Ramblings, rumblings, grumblings, and rambling grumbly rumblings.

The ceiling is done. I started in earnest about 1:00 and started sweeping up the mess about 5:30.

I replaced a three foot wide strip across the width of the room - that's it in the picture there on the right (click for the large image). I played it smart, using my Dremel and a spiral bit to remove small, manageable pieces of the drywall - a drywall saw would have put a lot of shaking into the material and possibly pulled down more than I wanted. There was dust, yes, but not the amount I expected largely due to the facts that I held the nozzle of my shop vac close to the tool , and the insulation between the joists didn't just fall out like I thought it might. The insulation stayed put, and everything went very well...

...Until a large piece of the affected ceiling fell on my head and back. The piece was about two feet wide and five feet long and it felt like the entire house had collapsed on me. With it came dust and termite poop and mouse turds in a long cascade down my neck and back, in my hair and inside my shirt. Thankfully, I was wearing safety glasses and had my mouth closed at the time. (The kids were safe: Katie was grounded to her room and Jami was watching from a safe distance.) I went to the front porch and stripped to the waist, and Michelle toweled me off.

My back hurts in a line just above my bottom ribs, but I can't tell if it's from having a sheet of gypsum fall on me or from working overhead all day.

In any case, there were three joists exposed by the work.  The first joist I sistered with new wood (mostly to give myself a nailing surface), the third was already sistered on the non-work area-side and didn't need anything. The second joist, however, was more eaten away than I thought: I went to grab hold of it to move one of the roof supports and it crumbled in my hand. Termites had turned it into an empty shell of a board, crushable with no more effort than crushing an empty beer can. That one I replaced completely, and removing it was easy.

After that, new insulation went in, new drywall over that and I have a few more seams to mud than I originally planned on for this project.  I'm okay with that.


In other news, I got me a bicycle. I've been wanting one for several years and one of our neighbors sold me his for ten dollars out of his garage sale. It's an 18 speed mountain bike, lightweight and bouncy and electric blue. The rear calipers need adjusting, the whole thing needs to be oiled, but it's a smooth ride for all that. We didn't have any available cash, so Katie lent me the money.

Yeah, my daughter bought me a bike. Cool, huh?

The worst part is over: the new header over the South window, bridging the termite damaged wood, is in.

It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be, though still dusty, dirty, and unpleasant. Decades-old chewed-through wood and a whole lot of termite poop is no fun when filtered through a circular saw running at several hundred RPM.

What I didn't know going into it was that the exterior sheathing was also weakened, so when I pulled on the cut sections of the studs being displaced, a hunk of sheathing broke off. The siding wasn't damaged so the envelope of the building is still (more or less) intact, though come Autumn and cooler weather I'll need to remove the siding in that area and install new sheathing. No problem, I've done that before.

The only things left to do in the room are to finish hanging the drywall, mud the seams, paint the walls, trim the windows and doors. In project order, they also happen to be in descending order of ickiness, so as I said,

The worst part is over.

I'll bring the full story later, but let me offer this as a quick update.

Friday evening, I started removing drywall from the front wall of the living room. Nothing new there, the usual frustrations. There are a few wiring why-the-hell-would-you-do-that's (which I will repair as part of the project), but no real surprises, except...

I already knew there was termite damage on the south end, but I didn't know the extent. There was quite a lot, so much so that I'm going to remove a portion of the framing and insert a header into the wall just to bridge the damage.

Oh, and a couple studs that don't attach to anything except the exterior sheathing. Like I've never seen that before.

I'm documenting the process and when the full story is told it will include pictures.

Today, I had just enough time to visit Lowes to pick up all of the relevant supplies before we made the long journey North to visit Kate and Rob for really good BBQ and an even better movie. (Wabash and Open Range.)

I've a project that has to be done for work for Monday morning, so the wall will have to wait. I've got a few more hours on that. I had hoped to have the wall up, mudded and primed by tomorrow night, but obviously that's not possible - not with sleeping and meals in there.