One of my birthday presents to myself this past January was upgrading the old Range Rover Sport into a new Range Rover Supercharged. It’s an unbelievably well engineered vehicle with a gorgeous interior and a fabulously powerful engine.
The current fleet consists of a Bentley Flying Spur W12, Porsche Cayman S, Mercedes SL, Range Rover Supercharged, and an F250. Not bad, in my opinion!
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 several years with an entry level John Deere zero turn mower that proved to not be up to the task of dealing with the uneven terrain of my land, I went to the Middleton Power Center and upgraded to a new Ariens mower. It has a much more durable frame, along with a bigger deck and more power.
Thus far, I’ve moved the lawn with it three times and it’s been incredible.
My hope is that this one will last longer than the previous Deere did!
Although it’s thankfully been a mild winter, we had some pretty impressive amounts of snow in February. Thankfully, the Range Rover and the Super Duty were able to plow their way through the snow and the rest of the cars stayed safely in the garage.
Now that the calendar has turned to March, the weather is starting to feel a lot more like spring, which can’t come soon enough!
In my search for a new bar, I came to the realization that finding a pre-built, good looking bar with the right wood and other features was harder than I anticipated. I finally found one that I liked, but when I went to order it, I found that the company that made it, American Heritage Billiards, was not accepting orders and appeared to be out of business. Thankfully, I was able to locate one of the bars on eBay.
I purchased it from a seller in Indianapolis, and was faced with the choice of shipping it, or going to pick it up. Partially out of boredom during the pandemic, and partially to save money, I decided to go pick it up. I rented a trailer for the truck, booked a hotel room at the Omni in downtown Indianapolis, and set off. The new truck made the trip pleasant and easy, and I was able to pick up the bar and load it into the trailer from the seller’s warehouse in suburban Indianapolis.
After picking up the bar, I had a fun time exploring some of the bars in downtown Indy along with a little bit of sightseeing, and a fantastic dinner at St Elmo that included an awesome bottle of Opus One!
The next day, I decided to take a more scenic route back to Madison, that took me through a few nice Indiana towns where I was able to do some antique book shopping, and then through Illinois (including Urbana-Champagne) before turning north and heading towards Wisconsin.
Once I got back home, I unloaded and unpacked the bar, and found it to be in great condition.
Now that I knew the bar I bought was going to work, I also purchased cabinets from New Age Cabinetry in California, that would be a more bar-specific look than the bookcases I’d had before.
As winter descends on Wisconsin, it was fun to take the new truck out in the first snow of the season! We’ll all be sick of the snow soon enough, but at least for a day it was nice. As anticipated, the truck handled everything really well and actually performed better than the old truck since it has more traditional tires currently as opposed to the old truck’s mud tires.
Last weekend I finally upgraded my old Super Duty (a 2012 F250 Lariat) to a new F20 Lariat, this time with the 6.7 liter PowerStroke diesel engine instead of the gas engine that I’d previously had.
It’s pretty astonishing how much Ford has improved the interior quality on the new trucks, with Mercedes caliber wood and leather (and a Mercedes caliber price, to be fair).
Here’s to many years of hauling cargo for all of the projects written about on this blog, along with plenty of trailer towing mixed in!
A couple of weeks ago, I upgraded from my old Flying Spur to the new Flying Spur. It’s an incredible car, and has so many small improvements over the old car in terms of interior polish, driving dynamics, and technology.
The garage is looking mighty nice these days!
When I was doing various spring cleanup tasks around the land, I noticed that the roof of the woodshed I built on the back corner of the land had collapsed over the winter. It’s not a complex structure, just essentially a cube made from treated lumber that holds logs in place. The roof is important though, since it keeps the logs from getting wet.
I built a new roof, and this time I included some additional structural supports, along with a way for water to drain from the roof if it builds up. The Ranger was very useful for this task, since I had to haul all of the wood to the job site about half a mile away.
With the additional support struts and drainage, my hope is that this roof will last significantly longer than its predecessor.
It was a pretty mild winter in Wisconsin through Christmas, but January and February brought a ton of snow. I don’t usually post about weather on this blog unless it’s flooding impacting the lake house or things of that nature, but I took a photo the other day of snow piled almost as high as the Range Rover outside of the house and thought it was noteworthy.
As much as I’m not a huge fan of the snow, it is beautiful to look down the valley from the windows on the top floor of the house. The huge pines with the snow look gorgeous.
Hopefully the snow melts soon and we have an early spring, but while we’re stuck with it at least it’s pretty to look at.