Author: doug

I took a day off from my regular job today to make progress on the dry room. The rough carpentry is done. The hardest part? Getting all that lumber into the basement! Next up? hanging the door, a little electrical, and plastic-sheeting the walls & ceiling. Once that’s done it’ll actually be usable, though I would like to hang drywall and put down some cheap finish flooring just to make it a little more attractive and durable.

As I feared, I missed the best of it. But I did get to see some nice clouds from the train.

The conditions in our basement pretty much follow the seasons — cold in the winter, damp in the summer. This is to be expected given that it’s a rubble-stone foundation in a 128-year-old house. Still, we store stuff down there so we run a dehumidifier. When the weather is humid or damp, that dehumidifier is easily one-third of our electric bill.

As all of you know, I am working on digitizing family-history photographs. I’ve been thinking about what to do with the originals. We don’t routinely air-condition the house during the summer, so storing them in the living space is not ideal. But they need to leave our dining room in time for Thanksgiving.

So that got me thinking: what if I built a modern vapor-barriered storage closet in the basement, and used our existing dehumidifier to keep it drier than I’m willing to run it now? That would cut our summer power usage dramatically and give me an excellent place for those photos — and all the other moisture-sensitive stuff we’d like to store.

So that’s what I am doing. Today I got as far as the perimeter plate, floor sleepers, and floor vapor barrier. The hardest part so far has been emptying out this corner of the basement of the other stuff we’ve accumulated. The white-painted stud walls already existed, a big part of why I chose this corner.

 

Actually, not at all spicy, are you kidding? Lis has to eat these!

I did, however, make a prime number of meatballs. So I had to eat one so they’d be divisible.

That’s our Gandalf.

 

I’m going to try SCIENCE!

We went out for Italian food this evening, and Lis got the clams. The food was good, but she was especially happy with the pretty little clam shells.

I have a new phone. It has a software zoom that combines sequential frames to boost the resolution of what would otherwise be a grainy photo. The effect is … interesting. It’s no replacement for a real zoom lens but the result is not unpleasant..

….that tastes like BACON and that’s a sandwich from the BACON TRUCK!

(Yes, it was so good I had to take a bite before taking the picture.)

Tonight’s project: we now have a wired doorbell. The actual ringer is not where I wanted it to go, because fishing the wire to its intended location proved too challenging. But it’s done, and it works, and the outdoor part will soon be replaced with a video doorbell.