Posts Tagged ‘DIY’
Saving Money
Last spring I contacted four landscape companies asking for quotes on upgrading our front walkway area which has settled to such a degree it doesn’t properly drain water away from the house anymore. Two of the four responded and showed up to submit a quote. It was good to hear some of their thoughts about possible solutions but the costs were a real shock.
They came in at $11K and $8K to remove what was there and replace it with a new finish.
I decided to do a much more minimalist fix using DIY labor.
We have nibbled away at the project over a very long span of months but the last few days of Cyndie’s boundless energy has increased progress significantly.
We knew there was a concrete sidewalk beneath all that stone but we just didn’t know how much. The bad news is that the concrete had settled in the wrong direction for draining water away from the house.
It occurred to me yesterday that we could hire a concrete lifter to solve that part of the job. We’d need to spend some money on that but it would be a lot less than the cost of total replacement. Then we would be able to more easily finish the re-installation of the slabs and river rock ourselves. Think of the money we’ll save!
I sure hope my body will be up to the task. A shoulder injury I’ve been dealing with for months has recently flared up to a degree that has me questioning the ultimate success possibilities of my self-healing routine. I was enjoying slow increments of improvement that gave me hope prior to a few instances where use caused new pain and loss of strength.
On top of that, for good measure yesterday I dropped some boards on my foot and gave myself a painful contusion.
I was able to toss 80 bales of hay last night without much in the way of limitations, so I’m optimistic my abilities won’t be too much of a problem.
I’ve started watching the 2nd installment of Netflix’s NFL series, “Receivers” and it has me wishing I could have the immediate attention of trainers and physical therapists like professional athletes have.
Of course, by not having them, think of all the money I’m saving!
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Fence Fixes
The first project of the day yesterday was to replace the broken board from the paddock fence. We still have all the old boards taken from the deck when that got redone, so I rummaged through the stack in the hay shed for an 8-foot board that was in reasonable condition. Cyndie came down to help and we worked to push the end post back toward vertical while pouring rocks and lime screenings into the void to hold it.
The wire had simply pulled out of the ratcheting tensioner so re-threading it and cranking it tight again provided the finishing touch after screwing the board to the posts.
One fix down, one remaining…
We moved to the bent gate and started by unthreading the webbing that Pam and John had used to temporarily secure the mangled gate. I loosened the clamp that secured the “hinged” end to the posts.
We laid the gate on the ground and debated our next move.
While talking it through, we started putting our weight on it and found that was enough to slowly return it toward flat. Next, we brainstormed ideas for prying the crossbars to close the widest gap. Using what we had immediately available, we found the webbing worked well to pull the bars closer together. After making extra wraps to hold it, we tied off the ends and declared it “good enough.”
The whole process went surprisingly smoothly and the fix was completed with relative ease using minimal additional tools beyond what we had brought with us. How often do things go as well as that? Rarely, in my experience.
It doesn’t look pretty and it’s not very sturdy, given several kinks and broken welds, but it closes the space and serves as a visual barrier at the very least. I’m rather pleased we aren’t forced to buy a new one to replace it right away. If a horse decides to run into it again, I suspect the result will be beyond repair.
For some reason, the horses showed total disdain for our activity and left us alone the entire time. Maybe they were embarrassed about the original incident and were distancing themselves from the evidence.
As soon as I finish mowing around the fence, I will energize the wires again and re-train the horses to avoid the fences at all costs. It’s probably not that big of an issue for them since they’ve now turned their attention to abusing the feed buckets instead.
When it comes to owning horses, it seems there is always another new fix awaiting attention around the next corner.
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Branches Pruned
When things go smoothly, I am generally surprised. In my experience, DIY projects commonly involve a fair amount of problem-solving. Not yesterday, for me. The only thing that didn’t go as planned was the surprise of a large branch falling on our driveway sometime while we were eating breakfast. Besides being rather shocking to find that unexpected mess on the driveway that was clean just an hour earlier, it was pretty funny because we were coming outside to trim branches in that same vicinity.
It seemed like it would be a simple process of cutting down a few branches in order to give Cyndie’s garden more sunlight.
However, things went so smoothly that a few branches soon became a lot more than a few.
I needed to get the ATV and trailer to haul three loads of branches away. That ended up being a breeze. Without complication, the Grizzly started easily, the trailer connection was painless, the ATV didn’t create a muddy mess anywhere, the branches were tossed onto brush piles without incident, and everything was put away just as the farrier finished trimming the horse’s hooves.
