Well, progress was made yesterday. Things are moving, and today should see even more changes around here. In the bedroom, the mount for the ceiling fan is in, the hole is patched, and two walls and a ceiling are painted. In the kitchen, the hole is patched. In the living room, the tile and over ½″ of mortar have been removed from in front of the fireplace in preparation for actually fixing things right. Apparently there was so much mortar because the firebrick in front of the fireplace are nothing like level, but it meant that once one tile popped loose, all the rest of them came out pretty easily, so it’s going to be a complete replacement there.
I took some pictures this morning before the guys show up at 8 and start doing more work. No spiffy composition or anything here, as the bedroom photos were taken in a dark room with no lights, so they’re lit entirely by flash. I’m hoping that the pictures you’ll see tomorrow are spiffier, both due to cooler things to look at, and because I’ll be taking them when there’s some ambient light.
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| Fixture in the bedroom |
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The old light fixture in the bedroom. Turns out I didn’t need the heavy-duty thingie to hang the ceiling fan from, since the box is attached to a joist. It just wasn’t attached very well before, and now it is. There will be a sort of plastic plate covering the rest of the hole, and it’s going to be painted the dark blue that goes onto the walls today. I really look forward to seeing how the fan I picked out is going to look in here. The picture in my head is pretty cool, but I’ve had cool pictures in my head before that turned out to be pretty crummy in real life.
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| Wall and ceiling in bedroom |
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Here you get to see two of the four colors that will be in the finished bedroom. This is the wall (blue) and ceiling (yellow). A second coat of each of these goes on today, as the paint didn’t cover quite as well as we expected, plus the dark blue goes on the north and south walls, and the trim should all get painted today, too. And I know it’s crummy to paint the wood trim, but it’s already been painted, and I don’t want to strip it and refinish it just now, so I’ll just be adding another layer to what’s already there.
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| fireplace hearth |
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The fireplace hearth, minus the tile. It’s kinda hard to tell in this picture, but those bricks are horribly uneven. On the right, there’s a full inch between the top of the frame and the brick. On the left, it’s about a half-inch. I suspect this was not an original installation, but rather some do-it-yourselfer kludging something together. I’m almost curious enough to tear out more and see if there’s some nice tile underneath there or something, but I’ll need the height to fit the fireplace doors I want to put back, so no more destruction on this one.
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| kitchen wall |
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Finally, the kitchen wall. It’s hard to see features in this picture, but they’re not real visible in real life, either. It’s basically white plaster on a white wall, and while it still needs to be sanded, primed and painted, it already looks pretty darned good. You can see the bit of the cupboard next to it that wasn’t finished (there was a microwave shelf on the wall there covering that up) and we’re not sure how we’re going to finish that yet, but we’ll figure something out today.
The guys from Finer Surroundings have been good so far, and things are going pretty smoothly. The biggest problem yesterday was that I hadn’t bought enough paint for the bedroom. I made the mistake of actually believing the manufacturer’s coverage figures for the paint. I should have known better than that from the painting I did with my dad when I was a kid, but apparently that lesson didn’t stick as well as it should have.
- While the guys were working yesterday, I took a look at this tutorial on Writing Lean CSS and simplified the style sheet here a bit. I wasn’t really able to concentrate to get any hard work done, but tinkering with the CSS worked pretyt well. I intentionally ripped out support for some ancient browsers in the process of cleaning things up, so if you spot problems, let me know. The biggest benefit is that I’ve separated the layout from the other bits more cleanly, and gotten a better understanding of how the pieces fit together, and what I’d like to do with them in the long run. Today may see some more changes, depending on what happens with a meeting that’s been rescheduled to an inconvenient time.
- Jim Geraghty takes a look at The Political/Social Dimensions Of The NBA Fight and points out that behavior at games has gotten almost as bad as behavior in the political arena. How about enforcing a little personal responsibility on those involved? Toss the players who charged into the stands in jail. Toss the fans who threw things at the players in jail. Fines for the players are just noise. Hit ’em with something they’ll notice and maybe people will start to realize that this sort of behavior is not acceptable. Mark Cuban thinks that Stern’s rest-of-season suspension of Artest was Perfect, but I’m not sure it goes far enough. [instapundit]