In my last post, I mentioned how we were having connectivity troubles with our satellite internet, due to heave foliage.
It’s very windy today.
Since we switched cables on accounts, we’ve had constant interruptions in service, to the point that my daughter was having difficulties working.
I’d gone outside to use up more of the rain barrel’s water around the yard when the girls came out to take a good hard look at the tree situation.
The satellites are aimed through a gap between two trees. A gap that is mostly filled with leaves right now.
The question was, should we prune?
It came down to a particular branch on one of the elms beside the small gate in the chain link fence.
Now, I’ll be straight about the pair of trees on either side of this gate. I would love for them to be gone. They were planted in a poor location, and their roots are currently pushing up the sidewalk blocks. My ideal plan would be to remove both trees, pull up their stumps, and lay down a new, wider, properly installed sidewalk that would better accommodate my husband’s walker. That is a HUGE job we are in no position to do for many years yet, if at all.
I’m pretty sure that when the current sidewalk was installed, the pavers were just laid down on the grass, and then some dirt was thrown up against the sides so the lawn mower could go over them. I think the paving stones forming a small patio under the kitchen window were install much the same way. Those ones are being lifted and shifted by the roots of the elm tree in front of the kitchen window; another problem tree.
I understand why my mother planted them. They provide excellent shade. The problem is, she didn’t think far enough ahead when she chose the locations. Now, the one by the kitchen is a problem for the roof, as well as the patio blocks and the basement wall. The ones by the small gate in the chain link fence were planted too close together, never mind the sidewalk running between them.
So these are trees that have many issues.
In the end, it was these many issues that had us agreeing to prune away one of the major branches growing towards the house.
That, and they’re elms. We could cut them down to stumps, and they’d grow back. The one in front of the old kitchen had already been cut back significantly, leaving behind a flat top the yard cats now use to hang out on. :-D
I didn’t have my phone with me, so I have no before pictures, but this is how it is now.
As you can see, this is not the first time this branch has been pruned!
This was also our first opportunity to use the pruning paint I found, which is black, so it’s not easy to see in the photo.
The girls had started off using the long handled pruning saw to cut it, but it started to jam. I ended up bringing over the step ladder and a buck saw. Once up there, I could see that where they’d started cutting had a huge knot, out of sight from below! So I started cutting a few inches away. We never did have to cut all the way through; the weight of the branch itself started breaking it, long before. One of my daughters grabbed it with the hook on the long handled pruning saw and was able to pull it the rest of the way down. After that, it was just a matter of cutting it free from the tree, which required one daughter to lift the weight of the main branch while the other did the cutting.
Once it was on the ground, I was able to go at it with the reciprocating saw and cut it into manageable sized pieces for hauling away.
Except for the main body. We set that aside for now.
We were thinking of the possibility of my using parts of it for carving, but I don’t think that will be possible.
It looks like the core of this branch was already rotting away! I think I even see insect damage.
Which means, if we hadn’t taken it down now, it may well have broken in high winds, like branches in the tree in front of the kitchen window already have. Well, that’s a likelihood for any of the trees. The rot just made this one a higher risk.
You can just see the black end of the branch we cut in this photo.
You can also see some of the many dead branches above it.
In this photo, you can see part of the elm tree on the other side of the gate, on the right side of the photo. Lots more dead branches, all out of reach.
Taking this branch down has opened up the yard quite a lot! I remember getting that same feeling of openness when I cut away the broken branches in the elm by the house (on the left edge of the photo, you can see part of a branch from that tree). We still have plenty of shade, too.
In the end, I’m glad we got it done. Whether or not it reduces how often our internet cuts out (which happened again while I was writing this, but only once, rather than the 3 or 4 times when I wrote my last post), we will see. For now, though, we got the one branch done, and will hopefully find a way to get at the dead ones, too. I’d really rather not wait for storms to bring them down, if I can!
While doing my rounds, before going to the city, I went to the usual spots to see if any more branches had come down during the night.
None had, but when I reached the fence near the pump shack, I heard something moving on the metal table beside it.
It took me a while, but I eventually saw a kitten slink under the table itself.
Was that Junk Pile cat’s white and grey baby?
Near where I was standing is a spot the cats use to go under the chain link fence. Rosencrantz, whom I’d seen earlier as I put kibble out for the yard cats, went through, stopping several times to look back at me and give me a death glare! :-D
Just look at that face!
So was that Rosencrantz’s baby I was seeing?
She made her way to the pump shack, then settled down in front of the door, keeping an eye on me. I could no longer see the kitten under the table, but then and orange head popped out of the hole at the bottom of the door!
I’d actually enlarged that hole last year, when Pump Shack kitten was living in there. (We haven’t seen Pump Shack cat, nor her mom, Guildenstern, in a very long time.)
It took a while, but the other kitten did eventually come around.
