Before I start on how things went with the clean up, I have another update. I just got off the phone with Canada Cartage – the company shipping our new washing machine.
They didn’t receive it at this end, so they will call us with a new delivery date when they have it.
I might still call the guy at Home Depot tomorrow morning, to see if he can pull a few strings. We’ve opted not to go into town to use the laundromat, and have instead been washing the necessities in the bathtub.
Oddly, my clothes have never been cleaner or softer. Ever. And all I’m going is leaving them to soak in hot water and detergent, then swishing them around a bit before rinsing them.
Weird!
I am happy to say that we have got the old kitchen done, and everything that needed to go back, has been brought in.
I’ll start with the old kitchen.
There wasn’t much left to take out of there. Most of it was behind the wood burning cook stove.
Which, interestingly enough, also hid another outlet.
No wonder insurance companies are such sticklers about wood burning stoves and furnaces!
That basin may well be older than I am.
I left it there.
Once everything was out, including the floor mats (which were carefully picked up so that I could pour out the crud over a large garbage can!) and random nails and whatnot were swept up, I took stock of the floor.
This corner is the worst.
And there’s nothing we can do about it, right now.
I am guessing the previous freezer my parents used to have here cause this damage when it finally died.
The best I could do at this point was take the little shop vac to the area.
I vacuumed the window of what may well have been decades of dead bugs, too. I even vacuumed parts of the stove a bit.
A container of nails and… dirt? had fallen in here. I got most of them, but we have found so many random containers of rusty nails, I just swept up and threw away the rest.
I just had to remind myself of what was in this cupboard.
We will deal with this another time!
The weather outside was getting really, really windy, so the girls and I pushed to get everything inside. We will likely change things around later, but for now, it’s all in!
We considered moving the freezer back into the other corner and putting the couch where the freezer is. In the end, I just pulled it closer to the door, to make more space for the shelves we put back where they were before. They are extremely sturdy shelves, and are great to stand on when we need to access the breakers.
I decided to put the rocking chair in the old kitchen, too. More because of how I wanted to arrange the sun room.
A small shelf that was in the sun room is now tucked behind the stove. At some point, we can put a small lamp in there, so a person can sit on the couch and read, and have somewhere to put down a drink or something. There was even still room for a small garbage can.
The prie-dieu that I still have plans to refinish, fits perfectly in the nook on the other side of the stove. As do the folding camp chairs, some window screens, and even my dad’s old wheelchair tucks partway in.
So that’s done for now! I’ll be finding somewhere else for the giant enameled container that is handy. My mother used that for everything from washing and soaking cucumbers to make pickles, to making bread dough. We’ve made use of it ourselves, already. Finding a container that large – with a lid, too – is not so easy, anymore, so we’re not about to put it away in storage. (We put even more stuff into the storage house today, too. :-( )
When it came to the sun room, the focus was on anything tool and gardening related.
This is where that plastic couch used to be.
The yellow shelf in the corner used to be in the old kitchen. Previously, we had a dresser under the shelf across the window as my “tool box”. The wood at the bottom of the drawers ended up warping so badly, it took quite some finagling to get it open. So, out the dresser went and we grabbed that shelf from the old kitchen to replace it.
It was full of jars, and a plastic bucket of nails and screws that was so old, the plastic disintegrated when I tried to pick it up.
We’d put the shelf under the window, on bricks, in case water got in (it did), but this time, we decided against putting any shelf against that window. Partly because the shelf has a metal top that will be a great work surface. Partly because the inner pane of the double pane window is badly cracked. At some point, we’re going to have to take the pieces out, so no one gets hurt.
The bins used for cat kibble and bird seed now have their own spots, out of the way. Before, they were just on the couch. No way the skunks can get those lids open in there! :-)
Not that that will be an issue anymore, but I’ll cover that later.
The small garbage can is there told hold our wiener roasting sticks, and other fire pit supplies.
Here is the other side.
