28 July 2004

In which George tries to find a right angle somewhere... anywhere!

Jon hauled away a truckload of crap to the dump.

George filled in the cute little missing notches of underlayment in the kitchen, installed the cover to the subpanel, finished peeling back carpet from the foyer closet and the mouth of the hallway, started marking and measuring the foyer for its underlayment, and got himself hung up on the horns of a dilemma: where to draw the border between tile for the foyer and hardwood for the music room.

Jon's idea was to run tile halfway into the pony wall that divides the foyer from the rest of the room and start the hardwood from there. While working on measuring out that line, George discovered that the pony wall is slightly concave and not parallel to anything else, so he couldn't figure out from what to measure or to what to be perpendicular or parallel. The foyer closet's plane is offset a few inches from the door's plane, and opposite the pony wall is a perpendicular wall, so they're no help, either. He thought about dropping a plumb bob from the wall/ceiling corners overhead, but those didn't appear to be on square with anything, either.

Despite the lacked of reference points, we both thought the line he'd drawn (extrapolating the plane of the pony wall, such as it was) looked a bit off square, so I suggested checking it against the foyer closet wall at both ends, and there was in fact a 1/4" difference. Of course, who knews if that wall is square with anything, either. George also wondered if putting the boundary at the halfway point of the pony wall would look silly.

He decided to clean up for the day and let Jon figure it out tomorrow. That seemed like a good choice to me.

How about that Theresa Heinz Kerry?

1 comment:

  1. One of the things that I most appreciated about the contractor who remodeled our bathroom was his ability to take a small, almost-100-year-old room, in which no surface was level, plumb or square, and hide that fact from all but the most practiced eye. The best solution is often to split the difference... which I will concede is more complicated with flooring than most other materials.

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