Today I learned that Martin (mkp) has a blog. In it he mentions having accepted the offer to join our group at Oracle which means I can now talk about it without worrying about impropriety, or whatever is the moral equivalent in the free-wheeling t-shirt-and-beer Linux industry.
I’m excited. Martin and I go way back. I have some hope that we’ll get to work on fun projects together once I get the current RDS project out of the way. More about that soon.
As promised, we managed to get the bulk of the painting of the new office completed last night. Liz generously volunteered her time to the cause. It turned out that it took us about four hours to get it done.
We had previously painted the windows and ceiling. The drywallers had mudded over some parts of the ceiling which needed to be touched up, but otherwise all we did was put on two coats of color on the vertical walls. They’re tiny walls, too, so it went very smoothly.
I got the unenviable job of putting the light green on the wall that connects the first and second floor through the staircase. Alice and Liz had already claimed the grown-up rollers so I was stuck wielding a 4″ roller on the end of a 8′ extension. That kept us entertained for a solid half hour.
True to form, the very first thing that felt the cool touch of wet paint was my calf. Turned out the back of that tray liner was still wet!
The amazing drywall ninjas finally finished their work today. The loftice no longer has nasty wood paneling, nor gaping holes, but proper smooth walls.
They did a much better job than the previous knuckle-draggers who did the drywall in the rest of the house. Their seams aren’t all squiggly. They actually went to the trouble of using those strips of whatever on the corners so that it isn’t just compound standing up to dings. They drywalled the inside of the closet. Imagine.
Now Alice and I have to paint the walls before we jet off to Phoenix this weekend so that the work can remain on schedule. The drywall ninjas (I should have gotten their names, or something.) did prime on their way out so we just have to put on the coats of color. It’ll be a breeze.
Work began this week on our project to clean up the upstairs office. This will be our only major project for the season and we’re hoping to get it done in time to enjoy most of the summer. We don’t have the energy for a repeat performance of last summer with the painting and the bathrooms and the ugh.
The original idea for the office was simple. When we bought the house the office was finished not with something reasonable, like sheetrock, but with reversed cedar planks. The side of the planks that faced the room were rough and only sort of painted. If you brushed up against them they’d catch your clothes. Replacing that nonsense with a normal surface was the driver for the project. Along for the ride came sanding and finishing the floors, trimming out the room to match most of the house, insulating while we had the walls open, and of course painting. We love painting.
That was the original idea, anyway. The stairs that lead to the office came up through a small enclosed space that was sandwiched between the walls of either bedroom. Alice never liked that it felt so cramped and that the walls above the stairs themselves were pretty useless. She made the clever suggestion that we knock down the wall that seperated the stairwell from the office. This creates more of a loft office that the stairs come into and that our bedroom happens to hang off of.
So that’s what we went for. The wall was flimsy and not holding anything up so it was easy to tear out. Now when you come up the stairs you get a nice view into the office. Light actually flows into the stairwell via the office windows.
I’m still fascinated by getting to peer into the dirty guts of this old house. The highlight photo along side this post features the dirty old chimney in the center. It was painted white but gunk (roofing tar?) seems to have made inroads at some point in the past. It’s fun to see fir floor boards all over the place up there. The entire upper floor was built from them and the extra bits were used as scraps for framing the walls. The crawl spaces look like they haven’t been touched since the knee walls first hid them away from the main space.
Next week: electrician and sheet rock ninjas. Here’s to hoping.
Alright, I think I’ve got the various blogging pieces playing nice together. wp-hashcash got the boot after having allowed about 40 spam comments in a day. Here’s to hoping that secureimage does a better job. I think gallery2 and its plugin WPG2 are ready. We’ll see how some initial albums go.
I finally got around to upgrading to the most recent version WordPress. It had been so long that I actually had to update twice — first to something even vaguely recent and then again to the most recent. Until I get better image management software running some of the posts will be missing their photos. I’ll repair them soon enough, I’m sure. Bear with us.
Upgrading this blog is part of a general effort I’ve been making to spend more time enjoying hobbiest computing and less time, well, wasting away in front of the TV. Recent diversions have included:
Further bulletins as events warrant!