The swing bench is close to where it was before, and the cube shelf went back to it’s previous spot. We now have a tall box to hold the long and weird stuff, in the corner, and the table saw is easily accessible.
I’ll probably shift some things around later, but this will do for now.
Then there is the door…
I can lift the replacement door to close it, but when I do, this is what the hinge is like at the bottom. It has only 1 screw, and it’s not all the way in, which is a good thing. I wouldn’t be able to close the door, otherwise.
At the top…
The top corner of the door is actually flush with the door frame.
I remember fighting with the old door to get it closed, and having to lift it. While I did check the bottom of the door frame, for some reason I never thought to look at the hinges. At least, not that I can remember.
Basically, that means that this has always been a problem. Right from when the old door was first hung.
Much of the sun room is salvaged materials, including all the windows and both doors. So I guess they just made do and lived with it. No one thought to fix the problem.
No wonder the previous door started to fall apart.
I’m going to have to jerry rig it myself.
*sigh*
Once that is done, then I’ll double check how much I need to trim the 2 pieces of door frame that we took off. For now, though, the door stays closed because it’s stuck at the bottom corner, where I have to lift it over the door jam. With the outside door closed, the inside door will now stay closed (it blows open easily, otherwise).
We can now keep the sun room closed. The cats can shelter in the old dog house my brother provided us, and no more skunks coming in!
Which means no more animal damage, urine or feces to deal with.
We can actually start using the sun room… as a sun room again! :-D
The girls took care of a huge job for me, in emptying out the old kitchen!
Well. As much as it will be.
Here is how it looks now, while we take a break and get out of the heat.
When we first moved here, my younger brother had his larger freezer where the one in the photo now sits. They moved it out shortly after we moved in, freeing up some space for us.
There was a shelf in the corner, filled with a variety of things hidden behind a curtain. My mother had a thing for putting curtain rods on shelves, then hanging light and lacy curtains to hide the contents. I don’t think she understood that she was damaging the shelves in the process. Mind you, with most of the shelves, it really didn’t make much difference.
This corner is where our current freezer, which had belonged to my parents, used to sit. When I was a kid and we were still using this kitchen, there was a fridge in this corner.
I have zero memory of there being a fridge in this kitchen!
When I started cleaning up the old kitchen before, I had put a utility shelf in this corner. In no time at all, things ended up dumped in front of it, because we had no place else to put them, and it became completely inaccessible!
That corner is where we will be putting the plastic couch from the sun room.
After taking this picture, I took down the curtain over the window that doesn’t have aluminum foil on it. It has a screen, so I tried opening it to get some air circulation, but it would only open half an inch. Ah, well. Better than nothing!
The window with the foil over it is supposed to get replaced. The replacement window is actually leaning against a wall, between the doors to the house and to the sun room.
We are not going to be replacing the window just yet, but I will keep that in mind as we set things up again.
Ah, the old wood stove! This is what my mother cooked on, until the addition was added to the house and we got an electric stove, to go with having running water and an indoor bathroom.
The hinges on the door are broken, as if someone tried to stand on it while open.
There are still ashes in there!!
Eventually, I want to clean it up and pick up some stove blacking – I even found some in one of our local hardware stores.
It’s amazing that this stove was going almost all day, every day, and the kitchen never caught fire. There is NOTHING protecting the walls and floor.
We will not be doing anything to what’s on the shelves in that little nook just yet.
Of course, there were all sorts of things the girls cleared out. The dresser in the photo being one of two larger items, plus lots of things like this sifter screen. It was used to clean the chaff and dirt out of seeds. It’s old and the wood is rotting, but it’s being kept. It’s very likely my dad made it himself. The screen is ordinary metal window screen. The wooden frame was very likely salvaged from a peach basket or something like that.
As the girls took things out, I started hauling some of the stuff either to the junk pile, or into the storage house, which is where that sifter went. I hate that we’re adding things into there. We’ve made no attempt to start cleaning it out. When we do, we’ll definitely need to use masks and gloves. If I can find some coveralls that would fit us, that would be good, too.
