Posts Tagged ‘home maintenance’
Snow Goes
The month of March arrives with its saying about lambs and lions, but the climate confusion we have going may require we come up with a new definition for the chaos of winter’s departure. Last week’s snow is fading fast around here now.
The little snowman that Sara made on Saturday has become just a fraction of his old self in the back yard.
In a week and a half we’ll be moving clocks again to shift the days an hour forward. Will it inspire me to get anything more accomplished in the evenings after work? I don’t know.
There is plenty to be done, but my motivation has been lacking by the time I get home from the commute. Of course, yesterday it happened to be a gloomy gray day.
If the sun is out and the air gets warm, I expect there will be an added spring in my step.
With the grounds wet and soft, I can turn my attention to some machine maintenance that is more than due, and there is always wood to be split.
Indoors, we have an appointment tonight for a quote on window replacements, and then I have a dishwasher door that needs the counter-balance spring mechanisms replaced.
I don’t see a day on the calendar marked for lollygagging around anywhere in the near future.
Do I need to make an appointment for that?
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Quick Return
It feels like spring! Seriously. A day after the snowstorm, our uncharacteristic weather has made a quick return. The clouds are gone, the sky deep blue, the sun shining bright, the air warm, and the snow, totally sticky and melting. It is something that can’t be controlled, so we just take what is delivered.
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The back yard is filled with evidence of visitors sledding and building snow sculptures. The snow is sliding off the metal roof of the shop.
I may look into a metal roof for the house when our shingles reach the end of their life. I would prefer to have the snow slide off the roof without my needing to pull it down using a rake on a very long pole handle.
I got a little tired toward the end of my efforts of pulling down snow from the roof on Saturday. On the last section, I hung the rake on the lip of the eave, just like I had done all the way around the rest of the house. But I let go of the handle with a careless lack of attention to detail.
It swung away from me with a little too much momentum. As I watched a fraction of a second last much longer than that in my mind, but quicker than my body could react to, the rake lost contact with the roof.
Why couldn’t it just fall harmlessly to the ground beside the house?
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It’ll Do
I have seen perfection. This is not it. I have witnessed the results of master craftsmanship next door at the lake place. First you flawlessly prepare the logs, then you apply coat after coat of tung oil to get a beautiful finish that will protect your logs from the elements.
I don’t have it in me.
Currently distracted with trying to do the necessary lumberjack work around here, tend to the all-too-frequent lawn mowing requirements, manage the unending supply of manure to be composted, fix fences, maintain trails, replace the ATV winch, cut the over growing pastures, rake the round pen, fill in the growing ravines in the paddocks, and work the day-job, I have elected to try getting away with doing an almost embarrassingly perfunctory job of patching the most needy bad spots on the house and shop garage.
If I actually execute this plan, it will be a big accomplishment of overcoming my perfectionistic tendencies.
Yesterday after work I ran a little test to see if putting the least amount of effort toward the task will produce a passable result. We have the advantage of already having plenty of cans of stain that were left by the previous owners, but I have no idea about the shelf life of this stuff, so the advantage comes without providing much in the way of confidence.
I followed up on a tip to use compressed air to help remove the old flaking finish, but quickly found my tank isn’t designed for the task. The pressure drops rather quickly, greatly reducing the effectiveness. After testing a few other methods, I settled on doing a rather superficial job of surface cleaning.
I was excited to find a stirring apparatus stored with the stain that I can connect to my drill for thoroughly mixing the product. The one half-filled can I opened looked fine to my untrained eye, so after a good stir, I dipped in a brush and started painting the stuff on the siding.
It may not look ideal and it probably isn’t going to provide maximum protection, but it is better than doing nothing at all, which was the option we went with last fall.
All things considered, I’m hopeful this effort will suffice for getting through another winter, at the very least.
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Uncharacteristic Wetness
Over and over, day after day, waves of precipitation have been dumping rain on top of the rain from the day before. Even though we might get a couple of dry days every so often between the waves, it hasn’t been enough time for the ground to drain.
This isn’t the kind of weather we usually get at this time of year. In my lifetime, the middle of summer would be when lawns started to turn brown and required watering. As fall arrived, the creek beds and swamps would all be dry.
That doesn’t seem to be happening anymore. Last year, I was surprised that I had to keep mowing the lawn just as frequently in the fall as I did in the spring. Now it is happening again, although this year it is even worse. I can’t keep up with mowing the fast-growing grass because the rain has been too persistent.