Of course, there’s that little sapling in the way! :-D
This is most definitely NOT the grey and white kitten I saw before. This one has more white, and also has patches of orange in it.
So this is a first time sighting of these babies!
These would be the younger siblings to Keith, David and Junk Pile cat.
Shortly after this, my older daughter and I headed for the city. Having gone looking around online last night, I had several possibilities for washing machines that I wanted to check out at Home Depot.
Once at the store, I went looking at the machines. I wasn’t too surprised that there were fewer than what I saw online. Aside from the prices, I had also looked at ratings. GE had some of the lowest ratings, while Whirlpool had the highest. Those were out of budget, though. Plus, I wasn’t seeing any on display.
I had an employee acknowledge me when I first got there, asking if I needed help right away. I didn’t, yet, which worked out for him, since he said he needed to go to the back for a while. This gave me lots of time to look at the machines before settling on this one.
It was a GE, but not the same model I was seeing on the website that had the lower ratings. In fact, I don’t recall seeing this model online at all. The price was also easier on the budget than others on display. There were several cheaper ones but… they were also TOO cheap! And I don’t mean just on price.
There was also the issue of size, which turned out to be more of a non-issue. Where we have the washer and dryer is already tight. My daughter at home measured the width and messaged me the info. Our machine at home was 26 7/8ths wide. We could go up to 27 inches, but that was it. The machines were all either 26 7/8ths inches wide, or 27 inches wide. This one was 27 inches wide.
I then waited for the guy to come back.
And waited.
After a while, I asked a nearby cashier if she could see if someone was available, on the possibility there was someone else in that section.
There wasn’t.
So I waited some more, wandering around a bit.
Which is when I discovered there was a whole other section of washers and dryers I’d somehow managed to not see.
Of course, that’s when the guy came back.
I told him I was looking for a washing machine, mentioned that I’d just noticed the other section. After a quick walk around, I showed him the one I said I’d decided on.
“No,” he said.
I could only laugh. He did explain, though.
Basically, the brand sucks. He’d never use one himself, and wouldn’t sell one, if he could avoid it. His recommendation was to go with either Whirlpool or LG. I’d seen both brands were highly rated, but I hadn’t looked at any LG models online.
The first one he took me over to was a Whirlpool. It was over budget but, more importantly, it was 27 1/2 inches wide. That half inch would make a difference.
He showed me a couple others he recommended, both LG, that were 27 inches. The closer one we came to, I told him straight up was out of budget, so he showed me another one.
After going back and forth, I went with the cheaper LG.
This is it.
It cost $100 more than the GE, but it was still within budget. Well. Almost. After taxes and whatever fees were added on, it ended up costing $835 and change. So $35 over budget. It is also a higher capacity machine, at 5.5 cubic feet instead of 4.9 cubit feet in the GE I was looking at.
Unfortunately, they do not keep an inventory of stuff like this. It has to be delivered from the national warehouse in Ontario.
Expected delivery to the store: Friday, the 24th.
That’s more than a week away.
Now, I could have decided not to buy it, then tried going elsewhere, but that would most likely have meant going to another city, at a competitor’s location where we got our replacement hot water tank. That store has higher prices for the same makes and models, though, so even if I were able to find an identical machine, I probably could not have bought it.
So I bought the machine. If we really, really have to, we can go to town and use the laundromat.
As he did the computer stuff, and put me into their system, we had time to chat. I told him about our washer dying yesterday, and how we had to decide if it was worth fixing. I told him about finding the plastic part under it, and he cringed. I mentioned the screws, and he cringed a bit more. Then I mentioned the puddle of oil, and he did a whole body twitch while in the middle of typing. :-D
After the transaction was done, he made sure to let me know to expect a call on Thursday, the 23rd. If there was no call, he said to call him early on Friday (I made sure to take down his name). The delivery trucks stop running at 4:30. Once they stop, there would be no chance of it arriving until Monday, so it would have to be early enough for him to make some calls about it.
The new washer will be delivered to the store. We’re too far away to have it delivered to our place. Which actually helped a bit, since it kept the price down. There would have been a delivery fee on top of everything else, but he was able to waive that.
So we’ve got more than a week without a washing machine.
And I needed to do laundry, yesterday.
While we could make the trip into town to use the laundromat, we’re not going to bother. At least, not yet. My daughters have already done a load of their own laundry in the bath tub, and I’m about to do the same.
The one good thing about the new washing machine not coming in right away is, we have time to haul the old one out and clean up the mess of oil under it.
By the time we got home, I was surprised it wasn’t even 2pm yet. If felt like it should have been more like 4 or 5!
This has been a very expensive month. I had to buy the push mower. Then I had to buy the parts and pieces to fix the sink. My daughter bought the new stove, and now we’ve bought a new washing machine. Meanwhile, we’ve got the riding mower still in the shop (at this point, I’m hoping they’ll continue to take their time getting to it!), plus my mother’s car will be ready for the end of the month. That one, at least, I’ve got almost 2/3rds paid off. My older daughter is still getting regular commissions, but my younger daughter is not going to be able to find a job for some time, given the pandemic situation, and our Premiere extending our “emergency” status for a couple more months, in spite of the lack of cases in our province. So it’s not like there’s any way for the income to increase with the outgo!
