Thursday - Chicken Anatomy Class

Today it's raining again. Wendy and I went over at noon to Kelsey's to examine some chicken parts.

Q: So what did I learn? A: The wings are among the best parts of a chicken.
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Rock and Dirt Against Wood - Wood Always Loses!

The whole upper garden is flowing downhill, carrying with it a huge boulder that Tim is standing on. As I mentioned before, anything built on a hill will eventually wind up at the bottom of that hill. Black topsoil has also flowed down and was leaning against the stair stringers and landing. The tons of weight had already pushed the steps out of alignment, but worse, the soil (and insect life) was beginning to rot away the substructure. Click pic to enlarge.

You can see where the stringers were submerged in earth.The remedy is to roll the boulder back uphill and dig all the soil away to allow the timbers to dry out and to keep the worms and insects in the soil from eating the wood. We've learned around here to take any soil we dig out back to the top of the hill to ensure the cycle continues.

Looking good now. If the rain holds off, we'll work tomorrow to get some gravel and stone in an effort to keep the soil away from the wood. Then we can add more rocks to try and shore everything up and slow down the relentless effect of gravity on our hillside project.

The process of earth sliding down the hill is called mass wasting. It occurs when rock, soil, mud, ice, trees, vegetation, roads, houses, or anything else, moves downhill. As a result, these processes occur over a range of speeds, from fast to slow. We usually think of those processes that occur fast, since these are the most well known. For instance, the terrible slide this week where all four members of a family were killed in the wreckage of a house swallowed in a landslide northeast of Montreal. Yet mass wasting does occur in processes with very slow and imperceptible speeds, (as in our case here) called creep and land subsidence.

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I Was Invited To Work On Various Boards

Cold and rainy today - Hurray! That means I don't have to work on the 'project'. The weekend was pretty cold, windy and rainy which actually provided a welcome break from my 'board work'.

Monday, the sun came out and it gave me a chance to turn all the boards on the lower steps and the landing.  I know that by turning the them over I am just buying time, but I figure the day is coming when either ALL the boards will need to be done or the deck replaced, or both. But for now - What a difference! Click any pic to enlarge.

I've been reading on the net that if I put in new pressure treated boards I will have to wait a year before I can paint or stain them. It looks like by using the boards from the railings and pergola, I won't have to buy any new ones. I also read that if the boards are more than 6" from the earth (which they are up on the deck) I don't need to use pressure treated timber, so I feel better about using the plain spruce lumber for the deck expansion and I don't have much pressure treated lumber to dispose of. Soon as we get some warm dry days in a row I can get the stain going and wrap up this phase.

The boring bees seem to be somewhat happy in the board I leaned against the wall. Maybe I'll mount it somewhere semi-permanently so they can finish out the summer. After all, it was their home and I rained on their parade.
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Wendy and I Had Wings Today

We each had 16 'medium' wings for $8.99 They come with carrots and celery with chunky blue cheese dip. Our waiter, Colin, told us  "They take a little longer now since we cook them from raw rather than pre-cooking them like we used to."  I think they taste better than ever. A very economical and delicious lunch indeed. Click for details.

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A Short Walk At Longwoods

We try to get out to the reenactment at Longwoods Conservation Area every year but the past weekend was too rainy for us, so we drove out there today. I read that we are 18 days ahead in this growing season, which is pretty evident everywhere but especially there. Click here to look at the same area last May 4.

We parked the car and walked our usual trail, past the old pioneer houses to the suspension bridge and on to the boardwalk that leads to the trail through the Carolinian forest and back past the park's activity center and finally back to the car. The pictures explain the beauty of the place better than I can in words. As usual, click a picture to enlarge, but this time you can see a huge enlargement.

Nature at her best!

 A nest on the path.

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The "Project" has Grown like my Waistline on a 14 day Cruise

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But the main goal, which was the deck boards, is nearly complete. The growth problem stems from the fact that, as each branch of the project advances, as things get fixed, other things near the project become, by contrast, more obviously needy of work. 

Scary! This is a dangerous spiral over which I have no control. The "project" is taking on a life of its own. Where will this end? Will I succumb to total renovation? Kitchen? Bathroom? Or the dreaded addition? Help me!

Click any pic to enlarge

The stairs from the deck down to the pool area have needed attention for quite a while. There is really no sense in painting them until some problems are addressed. There is a unique phenomenon encountered by people who live in houses built on the side of a hill. Students of architecture learn that the problem is, that everything, the house and all things attached to it or not, eventually moves by gravity at varying speeds albeit very, very, slowly down the hill to the bottom. 

We have noticed this movement on these steps, which was accelerated several years ago when a landscape company we hired added tons of rocks and topsoil to the slope above the steps. The tonnage has pushed the steps out of alignment with the deck in two planes.

The high corner sits on a column set in concrete. Its hard to say whether the rest of the steps sank down (likely) or whether the column lifted. At any rate, my remedy will be to notch out the landing, after disconnecting the stairs from the facer beam. The hard work, it took me all afternoon to get the spiral nails out. Alas - Success - Level again.

The next challenge is to somehow align the boards on the landing back parallel with the top steps, while keeping them 90 degrees to the bottom steps. There has to be some juggling here but I started by cutting out a wedge (rain starting) which will allow the boards to be pried up and re-installed in line with the steps. The picture below shows the boards reinstalled temporarily (I'm going to replace them all since rot has set in).  Fortunately all the stringers and supports looked good.

Not bad for a start. To complete the juggling act and perfect the illusion of straightness I shall cheat the gaps in the new boards to improve the parallelism.

There! The steps look much, much better and visually correct.  And I did the railings upstairs this morning.

Hmmm... Now that wall to the left needs work...

Enough for today already. See if "the project"  consumes my whole summer while I gouge weeds out of the paving stones. Check back soon.
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Just for Fun - Speakers Up!

