Me and My Fubar

November was a bad month all around and best forgotten.

December hasn’t been the greatest either.  We are preparing our house to go on the market in the spring.  Part of that is repainting …. pretty much everything.  The entire downstairs was very poorly before we moved in 11 years ago, and we’ve not done much to improve things over the years.  Now’s the time to correct that.

And while we’re at it, the hardwood floors in the family room need refinished, as they are fairly banged up – and an ugly pale grey color.  Friends of ours are hooked into Chicago’s vast Polish handyman community, and we can get a guy to come out and do the job at a very reasonable rate.  So far, so good.

…. And then we move all the furniture out and discover that the entire end facing the exterior wall is bowed and the boards all warped.  One of the end pieces comes right up – the nails holding it down have rusted through. 

Ouch.  That’s not good.

Plan B:  we tear up the hardwood flooring and replace it with laminate (less expensive than repairing what’s been water damaged).  But first, let’s take a look at that subfloor….. so I spend all of last weekend with a Fubar and a hammer in full destruct mode.  It rapidly becomes apparent that the warped hardwood flooring is the least of the problems.  The plywood subfloor is rotting away, the floor bows like a smile (indicating rot damage to structural members) and there is mold on the drywall.  I can replace the plywood easily enough (the solution is trivial – get new plywood and cut to shape – but the effort is very decidedly NOT trivial) but structural is beyond the tools and expertise I have.

Time to call in the contractor.

In the end, he has to shore up the wall, sister in new supports for the subfloor to existing joists, and get creative with the circular saw to replace the flooring (it seems the builders used plywood sheets that were 47 ½ inches wide instead of the standard 48” – where they got them is a mystery.  No doubt they “fell off a truck”, like half the shoddy stuff we’ve had to replace here over the years.) I watched the middle of the wall rise as he pounded the new supports in place – ouch.   Along the way I get the poor guy to clean out the rotted cardboard boxes and fiberglass insulation in the crawlspace below —- since he has the relatively easy access and I’m highly allergic to both mold AND fiberglass insulation, it’s a no-brainer.

I’ve spent 5 days on this disaster, and there’s still another to go with the Empire guys coming tomorrow to (finally!) install the laminate.  Then I get to scrub the walls and finish patching nail holes (though not in that order) so the painter (another Polish entrepreneur) can do his thing this weekend.  If he doesn’t cancel again.

All this has not been condusive to getting website updates accomplished, though I have at least been able to make canopies for Flying Wings and sort/bag parts for Vipers while stuck here at home.  And take pictures of the new 1/72 Raptor while measuring it for decals as well.   Man, it’s looking sweet!  It has translucent parts for all the interior consoles and instrumentation.  It’s accurate to the first couple of seasons, before they beefed up the CGI to make the missile carrier Raptors.  And Thorsten did the patterns, so everything is square and finely detailed.

Hooray, Thorsten!

So all has not been lost, I guess.