This "Work" Thing is Starting to Get Old

Some more tree trimming was on today's schedule. Now both trees on the side of my house are much cleaner looking, and I'm able to get much more light to the ground. There is a lot of moss back there which I don't think will survive much longer.

From the road, the side of the house looks a lot lighter physically now, without all the visual weight from the trees.

Each of the two trees resulted in a full trailer full of branches which were taken to the recycling yard to be ground up for mulch. It's still kind of scrubby looking at ground level, as I need to get all the old pine cones raked up and cut all the little weeds and crap that had been trying to grow.




Over the next few weeks I plan to do a lot more cutting & pruning. Might as well make full use of the trailer while I have it! I want to get all the trees near the house trimmed back so there is nothing overhanging the gutters. Clogged gutters suck.

Check Your Gutters, Folks!

Not just on a sunny day, and don't forget to check the downspouts, too!

We're finally getting some rain, after about a month of beautiful dry weather.

Being the anal-retentive home owner that I am, I took a quick walk in the rain to make sure water was only coming out of all the downspouts. In heavier rains, it doesn't take much to clog a gutter. I know this first-hand, and have had the water in the basement to prove it.

Upon checking the downspout by the tree I recently did a bunch of trimming on, I noticed that the downspout (which drains directly under the tree) wasn't draining any water. None. Zero.

The other downspouts had a little trickle coming from them, so I knew something was up.

Evidently, when I was pulling the cut branches out from under the tree I disconnected the downspout from the vertical run that goes up to the gutter. When it was re-connected, it was put on upside down which left a 1/2" gap in the bottom (hard to explain, but trust me) that all the water was pouring out. Right up against the foundation.

Not good, if the rain were to continue for too long.

5 seconds later and it was fixed.

No damage, but if I didn't notice it and it was left this way too long during a storm I could have ended up with a lot of water in the basement.

Moral of the story: check the gutters AND the downspouts. Not only when it's nice out, but when it rains, 'cause that's when you'll notice if it's working or not.

Taking My Own Advice

So not too long ago I was blathering on about chainsaw maintenance and not leaving gas/oil mix in the gas tank because it goes bad quickly enough to damage the little 2-stroke engines.

This afternoon I realized that my weed wacker and leaf blower have been sitting with the same gas/oil mix I put in at least 3 months ago. The leaf blower doesn't see a lot of use, and that gas may be even older. Not a good idea.

To be safe, I drained the gas from both tanks and put in enough fresh mix to fire 'em up. I let them run long enough to warm up completely and flush out any old gas, and then drained the tanks. They were then started again to run through any remaining gas in the lines. My plan is to drain the tanks and run them dry every time I use them from now on. In theory, this should help avoid getting a varnish build-up in the carburetors. The weed-wacker has been good to me so far. It's at least 10 years old and has never needed service. The leaf blower is only about 3 years old and still runs great (as it should).




Since I was showing some lovin' to the 2-strokes, I decided to also check out the 4-strokes on the push mower and the riding mower, by checking oil, air filter condition, etc. The push mower gets very limited use and mainly sees duty mowing the ditch - it's too steep of an angle to be safe on the rider. I might run one full tank of gas through it during the entire mowing season.

All of the motors are in good shape for the remainder of this season, but I'm making a list of spark plugs, air filters, crankcase oil, bar chain oil, and gas pre-mix oil for my next trip to Menards. I want to have everything on-hand to do all of the tune-ups this Fall. If I wait until Spring I might just keep putting it off.

It's early to talk about winterizing engines, but I do have a list to follow.
1. The engines will be started and warmed up to make sure they run properly.
2. All gas will then be drained and the engine started to burn off gas remaining in the lines.
3. After the engine cools down I'll pull the spark plug and put in a little squirt of oil.
4. With the plug out and the kill-swith in the "OFF" position, slowly pull through about two cycles to fully coat the cylinder.
5. In goes the new plug and the engine is ready to hibernate for the winter.
6. The three chainsaws get their blades removed and taken in for a professional sharpening.
7. The sharpened blades get stored in a can of oil.
8. The chain bars get cleaned, coated with oil, and warpped in newspaper.
9. The 4-cycle mower engines get gas drained and oil changed.
10. Air filters get replaced on the mowers and chainsaws.
11. Mower blades get removed and sharpened.

All that stuff will probably cost me $30.00 in parts and will hopefully keep my motors happy for another season of abuse. It'll probably take about 2 hours to do all the work. I can take a small TV out into the garage to watch a Packer game and be done before the game ends.

Some people fill the gas tanks on the mowers with gas mixed with a fuel stabilizer for winter. Since all of the gas tanks on mine are plastic, I think I'm better off leaving the tanks empty. My snowblower has a metal tank which is kept full at all times, even during the summer. The reason is that the metal rusts if it gets a chance, and an empty metal tank can get moisture in it from the air, leading to a rusty tank. I've seen it on motorcycles stored with empty tanks, so I have to assume it could happen on a snowblower.




Changing subjects, a while back I mentioned the weird design of my windows - the windows original to the house. Besides never having had the trim work painted (THANK YOU, previous owners!), the top panes are hinged. To open 'em, I remove the screen from the lower pane and then flip a little lock on each side.




The whole top pane then is pushed open as shown below. The only reason I can think of for this design is that it might allow warmer air closer to the ceiling an easier way to get out in the summer. It doesn't make the windows easier to clean by any means, so that's not it.




With the top hinged out I can then open the lower pane if desired. Maybe this helps air circulate? If the top window is open the screen is useless as it has to be removed to open the top window. If the bugs are out in force (welcome to Wisconsin) opening the top window is kind of useless because the house will be swarmed with bugs.

