If all goes to plan, by the time this post is published, I should be in the city with one of my daughters, doing half of our monthly shop. While going over our list, we realized we will have to split it into two trips.
Of the various outdoor projects we need to work on, I decided to start on the picnic table. It meant working in the shade, and with water, so being out shortly after the hottest part of the day would be less of an issue.
I had company.
Creamsicle tired himself out, rolling in the dirt where the picnic table has been for the past couple of summers. :-)
We will be painting the picnic table a ridiculously bright blue that I found, but first, it needed to be scrubbed.
I started with the underside, since that required the most time. Here is how it looked before I started.
I had kinda hoped those white patches were old paint but, alas, they were not.
They were old, dry mold.
I spent the next while methodically scrubbing away everything but the underside of the table top.
Which revealed a fair bit, such as the state of these two legs.
There were rotten pieces that just sloughed off as I scrubbed.
I intend to paint the underside of the table, and especially the bottoms of the legs.
This old picnic table has a lot of rot on it, but it is still strong enough to sit at. The goal is to make it more pleasant to sit at, until such time as we can replace it. The paint may even add some years to it, but I don’t expect it to.
You can actually see the colour of the wood, now! :-D
At this point, I’ve scrubbed everything except the underside of the tabletop and only managed a cursory scrub of the few inches above it. Here, it became an issue of mobility. I don’t bend and reach very well anymore, which meant I needed to find a way to raise the whole thing higher.
The area I was working in is near the old garden shed, which is an area I was able to clean up of a lot of stuff, our first summer here. Among those things was a stack of what I eventually learned are chimney liners. They and the chimney blocks we are now using as a retaining wall/planters (with more in the basement) were intended to replace the crumbling chimney for the wood burning furnace.
They were acquired shortly after my parents bought the property. The chimney had needed replacing even then (about 50 years or so ago), but it just never happened!
So now I have the inserts stacked by the back of the house, waiting until I can figure out what to do with them.
So I grabbed three of them and set them up.
… after hosing off all the spiderwebs, first…
They were perfect. I wish I’d thought of using them earlier. It made things SO much easier on my back!
Here is the underside of the table top, with years of dirt and mold scrubbed away.
I can also see where some attempts had been made to strengthen and stabilize it. We had lived in a building my parents bought as an investment property in the “downtown” of our little hamlet, years ago. After many years of problem tenants costing them thousands in damages, they didn’t want to rent the house out anymore, so we lived there for a couple of years before moving out of province. While there, we got this picnic table for a whole $5. The municipality was replacing the picnic tables in public parks and selling off the old ones for next to nothing. So it was already old when we got it, but still in great shape. It just needed a paint job. Which we never got to do, before we left the province. So my late brother brought it to the farm. He is likely the one to add the angled braces supporting the middle board. That bar across the middle was an addition, too. It looks like a hole had been drilled though to support a shade umbrella, which is probably why the braces and support bar were added. Then there’s the other piece, with a lager hole drilled through it, to support an umbrella with a larger post. I’m pretty sure we have the umbrella that was used in there, stored in the sun room now. When we’re done painting, I plan to see if it fits.
Then it was time to flip it over.
I know my mother did make efforts to protect this from the elements. She’s the last person so have painted it, and she told me how she would cover it with a plastic table cloth over the winter, to protect the wood (she used thumbtacks to secure it, and some of them are still stuck in the wood!).
It has been a long time since anyone has done anything to protect it, since. She has been living where she is now for about six years, so it’s definitely been longer than that.
Long enough for lichen to start growing on it!
The top was a lot easier to scrub. :-)
There was red paint at one corner of the table top, as well as the seat below. I suspect someone used the table to do something else, and made a mess on the table. Whatever kind of paint it was, parts of it actually dissolved and washed away with the water!
I had to use the hose almost constantly as I scrubbed. Otherwise, it all just sort of smeared. !! There was also debris packed into the spaces between some of the boards that not even the jet on the hose nozzle could blast out. Among the nearby junk around the old garden shed, I found some wire sturdy enough that I was able to get the debris loose and clear.
When we first got this table, it was a sort of reddish brown colour. I think the provincial parks department got some sort of deal on the paint because, for a while, all park benches and picnic tables were painted that same colour! There’s no sign of it now, though I can see that someone did paint it a different grey some time before my mother’s final coat of blue-grey.
So the table is now prepped for painting!
