I Saw, Therefore I Am

One one corner of the house I've had an extremely large evergreen that I've wanted to cut down since we moved here. It's huge, drops a ton of pine cones, and makes a perfect home for varmints under it's lower branches because they lay directly on the ground. It's also a pain in the ass to mow around.

Unfortunately, I'm the only one who wants it gone - my wife likes it as it provides shade for one of our bedroom windows. Therefore, I'm outvoted and the tree stays. But that doesn't mean I can't at least make it look better.

Since my smaller saw got to come out and play at my dad's house a few weeks ago, I figured it was time to break out the larger one this time around. It's best to not just let chainsaws sit forever without use. This saw is only about a year old, and since it's not an expensive brand I don't expect it to run nearly as long as my old Homelite has. Either way, it really runs well and made short work on the pine.




Here's the tree with the lower branches removed. I still need to go in with a hand pruner and take care of some of the remaining low-hanging branches. I also need to get in there with a rake and remove about three decades of pinecones and needles. I may put woodchips under it to clean it up a bit, but the pine needles may look good enough on their own.




My dad is storing his truck & trailer at my house while he's away on a trip, so I'm making the best of it and putting 'em both to use. I got everything cut off the tree loaded into the trailer, and it's a very full load.




I did a little cleanup under the tree and think I'll like how it looks once the excess material is removed. Kind of reminds me of a campground.




I also took a little time to work on two windows on the front of the house. Here's one of 'em with the new glazing in place. I only did the bottoms of the windows again, as the sides and tops were in decent shape. I'm still considering either completely rebuilding the windows or replacing them with higher-efficiency windows in the near future.

Mmmmmmm..... Glazed Windows

I've been planning for a while now to take care of the windows on the house. Other than a few small cracks in two of the windows, they're all in pretty good shape. None are painted shut and they all work as they should. Eventually I'll get around to replacing the cracked glass, but for now I'm focusing on the glazing.

For the most part, the glazing is still decent enough for another season or two. The worst parts of any of the windows are mainly the glazing at the bottom.

The window below is the worst one, which needs to be re-glazed on three of the four sides. The paint is also peeling on the wood. My big concern at this point is if there is any rot in the wood.




I got this far just by pulling loose paint by hand, which really had me worried.




After removing the old glazing and as much loose paint as possible, I was happily surprised to find that there was absolutely no rot. I put in a few new points to hold the glass steady and proceeded to the next windows.




Across the back of the house I did work on about half of the windows, again mainly across the bottom of the glass. After getting 'em all cleaned up I primed the bare wood. After a few hours of drying I re-glazed the windows and now get to wait a week for them to dry so I can prime and paint 'em. The picture below is just before the re-glazing.




Another job I took care of today dealt with plumbing for the bathtub. Since we moved in we've had to deal over and over with a slow drain which often clogs. The culprit has been the old drum-trap. Because of the design it's really hard to snake the drain to get rid of hair clogs. I don't mind using Drain-O once in a while, but this drain needs it almost every other week!




I started the work by cutting the whole drum out and picking up an adapter for the copper pipe so I could connect the PVC. I had to get a little creative with some 45* elbows to move the P trap over.

Oh, and the burn mark on the floor joist was NOT from me (you can see it was there in the first picture before I started any work). I hope this was from the previous owner and not a licensed plumber...




With the new trap in place everything drains perfectly now, and if I need to run a snake down from above it'll work. With the drum, the snake keeps getting hung up inside the drum.

Happiness is a Warm Saw

I finally got plenty of work done over the weekend.

Too bad it wasn't on MY house.

My dad asked me to come up to his place and help him remove some trees. This is the second time this summer we've removed trees from his backyard and you STILL can't tell it was ever done!

There are so many trees in his small back yard that even with a dozen of 'em removed it still is fully under canopy. We've got one more cutting planned for fall, and then a couple of sessions for next spring/summer.