Among the things I took in were a large and a small shop vac. When my daughters started talking about using a shop vac on the floors, one of them wondered if the large shop vac worked. I had taken a look at it while carrying it over, I thought that, while it might run, it probably doesn’t vacuum anymore. The little one was
(Aaaannnd… that’s it. I’m done for the day.
As I was writing the above, the phone rang. My sister had taken my mother to the cemetery, and accidentally locked her keys in the car. Long story short, it turns out her car has a combination touch screen she’d forgotten about, but since they were in the area, my mother wanted to see the yard. I am now completely drained. We’ll finish the job tomorrow.)
Where was I?
Ah, yes. The little shop vac. It was wrapped up in a plastic bag, so my daughter didn’t realize what it was. The old kitchen had (and still has) lots of jars that we put into the wagon, so before my daughter had to go back to work, we brought the wagon to the storage house and assembly lined passing them all up the stairs and stacking them in a space I’d prepared for them. Then I brought the little shop vac to the sun room to plug it in and test it out.
It works! So we have a little shop vac – small enough to fit into a grocery bag! – to help clean up the floors. This will be a huge help in the old kitchen, with it’s bits and pieces flooring.
After doing the glass, we stopped to take a break, and I started on this post. Then I got the call from my sister. It turns out she’d tried to call several other people first, including her husband who has spare keys, before being able to reach me. The concern was, there is no shade at all in the cemetery, and it was way too hot for my mother to be in the sun.
So I headed out to go get them, thinking to bring them here to wait for my brother in law – or I could take my mother straight home.
It turned out to be a moot point. I got to the cemetery, and there was no car! Clearly, they’d gotten it open.
Then I saw a car I’d passed on the way over, coming back up the road. I haven’t seen my sister’s newer car in a while, so I hadn’t recognized it. I learned she’d gone to the house closest to the cemetery (which is off the main road and cut into the bush) to make the calls, since her cell phone was locked in the car along with her keys. After reaching me, she got through to her husband, who told her to just use the combination. She’d forgotten there was one! Along the frame of the driver’s side window is basically a touch screen of numbers. She didn’t remember the combination, but her husband did, so they were able to get in. I guess they were on the way to the farm when they saw me going by and turned around.
Since they were there, my mother wanted to come see the yard. She insisted, she didn’t want to come into the house (stairs are difficult for her). I had already told them we had emptied the sun room and old kitchen, and everything was spread out in the yard. They were okay with that, so I sent a message to my family to let them know the situation, and off we went.
What does it say that I get better cell phone reception at a cemetery in the bushes than we do here at the farm? :-D
Once we arrived, my sister parked in the shade of the yard. I asked her if my mom had brought her walker, and she hadn’t, so I went and got my father’s walker. We keep it handy for times like this (and in case I ever need it!). My sister and I also moved the plastic couch into the shade of my mother’s white lilacs, for later.
We then did a tour around the yard, and it was about what I expected. My mother had no real interest in the progress made, and all the interest in the things she didn’t like. Oh, I’d pulled up the spirea over there! Yes, Mom. It was spreading and killing things off. I want the lilacs, not the spirea.
Which is when she told me she had also tried to keep up with pulling them out of that spot, too.
And why did I want those piles of sticks all over the place?
I don’t want them there, but we have to put the branches somewhere. They will be cleaned up in time.
We went around to the old stone cross my late brother had salvaged off a building he’d demolished, which was another area I’d pulled up spirea. I’d been given a hard time about that, too, but now the area is filled with wildflowers. My mother had already graciously given me permission to pull up the spirea in that area. There is one patch of spirea by the storage house that we are keeping. The butterflies and other insects just love them, and it’s a place where we can keep it under better control. My mother was, at least, happy to see how well the grapes are doing (no comments on their no longer being buried in spirea and now on a trellis, though), only to launch into how I need to water them. I really have to water them, because they’re under a roof (meaning, the eaves of the storage house), and they’ll do really well if I just water them.
