Shall fill in later; it was a success.

Meanwhile, here are some pix.

I am pretty excited about hanging my first door. It will be a 24-inch-wide flat hollow door on the bathroom at my student ghetto project and I have the old broken door to use as a pattern. I got the door tonight at Lowes, hauling it to the site in my old Chrysler by sticking it through the passenger window and holding it over my head while I drove. Luckily it was dark and I didn’t have to get close to anything on the right. Couldn’t do that with a wider door, and definitely won’t be able to do it with the 30-inch prehung I’m gonna need for one of the bedrooms.

Also got a 10-pack of ceiling tiles, probably about a tenth of the amount I’ll need to finish the whole place, both floors. I plan to salvage whatever existing tiles that have anywhere close to the same hole pattern as the new ones, and give both the old and new ones a quick coat of Walmart flat white wall paint.

Those two purchases blew the budget for the weekend. Looking forward to my work day tomorrow.

Did get an unexpectedly early rent payment from the new roomer at the brick house. He was supposed to move in mid-month but moved it up two weeks. That’s fortunate; his rent will cover the deposit I’ll return to the tenant moving out. And I got an email from a guy interested in that room. Life is good.

Still not crazy about the color. Used it originally to paint trim in a big white room. Having it on four walls of a windowless bathroom has a Pepto Bismol effect that a tipsy frat boy could find alarming. Kinda feminine, too — creative accessorizing will be needed if the next tenants are guys who notice such things.

But so what — I am massively impressed with the longevity of that paint. It went on good as new and looks pretty darn good for its age. Was thinking as I painted of all those years — from the time I bought this house, the whole time my son was growing up and my mom was getting old. I went through two careers, three dogs from puppies to old age, two cats, three bunnies, five cars, a couple of broken hearts — all that time, that paint was down there waiting, just keeping its shit together until it was its time to be of service

Sounds like I found an antique tapestry or some well preserved old wallpaper, but no, I’m talking about paint. Got home from the stone house in time for a board meeting of a charitable organization I’m on –because, despite my circumstances, vestiges remain of a middle class life. Lowes was closed by the time that was over. I couldn’t get ceiling tiles so I rooted around in the paint room in my basement for latex semigloss in some color other than white to paint the bathroom at that student ghetto place. Other than the bathroom all the walls in that place are wood paneling, next to which anything looks better than white. And I want semigloss so it’s easier to clean. The contractor who installed that new bathroom a couple of years ago painted it a nice mustard color; if the store was open I’d get something like that.

The storeroom had several partial cans of dark brown and one never opened can of the trim paint I used in my bedroom here at the brick house around 1987. Glidden off-the-shelf “peach chiffon” with a rusted lid and a price sticker for $11.99. Peach chiffon is more like baby doll flesh and a color I never really liked in my room. It’s been there for 26 years. Pretty sure I won’t be needing this can for any touchups. If I ever paint that room again I’m going with a new color.

I sucked off the rust dust with the shop vac and pried open the lid. It was separated, for sure, but stirred up smoothly — unlike some Walmart paint I bought two weeks ago that was unstirrable and had to be strained. Twenty-six years on the basement floor, never opened but never frozen or overheated. I’m off to doll-flesh that bathroom.

I hate drop ceilings, and I have a lot of them.

It’s hard to make myself care about an architectural feature I despise.

Every ceiling of every room in four three-bedroom apartments in the student ghetto has the old 2-foot by 4-foot steel grid suspended ceilings with the cardboard acoustical panels, the kind that make your whole house look like a basement rec room in Levittown. And sorry, folks from Levittown, I’m sure you remodeled your rec rooms years ago and got rid of the stuff.

I can’t get rid of it, not easily anyway, because the contractor who rewired these apartments right before I bought them in the mid-1980s ran the wiring haphazardly along and through the original plaster ceiling and then covered the whole mess with the drop ceilings. Not only that, but the top end of the classy fake-wood paneling which also graces every room in every apartment extends into the grid frame but doesn’t reach the original ceiling.

Changing the ceilings would be a job I’m not up to. Caring enough to maintain them seems like a good idea.

Over the years the white metal tracks acquired a golden patina of nicotine, cooking grease and fly specks along with pieces of Scotch, duct, masking and electrical tape used to hold up graduation banners, birthday balloons and such. Some are bent from supporting heavier stuff, many have come unhung from the hooks that are supposed to suspend them.

The tiles, all originally white, range from bone to beige to the same orange-shellac color as the grids, and there are so many variations in their texture and perforations that any room could be a ceiling panel museum. The low, checkerboard pattern of the filthy grids and multihued panels clashes nightmarishly with the equally mismatched wood-patterned walls, linoleum-square floors and miserly small windows.

I’m awfully mean to a place that has quietly supported me for the past 30 years. Because the truth is, these four apartments have been pumping money into my life with relatively little hassle since I moved to this town. That’s relatively little hassle. Sometimes they’re a huge hassle. But in general they’re easy to repair even when destroyed, which is not uncommon, and overall the net return has been decent — not enough to live on, but a good second income. I often said it’s like having a husband with a steady, low-paying job.

One of the four apartments was so dirty and busted up after the last tenants that I couldn’t show it. That means no rent, but I have a little more time to work on it. So I have some plans, which include installing a dishwasher and new base cabinets in the kitchen and giving it a thorough cleaning which includes the filthy ceiling. To that end I spent about 12 hours over the past two days spraying the tracks with Greased Lightning, wiping off the filth, getting off the tape residue with Goo Gone and steel wool and then painting them with white Rustoleum using a 2-inch-wide sponge roller on a stick. Gave my knees a break but oy, my neck.

To my dismay I discovered by accident that I probably could have just painted over the filth and saved a lot of time. Guess I’ll do that when I get to the tracks upstairs — because, even after 12 hours, I only completed the first floor. And I still have to paint or replace all the ceiling panels. And it’s just one of four places in this condition.