When they had a chance, the girls came out to see how it looked, then we flipped it upside down over the chimney inserts again. Since we’ve got at least 1 city shopping day to do first, it won’t be right away but, hopefully, it can be done before we go back to get the rest of what we need for the month.
Hhmm. I should probably pick up another paint brush or two. You never know. We might have more than one person available to work on it at the same time! :-D
Once it’s painted and ready, we’re thinking of setting it up near the fire pit. We will be making sure to pick up things we can cook over the fire, and I’m hoping we’ll be able to use the fire pit quite a few times this year. The picnic table will get some good use, once it’s no longer nasty to sit at! :-D
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
Yesterday, things were a bit cooler and finally nice enough to start a fire in the fire pit!
I’ve been putting small branches and the invasive vines I’ve pulled up into there since last summer, so it felt good to finally burn that stuff away!
While I was at it, I decided to clean up the bricks around the fire pit that the skunks revealed while digging for grubs.
Knowing that these were the glazed bricks we’ve got all over the place under there, I decided to use the sidewalk ice scraping tool. Just a flat blade that would slide across the surface, and cut away the root mats at the same time.
It worked remarkably well!
In the above photo, I’d finished uncovering the bricks all the way around.
There was some seriously thick root mats covering some of them!
The next step was to hose them down with water, including using the jet to pressure wash some of the dirt out from between the bricks, and between the bricks and the fire pit ring.
Where the water pooled showed me the most uneven areas of the brick ring.
What I will eventually be doing is taking them out completely, leveling the base off as best I can, then putting them back.
Ideally, I’d be adding a layer of gravel under there, first.
I am seriously considering taking the wagon and a shovel out to the old gravel pit to see what I can salvage out of there!
Until then, we make do.
My next step was to use break up the ridge of soil and root mats around the ring some more.
Every now and then, I’d find a small rock, but then I hit was seemed to be a much larger rock.
A strangely flat and smooth rock.
I found another brick!
For a moment, I thought maybe there was a second ring of bricks, but the angle of it was too random for that.
Somehow, a single brick got left to one side, and got buried with the others.
The ones around the fire pit getting buried makes sense, but how does a lone brick on the side get left there long enough to be buried, too? Did no one try to mow there, before it got covered? Did people using the fire pit (and I know it did get used) simply walk around it until it disappeared, along with the other bricks?
So very strange!
I set it aside with another brick like it, that I’d found under some nearby maple trees. :-D
(These glazed bricks have been around for as long as I can remember. I have no idea where they came from, but they would be at least 50 years old, and probably quite a few years older. While I intend to take them out of the various areas they are in now, to replace them with what should be there instead (like infill around the house!), these are going to be kept and repurposed. They’re too slippery to use as a “floor” for anything (which is probably what they were salvaged from originally), but I think they would be great on walls or something, at some point.)
Once I broke up the ridge, I used the metal blade on the scraper to push the soil away, to try and level things a bit more.
The grills in the fire pit, btw, are the racks from our old oven. After burning away what was already in the pit, I started working on the pile of branches by the collapsing log cabin. When a solid bed of coals was formed, I put the oven racks in it, then built the fire up again on top, to burn away any grease or whatever that got on them while being used. We basically didn’t bother to clean the oven when we knew we needed to replace it fairly soon. It did have a self-cleaning function, but we didn’t feel it was safe to use. With elements on the stove sparking, we didn’t want to find out if anything electrical would give out in the oven, too!
So I used the fire pit to get the cruddy bits off.
Shortly after this, my daughter joined me, and we built the fire up once again, to get rid of more of the branch pile.
I also used a metal rake to spread the soil out more, then took the hose to it, to break up the clumps. The water no longer pools at the bricks. :-)
After a while, my daughter took out the oven racks and set them aside to be hosed off, later.
The next thing I want to do is empty the fire pit of ashes, which will be spread over a garden area or two.
Once it is cleaned out, I want to add some cinder blocks or bricks into the pit. They will be there to hold one or both oven racks. This way, if we wanted to, we could use pots and pans for cooking over the coals. I do have a campfire rack, but it’s meant to put food on directly to cook, not hold the weight of cooking utensils. The oven racks and bricks will open up more possibilities for what we can do on our fire pit. :-)
While I was working on uncovering the fire pit ring, I had help.
Not the most useful kind of help!
More like the “pay attention to me or I’ll trip you” kind of help! :-D
Eventually, he got tired of trying to make me pick him up and went for a nap. :-)
Such a cutie!
