As I said previously, I had a few boxes of scraps from the flooring factory. I took them back to LOWES for no trouble return. But since I only get 90 days to return products, i felt the need to open more boxes and see if there are more. I bought 36 boxes. I opened 10 to complete the bedroom including two unusable boxes. That leaves 26 boxes I needed to check.
I opened and checked 11 more boxes and found no additional problems. I will take the risk that maybe one more box is defective in packing.
Overall, I’m very pleased with the product itself and gladly recommend Bruce floors.
These packaging errors are potentially devistating. I bought enough matching products to finish the entire first floor. If I have any more bad boxes, I may not have enough to complete the job. My initial 10% waste buffer is more than enough to not need to replace the two return boxes. The difficult part is the risk that color-style will be discontinued and I fall half a box short.
The bedroom is mostly done. Just need some trim painting, baseboards and touchups and done.
In summary, there is nothing here that was here when I started.
Raised subfloor 2.5″
Replaced plastic plank floor with 3/4″ hardwood.
Removed 4 windows.
Installed interior door where there used to be a wall.
Installed exterior sliding glass door.
Installed pot lights.
Increased insulation from R-18 to R-30 in the ceiling and R-11 to R-18 in the walls including replacing paper vapor barrier with plastic sheet barrier.
Raised ceiling to cathedral style.
All new drywall and paint.
New interior wall between bed and dining room.
3 new electrical outlets, cat6 internet and cable tv hard wired. Room lights and deck lights on 3way switches.
2 new HVAC ducts to bring in ac/heating.
Just a little more touch up and I can move into it. Then I finish up the dining room/office.
Biden announced today the unilatteral withdrawal of US forces from Ass-crackistan by September.
Republican Lindsay Graham immediately denounced Biden.
It is said even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while. This is such a good decision it should have been done every year since 2005. There is absolutely no reason at all for US forces to be there.
Prediction #1: The Taliban will get really quiet until September 11th.
Prediction #2: A few thousand Afghanistan citizens will throw grenades and plant roadside bombs to try to keep America in Afghanistan so the Afghanistan citizens don’t lose their jobs supporting American bases.
Prediction #3: A few ten thousand Afghanistan citizens will be murdered on September 12th. Of course, none of us will hear about it because not even Christian Amanpour will cover things that make democrats look bad. Hint: predictable bloodbaths make people look bad.
What Biden should have done: first negotiate a power sharing arrangement with Taliban with US force withdrawal included. Then it’s an agreement, not “running away”.
But in any case, this is long overdue and welcome news. Republicans are stupid to complain about this.
Republicans should reject democratic party initiatives on almost every topic, but it shouldn’t just be a knee-jerk response. It should be a reasoned response that advances the values our side enjoys.
Unfounded rumor: the only reason Biden is doing this is because he was not cut in on the skim from defense contracts. Drawdowns during the Trump administration severely cut the revenue stream to the point it wasn’t worth protecting. And most of that was going to Hillery and Kerry.
Time to put the bedroom floor in. I chose a 3/4″ solid hardwood from Bruce. I bought enough for the bedroob, kitchen, dining and living room. 36 boxes. Each one hundred pounds, 22 square feet, approx $100 per box.
I started out putting down a plastic/foam/foil underlayment layer. Then laid out the boards from one box and then a second. Then I started nailing them down using my finishing nailer.
This wasn’t working very well so I went to China Freight for a flooring nailer.
This worked much better. The finishing nailer was failing to drive 2/3rds of each nails deep enough to not obstruct from the next board. The flooring staples only failed one out of a hundred and then only when I mis-struck the tool with the provided mallet. In addition, the floor is assembling tighter, looks better and is going together much faster with no bending-stooping.
After 5 boxes of floor installed, I started laying our box number 6 and ran into this:
It’s a whole box of short pieces. Only the top 5 boards are of reasonable useful length in the entire box. This is a total change from the fist 5 boxes. It looks like the Friday afternoon box full of the factory scraps.
So I laid those out and opened box number 7 to see if that was a one-off. The 7th box was just like box 6. Only the top 7 boards are a useful length.
