garage – Page 3 – turtle + mole

Taking shape

Arwen just loves climbing into bags…

Phew! It’s been a long haul, but I’m starting to get drywall up. That gives some shape to the space:

Getting drywall on the ceiling, and the insulation up, was a major effort. Holding a 4ftx8ft piece of drywall over my head, by myself, while screwing it in was hard enough. But there are no 90 degree angles in this place, so every measurement seemed to be off and I had to lift it into place to test fit multiple times. Ugh.

The “before” photos would have been daytime…

Insulation…

In the toilet room (above right), I added wood into the wall behind where the sink will be (so I have something to screw into).

This is the same view with purple (moisture resistant) drywall installed.

This is looking at the doorway into the toilet on the right, and the door into the garden room on the left.

It’s actually looking like a ‘garden room’…

And the rain continues here in California: We’ve started using the garden room as a workout room. I bought a trainer and mounted my bike to it. Mole even tried it last week – we’re still not very familiar with bike trainers, so it’s been a bit bumpy (but not as bumpy as all the crashes on wet pavement I’ve been having lately).

Headroom is a big problem in this space: there’s none. A big duct runs from the furnace to the outside wall for the kitchen above. I have to walk under this duct. After I hit my head two or three times, it’s usually enough for me to do something about it. I changed the duct from round to flat and thin, so there’s just enough room for me to walk under it without losing more of my remaining limited supply of brain cells.

Here’s the duct installed. You can see bare studs around that will soon have drywall on to make walls…

More views of the space between the garden room and the garage…

Above left is the state of the slab in this space. Needs some work. Above right I’m getting drywall on the “garage back room” (between the garage and the garden room).

The green drywall is also moisture resistant – just a different brand. The photos above are the walls that were bare studs in the duct photo above.

Meanwhile, we are working on the guard railings around the stairs and deck at the back. Above left is mole sanding the pickets. I’ve lost track of how many years it’s been: This is the last unchecked item on my todo list for those stairs.

It wouldn’t be a turtle project without some intricate details. Cedar: I love the smell of it.

We still haven’t decided if we’ll paint it, or use deck stain. I’m leaning to the latter, both because it’s faster, and because it’s sad to cover up this beautiful wood.

A soundproofing bookshelf?

This is a huge post – I just never got round to posting. Fear not, there are some cat pics towards the end.

We kept the front room of the downstairs unit for our office. But in this Victorian, as in most, the front room is connected to a second front room with double sliding doors. The double doors do not seal any noise between the rooms – you can clearly hear everything in the adjoining room. Now that the second front room will be a bedroom, we had to come up with a way to provide some sound privacy: A built-in bookshelf.

Here are pictures of all the clamping and drilling…

I built the shelf in three pieces, because the door opening is so large that a single shelf would have been too tall to stand up in the garage, and would have been really difficult to move around (it wouldn’t have fit through the front door!) The design is two tall bookshelves above, and a slightly deeper cabinet at the base. The photo above is the piece of wood that joins the top and bottom part. Because I’m using plywood, I either mitered exposed edges, or glued solid wood to the edges.

This is the base cabinet all assembled.

And here are the bookshelves.

Then I stained and varnished everything to match the wood doors in the living room. The car gets to be outside for a while.

The base cabinet will have doors on the front. I made these from the remaining scraps of the plywood sheets.

Here’s a detail I’m particularly proud of. The doors are made from plywood, so I made decorative molding to glue into the edge around the panel.

An engineering problem: How to hold the bookshelves in place, without damaging the beautiful wood pocket doors. I made metal brackets that fit into the gap between the doors and the pocket in the wall. These I wrapped with fabric, and one leg slides into the gap, the second side screws to the side of the bookshelves. I’ll cover this with some wood trim attached to the side of the book case.

The sound insulating material went against the doors, but how to hold it in place while I assembled the book case? The solution: I cut drywall to fit tight into the space, and glued the sound insulating material to it with double sided carpet tape. The drywall serves to hold everything in place, and also adds to the sound absorption.

Here’s the book case almost complete. Still needs the doors on the bottom, and the trim around the outside to close the gap. But it’s working quite well to insulate sound. It’s not perfect, but enough to muffle sound between the two rooms.

Here are the doors with stain and two coats of varnish. One to go.

Oh, and what else? Yes, the “garden room” work.

Here are some photos of plumbing work preparing for a sink.

This the the plumbing for the space that will be the toilet. Beautiful.

