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Short games night, a new shelf, cleaning up

Friday evening was online board games night. However I went out with my wife for dinner first, to the local Greek restaurant. I tried their duck dish for the first time, in a traditional orange sauce, with vegetables, and it was pretty good.

Yesterday was very warm, and today was hotter, 28°C and 29°C. A blast of summer in early spring, well above the average temperatures for this time of year. In another sign of the advancing seasons, the channel-billed cuckoos have returned from their winter migration north. One has apparently laid an egg in a currawong nest just outside our bedroom window, and it’s hatched. This morning at daybreak I heard the raucous calls of the cuckoo chick and the more melodic calls of the currawongs feeding it. It’s probably going to be a loud morning every day for the next few weeks.

I didn’t plan on doing a run today, as my wife goes to the gym early and I wanted to stay with Scully, and it would be too hot to run by the time she got home. So instead i took Scully on an early walk before the day got hot, to the hardware store in search of that elusive offcut piece of wood for our planned laundry shelf. They had a bunch of offcuts, that were tantalisingly close to the size we wanted, but just a bit too small. So I left them.

I’m baking sourdough today, as we’ve run out of bread, which meant I had none for lunch. So we walked out to a nearby cafe for lunch. They had a special chipotle chicken burrito which I’ve had one before and liked, so I had that.

After we got home we looked at the laundry and discussed options for things. My wife suggested making the shelf a bit narrower than I was planning, and inly using it to store stuff like laundry powder and cleaning items, and putting a new laundry basket on top of the washing machine instead of up on the shelf, so it would be easier to access. This sounded goo, do I re-evaluated the size of the shelf… and realised that one of the pieces of offcut board I’d seen this morning would be big enough! I quickly dashed to the car and drove over to the hardware store, hoping the offcuts hadn’t been cleared out.

I found a piece the perfect size. Melamine coated particle board, about 600 mm long and 350 mm wide. I don’t even need to cut it to the right size – it’s basically perfect! I also grabbed two right angle brackets, and a new laundry basket, a foldable cloth one with bamboo frame that is wide and shallow, to replace our old wicker basket which is tall and narrow. I’ll attach the brackets to the wooden board with screws, and then after we get the place repainted next month I’ll drill holes in the laundry wall to mount the new shelf.

Th major spring clean proceeds. We cleared out some of the book cases today, which had shelves of old photo albums, from the pre-digital days. I’m going to scan the photos and then we’ll put them into storage boxes and store them away, freeing up a lot of shelf space. There’s a lot more cleaning and reorganising to do, and it’ll get more hectic as we approach the repainting.

A new kitchen bin

The home mini-renovation proceeds apace. Today I went to the hardware store – a different branch, actually, in a further suburb. The store there is much bigger than the one near us. I went to get a new kitchen waste bin, small enough to fit into the cabinet space under the kitchen sunk. I got a 17 litre bin, only a bit smaller than the current 20 litre size.

When I got home I cleared out enough space for it under the sink and slotted it in. I didn’t even end up having to remove anything from under the sink – just rearrange it a bit. I took the old bin down to the garage and will discard it during the next household materials collection in a couple of weeks. The kitchen floor space now feels cleaner and more spacious.

I also checked for wood offcuts to make my new laundry shelf. I figured this larger store would have more offcuts to rummage through, but when I checked there were one at all! So I’ll continue my quest for the perfect offcut.

This morning I did a 5k run. And around lunch time another handyman came, this time to check our kitchen floor. It’s wooden parquetry, and in need of a sanding and resurfacing after years of scuffing. The guy measured it up and gave a quote for the work. He suggested we do it after the repainting we have planned for the end of October, because the painters may scuff the floor with stepladders or leave paint drips on it, so it’s better to resurface the floor after that.

This evening I did the first three critical thinking classes of the new Generation Gap topic. It’s an interesting topic, but the structure and questions are a bit more work for me than the last couple I’ve done. More thinking on my feet to run the class smoothly as we move through the topic.

Bathroom floor polishing and kitchen light installation

Today was a busy day – not only for me, but also for the two tradesmen who came in to do jobs.

The first one was a guy who restores stone surfaces. Our bathroom has marble floor tiles and they had become rough and pitted in places with age and various bathroom chemicals. one of the worst bits was this dirty looking stain, which I’ve tried cleaning but never managed to get out.

As part of the grand spring cleaning and mini-renovation, I’d booked a guy to come and polish the bathroom floor. He arrived at 8:00 and spent most of the day polishing and working on the floor, including inside the shower stall. It must have been back-breaking work. He ground the stained area to “open up the pores” as he said, and then used a chemical treatment to extract the stain. He also worked on the rough areas, mostly inside the shower stall, probably caused by various body wash and shower cleaning products.