Unfortunately, it means a lot of things we’d hoped to get done this summer, likely won’t happen. We need to buy plywood for a floor on the trailer, and more for other projects we had in mind. I was hoping to buy materials to create a base for the cordwood outhouse we were planning to build this summer. While there is a lot we can get started on to prepare that won’t cost money, we do still need to buy some things, like mortar ingredients, and I was hoping to have concrete paving stones as a “floor” to build on. That project will likely have to be pushed back to next year. Plus, if anything else breaks down, there’s very little left in reserve. I’m just thankful we had as much as we did, set aside, to cover these. I just can’t help but think, how on earth are we supposed to come up with $10,000 for a new roof, when stuff like this keeps happening?
But, thanks to my husband’s private insurance and disability income, the bills are being paid, there’s food on the table, and gas in the tank. Being hear at the farm, we’ve got a roof over our head (even if it needs replacing!) and are secure as “caretakers” of the property. We are much better off than so many others, and have much to be thankful for.
Well, there’s one thing that might help, on the financial side. Our internet provider has had a new tower built in the area.
When moving here, the only option we had was satellite and, because of plan limits at the time, we had to get two of them to provide enough data for our needs. (Getting internet is a necessity, since my daughter’s business is entirely online now.) Even then, we had issues. Eventually, we were able to double the data one of the plans. Meanwhile, we lose connectivity fairly easily. Particularly in summer, when the foliage is full. The primary account’s satellite is usually fine, but the secondary satellite is barely a couple of feet to the side, and the branches block the signal more frequently (I’ve lost internet several times, just writing this post!). As we reach the limit on the data plan for our primary account, we switch cables on our router to the secondary account – and we switched cables just this morning. We have been regularly going over our data plans, and while the company waived those costs for the past couple of months, due to the lock downs and more people being stuck at home, that ended this month.
My husband talked to the company and will arrange for someone to come by next month to do a site survey (when we’ll have money to pay for the survey). If they can get a signal to the new tower, we would be able to move away from satellite completely, have only one account, unlimited data, and save almost $200 a month.
Yeah. We spend over $300 a month, just to get internet out here, with limited data and frequent loss of connectivity.
After shifting the dryer, then moving the washing machine, my darling daughter squirmed her way behind it to see what she could see.
Besides cat fur dust bunnies from hell and miscellaneous objects that somehow made their way under the washer and dryer…
…and the round plastic cap?? of some sort, that was oily along its edge…
…and the rusted out screws…
…and the puddle of a yellowish oil.
We tipped the washer as much as we could, so she could look at the bottom to see where the plastic thing came from, or the screws, or maybe where the oil was coming from. Unfortunately, we couldn’t tip it enough for her to see. At least not without sticking her head in the puddle of oil.
The next thing to do was to pop off the back panel, to see if the drive belt was off or what else might be the problem.
The back panel turned out to be completely different from anything we found while researching stuff online. My daughter could not see where or how the panel came off. From her angle, it looked like all one piece. From above, I could see where there was a seam between panels under the power cord, but that didn’t help her any.
As she struggled with it, I made the executive decision.
Tomorrow, we’re going into the city and getting a new washing machine. It’s not worth the hassle to fight with and fix this old machine.
It’s going to decimate our contingency fund, but that’s what it’s for, I guess. Thank God we have it, but nothing had better break after this!
After looking around online, I found the best prices at Home Depot, of all places. Not that there is a lot of difference, really. We won’t be able to get top of the line, but we won’t have to get bottom of the barrel, either.
So everything is all put back again, until we have to drag it all out again tomorrow. We’re going to have to figure out how to work around that dryer. The entry way isn’t very big.
*sigh* I think we’re going to have to shove the table to the side in the dining room again. The only way I can think of doing this is if we bring the new machine into the dining room, pull out the dryer, pull out the washing machine, put the washing machine in the dining room, clean up the mess under it, install the new machine, put the dryer back, then haul the old machine out to join the old stove in the junk pile.
There are two steps between the entryway and the dining room that we’ll be hauling these over, too.
At least washing machines are light!
Well, I guess I’d better start heating to bed. The earlier we start for the city, the faster we can get this over with!
I want to end this on a fun note, so I have some photos to share with you. When heading out to do my evening rounds, I wanted to do some watering to empty our rain barrel a bit.
As I started towards the sun room, however, I found a furry visitor, eating cat kibble! Stinky was back for an evening meal. When he saw me, he started to head for the sun room door, so I decided to head towards the barn and check on things. With the winds we’ve been having, I wanted to make sure there was no damage, plus I wanted to give Stinky time to finish eating and leave.
