Progress Happens One Chore at a Time

by rosemary on 08/26/09 at 8:03 pm

Summer is ending and I am just now getting to work on some nagging old clubhouse projects. A one hundred year old building always needs work and work is therapy for my soul. [Repeat this mantra] Today, I marathon shopped for supplies to complete my top 3 doable projects.

Rosemary in The Clubhouse Horror

Rust paint and very coarse steel wool for “The Clubhouse Horror”. Last Spring our Rental chair was showing the the building to a future bride. Her fiance was not pleased. The bride made us promise we would do something about the smell in the Men’s room before her September wedding. It was bad in there long before I joined the club. I have scrubbed with bleach, steam cleaned, and used animal deodorizer, but nothing touches that smell-o-male. There is a jungle of pipes rusting away under that exclusively male, wall hung fixture [who invented that thing?]. The whole business is just so bad to work around. At 9 hours and still counting, of scraping and chiseling those pipes, and sanding the walls and ceiling with my half sheet sander [fondly know as "the bomb"] I am almost ready to prime the pipes and walls. The final coat, rustoleum for the pipes, epoxy for the walls will, I pray, eliminate the smell. I say, ‘”never again ladies, we are keeping the boys room clean.”
Wood Boards and Screws We are reorganizing our many closets so more of our long term renters [added a church and a dance troupe] can rent closets for their equipment. This was an arduous process, the closets were a mess, and some members were reluctant to allow change from traditional uses. Now, in the name of progress and increased income, I am building in shelves and adding a hefty security deadbolt to a less convenient, but under-utilized, closet under the stairs. We will still have to shred boxes full of decades of old checks to make room, but that’s doable.
Bulletin Boards, More Wood Two years ago our club PR committee discussed placing a large cork bulletin board in the public area of the clubhouse. I was stumped until today on how to find one that fit the space and our tight budget. I looked at the back-to school circulars on my kitchen table and inspiration hit. A Rosemary-can-build-it solution appeared on the closet piece of scrap paper, combine 3 smaller bulletin boards [cheap for school!] in one 1X2 frame. Today I cut and stained the wood. I will post a picture when finished.
Dump Run The old coal room was/is downright scary. There is absolutely no light in there and ugh! the 100 year old pile of coal dust encrusted junk was truly unpleasant to sort. The boiler last used coal in the 1950’s but coal is still piled in the corners. A fellow club member, Correen, and I braved the coal hole last Fall and sorted piles for removal. This week, my darling spouse, Philip, hauled the whole mess off to the Waste to Energy facility.