Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1411
A weekend of working in earnest on the attic studio.
Hello hello hello. Monday. Late school start. Jane is still home. She is playing Cities Skylines next to me. We skipped breakfast today, she wants to eat it at school. That would be amazing if we could make this a routine. Fingers crossed.
Snow and ice this weekend. It wasn’t the fun kind of snow, it slowly turned into frozen rain and the snow got covered in a layer of ice. Everything got covered in a layer of ice. Couldn’t get the truck doors open, couldn’t get the EV charger out of the truck. It was an adventure.
On Friday Jane and I braved the ice, with full traction control and four-wheel-drive activated, to go to McDonld’s, where we were accosted by an old man who made us watch the video for “Hang on Sloopy” on his phone. I think it was the McCoy’s version. It was a shockingly sexy video. Ah yes. I have found it. It was indeed the McCoys:
He really liked that video. Really needed a father and daughter at a rural McDonald’s to know this.
He also spent a lot of time accosting a DoorDash driver who patiently explained to him how DoorDash worked while… not delivering his phone. I thought of the person, somewhere in my rural county, who paid a 200% markup to get McDonald’s delivered at 8 AM on a Saturday and… I decided they were probably going to have an awesome day.
We are working on the To Investigate playlist today. We’re listening to Anders Parker, one of the masterminds behind one of my favorite bands, Space Needle. Back in the day I gave Anders’ post-Space Needle work a bit of a listen — starting with Varnalaine through his first solo album in 2011, Songs in a Northern Key. But I sort of lost track, nothing by him or his Space Needle compatriot Jud Ehrber matched their soaring heights. But I am older and wiser these days, Anders has made eleven more solo albums in the intervening 20+ years, so we are checking a few of them out. We’re also gonna give Varnalaine another chance and apparently Reservoir, one of Jud’s projects, has an album I did not ever listen to. On it.
Due to additions thanks to my internet reading and friends texting me albums I gotta check out, despite making a good dent this weekend, the “To Investigate” playlist remains 44 hours long.
Most of the weekend was spent working on the attic studio at chore house. We are still getting set up, constantly realizing things we need to move up to the new workspace. Got a nice work counter set up, shelves and hooks for all the tools, a little workspace for Jane. Put moving blankets on the walls in the stairway, RAM board on the floor, pipe insulation on the wall corners so nothing gets banged up over the next year or two. Got a giant industrial tubtrug to lug out the OSB I am tearing up from the floor. I have resigned myself that nothing on the current subfloor is going to be reused. This is sad but also freeing.
The current task is to pull up the current subfloor — which is attached with giant nails and polyurethane glue and is a total pain to remove. Then we pull up the existing fiberglass insulation — because the attic is now within the heated envelope and it is not needed and it does not deaden sound. It is then replaced with Rockwool Safe N Sound, three layers for nine inches total.
Then we have to deal with the wiring that is just laid upon the floor of the attic: it can’t stay where it is, because there will be new subfloor on it and you can’t press wires underneath wood. So then we have to notch the joists. I am using a Dewalt palm router for this, with a 1/2” straight bit, carving small grooves into the rafters. I checked code and you can make grooves in rafters that are less than 1/6th the depth of the rafer (rafters are 12”, my grooves are 1/2” so we are good there) and they cannot be in the middle third of the rafter — we are good there. Then we have to nail little strike plates onto them so that when you’re putting the subfloor down you do not accidentally nail or screw into the wiring.
The whole thing is insanely tedious. I now have gotten about seven bats of Safe N Sound into the floor. Each bad covers about 25 square feet of the attic when you’re using it at triple thickness.
I then dragged my first panel of OSB up to the attic and… it did not go well. This is something I have been stressing about since this project was first conceived: the massive amount of sheet goods I need to bring to the attic. There is no way to easily do this. You have to bring them all up the winding stairway. If this were a quick construction I could conceivably remove one of the windows and rent a crane and bring everything up that way but that is not realistic for us for a host of reasons: the floor needs to be completely redone before I can move to the walls, the floor has several layers, and one of those layers is (probably) going to be lightweight gypsum concrete, so there would be nowhere to put the material. There is no good crane access even if I could remove the window. Etc. etc.
