Duke's Devastation

I have not posted for a few days basically because we have been making slow but steady progress on the back soffits.

Last night we looked out the back door window and noticed that we forgot something. On each soffit, we have a metal vent down the center that runs parallel to the house.  This structure gives ventilation to the attic area. When Rick sanded the soffit on the north side of the Florida room, he dutifully sanded the inside track of wood closest to the house and the fascia board.  Yesterday he painted primer on the whole thing, never noticing that he did not sand the outside track of wood.  When we looked at the soffit last night, we both noticed the rough wood and the oversight. Oops!  Today started with Rick sanding out the rough spots and trying the prime coat of paint all over again.

While he was doing that, I started at the other end of the soffits, painting the first of the finish coats.  Rick patched the last soffit behind the garage, and then he came over and rolled the rest of the first coat of paint on the three soffit areas that we could successfully paint today.

The heat rolled in with the high 80s by 10:45 this morning, so we were finished by then.  However, that was not the only action in our back yard today.  At about 8:30 this morning, a young man in a reflective vest came into the back yard, identified himself as a worker contracted by Duke Energy, and asked if he could trim the trees away from the power lines.  We had watched a fellow worker of his butcher the trees in our neighbor's yard, but what choice did we have?

He climbed the tree in the yard behind our house, and we watched the devastation once again.  The worker cut branches off that were way above the power lines and would probably never fall on the lines unless we were in a hurricane.  He cut off branches that were so far below the lines that they would not have any chance of ever growing enough to reach the lines.  What he did NOT cut off was a totally dead limb in the middle of the tree that probably would break off in high winds.  The results of his cutting were branches all over our yard (thank God I did not have a bunch of new vegetation back there!) and a totally gutted tree.

Many branches lie on the ground while the dead limb
in the middle remains in the tree.  

He left for about 20 minutes and then came back with another man who asked if they could bring a bucket truck in to cut our live oak.  Again, what choice do we have?  Rick told him, "No trucks" but that he could bring in a small lift and bucket system.  They left again, came back with a grinder, and ground up all of the branches that the worker cut this morning.  Then they left again.

Our "shade" from the camphor tree litters our back yard.

They have not returned today.  Maybe they saw me taking pictures of their "handiwork" and will spare our oak.  If not, you had better believe that I will be in the back yard watching them tomorrow.  They have already cut more than they had to, thus robbing us of lots of shade in the back yard.  I will not have them totally mess up the live oak and deprive us of even more shade.

The worker saw me take this "before" picture of our live
oak.  We will have to see if he returns tomorrow and what
the results will be.  He really only needs to trim away a few
branches.  If he tries to cut more,  I will protest.

Of course, we are working so hard so that we will have a little time to spend in our latest purchase.  When we sold the old sofa, we promised ourselves that we would buy something fun that we would enjoy.  We settled on a hammock built for two.  It arrived today, and we are looking forward to a little hammock time with a good book on the Kindle.

OUr newest purchase awaits us.

Maybe this will help us relax.

We move closer to that point each day.  I know that Rick thinks he may get bored with nothing to do, but I think that once he remembers how to relax, he will be just fine.

Friday Finishes

Mission accomplished, but we are both dead... or at least wish we might be if that would put us out of our misery.

I had hopes this morning of scraping and washing the soffits on the north Florida room wall.  In actuality, I not only finished that soffit, but I also was able to scrape the east-facing wall behind the garage.  All of the scraping is finished!  Hooray!  So why didn't I wash the last soffit when I was finished removing the loose paint?  Because summer has arrived in Florida, and by the time that I finished with the scraping, the sun had moved to such a position that it was starting to bake the east wall. Having spent two summers working down here, we have learned that when the sun really starts to beat, we know it is time to quit for the day, or at least move to a more shady location.

Rick spackled the east wall of the guest room soffit and the east wall of the Florida room until he ran out of spackling.  A trip to Lowe's for more around the lunch hour was a nice break.

