The Old Man and the Street

J. has a lot of tools, and he brought a few over to help me out a little.

We started off using his Sawzall to cut the uprights on 5 sets of shelves that I got for the basement. The uprights are 7’4″ tall, and while they would fit in the main part of the basement (which is 7′ to the bottoms of the rafters and 7’9″ to the ceiling), the storage room under the front porch is only about 6’8″ high, so I was aiming to cut them to about 6’5″.

With a hand hacksaw, it probably would have taken me a couple of hours. With the Sawzall, it took about 7 minutes. Yay Sawzall. Remind me to get one of those when my hands stop shaking from using this one.

Since I have to replace all the quarter-round that I ripped out, J. brought along his pneumatic nailer to show me just how easy it can be. I pulled the nails out of a piece of the quarter-round from the front foyer, sanded the junk off the back and bottom, and we headed upstairs to tack it into place with a few brads. Needless to say, using the nailer was a) easy, and b) a helluvalot of fun. Only downside: the nailer and tank cost $300 bucks. Remind me to win the lottery some day.

The house came with this swingset in the backyard

but we really don’t have any use for it, so I called up my friend J., who has twin 2 year olds, and asked him if he wanted. Well, “free” is J.’s favorite word, so he drove over in his truck and J., D., and myself set to work taking the set apart.

As I ducked down to start removing the bolts that held the bottom parts together, I noticed some writing under the swingset:

Joe and Augie, if you’re reading this, sorry about the toys, but they had to go. 🙂

Off to an early start this morning, we gave the bathroom it’s first coat of paint: Behr “Neptune Blue”. It’s already looking very nice.

We primed the kitchen and breakfast room with a Ralph Lauren “Deep Tint Primer” that looks reddish-pink.

After letting that dry, we put the first coat of Behr “Autumn Maple” on the Breakfast Room and then the kitchen, but it doesn’t seem to be covering as well as the blue in the bathroom.