Bedroom floor, not done yet.

Okay, while feeding chickens I remembered another chore I’d really wanted to finish this week…

I’ve tended these batteries at TC’s place for the past two years, but “tended” mostly meant “checked that they were still there, and that rats weren’t chewing the cables.” They were charged by the solar power system but the only load on them was what it took to run the inverter, which must have been negligible. Now and then I’d pry off the caps to see that they weren’t losing electrolyte in any unexpectedly great quantities but they didn’t really require much “tending.”

Now of course they’ll be powering a house and barn, and I expect that to change. I want to know how much distilled water I need to keep around for monthly maintenance of 24 of these things – my own 4 do go through distilled water – and so I want to start at zero by topping all of them off even though none are low.

Then I came back to the Lair and finished cleaning out the bedroom of all the tools, materials and assorted crap that has accumulated in there since I opened it to the main cabin.

Then I laid down tarpaper…

I was so sure there wouldn’t be enough. When I bought materials I got one roll, and this is how much was left over after wrapping the exterior of the addition and putting down a layer between the underlayment and the flooring. 🙂 No partial roll to store here.

Then I spent an hour and a half in the sun, sanding “planks.”

And then I laid down all the long sections. There’s still some nailing, but they’re all secure enough that I can cut the shorter sections. Nothing I ever built was entirely square, so I expect the 10 shorter pieces will be of at least slightly non-standard lengths.

And that’s what I should be doing now, except I’m tired and my stump is sore so I’m knocking off for the day.

And there’s one oopsie, in the form of a “great idea” that anybody could have told me wasn’t going to work…

In the passage between the bedroom and the closet I didn’t want to go to the trouble of cutting some sort of threshold, so I extended that one “plank” to butt against the next. Why I assumed those would meet exactly, I have no idea. Brain damage in my infancy, perhaps.

So I’ll pry that piece up, cut it shorter, and then cut a separate piece for the threshold. Hey, I’m making this up as I go along. If I knew what I was doing, I wouldn’t be who I am.