The airspace above the garden opened up nicely.
There was plenty of time left in the day to trim more fence lines and even mow grass on the back side of the barn before dinner.
With any luck, the ground will be dry enough to mow most of the rest of the property today. I’d love to finish it all since I leave for the bike trip tomorrow.
I wonder what other projects I’m forgetting to address before I go…
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Rock Fitting
On the way to the lake yesterday, we dropped Asher off for his in-residence training and he accepted the unfamiliar surroundings without complaint.
Asher is barely visible in the far pen beyond the front area occupied by a dog he didn’t yet know. He passed by this front dog with a brief check, and receiving no response, he decided to ignore it and move on to sniffing every surface in his pen.
We felt it was a great start. Satisfied Asher was in good hands, we hopped in our car and drove the rest of the way to the lake without him.
While we are up here, we are planning to add a finishing touch to the old cabin where the log guys cut off the bottom of rotting logs in March. Having a large stash of faux rocks at home, we brought some up for the job.
These rocks had spent some time as markers in our labyrinth and as a result, developed a layer of dirt that needed to be removed.
That’s fine. We had some time to spare.
After cleaning them up and spreading the rocks out so we could see them, we tried mocking up the layouts for each space.
It seemed like a good plan to me. We felt encouraged by the process and figured the hard work was all behind us. The next phase involved a new adhesive from Techniseal called Stickystone. It is a fast-setting vertical hardscape adhesive.
Unfortunately, it didn’t go as well as my test case back at home. A few rocks had fallen off the foundation of the house in Beldenville so I tested the Stickystone to reattach them and it worked with ease.
For some reason that I haven’t figured out, getting the adhesive to hold the rocks in place up here is only successful about half the time. After completing two of the five surfaces, we were using up the limited supply of adhesive too fast and my patience was dwindling.
We had spent so much time cleaning and prepping that the mounting and remounting had pushed us past the dinner hour. We were tired and hungry and I was very frustrated. Our remedy was a trip to Coop’s Pizza for dinner.
If it’s not too rainy this morning, we’ll try hanging more rocks until the adhesive runs out. I will be looking to focus on the outlook that partial progress is better than no progress at all.
Come to think of it, that’s also one way we will be considering Asher’s training while he is away.
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Cutting Away
There’s no turning back now. The guys started cutting away the rotting logs of the truss yesterday under the hot rays of mid-sixty-degree sunshine up in the Hayward area.
The view of this cross-section shows the degree to which the log was disintegrating. They also uncovered the bees’ nest I knew was there. Good thing there were no bees present at this time of year.
We won’t be around to see them install the replacement truss components because we need to head home this morning. Alas, that gives us an excuse to return as soon as we can arrange additional coverage for the horses.
We have a new project to undertake because they also cut off the bottom of rotting logs on the front of “cabin 3,” located just behind and to the side of the main house. It was decided the best finish there would be to fill the voids with faux river rock, which is something they don’t do.
DIY much? It just so happens that Cyndie and I have an excess of faux river rock stored in the hay shed at home. As a matter of fact, some of the plastered facades of our home have fallen off and need to be re-cemented. That’s a project we have been ignoring for lack of experience.
Now we have double the reason to learn how to do this repair ourselves. The next time we come up here, I guess we will be hauling a load of one-sided manufactured stones and bags of mortar mix. In the meantime, we better study up on proper materials, tools, and techniques.
It will be tough to decide whether we should practice on our own house in order to do a better job up here, or the other way around. I could see it going either way.
My choice will lean heavily toward which option appears to be the easiest of the two. I’m hoping that answer will be revealed after we discover all the factors involved in the process.
In reality, cutting away the rotting pieces was the easiest part of this whole project.
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End Near
On the last day of the year 2023, I was considering looking back through the images in my blog library to review what happened in our lives in the last 12 months. I couldn’t finish a scan through the images because the pictures stopped loading for some unknown reason.
That’s similar to my attempt to complete the installation of our new WiFi repeater cabling yesterday. I couldn’t finish because icy conditions kept me off the roof.
In the morning the heavy frost made the shingles way too slippery so I concentrated on the indoor work. Later in the day, a freezing mist started to fall on top of the frost that hadn’t dissipated. This morning there is a fraction of an inch of snow on top of the icy substrate.
