I am in my 50s, and I have a degenerative joint condition. As a consequence I work 4 days a week at a sit down office job, not five, because sitting in an office chair is painful. This is in stark contrast to my younger years, when I would not only work 5 days a week as a floor nurse, but also do 12-16 hour project days on the weekends. This means that small projects can wreck me for a few days.
With this in mind, yesterday was a nice day, so I pulled out my saw horses and tools, and built a cabinet box for next to the dishwasher.
This was just a gaping hole under the unsupported butcher block counter tops that the shit contractor left. He was paid to make a slide out cabinet but didn’t do the work. This is an ugly cabinet box made of 3/4″ plywood. I plan to paint all the cabinets and I will edge band and paint it when I do the rest. I was mostly concerned about the unsupported heavy butcher block drooping onto my $600+ dishwasher. Now I feel my dishwasher investment is protected, and we will be fine.
While I did this, I also cut up two closet sliding doors that we had to get rid of, so I can slowly feed them into the garbage can.
It also was good practice for using a circular saw guide that you clamp onto the wood. I’d never used any kind of guide before and this is my first circular saw.
I don’t have the most experience with circular saws, because when I was a kid I looked like a girl and my father refused to let me use any tool you had to plug in. I’m mostly self taught with the help of online videos. The guide came with a saw sled, which pretty much all the reviews said was garbage, and they were right. I tossed the cheap plastic thing, and just did my thing without it.
Turns out circular saws are not as scary as I had originally thought. I feel pretty comfortable now. It’s definitely weird going from being treated like a girl, and disallowed all access to the tools to make my life easier, to now not only being given access, to being supported and having other men in stores get excited to walk me through it. If transitioning from female to male ever taught me anything, it’s that sexism around home improvement and gender rolls are pretty damn real.
Speaking of ignoring gender rolls, I also finished sewing the curtain for my work room.
The house came with these thick white blinds. They aren’t terrible, but the cat and I hate the blinds. We lost about 6-7 inches of window at the top of these like you see in my half thought out before picture below.
Below here is an unfairly better taken after picture in which I opened both curtains, and also washed the windows because I noticed how filthy it was.
We will probably always keep the sheers closed because there is a lot of . . . activity across the street and we don’t necessarily need to live in a fishbowl.
I mean, The windows look so much bigger with that 6-7″ of space back. Also, look at that nice new window sill! I did that a few weeks ago, mostly because our cat is fat and can’t get up on there without it.
These projects are all a part of Phase 1 of the house plan. When I get all these little things done, I will deep dive into each room. That means better curtain rods, painted walls and cabinets, and finishing touches. Right now? I am just trying to get things functional and ready for a full launch into next year.
After all this, which I don’t think is much, I spent the rest of the day laying in bed sore as hell. I will probably not do much today either. I have to accept I am not 25 anymore, and pushing my body this hard has consequences. I’d be very kind to anyone else fighting with this, but I always feel like I could have done more.
After I finish writing this, I will probably make some breakfast for the wife and I, and go lay in bed again. Not a bad days plan, overall.
Garden Rat 