A damsel with a dragon

I continue to cough to an absurd extent so today I got as far as the backyard. The backyard, as it happens, was quite rewarding. Not only did I get to watch Shoddy work on the old wooden gutter, I picked enough raspberries to make a raspberry tart. Then this lovely fellow dropped by:

Housiverary 2017 report

Scott notes that I am always blue when I'm sick, and I've been sick for some days now so maybe it's not surprising that I am particularly aware of how pointless and self-indulgent blah de blah blah is when people are being run over or shot or beaten with baseball bats or hell, all of the above. It's an ugly world. It's not right.

And yet I know that some time from now I'll want to know what we did for Housiversary in 2017 and I'll hope to find out by looking at this dusty old blog so I shove all that social consciousness to one side (Cue "Reconstruction Site") and post some photos from this year's adventures.

"Before" shot (midday June 15)

Figuring that this would be about the last year either of us would feel equal to the labor, we opted to finish drywalling the upstairs now, which project included shifting twelve 4x8 sheets of half-inch (because Scott thought we'd never manage the 5/8-inch stuff) drywall from the garage, where Alki Lumber delivered it (along with 4 lengths of 2x4 and a couple of pounds of drywall screws), to the upstairs. The corners are too tight to move it via the inside so we carried it around the house, through the back door, did some fancy 3-point turnings in the kitchen, and then shimmied it up the narrow staircase. Twelve times. In the rain. (Fun fact: this is the first housiversary that has been seriously wet.) It actually went more smoothly than I, for one, anticipated.

 Before we even started moving the drywall I realized I was coming down with something and warned Scott that he'd have to tell me things several times over. I feel it's best to make that sort of thing clear from the outset. Just as he made it clear that the first couple of full sheets placed overhead were going require us to balance the sheets on our heads while climbing ladders. It wasn't until the next day that he told me he had been worried about one of us slipping and us both having our necks broken. Sometimes honesty is good, and sometimes it's best to keep one's mouth shut.

"After" view (after = late on the 16th)

That part went surprisingly smoothly, happily, and while there were some measuring and cutting challenges, and I found it particularly difficult to "lean in" sufficiently while driving in about a million drywall screws, we managed to transform close to all of the sheets into walls. Oh, there's a ton of mudding and taping in our future (unless I can get Scott to agree that we should just stencil "A P O L L O  9" onto one wall and pretend we've deliberately created a space capsule because, by gum, that's what it looks like), but that's certainly not in the immediate future.

We have, unfortunately, a lot of small bits and pieces of drywall left over that I can't see anyone being able to use so I guess it's the drywall recycling in Renton for us some Saturday morning.

 Here (left) Scott is carefully measuring the final space to be filled. (I use "final" somewhat loosely; there's still a large triangular hole for which there is only wood along the hypotenuse (at the bottom); Scott says he has a clever scheme for dealing with that. Me, I'm thinking about curtains.)

 Order is partially restored, meaning I've vacuumed up the worst of the drywall dust and detritus and shifted the Proudfoot Archive back into its corner (a project that was all but derailed when I found the packet of photos that included Ray, age two and a half, in what was supposed to be a dog suit. He looked like a deranged Easter Bunny). Now, when one looks up the stairs, one sees this:

It warms my heart, truly it does. Happy Housiversary, you beautiful old house of Aurora! We love you!