The other day I opened a half-empty 5-liter paint can to touch up an exterior wall, and it looked and smelled a little like a science experiment. Yuck. So today I stirred it all up with a little fungicida and put it to use.
This looks like a sloppy paint job, but look to the left. It’s worse—the paint stops!
Likewise on the right side: fades out in a slightly painterly fashion. The wall is highly textured, so it takes a lot of paint, and that’s as far as a little over a half gallon of paint goes. For what reason?
Because that’s the part you see out the dining room window. But of course….
Another chore put off for the better part of 15 years: for the first time, those doors close properly. What makes it sweeter is that the jack plane wasn’t functional before I started, and I was able to engineer a solution to that. Wonderful tool when it works!
Not long after we moved in, I had the bright idea to insulate the roof above our bedroom. I started with the north (sunny, because we live in the southern hemisphere) side, ripping little 1×1″ strips to support thin tongue-and-groove lambriz pieces, above which I installed fiberglass insulation.
I seems fairly straightforward until you recall this was an owner-built house, meaning that the ceiling beams are not only not evenly spaced, they’re not even necessarily parallel. So I could only cut strips for a foot or two at a time before I’d have to measure again, scramble down the ladder and downstairs to cut more pieces, slightly longer or shorter.
Which is part of the reason I didn’t proceed with the south side as well (which btw still gets plenty of sun in the summer).
The problem lay in finishing each row at the top. They ended with a gap, and insulation showing. After staring at that for far too long, I finally decided I needed a solution. It’s a bit complicated to explain, but required more lambriz, clamping and gluing, a template, drilling and installing screws, among other things.
All while balancing on the penultimate step of an eight-foot folding ladder.
One of those small projects that makes all the difference, if only to me. Oh, and one fun detail. I bought one piece of lambriz – 3.3 meters – and this is what was left over when the project was done 😉
