Skip to main content

Enjoying DIY Health and Projects

It's been a tough year and a half for most of us, but I've been taking advantage of the things available to us in 2021. DIY health, LED lights and modern home improvement tools have improved my life this year. 

The main thing has been DIY health. As many readers know, trying to get necessary labs from doctors can make you feel like Oliver Twist: "Please, sir, may I have some proper health care?" Being more irreverent and more of a do-it-yourselfer, I've ordered my own labs (allowed here in freewheelin' Indiana), researched my own care, and experimented with hormones ordered online. I've also been a member of Dr. Davis's Inner Circle group and found it invaluable. The L. reuteri/B. coagulans yogurt in particular has been helpful. It has been a bumpy ride, but my last thyroid panel came back normal. Normal--on no medications! My free T3 and free T4 are in the middle of the reference range. TSH is above program ideal at 2.4, but I'm not tired, I'm not gaining weight, there's no pressure behind my eyes, and I haven't been sick. 

I also haven't felt like someone ran me over after a few hours' work on the house. Last year's garage rehab went slowly for that reason. This year's project (fixing the cracked bathroom ceiling and replacing the fan and light) has gone slowly only because of some retrofitting difficulties and my lack of experience cutting lath and plaster and working with drywall. 

The scope of the ceiling project came to include replacing the fan after I dropped it and broke it. No problem, I thought, I'll find replacement parts. Then I saw how rusted the housing was.



Since the ceiling problem was probably from too much moisture, the fan was probably undersized, anyway. The cracks go through several layers of paint. Probably, previous owners painted over the cracks that kept appearing. 

No problem, I thought, I'll just put another fan in. So I bought sleek new fan with an LED light and nightlight, unboxed it, and found the exhaust was on the left. The old exhaust was on the right, and a ceiling joist blocked the path from left to right.

Exhaust tube (not shown) is to the right of the joist. 

Now this was a problem. I went out and bought a different fan with a right exhaust, but it looked cheap and flimsy and I didn't want to redo this project anytime soon. It was also too large for the opening, so I'd have had to retrofit it anyway. Back it went.

No problem, I thought. I'll cut the lath and plaster with a jigsaw and the joists with the sawzall. An employee at the hardware store said that the lath could be hard when he sold me some saw blades. He wasn't kidding--even the sawzall with the pruning blade wouldn't cut one of them. A landlord friend suggesting hand sawing, and that worked: the power saws were vibrating the loose wood instead of cutting it. Now I just had to figure out how to mount a fan into a gaping hole. Thanks to the misleading instructions that came with the fan, I went to a lot more trouble than necessary, but it got done. I connected the exhaust using a flexible extension bent 90 degrees, hooked up the wires with the help of a multimeter (the old tags in the picture are completely faded), stuffed them all in the J-box and called it a weekend.

Cutting the plaster with a saw created lots of fine dust, so I put on a cloth mask I made at the beginning of the pandemic. It's two layers of an old t-shirt. 


The mask allowed so much plaster dust in that I was coughing. It turned my snot gray. It wasn't loose (it fits better than my other masks) and there aren't any significant gaps. But it let in dust, and I think we can safely say, aerosols and viruses. 

No problem--I remembered I had a respirator. 

But there was the problem of a big gap in the ceiling and no way to put any backing in to support a piece of drywall. Today, though, I found out about drywall clips. They make ingenious use of failure: after you clip them on the the edge of the drywall you need to repair, you run a screw through the wall and into a mesh that's weak enough to fail but strong enough to hold the screw in place. Then you add your drywall piece and screw it in the same way. (The mesh is in the back, and large enough that you don't have to drill the screw in precisely the right spot.) Finally, you move the clips back and forth until they fail in fatigue. (See a video on them here if you're interested.)

I used the rest of the epoxy from last year to fill a couple of big gaps. I'm almost finished.

No rust! Much quieter, too! The grill attaches with two clever spring clips. The main LED light uses only 10 Watts.  

Night light on. Abatron epoxy at the top right--expensive, but strong and easy to work with. 

Even though I've had to look up at the ceiling a lot, my neck doesn't hurt. (I credit the B. coagulans in the yogurt.) 

Next weekend when the epoxy has set up, I hope to finish the plaster work and get the ceiling ready to paint. When it's done, I can finally enjoy the bottle of Bordeaux wine I bought for the occasion.

