Into the Fall

 Here we are, at the end of October, and I have a bunch of windows open. It's a beautiful day outside. Last weekend, I did a bunch of exterior work to start winterizing, and that included removing most of the screens. I had a suspicion that this might happen though, so I left a few strategically placed screens alone. 

This time of year, it's not so much to keep the bugs out (though the stink bugs and ladybugs have been out in full force) it's just to keep the cat in.

I have no idea why, but she's started drinking from her fountain like this.

I've been doing a bunch of little things.

Replaced the mirror in the bathroom.
Replaced that towel ring too, now that I think about it, but that must have been later.

Replaced the old almond colored broken outlet with a new white one.

Made an absolute mess of my parent's wall trying to hang a new phone.
I'm going to attempt to fix it this weekend with the right parts.

Replaced the old Victorian slide catch with a new round turn buckle latch that will more closely match some from the original hardware. (But it's still obviously new).

All the paint is done, now I'm just waiting on the new rail to finish this stairwell.

The blue is a little more "beach cottage" than I would prefer, but it is relentlessly cheerful.

Oh, but right! The air vent hole thing. I made a fancy cover for that!

This fancy cover thing. But the hole is way over there, in the stair well. My arms are not 8' long.
I'm not sure how this is going to get applied.
With screws, sure, but how to get over there is a mystery still.

Washed out the garbage bins and the vacuum parts.

Took off the screens and scrubbed them before storing them in the shed for the winter.

Started painting the shed windows. They had never been done, and were covered in mildew.
Sanded them down, hit them with a coat of oil based primer and a top coat of interior/exterior floor paint (that I used for the indoor stairs). I figure in this case, white paint is white paint.

Painted windows, ready for action.

 

You can't really tell, but painted windows in action.

Found things

 Back while Ian redid the shed roof, I started looking at the retaining wall/old barn foundation. Due to neglect, some of the big rocks have tumbled out, and a lot of dirt has washed down the hill. Compounded by leaves that were never raked out and turned to compost, the hill was starting to slide into the shed. I moved what rocks I could, and raked out the debris. In the process, I found stuff.

No idea what this is. It's about 8" long. No marks that I can find.

Bits and pieces. This glass was exceptionally thick-walled.
Someone planted Early something. Peas?

Whatever this was, it came from a large circumference bottle or jar.
Bigger than a quart, in my guess.

Found this tucked in the rocks. I cleaned it up and hung it in the shed. The gold is still shiny.

I think these are old radiator valves? A ton of these went in the dumpster for scrap. Never mind my house doesn't have radiators, in this condition, they literally can not be reused by anyone.

The Holy Grail - Proof that plausibly, once upon a time, my house had weighted sash windows.
I held onto this. Window weights are getting hard to come by.

As cleaned up as it's going to be for now. I think short of an excavator, or some really fun leavers and pullies, the two remaining rocks will have to live where they lie. I'm doing some investigation on how to get them back up in their proper positions. It would make accessing the back of the shed a lot more convenient. You can see how the water pressure has bowed out the wall over time.

The upstairs hallway and stairwell, continued.

This past week I've been plugging along on the upstairs hallway. Ian and Windy had fixed the walls to the point where it just needed a little fine tuning and some paint. At this point right now, the hallway has seen:
• Ian and Windy fixing the plaster/drywall and giving it a first prime
• a second prime to all surfaces
• 2 coats of ceiling paint (Muresco. It hides so many sins.)
• reattached the ceiling light
• 2 coats of wall paint (Ben Moore Regal in "Ewing Blue", which has turned out a little more coastal/beachy/relentlessly cheerful than I anticipated, even thought I tried swatches.)
• cleaned and reattached the wall plates
• Ripped out the carpet on the stairs
• 2 coats of primer on the stairs
• 1/2 a coat of Ben Moore Floor and Patio paint in white on the stairs. (Doing the every-other-stair technique.)

I had swatches all over that hallway.
That blue gets Really Cheerful when there's a whole wall of it.

Cheerful blue from one end. I need a better lightbulb.

Cheerful Blue from the other side.
Here it almost looks white, unless you have white to compare it to, which leads us to...

Here it is next to white. It's a lot brighter in person.

