Well, the weekend went off pretty much as planned, and I am dragging ass today (as expected.)
Friday night was exactly what I needed. We met up with the gang at the bar in Birches (strangely enough, the same bar we shared farewell drinks at six years ago when they left town) and caught up over a delicious dinner in a mostly deserted restaurant. The entire Yuppie population of Canton must have left for the beach or something, because parking spots and empty barstools were easy to find. After dinner, we headed over to Lulu’s to meet up with another bunch of friends, and despite all the best intentions, stayed to shut the place down. Frankly, we could have stayed for another two or three hours, as we’re friends with the owners, but when the magic number hit 3 we wisely bid goodnight and crawled back to the County for some sleep.
I can’t describe how good it felt to sit and talk with old friends again. In the last couple of years, I’ve noticed that my personal social barometer rises and falls like a pogo stick: I get intensely antisocial for periods of time, and then binge on groups of people. I don;t know why this is, other than the simple fact that I’m busy and lazy and have nobody else to blame but myself. I have to keep up with my own 2005 resolution to stay in contact with everybody as much as possible.
Saturday we decided to attack the floor in the kitchen, and so we began demolition in earnest. The first layer of linoleum came up pretty easily. The Luuan underneath (very thin, very jagged plywood) came up pretty easily too, even though it was installed with a million ring shank flooring nails. The third layer, another coating of linoleum, is a different story. At some point, some idiot decided that using tarpaper as an underlayment for linoleum was a great idea. About half of the tarpaper is so brittle with age that it’s relatively easy to remove. The other half is next to impossible to budge. I tried two different kinds of citrus-based gel stripper with disappointing results, and the heat gun just made this smell worse. It’s looking like the kitchen floor will not be included in the upcoming refinishing job, unless the contractors have some kind of magical suggestion that I can pull off in a week.
Update: There is no magic bullet. Unless I can clean it up by Monday, we’re waiting on the kitchen until we get back from Ireland.
Otherwise, the weekend was full of success. Our vegetables are growing and blooming rapidly—We have tomato plants that are almost four feet high. Jen’s perennial bed is growing out of control. Our cherry tree is loaded with almost-ripe fruit. The rose bush under our dining room window is covered in blooms this weekend. Our gladiolus bulbs are six inches high. The peonies in the front yard are blooming and fragrant. Everything seems to be ready for summer.
And I want to go back to sleep.
Here’s what the kitchen floor started out as, in May of 2005. (That’s right, I tore the floor up in the end of May, and we’re just now getting the tarpaper off.)
The other day, I checked my account balance online only to find the same seventeen dollars that was present the day before. We’re supposed to get this righteous tax refund check, you see, and then we’re going to turn around and give that money to a company with great big sanding machines, and they’re going to do some sanding-fu on our floors and then stain them and finally polyurethane, and we’ll all be happy. Unfortunately, yesterday the Gubmint decided to deposit the money into Jen’s account, so I was waiting in vain.
Regardless, the money has arrived, and if we can manage not to blow anything up or spend it on anything stupid, the flooring company is going to come out and make our house pretty.
Which means Project Bedroom is on indefinite hold and Project Remove Kitchen Linoleum has moved to the head of the schedule (but not before Operation Restore Shade Garden has been sucessfully completed this weekend.)
Words cannot describe how excited Jen and I are for this.
Not much to report today, just basic boring stuff. Lots of research last night on house stuff; new quality windows for the dining room will cost us upwards of $500 each. Two Energy Star-rated air conditioners for the upstairs will cost around $300 (Frigidaire 8000BTU models with remotes.) Switching out the first irrigation system in the greenhouse for a version with misting heads reveals a fundamental truth: More misting heads are required, with a greater coverage area (I got three 1GPH heads to play with, and they don’t cover enough area.) A minor setback. Also, my plan for a rain barrel gravity-feeding the irrigation system will probably not provide enough pressure to get water through the misting heads, which means I’m back to tiny, spread-pattern holes drilled in the pipe..
Sorry, but that’s all I got, kids.
Jen and I are trading out the cars this week to have oil changes performed and routine maintenance finally performed. This means I got to scoot into work in Jen’s Saturn, which features standard shift and a sunroof. A couple of years ago, I had a functional standard-shift convertible, and driving Jen’s car always makes me homesick for the Scout. The other day I was driving home in the Jeep with the windows down, and some strange confluence of scents on the air reminded me of driving on the beach. I immediately thought about Assateague, and had the idea to take Jen camping on the beach again before the summer heat and bugs move in. We have a bunch of commitments in the middle of May to attend to, but I’m going to shoot for a long weekend sometime that month to smell salt air and camp smoke again. Time to dig out our camping gear and take inventory…
In the small amount of downtime I’ve had today, I’ve been doing some preliminary reading on starting seeds from scratch. It appears we’ve missed the recommended window by a month or so, but I don’t think that will hurt anything in the long run. Most of the plumbing is roughed in as of last night, so I’m just waiting on the plastic and the final fittings from the greenhouse supply company. I’ve set the whole thing up so that we can attach and detach different piping based on what’s growing underneath, and there’s an inside fitting roughed in for a hose attachment and the valves to support it. I also found a downspout diverter for the rain barrels; this will get hooked up to the gutters I’m going to be installing on the garage and routed into the greenhouse piping system, so that we have a natural gravity-fed watering solution.
Whether or not to be worried or relieved at the news that our neighbor’s nasty three-color 1980-something Dodge Caravan was “stolen” from their driveway this afternoon sometime between 4:30pm and the time I got home.