Yesterday, I spent some contorted hours in the attic, balancing in a crouch on angled trusses to route a length of ethernet cable from one side to another. I drilled holes to give mice another couple of potential access points where the cable passes through wall and ceiling boards.
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I plugged the camera in to test my new connections and verified everything worked. The portion remaining involves drilling through the log wall at the peak of the loft ceiling to bring the cable from the repeater inside. Then I need to seal around that cable to prevent mice and bats from taking this new opening as an invitation to come live with us.
Today, I may putter about devising the mount for the camera down at the barn if the roof of the house remains overly hazardous.
I’m hoping the project doesn’t end up waiting until spring like the plan appears to have for digging up the electric supply wires to the barn.
I hope the theme of ‘not finishing’ doesn’t define the year ending today. Without the benefit of reviewing the year in my blog images, this is what comes to mind about the odd-numbered year, 2023:
We spent much of the winter months focused on Cyndie’s convalescence from her ankle reconstruction the previous November. She was functional enough to travel to Puerto Rico in April. In May, we adopted Asher. I did my annual bike trip in June. We made it up to the lake as much as possible through summer. As fall approached, we got the shoulders of the driveway professionally graded and then did the raking and grass seed planting ourselves. Finally, Cyndie opted to go for one more surgery on her ankle and had the metal hardware removed now that the bones had healed.
This morning a meteorologist on the radio announced this December has been the warmest since measurements started being recorded in the 1870s.
We have obviously reached the end of 2023 but I doubt we’ve seen the end of the warming climate’s effects.
Like we always do, I expect we’ll cope one day at a time and respond to whatever 2024 brings with as much love as we can muster.
Celebrate safely tonight all you wild and crazy people! Happy last day of 2023!
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Pitiful Disarray
I was thinking about titling this post, “Hot Mess” but felt it might not be the best use of the phrase. I did a little research and found that ‘Hot Mess’ describes something in pitiful disarray. That fit even better.
I was teasing Cyndie that her Christmas present from me this year is my completing a long overdue house maintenance task. Our usual routine is to buy a joint treat like an expensive, fancy vacuum or other long-married couple versions of a handy appliance.
The light fixture over our dining room table has been limping along with old compact fluorescent bulbs and two randomly intermittent lightbulb bases. I tried a couple of times to analyze what appeared to be a loose connection in one arm of the fixture but I could never figure out how to get access to where the wires connect.
Fixing it always got pushed aside because I didn’t know which circuit breaker needed to be flipped. Also, working on a light fixture without electricity in a dark area of our house would require setting up supplemental lighting. It doesn’t take much to trigger my skills at procrastination.
Well, Ho-Ho-Ho, this Santa’s elf got past all the excuses yesterday and dove into the project with some tricks up his sleeve. I had done some shopping on my recent trek to the Cities.
This brings me to the hot mess… Do you want to know why I didn’t know which circuit breaker controls this particular light fixture? I present to you, exhibit A:
Speaking of pitiful disarray, the original electrician doing the labeling didn’t do himself proud, and every modifier since has only made things miserably worse. Part of me thinks I should have long ago cleaned up the chart with clearly legible and easily interpreted references, but a larger part of me notices we’ve gotten along well enough thus far with things just the way they are.
When do you usually need to flip a circuit breaker? After it has tripped. Those are pretty easy to find. The hard part is when you want to cut power to something via a circuit breaker. That’s more of a challenge, but the need to do that is so rare, it hasn’t significantly forced the issue. That complication actually serves as a feature for a procrastinator.
For the record, the dining room chandelier circuit breaker is position 9. I flipped most of the single pole breakers, one at a time, and hollered up to Cyndie to find out if the light was still on.
With the power cut, I was able to reverse-engineer the assembly features of the fixture and tighten everything up snugly. While I was at it, I threw in a bonus of a new switch on the wall which included a slider for dimming the new LED bulbs I bought to replace the old CFL bulbs.
Next time Cyndie works on an art project on that table she will finally be able to clearly see what she is doing.
If I knew what the rest of the circuit breakers controlled, I would make a new chart for the panel, but figuring that out can wait a little bit longer…
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More Chews
This picture provides a great view of how Asher adores the custom homemade chew toys Cyndie has been creating for him:
After completing a craft project of her own, Cyndie wrapped leftover fabric scraps around chew toys Asher hasn’t been showing much fascination with for a while to give them new life. Adding a few morsels of smelly treats piques his interest and motivation to rip into the tantalizing new toys.
