Scattered Thoughts . . .

I started a rather small repair/renovation in our master bathroom about two weeks ago and my health is interfering enough to continue to put this small project on hold. As of today, this bathroom is still only partially usable... it sits in a vulnerable, unfinished state with bare wood exposed to a humid room (we are still using the shower daily) as I wait for my health to recover.  This time, the primary issue keeping me from this project is related to my extensive spinal injuries rather than my Systemic Mastocytosis. Although the past few days have been more about recovering from Systemic Mastocytosis problems, overall, my extensive spinal injuries have interfered with this project more than anything else. We've had to cancel a few other plans recently because of these issues as well. That is never fun. Everytime I need to cancel social plans because of my health, I worry that people will just stop inviting us to social events because we cancel our plans so often. This just a

It is snowy outside this morning so the conditions are not ideal for pulling shop tools out of the shed and into the yard so I figured I would give a quick update on how the bathroom project is coming along... For the most part, the bathroom is finished and we have been using it for a week or so now. (Finally!) I need to stain, polyurethane and install a little bit of crown molding... I need to build a small hollow beam for up at the ceiling to cover some rough plumbing...  we could use a nicer wastebasket...  and that is about all we still need to accomplish so we are almost completely finished. I do need to repaint the hallway outside the bathroom though. Parts of that wall took a bit of a beating while I was installing the electrical wiring, boxes and switches. I needed to spackle parts of the hallway walls so they now need some new paint. In the meantime... here are some photos of what we have as of today...   (By the way, it is really, really nice having a second bathroo

Pedestal sink will be installed here...  the bowl will be mounted on the wood cross-pieces above the drain and supply plumbing pipes. I had a productive day today... which was a refreshing change!  I managed to install the wainscoting in the new half bathroom today. I've installed this type of paneling in our living room already but I did things a little differently today... In the living room, this paneling runs from floor to ceiling and is stained. In this new half bath, we are using this paneling style as a wainscoting so it is only up the bottom half of the wall. We plan to paint this paneling rather than stain so I didn't need a high quality grade lumber. This provided more options and these new options provided cost savings. I opted for three sheets of 1/4 inch lauan underlayment at $13 each. I installed two sheets to the walls as the background 'panel' layer. Then Adam and I ripped the third sheet on my table saw into two and a half inch strips. I used

Plumbing for the washing machine and pedestal sink... Overall, things have been very quiet in the house for the past month as my health recovers from a painful dip which, at this point, has sapped most of my energy. I'm getting a bit bored and antsy laying around doing nothing but my energy level is still so low that it is impossible to accomplish a thing. On top of that, I spent a good portion of last night in the bathroom, sick, rather than sleeping... those are always fun times! (sarcasm) There have, however, been a few mornings during the past month when I felt that I had enough energy for an hour or so of work. On these few days I did manage to get a little bit accomplished on our bathroom project.   I needed to get a bit creative with all the plumbing to make it fit in this small space. In this first photo, at right, you can see some odd 45 degree angles to help make things fit. There was absolutely no room for sweeping elbows!  The waste line running up on the ri