Yardwork

I'm in the midst of the worst movie ever - "Poison Ivy 2 - Going Systemic".
I have another email in to my Dr. I really would prefer not to go back on Prednisone. I also have a call out to a poison ivy removal place, just to get an idea of the cost. Also a call out to a junk removal place to see how much it will cost to get ri of what's already bagged.

This was the first round.

If you zoom in on the picture, you can see were the vines were so thickly matted, I was literally rolling it up like a carpet. This made taking it up easy, but bagging it hard. About 4 hours later, I had made it out to the center of the wall.

6 bags full!

This first stretch I was super thorough. I pulled out 95% of the vine-y bits. This was Saturday. I thought I was suited up to do battle, showered twice, but woke up Sunday with that old familiar burning/itching feeling on my neck. Seems I wasn't careful enough. Pissed off, I walked out and went at the other side. Only to discover I had given myself a grand case of tendonitis in my left wrist the previous day, and I could barely grasp anything with that hand.
Now thoroughly incensed, I did manage to get the other side, though not nearly as completely as the first side.

10 bags full.

I had every intention of getting to the telephone pole there at the end. I ran out of piss-tivity about 10 feet short. Everything hurt, everything itched, and if I could have, I would have sat right down and cried. But I couldn't, because I likely would have plopped myself down on more poison ivy.
I uncovered the front for the most part, though.
The payoff is this:

Before.

After.

The large bushes are lilacs, as far as I can tell, and are still alive even though the PI and bittersweet had done their best to try to pull them down. All the vines up into them have been cut off, at least, so they won't get any worse. I've put down 100lbs of lime in the total area of the front yard, and put bone meal under the lilacs. After they bloom (if they bloom) I'm going to take a deep breath and cut them back to about 3' high. I've seen it done to leggy overblown lilacs. It's scary but it does work.
I also put down a pound of dutch white clover on all that newly exposed dirt (and around the rest of the yard) to try to get something established so the dirt doesn't run away.
I'm pretty sure there's a wisteria vine at the far end near the telephone pole. I'm not sure what to do about that, because it should be trained up something, and right now it's running wild on some lilacs. If I can get it under control, it can stay. (Go run up the telephone pole!)
If I can't, it should probably come out, since it will crush any vegetation in it's path.

Grape hyacinth

Lilac buds

Scrubbin'

I got home tonight and had to scrub some cement pavers for work, (it's a long story.) I had my stiff bristle brush and a big tub of warm soapy water out already, so I decided I might as well scrub the screens for the house while I was at it.
There are currently 23 screens for the house. They were all absolutely filthy. Moss and lichens were growing on the fuzzy weather stripping on the ones from the north side of the house. I honestly don't think some of them had been off and cleaned since they were installed.
Out of the 23, 4 are distinctly different in make than the others. All of them need new fuzzy weatherstripping. The 4 are part of a group of 8 I have identified as needing some repair to the screen it's self. Some are as simple as bird holes, (perfectly round holes where the screen has been pushed aside, usually around the center of the screen,) but some are complete re-screens. Luckily, Koopman's down the road re-screens windows.

The 8 that need a little (or a lot) of love.

The rest, drying out in the shed.

Moving on.

I have talked to a few landscapers, and most of them deal with poison ivy infestations with the liberal use of chemicals.
Since my well is right in my front yard, I want to use as few hazardous chemicals as possible, so this isn't going to work.
I was in Home Depot last night, and may have found an answer though!

Sure, I'll cook, but at least I won't itch.

I've been trying to get away from disposable goods because filling landfills and oceans with our garbage is bad, but in this case, I'm making an exception.


Last night I wandered around upstairs and tried to force the sack of prednasone ferrets living in my brain to pay attention and make sense of the hardware and electricity situation.
A lot of doors were reconfigured on the front (oldest) part of the house. There's Norfolk latches on a few bedroom and closet doors that look identical to this example (taken from an Ebay auction out of Maine).

Eventually they will all be stripped of their generations of paint and look like this.

On those doors, there's lift off hinges that look a lot like these examples from Horton Brasses. At least, this is what I imagine they look like, under the paint. I haven't attempted to get any of these off to strip. On the doors with the lift off hinges, but no Norfolk latch, there's often a turnbuckle latch that looks an awful lot like this:

But in my case, covered in layers of paint.

In some cases, the turnbuckle has been replaces with a little Victorian spring assisted catch. Eventually, I'd like to get all the ones with evidence of a turnbuckle back to that - they are lower profile than the Victorian catches, and make more sense with the Norfolk latches and iron lift-off hinges.

