Patching and breaking

 Things don't always go as one hopes. Well, actually barely ever.

First.

It seems that Oscar got stuck in the toilet, locking himself in. Mattias put some oil through the keyhole in the lock and, well. Noone casually knows how the door was open. 

The fact is though that after this episode, it was not possible anymore to lock oneself in (which, being a toilet, it could be useful).

The lock on the door

I decided to look into it and get assistance from online experts to fix it. So, I first dismount it. Interesting, it was put on the door with a random piece of wood. When I got into fixing it, I also took out another lock that was left around by the previous owner in the basement. The peculiar detail is that the second lock has some paint that would fit more the color that I see under the layer of white paint on the toilet door.

So, I wonder if that was the right lock for this door, but broke and someone put a lock that was somehwere else (and I think it must have been in the kitchen, since it is light blue under the paint layers).

A door without the lock

Let's take a good picture of how it look before I disassemble

 

Yaha, now it is opened

Ok. I opened it. I have played with it. Without the lid it locks. With the lid it doesn't. It seems there is some friction with some parts, but I still wonder how that became the problem just with some oil in the keyhole. 

I have spent already few hours on it, without figuring it out. I am sure that someone knows exactly how to fix it in few seconds. I just don't get it, so it has to wait a bit longer until I get any positive energy to not lose the patience on it.

Second. 

In some parts of the floor in the TV/Piano room there has always been some evil draft coming up, there where the sliding doors are. 

We have the only part of the basement that is not isolated under that room and I guess that around the sliding doors, as there is no threshold and probably the floor construction changes, there is this gap that let cold air come up. 

Mattias had the great idea to close the gaps between the wooden planks, or at least to put some insulation. He went and buy some flax caulk and even a tool for doing that (we could just use whatever we had around) and he started doing it. A bit. 

But the gaps are not deep everywhere, so it is not easy to let it stay, with people and cats running around and a vacuum cleaner that regularly sucks up the insulation.

The floor with the gaps poorly insulated

As lately I did find a lot of pieces of flax caulk everywhere, I tried to understand how to fix the problem.

I think generally one would use sawdust with glue for this job, but we had the flax caulk and I was going to use that. 

I thought then to use glue to secure it in the gaps. 

Mimmi decided to help picking up pieces of flax

I am using a properly very expensive tool for doing the caulking

Piece by piece, I took the flax, squeezed it between the gaps and pushed it down after putting some indoor glue. 

In certain cases, I put also the glue on top of it, to avoid that it'd stick out too much.

The end result

I am actually quite happy of the result. We did run also a vacuum cleaner test and it seems steady enough to stay where I put it. 

When passing the hand over that part of the floor, one doesn't feel any longer the evil cold air coming up, so hopefully this is a good patch for the issue at this stage.

Third.

I bought some fancy curtains. Well, it is about time to put some curtains up. Afterall we have been living here just 8 years and half. Some people would have put them up before even putting the beds in place.

So, I got the curtains. But then we need to find a way to put them up and after a lot of research on a long enough curtain rod, I picked up some semi random item that would work ok here, although not very super duper expensive or handmade or authentic.

Now, buying things is relative easy. Doing something with them is another story.

Mattias is busy drilling holes

Mattias is the handyman when it comes to this and he started to happily drill in the wall. First the drill was swobbling everywhere, so it took few weeks/month to go and buy the right point to use for drilling. 

Done that he succeded in the first hole. 

The second didn't really work as smooth. He managed to hit a perfect cross between the bricks, making it impossible to drill the hole. Or better. He made a hole, just an enormous one. The plaster just started to fall apart by looking at it.

The hole.

The end result

Conclusion? Now he has to move the previous attachment as it is no more aligned with the second one. We risk another black hole. He also has a third one to put up. 

This is going to take probably half a year more at least. 

Excluding the time it will take me to patch the holes....