The biggest trees we took down over the weekend were about 7" thick at the base, so I took my small saw:



This little Homelite was my grandpa's saw a few decades ago, and it made it's way into my possession. A year ago I tried starting it for the first time in probably 10-15 years and it was a no-go. The seals were shot and it needed the attention of a professional.

Lucky for me, old saws were made to last and are usually repairable. A guy I work with does tree removal on the side, and also repairs old saws. He said he had this one running in about 20 minutes, and that with proper care it should last a lifetime. After adding gas/oil mix and bar oil I can have it started from cold in 15 seconds.

He strongly advised using more oil in the gas:oil mix on both of my gas chainsaws as well as the gas weed-eater. The way he looks at it, the worst thing I'll do is foul the plugs, but I won't have to worry about trashing the engine due to lack of lubricant. The saws and weed eater all call for 40:1, but I'm running closer to 30 or 35:1.

I do have a small problem with the small saw wanting to die instead of idle, but as long as it's being revved to cut all is well. Plus, it starts with one easy pull so it's not like I'm creating a lot of extra work for myself.

This brings me to my tip-o'-the-day: don't store your chainsaws with gas or oil in 'em. Drain the fluids and run the engine to get rid of any remaining in the lines. Old gas makes small engines run like crap, and if you let it sit long enough it won't work at all. Also, the bar oil tanks leak a ton of oil all over the place if you don't empty the tanks. At least all 3 of my saw's leak oil from the oiling system (that includes the one electric chainsaw).

(I was going to put a picture of my other gas saw, a McCullough Eager Beaver on this post, but I didn't have a picture of it and when I tried doing a Google image search for Eager Beaver I got really distracted....)

A Rant

It's off the topic of homes and renovations, but I don't care. It's my blog and I'll write what I want.

My rant is with the Green Bay Packer organization, specifically anybody within the management team that let (forced?) Favre to leave the team.

16 years, two Super Bowl trips, record after record after record and you donkeys think that Aaron Rodgers is the "future" of the team?

Please....

I've got nothing against Rodgers, and hope he does well. But I'm not betting on it. In fact, I'd be willing to bet that the Jets (who had a dismal record last year) end up this season with a better record than the Packers (who lost in the NFC Championship Game).

All due to one player.

I've got nothing against the Jets, and now find myself rooting for a team for which, until today, I couldn't name a single current player.

I've ordered my new Jets jersey and will wear it happily, possibly to a game or two at Lambeau this year.

I won't abandon my home team, and I certainly won't stop being a fan of the one guy who did more to make Green Bay a powerhouse than just about anybody in team history.

I don't doubt that Favre and his agent could have handled things a lot better with regards to his retiring, not retiring, retiring again, etc., but let's face it: even after 16 years he's a far better quarterback than ANY other player on the Packer roster. Keep him on the team until you have someone better - don't push him aside and then blow smoke up my ass about it being "best for the team".

When that jackass Thompson has done 1/100th of what Favre has done for the team and city of Green Bay I'll give him the benefit of the doubt. At this pace I've got a few hundred years to wait.

Back to Work!

I've been slacking on the work around the house for a while now. The weather has been nice and I didn't feel like busting tail when I could be enjoying the weather.

For a while now I've been wanting to get some of the landscaping taken care of in the back yard. There were two large overgrown bushes that needed to be removed.

Removing the visible part of the bush is easy, and gave me a good excuse to break out one of the chainsaws. Removing the roots, on the other hand, sucks.

In this case, as I dug down I found that the roots weren't too large so I wrapped a chain around the roots about 8" below ground level and attached it to the lawn mower. I had my wife drive forward and I chopped at the root system until it broke free.




The root system on the other bush is a LOT heavier, so I'm planning to just dig out as much of it as I can and will then take the chainsaw to it to cut it off. As long as it's well underground I won't have to worry about ever seeing it again.




I also took care of the drain line from the sump pump. When we bought the place it was just a plastic/pvc line laid on the ground. The problem I ended up with was that the water would freeze in winter leading to the whole line getting blocked with ice. Since the sump pump runs all year long, this isn't a good option.

