As I start this post, I can hear the nightly fireworks going off from the State Fair – all the way from St. Paul! Whoa. The bad news is I think I’ve heard them every night of the fair so far, which means I’ve been up later than I want for too many nights, now that Karen’s getting up at 5:15 again…

But I’ve been up late working on the basement! Yesterday I hung the remaining pieces of drywall (after figuring out the spacing for the door) and started to mud it. Man, that sucks. I’ve done it before, long ago, but it wasn’t my project – I think it was a garage, or work area – and it didn’t have to be good. This one I want to be good. I’m taking my time, doing 3 or 4 layers in all, but tonight I wanted to just forget about it. It kept "chunking up" on me on certain corners (and it’s almost all corners!!) and I couldn’t figure out why. Ah well. I pressed through it (literally) and got it close enough, I figure I’ll clean it up with a sponge tomorrow morning. That was my day today, and probably for the next two: get up, sponge down the joint compound mistakes, go to work, run errands, come home, and put another layer on. The good news is the flat runs on the walls are looking good, and if anybody’s looking too hard in the corners the room has already failed!

Tonight I needed another project after mudding, so I picked up the hardware for the two doors I’m going to hang and tackled the first one. Yesterday I’d leveled and screwed in the interior pieces of the door frame, and today got the reward for the tedium: it hangs perfectly! No swing at all, it moves wonderfully, and falls right into the latch. Awesome. Only problem (which we’d anticipated, but thought we could work around) is that it doesn’t open all the way around before banging into the main house support beam. Ah well. I anticipated it so much I made sure to get hinges with a removable pin so we could just take the door out if needed. So good progress! My goal is to try to get the mudding done and at least prime the walls and hang the doors before the Chicago kids arrive for the State Fair. We’ll see how that goes…

Oh yeah, and I’ve got a million things fermenting in the basement. Sweeeeeet.

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