So, the latest here at the chateau d’saster would be me completely redoing the framing for the bathroom floor. You’ll recall I had to sister one of the joists, and install blocking between all of them to make the structure more rigid. Well… I spent most of today ripping all that work out after finally realizing the reason my subfloor wasn’t flat was because I’d only been leveling things in one direction. Normally, that approach would work, assuming your reference points are, in fact, level with respect to each other. Guess what? All the old joists are bowed (except the one especially evil bastard in the middle that’s 1/2″ thicker on one end than on the other), meaning my cribbing followed that arc precisely. Woulda been cool if I were building a boat, but I’m not, and it wasn’t. Anyways, several hours of prying, pounding, cursing, cutting, and panting later, all the cribbing was out. Y’know those flimsy-looking galvanized steel joist hangers? Them things are made to stay put once you nail ‘em in - I had to take out somewhere between 16 and 700 of them today, with 6 nails (driven into 100-year old lumber) in each. Then I got to rip the new joists to width, cut ‘em to length, and pound them into place with my new favorite tool (5lb hand sledge). I’m out of bolts, so there’s a trip to the hardware store tomorrow (everything locally closes early on Sunday), but I went ahead and laid the plywood back in place to keep the cold air in the cellar. Plus, it gave me a chance to see if this approach worked any better. It did! I now have a subfloor that’s both flat and level. w00t!

In other news, I’ve given up on trying to buy a banjo off of eBay. Everyone I like shoots out of my price range. Granted, I’m cheap, but this isn’t something I want to spend a bunch of money on just yet. Sooo, looks like I’ll be making myself a banjo. There’s lots of ways to do it on the cheap: cigar box, mountain style (flat boards rather than a bent hoop), gourd, etc. I’ll probably set up a separate section here on the site for instrument building projects, just in case anyone else is innerested in following along.