The result at the end of the day is really good. The floor is silky smooth everywhere again, including the previously sandpaper-rough areas inside the shower. And the stained area is completely gone.

Very happy with this job!

The second person was an electrician, the same one we had install new ceiling lights for us a while back. We had been thinking about other jobs that we could get done, and my wife suggested getting some downlights installed in the kitchen, over the bench that sits in the cutaway section opposite the cooktop.

In this view you can see the sink against the window wall. The cooktop is on the left side, just left of the knife rack. Opposite that is another bench, extending perpendicular to the wall, to the pillar you can see at far left of the photo. We often prepare things on this bench, and early on we recognised the need for more light here. So I installed a cheap fluorescent tube on the wall, which you can see above the microwave, with an ugly cord dangling down at an angle to the power strip on top of the microwave. It’s an ugly solution, but we’ve lived with it for years.

But my wife suggested we could get rid of it and install some downlights above the bench, maybe three running in a line inside the edge of the false ceiling that you can see above the kitchen. I informed the electrician what we wanted, and he said he could wire them to the same switch circuit as the main kitchen light. But we wanted them independently switched, so we could have them on or off separately from the existing kitchen light. He said he wasn’t sure if that would be possible until he arrived and had a look at the wiring.

When he got here this morning, he was skeptical at first. I wanted a new light switch in the place where our old copper telephone cable comes out of the wall, which is on that pillar at the far left – a convenient place for the downlight switch. I thought he might be able to run a new power cable up from there to the false ceiling cavity and do all the necessary wiring that way. But he said that he needed to tie it in to an existing light power circuit, and the only one suitable was the main kitchen light, which is switched from another switch on the opposite side of the kitchen entrance. Okay… but when he opened up that switch and looked at the wiring, he lamented that it appeared to have been run through the brickwork and concrete directly, without a conduit, which meant it might not be possible to pull a new wire through.

He aid he could try pulling the existing kitchen light wire through, tied to a leader cable, and then pull the cable back with two wires, and add the downlights to an extra switch on a new wall plate. But he said that if the cable was tightly restricted by the bricks and concrete, he might not be able to pull the new wires through, so there was a risk that we’d lose the cabling for the original kitchen light! I asked him to estimate the chances of that, and he said he could give the first step a try and if things felt like getting stuck he could try backing it out, and he felt that was low risk. So I said go ahead. Thankfully he managed to get the whole process done, although there was a tense moment when he was trying to pull the two new cables back through.

Here’s the installation of the new lights in progress:

You can see two installed, and the third with a wire dangling out, and also wires dangling out the hole where the original main light was installed. And here is the finished job, with the original light and three new downlights all on.

This view also gives you a much better view of the kitchen layout than the first photo above. After taking this photo I removed the old fluoro tube from the wall, which now looks much cleaner.

While the tradies were working on the bathroom floor and kitchen lights, I worked on writing my class for the next week of critical/ethical thinking. This week’s topic is The Generation Gap. It should be very interesting, asking kids to imagine thinking like adults and to discuss why people of different ages sometimes don’t understand one another.

Even though I didn’t do most of the hard work, it felt like a very accomplished day!

Sizing up a new kitchen bin

This morning I did my usual four online classes, finishing off a week of talking about Boredom with kids. It was actually a really interesting topic, especially discussing potential links between boredom and the ability to let your mind wander and be creative. It was clear most of the kids had never considered that possibility before, and thought it was a fascinating thing to think about.

At lunch I walked Scully to my wife’s work, where she spent the rest of the afternoon. I ran a 5k route home for exercise, and managed a decent time.

In the afternoon I inspected the cabinet under our kitchen sink, measuring it up to find what size of waste bin would fit under there. I think I mentioned earlier that we’re planning to replace the free-standing bin on the kitchen floor with one tucked away under the sink. I searched online for kitchen bins to see what sizes are available. It was hard picking one though, so I think I’ll need to take the dimensions of the available space to the hardware store, pick a bin that fits, and then come home and rearrange things to make space for it. I’d planned to do the rearranging today to make space, but realised it’ll be better to do it once I know what size bin we have.

This evening I have a day off teaching at the university, because it’s student study vacation week. I’ll be back next week to help students with their image processing projects.

Oh, and last night I watched Insidious: The Red Door on Netflix. I’ve been watching this movie series, and also The Conjuring series, and I finally realised why I keep getting movies from the two series confused. Because Patrick Wilson plays a lead character in both series!! The whole time through the movie last night I was getting vague feelings that this guy belonged somewhere else, not in this movie.

