Old Ceilings--New Finish

Posted on Saturday 11 April 2009 at 08:12

I'm not that good at taping and mudding, so Dave came up with a scheme to allow me to avoid making a mess of our ceiling in the new master bedroom. I had aching arms, neck and back, and hands going numb by the time we were finished the walls (biggest room I've done yet), so I'm doubly thankful for his finishing idea.

We had the choice of doing a lot of elbow-grease work on our ceilings--hand-scraping old spackle, patching cracked concrete board--or just going over it with new drywall. Ceiling height is 8 ft. 9 in., so we had lots of room for new finish. Dave's air nailer came in very handy for putting up strapping, a necessity due to a couple of layers of other board that had been applied over the last eighty years of the house's life. We didn't trust drywall screws to hold well over the long term in nothing but two layers of crumbling concrete board/old drywall.

Dave nailed the strapping into the ceiling joists and then suspended the new drywall from the 1 x 4. We were going to go with 1 x 2, but the lumber store had none in stock, and we ended up being thankful for the extra wiggle room for anchoring screws later on.

We used 10-ft long sheets of drywall so that there would be no cross-seams. These were centred on the ceiling because of Dave's finishing plan--one in the middle, the other two fitted along the edges after.

We then took 1 x 3" MDF and cove molding and ran that along the seams to cover them. The result is a really pleasant cottage-style finish. (We haven't put corner-bead on the pine-panelled beam yet. We're still cringing from the cost of basic trim for the rest of the room.)

Ugh, Blog Problems

Posted on Friday 3 April 2009 at 01:21

So I come to check in over here, and I find my links have been replaced with junk Java. Like, what??? Well, that's a nice confirmation of the decision to switch platforms.

Just for the record, my new home is ScitaScienda.wordpress.com. Copy and paste if you feel like putting in the extra effort to track me down. If not, I'll see ya round here sometime.

A Spot of Nostalgic Heartache

Posted on Monday 16 March 2009 at 06:04

I've been going back through this blog's old entries as I move everything over to a new, unified space. It's been a journey. Three years ago nearly to the week, I was starting this journal, writing about my first crop of home-sprouted peppers.

It's a useful journal, actually. I haven't collected all the entries from it--just the ones that have information on what's normal for different times of year or different procedures and processes. Or the particularly silly ones. Or the ones that remind me why I've loved living here, something I've lost over the last two years.

I doubt I'll really be leaving. This is my virtual greenspace. But I've changed. Our lives have changed so much in such a short time. My heart aches a little, looking back.

The end of all my blogs

Posted on Monday 23 February 2009 at 05:58

Effective immediately, I'm bringing all my many blogs together under one overarching theme. I've been slowly migrating some key posts from this archive over to the new location. This is preparatory to dismantling my website, which is just not a great investment for what I do with it.

I've just put up our latest backwoods adventure, How To Immolate a Coyote. I've also found a cool widget that allows us to have family music in the sidebar, and I love Wordpress's photo functionality. It's an excellent cross between a web page and a blog. It's slow work getting moved in, but I'm enjoying it immensely.

A bit about the new home, from the About page:

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Scita > Scienda

scitor [to seek to know , inquire, ask]
scientia [knowing , knowledge, acquaintance, skill].

Refers to the gap between those things about which we actually seek to know and inquire; and how much there is to inquire about, or about which to be skillfully knowledgeable.

Right-wing philosopher Erik von Kuenhelt-Leddihn described the scita as that which is known or sought out, and the scienda as that which needs to be known in order to form a rational decision. He described the gap between the two as an ever-widening chasm in the late twentieth century. I will not attempt to argue that this trend has reversed since.

Quite the contrary. There is a growing chasm between what we desire to know and what we should know in order to be well-reasoned, leading to much of the madness we all know and love so well. Having landed upon that turn of phrase, I realized that I had finally found a summary of all my various projects, phases and learning experiments. My life–our collective life as a family–has been about closing that gap of essential knowledge, whether spiritual, purely mental or physical in nature.

Canned Kittens and Spider Jewels

Posted on Tuesday 12 August 2008 at 09:28

It's been a good couple of days for adorable and intricate photographs. We've found kittens in unexpected places, rare evening mists, and bejewelled cobwebs decorating absolutely everything this morning. (Click the photos for the larger images.)