The Continuation of the Basement Stairwell Walls

I've been hammering away (not literally) on the basement stairwell walls. I must have done at least 4 sessions with the spackle at this point. Last night, I sanded them and washed them down for the last time before trim and primer.
Just a tip - don't play carpenter angry. Don't paint angry either. Sometimes it can't be avoided if you want to get the work done though.

Right side w/ trim and primer.

Left side - trim and primer. Can hardly tell there used to be a hole around the light switch.

Trim and primer.

I did not put up the trim "the right way" at all. I wound up using long narrow brass screws (that's what I had, brass is generally the devil to work with) because trying to hammer finish nails had the plaster shaking and cracking, and I didn't need more of that.
I've been trying to avoid taking the right rail down, but in order to paint the wall well, I'm going to have to. Because it's screwed in over plaster, I'm going to try to free the rail and leave the supports on the wall (lest removing the supports wakes a sleeping crumbling plaster beast.)
So, a few more steps forward. Tonight, first coat of paint.

Basement stairwell walls

Last night I sanded down the walls to figure out where the high spots were, and slapped some more spackle on the divots and holes.

Left side - Fixing up pretty nicely, actually.
One more sand and this one should be good enough to prime.

Right side - this side is a bigger pain in the next because the rail is in the way, and there was more damage.
The patch above and around the light switch is slowly getting better.
This side will need another round of spackle and sanding before priming.

Stay out!

That last picture is from where the wall of the right side of the stairwell joins the stairs above. It's the most amusing, ridiculous thing. The hole is maybe 7-8" long, and maybe 3" high, and blocked with 4 large framing nails (?).
I'm not entirely sure what we're keeping out (or in). Mice would dance right through the gaps. Rats? (Have seen no evidence of rats.) Squirrels? Cats? Wombats? A rogue wallaby?
I don't know, but I'm leaving it alone as a point of interest.

Not much of a visual difference, but I'm puttering away on it.

When I'm allowed too, anyway.
Good thing it's hot, she's not all over me for my lap right now.

Busy weekend of sheds and walls

I finally was able to complete the shed door this past weekend. It took about 8 hours over the course of the week, dodging rain drops, and making trips to the store for things I needed. But it's done -

Patch applied, I think this was post sanding.
Worked up from 60-120 grit, wiped it down with a tack cloth.

First coat of primer. I wound up putting on 2 coats to smooth it out.

First coat of paint. It was a lot more blue than I thought.

Final - 2 coats of paint and an overnight dry dulled it down a bit.
I need to pick up some black Rustolium in a can for the hardware, but other than that it's done!
Next - the roof.

In between the rounds of work on the shed, I decided to deal with the basement stairwell. First, because the mosquitos in town now carry EEE, so I can't be outside in the evening unless I'm dosed with bug spray. Second, because even though the dehumidifier makes the basement warm, it's dry, and feels nicer. Third, all the stuff hanging on the wall right at the top bugged me.
Plus, I could practice spackle in a place where it doesn't really matter.

Before cleaning and removing a rail. Dual rails are great, but it make the stairwell really narrow.
I will store it so that in the future if it's a code issue, I can slap it back up.

Post TSP scrub and rail removal.
Just scrubbing the left wall made a huge difference.

Patches patched. Some were pretty deep, so I am going to let it dry
for a good 24 hours before smooshing on another coat.

One downside to dating a historic preservationist, (hi Honey!) is that you pick up things by the very virtue of being at trade get-togethers and having evening conversations. He's a professional, and I mean well. I know there's right ways and wrong ways of doing things, and in the case of this basement wall, it probably should be stabilized with plaster washers and injected adhesives and all sorts of things. Pricey things. I know this. But... forgive me... I just want it to not have lath showing, so I'm smooshing spackle and fiberglass tape over the worst of it and smoothing it out (sort of.) The worst part is right over the light switch, which you can't see very well in the pictures, but at least it's not a gaping hole anymore. The patch might fall out in a year, but until then, for a basement stairwell, it will be good enough. Rather than tape and fill the corners, I think I'm just going to get some 1/4 round molding to cover the gaps. I think electrical runs around behind there, so I don't want to make it super difficult to get at.

Stay tuned for the continuing adventures in basement stairwells!

Some Pig.

