Posts Tagged ‘wasp nests’
Nests Removed
After a long delay in my attention to the project of mounting our surveillance camera, I dug back into it yesterday. That digging uncovered the presence of six old hornet nests and one large bird’s nest, none of which I realized existed under the shop entrance roof.
One of the primary things slowing me down in committing to this installation has been the issue of how I would get power to the camera. I decided to pull down the light fixture to gain access to the AC wiring. Deep inside the cover of that light fixture was where one of those wasp nests I didn’t know about was hidden.
I’m happy to be dealing with these nests in the winter when no wasps are present.
Some shopping for supplies will need to happen so I can add an outdoor outlet to the circuit of the light fixture. I will take this opportunity to also add a switch for that outdoor light fixture up over the door to the shop. For the longest time, I couldn’t figure out why that light never came on. Then I discovered it was directly wired to a circuit breaker that was in the “off” position. There was no switch. Oops.
As I was putting the ladder away after returning from feeding the horses, I noticed the ice mound under the eave in front of the garage was soft enough that I could break it up and finally remove it. One thing led to another and I decided to also shovel the soft snow from the giant mound that remained on the pavement. It would be good to open up that space for plowing the new snow predicted to fall in the next few days.
Shoveling that enormous pile of snow proved to be a bigger task than I should have tried to muscle my way through. I felt a pang in my ribs as I tossed one too many heavy shovel-full and that put an end to moving any more snow. I’m hoping that by stopping right away, the damage will be mild and not infringe on my ability to shovel when this next storm hits.
Today might end up being a day of more desk work than physical activity. It’s not like I needed an excuse to work on our tax returns or anything.
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Project Complete
We did it. It just didn’t make sense to wait for some future opportunity to replace the top boards of the railings. We were too close to the end to let the project hang unfinished for any length of time.
I pulled screws out of the old boards yesterday morning and installed the new boards in the afternoon. When I lifted the first board off the railing, we made a startling discovery.
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I’m glad we waited this late in the season because, unknown to us, there were a lot of wasp nests hanging underneath the boards. Our recent freeze rendered the nests vacant.
Here is just a portion of the screws pulled to remove the railing boards:
Even though it’s just a small step in the overall deck refurbishment project, the large number of screws take a significant amount of time to extract.
The grand finale that put an exclamation point on the whole job for us was getting the leftover lumber off the driveway and into storage in the hay shed.
Done and done.
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Relative Something 