cellar dweller
noun
: a last-place team : a team with the worst record in a league, conference, etc.
This time, I wasn't last, but I did spend the day dwelling in the cellar. In fact, I did 16,000 steps with 95% of them spread between three rooms in the basement, due to a bit of an expected, but forgotten surprise.
It was meant to be a pretty long, but easy day painting, and it started off well. After sealing the stairs with a thinned coat yesterday, I cut in by brush and then rolled the stairs with the top coat. After it was done, my wife happened to walk by upstairs and poked her head down adding, "It looks good, it was a great colour you chose" - which must have been hard for her to say, because she wanted dark grey.
It is now going to look like an art gallery.
So after doing the stairs, (which means we can only get in to the basement via the garage now), I was feeling pretty good about the rest of the day, and went on to tape some walls before moving to the laundry/ heating room to move out as much as I could. There are a couple things that I can't get out of the room by myself, so it is going to be done in two parts. I would seal the entire floor, and then paint the edges with the washer and dryer and a couple cupboards in the middle of the room. Once the floors are dry, I will move them back in place and then final coat the middle of the room, where we don't need to walk for a while.
That was the plan.
However....
What I failed to remember was just how bad the concrete in that room is, and it has also been painted over with some old (dark green) paint, that was flaking and taking the top level of the concrete off. So before I could really do anything, I had to get down on my hands and knees and scrape almost the entire room with a putty knife. And then once (most) of the paint was off, I had to sweep, and vacuum continuously, because the concrete just keeps on crumbling away to dust. Eventually, we have to dig up the entire floor in the basement and redo it, but it is insanely expensive to do, so painting should be a good enough stop-gap measure until we win the lottery.
But instead of a couple hours to do the room, it took me an extra five just to get it to a passable condition to seal it. And then, because the floor is in such poor condition, I couldn't roll it in most areas and had to get down on my hands and knees again with a brush to get sealer into the depressions.
I now have the knees of a cheap hooker.
It is going to be far from perfect, but hopefully good enough to last a few years. But, because it took so long to do the room, I couldn't get anything done on the garage side at all, which means that is going to have to wait until later in the summer. Which is a pity a bit, but also acceptable perhaps. If I had done it today, I probably would have rushed it and cut corners, because I was already starting to let that "laziness" creep into my work. But we are on a time limit with part of this due to schedules, so there is "must haves" on the list. The garage was not a must.
But it has been since last summer that I have worked like a dog like this, and it feels pretty good, though also not great. Tomorrow morning I will be at it again, but hopefully now that it is sealed, after a sweep to get rid of any more loose gravel, I hope that the painting part will go as smoothly as it did with the stairs and in a week from now, we will be able to use it lightly. And if it looks like I have imagined it to look, I think it will be pretty nice for a space that has been neglected for forty years, at the cost of a few hundred euros in paint and a lot of sweat equity.
Now for some recovery.
Taraz
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