My bedroom.

Here’s the current state of the apartment.  A lot’s changed over the past two years.  And there’s so, so much more to do.

I had to decide between cleaning and taking photos while the sun was still out.  You can see the beginning of the kitchen/bathroom wall going up on the left.

I was at an auction last fall, and got sort of carried away with buying things I didn’t need for cheap.  It took a while to realize that it didn’t matter if it was 50¢, I still didn’t have a good use for an antique surveyors transit.    But at long as I have one, I might as well make a lamp with it, eh?

Here’s the most recent design of the building.  Google Sketchup’s a fantastic tool.

The Closets are going up.

Living room.

It’s amazing how much rubble you can create with just a hammer and a certain amount of determination.

Back when the building was a hardware store, they had, unsurprisingly enough, a good bit of hardware.  Screws, nails, twine, horseshoes, poultry anti-cannibalism salves—all the necessities of daily life.  Now, some hardware stores owned by less clever people dealt with this menagerie of goods through random piles or unlabeled boxes. These, however, are also the sorts of people who built their hardware stores out of wood, or even straw.  My hardware store, however, was made by the sorts of clever people who build of brick, and besides fully-wolf-proofing all doors, they quite cleverly built in shelves and drawers.   Hundreds of drawers.

Now, if you’ve looked at the pictures of the store, you haven’t seen these drawers.  There’s a reason for that:  as an retail store, drawers are far less useful.  Going into a  store and having to open drawers to see the goods for sale turns out to give 43% of the population flashbacks of finding underwear in the morning, and it’s a very select group of retail establishments where that particular impression is good for business.  So when the previous owners took over the store, they removed all the drawers and used them as shelving.   
Thankfully, they were antique dealers, so they never threw anything away.  (Please see the previous story about the three truckloads of empty cardboard boxes for examples.)  All the drawers are currently stacked on shelves on the second story, waiting to be re-installed.  The only problem is the previous-previous owners.

At this point, a digression to avoid confusion:  The previous owners ran an antique store.  The previous-previous owners ran an auto parts store.  the previous-previous-previous owners ran a hardware store.   the previous-previous-previous-previous owners are lost to history, but one can only assume they did something nefarious, like ran a brothel & funnel-cake establishment.  Or nothing.   History does not indicate.  But.  Back to the current story.

The previous-previous owners, in a misguided attempt to prettify the store, painted all the drawers the exact shade of dirty grey used by prisons and mental health institutions to erode the human soul.  Why they thought this was an improvement is unknown, but the excuse that it was the early ’80s has been made. I, however, am less fond of the colour choice, so I have been trying to remove the paint and get it back to the raw wood underneath.

There are many ways to remove paint.  The easiest, and the one that I’ve apparently been using in my upstairs apartment, is to wait a hundred years or so.  This, however, is slightly impractical, give my desire to begin refinishing the wood before 2080, so I decided to try chemical strippers.

Chemical strippers are a collection of all the worst sorts of poisons and acids and nasty bits poured into a jug.  If you’ve ever seen Roger Rabbit, you know the stuff I’m talking about.  You pour it onto paint, and 20 minutes later the paint has been replaced with something the consistency of fresh bird droppings, but even more toxic.  You can only use it while wearing goggles, and respirators, and thick rubber gloves…and it still doesn’t do a very good job.   And it makes a terrible mess, since all the liquified paint gets all over everything.  I managed to do exactly one drawer this way, and then I gave up.  Partially because it was so nasty, and partially because I ran over my rubber gloves with the lawn mower, seriously decreasing their effectiveness.

The second idea I had was to use sandpaper.   This actually works, but it takes forever.   The wood of the drawers is pine, so it’s not very hard, so I can’t use an aggressive sandpaper, and more passive sandpaper just fills up with the stupendously thick coats of paint they used.  I managed to do three drawers this way, but it took about an hour a drawer.

