In and Around the House
....
The paint scraping continues. I'm about to get to the the worst parts of this garage, namely the strange janky window and the falling-apart rafter-tails. Scrape, scrape, scrape. This is what normal people do on their summer vacations, right?
Back around xmas time, Robb and I bought a carload of cymbidium orchids at an estate sale. I had to wait until they had finished blooming to re-pot them. This weekend, I finally completed this project. While I was at it, I also re-potted several of my other orchids, including the really special cymbidium orchids that I have suspended from the persimmon tree. I reconfigured the way the smaller orchids were displayed, and generally got extremely dirty and sweaty. It was a lovely way to spend a morning.
In the afternoon, Robb and I set about replacing our cracked sink with our splendid ming green art deco sink. And of course, things got complicated quickly. We had always been baffled by the fact that the sink was not centered on the wall, and sat off-kilter under the built-in medicine cabinet. You can see this if you look at the place where the sink used to be.
After lugging in the art deco sink, which weighs approximately one million pounds and is slippery and awkward as hell, Robb and I hefted it into position. And that's where things hit a snag. It turns out that the way the sink attaches to the hanging plate, is different than the way our previous sink attached. We have to move the hanging plate up several inches. And since we want to center the sink (because having the sink arbitrarily off-center drove both of us insane), we'll have to move the hanging plate to the left of where it had been previously attached.
Sounds simple, right?
Well, no. Nothing is ever simple, when it comes to restoring our little old house.
The sink weighs a ton, and there are no wooden studs behind the plaster-board where we need to attach the sink. There's nothing structural to screw into. The sink will have legs which will support much of the weight, but we still need it to be well connected to the wall. There are studs off-center, but none directly under the medicine cabinet. Guess that's why the sink was hung so strangely for all those years. Weird, huh?
Luckily, I've got access to a fabrication studio, and so I'll be paying one of my co-workers to modify the hanging plate so that we can screw into wood, instead of flimsy plaster-board.
(I had to convince Robb that this was a workable solution. He wanted to tear out the plasterboard, and reconfigure the innards of the bathroom wall. This made me want to kill myself, since I had spent so much time restoring the stupid plaster-board. Good thing we don't currently have a working sink. I might have drowned myself, right then and there.)
Goodness knows how long it will take to get things put back together. Working with vintage plumbing is always such an adventure!
The paint scraping continues. I'm about to get to the the worst parts of this garage, namely the strange janky window and the falling-apart rafter-tails. Scrape, scrape, scrape. This is what normal people do on their summer vacations, right?
Back around xmas time, Robb and I bought a carload of cymbidium orchids at an estate sale. I had to wait until they had finished blooming to re-pot them. This weekend, I finally completed this project. While I was at it, I also re-potted several of my other orchids, including the really special cymbidium orchids that I have suspended from the persimmon tree. I reconfigured the way the smaller orchids were displayed, and generally got extremely dirty and sweaty. It was a lovely way to spend a morning.
In the afternoon, Robb and I set about replacing our cracked sink with our splendid ming green art deco sink. And of course, things got complicated quickly. We had always been baffled by the fact that the sink was not centered on the wall, and sat off-kilter under the built-in medicine cabinet. You can see this if you look at the place where the sink used to be.
After lugging in the art deco sink, which weighs approximately one million pounds and is slippery and awkward as hell, Robb and I hefted it into position. And that's where things hit a snag. It turns out that the way the sink attaches to the hanging plate, is different than the way our previous sink attached. We have to move the hanging plate up several inches. And since we want to center the sink (because having the sink arbitrarily off-center drove both of us insane), we'll have to move the hanging plate to the left of where it had been previously attached.
Sounds simple, right?
Well, no. Nothing is ever simple, when it comes to restoring our little old house.
The sink weighs a ton, and there are no wooden studs behind the plaster-board where we need to attach the sink. There's nothing structural to screw into. The sink will have legs which will support much of the weight, but we still need it to be well connected to the wall. There are studs off-center, but none directly under the medicine cabinet. Guess that's why the sink was hung so strangely for all those years. Weird, huh?
Luckily, I've got access to a fabrication studio, and so I'll be paying one of my co-workers to modify the hanging plate so that we can screw into wood, instead of flimsy plaster-board.
(I had to convince Robb that this was a workable solution. He wanted to tear out the plasterboard, and reconfigure the innards of the bathroom wall. This made me want to kill myself, since I had spent so much time restoring the stupid plaster-board. Good thing we don't currently have a working sink. I might have drowned myself, right then and there.)
Goodness knows how long it will take to get things put back together. Working with vintage plumbing is always such an adventure!
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