I was ready to quit for the day, but Rick had other (perhaps not-so-good) ideas.  After lunch, he started to dig the trench for re-routing the front downspout drainage underground.  He dug the trench to follow the slope of the yard toward the street with the trench ending 19 feet from the house.  The pictures show that we had to jog out at the downspout to avoid the footing/ slab on which Gladys is built, but the rest of the 4 inch piping is a straight shot away from the house.  We had to do this because in the future we want a sidewalk that will lead to the gate of the new fence. If we did not bury the downspout, we either would have to walk over the downspout extension on the sidewalk or in front of the gate.  This was our only alternative.

The pictures show the progress better than my words.

Rick studies the slope of the drainage pipe,
probably wondering, "Why in the world
did I start this project today?"

A slight jog in the pipe moves the pipe away
from Gladys' foundation.

Always use pictures to show locations of underground pipes.
This one shows that the drainage pipe is 26.5 - 29.5 inches
in from the driveway of our house.

The completed downspout beats having to jump
over downspout extensions.  We like the clean
look of the finished result, especially since this will
be in front of the new fence in the fall.

The green cap at the end of the pipe pops up
when the pipe fills with rain water and disburses
the rain toward the street. Once the grass grows back,
the whole system will seem to disappear.

After it was all glued together and buried, Rick ran the hose down the gutters to make sure that the pop-up valve would allow the water to clearly run toward the curb.  Wow!  A 19-foot long, 4-inch pipe takes a long time to fill with water.  We finally got it to open, so we know that the whole system works.

The bad thing about starting a task after the lunch hour is that the work continued until almost 4:00 p.m. which is the warmest part of the day.  We are both exhausted, but we are glad that the job is finished.

We had one other question answered today.  The concrete contractor that Rick called yesterday stopped by this afternoon and gave us a bid for pouring a slab for a future lanai.  He knew what he was talking about and had some good suggestions.  Because of the slope of the land in our backyard, we will need to pitch the whole slab to the north, and to be safe we will have to add a 2-inch drain in front of the laundry room door.  That way, we will never have to worry about that doorway flooding, and we will have an in-lanai drain if we want to wash down the floor.  The bid came in at $2400, so now we know how much we have to add to the budget if we want the slab poured in the fall.

The contractor also told us that he could not pour a cement slab on the north side of the house.  Our city has a law that concrete cannot be poured within five feet of the property line,  so we cannot have concrete in that area.  We just do not have the room for it.  Our solution?  For now, we will just put down a couple of large patio blocks to go under the garbage cans, and we will worry about what to do with that area after we have the slab and the fence in place.

One step at a time.  We accomplished what we wanted to finish today, and Rick even did much more than I had planned.  We both are very tired, and we both are very sore.  Tomorrow is Saturday.  Perhaps I can talk Rick into going to the Farmer's Market before we get back to the ladders and the overhead work. We did not finish all of the soffits by our original Friday deadline, but that is OK.  Tomorrow is another day.

Pain, Pooped, and Plans

Shoulder surgery has been a part of both of our medical histories, so when Rick's achy shoulder turned into severe pain on Tuesday, we knew it was time to quit the overhead work for a couple of days.  Stopping soffit work was fine with me because frankly, I am pooped.  I hope that my tiredness is due to just trying to do too much rather than to being a symptom of my medical condition as I continue to reduce my Prednisone.

That is not to say that nothing has been accomplished.  Rick started today by getting back up on the tall ladder and painting the caulking around the HVAC cover.  Everything except the windowsill is now complete on the north wall.  Alleluia! Rick also got onto the roof yesterday and painted the electrical mast so that it will not rust.

After the painting, we tackled the stump I had exposed yesterday.  That part of the stump came out with about six cuts with the SawsAll, but, of course, that part of the stump lead to another...and another... and another.  We ended up removing two full bags of stump cut-offs, rotting wood, and wood chips along with the two huge stump pieces I have pictured below.

Thankfully, the stump pieces were rotten enough that we
could wrestle and pry them out of the yard.

We are glad that the stump is removed for three reasons: 1) Shell can now mow over the area without having to worry about ruining her riding lawn mower, 2) we will not have to worry about digging out the stumps in the fall when we are trying to put fence posts in that area, and 3) the raised part of the yard is now gone, leaving in its place room to put the dirt that we will remove when we dig the fence posts.