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The wetness this year has led to the dermatitis our horses are dealing with, and yesterday I noticed the excessive moisture is starting to show up on the house and garage. The step to the front door of our house stayed wet along the seam and was showing signs of moss growth. The stones along the base of the garage are turning green with algae.
It feels like the climate is changing.
I wonder if anyone is looking into the possibility.
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Home Invasion
I am now thrust from the bliss of the bike trip into the harsh reality of home ownership and maintenance. I came home to this scene Wednesday:
Some pesky critter is building a cathedral in my home and he/she/it is removing a LOT of insulating material in the process. I shudder to think what the space looks like in there.
We didn’t bother looking any further than the gaping hole located above the pile of pieces, which we immediately filled with a combination of some of the stuffing from the pile below, a couple of wads of steel wool, a section of screen mesh, and plenty of caulk.
I hope the residents were not at home when we sealed the entrance.
This kind of thing helps me to miss being on the bike trip even more than I already was.
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Mostly Ready
Today I depart for my week of vacation and I believe I am, for the most part, ready. That is, I finished the majority of necessary tasks at work and got my “away message” programmed in my email. I completed the task of mowing all the grass areas that we regularly mow. Most amazing to me, I took care of two tasks that have been successfully neglected for a loooong time.
It may have something to do with the fact that we have Elysa’s celebration planned for the day after I return from my adventure. I won’t have much time to tend to things in the small number of hours after I get home. What I find curious is how particularly easy it was to address both of these issues. It was like changing a light bulb.
Well, one of them was, anyway. Except, the light bulb(s) were high enough to require a tall ladder to reach, and were a unique size which we couldn’t buy until we climbed up to pull one of the burned ones for reference.
The other task was to adjust the hinge on one of our french doors to the deck. That’s not all that hard. I’ve done it before. But it requires a wrench and instructions that were down in the shop. I just kept neglecting to get around to remembering to bring them up to the house.
The real kicker is that the act of fixing the hinge adjustments put me in the mindset to finally also look at the lever mechanism which has been a curious nuisance from the day we moved in. To set the latch on the three doors to the deck, the levers needed to be lifted upward, which is entirely counter-intuitive. Visitors are always baffled by the anomaly, and often fail to successfully set the latch.
Since we plan to have a lot of visitors soon, I felt added incentive to take a crack at solving the riddle. It was a case of the simplest and most obvious possibility being the answer. There was a plastic plug holding the conventional latch retracted in all of the doors. Popping the plug out released the latch that automatically catches when the door is closed. Now when the handle is moved in the more typical direction of down, the doors will open.
It was a huge fix for us. Now it’s done. How much more ready could I now be?
Bring on the trip, and then bring on Elysa’s celebration.
In the mean time, for those of you who haven’t already seen it, I’ll offer the song I wrote about the week of biking and camping which I have participated in for many years around the middle of June…
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Frustrating Exercise
Despite my ambitious goals to accomplish many things yesterday (so I could take Cyndie up on an offer to turn my back on projects at home for a day to celebrate Memorial Day weekend with a visit to the lake) I finished far short of the plan. Now I am forced to try to get the grass mowed this morning, long before the dew has evaporated, so we can leave in the afternoon.
Complicating my efforts yesterday, and seriously hindering my progress, was a surprising and very dramatic reaction to something in the air. I started sneezing big time, and my nose began to run like a faucet. That both hindered progress and contributed to my not addressing any of the other things I had wanted to do.
On top of that, I ended up needing to make that almost obligatory return trip to Menards for supplies. I was working on patching our deck where boards have gotten soft with rot. The carpenter I called to replace them all is too busy to get to it until later, so he suggested I patch it for now. Following his simplified instructions, I quickly ran into details that required I problem solve.
It took two tries, but I figured out solutions and forged ahead, way behind schedule. Then my nose began to pour and the pry bar I used to pull nails became too worn and wouldn’t grip the nail heads. It was an exercise in managing frustration and rearranging goals. I’ll give myself a C grade for the lesson. (Mike, I needed your nail-puller and expertise!)
It was getting late, and I had all the tools spread out across the deck, so I forged ahead until after sunset to complete the task. I wanted to have one less thing left to do today, and I successfully accomplished that!
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Relative Something 