one of the upstairs circuits was on aluminum wiring. Aluminum wiring is not up to current code and in fact considered a hazard, which means we couldn't get signoff on the permit while there was said wiring in place. We tracked it down to the space that I refer to as my office.
"My office" is ... basically I have a stupidly unreasonably sized bedroom that divides sensibly into two conceptual parts, so one of them is the bedroom and one of them is the office. The office had my grandmother's desk and a papasan chair and a number of Very Full Bookshelves and another attempt at a desk that was really kind of a disaster but anyway while there had been an 'it'd be nice if we could paint/revamp in here' in play it was sort of Too Much Work To Consider so it wasn't going to happen. Except that putting the large computer in the office with aluminum wiring (previously used to run, maybe, a table lamp) was Nope, Not On, hence the whole Despair Boxes thing, and everything got repacked into a Tetris corner in the basement.
Two: I do not remember the timing on this, and I think it was in play before the Despair Boxes were a thing. But: we got a special loan for environmental efficiency modernization, where the guy we are working with gets paid (by the gummint) basically based on how much our blower door test improves. So we made sure to attach the Giant Fan to the door that wasn't the front door (a strange one-and-a-half sized door system which
artan has commented one could fit a ferret under, and which has long been taped shut with a sign reading "This is not a door" affixed to the outside) because obviously if we could improve that it would make a big difference to how much air blows through the house like the harrowing cries of spirits in the void. Our plan for using this loan was to do more insulation improvements, replace the bay windows in the front of the house with double-panes that don't fog up internally in the winter, and replace the front door, with some miscellaneous other stuff as possible.The door replacement necessitated the demolition of the stone veneer on the front of the house, which is a complicated thing: the stone is ... weird. It's basically pumice/lava rock in black and red, or was before the fuckwits we bought the place from spraypainted it beige. The chimney remains the same weird rock, but at least not spraypainted beige. This made me sad; while I despised the spraypaint bullshit, I had felt that Weird Lava Rock Front Of House was the closest I was going to get to living in a nice stone house and I actually quite wished I could live in a nice stone house. But replacing the front, now necessary, with stone, was Expensive.
So. We have these two projects running semi-simultaneously. This necessitates dealing with: the people who did a previous round of house siding for much of the external stuff, window men, door men, electrician, insulation guy, plasterer. I think. There might be another little man in there somewhere but I have probably lost that part of things.
Work is initiated, then... lockdown.
Now, project #2 is on something of a timer, something like 'you have a year from when we sign off on this loan to complete and test the work', and Insulation Guy is the project lead on #2. Insulation Guy has an immunocompromised wife. Insulation Guy shuts down for a while on availability while trying to figure out how to manage things.
Electrician finishes up the electrical upgrades in early lockdown, including replacing the aluminum circuits in the now spookily empty office with something code-acceptable. He will be back later.
We pick out a very nice door to console me for replacing the front of the house with siding. I get quotes from several masons on how much it would cost to do the work, just to get emotional closure; one comes in Just Barely Out Of Our Budget and because we need other things done we decide not to stretch.
The office becomes a perpetual font of quiet despair because it was just going to be a bit while we got some work done and the timeless void of the quarantimes consumes all faith in the possibility for change. We do remove the wallpaper, as best as can be done given that it has been sort of skimcoated with some sort of paint/spackle layer over top. This is about as exciting as it sounds but it turns out that three out of four children enjoy aspects of wallpaper removal.
House siding people have their mason come around to demo the front of the house. The rubble from this gets carted around to the back to be an improved backstop for the archery range, and attracts a weasel. (We hope the weasel was not frightened off by the rest of the rock pile being moved back there.)
After some dithering we decide that we want to try stone after all, and start working with the house siding people to get quotes. This is a long, terrible process of asking questions, getting responses that aren't responsive to anything we want to know about, and having the quote go up by $1200 or so each exchange. Assume this is continuing in the background from here on out.
As a consequence of the front demo we discover that the sill beam running the length of the front of the house has started to rot. This necessitates the demolition of the front stoop, as previously mentioned, which had not been helping the whole rotting procedure by being basically glued to the front of the house with patchy cement that was doing an excellent job of creating moisture packets up against the beam.
Because the house siding people are useless,
whispercricket, artan, and I take a few field trips to masonry supply places to look at fake rocks, rocks, and Very Large Rocks Suitable For Usage As A Front Stoop. Some decisions are easy; some are not; price quotes are very exciting.The government decides that ha ha whoops they're "losing" a lot of money on this environmental improvement program so they're going to shut it down RIGHT NOW, turn in your results by July! Insulation Guy spends several weeks having screaming arguments with them and pointing out that we have a contract that says we need to have this stuff done by October, what the fuck. A compromise is reached: the blower door test needs to be done by the end of August. We nervously look at the Door People and wonder if we are going to have a front door in time.
Little men come around to change out the windows and discover that it is not merely that the windows are fifty years old that they are drafty: when they remove the trim they find that there is no framing wood, just a hole. They go to get wood to frame out the fucking windows. We have new windows. It is much less drafty.
