Watcha doin? - a hobby thread

[starjots]

This has been the summer and fall of home improvement. At this point it's more of a job than a hobby.

We've own an adobe house in Albuquerque that for eight years has been rented by the room to friends of one kid. He decided to move to Denver, informed his friends, and all the tenants decamped at once. We were left with a house we had never finished improving that we'd always thought deserved to be made nicer than it was.

We're not done yet, but the end is in sight. Contractors re-piped the house and did the drywall work, and we are repainting the interior, refinishing floors, clearing out an immense amount of junk, redoing the kitchen, landscaping, etc. At the moment we working 50 hours a week with the end goal of turning it over to a property manager and not f'ing with it for some time to come.

This is the thirteenth or fourteenth time I've painted the interior of a house, and I've developed a particular pleasure in picking out a color scheme and executing it. Pros in this line of business generally spray everything a bland neutral, but I'm a diehard brush and roller man and hence, much slower. Recently I realized that 90% of life is brush work.

[HighlyIrregular II]

Speaking of brush work, I'm applying joint compound over plaster and I have to paint it. Its soft plaster, except for the base coat which is exposed in a few spots. It's soft because of however the plasterer screwed up...too much water, overworking, retempering, additives, or whatever. The primer I used for the first phase failed a masking tape pull test miserably but the compound hasn't fallen in the year since I did it. Now I have a better primer, but...well, I won't go too deep into it but it's a tricky situation and I won't trust anyone else to fix it. So, since rolling paint creates like a suction and can cause plaster to fall, the safest way to paint my work would be with a brush. But I'm not going to try painting overhead with a brush (I don't think) so I'll risk using a roller. What I'd really like to do it spray paint it.

Also, I've been making home made paper bags from painters paper. I use the bags to throw stuff out because I have plenty of the paper and I don't want to pay for plastic bags. I just leave the paper bags of garbage in the compactor room of my building and let them plastic bag it.

[HighlyIrregular II]

More insect photography but I'm not sure what it is. I snapped four photos with my phone but I only found two of them so I have to learn how my phone works or stick to my camera.

[Catoptric]

More insect photography but I'm not sure what it is. I snapped four photos with my phone but I only found two of them so I have to learn how my phone works or stick to my camera.

Google Lens app shows this:
https://www.inaturalist.org/guide_taxa/278750

The issue I have with focusing with a cell phone, is the shutter button gets in the way of holding the phone, and I somehow managed to get a second shutter button that can be adjusted on the screen to position it. Even then the biggest problem is getting the specific apps to not create a backfocusing problem, and usually the lens always gets dirty in the process, that whatever subject is no longer in position to take a good photo.

[HighlyIrregular II]

I'm not doin this but I think I'd like a good model submarine with a camera and a boat.

[Yesterday]

Baked an apple pie last night using my Mom's kitchen, improvisation and my mitts. The main divergence from typical pie ingredients is that I used agave nectar and frozen cheery-apple juice from concentrate as my sweeteners. I also included pumpkin spice with added ginger for extra kick. I pre-heated thinly sliced apples and aforementioned ingredients with a mixture of water, lemon juice, and cornstarch. The top pie shell was thawed so I could lay it atop the filling. Then I chilled pie again and baked it on 415 F for 20 minutes. Covered the edges of the pie with foil for another 30 minutes. Then removed the foil for another 10 minutes. Finished product satisfied my pallet. Nothing to brag about tbh. The photo sucks so here's to using your imagination!

[HighlyIrregular II]

I attached something to wooden studs for the first time in my life! My old place I wasn't in long enough to have occasion to do that, and I had plenty of storage space without shelves. Before that I was in a NY high rise with narrow steel studs that, in modern times I doubt are used for attaching shelves. In fact, the original super of the building put up a heavy mirror without using the studs as far as I could tell.

I used a stair tread as a shelf, heavy duty brackets and pretty large screws. I found out exactly where the studs were by drilling small exploratory holes. I bet it could hold my weight but I'm not testing it.

And you get to see some of my books if the picture gets posted this time. Forum is super slow again and picture didn't upload on first try.

As long as I'm waiting for the status bar to turn fully green, here's some bonus content. There are two common sizes for Phillips head screwdrivers, but I have Phillips bits of larger sizes. I needed one of those larger ones to fit my screws perfectly. The larger-of-the-two-common Phillips head bits seemed to fit and would normally be OK, but the diameter and length of the screws required a better fit once half driven. Slotted screws wouldn't have caused the tip to cam out but I used the screws I already had. I drilled larger holes twice before searching for the larger driver bit, and luckily I found it because the hole was already larger than minor diameter of the screw.