I looked and looked at the wires, and have come to the conclusion that there's probably 2 electrical feeds to the second floor - a white cable that services the master bedroom, and a big thick black cable that services the rest of the rooms. I'm hesitant to start working on the rooms, because I'd really like the snake wires for switches, even if I leave the original pull chain fixtures where they are for now. I think that's going to take some more reading and noodling around in my head.
Probably best left to dealing with post-prednisone.

The Power of Prednisone

I had a really long post about what I did over the weekend, but the Blogger app for my phone is old and ate it. I have to remove it from my phone and just post from the laptop.

Poison ivy has landed me on a 10 day course of Prednisone.
I used that to my advantage over the weekend, tearing out as much of the infernal stuff as I could get my hands on, dipping the stumps in RoundUp. These drugs make my brain feel like a sack full of ferrets on speed. I have to power of 10 men! And complete inability to concentrate on anything for more than 5 minutes! Pin balling my way around the yard was probably the most productive thing I could do with myself.
I cleaned out as much of the front hillside as I could. I then moved on to the area between the road and the wall, which is a solid woven vine mat of poison ivy and bittersweet.
I'm of a few thoughts on this - a) Cover it with black plastic and a ton of mulch and smother it to death which will take years, and might now work completely, b) Quickly, while still drugged, rip the rest out, (tick tock, 7 more days of drugs!) or c) Pay someone else to deal with it, (but, $.)
I'm really hesitant to accept help dealing with it, because I really, really don't want anyone to ride the Prednisone roller coaster because of my yard. But the stuff is everywhere. All the beds, and even woven into the under layer of the grass in the yard.
I have to do some hard thinking about that.

I got poison ivy pulled Saturday, and Sunday, I vigorously raked about 80% of the yard and got 120 lbs of lime put down in the raked spots.
FYI - if you have the choice, don't get the cheapest spreader. I borrowed Ian's, (which to be fair, he'd gotten to apply grass seed, which is a lot lighter than lime.) His spreader was made mostly of plastic parts, and I spent a lot of time fighting with it. Who makes a drive shaft and universal joint out of plastic? (Agway does.)
In the end, I wound up spreading about 2/3 by hand, using the spreader as a tiny wheelbarrow.

*Warning - snake pictures ahead*

I figured out where my littlest neighbors live - in a small hole by an old ground pipe to the south of the house. They are super curious, and not at all aggressive. I've named them Sampson and Delilah. They are a subspecies of Garter snake, called Ribbon snakes. Non-venomous - they like to eat frogs and spiders. That's cool. Long as they don't decide to move in.

Sampson - He's smaller and more yellow than Delilah.
He likes to just watch me from his little hole.
Now that we are aware of each other, we're ok.

I also discovered that there's a great fat woodchuck moved into a burrow on the west side of the house, just past the treeline. Little bugger is fearless. Not sure what I'm going to do about that, because personal space must be maintained with a rodent of that size.

So far, this is the first bloom that came with the property. I think there's a bunch of other things in the lawn and the treeline that are trying. Sending up a lot of green - I'm thinking about hitting the areas with some BulbTone.
Time will show me what's where.
Other than Poison Ivy.
I know where that is.

Tiny crocus!

Gutters!

The gutters guys from A&G were here today, exactly at 8 am.
I now am at full gutter strength all the way around, instead of just on the south side of the house.

Gutters!

The front (east) pitches off the far side. The driveway side (north) pitches off the front, otherwise in the winter I'd wind up with a glacier forming back there.

It sounds silly, but I can't wait for it to rain.

In other news, day three: poison ivy is still itchy.

Finally, the great outdoors

This past weekend saw my sister join me for a fun filled weekend of landscaping. Before she arrived, I ran around and tried to clean the place up, and did the month end filter changes. The one in the basement still seems fine - or at least not dirty enough to change yet.
After she arrived, and the various tools of destruction unloaded from the truck, the fun began.
Moss was scraped from the foundation apron. The driveway was scraped, and the grass cut back. A curb was rediscovered.

Curb!

Brush was hacked and slashed and chainsawed.  Bittersweet was yanked. Leaves raked. Snakes driven from the basking spots, and spouting spring bulbs uncovered and planted, thanks to a surprise visit from Terry. Even grass seed was thrown down for grins, (though now it's gone and gotten cold again.)

trim, trim, trim

I have about 8' more clearance down the side of my driveway now! Granted, all the trimming generated a heck of a brush pile. I had been unable to secure a brush dump permit or a burn permit, so it just keeps getting larger.

It's about the size of my car now.