Looking for offcuts

This morning we went to visit my wife’s family for morning tea at a cafe. I don’t drink coffee, but I had a Nutella cookie, which was really good. Very chocolatey.

After that my wife and I went into a big hardware store which was nearby, to check their timber offcuts bin. I’m going to install a shelf in the laundry to store things on, and I only need a relatively small piece of board, much smaller than the large boards they sell for $50+. When other people buy boards, they sometimes get the hardware store to cut them to the size they need, and the offcuts are left there in a bin for people to rummage through, and you can buy an offcut for as little as $1.

Unfortunately today they didn’t have very many, and all the board offcuts were MDF, which is not the material I want. I want either solid pine board or maybe plywood. I’ll keep looking in other hardware stores over the next few weeks until I find what I need.

Back home I made some sourdough bread, and did some comics stuff, and planned another two topics for Critical and Ethical Thinking classes for upcoming weeks. And then taught four classes in the evening. Phew!

New window sills and coat racks

The builder came back today to complete work on our new window sills. I took photos yesterday to show some of the work being done. Here’s one of the living room windows after the wooden sill was removed, showing the cracked masonry underneath.

And here’s the same window after the masonry was repaired and the new sill was put in place, but before it was painted. (The perspective is different because I used the wider angle lens on my phone.)

Today the builder filled in some small gaps, then sanded and painted the sills with undercoat. We’re leaving them like that and the final coat will be put on by the painters who will be doing everything in October.

While he was here, I got the builder to drill holes for me to install new coat racks in the bedroom. After he left I screwed them in and they look great. The builder also stuck our apartment number back on the outside of the front door. It had been taken off the old door before it got replaced for fire safety reasons back in March(!) and hadn’t been replaced yet.

Apart from all this I had an online science class and essay writing class to teach, and then this evening three critical thinking classes. In the science class I got the student to dissolve salt, sugar, and epsom salts in three different glasses of water, and we’re going to evaporate them and make crystals. Hopefully by next week’s class we’ll see some good ones.

The other news today is the weather. The forecast yesterday when I looked was for 10-35 mm of rain. But we’ve now had 75 mm in less than 12 hours, with another 12 hours to go before the daily total is recorded at 9am, plus another 7 mm overnight last night. The rain has been truly torrential at times – we had almost 20 mm in one half-hour period. And lots of lightning and very loud thunder. Several times the thunder rattled the windows, it was that close and loud. The forecast for tonight warns of the possibility of damaging winds and heavy hail. And tomorrow we are expecting up to another 35 mm of rain. Some flood warnings have been issued for parts of the state.

It looks like there’ll be a break in the rain for a while, on the rain radar. Hopefully in time for when I take Scully out tonight for her bedtime toilet!

Replacing window sills and cleaning behind furniture

Today was unseasonably warm like yesterday, but unlike yesterday it wasn’t 29°C and dry. Today was 26°C and very humid, which in some ways felt worse. The humidity came with rain blowing up from the south, which will cause temperatures to plummet overnight, back to winter chill for the next few days.

Today builders came in to replace our window sills. We’re having the old water-damaged ones replaced before we repaint the whole place next month. The builders ripped the old wooden sills off, which cracked some of the concrete. One sill in the living room had huge chinks of concrete come loose, revealing the raw bricks below. The builders filled the gaps with new concrete and laid the new wooden sills on top. They’re coming back tomorrow to give them an undercoat of paint, which will then be covered with our chosen colour scheme by the painters in October.

This work involved moving a fair bit of furniture away from the walls, where it’s been for many years. You don’t want to know how much dust and grime was behind them! I vacuumed the areas behind all the moved furniture and filled the cleaner dust container so much that I had to empty it immediately. (Normally it’s good for two whole cleans of the entire house.) I also washed down the walls and skirting boards with sugar soap to get some discolouration and grime off. Although the painters will do a thorough clean and preparation of all the surfaces before painting. I just couldn’t stand the sight of the mess and had to clean it up a bit.

In other renovation news, we got confirmation of a booking date for the electrician to install the new downlights in the kitchen. That will be on the 23rd of this month, the same date as the stone polisher will be in to polish the stone floor in the bathroom. Which is good, they can both do their thing at the same time and I won’t need to stay home twice for two different tradesmen.

I also write my new critical thinking class for the week, on the topic of “Likes”. And a new science class for my science student tomorrow. We’re going to be starting an experiment to grow crystals, and learning about how atoms combine in different ways to make molecules or crystals.

Trying paint colours

Today I went to the hardware store to get a couple of things: coat racks, which we’re going to mount on the wall of the bedroom to hang jackets and hats and things, and some small sample pots of paint to test different paint colours on the walls.