…
Yes, Mom, I know how to water plants.
She didn’t know what to make of the cucamelons.
Then we started walking towards the old garden area, and she could see the sunflowers at the far end.
What are those sunflowers doing there? Did you plant them?
Yes, Mom. We’ve been talking about that a few times, now.
What are those over there? Are they squash?
Yes, those are squash.
*long pause*
Oh, there used to be such a beautiful garden here! It used to be so beautiful!
*sigh*
She couldn’t, of course, go into the garden, because it is so rough. My sister and I went down to the end of the apple trees, and she had a few things to say about the horrible plow job. The summer before we moved here, she and her husband were the ones trying to cut the lawn in the area. The problem is that, instead of plowing in straight rows in the same direction, so the furrow overlap each other, my younger brother had gone in circles, instead. That left the mounds the were are now struggling with. We’re not sure why he did it this way, but my sister suspects alcohol was involved! :-D
Since I’d mowed a path, my mother was able to go through the maple grove with her walker, all the way to the old willow tree that we’d lost a big chunk of in a blizzard last fall. My sister remembers that tree being huge, even when visiting at the farm before my parents bought it. Then we went over to the fire pit, and I told my sister about how I found the bricks around it. She was amazed, partly because she remembered those bricks being there, and didn’t realize they’d been completely covered.
I tried to talk to my mother about some of the plans we had, but she wasn’t interested. Instead, she wanted to go to the storage warehouse, where almost all the things my parents left behind are now packed away in. I managed to convince her to first stop for a rest in the shade. After a nice rest and hydration, we made out way over.
She actually insisted in going inside, struggling up the few stairs to get in. The building is jam packed, with only a couple of narrow areas to walk in, but she squeezed her way through. Some of the cardboard boxes have started to collapse under the weight of their contents, and I found some things that could not be boxed where knocked onto the floor, including a little mirrored altar of my mothers. The original crucifix was long gone, and another had been put in it’s place. We found that on the floor. My mother decided to take it with her. It turned out to be the first gift she and my dad received, when they got married! Then she started pulling out the large framed pieces, eventually digging out a print of Mona Lisa.
She ended up taking that with her, even though she had nowhere to hang it!
Then she started digging at the end of the path, trying to reach something. There was a bunch of curtain rods from when we cleaned out the sun room, originally. I convinced her to let me get them for her, but when I asked which she was after, she’d completely ignored me. So I grabbed several and held them for her while she picked a couple of the least damaged ones.
My sister and I eventually persuaded her to stop trying to rearrange things and start heading out.
Then she decided she wanted to go into the storage house.
!!!
My sister immediately pointed out how difficult it would be for her to get up those stairs. I had to plead with her, not to go in. I reminded her of her breathing problems, telling her I’d been in and out of there several times, and my own lungs were starting to burn from it (as I type this, I can still feel my throat burning from talking so much, after being in there). I promptly got told that I needed to leave the doors and windows open to get the smell out. I told her it needed a major cleaning, plus there are no screens on the windows, and I didn’t want anything to get in and get trapped (my sister says that’s probably how the dead squirrel that is now a skeleton on the kitchen floor got trapped in there). She still insisted I should leave the door open and open windows.
What was it she was after in there? Maybe I could get it?
It turns out she was worried about a pair of brass candlesticks, and whether they were still there. They are actually a pair of menorahs, and I assured her, they were still on the shelf, covered with a light curtain. Oh? I didn’t cover them! was her response. Well, someone did. They’re still there.
In the end, my sister and I ended up going into the storage house, and we each grabbed a candlestick, took them to the door and showed them to her.
As we put them back, my sister and I were talking for a bit, but I just couldn’t stay in there any longer. My lungs were burning. Even my sister was already noticing it affecting her, so we headed out. I got more lectures on how I needed to leave the door open, and how I need to clean things. Eventually, my sister pointed out that I had stopped cleaning things, and they should probably leave so I could get back to it.
