Three Phil-Days

The wonder of a baby hasn't worn off for Joe. He initially wasn't sure about holding his brother, and preferred the safety of holding Tigger.

Then he suggested that maybe he could hold Tigger and Tigger could hold the baby. But when I suggested that he just try without Tigger's help, he did a great job.

On Saturday, because we had no outside contractors to wait on, we had an excellent day of accomplishment. Phil valiantly fought a migraine brought on by cement dust and polyurethane; he roughly installed the front door (meaning, it is in place, but not shimmed securely and has no handle). It took maybe five hours: sawing multiple boards, shooting them into place, measuring, lifting, waterproofing. But we have an enclosed space now!

I had the boys come for an hour or two. We had paid the drywallers on Friday, so I wasn't surprised that they didn't show up again on Saturday to come and wipe down walls. Of course, they would have had a swiffer mop or something to make that go quickly, whereas we had just a stepstool and some rags so it went slowly. My Mom did the ceilings and tops of walls, while Abraham and Joe did lower parts of walls. Isaiah did that, too, after a time. The little boys picked up trash. Jadon and Isaiah vacuumed. Jadon ran some errands for Phil. Then Isaiah made coffee and Jadon made cookies, and their help was done.

We never did figure out how to wipe down ceilings with piles of boxes underneath. I think we'll need to get some kind of a mop before we paint.

After wiping down multiple rooms, my Mom took care of the baby. He had an impressive blowout diaper that necessitated changing all three layers of clothing (six pieces of clothing, not counting the diaper). We wonder if he has issues with tomatoes, as he was unusually fussy and his tummy appeared to hurt, and we had enjoyed spaghetti the night before. Poor baby.

I dealt with scraping stuff up off the floor, washing away any orange clay marks I could find (which was pretty difficult on parge-coated walls; I'm happy the dogs can no longer access the interior). I vacuumed, too, which was strangely gratifying. The OSB floor showed a clear difference wherever the vacuum went, especially over cracks. In the picture, the lower right has been vacuumed. Perhaps it doesn't look that different, but there isn't standing grey dust on the surface of the floor.

I also put polyurethane in great globs down the sides of the French doors. It was about an inch wide space, and it was a rather disgusting task: black, tar-like goo that somehow needed to be pressed out of the dispenser (which took a surprising amount of hand strength, considering how easy Phil made it look), and then almost perfectly smoothed out. Those two lines probably took me an hour. It was a task that looked like it should have been just a few minutes. Construction is, apparently, just sort of an opposite time warp (everything slows down), no matter who you are.

My Dad was extra-helpful. He was the duplicate Phil and spent hours putting up a second beautiful layer of parge-coating above the windows. We might need to do one more skim-coated layer, but the many thick trowel-fulls are now done.

And then, after Mom and I both went down in defeat over taping columns and windows, my Dad did that, too. When I went to cook dinner, my parents finished all the window taping.

So we are really close to being ready to paint.

But we wouldn't have been without so much good help. That was at least three Phil-days that got finished in one.