The concrete in the garden room is a total mess. Here I’ve chipped and ground down concrete that was too high, and I need to fill in where there are holes.

The left side is after filling in the holes. But the floor still slopes, so I added a skim coat of leveling mortar to level the floor.

That’s me. Poor back.

The concrete in the area that I tore up the wood floor was extremely degraded. It was rough, and would dust every time I brushed it. So I coated the whole floor with a layer of non-shrink repair mortar. I had a great time doing it: Felt just like doing plaster.

It looked really great until it started to dry…

There must have been something wrong with one of the bags of repair mortar, or it may have reacted badly to the old concrete. But instead of being low-shrinkage, on about half the floor it shrunk like mud in a desert. Cracks everywhere.

Here I’m adding the wall to make the space for the toilet room. Yes, I still need to repair the window.

The old plumbing that used to come through here caused this wall, and the window next to it, to rot badly. So I repaired the wall. Above right is before I put in the new wall framing.

This is the repaired wall. I used mostly scraps – trying to use up the huge pile of wood I have stashed in the garage. Now I need to get the wiring in.

Arwen came to inspect my work.

“Hmm, good level concrete. Let me check the flatness…”

“Prrrfect for rolling on.”

More ugly

So I’ve started working on the ‘garden room‘. I think we used to call this the ‘creepy room’ before. Here are some photos Mole took before we bought the house:

I have big hopes for this space: I want it to be my ‘brewery room’ for brewing beer. But it could also serve as a guest room for people who are allergic to our “hypo allergenic” cats (apparently not so much). There were three major things I had to do to get started on this space.

Firstly, there was a wood floor in the ‘garage back room’ part of the space. It had no ventilation under the wood, so the wood is rotten, and it smells moldy. It also reduced the head room so I kept hitting my head on the wood beam. I swear a lot when that happens, so the floor had to come out.

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The wood was hard to take out, because all the nails had rusted, and the wood kept breaking.

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To add to the fun, they had made the wood floor slightly smaller than the room, and poured concrete to seal all around the edges. Lots of work to break out all the concrete, and another pile of concrete in the back yard to dispose of (eventually). Talking to the previous owners, apparently their grandfather used these two rooms as his storage space. He was probably trying to make sure that no mice would get into the rooms with all the concrete sealing every crevice.

The second part was to add support for the floor framing above. The previous framing to support the large wood beam and back wall was under-sized, and held in place with a couple of nails. Not secure enough for me.

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The photo above shows the temporary support (including my trusty jack) while I replace the post. Also, on the right side is an opening. I’ve put a door opening where there was an old window. I filled in the opening on the left side of the post, and put a new concrete curb and sill in, and made a good solid post to support the beam. I’ll add plywood to the wall once I’ve got all the electrical wiring installed.

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Above left you can see the new curb, above right is the new connection for the post. I re-used some old wood that has been piled up in the garage.

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Then I took out the curb at the opening on the right, and removed the rest of the concrete that had been put around the wood floor.

I also had to fix the drain plumbing. There were three drain pipes sticking up out of the concrete floor in the garden room. I had to chip out the concrete to get down to the sewer line and remove them.

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Above is before and after. I had a piece of pipe lying around that I reused for this (hence the white paint). The more difficult part: I want a toilet in the garage, so I plumbed in the sewer pipes for that on the other side of the wall.

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Above left is the hole I dug to go under the wall, above right is the plumbing in place. Then I filled it all back in again. Filling it in was actually a lot of work, because I had to compact the soil. If the soil isn’t compacted, then it will settle by itself over the years, leaving a void under the floor slab, which would eventually crack and collapse, making an uneven floor. To compact the soil, I worked in “lifts”: Put about 2″ of soil back in the hole, spray it with water to dampen it slightly, and then compacted it with a sledge hammer and a piece of wood until it will not compress any more. Then another lift of 2″, and repeat until all the soil is back in the holes.

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Here are the holes filled back in, and gravel (from the broken concrete) on top of the soil. The gravel is a ‘capillary break’ under the slab. It prevents moisture from the soil coming up through the slab. At least in this little part of the floor it will.

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Here it is after I repaired the floor with concrete. Next: the plumbing for the hot and cold water.

