Attic stairs installed!

These make me deliriously happy:


The thing is solid as a rock, particularly compared to the rickety ladder I climbed up and down on a million times to build this. In the final steps I had some very welcome help from Michelle who helped hold the step ladder and her husband Scott who nailed in the temporary straps in the attic while I held the permanent ladder assembly up over my head. I finished up the last of the nails and basked in the glory of a completed project. Well, at least the really hard stuff is done. There's still a nice frame to go around the edges, and the floor boards in the attic to nail down.

I found something neat at Home Depot: it's a motion detector that screws into the light bulb socket. I used that in the attic to save a little wiring work, and it makes a better solution. I stumbled across an odd frustration though. In the attic there was a little plastic junction box, apparently unused. I check on the nice bare wires that were sitting in it. Of course they were live. Seriously, the electricians who worked on this house need to be kicked in the jibblets.

Attic excavation

This is the space I'm doing all this work to claim:

Here you can see the original timber which blocks the new attic stairs from fitting. The little boards to the left and right are there to keep it from falling through and clonking me on the head when I cut through the dry wall that it's nailed to. The jagged scar in the dry wall just south of that is between the original timber and the beam I'm replacing it with.

I've also had a nice bike ride and watched Shrek 2 with Zoe today. With that and leftover Thanksgiving stuff and raspberry dunkelwiesen for lunch, it's been a good day!

Building an attic

So yesterday I had my first major foray into really changing the landscape of my house. I've been trying to excavate the space over the garage and create an attic out of it since there's about 300 square feet of usable storage up there. The builders didn't think we needed access to any of that, though they timbered it like it had to be bomb proof, so it can support enough weight. There's not much wiring or HVAC to get in the way over the garage so the space you get is far more open and usable than the upstairs attic.
I picked up an attic stair kit at Home Depot, and went for the beefier one, since the light weight ones could barely hold me, and the point of this is for me to be able to carry things up there. Unfortunately the beefy stairs are wider than the space between the beams, so I spent a lot of time yesterday sistering up one of the beams and holding my breath while I cut the original out. It worked great.
The flooring I picked out was chip board, and it comes in 3/4in X 5ft X 6ft. I tried to lift that up into the attic on my own but the sheets are too heavy and too long- they hit the roof timbers before you can get them all the way in. It took me a lot of grunting and straining and some of Stef's help to figure that out.

The rest of this Thanksgiving weekend will be pretty busy. Things to do: build a floor for the attic, take a bike ride, wire in a new switch and lights in the attic and the garage, write a paper of the Knowne World Handbook, help Zoe with her science experiment, polish my leg armour and mount brass on the edges.

Speeding

People who don't drive at least the speed limit under normal conditions really bug me. Like it's physically painful for me to drive near them. I'll cut a little old lady some slack if she's doing 60 in the slow lane, but if she's doing 65 in the fast lane it drives me nuts. My blood pressure goes up and I start spinning crazy stories in my head about how she must sleep with goats. I've been using my cruise control a lot lately, and it makes me more sensitive to the speeds other folks drive, since if they're not consistent I have to do more to adjust, rather than just move my foot a little differently. I'm not really a speed demon myself- haven't gotten a speeding ticket since about 1994, and I generally don't go much more than 10MPH over the limit (unless it's a stupidly low limit). But that 10MPH difference means a lot to me. Really, why would you only drive 65? Is there a warrant out for your arrest? Dead hooker in the trunk?

Zoe reading

According to the public school system Zoe should just be starting kindergarten this year. We were just hanging out this morning when she read one of Stef's medical texts to me.