Reusing Old Wood

I finished up the base trim today.  After countless trips up and down the stairs to the miter saw outside, lots of little pieces of wood laying around the saw, and nearly three days’ work, it’s done.  I do have to fill in some gaps with painter’s caulk when I get some, but the hard work is done.

Several of those pieces were cut wrong.  It’s probably good I made and painted a couple extra 12-foot pieces because I needed them.

Deb finished up painting in the same bedroom I finished the trim.  We were working around each other for most of the morning.  I realize now that I never took a picture.

There was a pile of the old trim on the front porch.  I asked Steven if he wanted me to load them all in the van and bring them to the burn pile.  After all, cut-up door casings slathered with paint and caulk are not useful for anything else, right?

Wrong.

“Oh, no,” Steven told me. “We can re-use this.”  He told me to pile it all up beside the wood shop building.  I was a bit surprised by this answer until his next statement.

“We will have the boys on Con pull all the nails out.  It’s tedious work.”

Now it all made sense. I’m not sure if the wood will actually be used to make something, but it’s usefulness as a consequence was undeniable: boring, tedious work that nobody wants to do, a great deterrent for undesirable behavior.  There’s hundreds of nails.

And the only thing I could think of was to burn it.

My next task was a shower.  This task was something I couldn’t have dreamed up on my own in a million years.  This shower looked like it had hardened brown goo on one side.  Steven explained to me that it didn’t drain properly, so someone in the past put a bunch of Bondo in it to try to re-shape the floor so the water flowed towards the drain.

Problem was, some of it stuck really well, some of it didn’t stick very well at all, and there was an area in the middle of the pool of Bondo that just didn’t harden.  The result was a big mess.  So Steven asked me for ideas on how to get it out of there.

I spent the remainder of the afternoon working in the shower, chipping the stuff out with a hammer and a small putty knife.  After a couple hours of work, I managed to chip about a third of it out.

I have a new appreciation for Bondo.  When it hardens properly it is about as hard as bulletproof glass and sticks so fast that the ceramic coating on the shower comes off with it.  It chips off in shards resembling glass and those shards end up flying all over the bathroom.

Guess what I will be doing tomorrow. 🙄

Progress, I think:

Maybe this is my Con.  What did I do?