I’ve been fighting a cold, which makes me feel grumpy and unmotivated. The other night after work I made some hot lemonade and decided to tackle something fun: sanding the cedar beams from the fireplace.

For some strange reason, Alicia didn’t want me to sand them in the house, so the first order of business was to lug them out to the shop. I moved all but the huge top beam. I’ll need help with that one. I leaned them against a shop cabinet that I still haven’t set up (after ten months of living here).

I bought this cheap belt sander on clearance at Target ten years ago. It’s their store brand, and has never been very good, but it got me through several important projects back in Dallas.

The main problem is all my belts are also ten years old. They snap as soon as you try to use them.

I tried the handyman’s secret weapon, but it didn’t help. It lasted about two times around the pulleys and then came apart. I went through four belts without getting any sanding done.

So I went searching through my boxes and bins, and found my plane. I bought it in Costa Rica in 1992. Tramontina is a good Brazilian brand.

The only problem is, I hadn’t used it in years. The blade had developed a little rust. I decided to try it anyway.

It worked all right, at least to begin with. Did you know that cedar’s natural color is white?

You can really see the sawmill blade’s tracks as you knock off the top of the roughness.

The plane eventually ran into some wood it couldn’t handle and got dull. While I was looking for a whetstone, I found my dad’s belt sander, which I inherited when he died. This is the real deal! Better brand name, wider belt. Most importantly, newer belt! (Although it’s probably at least five years old.)

It turned out to be very effective on that rough wood the plane couldn’t handle. Here you can see the huge difference between rough stained cedar and freshly sanded cedar.

I sharpened the plane blade with a discarded sander belt. Between the plane and Dad’s sander, I got through one upright and the mantelpiece before Alicia got home. I had a wonderful time and didn’t think about my cold symptoms at all. (Maybe sawdust is good for the sinuses.)

Signs of a happy carpenter:  sawdust-covered clothes and a cold beer.

And the next time I went out to the shop…

The problem with tools is they get old. I went out to do more work on the cedar beams, and Dad’s belt sander broke down.

My first thought was that the brushes (carbon contacts in the motor) had worn out. I opened up a port (the little round hole in the case) and saw that the brushes are fine.

So I opened the case (sorry, forgot to take pictures of that process, but it’s a simple matter of removing screws and prying the case apart), and found this. Take a look at those ball bearings.

I took a picture of the plate with the model number on it to look for parts on line.

So I chatted on line with a Sears parts specialist. He’s going to send me the bearings, front and back. But he doesn’t have information on how to get them off. I’ll have to keep searching.

If only I’d worked this hard the whole time my wife has been gone…

I would be nearly done with the downstairs by now.

My brother-in-law Diego showed up around 2:00 Sunday. While I was waiting, I finished disassembling the cedar beams around the fireplace. There were still two uprights, one on each end.

After I removed the last two props, the big cedar beam  remained wedged between the two walls. When I looked close I discovered that on the right it was sitting on a book by George McDonald! I had two ladders ready to prop it, so once I got rid of a toenailed nail on the left and lifted it off the book, it dropped onto the ladders. Diego helped me lift it off when he arrived.

The nails that held it together at the top were hidden behind these huge plugs. When I tapped the nails back out, the plugs popped loose. I will cut them flush when I reassemble it. The finished cedar will look gorgeous.

I put Diego to work priming the family room after we finished removing the cedar beams from the fireplace. I didn’t mind the paneling, but the place looks bigger and cheerier with white walls.

After he got a coat on the family room, he moved on to the dining room. Goodbye, striped wallpaper! I took the baseboards, outlet covers, and a/c grills off before he started.

By the time he left last night, we had a coat of finish paint on the ceiling and walls of the family room, and the dining room and most of the living room had been primed. The wallpaper bubbled up in a few places, so I’ll need to deal with that before I can paint it again. I’ll try slitting the bubbles and gluing the paper down. If that doesn’t work, I’ll cut out the bubbles and mud them smooth.

This is what my kitchen wall tile looked like when I started putting it up.