I'm considering renting a chipper for a day and just feeding it through, since burn season ends 5/1, and it's so green most of this would only smolder this year anyway.
Alicia and I also discovered that my property is full of pokey things. Rose, some very sharp vine-y thing dubbed "sticky creeper" for it's desire to wrap around your legs and cling to your pants, and a ton of young black locust trees.
Also, I had the dubious luck to find the poison ivy with my forearms. I have to remember that I must work with long sleeves *down*. Short sleeves + yard work isn't allowed for me any more. I'll skip the pictures of the poison ivy aftermath.

After yard work was time for exploring. We walked up and tried to find the back of the property, dodging ticks as we went. We found 2 pipes and a cement marker that could be pins. I'm going to have to do some research in the deeds to figure out what's what.

Getting there.

Moisture!

Yesterday I had a guy out to give me a price on how much it would cost to have a sump pump installed. It has to be a fancy air-tight sump pump, otherwise it will void the radon system warranty. The rough price is about $2k. This kills me, because a typical sump pump is about a quarter that cost.
At this point, I'm not convinced that I need one though. This was more an exploration for down the line. First and foremost will be the gutters and repointing, which I'm pretty sure will solve about 90% of my problem.
The first gutter guy had reached out to see if I was still interested and offered to let me pay in installments. He was professional and polite, and his price was right, so I told A&G Gutters yes. Within the next few weeks the house will now sport gutters on the east and north side. It won't be fancy. It'll use the rod hangers (which offend my aesthetic, but the pitch of the roof won't work with anything else). They will be functional and keep water from pounding on my foundation.

Spring is trying!

Soon, soon my oil tank won't have to stand in a puddle.
Hopefully this further reduces the amount of moisture headed up to the attic to feed the mold.

For every "easy" project, there's that other "easy" project.

With the closets nice and freshly painted, all I had to do was put the closet rods back up. But the closet rods, probably about 100 years old if they were a day, were terribly swaybacked. Off to Home Depot we go!
There were three closets that needed new rods. One was a half-height eve closet, and it had hand-cut little wooden braces to hold up the rod. It was also about 30" wide. Awesome.
The other two closets are the New closets, and they use 1" pipe flanges for the rod pockets. This is not terribly unusual - my grandfather did the same thing in his house. But they had used 1" wood dowels instead of a length of pipe as the rod.
One closet is about 38" wide, the other is about 42" wide.
Modern hardware stores only carry 1" oak dowels in 36" segments.
You see my predicament.
I bought 3 dowels, and cut the one to length for the old closet. It fits perfectly.
The other two... well.
At first I bought a selection of "nipples" - little threaded pipe segments meant to extend the flange. And it would have worked, functionally. It looked so terribly cobbed, I just couldn't let it go. Back to Home Depot I went (luckily, it's not that far away).
I returned the two dowels and all the nipples. (Yes, I snickered inwardly like a 12 year old every time it came up on the register.) I walked over to the pipe section, flange in one hand, old rods in the other, and had the nice man cut me 2 sections of pipe and thread them.
I should be able to come home, thread the pipe into the wall and be done, right?
Wrong.
One flange in each closet would not come off the wall, due to stripped screw heads and time. My thought was to over-thread one end, screw the pipe into the frozen side, and then back out the movable side to the wall. Easy peasey.
Nope.
The original rods must have been exactly the width of the closet, with no play. Now I had pipes that I couldn't thread into the flanges because there was no wiggle room. I had to get the frozen flanges off the (freshly painted) walls, even if I had to cut the buggers off.

Closet rods get serious.

With a great deal of mechanical persuasion, I got the flanges off the wall and threaded them onto the pipe. By the way - never trust the stock thread on black pipe - have the nice man re-cut them or otherwise make sure they are clean and clear. There's one that would only go on half way, and it's because of the stock thread - all the other fresh cut threaded ends were fine. I wedged them back where they belonged, and went to screw them down.
Never, ever fall prey to the pretty brass screws. I know they claim to be wood working screws, and they are pretty. They are a terrible lie designed to make you cry with frustration. Just get the plain old ones. You'll thank me.
Two stripped and one bent brass screw later, I just put back the messed up old slotted screws. They aren't pretty. They are functional. It is a closet, no one cares. In the future, I might replace them all with slightly longer screws, but they are fine.

After the rods were finally up, I put up a bunch of little LED motion activated and touch lights. In a perfect world these would all be wired, but I don't have HGTV's budget, so battery LEDs are solving the problem. Motion lights in the tall closets, touch lights in the short closets.

Touch light.

Touch light.