He would make such a loving indoor cat, but we’ve had no luck in adopting him or Creamsicle out. :-(
Lately, Potato Beetle and Creamsicle have perfected the art of rubbing against our legs WHILE we are walking, somehow managing to maintain contact and pressure even as we pull our legs away.
Such determined creatures!
Also, Potato seems to like my new shoes. Maybe that’s it. He’s happy I no longer have these.
My left shoe had actually blown out like the one on the right, but I’d used Gorilla Super Glue on it. Amazingly, it is still holding! The other shoe was only coming loose at the toe tip, so I glued that – only to have the sides blow out, soon after! The tip managed to hold on for days longer.
I’m not a shoe person. It’s so hard for me to find shoes that accommodate my feet, I don’t bother. I have one pair of regular shoes. Maybe a pair of sandals, too, if I can find them. Not this time of year, apparently. :-/
Women’s shoes don’t fit me, at all. I can wear extra wide men’s shoes, but to get the right width, I go with a size that’s a fair bit longer than my feet. Which is why I keep catching the toes of my shoes on things. :-D It means my shoes wear out on the sides faster, as my feet bend in a different area than the shoes are designed for. It doesn’t matter if they are cheapies, or if I spring for a higher end shoe. By the end of a year, all my shoes end up looking like this!
The new stove is in, and it’s absolutely fabulous!!
Yes, it did also take a couple of hours to get it done, but not for why you might think.
First off, moving the counter turned out to be a lot easier than I feared. Once I moved the dining table as far into the corner as I could, I had enough space that I would not have to move any other shelves.
Once the drawers, which held most of the weight (especially the cutlery drawer!) were removed, I also found I didn’t need to empty the cupboards, either. Once I got the counter unstuck from where it has been sitting for so many years, there were no issues.
I admit, it was a lot less disgusting back there than I feared.
Also, yes. That’s a piece of toast on the floor.
Oh, dear God. I just realized.
There’s another piece of toast stuck to the back of the counter.
I have just returned from pulling the counter away from the wall and cleaning it out.
Those would predate our moving here. In fact, they probably go back to before my dad had to move to the nursing home. Which means they’ve been there for probably more than 5 years.
And yeah… it’s still actually less disgusting than I feared.
There were a couple of things I expected to find, since I was there when they fell behind the counter. I did not expect to find a new jelly bag.
I was wondering what happened to the second one from the package…
Then there was this.
This would go back to before my mom moved to the senior’s apartment she lives in now, so it’s probably been there for more than 6 years.
The counter itself turned out to be remarkably easy to move. It didn’t even catch on anything in the process.
Then it was time to shut off the breaker and move the old stove.
What the flash in the photo picks up, that I couldn’t see when I went to move the power cord, is that grease had dripped behind the stove, onto the cord.
That was really gross to handle. I couldn’t even put on the disposable gloves we would normally use. It’s so hot and sticky, I wouldn’t be able to pull them on. So I used paper towel to handle things.
Things were so sticky back there, it took more effort than it should have, to unplug the old stove.
*shudder*
Once the stove was clear, I peeled off the self-adhesive shelf liner that was used as a backsplash.
Then I was done. It may not have been a lot of actual physical labor to most things around – I easily did it by myself – but by this point, I was absolutely dripping with sweat.
The girls then took over and did the hard part.
Cleaning.
Those two are absolute saints.
That floor is just … wow. The difference between the part worn out from decades of feet, and the part under the counter, could not be more dramatic!
Clean up done, the girls got to use the time needed for everything to dry, to cool down and stop sweating. Then they put up the self-adhesive backsplash.
Then we finally unpacked the new stove from it’s box. After measuring the other counter, we found we did not need to adjust the legs – at least not before we put it in place. The daughter that was trapped in the kitchen used a level on the floor, and it definitely sloped downwards, away from the wall.
The height of the stove, without adjusting the legs, was exactly the same as the height of the counter, but a sloping floor would have to be accounted for. First, we had to plug it in and get it in place.
Here, you can see how the 4 pieces of self-adhesive tiles were placed for the backsplash. We will get a couple more and fill in the gaps, later.
Then one of my daughters was an angel and sprawled on the floor while her sister and I tipped the stove flat against the wall.
Which made it perfectly level!
I guess it’s good to know our walls are straight, if not our floors… :-D
That made it a lot easier for my daughter to adjust the leveling legs.
No more food sloshing to one side of the pot or pan when we cook, now!
Once everything was in place, back went the counter.
The new stove is the same width as the old one, but deeper, so it sticks out further than the other one did.
