What else have you been up to?

 Oh, a little bit of this, a little bit of that. A whole lot of projects that add up; at least in terms of time. 

One thing I've been meaning to do is get the water runoff from the gutters further away from the house. So one afternoon, I went to Home Depot, got an underground drain pan thingger and some gravel and dug a trench.

Here I was laying out how I thought it should go, but that plan soon changed since having a 90* turn at the top seemed like a bad idea.

I didn't get any good "during" shots, because I was covered in dirt, but here it is after. It lets out at that dark spot in the upper center. I don't think I buried it deep enough. The next one I will set out forward an extra 2". Hard fast rain almost overshoots the catch pan when it's more centered.

A slightly better angle - the outlet is under the rock, but I didn't go deep enough, so the rock is going to have to disappear. Gets the water at least 8' away and down the hill from the house. Now I just need to do the other corner of the front of the house.
(The ruts are from the little excavator they brought in to raise the step. I need to get more dirt to flatten out my yard.)

Naturally the first day it rained I watched it work and took pictures!

I started a commissioned window job, and also started taking a leaded window class at the same time. While some of the class has been a little basic for me, I have learned a lot of tips and tricks.

One tip I learned is that when working out from the center of a half-round, the center is what you would think of as the "top" (not the little center of the "bottom"), so I had to flip it over and modify my work.

Here it's all fitted up and leaded. I soldered it last night, but I need to get it some re-enforcement bars, which I'll pick up at my class this weekend. Those will get soldered on, then it will get cemented, and it'll be done! I can't wait to get it up out of the basement into the sunshine.

I belong to the Society for Creative Anachronism - which is like a social club for history geeks. I donate a custom painted placard to the Royal Travel Auction once or twice a year. I had run out of blanks, so I went to Home Depot, grabbed a 2'x4' piece of 1/4" birch plywood and made a bunch more.

Then I took the last winner's heraldry (registered in the 80's) and started painting it. There's a whole process - priming, gesso-ing, transferring the image from the printout to the board, sketching in the details, and then painting multiple colored layers until finally I hit it with a couple of coats of exterior-grade poly.

At this point, I've only got the base coat of red on. It's coming along.
I want to get this one done before the next one has to get going!

I also have homework for my leaded window class. For project #3, we were given a choice of about 10 different patterns. I chose this one because a lot of the historical reproduction-type windows I'd like to do are very geometrical, so I need that sort of practice.

 

Tonight I'm just going to cook dinner, fold the laundry that has been stacking up on the sofa and is threatening to topple over on the cat, and watch TV, maybe paint a little on that red lion. I'm staying out of the basement, because once I go down there after dinner, I don't come out until well after bedtime. I've been messing up my sleep schedule this week, which is not good. Tomorrow after work, I'll go down and grind the edges of the glass pieces for project #4. This weekend if the weather is ok, after glass class I have to mow the lawn and try to get that other drain in the ground, get the rebar on the blue fan-light window, and if I'm feeling spicy, I might take the living room door outside and strip it.

No news from the wayward bathroom contractor who was supposed to be here today. I'm starting to wonder just how hard replacing windows really is so at least I could get the living room done. I had a couple of contractors out to quote just the windows, and it was almost $8k for 8 windows (and that was the cheap end.) I know that there's more to it that "rip out window, slap in window"- leveling, flashing, insulating, etc,) but yikes. I really wish they had just left the old wooden windows alone. Those I could fix. These vinyls from the 90's are a hot mess.
So, who knows, maybe I'll add window replacement to my bag of tricks.

Panoramic view from the Marshfield seawall. It's massive, and tall. Since I'm down on the south shore for the glass class anyway, (and I never go down there without a good reason,) I took myself on a field trip. It was a beautiful day.