Bathroom and Lasagna?? What the Hell?

Was in a very weird zone this weekend.

I wanted to get a whole bunch of stuff done in the bathroom and for some crazy reason I was jones'n for some lasagna. No, no drugs involved here.

First off the bathroom. From last episode I had gotten the tile up and was dreading the grout job. I thought that the grout was going to be a nightmare. Grout everywhere and me standing there having a complete meltdown.

Well, sorry to disappoint but it wasn't that way. About the only mistake I made was to try to do too big of a batch at once. Once I started making smaller batches, things went pretty well. It was still an unexpected workout with all the trowel and sponge work, but it went ok.

So here is the tile with the grout all finished. Oh, did I forget to mention the toilet? Oops....

Yeah, I told you I was in one of those moods where everything has to get done all at once. Yeah, the toilet is installed and all I have left is to buy the water connection hose. Sort of forgot that one. I'll get it tomorrow.

Kind of obvious that the tub needs to be re-glazed rather badly.

Now I really, really want to get the shower slider doors up. I think it will make a huge difference in the way it looks.

However, not being content with leaving it this way until later, I simply HAD to press on.

Yep, I just had to install a couple of the fixtures. As you can see, I still need to caulk around the edges of the tile, but you can start to get the idea.

So for the lasagna.

As usual, I had to start from scratch.

The sauce was actually started much earlier this morning and has been slow simmering most of the day. Here I'm going to reduce/thicken it and the noodles have just gone in their little happy bath.

So fast forward and I'll save you all the boring details. Here's the finished product.

Literally, as I type this, it is cooling just a bit so I can slice it up and eat dinner. It won't help my waistline one bit, but it sho will taste good!

So with that, I'm out to go chow down. Enjoy!!

Going back in time to better days..

A bunch of updates ago I said that I would get around to posting pictures of the little sailboat that I built a bunch of years ago. Well, I forgot about it until some little thing jogged my memory and I remembered.

So anyway, here's the little boat that I built from total scratch quite literally in the driveway.

I made it from plans and the type was called a 'Weekender' which was aimed at being able to sail on Saturday, spend the night somewhere, and sail home on Sunday. It was 19'6" on deck and a little over 23' LOA including the bowsprit. Except for the sails, it was all handmade from scratch.

The mast was made out of a quarter-sawn Douglas fir 4x4 piece that I found at this ancient lumber yard up in Port Canaveral. The keel was three laminated layers of 1x12 Douglas Fir that ran the entire length of the hull. Yes, I built it from scratch and it was attached with silicon bronze screws. Try to find those if you can. They were obscene expensive, but they will never, ever, rot or rust.

It had a group 27 deep cycle battery that ran a large trolling motor off of the transom. Wasn't all that fast under power, but it sure was quiet!

All of the exposed wood rub rails, grab rails, porthole rings, mast, boom, jib club foot, etc all were stained and had three coats of Epifanes varnish. They were beautiful and were like glass. The hull had two layers of 6 oz fiberglass hand-laid with epoxy and a white two-part epoxy roll/tip finish. Even the rudder (which for some reason isn't in the picture) was hand shaped, stained and varnished.

It even had hand made non-skid on deck made out of ground up walnut shells that were laid out on deck and captured with epoxy. It was really trick how it worked out.

The cabin was a small cuddy-cabin that could have slept two people quite comfortably and had a forward hatch that propped up for surprisingly good ventilation.

It was named 'Opus' which means work. It was my one piece of work that I was very proud of. I still get neighbors walking by that ask what happened to the boat.

Yes, that is a real ships wheel for the helm and was mounted against the lazarette. This allowed full cockpit mobility without having a helm right in the middle of the cockpit sole.

It sailed pretty good and the gaff rig got many, many waves and pictures. It's an old timey way of rigging a mainsail and it really isn't seen that much anymore. You can just see the bottom of the gaff in the extreme top of the first picture. I always wanted to rig a topsail and a staysail (pronounced stay'sl) jib for it. Then I could have legitimately said that it was a top'sl schooner.

The coast guard guy that came out to inspect it to allow a HIN (Hull Identification Number, similar to a car's VIN number) application was shocked when he pulled up in his truck. He filled out the paperwork first thing and said that he was expecting a bathtub with a broom handle mast, but was stunned when he pulled up to the curb. It really made me feel good as he went over everything and said that he couldn't find a single thing to ding me on.

So what did become of it? Well, I sailed it for 2 or 3 summers and decided that a bigger boat was needed. I put it up for sale (sail?) on a couple of web bulletin boards that were dedicated to what was called 'backyard boatbuilding'. Well, as it turns out, a guy out in Arkansas saw it and fell in love with it. He wanted a boat that he could take his wife out on in the evenings on some large freshwater lake. He actually drove all the way down here and bought it.

The last I heard was that he got it back up there, but some weeks later had a massive heart attack and they ended up selling it. Somebody in Nebraska(?) bought it and I pretty much lost track of it after that. I did get a picture from a friend many months later showing what looked like Opus but had been repainted to white with brown trim (ugh..). It was a lousy picture and I can't find it at the moment.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot. When I built it, I was big into boat-building lore. I found several references that it was considered good luck to put a dime under the mast foot as payment to Charon to pay for the crossing of the river Styx if the boat ever sank and all hands were lost. So instead of just any old dime, I found a Canadian dime that of course has the schooner 'Bluenose' on it and I actually did put that dime under the mast foot (the very bottom of the mast on the keel of the boat). It was still there when I sold it.