I was painting these walls and finally couldn't take the carpet on the stairs any more. I mean, I was so carefully fixing this space, I couldn't just leave the stairs. Last week I got out the wreaking bar, yanked up the carpet and tack strips, carefully filled most of the holes, sanded it and started painting that too.

Why Not.

I couldn't take it.

Even if that cat loved sharpening her claws on it and rolling around on it,
I couldn't do the carpet any more.

Demo is my favorite part.

There was padding under there, but you couldn't really tell by walking on it.
It was so dirty.

There was a reddish brown and dark green in the middle; grey, and at least 2 coats of different light blues on the edges. Why waste the paint if you're just going to carpet it?

At some point, probably when they put on the back bedrooms, they replaced the bottom two treads with left over hardwood floor scraps.

One coat of primer! Already so much cleaner!

Second coat of primer! On to the real white paint.

That's what I've been up to. I've ordered some better matching hardware for the closet doors, as well as a fancy custom handrail to replace the very generic rail that was there. Originally, the stairwell probably never had a rail, but modern codes frown on that sort of thing.

At this point, I can finish painting the stairs. Then I want to wait for the wall paint to cure for a little bit so I can tape off parts of it and paint the trim. Then it's the hardware  and the hallway will be done for now. I will still need to refinish 2 closet doors, but that can wait until winter.

I can't wait to call this area done.

An important update; The mystery pipe conclusion.

 I'm not sure if I mentioned it here, but last week I started trying to dig up this weird pipe sticking out of the lawn out near the road. I thought it was a sheared off old metal pipe fence post. I dug and dug, until I hit a collar. Then I stopped and called DigSafe. This was no left-over mailbox post.

DigSafe determined that it wasn't gas or electric, so I could go to town digging as far as they were concerned. But I wasn't convinced. That sucker wasn't budging for anything. I called the town water department. The lady on the other end wasn't convinced it was their problem either, but said she's talk to some folks and get back to me. She did, later that day, leaving me a message telling me that it was a "stub".
When the water company ran a main down the road a number of years back, they put little stubs in so that properties could tie in later without needing to dig up the roadbed. That's cool, but now *I* wasn't convinced. This (above) didn't exactly look like an intentional arrangement.

The water lady went on vacation. I waited for her to get back and called in again. I wanted a set of real live eyeballs to look at this. She wasn't pleased that I was wasting her time, but she finally relented to send someone up. A little while later, a man in a big town pickup truck pulled up. "Yup," he said, "it's a stub. But it's seen a snowplow or two."
He went on to explain the long wrenches that would be fished down the pipe to turn the water on and off to the street. (Mine is pretty shallow.)
He also told me that should I ever want to tie into the main, they would definitely have to replace this part anyway (up to this point is their responsibility), so he could just cut it off. He left to get his saw, and about an hour later he came back, marked the street, and cut it off for me.

Thanks Water Guy!

Now all I have to do is take measurements (just in case) and back fill it.
One less thing to bounce my poor lawnmower off of!

Getting a good head of steam

Last week a lot got done in a short period of time.
While I don't have any progress pictures, I do have before and afters of the shed roof.

Before: A 3-tabbed shingle roof, covered with moss and lichen.
(Last year, with the driveway freshly sealed.)

 

 

 

During: A trusty blue FEMA grade roof. I looked up how they recommend dealing with hurricane damage, so if you ever need a roof tarped, I have learned a few things.

After: It's up and done! With many thanks to Ian for doing the bulk of the work while I was trying to work at the same time.

The dumpster goes away today. I pulled all the stuff out of the bushes from when I demolished the mudroom closet, all the stuff from when I demolished the weird wooden surround around the chimney, lengths and lengths of rusted-beyond-use pipes from the bushes, a bend-pipe trellis? part of an arbor? out of the bushes. Then, when I saw how much room I had left, I called my neighbors and asked if they had anything they wanted to get rid of.

While waiting for the dumpster, Ian also cut me a beautiful new clothes line, the posts are rough oak, and the arms are rough pine. The old one had been holding out for me, but every time I hung up a wet towel, it crept closer and closer to the ground.

Before: This was taken well over a year ago, the angles had gotten much more severe.
It took minimal effort to push them over. I just sort of leaned on it.