When I came back, I found…
… two of them!
It’s been a while since I’ve seen two!
I watched them for a bit and took pictures – the zoom on my phone’s camera sucks, but it’s better than getting too close! :-D
This bigger one is the newcomer for this year. We had two coming over regularly, last year, and it may be these are the same two – or the little one is an offspring.
The bigger one ambled off and disappeared under the storage house.
The little one stayed to snuffle and nibble at the fence post we used to hook the chain to, when using the come-along to move the new cat shelter off the trailer a couple of days ago. After a while, he disappeared under the clothes line platform. At that point, I went ahead and did the watering from the rain barrel I wanted to. The rain barrel is right near the platform, but as long as Stinky was under there, he was well sheltered and would not see me as a threat.
So our washing machine is being weird. It agitates, but when it gets to when the drum should spin and water drained, it just… doesn’t.
It’s possible the drive belt is off. We can’t check it yet. The laundry that was in the machine had to be hand wrung out and went into the drier. The girls were then sweethearts and manually removed as much water as they could, before checking it over to see what going on. Which is when they found the drum is very loose.
The only way to check, though, it to take the panel off the back. We can’t do that until the drier is done. We can’t pull the washing machine forward very far, because there is a step blocking it. We have to wait until the drier is done, then put that out, so that we can pull the washer out around the step.
Meanwhile, I’m looking up the costs of a new washing machine. Depending on what we find, we may have to choose: do we spend the money to fix an old machine that has a high probability of breaking again in the near future, or do we dip into the contingency fund again, to get a new, energy efficient machine with a warranty on it. Who knows. It might be an easy fix. Or we might not even see the problem, even after opening it up.
We should know better, tonight.
Meanwhile, I was able to head outside this afternoon for a bit of work in the old garden area. I’m tired of damaging the blade of our lawnmowers when mowing in the old garden area, by hitting lumps of dirt I don’t see in the grass. Right now, while it’s still short, is the best time to do something about it. Since we’re limited in tools, that means manual labour. :-D
Basically, I went looking for the lumps with the tops flattened from betting hit with the mower blade, then dug at them with the potato fork, to break them up and loosen the soil.
In the above picture, I have actually broken up one of those lumps.
You can see why I keep hitting them with the mower!
The root systems are holding the sod together quite a bit, but they will be broken up further. After going over them with the fork, we’ll go back with hoes and break them up further, spreading the soil into the low areas and leveling things off as much as we can.
I took advantage of being out there with the fork and removed some of the larger weeds and tree saplings.
Well… almost the tree saplings.
I’d gone through the area last summer, pulling many of them out, or cutting them with pruning shears. While breaking up hills of soil, I spotted one that was larger and a definite tripping hazard.
Guess how I know that? :-D
I discovered that I was not going to get this one out, without other tools.
It was actually growing out of a long root.
There are NO trees near this. The closest ones are the strip of self-sown trees along where the squash beds are now, and the tree at the end of that strip is a maple. Maples don’t send shoots out like this. Poplars do, but the nearest poplars are along the fence, among the lilacs. There are more along the other fence line. From the direction this root is running, those further away poplars are the more likely source.
We’re talking about 100 feet away.
I left it until I can come back with cutting tools, later.
Then there’s stuff like this.
This is a burdock root. I keep mowing over them, and they keep coming back, because of roots like this.
And this is Rolando Moon, helping me…
More specifically, this is Greater Burdock, or Arctium lappa. We have it growing all over, and it can make quite a barrier to some of the sheds and equipment! While it can be used for food or medicine, it’s not something we actually want to cultivate, and we certainly don’t want it in taking over.
I wasn’t able to get all of this root out. It broke off, instead. Those roots go very deep!
I worked only on the West side of the old garden area.
It looks a bit like a bunch of giant skunks were digging for grubs! :-D
There is a smaller area to the East of the squash bed, but that area is much worse for hills that need to be broken down, and there’s at least one large rock that I hope to be able to take out. It all depends on how much of it is still buried. It was the heat and wind that drove me indoors early! But not before I checked a few other things.
The stack of wood from the maples we had cut away from the roof has given us a handy seat to stop and rest at. I was going to take a bit of a break there, before continuing on.
That seat is now occupied…
This stack is at the maple grove, but the red ants that built this brought spruce needles from across the North yard, all the way to this log! It’s about 40 or 50 feet, just to the edge of the spruce grove. They’d have to go past the mulch we put down last year, to get to where the needles are! I was seeing ants going in and out of cracks at the other end of the log, so this nest goes all the way through.
Well, this is a log I won’t be using for any projects. !!
I also checked on the grapes again.