That is not to say that the yard is now level.  Far from that. But a bit of transit work and measuring today did give us an idea of the high and low spots on the yard and how we are going to plan our fence for next year.  Nobody plans better than my husband; however, in all of his years, he still can not accept when everything does not go according to his well-thought-out plans.

While we were removing stump pieces, Duke Energy workers were in the neighborhood removing trees from around the power lines.  They were in our neighbor's back yard for quite a while, and truthfully, I am glad that we have had most of the trees from our yard removed.  What a hack job they did while clearing branches from the trees!  We watched in horror as they then moved to the front yard and basically sliced the front half of a palm tree away from the wires in our across-the-street neighbor's yard.  If I were that homeowner, I would be outraged.  The lesson here: watch where you plant a tree, and plan for growth 20 years from now.

Strings and posts outline where we would like a new cement slab.

The other thing we did was to lay out the yard for an expanded cement slab.  The small slab that is outside the back doors is sloped in such a way that it ends in a huge mud patch when we get rain.  The path that leads from the back doors around the corner to our garbage and recycling cans also is a swamp on rainy days.  A large cement slab, properly sloped, that may someday hold a lanai is the answer if we can find money for it in the budget.

Anyone know how much a 14x20 cement slab will cost?

Rick called for a bid today, so we will get that question answered within a few days.

We also made a decision not to put in any kind of irrigation system.  The hassle and health risks of the reclaimed water system are just not worth it.  We would hate to spend almost $2000 to hook up to that system only to have it clog up within a couple of months of installation.  Even more so, I want to be able to go out into our backyard and enjoy it without worrying about whether the grass and watering will make me sick.  We just cannot do it.  As Rick said, "Two-thousand dollars will pay for a lot of city water, and with trickle irrigation, we really won't use that much."  We will buy trees and shrubs in November, and water them until we go North in May.  They should be established by then.

We took funds that we gained by selling our old sofa and ordered a hammock today.  We really enjoy the hammock that we have in Wisconsin, so we wanted to have one here also.  We hope to someday be finished with all of the remodeling work, and we look forward to being able to get outside (the temps were beautiful today), to read a good book, and maybe even to take a nap in our double-wide hammock. Ah, the good life!

Confusion

The more we know, the more confused we get.  I'll explain that statement in a moment.

What we DO know for sure is that we are painting Gladys in the right way.  We have had three different professional painting centers tell us to remove the old paint, patch, seal, and finish with two coats of paint, and that is what we have tried to do with every inch of this house outside.  To that end, we got up this morning and added the second finish coat to the rest of the house.  The wall painting, except for a little touch-up work, is now complete. (Sigh of relief.)  Naturally, that means that we have the dreaded soffits and fascia left.

The completed paint job blends exterior cables into
the paint.  We need to replace the downspouts, and then
only the soffits and fascias await our attention.

After rolling the final coat on the walls, Rick climbed the tall ladder once more to put on the first coat of finish paint on the south side soffits.  Once he gets the second coat on tomorrow, we are almost done using the tall ladder.  He still needs to caulk around the HVAC unit vent, but then we can hang the tall ladder away for a while.  Hooray!  Rick does not like being on it, and I do not like him on it.

This wall looks so much better now that one unified color
hides evidence of where holes were patched and telephone
boxes and cables were removed.

Oops. I forgot that he needs the tall ladder to access the roof of the house, too.  We need to paint the electrical mast so that it does not rust out.  The neighbors have even painted the soil stack pipes to prevent them from rusting.  Ah, Florida's moist air is so wonderful!

While Rick was up painting the soffits, I started to excavate a tree root that was causing grief to our landscape service.  We talked to Shell yesterday, and she mentioned that she always has to mow around one specific protruding root.  We know that the root in question is from the dead holly tree that we removed a couple of years ago.  The tree service did a crapola job of actually grinding down the stump.  They did not even properly remove all of the resulting ground mulch from that area, so we now have a mound of mulch, dirt, and weeds that make the yard even more uneven than usual.