And this is what it looks like now that it has been grouted. I should have chosen a grayer grout but I was too lazy to try another store.

To give you an idea of the transformation of the kitchen, here are some dishes in the unpainted cabinets.

And these are the same dishes in the painted cabinet on the other side of the kitchen.

The sink side of the kitchen is nearly done. I like the brightness of the room now. The outlets and floor need changing, and the recess where the fluorescent lights are needs to have the seams mudded and some new lights put in.

This recess looks a lot better without the aluminum frame and plastic sheets that used to hide it. We’ll put some nice modern lights in and get rid of the fluorescents.

Saturday morning my brother-in-law helped me tear out all the downstairs carpeting. I’m getting the family room ready for painting. Bye-bye, dark paneling. The tricky part will be the rough cedar pieces that “decorate” the chimney wall. I’d like to take them down and smooth, sand, and varnish them. Cedar can be a gorgeous wood.

I don’t know why anyone would think rough cedar was attractive.

The carpet we tore out was cream colored. However, I found these threads that show the original carpet color back in 1975. Ghastly!

Sunday we start painting the walls. The place is going to look so different…

<p>A friend in Colombia heard this song on the radio some years ago and was entranced. He recorded it on cassette and gave me a copy, which I recorded onto my computer and have uploaded.

We would really like to know who this singer is, and the name of the song. I have searched using phrases from the lyrics to no avail. My guess is that it is from the 1950s or 1960s and that the singer is someone like Doris Day. The composer might be someone who wrote musicals. Those are uneducated guesses; I’m not a musicologist.

If you find out, please let me know.

The lyrics are more or less as follows:

[Unintelligible line]
The dreams I shape, they call to me
There’s no escape, I’m never free
I run and run and when I’m through I run to you.
[Unintelligible] rains that never ends
The summer rains they never end
The sound of larks it never ends
[Unintelligible] parks that never end
Time can’t erase, cannot dispel, that smiling face I knew so well
It was always there as you can guess to bring despair and loneliness
All those I tried to kiss all knew that I’d kissed you
When love was mine the earth was new
and there were things to see and do
When love was mine the skies were too
You’d run to me and I to you
Now it’s small comfort to recall that it is better dear by far
to once have loved than never to have loved at all
When love was mine the earth was new
and there were things to see and do
When love was mine the sky was too
You’d run to me and I to you
Now it’s small comfort to recall that it is better dear by far
to once have loved than never to have loved at all
</p>

I painted the cabinets this week, and decided today to install the tile backsplash before moving all the stuff back in. I went to Floor & Decor and found rough-cut Carrara marble squares for $2 a one-foot sheet! They have occasional green hints that I think will work with the green counter tops.

I started with the back wall by the fridge because it’s awkward to get to. Fortunately it didn’t require any cutting except around the outlet. The trim strip on the left edge is cut from a marble tile. (Sorry, photo is fuzzy.)

Next I started from the window by the sink. This required some cutting around the windowsill and smoothing the corner tile pieces. The edge pieces at the top are strips from a marble tile. You can see how rough-cut the marble is. I normally wouldn’t have chosen it but the price was too good to pass up and I’m selling the house anyway.

I worked back to the corner. Outlets and switches can be simple or tricky, depending on where they are. This one only needed cuts at the top and bottom. The tiles lined up perfectly with the sides of the box.

This outlet, on the other hand, required cuts on all four sides. Sometimes if you’re lucky you happen to have the scraps you need.

When I got to the back corner, I had a gap of not quite half an inch to fill.

To cut strips, you flip the sheet over so the mesh holds it flat. It’s tricky, though; sometimes the marble splits while you’re cutting, and sometimes it sags and your cut ends up angled.

Here’s another view of the sheet on the saw. I invested in a good tile saw some years ago because I did a lot of tiling in my handyman business.

This cut came out well.

Here is the sink corner with the gap filled in with little pieces.

And here is the section of kitchen I tiled today. There are two more sections to do, one this big and one about a third as much.

