My crap Hardwood floors

Why is it that some of us know the right way to do something, but don't do it? Is it being Lazy or is it wanting something so bad we go about it haphazardly? In my case. I know that when sanding hardwood floors, you start with a rough grade of sandpaper, medium grade and then fine grade. Stain the floors and add some polyurethane etc. I didn't do that. Disclaimer: Don't do what I did! You can sand through your floor and fall in! I used this machine. It's a monster. I never used it before . The old floor was gone before I knew it. Some parts were harder than others and took more than one pass. Parts of the floor have small dents in it now. I only used a rough grade and then stained/polyurethane the floors. I did do some what of a fine sanding by hand after the first coat of the polyurethane.
It took a few days for the floor to dry and the smell was getting to me. I'm thinking that I will redo them some other year. I guess the floor is better than before and we can put down some throw rugs. Some times, I'm my own worst critic. Syba seems to like the floor and Eleni loves it. Next time, I will take the time to do it right so I'll like it .

Moving the Outlet & the Closing of Beloved Cafe

As you faithful readers of the sloping house know, I knocked down a wall the other day. In that wall was an outlet that I had to move to another wall. The existing electrical wire wasn't long enough to hook into the new socket, so I had to install a junction box underneathe the house, splice the wire, and attach a longer piece of wire that would reach the outlet.
Here are some basic tools that I used:









The first thing I had to do was drill a hole into the floor so that the wire could come up through it. Then I pulled the wire up through the wall to the new outlet.

Next I attached the junction box (pictured here) and spliced the wires. The code requires that the copper wire, or ground wire, is secured to the junction box. After the wires are spliced, and the ground wire is secured, I twisted each of the two pairs of matching wires together (white to white and black to black) and put the twisted wires inside the covers (red and yellow pictured below).
After this I went upstairs to connect my outlet. Here is the basic outlet box I used upstairs which is used to secure the outlet to the wall.
After cutting a hole in the baseboard for this casing, I ran the wires through the holes in the casing. Then I matched and attached the existing wires together as I explained before. I used my CB tester on this outlet to make sure the polarities were matching the existing outlets and they were. I was concerned about the wires at first because the newer wire looks smaller than the existing wire, but when I tested the gage on the copper they matched up to what they were supposed to be.

Disclaimer: I am not an electrician. I only have a father who was.

If you follow my steps, you may burn your house down. OK, my wife wanted me to say that last statement.

I am sad to say, dear friends, that Beloved Cafe is closed due to a lack of customers. It seems Binge Cafe has reopened and stole all my people.

However, there is some good news. Beloved Binge will be hitting the studio in Atlanta. We're very excited to be recording in analog. We have some new tunes and some that you might know that we'll record. Hopefully we'll be done by the middle of April. I've been playing a lot more guitar these days and Eleni has too.

Beloved Cafe

Hey folks,
I just wanted to show off my new stew. It's all vegan and you will leave the table as full as a if you were at Thanksgiving. I used fresh Carrots, green beans, Braggs, rice and some other stuff. I also made a nice plate of fruit. It was a great dinner. This next dish is what I call Robey Delight. It has a little of this, a little of that and a lot of vegan love. I sound like Bob Ross. How would you like to wake up to this plate. It has tempeh, mushroom, garlic, potatoes and nutritional yeast flakes. Yum!! I know they both kind of look the same. Well I'm off for a bike ride to Whole Foods and Ninth Street.

Dust & Cake

I feel like blogging but I don't know what to blog about, so this will probably be another chapter in useless blogness. This picture here is me after sanding the plaster in the front room (the room where the wall was taken down - see last blog).
Now that the room is opened up, I had to redo some of the plaster by repairing the cracks caused by the house shifting over time. I never really worked with plaster before but it doesn't seem to be too hard once you get the right mixture of plaster:water.
We had to peel off all the wall paper before plastering t0 ensure the cracks were completely filled. Most people would say to knock out all the plaster and put drywall in. I find plaster walls a lot better because they are more acoustically sound, so to speak. They are also less fragile than drywall; these walls were built to last. I don't really care if the walls are completely flat or perfect. I want to spend my life living making music etc. rather than spending my whole life making this the house someone else would like ("marketable"). Not to say that having plaster walls isn't a good selling point. I love all the old charm and craftsmanship put into the house.

Oh yeah. Here I am baking a cake. I also made seitan with ginger/bbq sauce. My wife got mad at me. She was baking scones that were longer than the chesapeake bay bridge, and I asked if they were square, and she started accusing me of not appreciating her efforts to bake all the time then stormed out to lift weights (see our new set below). About 2 hours later she came out and told me to make meals for awhile. The scones tasted fantastic but not as good as my cake:

I don't know what Bingecafe is going to do without any new food. I guess she can copy my recipes.
(wife note: the seitan was like a charred log)
Until next time, from the sloping band house,
NL