Called Van’s this morning, the kit is marked ‘paid’ and there’s a ship under way right now that probably contains my kit. When it shows up, they’ll call me. Until then, I build stuff. Problem is, I’m not building airplane, I’m building bathroom. This is how it happened:
I took last week off to prep for the coming of the kit, part of which involved getting the main room of the guest house ready to be an airplane factory instead of a crash pad for drunken revelers after a night at the bar. We decided to pull the carpet out of the guest house, to prep the concrete floors for staining/sealing (going to look very, very cool), and discovered some mold under the baseboards. Well, one thing led to another and by Tuesday the bathroom was gutted down to the studs and joists. Needed a new subfloor, shower, walls, ceiling, plumbing and fixtures. I know FA about plumbing, so I had a laptop in one hand and a blowtorch in the other, trying to figure out pipe runs, sweat joints, and solder techniques. So that took a while. Then my knee flared up and I was down for 2 days. Then it was all about drain plumbing. Fortunately the soil line was ABS instead of cast iron as I originally feared, so the nightmare of how to set up the offset toilet flange kind of disappeard. The shower drain required a reconfiguring of floor joists, but that got done eventually. After that, we got all the drywall, cement board, and plywood and we put in the floor and the big piece of ceiling drywall. Bathrooms are good because they’re small, you don’t need a lot of material.. The flipside is that it’s tough to maneuver a 4×6 piece of drywall in close quarters. Sliding it past shower fittings and other obstacles is a big pain, but we got it. So now we have to finish the ceiling, then do the cement board for the floor and shower walls, then finish the walls. After that, it’s tape, mud, sand, then tile. And install the shower kit somewhere in there. So this will probably suck up all the time I have available for building for a while. What also needs to happen is to replace the lower foot of drywall around the perimeter of pretty much the whole place. Once that’s done, I can start moving tools and airplane parts in there.
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