I just love these baby grape clusters! Right now, these grapes are as big as they were, fully ripe, our first summer here, when we discovered the grapes in among the spirea. Last year was their first year cleared of the spirea and trained up the trellis, and there were no grapes at all. I’m sure that summer was one they needed to recover from the changes! I’m very happy to see how well they’re doing now – even after I accidentally killed one of the vines! Which you can see on the left of the photo. Other vines are climbing up the dead one, so I’m leaving it there.
Another area I checked on was indoors. At the beginning of the month, I’d rigged up the dehumidifier that was down there when we first moved in. Here is how it looked , after running for a while.
That damp spot had been an actual puddle. The well pump was covered in condensation, water was collecting under the pump, the pressure tank and the hot water tank. The new well pump, still in its box, was sitting on pieces of wood to elevate it, but the wood itself was getting so damp, I added some pieces of foam – they look like pool noodles with a cut from end to end, and I don’t know why they’re there – to elevate it even more.
This is how it looks now.
Where the puddle had been is now just a dry stain. There is no condensation on any of the pipes, and everything under the tanks and pump are now dry. There is only one spot, where the concrete has broken away, that is damp.
On the other side of the divider wall is where the new screened window is, and even that area has just a damp spot in the lowest area. Even the areas under the furnaces are just damp not wet. I unplugged the blower fan to let the motor cool down, but right now, even with the continued rains, I don’t think it is an issue anymore. When it was just the blower fan going, it did help, but the concrete was still wet enough that a white mold was starting to grow. There is no sign of that, now. I was a bit concerned about the screen window, since it’s “roof” had fallen off. There is nothing to prevent the rains from going in through there, other than the fact that it is so low.
There is a possibility of more storms or rain tonight. There is an odd weather system coming our way right now. Instead of a large mass of rain with patches of more severe conditions in it, the radar shows mostly clear, with dozens of tiny storms, moving across the prairies. There’s just no way of knowing if something will hit us until… well… it hits us!
And now it’s time to check – again – if the drier is done, and we can check out what’s wrong with the washing machine.
Yesterday was a day where the weather lurched from pouring rain to brilliant sunshine! Things had cleared up enough that I even turned my computer back on again for a while. The weather radar looked like we would be getting rain, but the more severe parts of the system would miss us, again.
Then, part way through a phone call, I began to see the lightning. It didn’t take long for the sky to turn completely black. Off went the computer, and I’m glad I did. Not only did we loose internet a couple of times (something we now expect, whenever the weather gets wild), but the power flickered out enough to shut everything down. Thankfully, not enough for my husband to notice his CPAP had stopped!
We were supposed to go into town this morning, so he could get some blood work and an ECG done. Unfortunately, pain had him up at 2am, and by the time I was getting ready to do my rounds, he was more than ready to try and sleep again, having completely forgotten about the tests, and couldn’t remember if fasting was required (it wasn’t; these tests are for the cardio clinic). Normally, blood work is just a drop in, but with an ECG as well, we’ll double check to see what has changed with the pandemic restrictions. Not that it’s an issue where we are. Our province never got hit hard, and there haven’t been any new cases of the virus in over a week.
Without that trip into town, I got to spend more doing my rounds, while the temperatures were cooler. On Sunday, I’d watered the garden plots with a fertilizer attachment, and yesterday morning, the squashes were looking noticeably less yellow!
These ones in particular are much bigger than the others.
Since the transplants got all mixed up when the trays got knocked over, I don’t know what type of squash these actually are, but I’m pretty sure these are green zucchini from the summer squash mix (which had 3 types of zucchini in it), only because I remember my mother’s zucchini from when I was a kid. But then, I have no idea if the other types of zucchini in the mix look any different, so really, it could be any of them. They are definitely not the patti pan squash, though. I’ve grown those in a balcony garden, and remember their leaves never got that big.
I don’t think I’m going to bother with trellising this bed at all, either. I might still do the long row in the back, if only because they are closer to the row of trees. This year is my learning year, so I’m willing to change plans and use the results to make decisions next year.
Some of my mother’s flowers are still coming up, in between the apple and chokecherry trees at the sound end of the area we put the squash beds in.
This butterfly was just sitting there, kindly letting me get a picture. :-)
While checking on the various plots, I find myself kind of torn. On the one hand, things seem to be coming up well enough. Granted, some of the squash will probably never reach full potential, between the lateness of planting and damage from that one last frost, but others look like they are doing well. Then I read from people talking about how they are already seeing little squashes starting to form in their gardens. The carrots, beets and parsley are growing well (only 3 khol rabbi sprouts survived), and we’ll be able to use the plants we thin out in salads and such. Then I talk to my mother, and she mentioned how my sister has been bringing her fresh vegetables. I have no idea what she would have in her garden that’s ready to harvest already! Lettuces and spinach, maybe, but my mother never refers to those as vegetables. So is my garden doing well, for our region, or not? I didn’t plant things that late, for this area, and my sister is in the same climate zone we are in.
Oh, dear. I was just informed by husband that our washing mashing stopped working. The breaker has not been tripped, and there is no obvious reason why it stopped.
