Nothing to write about

I'm tyring to write at least once every three or four days. I don't consider myself a very good writer and I need to practice. So, I'm sitting here trying to come up with a topic when I realized it's the lack of a topic I should write about. (My brain thinks like that...)

The past couple of days have been kind of 'meh'. A lot has been going on in the Boykin household.

Over the weekend we committed murder on the trees in our back yard. We had 35 of them removed. All you damn hippies just settle down! The majority of the trees we removed were either unhealthy, softwoods (pine, etc) or dangerously close to our house. We did NOT clear cut our back yard. We left the strongest and healthiest hardwoods in. Despite 35 trees being removed there are still at least a half dozen. These trees were all removed from an area of about 1/3 of an acre. I'm sorry, but you CAN have too many trees.

Besides the general lot improvement this will provide it will also give us the room to build a full fence around our back yard. Later this summer we want to put in a 5' high vinyl coated chain link fence so the mutts can troll around outside off leash and get exercise. We will not be letting them out there and forgetting about them. No, the play area is for playtime then they come back inside.

Jen and I finally reached the point in our DIY bathroom remodel where we are putting things back together. We had the plumber in yesterday to do the last of the rough in work. Over the weekend I put in a new exhaust fan and duct work for that. Bathroom v1.0 (circa 1960) didn't have an exhaust fan and was VERY prone to getting moldy. YUCK. This new fan should really help that alot. The duct work for it was a it challenging. I needed to route it by a DWV pipe without pinching the duct. I got that sorted finally. I was JUST able to find space on an exterior wall drill a 4" hole for the duct outlet without mangling anything. All in all that turned out pretty well.

This coming weekend Jen and I will set the new bathtub in place. We bought a really nice American Standard whirlpool tub. The catch is we didn't get the whirlpool part. We wanted a nice and DEEP soaking tub that would fit in the tiny bathroom space. (The total bathroom size is only 5' x 7'). Anyway, we got the tub and will put it into place soon.

It turns out you need to support the tub bottom with mortar because the tub rim isn't a weight supporting structure. Ugh. I have 5 - 60lb bags of mortar. I hope like hell that's enough. It should be.

Once the tub is in we can really start moving on the reassembly of the bathroom. Next is the walls and floor. We are putting in an electric radiant floor heater. It's fairly efficient given the size of the room. The existing hydronic radiator took up too much space so we had the plumbers come in and remove that piece from the boiler circuit.

For the walls we are putting up Hardibacker for the entire thing. We are only tiling the bathtub walls but there is so little other wall area that we just decided to continue all the way around rather than try to transition to blueboard.

What else is going on....I started watching Dexter on broadcast tv. It an interesting plot. A serial killer who only kills serial killers.. Strange. I went ahead and Netflixed the 1st showtime season so I can get caught up. I understand the Showtime episodes are a tad bit bloodier.

Ok, that's it. I've managed to write about nothing.