It also has a much larger oven, so we’re very good with this!
It’s going to take some getting used to having the controls in front.
Once the breaker was turned back on, the girls figured out how to set the time, using the 24 hour clock setting. Then they tested out the cooktop.
We are just entranced. I don’t think we’ve ever had anything so nice and new before. It heats up so quickly, it’s mind blowing! The larger front cook surfaces have two sides to their controllers. Use one side, it heats the full circle. Us the other, and it heats a smaller circle.
It also has no element in the oven, and the self-cleaning function is a safer, less power consuming, technological upgrade. We’ve had self cleaning ovens before, and never used them. This one, I actually will!
Best of all – no more sparks!
I am so glad this is finally done, and so thrilled with the stove itself.
Next thing on the list: replacing the taps and faucet in the kitchen sink. :-)
I’m really, really hoping someone installed shut off valves under the sink at some point. I’d really prefer not to have to shut off water to the entire house, just to work on the kitchen sink! :-D Not that I’ll have anything to do with replacing that. A much more able-bodied daughter is going to have to crawl under the sink. :-D I actually went back to pictures I took from the last time we had to go under there, when the drain on one of the sinks broke apart. None of them show enough that I can actually say for sure, and we can’t remember. We don’t really use the cupboards under the counter the sink is in. Only one drawer and one cupboard at the end is actually positioned in a usable space.
Well, we’ll find out soon enough.
Until then, we’re just going to try not to melt away.
I’m happy to say that, yesterday evening, when things started to cool down a bit, we got a couple of big jobs finished.
The first was to finish cleaning up the pile of branches pruned from the apple trees.
My awesome daughters actually finished the job by cutting up the largest pieces. Except that one big stump piece. We’re not going to bother with that.
It’s going to take a while to burn this away, but at least it’s neatly stacked, and I can mow around it.
Speaking of which, that was the other big job I finally got done. I finally got into the west end of the old garden area, and into the maple grove. The new mower is just awesome, getting in between the trees. I turned on the “health” app that my phone came with, for the pedometer, and according to that thing, I walked about 7 km (4.34 miles), just mowing in the trees.
I’m glad that got done last night, because when I did my rounds this morning, it was already 24C/75F, and the dew wasn’t even dry yet!
These flowers will soon be a riot of purple, all along the south fence by the spruce grove. :-)
Since manual labour outside was not going to happen yet, I decided to spend some time working with the basement.
The kittens had already escaped when I first came down to tend to them in the morning, and I couldn’t get them all back. My husband was sweet enough to supervise them while I did the outside part of my rounds (more to make sure the adult cats didn’t hurt any of them), then helped me get them back into the basement, so I could give them some wet cat food.
When I tried to go back down later, I opened the door and found 4 kitten heads at the top step – the door just clears them when it opens! – and that was it. They were gone. All five of them ended up upstairs, running around.
I let them be. They’d done all right earlier – only Fenrir is a concern for aggressiveness – and I decided to take advantage of them being out of the basement. I brought down a long corded power bar, and some large cup hooks (among other things). I attached the cup hooks into one of the floor joists running across the ceiling of the basement. Two of them are now holding the cord for the power bar, with the plug ins hanging down. It even has USB ports, if I need to charge my phone. Three other hooks are now there to hold whatever else is needed.
With the kittens away, I used my wood burning tool, with the knife blade attachment, to cut a couple of 5 gallon water jugs in half, then cut the necks off the top. The halves are now available to use as covers for plants, if needed, and the necks I left as cat toys. ;-)
I was then able to let the tool hang from one of the hooks to cool down, completely safe from kitties, until I could take off the knife blade and put it away in its case.
Then my daughter helped me bring the babies back down again.
Once that was done, I started working on my carving practice. I had kittens crawling all over me until they got bored and left me alone.
How adorable is that!!!
Beep Beep had been persuaded to come down, too, and she decided to join her babies.
That lasted until I started using my Dremel tools and scared them all away. :-(
After I was done with the noisy tools, and continued to work on the spoon, I started hearing a very tiny, very wet, slurping noise.
Yeah. That’s Leyendecker, nursing!
What a silly kitty! Even Beep Beep is looking at him funny. :-D
I am quite happy with how the spoon progressed today, but I’ll post about that later.
We’ve finally reached the high of the day for today (27C/80F), so things should start cooling down now. I’m hoping that, after supper, it’ll be cool enough to get stuff done outside. The next couple of days are supposed to be even hotter, with thunderstorms expected tomorrow, so anything I can get done tonight is bonus.