This is insanely difficult for me. I can’t use these. They will make the floor look like patchwork or increase by scrap rate from less than 1% to 70% and make the effective cost increase from $5.50/square foot to over $15/square foot. The first 5 boxes had no more than 4 pieces that were less than 24″ long.
This means I will have to box these back up and take them back for a refund. It also means I will have to open ALL of the other 29 boxes so that if they are similar, they can go back before the return policy at LOWES expires. (90 days). They are too expensive to let it ride.
Makes me wonder why they need a 7 foot long box to contain a box of wood chips.
Here is box #8 for comparison. Only 2 pieces under a foot.
The news this morning is that Prince Phillip, royal consort of the Queen of England, has passed away at the age of 99.
It caused me to wonder to what does the queen owe her own longevity in office. As I recall, my own limited knowledge of British history leads me to believe that the royal prerogative was once worth fighting wars over. But today, they let an old woman carry on until her own peaceful demise, despite the empire collapsing during her reign and her own Island nation being overrun by foreign powers to the point where the mayor of her own capital city is a foreigner.
The answer is, the British monarchy is a powerless sock puppet, emblematic of the UK itself. The second and third families are not fighting wars of succession because there is absolutely nothing left worth fighting over.
It is like in the Mike Myers movie where Dr. Evil demands “ONE MILLION DOLLARS”, and number two reminds him they get far more than that already from their Starbucks stock. Everyone with the power, wealth, and ambition for more are going into other pursuits rather than seeking royalty.
The funniest thing is how generations of royals have rested on the claim of royal blood, even when that only goes back a few generations to the last usurper. Funnier still that they claim divine right, in a nation that is increasingly atheistic (or Islamic). It’s not like the royals have manifestly greater wisdom, patriotism, education, or some sort of magical powers that their kingdom depends on to make it rain. They can’t even command a single dragon to lay waste to the armies of their enemies.
The British royal family is a live action entertainment venue that has zero value to anyone other than Disney.
He has been gone for over a month now and they still won’t let him get off the treadmill.
It’s time to move on. It’s time to rejuggle the lineup and let some of the others have their shot. This unending clip show that has taken over the Rush Limbaugh show is not worthy of him. Let the man rest already. I understand that there is no “next Rush Limbaugh” just as there is no “Next Trump”. That is what life looks like. Some people are easily replaceable and some are not.
I have a Husqvarna 440 chainsaw that I have had for a few years. The thing really works like a champ. The one thing I won’t tolerate in a 2 cycle engine is difficulty starting and I don’t have that problem with this. Even the first start of the season is effortless.
I decided that the weather was nice enough to take a break from drywall and cut down a tree that pissed me off. (Sometimes you have to remind the other trees who is boss). I was doing a fine job of cutting when the sawblade got pinched. Once I freed it up, the chain wouldn’t move. I have pinched the end of the bar and froze up the little wheel in there.
No problem. I went to the local saw bar merchant and bought a replacement 16″ blade and chain set from an off-brand, Oregon. This is a easy swap out that I have done before with no trouble.
Not this time.
The Oregon bar and chain set do not fit my saw. The chain is smaller by at least an inch and that prevents the adjusting lug from engaging on the bar.
You can see, even when it is all the way loose, it is still just a bit off.
So I tried using the old chain on the new bar. Still no joy. If you look really carefully at the round holes where the adjusting lug would engage, the brand name bar has slightly larger holes than the Oregon bar. The difference in the long center hole didn’t matter because the ends of that hole never come into contact with the aligning bolts.
To fix this, I went back to the drawing board and pried on the pinched end of my original bar to pry it open a little and free the sprocket on the end. This worked. I put it back together with the original parts and was back in business.
Adendum: for the benefit of those wondering what a “pinched end” is. It is the tip of the blade, furthest from the motor, or “the end”. “Pinched” is an unnatural condition. Normally it is not pinched. Pinching or compressing seizes the small sprocket sandwiched in the end and prevents the chain from moving.
1. The nation of Japan is run by high school students. And the schools are run by students. The student council president is a very powerful person. More powerful than any adult.
