The Neighborhood Coughy House

The crud has hit our house. It's been toying with us for a week or more now, but this weekend it made its move. My middle son spent much of yesterday dripping and coughing and generally being miserable. His other two siblings seem to have lesser versions of it, though we're not entirely sure the baby is out of the woods. My wife has had some sort of crud most of the last week, and is either getting it again or has picked up a different strain.

As for me, if I did get it I didn't notice since I'm already high on decongestants for my allergies. I suspect, from watching my son go through it, I would have noticed. So either my day is coming or I've been extremely fortunate so far.

My company is back on the auction block again, so I'm officially and preemptively on the market again, too. I'm not hearing any convincing reasons to stay. It never hurts to start finding out what else is out there.

My company gave me MLKj Day off yesterday, so I spent it (in addition to helping nursemaid sick kids) catching up on a few projects around the house like taking down the outdoor Christmas lights and attempting (successfully this time) to put a nice edge around the fireplace hearth.

For some reason the previous occupants decided it would be fun to rip up the carpet to run surround sound wiring beneath. They did a horrible job of replacing the carpet around the fireplace, and the tack strip was poking holes in our feet. I tried last month to do something about it only to find that our downstairs carpet is installed over concrete (and a pad, of course), which makes it very hard to nail anything down. I'm not sure how they got the tack strip in, quite frankly, unless they added it while the concrete was still wet.

So my next plan was to get some Gorilla Glue and glue some nails pointing upward around the edge of the tile heart so that I could take a piece of wooden moulding and hammer it down onto the nails, which would hold the carpet down and put a nice edge on it all. One problem: Gorilla Glue has to be clamped, and they mean it. I had no means of clamping a dozen or so nails to the floor.

So next I tried getting some 1/4-inch slats, driving nails up through it, and gluing that on the floor to secure the moulding against. The nails either didn't hold or the moulding split. I never even got far enough to try gluing the slat to the concrete flooring.

So yesterday I abandoned the idea of securing the moulding without any fasteners showing. I glued some more of the 1/4-inch slat to the concrete, "clamping" it with a pile of books on top to hold it down (I knew I held onto those darn books for a reason!), and then screwing the moulding down through the carpet and into the slats. After developing an impromptu countersink method, it went together like a charm.

One more item off the list. Just in time for the list to start growing again. With spring coming we've begun making plans for yard/garden/interior. I'm sure I'll keep plenty busy this year.