The Bondos of Matrimony

Today was our 16th anniversary. As Lisa left to go on a bike ride with our daughter this morning she looked up and, "Married for 16 years and you've spent 9 of them on a scaffold."

In spite of that, our marriage is at least as strong as the bondo I used to fix the barge board, more on that later.

As a dutiful husband I picked up where Lisa left off in the kitchen. Since she had stripped the nook table, as noted in my last post, I took it out for her to work on. Last week Friday I was home alone with a day and night to myself, I decided to work in the kitchen to surprise Lisa. I started by trying to loosen some of the plywood under the vinyl on the floor:


I soon discovered that even though there were LOTS of staples holding the plywood down, I could find where the plywood seams were:


It was removable with a large crowbar and brute force, pretty soon I had a good sized chunk out


If you look above you can see lines where there must have been 12 x 12 vinyl tiles just stuck right to the floor. Thankfully they were gone but the maple floor underneath was VERY STICKY. I went to Menard's and got a bottle of stuff to cut the glue residue, it worked great, but was $17 a bottle:


Luckily there was a plywood seam that ran right in front of the stove and fridge so I could clear out half the kitchen and not have to mess with under the appliances yet. Lisa was VERY pleasantly surprised when she came home Saturday.


I've spent the rest of the week working on the corner of the back of the house. All the bargeboards around the house had been covered in aluminum a long time ago, I pried back a piece to see what was going on. The end of the Northwest corner's bargeboard was about 75% rotted away, and so was a large chunk above the lookout post on the north side. All the aluminum did was hide it. So the past week I dug out all the rotted wood. Then I covered the surrounding area with wood hardener. Then I layered on the bondo for a few days, and when I built up enough I sanded it back down smooth. Here is the back corner:


And a close up:


I may have over done it on the wood hardener on the end!

Today I primed the whole area, and started screwing on the plywood braces for the garage. More about both of those next week.