In the near future, we’re going to be replaing water-damaged ceilings in T’s bedroom and the nursery, and replacing some water-soaked, mildewed drywall while we’re at it. T and L have been packing everything in both rooms and moving it to a friend’s garage, where it’ll stay for the duration (about two weeks, since Moon is coming down from Fort Worth next weekend to work with us on installing the new drywall). Yesterday, though, I managed to cause a Major Upheaval by coming home with the new drywall all bought and needing to be stored. L immediately flew into a fury, saying this meant she had to drop everything and demolish one wall and part of the ceiling in the nursery, so we had somewhere indoors to store the drywall (left outdoors, even blocked up off the ground and covered, it tries to dissolve if it gets wet).
So she took out her anger toward me by smashing wallboard, and T and I got to shovel up the broken bits, as well as the blown-in urethane insulation (L says ‘urethane hell, it’s fiberglass’) and tar and gravel débris from the mopped flat roof that was on that part of the house when we bought it, and that got torn off during the first part of the Roof Saga. We filled our sixty-gallon trash can and eleven leaf bags with the trash; I figure that’s about half what we’re meaning to tear out in that one room, excluding the moldings and baseboards, which L hadn’t meant to replace, but which she shattered in the removal process (I was kinda expecting that, and had already priced cove molding, S-base boards and quarter-round base moldings). T and I both made great targets for the Asian tiger mosquitoes that live in swarms in the bamboo hedge at the back of our lot (another reason to get rid of the bamboo as soon as we can) and that make the back yard unusable almost year-round, so we’re both hitting the Lanacaine heavily today.
L had another engagement in the evening, so she went off to it, leaving me with a bunch of nails and drywall screws sticking out of the joists; I grabbed my hatchet and brand-new Milwaukee drywall screw gun, and pulled out all of them. L had been trying to pull out the drywall screws with a claw hammer and was, naturally, getting nowhere. After that I got the mini-shop vacuum and sucked up the remaining bits of wallboard and insulation. The finish on the floor (engineered hardwood) is going to be in nasty shape by the time we’re done, what with the gypsum dust and the ordinary dirt, but I don’t see there’s much to be done for it until we’re finished.
So this afternoon, my neck, shoulders, arms (particularly my right wrist; I’ve stirred up the tendonitis again) and middle back all hurt like the devil, my ankles and feet are swollen and sore from standing on them for too long a time, both shoveling and up the ladder pulling screws and nails from the joists. L’s intending to pack more things to move out to storage. Maybe I’ll find enough energy to dig up the jonquil bulbs this afternoon (I got up the oxblood lilies yesterday) and store them all against fall re-planting.