So let me just quickly share these fun photos with you, and then I have to see what I can figure out is going on with our washing machine!!
I know I’ve said this before. I’ll probably say it many more times.
I have the best brother!
He and his wife are just amazing. Yesterday, we had a wonderful surprise from them. I got a message from my SIL that my brother would be coming over with their old dog house, for us to use as a cat shelter!
They have always had large dogs. When their last one passed away, they decided not to get another dog. With a new grand child in another province, and prospects of retirement and selling the property in the future, it just wasn’t something they wanted to do.
This left them with a large dog house in their yard that wasn’t being used.
And they know we’ve been using the sun room to provide shelter for the cats over the winter, leaving the doors propped open slightly.
What they didn’t know is that we were looking into building a larger shelter with a roof that could be lifted up, for easy access and cleaning.
Their dog house not only has such a roof, but it’s wired for electricity!
My brother, saint that he is, ended up taking several hours not only to move the heavy shelter (using tools like a come-along, and good old physics!) onto their trailer – something my SIL could not help with at all, having had surgery not long ago – but to replace part of the roof and paint it, too!
Just look at this thing!
He even brought the pallets that were under it.
With three of us working together, we got it unloaded and set up in only a couple of hours. We had to set up a fence post, at an almost 45 degree angle, to have something to attach a chain for the come-along to. The shelter itself is on top of a skid. Once that reached the edge of the trailer, my brother and I levered up the ends of the skid to go over the lip and clear the board he’d put on the ramps. The ramps were designed for wheels, with recesses in the middle to prevent them from going sideways. The skid would have fallen right into those, but he had boards wide enough to fit right in there.
The chain for the come-along had to be adjusted a couple of times before the shelter was at the end of the ramps, but at that point, the fence post was now in the way. My brother unhitched the truck from the trailer and, while I removed the post, drove the truck around to the other side and used it to pull the shelter off the rest of the way. He then had to move the trailer out, back the truck up to where the trailer was, then haul the shelter to where we had decided it should go.
Which is pretty much where one of the old doghouses, now set up near the outhouse, used to be!
There were three possible places we could put the shelter, and have easy access to an outlet. There’s the outlet on the side of the house, but with the fancy lilacs and cherry trees right there, that wasn’t really an option. We could have put it near the back of the garage, but it gets very wet there when the snow melts. So that brought us to the spot in front of the sun room. We should be able to run a cord through, and still close the doors, in the winter.
Check it out!
You can see an outlet that the light it plugged into. The light has a pool-grade cover over it, so nothing it getting at that bulb. It’s a 100 watt bulb, so it will also provide a bit of warmth. There is a second outlet just on the other side of where the cord goes through the wall. They had had a pet safe warming blanket plugged into there. My brother tested them out before bringing it over, and it all works. We will be able to plug in the heated water bowl in there. It has a long enough cord to be plugged in and still be outside.
The main part of the doghouse turned out to be too small for when they had two dogs, so my brother added the “porch” at the end – which now has a fresh new roof. The flax inside was still clean, so they left that.
Though my brother brought the pallets it was on, I wanted it on bricks. I’ve cleaned up way too many rotten pallets to go with wood directly on the ground again! And we just happened to have a stack of bricks I’d cleaned up from various places that we could use.
We will continue to add bricks for both support, and to level the shelter more. You can see the patch of dirt where the previous doghouse had been sitting. We went further out, where the ground was more level, but it’s still not flat.
Do you see that beam sticking out, with the decorative cut at the end?
The roof of this is very heavy, and my brother had included this with the thought to add a counter weight, or maybe a spring – anything to make it easier to open the roof up. He never got around to adding anything, though. It’s something we might do. Or not. We’ll see.
With the skid under the main body of the doghouse, the “porch” just sort of floats above ground. The top is starting to pull away from the main section, though – despite the many deck screws holding it in place! – so I intend to add bricks to support that, too.
There are two layers of shredded carpet over the opening to keep the weather out, while still letting critters in.
The skid is starting to look kinda rotten, even though it had always been on top of pallets, not directly on the ground, and I find myself looking at it and thinking…
Is that about the same size as the long frames we made for the goat catcher? If I cut the ends at an angle, one of those would make a very strong replacement skid!
Switching those out would be a huge job, but it would be worth it.
Aside from little things like that, and some minor repairs to old wood, we are now set for a winter shelter for the yard cats! One with warmth and light.
I hope the cats enjoy it!
On a completely different note, while going around and deciding where best to put the shelter, I decided to dig out the hose attachments and fertilizer and give our garden beds a good feeding. I was moving the hose at the front of the house, so I could reach the carrots and beets, when I suddenly lost water.
The hose end snapped off, right at the tap!
I hadn’t even pulled on it. The hose was just moving. It’s designed to rotate freely, and you can see the piece that was there to keep it from bending.
