Two Silos Farm

I’m taking a vacation day from my paid job, so I can spend the day working very hard at my unpaid job. It would be nice to take a day off “work” and not spend it working once in a while. . . But this needs to get done.

To catch up, last Sunday we spent the day putting in the last of the joists.

And started on the flooring.

I get confused, but think the bottom layer is the subfloor, then the underlayment (or maybe that is reversed?) and then the actual flooring is whatever is put on top that is visible. The bottom stuff is ¾” sturdy-floor plywood. About noon is when hubby realized he had the wrong thickness underlayment. Tried a few creative methods to get the desiel truck started, but he finally gave up and left that until Monday – after it could be plugged in over night.

By Wednesday night, he had most of the underlayment down. This picture shows were the walls for the half bath will go. Discovered we need more underlayement – forgot about what we needed in the half bath. It’s a good thing Menards is only 12 miles away. If you are going to do major renovating, it’s good to buy a house close to a building material supplier.

Here is a view from the other direction. And no, I don’t try to take pictures of the cats, they just have a way of following me around.

Wednesday night, after I got home from work Hubby and I worked on closing up the small section where the wall use to be. This was done seperatly, as we had to work around the braces. We’ve used these braces a lot more than we expected to when we bought them.

Thursday hubby worked on building and installing the support wall, and then he installed the door.

It’s too bad I was at work, I’m more likely to think of things four steps ahead and that helps alleviate future problems. The bottom of the door needs to be cut off – it’s installed a bit too low. Opens fine over the tiles, but not over the throw rug that is on top of the tiles. Ok, how was my hubby suppose to know there would be a rug there? It’s laying on the floor right now. All he had to do was open the door up all the way, and he would have realized it needed to be raised another ¼”.

He told me the door gave him lots of grief, and I didn’t realize the problem until I opened it up this morning. So he doesn’t know about this yet. I’ll also point out how he could have fixed the one problem he told me about. Just so he’ll know if he encounters that problem in the future.

Don’t read that as a criticism of my husband. It’s just that I’m way better at solving puzzles than he is. We work so much better as a team. Where I get frustrated is that if he encounters a problem, he will rarely stop and consult with me about it. He just goes ahead and spends a lot of time trying to figure it out without my help. With this door, he could have got it partly installed, and then stopped when he could not get it to straighten out. Then when I got home, we could have worked on it together. Then we would not have a fully nailed in door that does not quite shut right.

Things like that don’t happen all that often. But often enough that it really bugs me that he won’t stop, but will get angry and finally give up and just nail everything so firmly in place that when I get home and have a simple solution, the only way to “fix” it is to tear everything out, buy new and start over.

Oh well, it is way better than it use to be, hubby does accept that I’m pretty good at that kind of stuff – took years for that! He always said he wanted to marry a woman that was smarter than him, and I don’t think I could handle being married to someone that I believed was smarter than me. So it works for both of us LOL!!

Enough of that, after 27 years we’ve learned to work together and get along, and these other things are only minor bumps in the road – repeated bumps, but minor none the less.

It’s after 5am, and I’ve got a ceiling to tear down. Hubby left tools and stuff all over the floor in the laundry room, so I’ve got some cleaning do to first.

It’s going to be cold work – I’ll put on my coveralls and probably a tyvek suit over that. Those don’t breathe (obviously) at all, so that will keep the body heat in.

Cathy