After: The reason it took minimal effort to push over the old one is because this whole slope is sitting on a ledge. The close post is down about 32" until we hit ledge. The distant one is about 22".
It will hold up the cloths to dry though, and that's all that matters.
I sanded them to get the splinters off and then hit them with a coat of linseed oil. Not that it will do much, but it made me feel better. Today I'll string it now that the oil has soaked in.

And today I also just started the process to order the new handrail for the indoor stairwell. Temperatures come down, and progress picks up.

Whoa, Now Blogger...

 This summer has been slower for projects -
a) There's simply less low-hanging fruit to be done.
b) It's been Hot, and Covid.
c) I have run out of zeal for projects that seem never to end.

On top of that, Blogger changed their interface. It used to be that the order I clicked on images was the order they would import to the blog. Now it's exactly the opposite. I usually try to curate images into a story that flows (even dis-jointly) in some sort of order.
Now I could go and try to re-import everything, or I could try to tell the story backwards.
So let's start at the end of the weekend.

Some of you might know about how I've been fighting with my lawnmower all season.
This is the little leaver that's supposed to hold a rear wheel up at a pre-determined height.
Notice that it's no longer attached to the mower.

The power washer guy had come and gone on Sunday morning.
Now the slugs can't use it as a buffet.
Soon, a new roof.

There was an annoying pipe sticking out of the ground down near the road. It stuck out about 4" - the perfect height to hit with the lawnmower. (Which might be why it's falling apart.)
I figured this would be a quick project - dig out the weird pipe so I stop hitting it. I assumed it was an old fence post or something. At 3' down, I found that coupling, so today I'm calling Digsafe.

After reviewing how the rest of the images of the hallway prep/paint was going, I decided to delete the rest of the images and re-import them into another post. Trying to tell that story backwards would just not work. Stay tuned...

A little bit of everything

It's been hot.

It's hard to gather the oomph to do messy work on the house, in the house, when it's this hot.

I planted 2 delicata squash plants. I got 2 delicata squashes (so far).

This is the only remaining fruit from the Cheese pumpkin experiment.
The vine climbed up the fence, keeping this one .. gourd? squash? away from nibbling faces.

Tomatos are coming along. Just noticed some blossom end rot on a few,
so I'll have to go grab some bone meal.

My beans did terribly. I think I over fertilized them. But there's new growth at the bottom,
so I cut off all the leggy tops and we'll see what happens.

"Lunchbox peppers" Truly a waste of time.
Barely bigger than a jalapeno, with nothing interesting about it except it's stunted.

The dill is blowing out, but everything else looks pretty happy.
I'm hopeful that this box can get moved to the basement or the shed
and I can rig a light for it over the winter.

Have some carrots going to seed. Never had that happen before.

Blue Jade Dwarf Sweet Corn. So cute! So pretty!
Such a lovely experiment I won't repeat because what a waste of precious garden space!

Dragonflies love my yard. Blue, green, black, and golden ones are not uncommon

At least I can grow cherry tomatoes.
I think these would grow anywhere, under just about any condition, to tell you the truth.

It is color picking time for the upstairs hallway.
The trim will stay white, the floor will stay hardwood (it's more reddish than this picture) and I'm going to have to get test cans, because this is a hard space - The are near the window is quite bright, but the stairwell is quite dark. nothing is going to look uniform.
I'm thinking the lightest versions of #3, 4, and 5 (from left to right.)

The rodent is back

I'm a pretty live-and-let-live sort of person.

Except when the creature involved has hundreds of acres of conservation land to hang out on, but decides my gardens are way better.

There's a woodchuck.

He's eating everything. Mowed down the sunflowers. Smashes the tall Phlox. I have an electric fence up around the veggies, because there's no way I'm watching him stuff his fat little face with all my effort. He dances through deterrents. Sashays through sprays. I hate him.

What it means is that this fall, I have to make another huge push to knock back the brush, expose his den entrances (plug them) and put hardware cloth up to block off under the shed (where he launches his attacks from.)

In the mean time, I've been making slow progress with the stripping of the Office. I have a new orbital sander on it's way to hopefully touch up the surfaces quickly once it's stripped.

Other than that, it's been too hot, and I've been too distracted to get much done.

Now that the wall is all nicely patched, I'm thinking about replacing this railing with something that might look more appropriate when I go to paint it. I found a manufacturer in California who would make be a custom black iron rail for $460 (including shipping.) We'll see. I still need to do that last of the sanding, and then prime and paint it all.