cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Lifeboat I find myself extremely pleased at the prospect of finally having an upstairs of sorts. I fucking hate living on one level. Especially sleeping on a ground floor. It feels wring. Our last house had a partially finished basement, but that's not quite the same thing. I want an actual upstairs. The workshop has an upstairs. Ok, so you can't stand up in it and the access will be through a ship's ladder. But it's going to be a loft used for actual living space. I'm psyched. It will be my little hidey hole. I'm thinking that I'll finish it out using yacht interiors as an inspiration. If you've ever spent at least a little time below deck on board a rather small yacht then you know what I mean. In the otherwise unusable corners at the edges of the roof, I will enclose 12 inches or so of that to make small cabinets with triangular interiors. The ceiling will be covered with stained plywood rather than drywall. Wherever possible, I will use brass fittings for things. I am seriously in the home stretch here. It is at least possible that I could get the whole roof framed this weekend, weather cooperating. Then to get dried in, it's just the roof sheathing, housewrap (roofing felt) and installing the other 2 windows and the door. That's like, 3 days of work after the roof is framed. Maximum. Then I can start doing the really fun stuff inside. I have a stash of hardwood flooring left over from when Trish's parents re-did their floors. It should be enough to do the lower level of the workshop. I've been saving it for the last year or 2 for just this sort of thing. Then I've got the very simple wiring to put in, which won't be hard. Insulation. Easy. Trish *says* that she will install drywall in the workshop in order to learn how to do it for the new house. We'll see. If time goes by and its not getting done then I will just do it myself. That plumbing system is going to be fun. I'm building in a teensy little compact kitchenette. No fridge, since that would draw too much power. Also probably no hot water for a while. But there will be a small counter with a sink and a 2 burner propane stove top. A cabinet underneath and another above the sink. I'll be able to brew beer there. Also I will stock the cabinet with dry goods and stuff in cans with a very few utensils and pots so that one could actually cook in that kitchen for a while if it was absolutely necessary. After all, this is intended to function as emergency back-up housing. I want a little dining table but there's really no room. So I'm going to make a built-in for it. It will be a table top that is attached to the wall on one end with a piano hinge. There will be one leg on the other end that folds down. When the table is not needed I'll be able to fold it up against or into the wall and latch it in place. When it's time to eat, it folds down and the leg gets extended into place. This is another thing you see on small yachts some times. It will take me maybe 3 hours at most to build. I've already got salvaged tabletops in storage, a leg is easy enough for me to cut, and a piano hinge costs about eight bucks at the hardware store. I've got a bunch of old latches in a tool box somewhere. We just do not trust our shit-box of a house. Winter is a very hard time for us. The economy continues to go to shit, oil prices keep setting new records and I want to be prepared for the possibility that we literally can not afford to buy bulk heating oil at all this winter. This building I'm constructing is going to be our lifeboat. A small, yet highly efficient little house that we can heat on a budget of next to nothing if need be. Oh right, the sex thing. Yeah, Trish said something the other night about how her one request on her birthday (this weekend) is that we get a bottle of liquor and stay up really late so she can ask me all sorts 'interesting' questions while I'm half drunk. It's not hard to figure out where she's going with this. She's clearly got some laundry list of sexual experiments that she wants to spring on me. Neat. 12:30 - 2008-04-24 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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