michaelruby

Spontaneous planning

Recently, I read about two services that would work very well together when you’re trying to organize a group of people who make use of disparate internet tools. Let’s say 5 of your friends use facebook, but someone else only uses yahoo calendar (why they would do such a thing is beyond me) and 3 others use google docs. The only unique identifier you have for these people is an email address. With meet-o-matic for scheduling and TinyChat for a disposable chat room, you’re well on your way to getting everyone together for a little face time.

Mineral Spirits

If you ever plan on refinishing hardwood floors in your home be warned of the following two things be cognizant of the following:

• you’ll be left with a lot of dust
• don’t clean it with mineral spirits

We put the hard in hardwood.

Sanding hardwood floors was not quite as easy as I thought it would be. I’d also like to mention that installing new flooring is actually easier than refinishing old flooring. Who would have thunk it? Apparently, when your floor is old, slightly warped, and covered in paint and residue a 36 grit sand paper simply won’t suffice on a first pass. The subsequent 40, 80, and 120 grit papers helped a little, but next time I’ll start with the coarser 20 grit for maximum wood removal. Lesson learned. Now to touch up a little with a handsander… :(

How many roofers does it take…?

For the past month or so we have been looking into buying a house.  Let me rephrase that…  For the past month or so we have been looking into buying “A” house.  Yes, that’s right, a, as in one, as in more than zero and less than two.  Recently the reason for the delay has been a disagreement over an old, dilapidated roof.  At issue is a large pile of bricks perched precariously a top with nothing to support them whatsoever.  It’s quite funny actually.  There used to be chimney, but someone thought it would be smart to leave everything above the roof and everything below the floor while removing all the unnecessary, load-bearing, junk in the middle. Yikes!  Oh, and not one but two roofers already told the seller that the whole monstrosity needs to be re-tarred and shingled.  So, what is the bank with too much inventory and not enough time to do?  Ask for a third opinion of course!  Wow.