Which they did, but by then, I was done. That hour or so with my mother drained more energy out of me than two days of working on the sun room and old kitchen. I would so love to have a better relationship with her, but she just can’t seem to find anything good to say, without undermining it with by making sure I know what a bad job I’m doing, or how wrong what I’m doing it, etc. I’ve reached a point in my life where she can no longer hurt me, but my goodness, it just sucks the energy right out of me! She couldn’t even resist making a snarky comment about the sweatpants I was wearing; the ones I wear when I know I’m going to be doing dirty manual labour, that used to be my husband’s. They have elastic around the ankles, to help keep the wood ticks out. No recognition at all that I dropped everything to go and get them when they were stuck at the cemetery, and that’s why I was still in my grubbies.
But I did get a lecture about how she won’t be around forever, and after she’s gone, we’ll remember and miss her.
*sigh*
I wouldn’t be surprised if my mother lived to be 100. For all her complaining, she’s got an amazing constitution. Even when she had abdominal surgery and they kept her in the hospital for a week, she recovered faster than when I had a much less invasive day surgery! I was about to say she could get hit by a truck and survive, but… she’s already done that.
So I’m done. Wiped out. Exhausted. Not physically, but mentally.
My daughter headed out to secure some of the stuff so they won’t blow away. I’m going to go do the watering with fertilizer I’d planned on doing, once things cooled down a bit.
I’ll at least be able to say I finished one thing, today, after that!
Today, I finally started on a job that should have been done at the start of spring! Between the rain and the heat wave, and various appliance catastrophes, we just never got to it.
It’s still 24C (75F) out there as I write this, so it was still uncomfortably hot for the work, but it’s much more bearable than what we had last month!
My goal today was to empty out the sun room, so I could sweep up the concrete floor.
Here is what it looked like once I emptied it (except for the table saw; I’ll move that when I’m ready to use it).
This is after 2 winters of the sun room being used by the yard cats as a shelter, and 1 summer as a kitten maternity ward.
Also, visiting skunks. Most of the poop on the floor under where the plastic couch was sitting is skunk poop, which is distinctively black in colour.
Here is how it looks now.
It was a pretty gross job, but still nowhere near as bad as it was when we first cleaned it out.
Washing the floor will wait until we are done with a whole bunch of other stuff, first.
The cushions from my late father’s swing bench – one of his favourite things was to lie on that for a nap in the sun room! – have been hosed off and are hanging to air out. I set up the kiddie pool we ended up using to mix soil and peat, and it now has some of the dirtier old blankets, pillows and cushions we’d given to the cats, soaking in it. Other items are draped and got hosed off, and the biggest blanket is waiting for its own soak, tomorrow.
I hosed down some of the furniture and shelves, too, and it will all stay in the yard overnight. Tomorrow, the girls will empty the old kitchen out, as much as possible. Once that’s done, I’ll do what I can about the floor in there (I doubt I’ll be able to wash it), and the plastic couch will go into there instead of the sun room. The utility shelf currently in the old kitchen will go into the sun room.
I’ve also finally taken off the parts of the door frame I need to trim narrower, so we can finally close the replacement door. Once they were off, however, I discovered something odd. In spite of being sized to the old door, carefully measured and trimmed, I still couldn’t close it once the frame pieces were off. It was hitting the bottom. I had to lift the door in order to close it.
I remember the old door did that, too.
Once I lifted it and closed it, I looked at the hinge side and discovered that the frame itself is wider on the bottom than on the top. !!! So the door is hanging at an angle, and that’s why it needs to be lifted to be closed. Which, of course, pulls the hinge away from the frame. From the looks of it, that’s been a problem for a very long time!
Well, I’ll just have to figure out how to fill the gap, then rehang the door.
Replacing the old broken door turned out to be a much more complicated job than any of us expected!
By the time we’re done, though, we should not only have the sun room reclaimed, and my husband will be able to use it again, but the old kitchen should be a usable space, too. Other than to just shove things in that we have no other place for, that is! LOL
Well… except for the mosquitoes. The bug spray we used is supposed to last for 8 hours. It didn’t!