Five year project

The laundry room has been the project that keeps on giving. It started out that I was just going to replace the back stairs in August 2011. Then I ran into problems waterproofing, so I stopped the stairs, and started working on the laundry room. Five years later, it’s finally DONE! So I thought a before-and-after photo post is in order:

Checklist

This is the checklist I scribbled on our white board, back when I thought it would be a quick project. I kept adding items as I went. Very satisfying to have all boxes checked.

Above left is the back door to the kitchen before. Above right is the same view after, with the door moved to approximately where the window used to be.

Looking a bit to the right, the dryer used to be jammed into the corner so tightly that the back door wouldn’t open unless you pushed against the dryer. Actually, it was such a tight fit, that the previous owners had cut out part of the back wall to make it fit. You can see the old back door location at the right side of the photo. Now it’s all windows in that area, looking out to the garden. I’ve put a small couch in this space… Hmm, maybe I should have used a photo with the couch in it. Oh well… You’ll have to come visit to see.

Here are two more photos of the old back wall of the laundry room. You can see the door opening into the moldy ‘tear-off’ room. Funny, in these photos it looks so sunny and airy, and you can hardly notice that to walk in there, you have to be under 5′-10″. On the right side is the wood door to the toilet. Actually, it was more like a closet with an always stinky toilet in it.

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This is the same side, now. I put a wall all the way across that side, so made the laundry room a little smaller, but a more functional bathroom. Bathroom door is now a nice restored redwood door that I hung on sliders to make it a pocket door.

The washing machine is in a similar location, but there’s now a sink behind it, instead of next to it. The new arrangement is not perfect – but was the only way I could figure out how to make this work. One other solution was to not put a sink in this room at all, but I find it so useful to have a utility sink.

This room used to have loads of shelving, so I added some shelves. Living in earthquake country, shelves scare me a bit, so nothing on them yet… We used to have lots of plants in this space, but I’ve found that if I put plants in there now, they die because I don’t go in there often enough to remember to water them.

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Instead of that stinky little closet with the toilet in it (sorry, no photo), I expanded the space to make a tiny, but functional, bathroom. On the left is the shower.

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And last weekend, I finished putting up the mirror and an electric towel warmer. There’s no heating in this space, so hopefully this will help a little (?) I’ve still got to figure out how to deal with the power cord – probably just some white wiremold aligned over the grout lines would do it.

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prrrrr

England, the Garden, and Tile (plus kitties)

Well, one of the big things that happened last month is that I went to England with Misha. It was a short visit (the pictures are linked to a larger version).

On the way up to Mum’s house on the first day, we walked through the farmers market – I got a bit turned around, and didn’t realize which street we were on and assumed it was really small this time of year (above left in front of the only vege stand we found on this street). Above right: “Changed Priorities Ahead” (hopefully they are enjoying themselves more).

We went back to the farmers market with mum – a bit late as everything was getting closed down for the day. We still got some yummy flapjacks, though.

We went on a long hike to the Woolpack (famous because the author Lorrie Lee used to love this pub), had a pint and some “chips”, then continued the hike up Swift hill. On the way up the hill, we came across paintings of badgers in many different costumes on the fence posts. There must have been over thirty paintings. They were painted as part of a protest against the “badger cull“.

The weather was quite warm (for February), but drizzled on the day of our hike. This is the view from the top of Swift hill, looking down over the Stroud valley toward the river Severn (off in the haze somewhere…)

Mum and Misha sitting at the top of Swift hill (just before Misha pulled out some energy bars to share). The snowdrops were all out – couldn’t help trying to catch a photo on the way down (above right).

Here I’m trying to take a selfie with the black sheep. Who isn’t a black sheep in some way?

The flash made their eyes glow. Kinda creepy?

We rented a very little house in Stroud to stay in for the week. Here’s Misha locking the front door. Yes, we did have to duck to walk in. Fortunately, the ceilings were a little higher!

Above left: breakfast! Above right, a photo of Misha, Mia and me from about fifteen years ago. Maybe more.

We also took a trip up to Manchester to visit a family friend (our second mum Jaya, from when we lived in a house filled with eleven children and three single mums). I’d not seen her for over ten years – Misha probably more than 20!

Mum wanted us to break down a brick wall and do some hedge trimming while we were visiting. I refused to climb up a ladder on the sloping driveway to trim branches – so Misha did it!

Above left is a photo outside mum’s house. Above right: Does this product name look appetizing to you (Gü)?

One last photo before we took a train back to London.