I’ll need to grout it tomorrow or Monday. I think it will look great.

I confess, I grew up enjoying Neil Diamond’s music. I even had some albums, and of course enjoyed I’m a Believer and other songs he wrote for the Monkees. In my adulthood he’s not someone I seek out, say, on Pandora, but the other day on an impulse I pulled up an ancient concert performance on YouTube and was impressed by the song A Solitary Man.

I like it. It’s lightly written, not sappy, not as pretentious as some of his other songs or performances. I have it on my YouTube channel among the songs I want to sing someday.

I’m not the only one who likes it. Johnny Cash thought enough of it to include it among his American series, and ended up winning a Best Vocal Performance award for it.

Here are the lyrics:
Melinda was mine ’til the time that I found her
Holdin’ Jim
And lovin’ him
Then Sue came along, loved me strong, that’s what I thought
But me and Sue,
That died, too.
Don’t know that I will but until I can find me
A girl who’ll stay and won’t play games behind me
I’ll be what I am
A solitary man
A solitary man
I’ve had it to here being where love’s a small word
A part time thing
A paper ring
I know it’s been done havin’ one girl who loves you
Right or wrong
Weak or strong
Don’t know that I will but until I can find me
A girl who’ll stay and won’t play games behind me
I’ll be what I am
A solitary man
A solitary man
Don’t know that I will but until I can find me
A girl who’ll stay and won’t play games behind me
I’ll be what I am
A solitary man
A solitary man
A solitary man
A solitary man
A solitary man
A solitary man

Last night while I did cardio at the gym, I alternated between tennis and Canadian football on the TV screen. The tennis was evenly matched between two dudes I don’t know, one of whom used a lot more spin than I’m used to seeing in tennis.

The football was fascinating.

It appears that Canadian football involves twelve players on a side. Offensive players can be in forward motion, so most plays involved two or three guys running forward at full speed, with the snap occurring just as they reached the scrimmage line. It looked really cool.

From what I could see, they had only three downs to make ten yards, so punting happened frequently. There also were a lot of fumbles, which may have been a coincidence.

One of the teams was the Montreal Alouettes. What kind of team name is that?! I suspect it’s the league’s equivalent of A Boy Named Sue, chosen to keep the players sensitive and angry. Can you imagine an NFL team named after Head and Shoulders Knees and Toes, or maybe The Hokey Pokey? (Actually Virginia Tech’s team is named the Hokies, which may explain some things.)

In other news, my kitchen cabinets are coming along slow but steady. Last night I primed the backs of the doors, but I didn’t have time to paint them, so that will happen tonight. It looks like the door fronts will need another coat of paint before I can hang them. If all goes well, I’ll be putting the doors back up on Friday night. Then I’ll move everything into those cabinets and start on the other half of the kitchen.

We have decided to put laminated wood floors both downstairs and up. Lowe’s has very nice 30-year laminates for only .99 a foot, far better value than anything at Home Depot or Floor & Decor. The nice thing about laminate (compared to tile) is that once you’ve installed it, you’re done. I can do an average room in 4-6 hours. Tile takes a couple of days and makes much more of a mess.

I do plan on tiling the kitchen, breakfast room, and laundry. Most of that area is currently covered with a brick-pattern vinyl. If I can get the old vinyl up safely, I will. Otherwise I’ll need to float out the edges with thin-set for the transitions to bare floor.

I also plan to install tile backsplashes in the kitchen, and to tile the risers on the stairs (although the pattern will be simpler than what I used in Dallas). There’s nothing like nice tile work to make a house memorable to a potential buyer.

Better get back to work.

Someone selling Oakley sunglasses.

This place is barely born and the buzzards are already here…

And I’m one of the first to post on it!

But it looks an awful lot like WordPress. I’m curious to see what it has that WordPress doesn’t.

I don’t see a way to modify my font yet.

Are we going to have themes, as in WordPress, or will we be able to format text as with a word processor?

What do ul ol li mean?

So much to learn and discover. But I’m glad Xanga’s back.