This chunk of root is just a forecast of the work that awaits
us when we start to dig holes for the fence.  The yard is
criss-crossed with roots from old and still living trees.

Once I got into the rotting roots, I ended up filling one whole 30 gallon bag with just chunks of root, root fibers, rotting wood, and bark.  I started on a second bag, and then hit the main root that we have to remove.  I dug around that root but finally gave up.  It is firmly connected to other roots and probably goes down much further than I care to dig.  I am hoping that Rick can make short work of it with a persuasive SawsAll application tomorrow.

After lunch, we set out to see how much trees might cost us in the fall.  We went to a nearby nursery.  Their stock looked very good and healthy, and we got some ideas of what kinds of trees we might plant.  Although Art suggested an elm, we know that the tree is deciduous, so it will not have leaves for most of the time that we would be down here in the winter.  That is the same reason we do not want to plant a crepe myrtle.  The trees are beautiful when they leaf and bloom from April through November, but that means we would only see that beauty for a few short months. The woman at the nursery gave us some other suggestions, so we have a lot of planning and decisions to make before we take our old trees down and try to replace them in the fall.

Then the discussion turned to irrigation systems, and that is where the confusion starts.  No nursery in the area will guarantee their plants, trees, or work unless a homeowner has an irrigation system.  One nursery worker that we talked to was totally opposed the reclaimed water.  He said that we would get the water from the Pinellas County site (which we do not believe is true), and that the water clogs up the heads and homeowner's irrigation systems all of the time.  He also said that he did not trust the quality of the reclaimed water.

Rick had already talked to the plant manager at the city's reclaimed water plant, and the manager said that they treat the local water at that local site.  The payment system for the city's reclaimed water is different than the payments for reclaimed county water, so we believe that the two systems are not from the same source. The city plant manager was fairly confident that their system delivers fairly clean water, and that using reclaimed water offered very few, if any, health risks if a person used it in a sensible manner.

The man at the nursery said he used regular city water, to the tune of almost $90 a month, to keep his $20,000 gardens at his home irrigated.  He was very negative about reclaimed water, saying that it was sewage water (true) and that it posed health risks. The woman working at the nursery was sort of middle-of-the-road in her opinion. She said that some systems clog up, but that the health risks probably were not all that dramatic.  She suggested that we have a professional put in a city water system, and that way they could come out to the house and check the filters every four to six weeks.  Yeah, right.  I'll just contact a service and write a check from my bottomless bank account.  Oh, wait. Slight problem here.  I do not have a bottomless bank account. Darn!

Thus our confusion.  Is reclaimed water safe if we take normal precautions?  Is putting in reclaimed water practical, or will it just clog up every month?  Is using reclaimed water better since we can water three times a week while with city water we can only water once a week?  Who could we get to check the filters monthly while we are gone?  Would we ever consider using a city water system?  If so, would we be comfortable leaving the water on while we are gone? How much would it cost to get it installed, and what monthly service charges would we have to cover?

Is saying "to hell with it all" and just buying the trees and shrubs in November and watering the daylights out of them until May our best bet?  Steve and Chris do not have an irrigation system, and most of their vegetation and trees survive quite nicely.  I agree with Chris that what survives deserves to be in my yard, and what does not survive should not be a part of my landscape.

Rick is overwhelmed, so he is crabby about it all.  He says we will not plant anything, and then we will not have to worry about spending money on something that will die.  Grump, grump, grump.

We have some decisions to make.  I am not sure that spending money on any type of irrigation is a good thing.  I would rather buy another good hose (so we have one for the front yard and one for the back yard) and a couple of sprinklers, and just buy trees in November and water them until May.  That is what Art suggested before he saw that we could hook up to reclaimed water.  He is all for reclaimed water because then we could set it up for year-round watering without having to keep municipal water active while we are gone, but he did say that trees probably would do just fine if we bought them in November and watered them according to schedule until we left in May.

At that point, Florida is getting into the rainy season, and I guess I would just trust God to take over at that point.  After all, if you cannot trust God, who can you trust?