I wonder if it’s in the same place the bass boat wound up after the repo guys showed up with the wrecker at 12:30 in the morning last fall.
-and-
How it might be possible to crawl through both time and the TV, back to the David Letterman show, to personally kick the shit out of every member of the “Kaiser Chiefs”.
I’ve been dreaming of using our greenhouse for actual growing purposes ever since we stood out in the backyard and saw it for the first time. When we inspected it, I knew it would need a lot of work. The owners had left us a pair of rain barrels, one potting table, a selection of clay and plastic pots, and one empty greenhouse with a busted heating fan, questionable electrical system, and half-disconnected irrigation pump. Being a closet engineer, I’ve been dying to get to work on this, and Jen has been wanting to use it for growing stuff since last spring.
Since move-in day we’ve cleaned it up and found that the electrical system works fine—the flourescent lights need new bulbs and possibly new ballast—but the irrigation system made no sense. As far as I can tell, there’s a weird pump above the door which used to be hooked up to a water line which then pumped water between the two sheets of plastic which cover the greenhouse. It’s either that, or it vented something out into the air…but I can’t tell how or what.
Update: I think I finally figured it out. It’s an air pump, and it used to inflate the layer of air between the two sheets of plastic. Somehow, I guess, this increased the R value of the structure and kept things warmer.
The heater is still powered, but makes a frightening screech when it’s turned on. It sounds like a rusted or thrown bearing.
Last weekend I took a closer look at the outside of the structure and found out how the plastic is kept in place. It’s a simple tension system, where the plastic is fed into a channel on the frame, and a long strip of aluminum is then fitted into the channel over top, then gently tapped into place. They then sealed it with pounds of silicone caulk, which will have to be removed, but that’s a small matter.
Today, because we’re not getting hammered by income taxes, I took some of my IRS money and ordered a bunch of stuff: four lengths of UV-rated greenhouse plastic, a trio of 1 GPH misting nozzles and their respective PVC fittings, a hose-to-PVC connector, and a drain valve. My original idea was to use copper and PVC together, and drill small holes in a length of 1/2 PVC to mist, but I decided to spend an extra $15 to test out how the nozzles work. The rest of the PVC is off-the-shelf stuff, and should be another $20 or so. It should be here next week, and I’ll keep you up to date on the progress.
This morning fresh air blew through the open windows and I could smell the scent of the tulip tree on the breeze. It’s supposed to be overcast and raining today, and in the 60’s for the weekend, but everything is blooming outside, and the birds were in full song. I broke out the year’s first pair of shorts.
There’s a long list of things to be done outside this spring, some of which includes ripping out all the ivy on the west side of the house and de-infesting the ‘hedge’ over there of the creeper vines. I’d really love to get out there early tomorrow with some coffee and a pair of clippers to do some surgery, especially because that’s where the poison ivy lives in the summertime. Having that cleaned up would make the side yard a lot tidier this summer. Jen’s perennials have (mostly) peeked up above the soil, and the first round of bulbs have come and gone.
Measuring out the greenhouse for new plastic, I found that it’s going to be cheaper than I thought to buy, which is good news.
I’m going to build the other planter for the greenhouse tomorrow as well, and I suppose we’ll be buying some topsoil and mulch for around the yard to boot. I’d really love to spend the entire day out there, but I may have to curb my green fever so that I can get some paying work done as well.
Yesterday Jen and I started moving furniture around in preparation for Major Change. We’re having our new bed delivered on Tuesday, and we decided to prepare for it by emptying out the Cream room to make way for demolition (it’s the only room on the second floor without new electrical runs.) This involved moving her dresser out to the atrium, the bed into the living room, the other furniture to empty corners of the house, and scaring the cats out of their wits. We also cleaned off the front porch, which had become a junkpile/dustbin since before Christmas—I found our marriage license on the deacon’s bench under a pile of junk mail from December—and straightened up the rest of the house. I’m hoping we can get the electrical work in the bedroom done quickly (read: two or three weeks) so that she doesn’t grow sick of the arrangement and attempt to kill me in my sleep on our new bed.
We then got a call from the godless heathens Cauzzis, who wished us a happy Zombie day, and asked if we could bring them some food. Never ones to let a good meal go to waste, we called
When we got back home, we spent about a half-hour attempting to stay awake until the Indian tryptophan took hold and knocked us out, but not before wandering aimlessly through the house trying to remember where we put everything.
Yesterday it rained in Baltimore. Not a gentle spring shower kind of rain, and not the usual “this is how it rains in Prague when I’m depressed” gray March rain. This was sideways rain, where the windows on all four corners of the house are getting hit simultaneously and the cats are running to find high ground before the water rises above the litter box. Jen and I peered out the kitchen window at the swollen river winding its way through our backyard down to the bog behind the greenhouse. The bog that I wrote about earlier quickly turned into a lake behind our neighbor’s house, flooding the lower 1/5 of his property.
To my suprise, I got a call from my councilman (actually one of his aides) yesterday, and he was kind enough to answer all my questions to the best of his ability. The construction behind us is for new storm drains, and it’s supposed to pull all the water off the low spots behind our houses. Whether this will work or not, I can’t say, because in my non-engineer’s opinion, they’re ending the drains a yard and a half short. Supposedly the engineer in charge is going to call me and talk me through it all; I hope they reconsider the plan so that we don’t have to dodge mosquitoes all summer long.