anyone want a shopping cart?

There's an old Market Basket shopping cart near my house on Stickney Ave, Somerville. It showed up in my driveway Sunday night or Monday morning Saturday night or Sunday morning, and now it's on the sidewalk. All four wheels work - it doesn't have one of the 'boot' things that some newer carts have to keep it from rolling outside of its appointed parking lot.

If nobody takes it before Weds nite/Thurs morning, I assume one of the folks walking around collecting bottles or driving around collecting scrap metal will pick it up.

Fuck yeah.

So, I've occasionally bitched about the wall treatment that afflicts many of the walls in my apartment and the common area of the house. They were going for a sort of stucco-ish look, but it ended up looking like a crazy frosted cake with drywall compound slathered on in big swooshing arcs leaving ridges of well over 1/4" on the wall surface. I have to dust my walls. Seriously. Hate. Hate hate.

I've dabbled a bit with sanding down some of the walls in the stairwell going from the second to third floors in my apartment. It's tedious and loud and even with the shopvac hooked up to the sander it makes a hell of a mess. It really needs to be done as an all-at-once project rather than "a bit here and a bit there" just for economies of scale in dropclothing and cleanup.

So, when my awesome tenant mentioned she was going out of town for a week and a half, I saw my chance. clauclauclaudia and I sprung into action after she left and proceeded to use a 6" sander to grind down the wall to something approximating flat, skim-coated it, and primed it. I had initially been hoping to get it painted as well, but that didn't happen due to a combination of everything taking longer than we expected and an unfortunate family emergencies on my part that took away some of my time that would otherwise have been spent working on this.

I spent all of last weekend and most of labor day weekend (plus the Tuesday after labor day, which I took as vacation) getting hot and sweaty and exhausted (not in *that* fun way, but in this other fun way) and wow I am sore all over (ditto). However, the priming is done, and so now we can pick a paint color at our leisure and paint it. Painting the walls isn't going to be intrusive for my tenant in the way that turning a fuckload of drywall compound into noise and dust would be.

Behind the cut I have some before and after pics. ( pics here )