I re-used the line as it comes through the wall, but then immediately turned the line up so that it could gradually slope down towards the end. It's not pretty, but the line will be hidden by the planting we are going to do next spring.




Here you can see the slope along the back of the house. I'm hoping that when it's running that it acts like a siphon and pulls extra water out of the crock. In the past, anything left in the line would run back down into the crock - a couple of gallons total. Either way, the water is finally going to have a good way to get away from the house. On the ground are the remains of the old pipes used to try and get water out.

It's been so dry recently that the crock was only about 1/3 full, but it was enough to test the system to verify that it works. Tomorrow we're expecting rain, so maybe I'll know for sure.




And now for something completely different. Bacon Salt! So many things cooked these days get some salt added, from steaks on the grill to potatoes in the oven. Since bacon makes EVERYTHING better, I got these and have tried them a few times. I think I'll probably only use them on steaks and burgers. The bacon flavor comes through faintly and isn't overpowering.

Trip Pictures

If I don't do this now I'll probably forget to do it, so here are some of the highpoints of the road-trip.

The first major site we hit was Mount Rushmore, the weekend after July 4. The rid on top of Roosevelt's head was for the removal of the fireworks hardware which was used for the celebration. It'd have been cool if they could have made showers of sparks shoot out of Jefferson's eyes, but that probably would be dignified.




Next up was a drive through Custer National Park, a very scenic and cool drive. The animals roam free, and these two buffalo came in for a nice close-up. This one was inches from my door as I passed him - I could have easily touched him as we went past.




We went through Deadwood, which was a disappointment for me since I'm not a gambler. I was hoping for more of a historic city. We went up to the cemetery where Wild Bill Hickock is buried and saw the grave sites of a number of notable Deadwood's past citizens.




The main focus of the trip was going to Yellowstone for 3 nights. I knew it was a big place before we went, but if you've never been there it's hard to fathom just how massive the park is. I drove around 300 miles within the park and seldom drove on the same road twice.

How do you sum up Yellowstone in a couple of pictures? You can't.

This is the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. There was a late thaw so there was still snow on the ground in places. The water was flowing much more heavily than normal for this time of year, so the falls were more spectacular than normal (from what I was told).




Instead of putting up a picture of Old Faithful (I have about 50) I'm going with a thermal pool. The colors are actually different types of algae which live in the different water temperatures. This pool used to be blue in the middle, but crap throw in by vandals over the decades changed the temp of the water causing it to reflect green instead of blue.




We took two days to drive from Yellowstone to Milwaukee, but didn't skip a small side-trip to Devil's Tower in Wyoming. Anybody who's seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind has seen it. I'm not a rock climber so I didn't get to go to the top.




The weather was about perfect - 70's and 80's for the entire trip, with cooler temps in the mountains. There was no rain for about 2,500 miles of driving meaning the Jeep got to bring back a few thousand souvenirs for me.

A Case of Slacker-itis

Alright, alright. It's been a while since my last post.

In my defense, I've been doing other things. Working. Sleeping. Eating. Blah, blah blah.

Really though, most of my time recently has been spent preparing for and going on a road-trip with the family to Yellowstone. Since we drove, there was a lot of preparation for the vehicle, packing. etc.

I got some very nice pictures that I'll post in the future, covering stops in Yellowstone and the Black Hills (Custer National Park, Deadwood, Mount Rushmore). In fact, I took just over 1,200 pictures over the 10 day trip. Now I need to spend a lot of time weeding through to get the best pictures - who wants to look at 90 pictures of the same waterfall??

We also had some very cool close-encounters (good description, as we also went to Devil's Tower) with some buffalo. Close enough that I could have reached out the window and slapped one, possibly earning some major scarring to the Jeep in the process.

Nature is pretty cool, even if you have to drive over 3,000 miles round-trip to see it!