I bought this hose last fall. It’s less than a year old, and has seen hardly any use!
The more inconvenient part, though, is that the tap at the front of the house needs a new seal. We can’t turn it off, because it just sprays at the tap. Which meant that, when I discovered what happened, there was water flowing at full pressure right at the house, and while shutting the tap off did slow it a bit, I still had to yell for a daughter to dash into the basement and shut the water off from there. Thankfully, the pipes to the outside taps do have their own shut off valves, unlike the pipes supplying water inside the house.
A couple more things to add to the fix-it list!
For now, however, it’s time to shut down the computer. I’m seeing thunderstorm warnings flashing on my task bar! I expect the storms to miss us again, but we’ll likely loose internet, and possibly get power flickers, too.
That, and my daughters are taking me into town to pick up Chinese food for my birthday. They are so sweet! :-)
Today is Sunday, which I try to keep as a quiet day of rest, but of course, the morning rounds must be done.
After putting kibble out for the yard cats, I paused to enjoy some of the flowers that have come up in the old kitchen garden.
Though we covered the entire area with cardboard and mulch, some things have managed to come through. Like there cheerful yellow flowers that have come up near the rain barrel.
A whole bunch of these white ones have come up near the sun room window.
Then I got joined by a beautiful, furry flower!
Who insisted in being carried for most of my rounds! :-D
While one of the goals of mulching this area was to kill off some of the more invasive plants my mother had introduced, I’m not too worried about what’s coming up now. The weeds and quack grass are much easier to pull out, with such a deep layer of mulch, and the flowers have been coming up very strong and healthy. The other goal for this area is to level it off to the retaining wall, so we’re focusing on adding material at the end furthest from the house, and leaving all these flowers to grow. Eventually, this will be a kitchen garden, for herbs and vegetables that we tend to use the most, but there is no hurry on that. It’ll be done in stages, and as I figure out what flowers are there, and which I want to keep, I can transplant them to other areas.
For now, we will enjoy the flowers where they are. :-)
Including furry ones that follow me around and give love and cuddles!
The kittens have taken to napping under the couch regularly. Beep Beep can just barely squeeze under there, herself. A little while ago, my daughter saw her squeeze part way there, then start wiggling oddly. Moments later, some sleepy kitties came out. She then flopped on the floor for them to nurse. She actually woke them up for lunch! :-D They’re more than old enough to be weaned, but it’s still great bonding time. :-)
My daughter got the broken flexible pipe replaced. She did just the one for now.
The other has been left for now, partly to make sure the cold water is working fine and there are no leaks. With the hot water, there is at least a shut off valve at the hot water tank. When we replaced the tank shortly after moving here, the plumber added one on for us. When it’s time to replace the other piece, only the hot water to the house will need to be shut off, and not all the water.
For some reason, the copper pipes are painted, including the end of the flexible hose. My daughter tells me the pipes to the old sink in the entry way, which now supply water to the washing machine, were also painted.
Why paint copper??
As for me, I headed outside for a last bit of mowing.
That’s 4 days of mowing, now, and I’m skipping some places!
I did do an extra bit, though.
I mowed a path to and around the old Farm Hand tractor. Next, we’ll be going in there with the weed trimmer. Once we can access the tractor, we need to cut away the trees that are growing through it. We aren’t able to maintain the tractor itself, but we can at least prevent some types of damage to it!
For the last couple of summers, I’d been able to keep an area to the back gate mowed, large enough to drive through. This year, between the rain and the heat, I just never made it that far.
Today, after mowing the area in front of the storage shed, I decided to mow a path to the back gate. It’s our “emergency exit”, so I don’t want to leave it entirely.
A path, however, is all I was up to!
I cranked the mower up as high as it can go – which is higher than the riding mower can go – and only managed a path twice the width of the mower itself. I actually took 8 passes, just to get it as good as this! The first pass, I had the front wheels up almost the whole way, just to get the height down enough to not choke out the mower.
My daughter suggested it would probably be easier to use the old scythe in the garden shed, instead of a mower, for this stuff! She’s probably right. This is hay that’s being cut! Heck, if we had the equipment (well… working equipment), we could probably get a couple of large round bales just in this section! :-D
I’m hoping to at least keep up a path to the back gate. I don’t expect to make the wide “driveway” I’d kept clear last year. I’d hoped to do more, since the area becomes quite the fire hazard, but we just can’t keep up with it all. More time is being spent on the lawn than anything else right now. As much as I love mowing the lawn, there are other things that need to get done! Ultimately, the goal is to have less lawn, with trees in some areas, and raised garden beds in others. Maybe even a greenhouse or two. Other areas, I hope to replace the grass with moss.
Until then, though, there’s an awful lot of grass to cut!