Because we’ve planning this repainting of the whole place, we’re also taking the chance to look at other ways of refreshing and reorganising things to improve the living space. We’ve been hanging jackets over the dining chairs, which is a bit annoying when either you want to sit or when guests come over. And we have a few random hat hooks in places, but we realised we can install a rack of hooks in a space in the bedroom and move all of that stuff into one location to make things neater.

When I got home, I cleaned a section of wall to prepare it for painting, and when it was dry I applied coats of two different colours. We’re going for a warm white shade, lighter than what we have on the walls at the moment, which are quite creamy. I also have different lighter shades for the skirting boards, which I’ll add tomorrow to see the full effect. I painted wall patches about a metre high from the floor and 40 centimetres wide, so we can see it over a significant area of the wall. It’ll all get covered up by the full repaint when that gets done in October. So until then we’ll live with odd patches of different colours.

I also worked on Darths & Droids a lot today. There’s forward planning to be done for the next bit, so I wanted to get ahead on it.

On TV I’ve been watching Archive 81 on Netflix, an 8-part series which is described as horror, but it’s really more of a mystery thriller with some vague supernatural elements. I’m six episodes in and it’s been really good.

Picking paint colours

Today I went to the hardware store with my wife to look at the range of paint colours and grab some brochures and paint swatches to bring back home. We want to change up the colour scheme of our place a little as we plan towards getting it repainted in October. We grabbed about a dozen different “white” shades and very light “neutral” shades, and then picked a bunch of colours that we like to consider doing accents in places like the architraves, skirting boards, and cornices.

One of my friends suggested a feature wall in a different colour, and I explored today with taking photos of the interior and opening them in Photoshop and selecting walls and changing colour overlays to simulate painting them different colours. This achieved the effect of making my wife say to thank my friend for suggesting it, because now she knows for sure that she doesn’t want a feature wall.

We also received a quote for the painting from the painter who came to look on Friday. It’s roughly what we expected, so we asked to go ahead and book a date. The painter is away on a holiday for the start of October, but the best time for us to do the painting is the week of 13-17 October, because that coincides with my next ISO Photography Standards meeting. It’s in California, but I’m not flying over, and will be attending online. I need to take the week off from teaching Outschool classes so I can do the meeting, which will be 11pm to 7am in my time zone – absolutely the worst possible. So I’ll need daytime to recover, and won’t be up to teaching classes. If we can get the painting done the same week, it would mash the inconvenience together into just one week.

But I suspect we’ll have to get the painting done the week after. Which is worse, but not terrible, as I can use the daytime in between my meeting nights to pack things away in preparation. It will be worse again if the painter can’t do it until another week later. So we have to wait and see when they’re available.

We’ve also invited our new neighbours over for a board games evening in a couple of weeks. We know they like modern board games, so it will be a good chance to actually sit down with them and get to know them better, compared to the very brief conversations we’ve had so far when bumping into each other in the hallways or garage.

Back to work Monday

Well, it was really back to work Sunday evening for me last night, but today was my wife’s first day back in the office, and I had my fullest day with six Outschool classes to teach, beginning at 8am. I got a bit more sleep last night than the previous few, but still woke up a bit early, I think just before 6am. Hopefully one more night will see me sleeping through until a normal wake-up time, and I can declare the jetlag defeated.

The new next door neighbours have not started moving in yet. They are doing some renovations of the apartment before moving in. I mentioned three days ago they were removing the wooden shutters from the windows. Now they’ve ripped up all the carpet—I guess to either install new fresh carpet or perhaps wooden floors. And today they started painting, which caused a paint smell to permeate into my place even with all the windows shut. It was quite bad late morning as I was doing some classes, and Scully’s nose was affected and she started coughing.

They left a box of Lindt chocolate balls outside our door on Saturday, with a note apologising for the renovation noise and saying they expected it to be finished in two weeks, after which they’d be moving in, and looked forward to meeting us. As it turned out, the buyer of the apartment was one of the people we met briefly when they inspected the place, as we came out of our door while they were in there, and they asked us a few questions about the place. We were enthusiastic about our love for this as a place to live, and about the surrounding neighbourhood, so maybe that inspired them to buy it!

I took Scully out as soon as my classes finished, and walked her over to my wife’s office to drop her there for the afternoon. I wore my running clothes and ran all the way home, taking a longer route than runs along a bike/pedestrian path for a lot of the way so I could avoid car traffic, and to make the distance up to 5 kilometres. It’s the first time I’ve run this route and it was nice to have a change of scenery.

Tonight, another slightly early night and hopefully a full sleep through!