Yesterday’s Work, Today’s News.

Alright… Today’s post is partly out of date, partly current, and partly bilaterally breaking the space time continuum.

First we’ll visit a few days ago, and proceed until tomorrow.

A few days ago I checked the dump and intercepted some bead-and-batten panelling. You see folks, “intercepted” is an industry term for material that never hits the dumpster. It goes something like this:

*Scene opens, man with paneling in back of truck appears*

Me: “Hi, throwing that panelling away?”

Man in Truck: “Yup.”

Me: “Can I have it?”

Man in Truck: “Sure.”

Me: “Thanks.”

As you can see, it’s all very complicated and best left to the amateurs.

That trip yielded this:

Enlarged to show detail, like a cereal. Yes I’ve used that joke before. No, I don’t care.

Now, if there’s anyone more obsessed with preventing waste than me it’s my Dad. He once built a shelving unit that involved at least 50 8ft 2×4’s and arranged his cut list so, barring saw dust, there was less than 6″ left of scrap. What can I say, the guy’s good. Figuring out the layout of the paneling was his domain for sure.

This particular panelling will be used as waynes coating in the living room. Here’s the layout Dad worked out that dodged all the holes. When the Fibonacci sequence is used for waynes coating you know you’re doing something right.

Okay… now backtracking some more. To the order of a couple weeks. We wanted to still do some form of fabric paneling. My original plan was to use old drop-clothes, but Hyatt’s dad very poignantly asserted that there isn’t such thing as a scrap drop clothe. Touché. Well, thinking further we wondered about old kite board kites. I went up to a local kite board rental place, and as luck would have it they’d received 18 defective kites; all of which would have to be cut up and discarded. For some reason they could only give me one, but it’s more than enough. This will be the top half of the living room walls, above the bead-and-batten waynes coating. The green is a little loud, but I think the colour will be a nice punch next to the muted earthy wood. Also, I checked, and it’s nicely flame retardant to boot!

Okay… jumping back to the past couple days. I’ve continued sanding the floor… some of the floor over to the left of the living room was pretty uneven so I had to spend a couple hours with a belt sander, but I got it close enough to call.

At first we were worried that a belt sander might be too aggressive, so I made a little panel out of our scraps(relative term). Alas, it was fine, and thus the we went ahead. If in doubt, try it out!

We tried out a couple of stains, including the quintessential “Golden Oak.” In the end we thought the natural tone of the pine was the best, so we just used clear polyurethane. Apparently we have a rather unusual amount of random stain and polyurethane lying around our house, but for my purposes I certainly can’t complain.  I’ve done a couple coats and so far it looks great; I couldn’t be more pleased. Unfortunately you can’t walk on it while it’s wet, and so I don’t have a photo of the poly’d floor yet. But I shall tomorrow. So, instead of something substantive here’s a random photo of clear Minwax polyurethane I found on Google Images!

Okay, and finally to today’s find. I was out running today and on my way back I was planning on taking the short route home. But then the voice appeared. It was clearly Morgan Freeman, so I took note. It told me to turn. And so I did.

See that little jut there? Had I not taken that, I’d not have run by the dumpster in front of the newly finished house and I wouldn’t have found this:

Let’s see… four or five 12′ 2×6’s, three 12′ 2×12’s, a 20′ 2×6, and a 16′ 2×4. A 12′ 2×12 currently sells for $31… it’s probably at least $120 worth of lumber in total. There are a couple nails scattered in it but past that it’s straight and clean. This will become the stairs and the deck. The moral? I presume it’s listen to Morgan Freeman!

I’ll post a photo of the polyurethaned floor tomorrow morning, and then there probably won’t be another post for a week or so. But I hope y’all have a great week.

Thanks, and… uhh.. peace and such.

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