I also have this absolute neurosis that I want to do as much of this project all by myself as possible. There are parts I cannot do myself – plumbing, electrical — but everything else, I want to do with my own hands. I MIGHT, at some point, have a dude party where I invite all the dudes in the neighborhood over and do a bucket-brigade-style chain of people moving material up to the attic. But I think I will save that for the drywall?
Because after moving a single 76-pound board up to the attic by myself, well, not super into doing that 40 more times. It’s fine moving it horizontally — I have a special Kreg sheet-goods moving jig that is really wonderful. But getting them up the stairs? Nearly impossible.
Furthermore, actually pulling up the current floor was a pain in the ass. I had worked out that I would use my “turkey saw” — a 4.5” Dewalt barrel-grip circular saw — with the blade depth set to 23/32” to saw the current OSB into smaller, manageable chunks. That worked great. Then removing the part between the rafters, no problem. But prying up the glued down, overly-nailed pieces on the joists, well, that is a pain the ass. People with nail guns, man. They go so gung ho with nails. A single foot might have three nails. It was slow going.
SO, given all that, after two solid days of work, I got one new sheet down. I was very proud of myself. BUT, at that rate — one sheet a weekend – it would take me nearly a year just to get the firs two layers of the floor in. And the floor has eight more layers! Never mind the rest of the build. I mean, I would do it — I am loving this journey. But, you know, I would like to use my studio in, oh, this decade.
It also doesn’t help that I am a neurotic cleaner of my workspace. Vacuum constantly. Keep the dust down. Wipe things down. Keep my tools organized. It takes time, but, you know, safety first. Except I am not doing it for safety reasons I am doing it for compulsive reasons.
BUT the good news is, last night I had two epiphanies after working on this all weekend:
1) I was watching the Perkins Builder Brothers and a plumber told them they had to move a joist in a house they are currently building, that is completely framed and enclosed. And it was a pain in the ass, to be sure, but the techniques they used gave me an inspiration: don’t pry up the OSB, use a Sawzall and cut through the nails and glue. It will be so much quicker. Very excited about this.
2) I have accepted that I will need to saw my 4’x8’ OSB boards to 4’x4’ before carrying them upstairs. I was not psyched about this, because the only way I could think of to do this without measuring every single one was to use the table saw, and my table saw is just a little portable one, no outfeed table, etc. So then I went down the path of dreaming up an outfeed table, using my BORA portable table or something. It was getting insanely complex. But then I had an epiphany: no. Just make a 4” marking jig out of 2×4’s, then buy a 3” thick 4’x8’ sheet of rigid foam. Throw the foam on the floor. Drop each OSB piece right on the foam. Use the jig, mark the halfway line. Cut it with a circular saw or the track saw. Each piece should take less than a minute. I can batch as the boards arrive.
SO. I am sore all over, we encountered some pretty serious setbacks on weekend 1 of real attic work, but I am still jazzed, one week of work did not make me lost interest in the project (which happens!). And I think I have found a way to work around my setbacks.
Here’s to the next weekend.
While picking up supplies for work this weekend at the hardware store, Jane wanted another one of the Lowe’s Harware Kid’s Projects kits. She bought a castle. She sat at her little new workbench in the attic with her pink toolbox caddy I had made for her earlier, and got to work hammering on her project. Eventually, at one point in the project she got frustrated with hammering. Just so angry. I kept telling her to take a break and just think about it and sometimes we need to stop and think about our projects, while I am trying to single-handedly bring a 76-pound board up the stairs solo.
I should have taken my own advice. Because the thinking, that’s half the project.
Moody and quiet playlist for you today. Good to finally be catching up and making more of these.
Take care, love you, talk tomorrow.
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Thanks for reading.
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Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.