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Hmm, so I also did some tile work. Actually, I finally finished the tile on the floor in the laundry room. This is the hexagon tile, with some black tiles used to create patterns. Initially, I was planning to do a border in this room. Then we decided to just do the same patterns as the bathroom, and also something in the middle. And then I added an extra little circle at the center of each wall line. And then (see later)…

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Above left, a detail of the pattern in the middle, and above right is one of the only cut edges (at the door).

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Above is how I looked all day. My knees hurt.

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Above left you can see why there was very little tile cutting. I could just continue the tile under the base boards, and didn’t need to finish them tight against the wall (actually, it’s much better not to, so there’s some expansion room).

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It’s hard to see in the photo, but instead of cutting the baseboards both at 45 degrees at the corner, I have butted them together, and hand-cut one of them so that the piece on the left fits into the grooves on the piece on the right. This is the way it was always done before power saws, and actually results in a joint that is less likely to open as the wood expands and contracts. It’s much more work (of course).

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Here’s the tile all in, and grouted. When I was installing the tile, I ran out of white tile (about half a square foot short), so tried adding even more patterns at the doorways with black tiles, so that I could stretch the remaining number of white tiles. In the end, I just had to buy more tile. Now it reminds me a bit of how some people’s tattoos look: Lots of different patterns strewn around. I think it’s about as permanent, too, because I can’t see myself wanting to do this again!

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Now the baseboards are all in, the floor is done. While I was putting the baseboards in, I stood on pieces of plywood because it’s a bit early to be walking on the tile (needs a week to cure). I’ll start painting next week.

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We had a few weeks of reprieve from the El Nino rains, so I rented a jack hammer and broke out more of the concrete in the back yard. Last year, the pear tree did very poorly in the location I’d put it (even though it did gallantly give us some fruit). The poor tree had almost no leaves, and was being crowded out by some aggressively drought tolerant plants. So I decided to move it. Hopefully the move doesn’t kill it, although the previous location would have anyway.

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Here’s after the concrete is all out, and I’ve added mulch. The pear tree used to be on the far left of the upper left photo. Now its at the far right of the same photo. More sun and space. Fingers crossed. Above right, you can see what remains of our peach tree after the tree-jumper incident. It blossomed this spring, and is looking very healthy right now, so I think it will recover.

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Mole was taking photos, so I think the texture of the pile of broken concrete appealed to her…

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Our garden grows nasturtiums!

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While I had the jack hammer, I also broke out some of the concrete in the room underneath the laundry room. We’re calling that room the ‘garden room’. I plan to make it into a place to brew beer 😉 But there’s a bunch of plumbing sticking out of the concrete that I need to remove.

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We didn’t get many crocuses this year – but here’s one!

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Bella sometimes likes to climb inside my shirts (when they are clean)…

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This time she fell asleep in it!

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Here’s Arwen looking blissful on a blanket that Mole knitted specially for her!

planer vs heat gun

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Sometimes Bella likes to lie half hanging off shelves. No problem with heights, I guess!

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I did some more wiring. The garage was on the same circuit as much of the downstairs unit. And with all my fancy power tools… the breaker would trip. I added four circuits. Two for the garage, and two for our upstairs kitchen (which was also on the same circuit!) But it meant taking off more ceiling, and lots of conduit bending and pulling wire.

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Stringing the wire through the conduit took much longer than I thought it would. As usual, what I thought was a one day project was really a four day project.

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And now that the girls are three — they can go into the garage. Here’s Bella inspecting the conduit bender.

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Here’s Bella doing her best impression of an otter. Her hairy belly makes here look really big. heh. And Arwen taking a nap on her favorite blanket.

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Mole, Arwen, and knitting. Cozy! Arwen is on my lap as I write this. She has a unique squeaky rattling loud purrr…

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The wood that was the laundry room siding was thickly covered in flaking paint. Before I put the wood on the soffit, we stripped it with a heat gun, and it took many hours. I decided to try another (faster) method for the rest of the wood: a planer. For the first pass, I hooked the dust collection up to a HEPA vacuum to try to catch the (probably leaded) paint dust I created.

The process generated two full garbage bags of paint chips, and wore through a set of planer blades (paint is quite abrasive and I hit a few nails.) But I stripped about 300 linear feet of wood (both sides) in one day. Of course, this method only works on flat boards, but the heat gun takes about 10-20 min per foot per side.

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Here’s a picture of the pile of wood part way through planing. Some of the old wood is really beautiful tight grained wood. There are some rotten bits, but I’ll trim them off.

