Corner of Bourbon & Division

Well, I didn't miss it so much as I slept through it. Night shifts will do that to you.

Happy belated Canada Day, everyone! *cough*

I have at once very little and too much to talk about these days, so much so that every time I open up a new LJ post my mind kind of goes blank. Part of me feels guilty about making a personal post when I still haven't finished my June posts, and another part of me just doesn't even know where to begin with a personal post anyway.

*throws up hands*

Neurotic? Me? Never. :P

Tonight is my last night shift for the week. I'm heading home directly after this because the fence guys are coming at 7:00, and I am quite sure that unless someone is there to guide them with a firm hand, they will find more reasons to freak out and not build a fence for me. It's been three weeks now since the last time they were supposed to build the fence, and I'll be damned if I let this get put off a single day more.

On Thursday I have a guy coming in to install the new floor in the basement, which means that tomorrow (technically today, I guess) I'll be spending the day moving all the stuff out of the basement so he can work. Well, all the stuff that can be moved, I suppose. I can't move any of the appliances (too heavy), and there's the giant wall unit that will have to be taken apart before it can be moved. Also the turtle tank, though we can at least empty that and move the turtle as needed. There is so much stuff in the basement right now that it feels a little overwhelming, but I figure once I get started it won't be as bad as I imagine. I've always had the tendency to blow things out of proportion in my mind, after all.

I'm not sure how long the floor will take to install, but I'm assuming it'll be a 2-3 day job, given that there will be furniture to move around. That means that he will hopefully be done by Saturday, or Sunday at the latest, which means that the house can then go up for sale ASAP. If he's done on Saturday then I can get stuff settled back in the basement on Sunday. On Thursday and Friday, while the work is going on in the basement I'm going to do a big push to pack non-essentials and start the process of "staging" the house, to make it look as appealing as possible to potential buyers. That means de-cluttering the bedroom in particular, packing some of the books and organising the rest, and clearing up space on shelves and counters and such. Hopefully the buyers will be able to see past the piles of boxes and throw all their money at me. ;)

If the house doesn't provoke much interest right away, I will discuss painting with my real estate agent. I already need to paint at least one wall in the basement, and will probably need to fix/paint the back wall that Smudge damaged all those years ago when he used to use the wall as a ladder to climb up into the basement ceiling to hide. There are pretty deep scratch marks in the wall that I have no idea how to fix, but I assume putty and paint will be involved.

Long before the emergency in Moncton, I committed to three days of overtime next week. Just the thought of it kind of makes me want to weep from exhaustion, but the extra money will come in useful, I suppose. I just don't know when I'm going to get anything done. Even if/when the house will be empty eventually, I kind of have to be there in order to get work done. I can't paint the walls remotely, no matter how hard I try. ;) At this point, getting the house painted by someone else is pretty much out of the question, as I have officially run out of money for renovations/prettying the place up. If I can find inexpensive white paint I can do it myself, since I can't imagine it would cost that much to buy enough paint for the walls, but I can't afford to pay someone else to do it. *sigh* Why is everything expensive?

This weekend the dog goes back to the vet, speaking of expensive things. The good news is, he doesn't have Cushings. The bad news is that he has Something Unspecified going on with his liver, which means blood tests AND taking him to the very expensive clinic in Lachine for an ultrasound. This will let the vet determine (we hope!) if his high levels of ALP are due to a tumour or to something else or who the fuck knows. He'll also be getting the stitches out of his eyelid on Saturday, which will be good news for all concerned. Here's hoping that that's the last we will ever hear about this eye surgery, because there's been quite enough veterinary trauma to last me a lifetime this year.

I'm not entirely sure how Sunday is going to shape up. I think I'm going to have to plan to leave later than I normally would, since I'm going to be gone for a week instead of the normal four days. So I have to pack as much stuff into the four days I'll be home as I humanly can, to make sure that I don't fall too far behind schedule. Then I'll be home the following Sunday evening, all of Monday, and then run back to work on the Tuesday for another five day stretch. Good times. Basically, July can be summed up as renos-work-work-renos-packing-work-work-work-try to sell the house-work-work-packing-work. Or something like that. Possibly not exactly in that order, and maybe with more work thrown in there for good measure.

So that's the summary of the last few days for me. Nothing at all, except for worrying about work, the house, and the dog, not necessarily in that order either.

I decided to start researching paving slabs to see if I could find some that are a decent price (I had a flash of inspiration that told me that I could go to Home Depot or the like tomorrow before leaving for Montreal, thus sparing me an extra trip this weekend). The problem I think I might be encountering is not so much that I can't afford the slabs, but that the job of laying them out might be a case of my biting off more than I can chew.

Let me provide some context. The area I want to lay over with paving slabs is right at the base of the stairs leading down from the back balcony. It's about 60 square feet worth of space, 2 feet by 30 feet. Between the hard winter and the dog using it as his bathroom all winter, it's now all hard-packed dirt that turns into an oozing, churning morass of mud whenever it rains. Also, in spite of my attempts to clean out all the dog poop, well, some of it inevitably got ground in there as well.

The idea was therefore to create a clean space there using paving slabs. I thought I could simply lay them down, and, even if they weren't perfectly lined up, it would still be better than wading through mud and residual faecal matter. The more I research, though, the bigger this project seems to be. It doesn't look like I can simply put down the slabs and hope for the best. All the websites I've looked at insist that I have to excavate the area where I want to put them, then fill it in first with gravel (or loose stones, or what have you), pack that down using a tamper, and then fill in another layer with sand, tamp that down. After that I'd have to put in edging, held in place with nails, and only then would I be able to put down my paving slabs.

So not only is this project turning out to be a lot more expensive than simply getting some paving slabs to put down (gravel and sand and edging and nails, not to mention renting a tamper), but it's not something I can do in less than a day at best. And that's supposing I even know what I'm doing, which I absolutely do not.

Out of curiosity, is there anyone out there on my flist who has done something like this before? Any advice? Dire warnings for ignorant amateurs like me to not do this sort of thing unsupervised, ever?

Halp.

At this point, even if I do get the materials this weekend, I may have to resign myself to not getting the paving slabs put down. If I get the yard clean, though, Bean might at least be able to play if he simply avoids that one area (hah). Of course, there's still the issue of there being no fence, but at this juncture I can't actually help that until people come by to give us an estimate. I'll see if I can get one from some other service providers, too. I have a Home Depot card, which is why I'm trying to stick with them as much as I can, since it gives me some breathing room rather than having to cough up all that money at once.

Right. Back to work.

I'm feeling a bit more energetic these days. ( Light and energy. )

( Gardening, fencing and asphalt. )

( Paperwork. Blech. And also the prospect of selling books. )

So that's about it for now. I have other thoughts about time and procrastination and time management, but they're all still pretty rough, and not ready to be written down.

I'm feeling pretty optimistic about summer. Maybe it's the extra sunlight, maybe not, but I'm not complaining. I'm looking forward to the warmer weather and to getting outside more.