Unfortunately, my husband wasn’t up to joining us, so it was just the girls and I. One of whom helped me unload the riding mower for the van, while the other tended our first fire in the new set up. :-)
Those blocks turned out to be very handy, in many ways!
With the pit all cleaned out, we were reminded of just how big it really is!
This metal ring is one of several my late brother had acquired. He worked in demolitions, and once had the job of dismantling a coal fired electric generating station. A company in the States had purchased it, so my brother and his team had the job of dismantling the pieces that would go to the train station for shipping. Dismantling them was very dangerous. While the station had not been used for many years, there was still coal dust all over, and coal dust is explosively flammable. What wasn’t shipped to the purchaser was demolished and went to the landfill, so he was able to salvage sections of pipe. This is one of three that I know of, that became fit pit rings. :-)
As for our cookout, we have a terrible habit of starting to cook way too early. We’re just too impatient to wait for proper cooking coals! :-D So we deliberately didn’t being the food out until later. The question was, how to set up the food and fixings? The picnic table is in the process of being prepped for painting. The folding table we’d used before is now being used for something else. Plus there was that whole bug problem.
Solution found!
Yup. The mini greenhouse! We could put everything in, the close it up to keep the bugs out. :-D
The only thing that was a bit of a problem was how wide the mesh is on the shelves. The squeeze bottle kept tipping over. :-D
Ah, perfect!
Did I mention how handy those blocks turned out to be? :-)
After we’d had a bunch of hot dogs, we build the fire up again, then tossed in a packet of stuff to make colourful flames. I’d actually bought them last year, but with the fire bans, we never had a fire to use them in!
I’m sure the colours would have been much more dramatic if we had waited until it was darker. :-D We’re saving the second one for another time.
Unfortunately, no one remembered to read the packet to see how long the stuff lasted. We still had S’mores to do, and a coloured fire is not for cooking over. I was eventually able to find that it could take from 1 – 2 hours, depending on the fire and conditions. So we built the fire up more, until it was all burned up, before letting it get down to cooking coals again.
Then we made S’mores. :-)
The problem with that is, while we all love to toast marshmallows to golden perfection, none of us actually like eating them all that much. :-D I could sit there and toast marshmallows all day, as long as I had someone else to eat them! :-D
It was a wonderful, peaceful evening. While the girls and I were out there, we got visits from Creamsicle and Potato Beetle, with all their loving attention. We also got to see Junk Pile cat’s THREE kittens! Just flashes of them, really, as they’re even more skittish than their mom, but they are now coming to the house – even into the sun room! – with her. We also got charmed by a chipmunk on the stacked wood pile, and even Stinky came by, determined to dig for grubs among the nearby hawthorns.
With our big shop coming up some time next week, the girls and I will have cookouts in mind when we make our list. :-) I can definitely see popping on the racks and cooking supper out there.
Hmmm. As I’ve been working on this post, I’ve noticed some connectivity issues. We had still not received a call from a tech about coming here to check out equipment. The secondary account is still getting no signal at all, while the primary account is also kicking out much more frequently than usual – and no winds or storms to account for it. At least my daughter can still work. That’s the main thing!
Now let’s see if the connection is back, and I can hit “publish”! :-D
This afternoon, my daughter and I headed into town, first to pick up the riding mower, then to pick up fixings for a wiener roast.
Since the mower was too far gone to fix everything, it cost less than $45 for the work that was done to put the drive chain back on and tighten things as much as he could.
As I paid for it, I asked for help to load it into the van, then went out to set up the ramps. The woman who processed the payment came out, while a guy from the shop started up the mower and drove it over.
The woman that was helping me expressed surprise that it would fit in the van at all. After the guy drove the mower over and lined it up with the ramps, he came over as I showed them the drop on the inside. The guy asked if I was sure it would fit, and when I said yes, he thanked me for warning about the drop…
Then got back on the mower and started driving up the ramp!
