Not gonna do it!! I am NOT going to go back to only updating the blog every month or two. Gonna make it a point to update about once a week or more if something news-worthy happens. The main reason is that this blog will be my traveling journal once I do jump off and go RV'ing. So I want to keep it up and going. Here's the latest.....
House (Renovation)
When I last left off, I had found a water leak in the hall
bathroom shower faucet and things were looking pretty bleak. If you remember:
Well, it got worse. I could not for the life of me get that
valve apart as it was frozen by 20-something years of time. Since I couldn’t
get it apart, I couldn’t fix the solder joint where the leak was. The heat from
the torch would have wrecked the seals in the faucet. So I finally just ended up
turning off the water to the whole house and un-soldering the feed connections
and capping them.
One positive was that since I had to completely disassemble
the whole thing, I was able to take the valve assembly out to the garage and
work on it there rather than sitting in the tub and try not to wreck it. I neglected to take a picture of the assembly all put back into place, but trust me, it looked nice.
Picked out a nice mid-line shower faucet at HD and reworked
the whole piping assembly to accommodate the new faucet. I then got it
re-attached to the shower feed lines and had to rework the wood blocking that
the copper pipes attach to. No big deal, but still a pain. After all that I was able to finish out the Durock sheeting
and start thinking about tile.
Here's the tub surround with all my lines all drawn for the tile layout. Have to look close to see them or you can click on the picture and it will get bigger.
Tile should start going up sometime this week, or weekend, or next week, or.....
I really have to point out that YouTube has been an
invaluable resource for how-to information. Who knew that pretty much anything
you want to know about copper pipe soldering, Durock, green board, drywall
points, etc is right there on YouTube.
House (Un-stuffing)
I’ve got about half of the old VHS video tapes ripped into digital
format so far. This is a long process as I have to play each tape while the
sampler records it. The other problem is that some of those tapes have
deteriorated a good bit. I’m hoping to have it all completed by the end of
July. Once they’re all done, they’ll all go into the trash and I can finally
get rid of the VCR. If you've got some VHS tapes you want ripped, let me know and I'll loan out the sampler thingy. Otherwise I'll sell it in the next garage sale.
Got some more stuff gone through mainly in the garage. I’m
hoping to get rid of another garage cabinet in the next couple of weeks. Won't be long and I'll be able to demo the paint booth and the workbench. The goal is to get as much 'stuff' (hate that word) out of the garage as possible so I can acid wash the concrete and eventually paint the ceiling, walls and floor.
One of the next things on the garage list is to empty out and get
rid of the fridge. Believe it or not it’s the one that was in
Mel’s grandmother’s house from years ago. She had it in her house for many,
many years and I sort of ended up with it. It’s starting to make some strange
noises from underneath and I suspect it’s on its last legs anyway. That plus the floor of the interior is rotting out. I only use
it for beer and freezing large meats anyway. Since I quit competing and I can’t
eat that much meat (or at least I shouldn't), I don’t need to use it for that anymore.
I’ll probably end up buying a small dorm style fridge to keep in the
garage for beer and water only. That will save me a big chunk of space and
electricity.
I’ve gotten really serious about weekly meal planning and
staying on my grocery list at the store, so the fridge in the kitchen stays pretty emptied out most of the time. Don’t see much point in running a
second large fridge in the garage that only has 6 or 8 water bottles, and maybe
a six pack of beer in it.
RV Search
This area has slowed down for the summer as it’s too hot to be
prowling RV lots and there really aren’t any more RV shows until the fall. I’ll
still be prowling the websites quite a bit, but it’ll have to be something good
to actually go onto a lot and roast.
Other
Really getting seriously into this budgeting software (Ynab),
and the changes in lifestyle that can go with it. I also found a website called
‘Mr. Money Moustache’ that gets somewhat fanatical about curbing spending and maximizing savings.
I don’t subscribe to every bit of it, but I have changed quite a bit about my
budgeting and spending. It’s starting to show a difference in my finances and I can plainly see the advantages in it.
I had to give Quicken the ol' boot. Those clowns were forcing me to basically re-buy the software every three years in forced 'upgrades'. The vast majority of reviews I read about the upgrades were all about it being a major ripoff. That plus their budgeting tools were very weak at best.
Stay tuned for the next riveting chapter….
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