A productive weekend

[shadesofmauve]

Now, if I could only get to the point where I was making actual forward progress instead of completing things that are long overdue or scrambling to make repairs, that'd really be something.

Friday a best buy repair guy came out to look at my wobbling washer. Upshot: The third-party installers were indeed crap, but so is my laundry room floor. It's not just uneven, it's squishy (unsurprising; house is 1960, laundry room has had water issues), which is why we could feel the washing machine in the kitchen, and why the washing machine took itself for little strolls (either that or it hates the life of a washing machine and wants to see the world).

He suggested reinforcing that section of floor with a bit of super thick (inch plus) subflooring, which is pretty much what dad had suggested, and gave me his direct line so I can call him back to check everything afterwards without spending an hour in customer service hell.

(He also liked cats, which is good, because when Calliope sees a human lying on the floor staring intently at something she assumes it must be interesting, and she gets down there and stares too.)

Spent Saturday at my parents' house printing my New Year's cards, since I broke my printer last week. Desktop printers are awful about odd paper sizes and I made the card using InDesign, which my parents don't have, so I went in armed with two different pdf versions (identical except for placement). Neither of them printed correctly. Thankfully dad had just installed photoshop CS2 (Adobe accidentally gave it away free a few weeks ago), which allows you to print with specific image offsets, and by rasterizing it at a high enough resolution to make smoke come out of dad's machine* I was able to shove things around until I could print 'em right. Then reprint them, because I somehow did the insides upside down. Then fight with mail merge. Then fight with getting printer to eat envelopes.

Dad was working on his shop and making trips back and forth to home depot, so he picked up a sheet of subflooring for me and had it cut to size, and I borrowed his long level and his handtruck (and car) for Sunday's adventure and made another trip to home depot for giant decking screws, so I could fix the laundry room.

Sunday started with cleaning the laundry room and moving the new washer and dryer so I could get at the floor under them. Dryer was easy; washer required both me, madalchemist, the handtruck, and a lot of grunting.

I spent awhile carefully leveling the piece of subfloor based of the high point in the far corner. Naturally I sunk the first screw there, and naturally it sank over an eighth of an inch and I had to relevel everything as I attached it. Seems like some of the floor squish was due to crappy vinyl, and screwing the subfloor over it acted like a clamp. Anyway, it took me waaaay too long fiddling with shims, but I got it securely down and, while not perfectly level, it's a vast improvement. madalchemist jumped on it as a test -- I could feel the floor move when he jumped on the floor, but couldn't feel it when he jumped on the new sheet. We shoved everything back where it went and re-attached all the things that needed attaching. Now I just need to get the nice repair guy out again and maybe the wobble will actually be gone.

My knees are bruised to heck -- I didn't think of getting my gardening knee pads until I was well into the job, and then I thought it'd be over soon, so why bother? (Hint: It wasn't over soon). Now when I kneel my knees touch the floor and then bounce back up almost of their own volition, and I end up doing the crouching tiger yoga pose to get things off the floor. :P

*Dad wants his computer to fail so mom will let him buy a new one, so he was actually hoping I'd abuse it past it limits.

Comments

[t-c-da.livejournal.com]

Sounds like you've been having the sort of fun we had when we put a new kitchen in a couple of months back.

The guy doing the install for us noticed the floor was a bit out of whack, so measured it. (the lounge and half the kitchen are over the garage below so the floor is not well supported) He found that the section of the floor holding up the main supporting wall for the next floor up (bedrooms) was 20mm lower than it should be - cue jacks in the garage to hold the floor up! Unfortunately he didn't check the resulting level until after we had re-GIBbed the kitchen and we couldn't jack it up the extra 5mm without cracking the wall lining (aka GIB round these parts), so the kitchen still has a 5mm slope along a 3.7m length.

Then when it came to the new flooring, the flooring guys insisted the creaking floor section further along be fixed before they laid the lino, so back into the garage to screw reinforcing to the underside of the floor to eliminate the creak where a previous owner had cut a section out for some unknown reason...

Fun and Games for one and all! BTW we have never had a car in the garage in the 11 years we've lived there...

[shadesofmauve]

Nothing is ever level, is it? :P Old buildings, water in the ground, the occasional earthquake -- you never know what you'll end up with! At least 5mm in 3.7m isn't too bad!

So drywall is GIB for you. It's funny; I have a friend in England who's done a lot of work on her house, and between you, me, and her, I think half our construction terms are different. A lot of other specialized vocabulary seems the same, but get into the hardware store and none of it matches! Some of it is due to construction methods -- we just don't do masonry home construction on this coast, really, there are maybe five brick houses in town -- but not all of it.

This was a rough fix for me because I want to redo the whole room as part of the studio project -- I want to match the new floor to the old and move the washer and dryer hook ups, which pretty much means taking up all the old floor. I can do a proper job of rebracing then... if I ever get to actually DO it! I envy you having a kitchen project -- I feel like I'm stuck in repairs instead of improvements. How's it look? (And as importantly, how's it cook?) Pictures?

EDIT: You don't use your garage either? Curses; why must my city be blind to reality?

