Porch Replacement 2023 Jun 12-30

June 12: Demo the concrete porch and ramp

June 14: Pull the last of the concrete out of the wall.

June 15: Repair rotten siding and prepare it for wooden porch attachment.

June 21: Dig a hole to bury the concrete rubble - Create a French drain

June 23: Add a concrete landing at the bottom and replace the lawn. Almost finished!

Water the replaced lawn...hey, not the concrete! Almost finished...final photo to be posted later

Knitting for a Baby Girl

I found six skeins of pink yarn in my stash and I heard there was a baby girl due to be born in June. So I knitted up two pair of baby booties (one small pair and another larger) then knitted a big blanket, using up all of those pink yarn skeins.

Cleaning up an old hatchet head

I brought an old rusty, beat-up hatchet head to Lief's workhop and he built a new handle for it from a scrap of Walnut. He polished off the rust, ground out a new beveled edge, shaped the wooden handle, attached it to the head, then soaked the final result in linseed oil.

White Cross Garden Spider Babies - 2023 May 11

Another batch of White Cross Garden spiders has hatched and the baby spiders are making their way out into the world. Our yard usually fills with these spiders each summer. I'm careful to avoid breaking their webs unless they're in a critical pathway for humans.

Giant Cottonwood Tree - 2023 May 7

Look at the size of that Cottonwood tree James cut down. It made such a thunderous noise that several neighbors checked in on them to find out what had happened. James called Heidi immediately just to let her know he was OK. He wanted to open up the canopy so his freshly planted Cedar trees would thrive. Check out the moss on the trees in the background. This is certainly a rain forest.

I'm not sure if the dark wood at the center of the log is a problem. The lumber companies call this "Poplar" and it's commonly used for making drawers, at least the parts that don't show from the outside. We counted the growth rings. There were only thirty rings, spaced about a half inch apart. So the diameter of this tree grew by one inch each year, for a total of 30 inches diameter.

Check out the rectangular black marks on edge of the stump. That's where he drove iron wedges in to force the tree to fall to the right. It fell to the left anyway.

Tulips In Bloom 2023 April 26

This is the best photo I got of the blooming tulips. The camera is pointing straight down into the centers of the flowers. They also looked good when back-lit with sunshine but that type of lighting is even more difficult to capture on camera.

Homemade Scones Attempt #2 2023 April 17

These scones were crunchy on the outside and fluffy on the inside, but they tasted terrible. I made them taste better by filling them with strawberry jam.

Homemade Scones 2023 April 7

I followed a recipe very carefully from scratch ingredients and baked these scones myself. They tasted good but were tough and shoe leather. Not that I've ever tried eating shoe leather.

Lug Nuts Over-Tightened 2023 Jan 5

Lief bought a used Subaru for Abby to drive while she's in college. It needed to have the brakes checked and in the process of removing the wheels we discovered the lug nuts were so tight they broke the lug studs on two separate wheels. I estimated that the lug nuts had been tightened to about 150 foot pounds. It took all of my strength to get them loose, and of course two of them snapped off. (The brakes turned out to be OK.)

Replacing the broken lug studs proved to be a challenge. We put the new stud in place and then tightened the wheel until the new stud had been pulled tight and reset into the axle hub. We checked the torque on all four wheels with a torque wrench and found them to be at 90 foot pounds...a bit tighter than recommended but soft enough for Abby to get loose in an emergency. A few months later she had a flat tire and had to remove those lug nuts herself. Lief talked her through it via cellphone: "Arrange the wrench so it needs to be pushed down, then shove it down with your foot." It worked!

Heat Pump Generates Ice 2022 Dec 1

After a cold December night I checked our new heat pump. Sure enough frost had formed on the heat exchanger outside. But the electric backup heater inside provided enough warmth to melt it off. The heat pump proved to be an efficient method of heating in the cold weather, in spite of needing a little help from the backup electric heater.

Milling Lumber 2022 Nov 12

James drove a pickup load of Alder planks to Lief's house where the three of us spent all day and late into the night planing it and milling it into "standard" sized lumber. This photo shows the pile of wood shavings we created with the planer.

The next morning the pickup truck became disabled and had to be towed away. James took the lumber out of his pickup and we tied it to the roof of my car and he drove it home to Amboy.

House Exterior - Peel & Paint 2022 Jun 25 to Sep 22

This is year #4 of peeling and painting the house exterior. Everything to the left had been finished in a prior year, so I started with the wall facing the street, moving to the right. The plywood surface on the 16 foot plank has dry-rot in places, so I reinforced it by laying a 2x12 board on top.