It didn’t seem practical to spend an entire month sanding drawers, so I decided to try something more drastic, but reading Sartre to the drawers was equally ineffective.
A blowtorch, though, turned out to work like magic.  If you blowtorch the paint, it both melts and catches fire, and then you can scrape the flaming paint off the drawer, leaving the wood underneath almost completely untouched.   A light sand, and you’ve got a drawer ready for staining, sealing, and re-installing in less than 10 minutes.  This does mean that you have to make sure that the flaming paint doesn’t catch anything else on fire, but having a fire extinguisher on hand means that’s a small price to pay for such convenience.  And as an added bonus, having a blowtorch handy will help me deal with any wolves that decide to drop in.

It’s been almost a year since I’ve written anything, for good reason—I’ve been away for a year, doing this and that, one thing or another…No, I haven’t been in jail.  That’s not even funny.  I’ve been in Canada, which is completely unlike jail.  For example, it not overcrowded.  Also, jail doesn’t have Tim Hortons (for good reason, or the rates of recidivism would skyrocket).

However.

The first order of business on my return was to look over the building and make sure that nothing significant had changed.  And at first glance, it appeared to be as I left it—the paint was still peeling on the front stoop, the windows in the back were still smashed, the chirping of little bat voices still resounded through the back rooms. Something, though, felt off.   Something had changed.   At first, I thought it was the fact that the roof wasn’t leaking, but the blue skies and sunshine meant that was normal.  I thought that it might be the Bigfoot behind the front window, but that was just me and my West Coast Beard reflecting in the plate glass. I figured it was probably just my latent paranoia, but then I looked down and noticed an ugly grey plastic box, poorly screwed directly to the wood of my 130 year old facade, smack dab in the center of the building.

The back story of this box is as follows:  About a year ago everyone in Emlenton get a flier tacked to their door, saying that we were no longer allowed to wash our dishes, or brush our teeth, or drink our tap water.   Apparently the little independent water company had neglected such things as changing the filters or testing the water long enough that the water was full of microbial agents—rumor has it that the existing filtration configuration was a single Brita filter and an ice cream bucket.  We gave him a week to fix it and…he didn’t fix it.  And then we gave him another week and…he didn’t fix it.  About six weeks later, the government stepped in, fined him something like half a million dollars, and gave the entire company to Big Water Corporation, Inc.  Which just goes to show that sometimes you shouldn’t support your local businesses, at least not when they’re infecting you with cryptosporidiosis.

Big Water apparently decided that the water meters Lil’ Water had been using weren’t good enough, so they decided to replace all of the meters in town with brand new Fancy Dancy Radio Transmitters. This meant they no longer had to deal with the agony of tromping around in people’s basements, wading through cobwebs and broken lawn furniture. Now they could just drive their (allegedly) unmarked vans down the street, picking up the radio signals and measuring water consumption, 1984 style.  Which is fine with me, since (a) I don’t use much water and (b) I have radio transmitters in my basement measuring the consumption of (allegedly) unmarked vans.

However, for reasons that I don’t fully understand, they decided that they would install the radio transmitter outside my building.  Which seems to defeat the entire purpose of having a radio transmitter—that being that radio transmitters can broadcast through walls without needing holes drilled for them.  This was apparently unknown to the installers, as they wired up the new meter, drilled a hole in my floor, then a hole in my wall, and then screwed a box to the outside of my building holding a radio transmitter.
I suppose that the fact that my building, with the exception of the facade, is made entirely out of brick and stone means that it might be hard for radio waves to transmit from the outside; however, if you’re going to mount a box, for heaven’s sake, do it in the corner, or at the bottom, or somewhere where it’s not a horrible ugly nasty eyesore.  It’s not like it would even be that difficult to do—the entire basement is open, and you’d just have to run your wire an extra 20 feet across the exposed timbers of the basement.

I think that it’s time for me to exercise my little-used complaining skills and call to object.  It’s probably as good a way as any to celebrate my return to America.