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Here’s another photo of some of the boards after planing. Next step is to rout a decorative edge, and edge the boards so they fit together neatly for the wainscot in the laundry room.

And now for a photo of Bella relaxing in the sun:

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most boring post EVER!

If you are hoping for kitten photos, or even human photos, read no further. I’ll blame this on mole: I can’t take photos of myself doing things.

Now that the roof doesn’t leak any more (well, I assume it doesn’t — it hasn’t rained in quite a while), I can work on the inside of the laundry room. First thing: I put in the framing for a new pocket door. I bought the kit almost a year ago, finally installed it (hiding behind the hanging plants):

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The one thing that bothered me after the roofing was done is that I failed to buy a new skylight that fit the opening in the roof properly. So, retrofit: the photo above right sort of shows how the framing sticks into the space of the skylight. I spent a day with the reciprocating saw cutting out joists, and putting in reinforcement. Mole said the whole house was rattling from the noise. To me, it looks better…

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But the photo above left really doesn’t show it. Oh well. Above right, I’ve put in new recessed light fixtures. This is going to be a fancy laundry room.

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Oh, and the really, really boring stuff: Plumbing. Well, it’s rather exciting when it doesn’t work, I suppose. Here I’m putting in the rough plumbing for the sink and shower. I don’t have the controls yet for the shower, so the pipes just end after they stick through the stud. Above right: the pipes below the laundry room floor.

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Of all the projects on this house, the most intimidating is gas piping. Everything else, there’s some type of warning or fuse if somethings done wrong. With gas, I guess you smell it: But it feels like if this is done wrong – BOOM! So, I used lots of joint lube, cleaned the threads meticulously, and tightened every joint to the extreme. Above left is the pipe going above the ceiling in the garage, above right, where it transitions to go to the garden room (fancy!).

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Above left, it tees to go up to the laundry room (for the dryer), and I added a pipe that will allow a stove down in the garden room (beer brewery maybe?). I went over every connection with soap to check for leaks: None! I did find a slow leak in three valves, though, and managed to tighten them up.

Oh, and these photos are the last photos that our first digital camera will take. It finally quit, after over ten years (almost every photo in this blog was taken with it).

Real Pros

When I went to buy roofing materials, the person at Western Gravel & Roofing Supply talked me into hiring a contractor: He was afraid I’d burn down my house with the torch (!) and recommended a contractor who happened to be in line.

What a contrast to the last roofers we hired. These guys were awesome!

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I did the prep work before the contractor arrived. I forgot to take a photo before I started ripping off the old roof. Above right the photo shows where my foot went through the old rotten wood!

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Above left is the view from below. That piece of wood had to be replaced. One top of the old wood, I installed plywood. This is both to provide better earthquake resistance, and to span over weak old wood.

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Now the pros showed up. Actually, they told me they’d arrive at 3pm, so I thought I had time to finish the prep before they got here. They arrived three hours early. So they helped me install the insulation for free (I added 2″ of rigid insulation on top of the roof). Above right, Enrique and his assistant smile for the camera.

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This is the reason the roofing supply salesperson didn’t want me doing the roofing myself: Notice the 18″ long flame coming out of the torch? This is on low. Here, Enrique is melting the back of the modified bitumen roofing, so that it seals down to the roof. Each strip is melted to the previous strip to make a continuous membrane over the roof.

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Ironically, after watching the roofers, I realized that fitting the roofing around and over all the tricky corners was where their skill and experience really helped. It would have taken me weeks to do this, and it probably wouldn’t have been done as well in the end. Pick your battles!

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One more photo as they finished up, and here it is done. Beautiful, eh? I managed to salvage the old skylight; took some serious chipping and heat-gun action to get it off the old curb. I’ll probably replace it one day, but for now, it’s fine.

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So now we’re done with the outside of the laundry room. All I had to do after they finished the roof is to put the gutter on and paint it. Here’s photos with the scaffolding down.

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Now I can start working on the inside without worrying that it will get ruined by rain. Sometimes, it really is worth getting the pros.

Bigfoot

We have been slowly progressing with finishing the trim around the windows of the laundry room and garden room.

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I spent almost all day getting the trim to fit in above the windows, and tight against the soffit. Had to splice on a piece at the end, because the board wasn’t quite long enough (above right). But that’s nothing: When I bought the redwood, I got tempted by the slightly cheaper, rough-sawn redwood planks intended for fences. We had to plane and sand and prime them all before putting them up. Silly Turtle – no wonder it takes so long! Now that all the trim is on around the windows, though, it’s starting to look finished.