I had originally been thinking of working in a different area today, to remove more dead and damaged trees in the West yard. That pile of apple branches, however, was bothering me.
So I started breaking that down, instead. Here are the before and after pictures.
This is as far as I got, before it started to rain.
I’ve been breaking it down to firepit sized pieces, to make it easier later on. I have to admit, as I cut some of the larger pieces, I find myself thinking that … some of them look pretty good … maybe I could salvage some of them… It seems like such a waste to burn this beautiful apple wood! I wouldn’t even want to use it for a cookout, since I don’t know how the fungal disease would affect the smoke. But gosh, apple is a beautiful wood!
I made very good use of the new long handled pruners I got not long ago. It was going through nice thick branches like nothing! I used to have to use a saw for a lot of these. I noticed, however, there was a rattling noise that seemed to increase. And was that anvil supposed to rotate with the cutting blade like that?
Nope.
At some point, we lost a bolt. There is no nut at the other side. It looks like a proprietary shape, too. Or at least not something I have seen when perusing the section at the hardware store.
It has a lifetime warranty, though, so I looked up the website and sent an email with the above photo and another of the bar code (because, of course I don’t have the receipt anymore… LOL) as proof of purchase. We’ll see how that goes. I might just zip tie it in place for now.
Hmmm… It looks like the rain has already passed. I might be able to finish breaking down the pile today, after all. :-)
Basically, I’d managed to clear around an old tree stump, and not much else, before being driven indoors by the heat.
This time, I brought out the reciprocating saw to take down some of the larger things, including cutting the stumps of what I’d cleared before, to ground level.
One of the issues we have with using the outside plug is, even the weight of the cord itself tends to pulled it out enough to kill the power.
Today, I tried a solution that worked out just fine.
This pole used to have a bird feeder on it. I took the feeder off to repair it, but with the lilac growing over it, I don’t see use putting it back in this location again. At some point, we’ll pull it out, but for now, it’s coming in handy! :-D
Here is how the area I worked on looks now.
The branches in front, on top of a stump, are for the chipping/burn pile. I cleared as far back as the next stump.
This turned out to be a very finicky job. I kept having to pull things out by hand, like crab grass and small saplings growing out the roots of things I’d cut away last year, then raking out debris, just to get at the larger things I needed to cut down.
In the process, I uncovered a bunch of flowers. I don’t know what they’re called, but I’m finding them kind of all over the place.
I also uncovered these.
There are quite a lot of these very delicate little wildflowers! I tried not to pull any up as I cleared debris from around them.
Further in is where more cherry trees are. None of which have bloomed, that I ever saw. You can see on the right of this photo, the cherry trees that were killed off last spring, when we had a sudden drop in temperatures after they started blooming. They got fresh growth from their bases. I think I have identified one or two in this area that look like they are strong and healthy enough to keep. The rest will be taken out.
Meanwhile, covering the left half of the photo, berries are starting to form on what I believe are chokecherries!
These are pieces of cherry wood that I will be keeping for future projects.
This is the pile of debris I cleared away from that small area!
We’ve started a pile behind the old outhouse, of what is turning out to be a tree debris compost pile. Stuff that we don’t want to add to the chipping/burning piles, but that don’t belong in the compost pile, either.
When we get to the point where we will be building accessible raised bed gardens, debris like this will be used on the bottoms of the beds to help fill them.
It’s remarkable how much stuff came out of such a small area!
When next I work on this area, I want to start on the other side of where we want to put the cordwood outhouse, clearing more towards the junk/wood pile. There’s at least one old tree stump in there, plus fallen trees that need to be cleared out.
Those might end up being part of the walls of the outhouse! :-)
I’d like to be able to access the junk pile better, so we can go through it and see what wood in there can be salvaged, what needs to be added to the debris pile, and what needs to go into the junk pile that will be hauled to the dump.
There are two Saskatoons and an elm growing on that side. We’ll have to decide which, if any or all, of these will be kept.
There’s also a mound of… soil? beside it. I’d like to get rid of it, but it’s got a layer of grasses growing on it right now, so I can’t tell what it’s actually made up of. The other mystery pile out by the barn turned out to be a pile of insulation. I’m kind hoping this one is something like gravel, or even just dirt.
The goal at this point, though, it just to clear access to the junk pile, then get back to clearing the space the outhouse will be built on, and start clearing out the sod.
I’m happy to have gotten at least a little bit or progress in there today!