One of the things that is quite visible when the grass is tall, is a path through the grass, worn down by cats, leading from the yard to under the storage shed. While I was working on the path to the back gate, and was turning to make another pass, I noticed Junk Pile cat, sitting in the newly mowed grass in the shade of the shed, watching me. I think her kittens might be under there. When I told my daughter about it, she said she saw them this morning! Junk Pile cat had brought them to the house for food. :-)
I look forward to seeing them more often and, hopefully, being able to socialize them at least a bit. And their mom, too!
After our incident with the kitchen pipe, yesterday, I headed into town as early as I could. Of my morning rounds, the only thing I took the time to do before I left was to make sure the outside cats had food.
There is an employee at the hardware store that I was very happy to see. Quite a few times now, I’ve been able to get help from him that went above and beyond. For all the times I’ve talked to him, he’s becoming aware of the state of the house we’re in, so he makes the effort to ask extra questions and give extra information.
This morning, I told him about what happened last night (I am extra glad I bought that box fan yesterday, because that was set up last night to dry the floor under the sink!), then showed him a piece that had come off my daughter had given me, just in case there were other types and sizes.
He’s never seen that part broken off like that before!
So he went over the different types of flexible pipes available, and I ended up getting a pair of 24 inch ones with built in shut off valves. We’ll just go ahead and replace them for both taps. He then asked if we had copper pipes, which we do, so he brought me over to a display sample in another aisle that had copper pipe in it, describing to me how to cut off the end, while popping the display piece apart to show me how it should look after abrading it…
Cut off the end. Of course, we have no cutter!
He found one for me.
Once I had the necessary bits and pieces, I picked up some other things my daughter put on the list for me – some of it are for the next time something like this happens! :-D
The down side is having to go into our contingency fund, to pay for all this. :-( But at least we have one!
Now, it’s up to my more able bodied girls to do the installation! They’re just going to wait until everyone is done using the water for a while, before shutting water for the whole house down again.
Once home again, I finished my rounds outside which, today, included using more of that anti-wasp stuff. I’d found a wasp nest in a corner of the house. We’d found one there last year, too. I’d hosed it away, and I thought they were gone, but last night I hosed it one more time, just in case.
Wasps started coming out again.
Somewhere in there is a crack, and I think they’re getting into the roof above the old kitchen.
When I checked it this morning, there was no sign of wasps, and no sign that the nest was being rebuilt, but that’s what I saw last night. I sprayed it anyway. Sure enough, wasps started falling out of… somewhere.
Thankfully, this stuff will contact kill, so any wasps that are somewhere in the crack would not be able to get out without coming in contact with the spray. I made sure not to use up the whole can so that, if I need to, I can spray again. At least a little.
Of course, in my rounds, I checked on the garden plots.
More squash are blooming. :-)
The size difference between some of these plants is rather remarkable! Some are still so tiny. I don’t know how much of that is due to the different types of squash, or to any health problems or weather damage. The first squash bed has just a few survivors, struggling to grow. This is the one that got frost damaged, even though we covered them for the night. The rest were all transplanted at the same time, so it’s more likely the differences there are due to type, not damage.
It should be interesting to see what we get out of these.
Not too long ago, I wrote about my daughters installing a new kitchen faucet. One of the issues was, we have no shut off valves. There is one main shut off valve that shuts off water to the entire house.
Today, that became a problem.
One of my daughters had gone into the basement to clean out the litter boxes, when she discovered water dripping from the cold water pipe leading to the kitchen sink.
No, the pipe was not leaking. The water was coming from above, and from the damp state of the floorboards above, it had been leaking a while.
My younger daughter started clearing out under the sink to see what was going on, while her sister and I started cleaning up in the basement.
Suddenly, the drip started dripping even faster!
Which is when the water for the house had to be shut off.
My daughter had tried to tighten the flexible pipe between the copper pipe and the tap, and it started spraying all over.
Did I mention there are no shut off valves for the sink?
It ended up falling apart, and try as they might, the girls couldn’t even rig something up to hold overnight, so we could turn the water back on.
While they were fighting with that, I went hunting in the basements. There are so many parts and pieces around, surely there must be something we could use to at least plug the pipe, so we could turn the water back on?
When we were cleaning out the basement, some things never made it to the barn. Including a box I’d shoved under the stairs. It’s full of parts and pieces of taps and faucets and pipes…
… and balls, and parts of shower heads that have never been used, and other unidentifiable things.
I also found this.
Actually, I found the box with an eyedropper and what appears to be the instruction sheet inside. I found the bottle that should have been in it, buried in the bottom of the box.
You’d think, by now, I’d no longer be surprised by the things I find in the strangest of places, but … really. Why? Why was this here??
I’ve since tucked it into a place the cats and kittens can’t get into.
Meanwhile, the girls were able to seal up the top of the cold water pipe in the kitchen, allowing us to turn the water back on to the house.
Tomorrow, I’m off to the hardware store, as soon as it opens!
I figure, we may as well replace both of the flexible hoses, which I’ve seen in kits for both hot and cold water.
The Re-Farmer 