Winding Down

Even though we have owned Gladys for three years this coming June, she still is revealing secrets about her past.  When Rick removed shovel-deep dirt from in front of the east wall of the Florida room, he unearthed hundreds of small, woody roots.  The roots undoubtedly are the remnants of a row of hedges or shrubs that used to border the windows.  Although the area was bare when we bought the house, at one time the owners had spent both time and money to landscape at least that part of the back yard.

The tinted sealer coat is Step 1 on finishing the back walls.

We had to remove the dirt, of course, so we could seal the plaster in preparation for new paint.  We finished the sealer coat yesterday, so today's initial task was to get the first finish coat of paint on the walls.  We both had reasoned that the walls would be easy to paint and would cover quickly because they were filled with windows and doors.  Silly us!  All of those windows and doors meant a lot of cutting in with paint before rolling the major areas, so painting these walls was both putzy and slow-going.  We started fairly early this morning and did not finish until 11:30.  Thankfully, the day is overcast and cool, so we had perfect painting weather.  The forecast calls for no rain all week long, so we hope to make real progress on the walls and the soffits.  Maybe by Friday we can have the whole house painted.

Rick fills the paint roller as he finishes the corner where
yesterday we removed the conduit with the electrical wire.

The finished first coat of paint gives the back of the house
a uniform, clean look.

Rick continues to investigate installing a reclaimed water system.  We learned today that even though our county has the cleanest reclaimed water in the state, the county officials still have listed on their website a warning that residents with compromised immune systems like me should not be outdoors when reclaimed water systems are running due to possible bacteria or viruses that may be present in the water. Oh, good.  Now if we use water to keep our trees, plants, and grass alive, it may make me sick.  Some days I cannot win for trying...

Rick actually went to the city today and asked the water department about the warning.  They told him, in effect, that the county probably was trying to cover themselves against a possible lawsuit, and that they had never heard of anyone getting sick from using reclaimed water for irrigation purposes.  The man Rick talked to said he certainly would not use the water to drink, to bathe in, or to swim in, but that once the water was on the ground, it should be safe.  His advice: ask your doctor.  Since I have to see my rheumatologist in a couple of weeks, I certainly will get his opinion on the matter; however, I would not be a bit surprised if he told me to ask the water department if the water is safe.

Rick is out right now buying yet another gallon of paint.  The house has taken more than we had anticipated (Gladys is thirsty), but hopefully this will be the last gallon of Honeysuckle that we have to buy.

Our repairs and purchases this year have pushed the budget to its limit, so I am glad that we are nearly finished for this winter season.  We still have money reserved for putting in pavers and for the fence next year, but the budget will totally be depleted after that.  Anything after that point will just have to wait until we can save enough to move forward.  Are we sorry that we have spent so much to make Gladys a clean, secure, livable home?  No.  However,  I think that we are both glad that we are getting near the end of the major projects to make her complete. At our ages, our energy is dwindling nearly as quickly as the budget!

Patches and Plans

Happy Easter to you all!  We both hope that you are able to enjoy the day with family and friends, and that signs of Spring are with you no matter where you live.

One of the things that bother us here in Florida is that church services are late.  While we can go to a 5:30 p.m. Saturday service, the Sunday service does not start until 10:00.  We are used to 7:45 a.m. services in Wisconsin, so 10:00 a.m. feels almost like mid-day.  However, since today is Easter, church held a "sunrise" service at 7:00 a.m.  We figured our little church would be packed since a pancake/ sausage/ fresh fruit/ eggs/ etc. breakfast followed at 8:15.  Boy, were we wrong!  We probably only had 25 people in total at the service; the place was practically empty.  I guess the reason church holds later services is because the older folks down here do not want to get up early.  I'll bet more show for the breakfast and then go to the services afterward today.  That somewhat surprises me. If I were having family over to celebrate, I would want to go early and have time to prepare for guests; however, like us, many people have children and grandchildren elsewhere, so I guess they have no one to rush home for. We also know that many of the people in the congregation are Snowbirds like us, so they have already departed for homes in the north.  We are glad to be home in Gladys now so we can Facetime with our children and grandchild when they roll out of bed (Central Time) and call.

