Home improvement Monday

Yesterday was a long and profanity-laced day. Not necessarily a bad day, but it was long. Finally, after years of procrastination, I finished the insulation in the attic and added some to the kitchen walls as well. I insulated the back part of the house a few years back with the assistance of a neighbor's machine. Unable to coordinate with that neighbor, I decided to use the Home Depot machine. Here is how my day went. (Just remember the profanity part.)

7:00 coffee with SOF before she left for an early meeting.

7:30 drove to Home Depot to get the machine and insulation. Glad I still have the truck.

8:00 realize on the way home that this machine is really heavy and that the lady at the service desk hadn't been kidding when she said it was a 2 or 3 person job.

8:15 Arrived home and investigated machine closer. Has an on-off switch on the side. Little poster says, "the hose is the only thing you take into the attic." Yeah? Well who is going to turn the damn thing on and off? Even with two people, this would be a hassle (especially when blowing into the walls). Dammit.

8:30-8:50 perused yellow pages looking for options and searched my brain for any friends around who might have the flexibility to help me during a week day.

9:15 Yoga. Almost skipped, but realized I needed to go. Not only did we blow bubbles outside before class (don't ask), but class was great and really helped me clear my mind. During meditation, I figured out how to fix my problem and left class ready to go.

10:45 purchased extra extension cord to fashion my own remote control for this beast. One cord plugged into the power source, one into the machine and an extra surge protector (with its own problem as you will see later) gave me a handy switch.

11:15 realized I didn't have goggles to protect from the attic dust. Shit. Off to the store again.

11:30 trying to move everything around the garage and hit one of the beers I made last year (got a wild yeast in it which made it foamy and undrinkable). Bottle shatters with a sound like a damn gun going off. Shit.

11:45 trying to get the cords, surge protector, and hose into the attic. Dropped extension cord. Profanity. Climbed down to retrieve. Back up ladder.

11:50 hit head on rafter. F#@k!

11:51 hit head again on rafter. Are you f*#king kidding me? Dogs howl from below.

12:00-1:30 Actually added insulation to the attic. This machine was much slower than my friends and I had to constantly climb down the ladder to refill, but it worked well enough.

1:30 went back to Home Depot for more insulation and started on the walls. Now we are having fun. The hose attachment narrows to 1 inch and so easily plugs when the recycled paper and stuff gets a clump. And there are a lot of clumps. F*%king lot of clumps. Add to that I had to stand on one of our taller chairs to reach the wall in the back of the cabinet and this meant jumping down and unclogging and then back up. Let's just say I got my workout.

2:00 jumping, standing, unclogging, refilling machine. Swearing. Machine is slow and takes forever to fill wall cavity. At one point, I crawl under house (which gives me heebyjeebies) to make sure I not dumping paper insulation into the crawl space (I wasn't). Making a bigger mess than I wanted to, so retrieve shop vac to hold next to drill when making the holes. That helps, but one time when I thought I had two holes on either side of a stud, blowing insulation into one resulted in insulation blowing out other hole. You know I was swearing then.

3:00 Biggest profanity laced event came when jumping back onto chair holding the blower hose and my jerry-rigged remote. Accidentally hit switch. Machine turns on. Hose was not in the wall, but pointed randomly in kitchen. F*#king insulation everywhere.

3:10 Shop vac very handy and worst is cleaned up rather fast. Of course, one of my hankerchiefs on the floor also sucked up by shop vac. F*@K!!!!!

3:20 Calmer and ready to continue. Few holes later, drop my remote/surge protector while on the chair. Swearing, I get down and realize I had unplugged the extension cord. While reconnecting brain slowly wonders if one side of the surge protector was "switched" and one was "unswitched." Brain sluggishly connects dots as reconnecting plug results in another spray of f*@king paper through kitchen. At this point, more tired than anything and so it almost funny. Almost.

5:00 finally finished. First good thing happens when local high schooler raising money for weight lifting equipment comes by. I give him some money and he helps me load machine in the truck. Yay. I race machine to Home Depot and come home to help SOF clean up rest of my mess.

6:00 comes the deluge. While we are waiting for our delivered Chinese food, the rain comes in buckets. Our power goes out. It is really funny by then. But we are both inside and dry, and the machine is safely returned to Home Depot so we sit in the dark, listen to Terry Gross and watch the rain.

9:00 still no power. After all the rain we received in the last two months, this is our first extensive power outage. We sit out on the front porch and light a chimenea fire. It was nice and peaceful until the mosquitoes drove us inside.

10:00 power back on, but Daily Show is a rerun. Jon!!!!!!

Storms through night keep us awake and we both start Tuesday tired. I am very sore. But the insulation is done. Yay.