The more I look at these windows, the more I think I want to keep them. They're a weird design, but they're all solid. They also have two panes of glass so they're reasonably efficient for their age. I figure I can remove them one at a time to completely clean 'em, scrape and loose paint, sand 'em, and re-glaze 'em. A few of them need new glass which I can cut to fit myself. Doing one window per weekend as time permits in Spring and Fall might take a couple of years, but at least they're in good enough shape now that they can wait.




Last for the day, I put the boy character to work helping me clean up under the tree I was cutting on a few days ago. We ended up with 6 boxes of pine cones, small branches, and needles. I'll take it to the yard waste recycling station next weekend. This trailer was filled twice, just with junk from the ground.




I'm much happier with the cleaned up tree now. The big thing next spring will be to find ground cover plans that like living under pine trees. A lot of plants won't grow there because of the soil acidity. I'm planning on covering the area beneath this tree and the one behind it, and extending that planting all the way up to the house (just to the left in this picture). It's all scrubby looking and crappy right now due to the lack of light. Only weeds and really thin spots of grass have been growing there for the past decade, and a lot of the area is just dirt, which does nothing to help shed water away from the house.

Revisiting My Favorite Past Post

A year ago I posted my opinion about the ethics and business practices of one of the Flip This House companies. Checking out which of my pages get the most viewings, this one is always at the top of the list along with people searching for Ikea cabinet information.

This morning I re-read the post for the fun of it, and then looked at the comments. To start, here is the unedited post:

A&E's Flip This House, San Antonio Scumbags

First, let me say that I have less than zero respect for that raging piece of crap Armando and how he conducts business. With that said:

This week's episode (and I don't know if it was a rerun or not) had the previously mentioned shit-bag flipping a house which should have been condemned and bulldozed. It was filled with cat crap, rats, roaches, debris, etc. Just plain freakin' horrible. Bad enough that the neighbors called the police due to the smell.

Well, Armando figures he can just clean out the garbage and paint using some odor-neutralizing paint and he's good to go. Typical cheap-ass-don't-worry-about-who-may-actually-end-up-living-here-in-the-future attitude from him. His brother had the balls to quit on him so he wouldn't have his name on that project. Good for him.

As they get deeper and deeper into the flip, they end up having to replace drywall, plumbing, etc., all of which cost this cheap SOB plenty more than he expected. Since all he seems to care about is money, this made the episode fun to watch. I mean seriously, how could anybody with even a small slice of intelligence walk into a house that is literally caked in cat crap, urine, and worse, and figure that it's NOT going to cost a ton to clean it up correctly? Better yet, how could anybody figure the house could even be saved?

I am amazed at how he can disregard the potential health-issues like this. To my knowledge, they didn't remove any subfloors on the place (they could have been concrete, but they didn't really show). The odor-blocking paint probably helps, but that only covers the surface - the problem is that the urine is soaked into the wood. Anybody who dislikes cats (like me) knows how bad cat piss smells and how difficult it is to fully remove from a house - especially when it's hot & humid. Last I checked, Texas gets that way occasionally.

The condo I renovated a few years ago (here, here, here, and here) had a cat-piss problem, but it luckily localized in one area which we could daily wash with bleach. After a dozen washings it got a heavy coat of primer and paint. All molding was removed and replaced. New carpet tack-strips, padding, and carpet was installed over the concrete floor too, and we could still very faintly smell the piss if we got right down on the floor.

At the end of the show, they accepted an offer on the place from a lady with two young kids. I was happy to see that the sale fell through. She had two freakin' kids and they were going to sell her this polished-turd of a house. Nice ethics you got there, Armando - it looks like they've never been used. Shit-bags like you who are only interested in making money have a special layer of hell reserved just for you.

I don't know if linking directly to one of the comments will work, so I'll just quote it here:

April 21, 2008 10:29 PM

Nina Erdos said...

You're an attention whore. What about the people who did this to the house or the owners who left it this way? At least Armando took on the project and in the end it was 8 million times better than the disgusting abandoned crap it once was.

Why spend so much energy hating someone based on an edited TV portrayal? This is a country founded and built on capitalism, yet someone who improved a neighborhood and is earning money as a result of it is chastised. Did you renovate your cat house for free?

Get off of your ridiculous high horses and get a life.

My response? Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha! You delusional moron. People that let their own house get destroyed are not the issue. It's their house to destroy, and when it goes up for sale, buyers know what they're getting. Armando did every thing he could to hide the problem - a problem that will very likely NEVER go away and will remain a health hazard for future owners. That house should have been razed.

Regarding this being a country founded and built on capitalism, does that mean people should not have ethics with regards to how they do business? Is the only goal money? For some people, it evidently is. And I'm sure that A&E went out of their way to only show the bad side of Armando - yeah, blame it on editing. A turd is a turd, no matter which side of it you look at.

As for me renovating my "cat house" for free, of course I didn't do it for free. I actually renovated it for my dad (who owned it as a rental for about a decade) for a share in the profit. Why? Because I knew if the work wasn't done he was only going to get people low-balling him on price, because the place was left a dump by the tenants. That meant I earned a whopping $6,000 for 6 months of part time work. That covered clean up, demo, building, and working with the Realtor to finally sell it. It was done knowing full-well that nobody was going to get rich on the sale, as that was not the goal.

If you consider that being on a high horse, you must be related to Armando and as fvcked in the head as he is.


* The opinions and comments above are those of "Muskego Jeff", and probably irritate scum bags with low moral standards and no business and personal ethics.

I really should go back and read old comments like this more often. This idiot just gave me 15 minutes of joy, laughing at somebody actually defending that waste of a zygote Armando.

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....)