Comments

"When it's done, I can finally enjoy the bottle of Bordeaux wine I bought for the occasion."

... and it will be thoroughly deserved :)

All the best Jan
Lori Miller said…
Thanks, Jan! I'm looking forward to it!

Popular posts from this blog

Dana Carpender's Podcast; Dr. Davis on YouTube; Labor Day Sales

Dana Carpender, who's written several recipe books and other works on low-carb, has a podcast and is still writing articles at carbsmart.com. She's a terrific writer and amateur researcher (otherwise known as reading , as Jimmy Dore jokes ). I use her book 500 Low-Carb Recipes all the time and I'm looking forward to hearing more from her. I've embedded her podcast on my blog (click on the three lines at the top right if you don't see it, or go to Spotify or other podcast source if you're getting this by email). Carbsmart.com doesn't seem to have a blog feed, so if you want to see the latest posts there, you can sign up for notifications at their site. Dr. Davis has been putting a lot more videos on YouTube, so I've added his channel to the lineup. Click on the three lines on my blog if you don't see it, or go to his channel here .  * * * * * Primal Kitchen is having a Labor Day sale-- 20% off everything. They sell high quality collagen powder, con...

Fasting blood sugar & insulin have crept up!

It's pretty bad when even conventional medicine thinks your blood sugar is high. I had lab tests done last week, as I do every year, and saw things were going in the wrong direction. Photo from Pixabay . Uh-oh.  Ideal blood sugar is about 70-90. Your blood sugar can be high because you're stressed or ill, but I felt OK. I can't blame it on cortisol, which was smack in the middle of the normal range. And my A1c, which reflects blood sugar over the past few months, shows that whatever is going on has been happening for a while. My insulin is more than double what it should be. Oddly, my triglycerides, which typically indicate carb consumption, were good.  I don't have an explanation for the triglycerides. I should have suspected something was wrong, though. I've felt very tired and a little sad for the past few months. Unlike many people with higher than ideal blood sugar and insulin, I had only gained about three pounds.  Regardless of my good weight and triglyceride...

Interview: The Microbiome's Effect on Almost Everything

Mark L. Cannon, DDS, MS joins Bret Weinstein of the Darkhorse Podcast for a discussion about the oral microbiome and its downstream effects on everything from acne to Alzheimer’s. Dr. Cannon is a pediatric dentist and professor of otolaryngology (ear, nose and throat medicine). It's an hour and 44 minutes, but well worth your time. Link here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjkOgCXiMeE

Avoiding a Nightmare by Using Math

The answer lies in trigonometry. -Sherlock Holmes Don't worry if you never learned trigonometry--the answers here lie in arithmetic. Medical test results often come back positive or negative, as if the result were a certainty. Of course, there is the accuracy, but if the accuracy is 99% or so, what does that really mean? That you should get your affairs in order? Before you call your probate attorney, let's take an example from the book Calculated Risks by Gerd Gigerenzer. Let's say you're a 40-something year old woman with no symptoms of breast cancer. You have a positive mammogram. What are the odds you have breast cancer? Using some assumptions about test accuracy and rates of disease based on real data, the odds that you'd have breast cancer are one in eleven according to Gigerenzer. (If you were way off, don't feel bad--most of the physicians Gigerenzer tested were way off, too--and they had the data in front of them. Not that that's comforting in every...

Lousy Mood? It Could be the Food

Here's a funny AMV(1) on what it's like to be depressed, apathetic and overly sensitive. Note: explicit (but funny) lyrics in the video. Hearing this song brought a startling realization: I used to be emo, but with normal clothes. Sulking, sobbing and writing poetry were my hobbies. When I was a kid, my mother said that she wouldn't know what to do to punish me if I had done something wrong. And yet things got worse. Over a two-week period in 1996, my best friend moved away, I lost my job and broke up with my boyfriend. I lost my appetite and lived on a daily bagel, cream cheese and a Coke for the next few months. I had tried counseling, and didn't find it helpful; in fact, I found reviving painful memories was pointless. Not thinking about them, on the other hand, worked wonders. Later on, so did studying philosophy and learning to think through emotions instead of just riding through them. But what's blown away all the techniques is diet. Since I s...