Archives June 2020

This past week, construction began on the new oak staircases at the Verona house. I’m replacing the old carpet stairs with new oak stairs, stained to match the hardwood floors. It’s a long, tedious process to cut the stair treads and risers exactly right, but it slowly began to take shape. First, the previous stairs had to be ripped out:

Before the new treads could start to go in, new support stringers had to be cut and installed, and we used plywood to raise up the stair frames by three quarters of an inch so that the new stairs would be at the same height as the old carpeted stairs and thus would be flush with the old skirt boards.

Once that was done, the new risers and treads, which had been custom manufactured and stained, could be cut and installed.

The result turned out beautifully! There is still a lot of trim work left to do, the railing needs to be reinstalled, and the nail holes need to be puttied, but it’s pretty easy to see how good the finished product is going to look.

Next week, we start on the upstairs staircase!

After a good ten year run, it was time to say goodbye to my grill. It was a housewarming present for my first house, and was an awesome grill but it was starting to rust out and fall apart.

I replaced it with a very similar propane Weber grill, and have been very happy with the new grill so far, and it’s nice to have a grill with working ignition, fuel gauges, and other basic functionality.

With the new grill, the already beautiful deck got even better!

Over Memorial Day Weekend, my wife and I spent the long weekend at the lake house and I got everything ready to go for summer. First, I did some minor repair and repainting work on the stairs and railing going down to the water.

Next, I repainted the shed and did other paint touchups around the exterior of the house.

After that, I installed a new outdoor table on the deck, and anchored it to the wood so that it wouldn’t be easily blown out of position by the wind.

Next, I used my chainsaw to chop up some of the downed trees from last spring that I had left where they fell. This opened up the paths to the left side of our land and made the view from the deck nicer.

Deano Dock and Lift came by and reset the dock, which had been knocked out of position over the winter, and I repainted the stairs that connect directly to the dock. This will likely be the last summer that this dock is in place, it’s showing its age and I am looking to switch to a dock that will have fewer problems with the current coming off of the river.

The last major task was to install the canopy and awning at the boat lift, which is always a somewhat miserable task since the heavy canvas has to be pulled over the the lip of the awning and dragged across the top while standing in the boat.

Once that was done, it was time to restock the fridge and the bar at the lake house, and then get out on the water.

It’s been a beautiful couple of weekends of boating so far this year, hopefully the good weather continues!

The shelves in the garage that I had used to store paint, as well as the shelves in the guest house garage that I had used to store gardening tools, were all in general disrepair and sagging from the weight of everything stored on them. I invested in some much stronger steel shelves, as well as new garden tool cabinets in the guest house garage and garden tool racks in the shed.

I finished all of the landscaping tasks I had planned for spring, which was a pretty exhaustive list, along with a number of other minor outdoor projects. Here was the full list of tasks I had planned:

• Climbing plants along wall
• Improve planters outside sitting room and library
• Replace cut down trees
• Plant something in former pond
• Improve planters on side of guest house
• Improve planter areas around front walk
• Improve planter areas near front door
• Power wash front of house
• Plant grass
• Reset eroded paver stones
• Replace bark
• Replace arbor vidas on edge of wall
• Vacuum and sweep garages
• Cut down tree in planter near the well
• Aerate grass and reseed yard
• Rip out everything in beds by library
• Use rope to reshape bush next to garage
• Remove old cable wires and dishes
• Spread fertilizer
• Remove all old landscape lights/boxes

As the weather warmed up, I finished the rest of the planting and continued to whip the lawn into shape.

One of the issues plaguing the lawn recently has been mole damage, and it had gotten out of control to the point that I had to do something about it this spring. By using a combination of poisoned mole bait and mole spikes, I’ve gotten it under control. Mole spikes are a pretty cool invention, they emit sound underground that drives moles away without killing them.

One of the last things I did in the yard was planting climbing plants, mostly Boston Ivy, along the base of the wall. My goal is to get them to grow on the wall and make the artificial parts of the wall look more natural. Boston Ivy grows very fast, 5-8 feet per year, so I think by the end of the summer of 2021 the sections of the wall should be properly covered if everything goes according to plan.

Overall, I’m really happy with how the yard turned out this spring, and it’s fun to see the fruits of my labor when I look out over the lawn from the porch.

After the electrical failure that the well experienced several weeks ago, a new underground line had to be installed to power the well. I took the opportunity to also have a new underground line from the guest house to the shed and to the gate dug, so that intermittent GFI tripping due to a ground fault between the guest house and the gait would stop happening.

Krantz Electric brought some heavy duty digging equipment for the project, and after a couple of days finished digging a trench and laying the new power lines.

After the digging and wiring was complete, we re-leveled the ground and I got to work planting new grass. It’s going to take a month or so, but by mid-summer I should be able to get the lawn back in gear.

In the meantime, the well has had no issues since the new line was installed, and the gate is working flawlessly!