Thankfully, the back wheels got a bit hung up on the bottom edges of the ramp, because he was basically ignoring my hand waving and couldn’t hear me saying not to drive it up until he was right next to me. Once I told him he couldn’t drive it up (how did he expect to fit under the roof???), he complained a bit. Then he and the woman started pushing from the back, while I steered and pushed from the side.
They had a hard time of it. The girls and I have loaded it into the van a few times, and that was before we had the nice new ramps by brother bought for me, and I don’t remember having that much of an issue.
Of course, once it got to the top, the front wheels dropped and the mower could no longer go forward. I told them that this was where I had to go inside, and climbed in through the side door.
In the end, I ended up picking up the front and and hauling it the rest of the way in, because they didn’t seem to have issues with the back end.
The guy did compliment me on the ramps as I was putting them in with the mower, though, so I told him where my brother got them from. :-)
The mower and the ramps fit just fine in there!
As I write this, it’s still sitting in the van. I’m about to go help get set up for the wiener roast, and I’ll snag the girls to help unload it while we’re out.
I am so looking forward to it! We’re just going hot dogs, but it’s been more than a year since we’ve used the fire pit. It’s going to be awesome!
Shortly before my husband and I left for town this morning, I happened to glance out the window and saw a couple of the renters cows.
On the wrong side of the fence!
So I quickly went out to close the vehicle and person gates in the chain link fence, then messaged our renter to let him know about it.
Next to the barn is a wide open area in the fence that used to have a barbed wire gate at some point. That has long since disintegrated. There’s no real point of trying to built another gate, since the posts themselves have shifted. We’d never get a straight gate out of it, and it’s really not worth the effort to try and straighten those huge posts.
The only thing stopping the cows from getting through is an electric fence.
Our first summer here, the electricity cut out, and the cows made their way through. The first time it happened, it was just a few of them, with a cow and her calf making their way into the inner yard before we saw them. It happened again in the fall, and this time the herd went on a stampede!
Last spring, I made a simple rope gate across the opening. There’s no way the rope would stop a determined cow, but it would at least be something the cows could see as a possible deterrent.
Well, it didn’t really work. :-D
As I was heading out to prep the van and moving it closer to the gate (normally, I would drive into the yard to pick up or drop off my husband and his walker), I startled the few cows that were in the outer yard, and they went back through the gate by the barn.
When we got back, I went over to check the state of the ropes. The top one was doubled, and both were broken. One, I was able to tie back together, but the other seemed to be missing a few inches, so I just wrapped the ends around the line.
The bottom one had been pulled well into the barn side of the fence. Pulling it up, I found it was pretty tattered and wet. When I tried to pull it towards the other post, it broke again. So I took the broken part and hung it on the post, on the side with the caribiners.
As for the wire for the electric fence, I could see no sign of it in the tall grass. Just the insulated holders were still standing.
When I headed out to go into town again, several hours later, I found that the renter had already come by and fixed the electric fence. We never saw or heard him!
He also changed things up a bit.
He made use of the bottom caribiner! He took off the bit of rope that was still tied to it, and now it’s holding the wire securely. The insulated wire that makes up the end of the fence is now tied around one of the other large posts. It’s looking a lot more secure than it was before.
Not that it would stop a cow, if the electricity stops again. :-D
You can see part of what used to be the bottom rope. It actually looks like a cow had tried to eat it!
The rope itself has been out there for more than a year, and the sun and weather has clearly weakened it. I could probably tear it apart with my hands, at this point. When I get the chance, I will replace it with new rope.
And get another caribiner, so this one can be just for the wire. :-)
While we have been able to determine that the trees in the south yard are NOT the cause of our current internet problems, we did work on some additional pruning of the elm we’d worked on earlier.
This is one of a couple of large branches we took down, that were growing into the lilac bush I’m trying to save, as well as overhanging the haskap bushes and flower bed between the elm and the lilac.
This is my daughter trying to get at one of the dead branches. We added the extra length to the extended pole pruning away, making it about 12 feet long. She could still barely reach it!
