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.

Labels:

Comments

Lowcarb team member said…
"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
August 22, 2021
Lori Miller said…
Thanks, Jan! I'm looking forward to it!
August 22, 2021
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Winning! Read some good news!

The good news keeps on coming. After four years of the country being in the biggest mess that most of us have lived through, it feels like spring is here early. The cold wind is refreshing, the snow is sparkling, and the days are getting longer.  Photo from Pixabay . If you're getting this post by email, click here to see embedded videos from X. Trump bans the chemical and surgical mutilation of children in the name of "gender affirming care."  This is just an executive order, which the next president could overturn; we need Congress to pass a law. The CIA admits COVID was mostly likely a lab leak after all. "The CIA analysis supporting lab origin of COVID was completed and published internally during the Biden administration. It was withheld from the public by the Biden Administration in violation of the COVID-19 Origin Act of 2023, which mandated release," said Richard H. Ebright on X.  The CIA now says lab leak is the most likely explanation for COVID-19. R...
Post a Comment
Read more

Not Only Cheaper, But Easier

A while back, I wrote about saving money on break time coffee and snacks. I haven't done very well putting it into practice. But a post by James Clear today got me thinking about it again: Warren Buffett uses a two-list system to prioritize things. Check it out --and follow the instructions. Using Buffett's two-list system, two of the goals I ended up with were taking care of myself and saving $400 more per month than I already am. As I said, I've been wanting to save money, and the system made me really focus on this. I came up with 11 money-saving ideas, six of which had to do with food. Buying hamburger in bulk. Ranch Foods Direct sells one-pound packages of 80% lean pastured ground beef in bundles of 20 for a lot less than Whole Foods. Sprouts only carries super-lean beef that's grass-fed, and it's more expensive, too.  Not driving to Whole Foods. Whole Foods is out of my way, and saving a weekly trip saves gas. Coffee at home, tea at work. Tea is fr...
24 comments
Read more

Let's Grow Vegetables from Seed

MAHA may be a great idea, but what you do at your house is more important for your health than what's happening at the White House. Growing your own vegetables provides food that's fresher and tastes better than store-bought and helps you get some fresh air, sunshine and exercise. If you grow enough, you can even can your own sauces and soups that don't have any franken-food ingredients. My first time growing celery from seed.  Here in central Indiana, it's time to plant celery from seed since the average last frost date is 10 weeks away. In a few weeks, it'll be time to plant tomatoes. There are a couple of ways to figure out when to start various seeds where you live: You can find out when it's time to plant things by 1) looking up your average last frost date, 2) getting a seed packet and looking at the instructions for starting the seeds indoors, and 3) counting backwards on a calendar by the number of weeks indicated. You could also ask Grok (X's AI fea...
1 comment
Read more

Blog Lineup Change

Bye-bye, Fathead. I've enjoyed the blog, but can't endorse the high-fat, high-carb Perfect Health Diet that somehow makes so much sense to some otherwise bright people. An astrophysicist makes some rookie mistakes on a LC diet, misdiagnoses them, makes up "glucose deficiency," and creates a diet that's been shown in intervention studies to increase small LDL, which can lead to heart disease. A computer programmer believes in the diet and doesn't seem eager to refute it because, perhaps, scientists are freakin' liars and while he's good at spotting logical inconsistencies, lacks some intermediate knowledge of human biology. To Tom's credit, he says it's not the right diet for everyone, but given the truckload of food that has to be prepared and eaten, impracticality of following it while traveling (or even not traveling), and unsuitability for FODMAPs sufferers, diabetics and anyone prone to heart disease (i.e., much of the population), I'm...
24 comments
Read more

This Just In: Yogurt Doesn't Improve Health

A recent study from Spain finds "In comparison with people that did not eat yogurt, those who ate this dairy product regularly did not display any significant improvement in their score on the physical component of quality of life, and although there was a slight improvement mentally, this was not statistically significant," states López-García. Most yogurt is pretty much pudding with a little bacteria . Pudding is a sugar bomb. Hard to believe the stuff doesn't improve health outcomes, isn't it? But as usual, researchers are calling for...more research. "For future research more specific instruments must be used which may increase the probability of finding a potential benefit of this food."
23 comments
Read more