Shed door progress

You can't tell, but I'm making progress!

It might rain!

I've been tuning up the shed door. There's been patch involved for the holes, and a lot of sanding. It seems that there was a light coat of varnish on the boards that mildew got under, so I've started with 60 grit to strip all that junk off (and take the patch down.)
I have to stop tonight and pick up more sandpaper, since I discovered last night that I jump from 60 to 150 in my sandpaper library. A few years back I bought an electric sander to finish my sister's wedding cake stand, and it has proved it's worth time and again.

I love my sander.

I also succeeded in killing the hornets, so the driveway is officially all edged.
Thank goodness. Time to get sealed. Keep your fingers crossed that it doesn't rain on the day my guy is scheduled to do it.

All edged! All grass removed from the cracks!

Stuff in the yard

I spent a huge amount of time this weekend (between 10 and 12 hours) edging the driveway. The fist day I was using a flat head shovel and a paring knife, and then upgraded myself to a step-on edger. It was a significant improvement, I tell you.

Before

During

Still during. There was a lot of during.

After. This was Saturday.

Sunday got me down to the road (at least on the right side.)

Things you find buried by the edge of the driveway.

I have about 40' more left to do, but there was a ground hive of yellowjackets I needed to take care of first. Last night, under the cover of darkness, armed with a flashlight and a can of Raid, I did the deed. This morning, there was no activity, so I think I'm good, but I'm going to watch the hole for a few more days to be sure.

While doing yard work things, I was going in and out of the shed. The door kept hanging up where the flashing was rubbing on the ramp. Eventually, I tired of fighting with the door. This was the door -

(Photo from June.)

I got out my hammer. And my screwdriver. And I yanked all that crap right off the door.

They had enough nails and screws on that thing to withstand a hurricane. The proper application of brute force and annoyance had it all in the trash bag in less than an hour.
Low and behold, there's a door under all that nonsense.

Behold! A door!

Granted, the metal flashing had been holding the moisture *against* the wood, so there's a few inches of rot and insect damage in the lower left hand corner. Nothing looks active, so I scraped out the loose stuff. It is not worth the aggravation to try to replace the planks.

Metal flashing didn't help here, what with the water splashing back up on it from the ramp. (no gutter)

I picked up some bondo-style patch, which has been applied. I'll sand, prime, and paint it at some point this week.

In other news, the phlox is still going strong.

How?

How can I get anything done with this adorable weirdo sacked out in a catnip coma on my lap?
Spackling had to wait.

More things that want to poke me

I got in a morning of yard work before driving to my folk's Saturday. Got the yard mowed and then attempted to prune back the forcythia. A 6th sense told me to step back, and I discovered I had been all but on top of a ground hornet nest. All I can think is that my foot was actually on the hole, plugging them in, and then I backed up fast enough that I was able to get away.
Ok. Enough of that.
I went and started to cut back the front stone wall that was starting to over grow again. 6the sense told me to back up again, and to my amazement the lawn (now at about face height) was covered in Bumble bees, all flaying around at about 6" off the grass.
Not one to piss off a Bumble bee, I decided to wrap it up and head in for a shower.

Other yard news - The hosta is blown out and now my phlox is going crazy. All sorts of colors, thought right now the dark pink is dominant. There's a pretty little coral colored one that I need to watch - I'd like to have more than one of that. I've caught some of it getting mildewed, so I've hit it with a weak vinegar solution to hopefully control it before it spreads too bad.

A little bit of everything

I didn't really have a good plan headed into the weekend. With the heat, I wasn't sure what I was going to do when. I needed to mow the lawn and do some trimming (2 weeks is about 4 days too long to let that lawn go right now). I needed to treat more Poison Ivy I found (I mentally note living Poison Ivy when I'm in the yard and wander around once a week to squirt new patches.)
Over the course of the weekend, I cleared the 10' left of the back wood line to the little path to the composting foundation. Under the blackberry and multiflora rose and poison ivy, I found a pretty little spiraea - a friend of mine versed in these things thinks it's S. latifolia, "Meadowsweet". (Thanks Camille!)

The bugs love this bush. Bumbles and all sorts of flies all over it.
Curiously, no honeybees though.

