Working bee weekend

This past weekend Lani and I had a bit of a working bee preparing the house for the Connolly family visit on Wednesday.

Job #1 – Fix the creaky floor
For some time now our upstairs room floor has creaked quite badly in a few spots. The creaks were really only a problem when we had visitors staying in the spare rooms directly underneath our room. We pulled up the floating floor and after a bit of mucking around and investigation discovered the creaking noises came primarily from the nails in the floor panels. Thankfully no structural problems. Removing the nails was impossible so we used a countersink and hammered the nails completely through the floor into the supporting beams underneath. We then put in a few long screws to hold the boards in place, applied talcum powder along the joins, and then laid the floating floor back down.

Job #2 – Hang a new door
We hung a new door in the doorway entry to the downstairs area. Primarily, we wanted to be able to close off the downstairs area to block out the sound upstairs, or vice versa. For example, sometimes when you had the TV on upstairs and downstairs the sounds would compete and the TVs would gradually be turned up higher to drown out the sound from the other TV. I was a bit nervous about possibly wrecking the door when cutting the handle holes and hanging it but I purchased the right tools for the job and in the end it really was quite easy to do. The other benefit of a door will be to block baby Jessica and MJ from playing on the stairs.

Job #3 – Fix the washing machine
The water pump on our washing stopped working on the weekend. It had played up a little a few weeks ago and started working again but this time it just wouldn’t work. We decided to investigate the problem and try to fix it ourselves before buying another one. When Lani tilted the washing machine over a little I was amazed at how basic it was underneath. I unclipped the pump with ease and discovered one of Jasmine’s socks severely shredded in the pump intake area. Removed the sock, clipped the pump back into place and the washing machine was fixed. Thank you Fisher & Paykel!

Job #4 – Clean up the mess
Finally was cleaned up all the mess and completed a number of other smaller jobs to complete a successful working bee weekend.

Only negative was declining an invitation to go surfing and finding out today that I had missed out on some really nice clean waves. There is always next weekend.