Scary Cabin

It gets everywhere and now we’re making more of it. But at least this signifies that we’re nearing the end of the drywall work. Mudding and sanding, sanding and mudding. We finished up taping most of the drywall joints this weekend and cleaned up some of the old drywall.

Working on the old drywall is 2x (maybe 3x) worse than working on the new drywall we’ve installed. The old drywall has one of two problems, sometimes both. Some of it has some type of texturing coated with old (probably oil based) paint which means skim coating it with joint compound to smooth it out. Or it has glue that was used to attach the paneling which then rips off parts of the paper coating. These have to have a really light coat of joint compound to keep them from wrinkling. In both cases, it means multiple coats of joint compound with likely some amount of sanding in between. And where the old drywall has taped joints, they’re not really finished, since they were covered with paneling.

So all the new drywall has freshly taped joints which need some light sanding and probably only one more finish coat (a few are on their second coat and almost done). There’s one corner of the back bedroom that still doesn’t have drywall so it needs that and joints need to be taped. This is waiting for more sub-floor to go down so the flooring is out of the way (well and the laminate will need to be moved out of the way too).

To gain access to the ceiling above the stairway, I built the Stairmaster 6000 ™, this name probably violates a bunch of existing trademarks and if anyone cares, I’ll scratch out the sharpie written name and replace it with something else. This is basically a small platform that can be moved from stair step to stair step and elevates any single step by about 24”. This makes it possible for me to reach the ceiling above the step. It was used this weekend, for the first time, to remove the nails and add more joint compound to the walls. Later, it will be used to mask off the ceiling before we spray texture.

We had an incident with our new ceiling fan this weekend. We spent quite a bit of time looking for a fan that had the right style and feature set. We finally found this one at HomeDepot. It has an LED light like we wanted and the fan blades are positioned at the lower part of the fan assembly. This works well downstairs where the fan blades needed to be a bit lower to clear the beams. This particular fan wasn’t even on display, just a couple of boxes sitting at the end of an aisle. Genny decided she wanted this same fan for the two bedrooms up stairs too. And wouldn’t you know, it’s out of stock with no expected ETA. After some searching, we found 4 in stock at another store nearby so we got the two we needed. Now that I’ve established that this fan is hard to find and that we have two more waiting to be installed, what happens? We turn on the fan and it starts making this loud clunky, tapping sounds as it spins. It’s definitely something inside the fan. Great, a defective fan. So, knowing that we probably can’t easily return it for a replacement, I figure we have nothing to lose by opening it up. As soon as the motor cover comes apart, the issue is obvious. There’s a electrical component that’s loose and hitting the motor as it spins. It’s supposed to be stuck to the case with double stick tape. So after re-sticking it to the case, it’s now noise free again. I suspect that this may happen again, but at least it’s an easy fix.