Then the pole came apart at the join.
Not where it’s meant to come apart!
So that job got finished from a step ladder – which is not safe at all! – but at this point, there’s not much more we can do about this tree without calling in the pros, with the equipment needed to get high enough.
Here is how it looks now. A bit more open, and a few less branches to worry about.
At the bottom of the photo, just right of centre is a maple tree growing up and into the elm branches that I will likely have to take out, if I want to save the lilac. I’m loathe to do it, as it’s such a healthy tree!
Besides. There are a lot of dead trees and branches that need to be taken out, first, as well as continuing with cleaning out the spruce grove.
Little by little, it’ll get done!
I think that’s going to have to become my new motto. :-D
It seemed our internet woes were solved, late yesterday. Alas, by morning, we had no signal, once again.
My shoes finally blew apart, though, so the girls and I went into the city. Yes, we can find shoes locally, but not anything suitable for my monstrous, deformed feet.
Since we are in the city, anyhow, we are taking advantage of the trip. While the girls are in another store, I stayed in the van to put on my new shoes, and take advantage of having a data signal on my phone, to write this post.
Hopefully, we will have internet again by the time we get home. I have pictures to upload and share! 😊😊
First up, a big Thank You to City Mouse for making a quick update post for me yesterday.
We are still having internet issues, and it’s not the trees!
For those who are new to visiting this blog, here’s out set up, in a nutshell. Because of the house being surrounded by tall trees, which protect us from severe winds and snow, we cannot get “regular” internet. We can only get satellite. There is only one company that services our area. When we first got a satellite, the highest data plan available was 100 gigs. Our normal usage before moving out here about about 350 gigs, with 4 of us using it. We had to get a second account, with a second satellite, just to get another 100 gigs of data. So we would keep an eye on our data usage, then when we got close to 100%, we’d switch cables on the router to switch accounts.
Some time later, the company got a new satellite, which allowed us to get a better plan, but it required moving the satellite dishes to another location on the house. However, their new system allowed us to add another 100 gigs to the primary account. So we’d use the primary account for 2/3rds of the month, then switch cables when we got close to 100% of our data. The secondary account had some issues due to tree branches, but it wasn’t that bad.
When the lock down started, our internet provider waived overage fees for a limited time, so we didn’t bother switching cables for the last couple of months. This month, my husband got the courtesy email saying we were at 90% of our data. Which is the first I knew of their no longer waiving the fee. We switched cables, but by then, we were already at 103%. The overage fees is double the regular cost per gig.
When we first switched cables, we had intermittent signals, but the next day, we lost our internet in the morning, and it didn’t come back. We actually did get a signal at about midnight, but it only lasted about an hour before we lost it again.
The problem is, my daughter’s business is all online. She has commissions to work on and clients to contact, references to download, etc. She can do up to a certain point offline, but then she has to go online.
She and I just tried going into town, with the plan to go somewhere that has free wifi, sit for a while as she used her laptop to do what she needed over a cuppa or a snack.
Instead, we found all the usual places – restaurants, coffee shops, hotels – have their free wifi disabled.
So we went home.
Right now, we’ve switched the cable back to the primary account. As I write this, we have internet, but we’ve lost it a couple of times already. My husband had tried calling the company, only to get a recording saying they were having technical difficulties, then going into a very long list of the different areas that were affected.
The problem is, if we use the primary account, we’re paying double for the overage, while also paying for a secondary account that isn’t working at all. Even the light on the transceiver is showing there is no signal from the satellite, most of the time, but even when the colour changes, showing that we should have a signal, all of our devices show no internet.
But my daughter needs to get work done. So I am posting this for the time she needs to do what is necessary, and then we’re switching the cables back. At some point, we have to get through to the company to find out wtf is going on. And we had better get a credit of some kind for this!
Until then, I will make quick update posts as I’m able, but using as little data as possible in the process, or make posts when I’m in town and have a signal on my phone.
The Re-Farmer 