For the love of Rigger boots
Any reader of this blog must get mighty sick of me trumpeting how hard I worked this or that weekend. Well this weekend I worked harder than any other weekend I’d ever worked. I mean dead flipping blinking bloody real unrelentingly literally hard.
Barely looks like it, but I did do a bit of work.
I’d taken the Friday off and this gave me a good two day swing at getting things moving, so in my ignorance I made a deal with myself. Do lots of work on Thursday evening when I get in from work and I’ll reward myself with a trip to the coast, a run along Seaton seafront (see this is what I do for pleasure), a trip to my folks for a visit and a shower there followed by a trip to the movies to see “The Martian” and afterwards jump in the car and spend the rest of the Friday working on the house.
Not a bad plan.
I got in from work, donned my overalls in double quick time and sure enough I worked the night through on the house. I basically didn’t break for anything, I pressed on without food, munching down on yoghurt bars washed down with Coke till I stopped at midnight and a half.
I got into bed and before clocking out for the evening I did a bit of time-base analysis on my planned day of rest. Basically it worked out that I’d have to get out of bed at six in the morning and by the time I got back from the flicks it would be well after three in the afternoon, so it would essentially make my Friday disappear and no significant work would get done that day.
I decided that I couldn’t afford that day off and pressed on with the house for the full Friday. An 8:30 start culminating in a midnight plus minutes finish.
The next day was much of the same, I treat myself to a Chinese at the end of the day before restarting again to work into the wee hours. Note to self, if you go to the Chinese after a day on the tools, make sure to check oneself in the mirror before venturing out. Turns out my face was rather covered in black fingermarks the most notable being a rather dictatorial toothbrush moustache under my nose. Not good and no-one said a word too, which was even more disturbing.
Anyway what did I get done?
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On the work front I got the sub-floor finished – well I’m within a breath of finishing it as I still have to insulate the cover over the air vent – this is something I had to get done, I’d been promising to finish this for weeks and it needed sorting out once and for all.
In order to get it done there were many other tiresome little jobs that needed ironing out first. I decided to tackle these first rather than doing them while undertaking the fitting of the plywood subfloor. I hated doing these jobs, but just grinning and bearing it and suffering for an evening and a bit and I managed to get them out of the way. These jobs were nasty little items like routing the cable for the cooker, routing the ring main, insulating all the pipework and clearing between the joists.
I’d planned all these niggly jobs in advance, but there were a handful more that just leapt out and created their own time slips. I found that in one corner near the door there was single joist that was millimetres out of whack with the rest of the room and this meant lifting it with teeny bits of packing. This packing up also meant I had to saw bits off the bottom from the door casing of the door leading into the utility room, not a job I’d like to do again in a hurry.
There was also a bit of gluing of panels to concrete, particularly on the old hearth and the main door into the back porch. All this needed to be done before I could press on with the insulating and the flooring.
Anyway once this was all out the way it was a long but nice job to roll out the insulation, hey make sure to wear a dust mask kids, not like I didn’t… cough. I did catch on quickly though.
Once the piles of insulation were now in place – using the 170mm Knauf Ekoroll I’d bought the other week – I then got to panel the rest of the room out with the Spruce plywood.
Spruce plywood is not the nicest material to work with but it’s cheap and it’s structurally accredited for flooring purposes. Some of the angles were particularly wibbly, but armed with a jigsaw, a good rule, a pencil and a bit of skill I was able to make a good fist of flooring out the room. Close enough for rock and roll, it wasn’t perfect but it didn’t need to be, the tongue and groove would cover up all the little faults.
I think this weekend I learned my limits, as the next day I visited my folks with my daughter and spent some time snoozing in an armchair. Nothing strange about that but there was a point where my folks couldn’t wake me up, I was that far gone.
It’s good though, I’m now happy to work that hard and working with tools holds no fears – touch wood – if it’s a job that needs a jigsaw, then it’s a job where I use a jigsaw, nothing unusual, no fanfare, just a job where I plug in the jigsaw and carve out some wibbly lines.
I look at the initial video of me pulling out that first fireplace with a crowbar – I know I’ve mentioned this before – and there’s some cack-handed arse sticking his bum out while picking at the fireplace gingerly with a too-large tool.
I like to think I’m better than that now, I now feel deserving of the tools I own. Sure I don’t measure up to a seasoned joiner or builder but I don’t feel out of place wielding a claw hammer, or sawing a piece of timber with a nice Spear and Jackson Predator. I feel assured that don’t look like an Eastenders actor pretending to be a contractor strangling a hammer, I think I’m now in the foothills of builderdom.
Sad to say but on a recent visit to Screwfix I got excited by a pair of Rigger Boots and I nearly swooned at a pair of work trousers fitted with a hammer holster. Cor blimey, I really do need to get out more.
The irony of working on Friday and not going to the movies was I had the pleasure of listening to the Friday afternoon movie review show by Simon May and Mark Kermode. They not only reviewed The Martian but proclaimed it to be rather excellent…. I really do need to get out more….
Anyway I don’t care as I now have a rather lovely family room sub-floor, complete to almost a hair-width of completion. Despite the hard work I loved it too, maybe I still love the misery.