Insulation Guy, done arguing with the government for a bit, replaces the sill beam, because that's outdoor work and he is glad to have work that doesn't require that he talk with humans. He also fills the trapezoidal spaces under the bay windows with insulation because they were basically voids that were desperately trying to equalize with the outside air, and insulates front of house downstairs. And, miracle of miracles, he decides he's okay with venturing into doing the upstairs insulation. This requires punching fist-sized holes into the walls upstairs so that the insulation can be blown in, between each stud. This is many hole. Many hole stretches around two sides of my bedroom, one side of two bathrooms, and the front of the junior monkeys' room (which was just recently painted, so argh, but at least we still had the paint in reasonable condition).
Finally we have return of plaster guy, who has, since we last hired him, gotten a union gig and doesn't really do plastering anymore but is happy to pick up money on the side to do weekend jobs for amiable people who pay immediately. Plaster guy and a friend turn up and patch most of the holes, replace the office ceiling (had I mentioned my office ceiling was falling down? No? Okay so we had black mold when we got the place, a chunk of the ceiling was ripped out and replaced, and the plaster job we had done after that was... not lasting).
artan repaints the juniors' bedroom wall.We miraculously obtain a front door in time for the new deadline. (Door people also replace a screen sliding door broken by children.) The electrician punches holes in the new wall for the installation of new lights and doorbell, which process reveals that one of the walls next to the front door contains a concealed, mysterious door which probably does not go to Narnia. This is the source of massive bafflement ("was this a closet that got demoed but they left the door for some reason?")
kaifu suggested that it might be an abandoned pocket door and that suddenly explained everything, including the fact that the doorway adjacent has random planks tacked up against the trim and painted white which would cover pocket door tracks.artan reminds me that I need to design the shelf/desk unit that is being constructed for the office space. After substantial brain fog, I do so, so he can go get wood for it.Insulation guy comes back, insulates around the front door, and performs the blower door test. We have improved the air seal on the house by 40%. (We needed 20% to max out the benefits on the loan, I think.)
The office! Makes progress again! With the holes from the electrician and the insulation guy patched, it can now be sanded, primed, and painted with the paint we got for it nearly ten years ago! Which, when it's up on the wall, has people approaching me with, "This is a perfectly good color but is it really you?" because - oh, I'd forgotten that I had put my foot down on the repairs in the living room, that if we were going to paint the wood trim I demanded that we paint the room an interesting fucking colour because my taste in interior decorating at the architectural level is somewhere between "colonial" and "Victorian". So the nice misty blue was, well, maybe you could do something more to your taste? Which I appreciate, and so I fought out of the 'I'm so tired could we just get something done' to pick out new paint. (My office is now approximately blue jay colored, or that summer sky blue that you only get one or two days a year when there are no clouds even thinking about being in the sky.)
After another alarming round of "We don't answer your questions and the new quote is notably higher now" from siding folks we determine that some of the front of house stuff can be done by Insulation Guy, and contact back the mason we had reluctantly not hired before (and get quotes from a couple others just to be sure) to ask him if he can requote and fit us in before frost.
We move all the furniture from the bedroom half of that room to the office half of that room. Small children are recruited to work on the wallpaper stripping on the bedroom side. The nice built-in shelves that
artan had put up, which I had filled with all my shrines and stuff that normally live in the office, have to come down. Despair Boxes are iterated.Then the plasterer could come back, fix the holes on that side, fix the holes around the new front door (and an incidental bit of ceiling over the dining room table from a slightly oversized light fixture hole), fix the holes in my bathroom, and by the way smooth the ceiling on that side so it matches the office, which does not have weird swooshy decorative plaster. This takes him two weekends because doing the ceiling is fucking hard work and he says "This is why I don't do plastering anymore!" cheerfully as he takes our money.
keshwyn drops by to help artan cut wood for a) my office stuff, b) a project of keshwyn's, and c) a shelf thing for jenett. Being at opposite ends of a sheet of plywood is appropriate social distance. keshwyn helps me finish a Pokemon Go quest.artan sanded the bedroom, with a mild assist from me reminding him we have an air filter for my studio (my studio being the space currently full of my office in Despair Boxes). People were making a Container Store order and I determined that there is nothing that would fix my Massive Issues with the bathroom. (These issues are basically a 'remodel the bathroom' problem, taken in toto, but I could get by with shelving.) I rant about shelving. artan builds shelving out of scrap wood and moves it up to the bedroom so he can just prime it when he primes the bedroom.The bedroom has been primed, as of today. (Also the bathroom shelf unit.)
Remaining to do: Trim outside. Actual fucking front of house. Front step. Lights and doorbell install. Paint bedroom. Clean bedroom floor and do touchup work. Put bedroom stuff back in bedroom. Clean office floor and do touchup work. Finish constructing the office furniture (happening in bibs and bobs around other things). PUT MY FUCKING OFFICE TOGETHER.
I... think I got most of it.