New pipe rod and motion light (pre-shelf).
No one will ever have to worry about sagging rods ever again.

Pipe rod/ motion light (post shelf)

And with that, the saga of the closets is officially done.

Vindicated

I know everyone's probably bored to tears hearing me wax on and on about paint color choices. Especially about how very disappointed I was with "Fresh Cotton", aka Warm White. Most people would have been able to shake it off, laugh, and go get a new paint color. But this got under my skin and really bugged me. I could see it in my head, and it worked, so why wasn't it working in real life?
In real life I'm a graphic designer. Color theory is a Thing. Being able to pick colors accurately is Kind of A Big Deal. To not be able to pick a color accurately, for my own walls, even if it was just for a closet, became something of a professional failing for me.
I hemmed. I hawed.
I bought new Ultra White paint.
But it didn't feel right.

The revelation came after coat #3 in what I'll call the "new" closets. These are the closets in the bedrooms over the kitchen and dining room. They have the tight Victorian floors, and someone took the time to put those floors clear into the closets. After coat of paint #3, "Fresh Cotton" finally presented as it's actual color. And I kind of liked it. Against the wood floor, it wasn't bad. It was warm white, the way I thought it would be.
In the other closets, it was still presenting like crap. There was a number of variables - one, the material. New closets are made out of some flavor of wallboard (paneling? Drywall?) and old closets are mostly horsehair plaster. Then there was the lighting. New closets are tall and shallow, and let in a decent amount of light. Old closets are half-height and deep, with little natural light. The last variable, and the one I could do the most about, was the floors. New closets are hardwood, old closets were a selection of white, brown, and green paint.
I had some grey floor paint ("Thunderstorm") left over from the basement project. I was going to make do with that and repaint the insides of the old closets. But Thunderstorm is earmarked for painting the basement stairs once I can prop open the bulkhead for an extended time. Plus, while I'm starting loosen up, painting the insides and walls of the half-height closets had gotten downright painful. Floors, with the help of gravity are far easier.
I took a leap, returned a bunch of Ultra White paint to Home Depot and drove over to Koopman's, the local Benjamin Moore dealer.

When you've been using run of the mill paint, and you treat yourself to the Good Paint, it makes it hard to go back. It's just so much nicer to work with. I could drone on about quality paint, but I'll skip that part.

One quart of "Clydesdale Brown" later, I proved my intuition right. "Fresh Cotton" was fine, it was the floors messing with my head.

Old floor.

New floor. (New closet rod too, the trials of which will be in a separate post.)

Old floor (the back is dark green.)

New floor.

Old.

New.

It is with great pleasure that I pronounce the closets are painted and done, all but the hardware, which will be it's own post. I have to let those painted floors cure for about a week before I go stacking tupper-tubs on them, but it's so nice to walk up and just look at them. All nice and clean and done.

On Paint

Bear with me. I've been stuffing and unstuffing myself into awkward closet spaces since Saturday. My everything aches.

Say it with me - No one is going to be in your closets looking for brush marks.
No one.
Not your realtor, not your friends, not your mother.
No one reading this blog (Hi Mom! Hi Dad!) are in the real estate market at the level where we have to worry about a potential buyer showing up and hearing, "Oh My God, we simply can not buy this house Chad, there's brush lines in the closets!"
No one cares, as long as there's ample clean space that holds stuff.
If you're going to take it upon yourself to overhaul the closet situation in a cobbed old house - here's a tip. You're going to be wedging yourself into some very uncomfortable places. Maybe go on a diet, and take a month or two of yoga before you start. Stretch liberally.
Then, and I can't say this enough, buy the good paint.
It seems counter intuitive, right? It's just a closet, cheap paint should be fine. But here's the thing - even though you cleaned the space (contortion act #1) and then primed the space with stain blocking Kilz (contortion act #2) and laid down a coat of paint (contortion act #3) you're going to look at the uneven streaky surface and know deep down in your heart (that even though it's just a closet) you're going to have to wedge yourself back in there for a second coat of paint.
If you'd just bought the good paint with primer and crud built in, you'd be done. But no, because you got the cheap paint, you're got to get back in there for round 4, little buddy. Ready the aspirin.
At least you'll have fun stories for your chiropractor. (Shout out to Dr Dan!)

A note about color.
Warm white seemed like a good idea at the time. It was cold out, so anything that promised warm seemed like a good idea.
But you don't like warm white. It's not white. It's not yellow.
If you want yellow, buy yellow. If you want white, get white. You're stuck with it now for the closets, because you've got a gallon of it, (and no one is going to look critically in the closets anyway and if they do, get new friends.) Once the closets are done, you're going to use whatever's left for primer. Or to paint beehives. Maybe once you paint the floors, it won't be so bad, but right now, against the old green floors, it's just horrendous. You're going to have to go get warm-toned floor paint to try to salvage this, friend. Brown might work. Good luck.

