Recent Projects
After work last Wednesday, I was frustrated after having a particularly unproductive day, so I went and built a lawn waste composter in about 20 minutes. That felt GOOD! It’s big, too — roughly 8 feet by 4 feet (used all but 2 feet or so of a 25-foot roll of PVC netting), so there’s plenty of room for all the wet leaves that are littering the lawn right now. Will get to them when the sun peeks out … sometime next week.
[Picture coming]
While my dad was here, we installed insulation in the upstairs hallway (just the office and Isaac’s room to go), as well as a weather-blocking threshold on the interior front door. That should block the gale-force cold air winds this winter. Part 2 of that project is to finish weather-stripping the doorframe, which will involve installing a few more nailing strips, sealing the edges of those up with caulk, and sticking the weatherstripping to the edges, getting a seal around the entire door. That’s on deck for Saturday.
Also on deck for me is leveling the bathroom floor in preparation for installing the new flooring (finally!). And working on the leaky apartment tub, and possibly chasing down the other leak I noticed during the weekend’s monsoon rains. Bigger stuff coming up will be the following:
- New siding on the south face of the house — 8-10 courses, to replace the utterly rotted-away stuff on there
- Roofing patches on the porch roof, and possibly the apartment bathroom flashing
- Fixing the flashing around the furnace chimney
- Insulating the attic and 3rd floor gable-end walls
And we’ve managed to find plowing service for the winter, which is a relief. A touch more expensive than last year, but we’re also having more space plowed (tenant parking) and he’ll also salt and sand the drive. Which rocks (heh), because it’s just ridiculous to try and do that driveway solo with a lawn spreader. I’ll save my efforts for the entryways, thanks.
And finally, we caved in and flipped on the heat last night. 4 more days of damp cold coming up, and it was getting ridiculous. Just up to 65 on the thermostat … seems to run the furnace every 6 hours or so, which is fine. I’d hoped to make it into the end of October, but the weather is being somewhat disagreeable. Ah well. At least the air filters have been replaced!
