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.