Friends Hans and Glenys (we met on the Alaska cruise last June) sent this to me. Canadians are taxed to death so they have to be innovative and resourceful. A gasoline driven percussion instrument. Hey, that's only 99.9¢ per hour (liter) You can't hire anybody for that! The clip is titled Saskatchewan Philharmonic.

Click the arrow in the picture to start the tractor - I mean the percussion machine. Double click to go to You Tube.

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Floor Boards and More Boards - Project Escalates.

Click picture to enlarge.

The old interlocking paving stones at the end of the deck have sunk down over the years, and the garden soil has been built up. They look pretty bad beside the new deck extension and those old deck boards over the step look terrible.

We need a new step. I decided to recycle the nice big slab of concrete that the defunct and long-gone air conditioner unit used to stand on. and "while we're at it" lets invert a few more deck boards to make the new step look even better.

While my son Tim and I were putting the finishing touches on the step, my dear wife Wendy was busy washing down the aluminum siding on the house in anticipation of the arrival later in the week of a painter she had called "just for a quotation". (I don't paint. I get paint on everything except what I want, and I don't have the patience to keep things clean and tidy as I go along.)

 

Hey! The day wouldn't be complete without a few more deck boards.

 After all that's the original, basic project, right?

Now, with the house washed down, the railings on the deck look even more shabby than I had noticed before. It's a beautiful day, so maybe I'll tear off those old weather-beaten rails and replace them with some new boards that I had left over from the original deck board project.

Normally rain is a scourge of backyard handymen but in this case it gave us a well deserved break while I figured out what else I need to buy.

Click on the Bee to enlarge, although he is already large at over an inch long. (count 17 squares/inch)

A few homeless Boring Bees that we displaced when we demolished the old pergola have been hovering around and seem very distressed by all our activity. I set up an old board with bee holes in it to try to keep them happy but the board keeps getting moved and they don't seem impressed with my efforts; not that  a human can ever impress a bee I suppose.

See what I mean? This project is growing like the National Debt and we're only into the first week of May. The only up-side is: at this rate it looks like I'm building up enough "brownie points" to get me through the whole summer on my boat. We'll see!
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A Simple Project. Ha!

Like most of my projects, this one began last week as very minor and progressed into a more involved undertaking as it went along.  It's been over two seasons since we re-stained the patio deck and it showed. Some of the old stain was worn off and the rest was still stubbornly there.

Our government, in a seemingly blind duplication of USA policy, has made it virtually impossible to obtain the same old CIL oil based stain as I had been using. This means a change to a water based coating to which I have a skeptical view as far as longevity.  If we are forced to change from oil-based to water-based I figured the best thing to do is to sand it all down and repaint. It might be a good time to change the colour too, since I was never wild about the 'natural cedar' tint and besides, you can't get an exact match anymore.

Anyway, some of the 30+ year old deck boards were badly weather checked and split, so my son Tim and I decided to replace the worst ones. When we pried a few loose, we were surprised to see that the back side was in remarkably good condition. This led us to our original plan which was to remove and invert all the boards that were seriously cracked or cosmetically bad before re-staining the deck. Period.

Oh oh! We can't repair all the boards since a gargantuan planter box sits right on some bad looking ones. Too heavy to move, we'll have to empty out the dirt. OK but there are also some support columns for a deck structure resting on some of the deck boards.

On top of our patio deck we have an aging and deteriorating pergola-come-patio-cover that we decided "while we are at it" should come down if for no other reason that it was becoming an eyesore and a safety hazard. We figured a heavy snow load or a wind storm could bring it down and kill somebody if they happened to be under it when it collapsed. This structure was laden down and carried a load much heavier than what it was ever designed to carry due to the fact it was covered with a huge grape vine. Not only that, as mentioned, its supports are in the way of our original deck board project. As well, the monster vine atop the structure has been attracting Japanese beetles by the tens of thousands every July. The excrement from the throng of grape leaf eating bugs combined with the heavy shade below, has caused the growth of green mold on the deck boards and will inevitably lead to rot. "You don't want to damage your new deck finish do you?"

After checking with our cruising friend John, who is, among other things, a professional deck installer, about some nail/screw issues and the wisdom of turning the boards over, we were nearly ready to rent the sander. 

But wait, Wendy suggested we look into expanding the deck now that the structure was down and a massive planter box had been emptied of a half a ton of topsoil and clay. I agreed that if an expansion was needed, this would be the perfect time to do it while everything was out of the way. It had always bothered us that the deck ended half way past our bedroom window. Why didn’t the original builder carry the thing just past the window?  It always looked funny to me. If we every wanted to replace the window with a sliding door, the deck would have to be bigger.

The original job looked easy. But, this project is growing like a bad tumor. Total it up: Invert a whole bunch of boards. Add a small expansion to extend a part of the deck so the new boards would all be painted at once and it would look like the added on bit was always there. Tear down the pergola, remove the ponderous grape vine and chop out the roots. Empty a big planter box located in the way. Fine! Now dig up and remove the garden that is also in the way, and carry all the dirt temporarily to the front driveway and, while you're at it, make a patch for an unsightly hole in the aluminum siding where a former, relocated AC unit was plumbed in, which was revealed when the planter box was moved.

Now that the patio cover and giant vine are gone, the neighbors have a clear view to our patio. This, I recalled, is why I built the patio cover in the first place. That, and also the fact there is absolutely no shade after 10 am and no place for hanging pots.

Hmmm! Looks like we need a tastefully, decorative privacy screen and some sort of new structure to hang plants and maybe we should have the old aluminum siding on the house painted now that the deck looks so good and maybe we should add that new sliding door off the bedroom and how about...

Wait, stop! That's enough for one blog entry.