But it's the first day of spring! Now we begin to see what lives here with me, other than the birds and the squirrels.

Promises of things to come.

Everything hurts, but everything is primed.

Painting upside down and backwards is going to keep my chiropractor in business. But all the closets are now primed. It's already brighter, if not perfect.
(It's an old house. It will never be perfect, but it can be better.)

Cleaner!

Brighter!

The plaster is going to be what it's going to be. I'm not going to waste my time tearing it out and replacing it if it's going to stay put. Some of it's a little loose, but so far so good. This is the bedroom that had the green trim.

More plaster, out in the hallway.

Primed!

Next up - the application of "Fresh Cotton" and "Thunderstorm". I hope the slightly warm white plays ok with the grey floor paint I already have from the basement door.
They are closets. I really don't need to overthink colors in the closets.

Toss those plans right out the (open) window!

I had considered re-potting plants and cleaning the basement this past weekend. The only basement thing I did was repair the chimney door (see previous post.)
Instead, because it was just so darn nice out Saturday (45 is nice, ok?) I threw open the windows upstairs to let the place air. I got to looking around. What did I need to do upstairs? I needed to put stuff away, but I was reluctant to stuff things into closets that needed attention.
Right.
Thus began the Great Closet Overhaul of 2019. I emptied out whatever had been put in the closets into their corresponding rooms and began scrubbing.
I'm pretty sure some of those closets haven't seen paint since they were constructed.
6 closets in total were scrubbed. 6 closets had holes patched. 3 are plaster over lath, 2 are... wallboard? 1 is a combination of the two. Everything is getting paint. Rods and shelves were removed! Floors were covered! (Or not. Some are painted, some are hardwood.) 3 have been primed! (Yay Kilz!)
Before:

One of the eve closets (there are two, I only took pictures of one, they look the same, with the exception that this one has a green stripe on the purlin? where as the other one was left white.) Plaster walls, some unfinished, with cleats for long-gone shelves and cracks where the house has settled. There's evidence that the green floor used to be in all the rooms on the oldest section of the house.

"New" closet in the bedroom over the kitchen. Wallboard and hardwood floors.
This narrow board floor is throughout the "new" section of the house, and appears to have a wax finish.

Old built-in closet in the main bedroom, over the living room.
This heating duct is the only source of heat for the entire second floor.

The other "new" closet. This one has a lock, which is a little curious.

I didn't take a picture of the "combo" closet because there's really no good way to photograph it.
This will need to be a multi-day process. I'll post "primed" pictures as I finish up that step.
(I also need to get some new closet rod.)

The basement can wait for weather so warm I want to be in the cold, damp basement.

Chimmy Door Conclusion

As I mentioned in a previous post, last weekend when I was at the farm my dad was able to trim the bottom flange off the chimney door. This left a raw surface where he cut it. He and mom suggested hitting it with some Rustoleum to give it a fighting chance.
I was pretty sure I had some black. But no.
Then I thought I grabbed the clear. But no.
Which is how I wound up with a white chimney clean out door.
A white door on arguably the dirtiest place on the house. Oh well. At least it's clean and functional.
Once the paint dried, I assembled the bits I needed.

A bag to hold the junk I'll dig out of the chimney, a trowel, the door, and a tube of JB Weld,
which claims it will adhere to metal and concrete.

Since this door doesn't service an active fire chimney (it's the exhaust for the furnace), I was comfortable using an adhesive instead of messing around with mixing up mortar. The door is only mildly functional - it is an access - but it's not as necessary as if this was still a wood or coal chimney.

Opened and cleaned.

I shoveled out the debris. There wasn't very much, which is good. I'm going to skip how I cleaned out the old mortar from around the hole. Let's just say you shouldn't do it the way I did it, but I wasn't about to run out to Lowes again. The old mortar was a little more stable than it looked and took some persuasion. I could have sworn I had a cold chisel around, but I couldn't find it to save myself.
I never liked that screwdriver anyway.

Fits!

 It took some fussing and persuading, but I got it in! After a dry fit, I mixed up the JB Weld and slathered it around the back of the flange and pressed it into place. For my purposes, I probably could have gotten away with just dry fitting it, but it felt better to have it stuck there. I pointed a space heater at it for a while so that it would cure a little faster. (It's kind of chilly in the basement.)

DaTa!
Check that off my list!