2. Even the armed forces cannot get along without using children to pilot their high tech robots and space ships.
3. High school girls are forced to dress like hookers but boys in the same school dress like professionals.
4. All of the high schools are elite and hard to get into and are highly specialized. They have a special school just for werewolves, another for magicians, another for demon hunters, and more.
5. There are lots of demons and monsters roaming the streets in Japan and people hardly notice them.
6. Japanese kids are extremely durable. They can take a punch, get hit by a car, and get run through by swords and just shake it off.
7. Japanese kids live alone or in dormitories. If they have parents at all, they aren’t very useful.
Social Security is NOT an insurance program. It is a Ponzi scheme. It never “saved” any of your money to pay back to you when you get older. It taxed you when you were working and when you get older it will tax other people to pay you.
Congress didn’t “borrow” anything from Social Security in any sense of the work that works for “borrowing”. It outright took the money and spent it to buy other votes. It has only one way to repay that money. Tax other people even higher, just like they would to pay those old people in the first place. Zero practical difference. It’s a pay when it is due system.
Telling people it was insurance was a con designed to get all those old Boomers and “greatest” generation people to pay into it thinking it was just like working hard and saving, which were virtues they could understand and get behind. But it NEVER worked that way. It was always a charity for non-workers, paid by workers.
I am sure all those old people really believe that they aren’t pitiful objects of charity, but they are. The government taxed their income, spent it, and now will tax geezer’s children and grandchildren’s income to pay the geezer generation. Those old people would NEVER demand payments from their own kids and grandkids, but they will cheerfully demand it from other people’s kids and grandkids because, THEY PAID INTO IT.
You don’t fix a Ponzi scheme by demanding more victims join it. You fix it by accepting it for what it is. Shut it down. Pay the people who are in it with what they expected. Let the younger workers off the hook for the future. Why would any self respecting grandparent demand their own kids join a Ponzi scheme that the old people benefit from?
And since we are just creating trillions of dollars out of thin air now, I see no reason at all why congress couldn’t just pay off the $2.6T without even raising taxes. Just sign a bill and make it so. But don’t put the money into a lock box. Pay it to the beneficiaries and let them do what they will with it.
And stop lying to ourselves that this was ever Insurance.
This sucks. I hate drywall. So much bother. Nothing is as simple as it’s supposed to be.
According to YouTube experts, it shoult take 2 days for a room like this. I’m on day 10 and not even close to painting. Experts say first rough coat to embed tape, then a finish coat. I’m on coat 5 trying to smooth out imperfections and look nice.
I have used three kinds of mud.
The bag stuff is recommended, but I don’t recommend it. Mixing doubles the time it takes to do your project. Then if you don’t mix just right, it’s too runny or too hard or starts to set too soon.
Green bucket “all purpose” premix is nice and thick so it sticks and fills well. But it seems to have a LOT of chunks in it that leave gouges in your finished work.
Blue “dust control” premixed is thinner and leaves a very smooth finish, but that thinness comes at a price. Coat over tape is usually not thick enough to coat it. And on ceilings, it is likely to drop large chunks.
Done right, there should be very little sanding needed. But I must be doing something wrong because my surfaces are nowhere near good enough to paint without sanding.
There is no noticable difference in the dust created between dust control and all purpose.
Drywall screws suck. They often either don’t go deep enough or they go too deep and punch through the drywall. I’m sure that with a few hundred more hours of practice I’ll get them just right. Either way, they create more work to get the surface just right. I’d prefer drywall with a tougher paper surface or screws with a larger head. While we’re at it, redesign the phillips head drywall screw with a torx so it isn’t slipping and stripping exery tenth screw.
Then there is the frame not being straight. So the wall isn’t going to be straight.
I know some people recommend adhesives. As I noted earlier, the old drywall I removed used adhesive on every 2×4 stud, but it didn’t bond anywhere on the drywall. And since I put up large plastic sheet as vapor barrier, adhesive would just stick to that, so it’s pointless.
Flaws in white mud in dim light or even bright light is nearly imposible. I use a bright flashlight shining from the side and then mark the flaws with my carpenter’s pencil. That way i don’t miss them.
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