It was a fun boat and I had a good time building it. I always wanted to go up to Maine and learn traditional lapstrake or clinker style of boatbuilding and build a much bigger boat (a la the movie Message in a Bottle?). I guess it just wasn't meant to happen as I really don't see that ever actually occurring. Of course I say that now. Next month my plans could get turned completely upside down and who knows? I sure would love to do another one. That would be a project of a lifetime.

Flashbacks and pipedreams

Howdy hi, there friends and neighbors!

Sorry, a flashback there. Betcha you can’t guess where that comes from without an internet search.

Big News!! Friend of a friend heard that I was renovating getting ready to sell. He and his wife show up and LOVE the place and want it as is. Formal offer probably in the next day or two and they want to move in immediately!

Yeah, I wish.....

That was a daydream while I was waiting for some paint to dry. Yeah, I really did have to wait for some paint to dry. Insert joke here....

So on to the updates:

House Renovation

Over the long weekend I decided I was going to get back to it in full force and knock out as much as I could in that bathroom. That was the plan. That really was the plan. Actually, it wasn’t that bad. I did make good progress, it was just painfully slow. Tile craftsmen have absolutely nothing to worry about if I ever lose my job. I can do it, but I would be no competition to them and I would starve to death.

Started out on Friday morning all pepped up and ready to go. I got all the materials assembled and then the worst possible thing that could happen, happened. I started thinking about it…again. Are my layout lines correct? Did I pick the right tile? Should I do a straight line pattern or a brick pattern? Did I have the top & bottom cutoff measurements equal? Many, many more….

After about 20-30 minutes of this second guessing game, I just picked up a tile, buttered it, and slapped it on the wall. There! Committed now! No more sitting and festering about it. So off to the tile races I go. Of course by the end of Friday I stepped back and holy crap! I worked all day long and hadn’t even finished three courses. This is going to take me a month! Now, of course I sat and fussed around with each individual tile until it was perfectly set (the engineer in me). I had those little spacers all over the place. Pretty dejected on the lack of progress, granted they were perfectly set, but way too few of them. Here’s the first days progress.

Saturday morning I decided I was going to pick up the pace and get moving along, and for some reason it did go faster. I think one of the biggest time wasters (besides my OCD) was that I didn’t know how to handle that trowel. I got adhesive all over the place on Friday, but on Saturday I started to get a rhythm going and didn’t slop the adhesive all over and have to stop and clean it up. I also got better at eyeballing the side gaps and only put the clips on the horizontal gaps. The weight of the tile made it slide down so the clips were necessary there. Here’s the progress when I broke for lunch on Saturday.

So Sunday was a new challenge with the accent strip. I did slow way down and spend some time on that strip and I’m glad I did. The strip pieces aren’t exactly the same thickness as the tile so it took a little finagling to get it set right.

After that it was the race to the top! The bullnose came after that and they were surprisingly difficult, but it was time to power through and get it finished. I even got the first coat of paint on the ceiling as I was dying to get an idea of what the finished product is going to look like. That's why the lights are just hanging by the wires.

Sorry, you're going to have to tilt your head or rotate the picture. For some reason Google won't let me do it here. Note to self, don't do this again.

This weekend was floor tile. I decided to hold off on the wall grout as the floor grout will be exactly the same, so I may as well do one big grout party. Here's where I am as of Sunday (7/12) evening.

Oh yeah, almost forgot to mention that I went ahead and did the final painting on the walls. Hard to make out in the above picture, but it's a very light sea foam green that picks up the green in the tile accent in the tub surround. No, that cutout for the toilet was not fun.

Next up will be to grout and then put the water valve on the stub for the toilet and install the toilet itself! After that will be vanity!

House Un-stuff

Started work on emptying out some of the kitchen cabinets in anticipation of the big kitchen explosion. I’ve been getting into the habit of only buying groceries that I will actually use during the next week and not having so much ‘extraneous stuff’ that doesn’t get used.

Seriously, go open a cabinet or the fridge and take out all the things that literally haven’t been touched in 2 or 3 months. Those are the things that you will never use and is just taking up space. Not to mention the money wasted on it.

Another thing to try is to not buy groceries for a week and see how many days you can go using just the stuff that you already have on hand. I went more than 2 weeks and still have a couple of things that could get used up. It’s scary amazing how empty the pantry and fridge get when only groceries that will actually be used are purchased AND my grocery budget has dropped dramatically.

Sorry got a little off-topic there.

RV Search

Was going to go out to Lazy Days over the 4^th weekend and it was just too damn hot and the storms move in pretty thick and fast over there. So I’ll try again in a couple of weeks. Otherwise not a whole lot happening on this front right now.

Other

Starting to think about what make/model of car I’ll be trading in the truck to get. It’s getting pretty close to the point where I just don’t need a truck anymore and I just can’t justify the horrible gas mileage in trade for the towing/hauling capability. So I’ve started browsing used car websites and seeing what I like versus repair costs/gas mileage/etc.

Yes, it will be a used car. I’m of the opinion right now that I probably won’t ever buy a new car ever again. In fact, the big truck that I’ll buy for the fifth wheel will be used. I’m finding that a car/truck about a year old can be purchased for a WHOLE lot less money than new. I mean we’re talking thousands of dollars of difference. Will I miss that feeling of driving off the lot with that brand new car or truck? Yeah, some, but it’s an unbelievably expensive feeling.

Just for fun, let’s say that the new car feeling lasts a week, and let’s say that I’m awake for 14 hours a day. That’s 98 hours. Let’s also say that I save $20k buying used rather than new. That works out to more than $200/hour. Is that even in the realm of justifiable? Not in my mind.

Wow, I got long-winded on this one. So until next time, onward, or is it upward? Sideways? No, it's exponential. I got it, it's, it's, no wait, what was I saying?