[t-c-da.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the difference in terminology is intriguing - I've live and done work in Australia, Scotland, England, and New Zealand, and just about everything is different in one way or another... Kiwi dwangs = UK noggins, for example. GIB is the brand name for what I assume you call drywall, and is common to .au & .nz (it's two sheets of heavy paper wrapped around plaster, usually 9mm thick for usual housework, but comes in a variety of thicknesses and grades for specific purpose, such as fire retardation sound insulation et al).

Our house was built in 1980, but I suspect mostly from second hand materials - e.g. no two windows are identical. Houses in .nz are usually built of timber, largely because timber rattles in earthquakes where bricks tend to fall over. Larger buildings are generally much more robust than in other countries I've visited, again because of earthquakes - you might recall significant chunks of Christchurch getting trashed a couple of years back now... Adelaide (where I grew up) had a "major" earthquake in 1953 at Richter 3.5 which damaged lots of houses (although not as bad as Christchurch) a size which doesn't even get a mention here in NZ. There's a twitter feed from GNS for events over Mercalli 4.0 which my son in London follows, but not being a twitterati I don't know how busy the feed is.

I should see if I can resurrect my Flickr account and post some photos of the kitchen (we deliberately didn't post any before #1Son got back form the UK last December so it would be a surprise for him).

[/rambling]

[shadesofmauve]

Yup, that's drywall! I occasionally hear 'sheetrock', but it's almost always drywall. (Oh, look, there all the terms are on wikipedia, with special reference to NZ's Gib!).

New Zealand construction sounds a lot more familiar to me than UK construction -- we're quake friends. (I always want to sing "Ring of Fire" when this comes up, but it's the wrong Ring of Fire). :P Timber construction, earthquake straps, everything double secured and tall buildings made to shimmy a bit.

I certainly remember Christchurch -- part of the reason it was so deadly is that the area had been hit twice in succession, right? I was in a 6.8 earthquake in 2001, centered about 10 miles from where I lived at the time, but it was a deep quake, and the center was under an island without many people on it -- lots of property damage, mostly to older buildings, but no direct fatalities.

We made fun of the east coasters for getting all worked up about a 4.0, naturally. But their buildings aren't made to handle it. That was one of the most amazing things about travelling in Europe for me -- all those stone and masonry buildings that were hundreds of years old! they'd have fallen if they were built where I'm from.

Kitchen: yes, pictures, pictures! Did the surprise work?

[t-c-da.livejournal.com]

Christchurch Feb2011 was particularly devastating because of the G forces, produced in part by the shallowness of the epicentre and also the angle of the fault lines - the force of the quake was directed straight at the centre of the city, and produced accelerations of 2G both horizontally and vertically. The current design standards are specified around accelerations of 0.9G.

My back of a fag packet calculations would equate those forces with driving a building at 15km/h into a cliff, which makes it a small wonder more of the city wasn't flattened. Interestingly that quake was one of the best instrumented shakes ever, as GNS had put instruments all over the place to measure the aftershocks of the earlier Darfield quake - I heard that seismologists would be studying the data for decades.

An engineer on one of the committees i serve on said the Royal Commission into the quake was centring on the wrong buildings. Instead of worrying about the ones that collapsed, it should be looking at how those that didn't fall over survived and what enabled them to survive.

And, yes, the surprise was effective. Photos will happen RSN...

[shadesofmauve]

Oh, another thing re: construction. Everything I mentioned applies to new construction -- most cities also have brick buildings in the downtown core, which are old (by our young, west coast standards) and are, as my dad puts it, from "Back before they invented safety."

[fenmere.livejournal.com]

I should do more cat lifts.

[shadesofmauve]

I suspect your comment was intended for the post above -- but yes, it seems cat lifts are remarkably effective. Assuming you have a big enough cat. :P How heavy are they, now?

[fenmere.livejournal.com]

13 and 11 pounds.

I wonder how my reply got down here!

Anyway, other things that might be working that shoulder could be playing violin and carrying shoulder bags.

[shadesofmauve]

I paid attention to my shoulder bag on the way into work today, and that isn't it -- all the work is being done by my back and trapezius (so it's definitely a contributor to the perennial neck/shoulders tension). The fiddle isn't enough weight to be work, but holding my arm up in that position for long periods of time might be.

I really think it's mostly the cat, though. It's one thing when he drapes himself across both shoulders equally, but quite another when he wants to rest his head on my left shoulder and expects me to carry the rest of him. :P

[criada.livejournal.com]

Now you know what my life in a print shop is like. Every. Single. Day. (though thankfully we don't have to deal with envelopes too often. That's what third party mailing companies are for.)

[shadesofmauve]

And it's a job I don't envy you.

At work we do our own print production for anything under 500 copies, and occasionally a bit over, but we almost never have to wrestle with odd-sized papers. The worst we get is trying to convince the xerox that yes, it really can manage double sided heavy weight. We also occasionally use the xerox to print content on the flip side of paper that's had the front printed on an offset press, and that can be a pain to manage.

And if something gets a little bit off, at least we have the tools to deal with it. If I hadn't broken my printer, I'd have had some of the same issues, but the InDesign file was already laid out properly for *my* printer's peculiarities, based on five years of past cards (basically 'design card; scoot everything .75 inch to the right; print), but naturally that didn't work on Dad's printer. If he hadn't gotten photoshop I would've had to drive back across town just to scoot the image over!