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This (above left) is the window under the laundry room (‘garden room’). We built out a small box head above the window to shade and protect the windows from rain. Turtle being turtle, I couldn’t resist getting my router out and adding a bit of decorative edge (above right) to the trim. It also serves a purpose: Rounded edges don’t show dents, and they hold paint better than sharp corners.

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The photo above left shows the back wall of the laundry room — a bit difficult to see, as my home-built scaffolding is in the way. Above right is the corner that faces the deck. So, this is quite exciting (for me): All the exterior trim and siding are installed on the laundry room. Now we need to fill all the holes, sand, and paint.

While we were working on the laundry room trim, the cats sometimes came out to play. All the flowers have been blooming in the back yard, and the bees are loving it. Unfortunately, Bella doesn’t know the difference between a fly and a bee…
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She decided to catch a bee, and when she slapped it down on the ground, she got stung. Mole was calling her ‘bigfoot’ for the rest of the day…

R2D2 D:<

It’s been a big family visit month.

My sister Eva had her wedding (again), but this time, in Santa Cruz. My whole family came to visit, including my sister Mia all the way from Asia, and Mum, my aunt and cousin from England, my brother and Aja from Brooklyn… Nice to see everyone, now back to the grind: didn’t get much done on the house…

It’s been one wall at a time on the laundry room. This is the lower half of the last wall. Above left, you see the window opening in this wall, and above right, some nice strapping around this window. Although the code doesn’t require it, I decided to paint the edges of the plywood with wood preservative, just in case. That bottom edge is so important for seismic, but is also in the most damp location.

While we were working in the room under the laundry room (the ‘garden room’ I think I’m calling it), we got an unexpected inspector looking down through the hole in the floor.

At this point, it had been about a month since I’d disconnected the washing machine. We were making the occasional emergency trips to the local laundromat, but the pile of laundry was mounting. So I spent a weekend plumbing in the washing machine again. Top right is where the sewer line exits at the floor level. The sheet metal and rubber against the wall is a roof jack, intended for when pipes exit through the roof. The rubber seals tightly around the pipe, and is crimped onto the sheet metal. I’ve been using roof jacks to waterproof around these wall penetrations. There are probably equivalent pieces intended for walls, but these are all they have at my local supplier. And it’s a whole lot better than what the plumbers did on other parts of the house: they drilled a hole and squeezed some caulk in there. Lots of rot was the result.

Above right is a view on the inside, looking up. You can see the sewer line that will serve the toilet, and also the washing machine. There is also the pipes for the hot and cold water in the top right corner of the picture, going up through the floor. The photo above left is how the sewer pipe looks on the outside of the building now.

And lo, we have a washing machine again. The room is still bare, but at least we don’t have to hike down the street with our baskets of laundry. We are so spoiled.

Next comes building paper, and another window. A couple of years ago, when I ordered replacement sashes for the windows in the office, one of them came with single glazing. The supplier replaced it with a double glazed window when I called them, but then I had this extra window left over. It’s been sitting around the garage ever since. So we decided to use it here. Works quite nicely. I’ve made it into a fixed window. Mole sanded and primed the whole thing, on all faces, twice.

We’re still reusing the old siding that came off the building. Mole spent many hours sanding these, then priming all surfaces. It’s an extraordinary amount of work reusing old materials. The photo above right shows how the wall penetrations look when a roof jack is used. It will all be painted the same color, so not quite so obvious.

When we first started working on the house, we bought a HEPA shop vacuum cleaner. It was quite an expensive model Turbo II made by Fein. I love it, because it doesn’t make a racket like all the other shop vacs, and it’s always hooked up when we are sanding anything that may have lead paint (ie, everything.) It turns itself on and off whenever the sander is turned on or off. One thing that had never occurred to me: it really needs servicing every now and again. It’s probably been running over 5000 hours since we got it. Well, last weekend, “r2d2” as we call it, had a heart attack! I thought it might be just worn brushes, so I took it to pieces. The brushes are worn, but not the problem. The motor’s kaput.

I’ve ordered a replacement motor, but never realized how much I use this thing. We can’t sand anything without it. No siding, no painting, no smoothing wood. Cleanup is difficult. We use it to vacuum off our clothing after working. Wow, this is an important tool.