Category Cleaning

Just like in previous years, an important part of my spring is opening up the lake house, getting the boat lift in the water and the boat on the lift, restocking the bar, and getting the lake house yard in gear for summer. The first thing I did was work on clearing the yard of weeds, and clearing bramble from the path down to the water.

I then shoveled sand and dirt that accumulated over the winter down around the dock deck and stairs, and made sure the dock was good to go for summer.

After that, I did some painting touch ups on the outside of the house, most notably the window frame from the window that was broken when the new roof was put on last fall.

After that, I restocked bar and tidied up the interior of the house.

Once the house was all set, I got the boat in the water and onto the boat lift, and with some help from my friend Bret got the lift awning in place.

After that, it was time to hit the tiki bar and party cove, and enjoy the summer on the water!

One of the first tasks I did this spring as the weather started to warm up was to pull all of the cars out of the garage and vacuum and sweep the floors. It’s something I do every spring, and I’m usually able to keep the garage floors clean enough through the fall that I only have to do it once a year.

After the garages were clean, and before it was warm enough to really start doing any landscaping work, I took out the ATV and did some cleanup work across the my land. Given how large my property is, it’s inevitable that trash will accumulate, either along the side of the road or in more remote corners where I suspect the local teenagers sometimes sneak in for a clandestine place to party. Something about finding 29 vape cartridges and a bunch of empty bottles of cheap liquor makes me thing that my suspicious were correct:

I’m also still, after nine years of owning the house, finding golf balls that the previous owner chipped into the woods. Every year I think I’ve found them all, and every year more turn up.

In any case, it felt good to get everything cleaned up and ready for spring before the undergrowth and leaves came in, which make it much more difficult to find and retrieve the trash.

After the drywall repair that was done in mid-January, I repainted the walls and put all of the rooms back together, which was one of the last steps before all of my winter flooring work could begin.

After that, I worked to get everything cleared out for the new flooring. Most of this simply involved moving furniture off of the floors, but I to take apart the old bar and donate all of the old shelving. Thankfully, I was able to find good homes for everything. After the floors were cleared, I finished hauling in the rest of the flooring.

The very last step was to have Midwest Billiards come over and take apart the pool table, and move it plus the shuffleboard table to the guest house garage so that they were out of the way.

The long project to remodel the master bathroom is slowly but surely winding to a close. Now that the cabinets, countertop, and tub are done, I’m moving on to the floors and shower. I recently took delivery of all of the fixtures and tile for the project, and plan on starting demolition and construction shortly after Thanksgiving.

Before that, I’m taking the opportunity to replace four of the six toilets in the house with new ones, since the master toilet was already going to be replaced anyway. For the master bathroom and the bathroom off the kitchen (which are the two most frequently used in the house), I went with a very high end Kohler unibody model, which will be easier to keep sparkling clean. For the other two bathrooms (the guest bathroom and the bathroom in my office), I went with more traditional Kohler models since those are used less frequently.

As I work my way through installing all of them, Mr. Paul the cat has attempted to help despite having no plumbing experience…

Everything should be done by the end of this week and ready for the next phase of construction to start after Thanksgiving!

When I was cleaning up brush and removing bushes from around the front of the house as part of my overall spring landscaping efforts, I noticed that a significant amount of moss, dirt, and general grime had built up on the front of the house, especially the roof and around the windows above the front porch. Over the course of a weekend, I power washed most of the house and was able to remove all of  the built up grime.

The end result was a significant improvement, and was more noticeable than I expected it to be.

After that was done, I moved on to other areas of the house. In particular, the back of the house (near the library on the lower level and the sitting room on the main level) had a lot of green algae build up, that was really easy to remove from the vinyl siding with the power washer.

When I was washing the siding, I made an interesting discovery: I found a large hole in the ground right along the foundation, that I believe has been responsible for some of the seepage flooding the house has experienced a couple of times over the past few years.

I’m not sure if it was caused by natural erosion or was burrowed by an animal, but regardless I filled it in with dirt, which hopefully will help stave off future flooding.

Over the past few days, I purged, cleaned, and reorganized the storage room in my basement. It wasn’t in overly bad shape before, but there was a lot of stuff in there that hadn’t been touched in years that needed to go.

After getting rid of four full truckloads of stuff and thoroughly vacuuming the room, it was a night and day difference!