Slow going

Slow and sporadic... that's me this week. Other than Water! Water Everywhere!, it's been pretty dull around here. My mother came out in the beginning of the week (actually, I took the train out there and then drove us back - my first time doing long-distance, 75mph driving) to help. It was hot enough, though, that neither of us did much of anything while she was here. The air conditioner doesn't cool much of anything other than the living room which is currently too full of boxes and other stuff to work on.

We did strip some paint in the dining room, which led to the discovery that there's a 4x4 foot area where the plaster's been replaced entirely by drywall. It makes one wonder just what happened to the wall that the POs needed to replace that large a section of it.

I've been cleaning the baseboard heater (pipe and fins only - the surrounds have been taken out entirely due to the stench) in M's room. A number of fins had to be cut through and removed because they'd corroded to the point of not staying in place. This picture:



is not of that section. It is of the cleaner part of the heater. Ah, the scent of urine and corroded metal! mm.

I also primed some of the trim in my room, touched up the bits of ceiling I'd managed to paint purple while painting my walls, and stripped more paint from the trim in the wallway with the heat gun. It might have been the fact that I'd taken my muscle relaxer an hour previously, but I found there to be something strangely (and worryingly) somnorific about using the heat gun.

I've been frustrated about not being able to work on the houseblog (due to laptop death), almost as though getting it in the state I want somehow contributes to the state of the house itself. ...The saddest part in all this is that I do not have a single picture of the house that isn't so crummy that I'm unwilling to use it in a banner. The air conditioner in the front window just adds to the sad, gloomy look of things. (Actually I had a post in progress about the mood/air of the house due to its reject style roof, but, naturally, it was ON MY LAPTOP.) Ah, well...