Little by little, I'm reclaiming the edge of things. Not having a truck to haul things away to the brush dump is starting to be a real impediment. I have to start seriously thinking about what is going to replace my trusty '07 CRV - at 270k miles, with a shot heater core and a dead AC compressor, it's going to be time soon. I like the idea of the Ranger or the Tacoma - not too big, but big enough to haul away all the yard waste with.
I did the mowing and the trimming around the pop-up rain drops, and cleared away the ferns that were encroaching on the left side of the driveway near the shed.
I also decided that this was the weekend to do the basement stairs (since it was cooler and drier down there than upstairs.) I don't have any before pictures, but image it a dark chipped grey. There's no good ways to photograph this (no light in the stairwell, I should fix that) but there's the after:

Washed, primed and painted a light "thundercloud" grey in the Benjamin Moore "Patio Floor" paint line. Now it matches the door to go out the bulkhead, and that pleases me. As a glossy, it should be easier to keep clean. I also painted the two support posts at the bottom of the stairs to match - they had be kinda-sorta painted over the years - (really I think it was someone just cleaning extra paint off their brushes) - but now they are nice and clean too.

Speaking of the basement, I managed to hit 45% humidity in the basement last night! For the first time since installing it, I heard the dehumidifier click off for a little while. 

I've scraped all the rest of the devil's spackle off the wall in the upstairs bedroom (taking bits of the wall with it as I went, grr,) and purchased a 3.5 gallon bucket of regular old dust-control drywall compound. Hopefully that will start to come together a little faster now.

I installed a wifi repeater, so now I get internet all over my back yard. That wasn't really the purpose though - the point was to put up a Ring device to monitor who might be behind the house. Now I've got a lot of great short videos of me mowing the lawn and watering the flowers. It's entertaining, if nothing else!

The side effects of drying out -

When water evaporates, sometimes things get left behind. There's a fancy term for that, called "efflorescence" - the salts get deposited on your masonry.
 On walls, it looks like a white stain. In my basement, it looks like a science fair project.

Not snow. Or frost.

Must be aliens.

Salt aliens.

It's hard to tell, but that fluffy white stuff is a crystalline structure "growing" out of my floor. Dehumidifier is doing it's job! This weekend I should vacuum the basement again.

Dryin' out!

I have been doing a ton of research over the past couple weeks (well, months, really) about a dehumidifier for my basement. It's really wet down there, even after the gutters. (They helped, but didn't solve the issue.) What I've got is a good case of rising damp and a super porous foundation of dry-laid field stone and some roughly dressed granite.
I knew that manually emptying a dehumidifier wasn't going to work to fix the problem, because I'm not home to dump it so much of the time. I looked into dehumidifiers with pumps, but they all got terrible reviews. It seems that you can dehumidify or pump, but you can't do both, economically, with one machine. I agonized over this, because even cheap dehumidifiers aren't cheap, and I hated the idea of spending money on something I knew going in was likely to break.
Then one day, a happy accident of key word searches yielded a different idea. If a combo dehumidifier and pump stunk, what about separate gizmos? It's not like I'm trying to dehumidify a finished space, I don't need this to be pretty - I need it to be functional.
That led to me purchasing:
• a Frigidaire 70 Pint Dehumidifier,
• a Little Giant Automatic Condensate Removal Pump (with Safety Switch and 20ft. Tubing.)
• a 25' heavy duty extension cord
• and a 10' garden hose (that I needed to cut down)

After a lot of reading and a little monkeying, the rig was rigged! And it worked!

That's not a leak, that where I splashed water when I was pouring it
into the little pump to make sure it worked.
(It worked.)

I don't have a reading of what the humidity was when I left on Friday morning, but it was so moist the water was condensing on the water filter cover attached to the radon system and dripping to the floor. I left it running continuously to try to draw it down hard, and by the time I got back on Monday night, it was down to 60%!!
I have the machine set to 45%. We'll see if with all this rain the little machine that could can get there.
I'm afraid of what the electric bill will be, but it'll be cheaper than the house rotting from the inside out.

The hole is good for something!
But I need to get a longer hose to get it further away from the house.

So that's the expensive and thrilling conclusion to the saga of of moisture issues in the basement. With the addition of a fan in the crawl space, hopefully it will be well and truly under control.

Everything's out to poke me.

