07:59 – It was 48.4F (9C) when I took Colin out at 0645 this morning, gray and drizzling.
Herschel spent all day here yesterday, ripping out the ceiling and fixing joints. The entire ceiling in the downstairs den is going to have to have the ceiling removed and replaced. The house was built only ten years ago, and I asked Herschel if they’d used cheap materials or something. He said they’d used top-notch materials, but the water around here corrodes stuff. He did say they’d made what he considered one dumb move when they installed a plasterboard ceiling instead of a drop ceiling. So we’re going to replace the ceiling with a drop ceiling, whether insurance pays for that or not.
The leak soaked and warped the hardwood floor in the master bath on the main floor, and actually got through the wall into the adjoining master bedroom closet. Between that and downstairs, there’s a ton of work to be done. This morning, Barbara and I are emptying bookshelves in the finished area downstairs and hauling books out to the unfinished area.
It’s fortunate that this is a very slow time business-wise because we’re going to have to spend a lot of time on this project ourselves even though we’re hiring people to come in and do most of the work.
08:51 – We’ve now pulled all the books from the downstairs den bookshelves and carried them out to the unfinished area, where they’re sitting in plastic bins on the floor and a folding table. The only thing left on the bookshelves is our router/WAP.
It’s there because that was the only data jack in the house, so it was easier just to install it there. But yesterday Barbara suggested that as long as we have the downstairs ripped up I might as well run a data cable up to the den and install the router there. She pulled out my 6-foot drill bit, which is a holdover from 25 years ago when I used to install structured cabling systems. So sometime over the next few days I’ll drill a hole from the corner of the den down into the unfinished area of the basement, which is where the fiber terminal adapter is installed.
Rather than try to get fancy and install a jack in the wall upstairs and make a run of Cat 6 to it, I’ll just drill a hole in the floor, run a 5o-foot Ethernet cable through it, and plug it directly into the TA downstairs and the router/WAP in the den. Oh, and the one lesson I learned early on is always to leave an extra pull in the hole.