Day Three

Woke up, did the crossword, went running, came home and plotted home improvement. Last night I stripped the paint off of the door handles for the bathroom and Sasha's room. Here they are like, uh, new. That is some terribly potent stuff, even when it is ages old, like mine is. Here's what it does to paint in about 30 seconds--just imagine what it would do to your skin (or worse, eyes). 

I contemplated at length today what exactly I'm doing next. I know I need to strip the tile, but a thought occurred to me: I don't need to knock down *all* the walls -- just the North wall that has the window in it. It's bulging awkwardly, the concrete wallboard is disintegrating and that whole area needs insulation desperately. But the other walls don't need to come down -- they just need new tile.

So, I'm definitely taking out the one wall, and cleaning (sanding) down the others. And I absolutely need to take out the flooring and get that ready for tile as well. Also realized -- I need concrete board for the area behind the toilet and sink, not wall board; and happily, I have a piece left over, and it may be the right size; also my remaining pieces of wallboard should suffice for the rest of that North wall, which would be great. Moving and lifting giant pieces of wall board is a huge pain. And if the seam between the concrete board and the wall board is covered by tile; it'll all be invisible. 

After all that contemplation I went to a tile store, but was uninspired; went to the hardware store and picked up various things, including a short sledgehammer; grocery shopping and then home in time for a massive delivery from IKEA (what you see below is literally half of what came). New bookshelves for Sasha's room, a wardrobe for me, the sink and a mirror for the bathroom, and a new cabinet for the kitchen. Everything seems to be here, and although they did their best (see below -- I love that they punched a giant hole right through the "fragile" icon), it all seems to be in one piece so far. 

The next five hours were spent assembling one piece of IKEA furniture. The cabinets are very complicated, and the instructions are famously baffling: several of the instruction sheets are dozens of pages long, and attempt to use a single picture with no text to convey information like "if you are assembling this other configuration of the cabinet, turn to page 11 and start following instruction 7." It's assembled and in more or less good working order -- IKEA's material quality has gone noticeably downhill (all the metal pieces are made from an absurdly light and weak aluminum alloy, and the placement of the drawers needs millimeter level tweaking to get them right; that wasn't the case the last time I assembled a kitchen cabinet from them). Anyway, new cabinet -- it's *not* light blue, sadly; that's just the protective cling wrap they put on.

A funny thought occurred to me: we have one drawer front from our old kitchen that never got used (I have no idea why not, but it's been in the garage for years). Could it be used on the new cabinet? And the answer is, yes with some work and maybe not totally convincingly. I had to pry out the old handle, flip the drawer front upside down and install the new handle (the cabinet requires all the handles to be the same). Tomorrow I'll see how it works in the cabinet and whether it looks okay. What remains is the toe kick, and of course, a piece of butchers block to go on top.

I have meetings in the afternoon tomorrow, but I'm going to try the locksmith's, possibly another tile place (although I found some on line that I may go with instead -- see below), and a lumber store, since I now need a couple of things on that front. Then I'll start on the walls and floor. 

The last thing I did today was finish converting all of our old digital videos of Sasha into a usable modern format (.mp4). As it turned out, only one tape was left that needed converting (unless there are more lurking upstairs, but I think that's probably it. They basically stop when he's three or four. 

Anyway, doing fine here -- kitty helps me assemble things and do other housework, as you can see. 

("Just *try* to reach inside this box for the next piece, weak human!")