In order to avoid the need to move the ladder and scaffolding more than I had to, I peeled and painted the upper half first, then peeled and painted the lower half.

This is the northeast wall. It is so wide that I had to move the ladders & scaffolding twice but two coats of paint overlapping helped hide the start/stop points. Each of these segments took several days to peel, sand, and then paint with our opaque stain.

This is the southwest wall. I was unable to work on this wall during mid-day because of bright sunshine and heat. Finally I thought of setting up a patio umbrella and then could work on small patches at a time.

Working quickly, I was able to peel a row of paint and leave it hanging from the wall. When I finished that row the peeled paint had cooled off and was brittle. I could scrape off the entire row in a single stroke.

The bottom half of this southwest wall is finished all the way to the French doors. It will take three stages of scaffolding to complete the upper half.

This section went very fast because I had a helper. Young Ian from next door needed an excuse to climb up onto the scaffolding, but he had fun scraping the brittle paint off the wall.

This left section of the upper half is now sanded down to bare wood and ready to be painted with opaque stain.

The middle section of the upper half is sanded down to bare wood.

The French door trim took extra time since it had suffered from weather damage. I removed it, repaired, replaced and painted it with white enamel trim paint before painting the beige siding.

My scaffolding would not fit into this corner, so I had to improvise. A wooden pallet board on top of two sawhorses worked perfectly.

The upper half is finished but now the lower half is all that's left.

Finally, September 22, the entire peeling and painting task is done.

The walls done during the first three year's worth of peeling and painting do NOT have any blisters or peeling paint. This is in contrast to every prior paint job we've done (where we didn't peel first before painting). In the past it only took a month or two before the paint began to blister and peel. Notice in photos #9 and #10 above, the final corner, lower half. The beige paint there is less than ten years old and it is covered with popped and peeled blisters.

At the date of this posting (10July2023), this paint job is 1 to 4 years old and there is still no sign of blisters or peeling. My conclusion is that cedar siding must be painted with stain, not paint. Once regular paint has been applied then that paint will begin to blister and peel, even after you paint over it with newer paint. All of the old paint must be removed and stain applied instead.

White Coat Ceremony - UW School of Medicine 2022 Sep 9

James G posed here with his team of Medical students prior to the "White Coat" ceremony.

After the ceremony James gets a hug from Mom.

Lion Cub by G. Alan Wright 2022 Sep 9

While exploring Spokane on September 9, 2022 we found the Lion Cub sculpture by G. Alan Wright. It was named "Bronzo the Brave" dated July 1, 1963 and of course it was cast from bronze metal.

Emily and Boys 2022 Sep 4

Emily brought her two boys to visit us on September 4, 2022. We showed them how to explore the river with an underwater viewing box. They found fish and lots of other critters.

Fence Repair 20 June 2022

We used the cedar fascia boards from our gutter replacement project to make new pickets for our fence. We stained them brown and fastened them with stainless steel nails.

The cedar gutters made nice borders for our flowerbeds. (See the white borders in the fence photo.)

Poppies - June 2022

The poppies grew as tall as me. One was a spectacular fluffy color of pink while most were red with single petals.

We also had a nice crop of Columbine.

Roof Leak 30 Dec 2021

The heavy snowfall accumulated on our new roof, then began gradually sliding down the slope. All around the house it simply fell off the roof with a huge crash, but here in front it was held back by the chimney. The glacial action pushed a lump of snow up under the chimney flashing and began leaking down the chimney and out into the basement.

Our roof warranty provided a roofing expert to come out and analyze the situation. From now on we are required to break away accumulated snow at that chimney location so it cannot build up like this.

Christmas 2021

Finished knitting this afghan on Christmas morning, in time to wrap it as a gift.

The next morning, Christmas Day, our furnace's heat exchanger began leaking exhaust fumes into our living space. We had to turn off the furnace and the outdoor temperature was below freezing. We went to Lief & Angela's house in Auburn to stay for about four days until we could repair the furnace. It snowed on Christmas Day so we were trapped in Auburn and it was difficult to get a furnace repairman out to our house. After returning home we used four electric space heaters to keep our house warm. We ended up replacing the oil furnace with an electric backup heat system in February, and a heat pump in June.

Milling Alder Logs: October 2, 2021

Catching up on posting to my blog, these photos are from October 2, 2021

Jim Horne invited us over to help mill up some old Alder logs. He used his backhoe to pick them up and put them on the milling machine.

Two men were required to balance the log while setting on the milling machine.

Heidi acted as "quality control" to verify the correct height of each cut.

We turned the slabs on edge to trim off the bark from each side.

The day was complete after filling the pickup truck twice like this.