I headed out to see how much I could do for clean up, before the weather drove me indoors.
This is the area we decided we will put the outhouse we are planning to make as a cordwood practice building.
The double ended arrow is a dead spruce that will need to come down, before it falls down. There is another spruce we’ve identified as a risk, near it. It’s still alive, but already starting to fall, with roots on one side torn loose from the ground. Likely from high winds. Getting rid of those before we build is on the to-do list. The last thing we need is to build what is intended to be basically an emergency outdoor bathroom (because we discovered a need for this!), only to have a tree fall on it.
The other arrows point to tree stumps hidden among the underbrush. The ones I’ve spotted so far, at least. I’m sure that, as we clear things away, we will find more. Hopefully, the roots of these trees will not be an issue when we start clearing away sod to a depth of 6 – 8 inches.
This is all the progress I managed to do.
Basically, I cleared a bit of an old tree stump. Some of the stuff I cleared last year was starting to grow back, so that had to be gotten rid of. Then there were some cherry trees that are spreading. The cherry trees in this area have still not started to bloom yet, unlike the one near the house, which has already completed it’s flowering stage. I did keep some larger pieces of cherry.
I checked the weather about an hour after coming inside, and it was 26C/79F, with a “real feel” of 32C/90F, and a humidity of 62% – and it would have started to cool down by the time I checked!
They’re predicting thunderstorms again. Go figure.
While trying to clear around the old stump, some grasses pulled away much easier than I expected.
It turns out that there is an ants nest in it. We have two common types of ants here (though I don’t know what their proper names are). Black ants, which build their nests in the dirt and in open areas, like lawns, and red ants, which like to build their nests of spruce needles and in trees. These ones are NOT carpenter ants. That much, I do know. But they will take advantage of a dead tree stump, if it’s rotting enough.
The other thing I was able to do was clear away the piles of old boards we’d used to mark out the garden beds and hold down the protective plastic. I didn’t want to just stack them on the ground, where they will just rot, but where to put them that will keep them off the ground?
Well… there are these two old dog houses by the old outhouses, that we will cover in the fall again, so little critters can use them for shelter.
May as well use those!
We are going to need to clean up the rest of the wood in the junk pile, so I figure we can add more of the better boards onto here, to create a sort of roof. Who knows if they’ll stay here, but it’s one way to keep them off the ground, and that’s all I’m really after, right now.
Once I got inside with my chunks of cherry wood, I went into the cool of the basement to debark them, and keep the babies company.
I misjudged my ability to work with them around.
This would be Big Rig, under Leyendecker, both of whom got all sleepy on me. As I was trying to maneuver my phone to take this picture, Big Rig’s head just flopped over like this as she feel asleep!
Then Beep Beep climbed up, waking them both up, so she could curl up on my chest and demand attention. !!
For I while, I had Saffron perched on my shoulder, just watching the world go by, Big Rig, Leyendecker and Beep Beep, curled up on my arm and chest, snuggling and falling asleep, while Turmeric climbed my leg and tackled the tip of Big Rig’s tale. Only Nicco left me alone, preferring to explore the table behind me, then curl up for a nap on the platform bed frame they like to sleep under.
Thankfully, since I was able to reach my phone, I was able to let the girls know about my predicament, and they came down to assist me after they finished making supper. I did manage to detach most of the cats off of me – temporarily. Saffron was just sitting on my shoulder, so I left her be, but even as I worked on a piece of cherry with a large knife, I soon had kittens back on my lap to watch!
Thanks to the girls distracting the kittens, I did manage to debark two pieces completely – and even get the bark off in one piece!
The thicker, shorter section was only partly done; more than half of it seems to have been in the process of dying or something. You even see where the colour changes in the photo, from fresh to dry wood. The bark just would not come off, and with my wrist still giving me grief, using the knife to take off the bark was not a good thing!
My daughter looked it up, and it turns out cherry is poisonous to cats (except the pulp of ripe berries), so all the little bits and pieces went into my sawdust bin, which has a seal-able lid. The pieces of wood are now drying in the rafters, and the bark I was able to remove all in one piece are now laid out on a shelf in the sun room, drying next to my seed trays (where a single squash of some sort has germinated!).
I do hope it we finally get a solid rainfall, instead of having the systems swoop right past us again! It’s not like we’re dry right now, but it would be wonderful for that humidity to finally be reduced! I would love to be able to work outside for longer! There is just too much to get done out there.
The Re-Farmer 