Or make me itch.
I made pretty significant progress in slashing the back treeline back to the woods this past weekend. I've resorted to tossing all the old brush and yard clippings into an old  3-sided foundation hidden behind the shed, or putting on the lower original pile that is *huge* at this point. The problem is there's no good place on the property for a burn pile right now - everywhere is too close to something I don't want to burn down - the road, the house, the shed, or trees.
If you remember, a lot of my wood line looked like this:

After trimming and mowing and pulling and a whole lot of rubber gloves and Round-up, I've beaten it back to look like this:

You can see the open spot there on the right, where I cleared a path up into the woods. The very path that the deer used to get to the rose bush (and then relieve themselves.) I threw down some grass seed without much hope that it will grow. I'm hoping it sprouts this fall - it's just too hot and dry for grass right now.
I got from the far edge of the path opening all the way around to the other side where there's a short path to the foundation where I dump the trimmings. I can't go mush further here, as from the dump path to the shed is a solid mass of poison ivy at this point.
That's where I decided that the gloves were coming off. (Just proverbial. That would have been a bad idea. Keep the gloves on.)

I went to Tractor Supply and bought the largest container of special brush killer they had. Came home and spent Sunday morning stalking the property, hosing down the 3-leafed devil everywhere I could find it. If I want to have a garden, I'll have to bring in top soil, but I was just done. Done.
I also mowed the lawn and whacked back some of the brush that was encroaching into the lower lawn, but that's going to take a more concerted effort to control.

I hope all this work pays off next year and I'm some sort of maintenance level with the parts I've done this year.

It's on.

It is the most dangerous time of year.
Home Depot has a sale right now - 50% off trees and shrubs, including roses.
I was good. I walked by them all.
Until I walked by this pretty, compact, "Coretta Scott King" rose (which I think was mis-labled - the blooms look nothing like the internet pictures.)
I got it home. Planted it carefully in one of the few area open that I could.
Fertilized it, fussed over it and enjoyed it.
Woke up this morning, and looked out my kitchen window to admire my pretty rose.
No roses.

3 days.
3 days and the deer came through and ate every single bud off the bush. Open ones, closed ones, all of the buds are gone.

Deer. One reason why we can't have nice things.

Long time gone

It's been a while since I updated. Two weekends ago, Ian and I attended an SCA event down on the Cape, so that ate up all my free time. When we got back, I came down with a stomach ailment that left me on the couch for two days and pretty useless for two more. The weather didn't help much, with it being so hot I didn't want to move.
Then it was the 4th, so I went to hang out with Ian and watch him work on his shop, and then went to my folks to visit and check on the bees. (Bees appear to be doing great, but I need to order them some new frames.)
Yesterday I finally had a little time to get some yard work done. At the top of the driveway where it curves around the house, I'd noticed a few little pink flowers hiding in the brush.

What are you?

I started digging out all the brush (which contained a lot of weeds and black raspberry, which acts and feels a lot like razor wire.)  I uncovered that plant, and then another, and another, and... over 10 plants later, I culled out the sickly little ones, staked up the bigger healthier looking ones, and put down 10 bags of mulch.
Between the lilac bed, and now the Surprise Roses bed, I'm up around 25 bags of mulch. At 2 cubic feet per bag, that's 50 square feet. Next year, I'm just going to have it delivered loose. The one nice thing about the bags is the portability. Lot of plastic waste when you're done though.
After uncovering the roses, I started working my way up along the back tree line. I had been mildly annoyed that while I own 1.6 acres, I couldn't access about 1 of them because of the prickery barrier at the treeline. I found a place that with a little encouragement turned into a natural access, once I bush-wacked my way in.

This isn't exactly before, but it's a really good representation of before.

After cleaning, but before mulch. I forgot to take a picture post-mulch.

Make-do fence. This open area already existed but was full of prickers - it might have been the access path before it grew up.
Now cleaned out it looks like you can walk up the driveway into the woods,
and I don't want just anyone using it as an access to the conservation area.

Uncovered roses! They have no scent, and are awfully cute. I think they might be ramblers?
I've given them a little support to get them off the ground, and be able to keep the area more clean now.

So pink!

*Edit - After some digging, I think it's possible that these roses are some long-neglected "Dorothy Perkins."