Even though they don’t last long, it’s fun to see his playful destruction occupy his mind with something creative when nothing else seems to be satisfying him for a moment.
I’m looking for all the distractions I can find to occupy him while deer hunters are out and about in our surrounding properties. Asher does not like being confined to quarters!
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Homemade Chews
Our dog, Asher is a chew toy destroyer. He loves to rip things to pieces. Since he also shows a passion for tug-of-war, rope toys give him a chance to do both tugging and destroying. Cyndie bought him a “ball” made of rope which was a genius idea for a toy.
He showed moderate interest in it until one section finally came loose so he could begin to shred it. Since then, his interest soared and he thrills in bringing it to us for some tugging that leads to holding it for him to chomp the unraveling rope.
Asher also takes great pleasure in tearing the stuffing out of fabric toys and then shredding the fabric. Watching him do this to something Cyndie just bought causes us mixed feeling$.
Well, it causes me mixed feelings. I love seeing him have fun but the idea of destroying something we just spent a lot of money on bothers my miserly mindset.
That led to an idea. I asked Cyndie if she would consider sewing together some “toys” out of found materials we have at home. I brought her a short length of natural rope and Cyndie produced a collection of heavy fabric pieces. We also dreamed up the idea of putting a hard chew he’s shown meager interest in, inside one of the toys Cyndie was sewing together.
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Cyndie then put one of his squeaky balls inside a little pillow she made.
He loved it! Surprisingly, he didn’t immediately rip the new toys to shreds. He mostly seemed to be trying to shake the pillow to death. The long, skinny thing had scrap pieces from a store-bought stuffed squirrel he chewed to pieces sewn onto each end. That seemed to fascinate him.
He spent a little more time trying to rip into that one, but it was still mostly intact as of last night.
With days of rain (plus predictions for slushy snow tomorrow) keeping us indoors for long spans of time lately, there haven’t been a lot of opportunities to get him running around outside. We keep trying to find other ways to expend some of Asher’s high-octane energy.
Methodically destroying sanctioned homemade chew toys gives him a good combination of mental stimulation with the tactile reward of chomping on something interesting.
I just hope we aren’t conditioning him to seek out any old thing lying around the house whenever that urge to gnaw on something shows up.
Meanwhile, I just finished putting together a small wooden puzzle to start my season.
Let it rain and snow. We’re good to go indoors.
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Plum Jam
The volunteer wild American Plum trees growing in a bramble along our property line and along the edge of the compost area have been showing good fruit this year but have been ripening at different rates. Yesterday, we decided to take the plunge and collect a batch for making plum jam.
I suggested we bring out a sheet to capture fruit that falls when shaking the tree. Cyndie handed me the sheet and sent me into the bramble to spread it beneath the branches. Easier said than done.
One reason we didn’t want the plums to fall to the ground is that Asher has shown an interest in eating them and can get to the fruit faster than we are able to pick them up.
The sheet worked well enough, despite the plums falling from a wider area than it covered. That was probably a good thing that kept us from trying to process more than what we had time to deal with yesterday.
Cyndie spotted a lone plum that had landed in the crook of a bare branch.
I got my hands messy helping to pit the plums and did my best to support Cyndie during the cooking and pouring into jars.
The plums aren’t overly sweet but Cyndie succeeded in mixing in less sugar than the recipe called for and taste tests had us both agreeing the flavor was good; not too tart.
The telltale “ping” of lids popping during dinner indicated the cooling jars of jam were sealing as hoped.
Since our harvest of wild black raspberries was lighter than usual this summer, it feels good to be able to take advantage of a different free crop that nature has provided. We ended up filling 18 jars of varying sizes with homemade plum jam.
The flavor stands no chance of competing with my passion for Cyndie’s wild blackcap raspberry jam, but I intend to enjoy the plum jam plenty since the fruit is from our property and was canned with the same loving care as all the goodies prepared in Cyndie’s kitchen.
Also, because we spread it on toast, and toast is just about one of my favorite morning treats. Toasted bagels, brown bread, honey wheat, or the all-time greatest, toasted homemade bread of any type (including Gramma Betty buns).
Guess what I want for breakfast this morning.
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Relative Something 