We did not accomplish a great deal yesterday, but that is OK.  We still are on track to finish the house before we go home in a few weeks, and that is all that matters.  When we bought the house, we noticed a 20 amp outlet in the wall next to the Florida room door.  The electricity to the outlet was run through conduit on the outside of the house.  We still do not know if the outlet was added later to run medical equipment or if it was used for something like an aquarium.  The placement of the outlet seems odd; the location is not centralized, and the dedicated line seems to be in an awkward position.

Rick works at removing the conduit from the
wall outside the Florida Room

At any rate, when we updated the electricity almost three years ago, the electrician cut the line and left it dead.  The conduit outside was an eyesore, and the awkwardly placed outlet inside was not attractive nor necessary either.

This corner, which someday may be inside
a lanai, will look much cleaner once the patches
are painted and blend in with the rest of the wall.

Yesterday, Rick took care of that problem by removing the conduit and wire on the outside, by plugging the hole in the soffit where the wire fed into the house, and by patching the hold left in the wall on the inside when he removed the outlet box.  A second coat of spackling on the wall today should fully erase yet another scar that we removed from Gladys' exterior and interior.  Like the long-gone and forgotten air conditioner that used to hang through the dining room wall, this outlet, too, will just be another little secret that Gladys will hide under a good coat of plaster and paint.

A second coat of spackling, when dry, will soon hide
any evidence that an outlet used to be in the wall.

Rick continues to investigate how to add a sprinkler system next year so we can hook up to the reclaimed water in the neighborhood.   The more we learn, the more reasonable the whole proposition sounds.  We have to make provisions now, though, so that any pipes we want to put into the yard are accounted for before we do any pavers or cement work.  That means preliminary plans for the landscape also.

While I am not about to commit to a total landscape plan in the backyard, we can somewhat commit to an additional tree centered between the two oaks that shade our backyard, and two or three replacement trees in the front yard.  We probably are going to remove the large palm tree that is planted too near to the house.  I would like to plant new palms in the front yard along with a Florida elm to replace the dying bottle brush tree.  Additionally, I have started to plan the front flower gardens.

Replacing our mailbox next year is a priority.  The post that holds it is almost eaten through with termite damage and damage from our lawn service.  Mike, the man who trims, edges, and power-blows the clippings, is a bit overzealous with his string trimmer.  He has almost cut through the bottom of the mailbox pole!  I would like to put in a new pole and then make a small flower garden around it just to keep the trimmer away from the new mailbox structure.

Colored-pencil sketches outline preliminary plans
for flowers and shrubs for next year.

To that end, I have started to plan the rest of the front gardens.  Planning landscape here in Florida is fun because I have a whole new set of plants with which to play.  Rick laughs at me because I always try to sketch out what a garden may look like.  I want to keep the look tropical, so I plan to use red or pink hibiscus, blue plumbago, orange/green/yellow/red leaf crotons, yellow and green-striped ginger, various grasses, green and yellow ?? (I see the bushes all over, but I don't know what they are called!), green Fortune's Mahonia (which look like little palm trees), yellow bush allamanda, red pentas, and red Ti plants.

My "blueprint" for front gardens will help me when I actually
go to a nursery to start selecting plants.

Of course, once I get to the nursery or better define my gardens, some of my plans will undoubtedly change.  For right now, though, dreaming and planning costs nothing.

We are to the point where we are starting to wind down on what we want to accomplish yet before we travel north.  I am content to finish the painting and soffits.  That way, we will leave Gladys looking bright and new, and she will be a welcome sight when we return in the fall.

Finished... Almost

We are both dead tired after working from early this morning until dinner time.  Rain was predicted for today, but a glance at the morning newscast showed that most of the rain was going to go to our south.  That turned out to be the case, so we grabbed this opportunity to make further progress on painting the outside of the house.

The completed garage window.  Eventually, Rick plans
to skim coat and paint the interior walls. 

I start, though, with a picture of our finished garage window.  When the new window was installed, we did not like how the installer plastered the window inside.  As I mentioned in my last blog, when we looked at it, we noted that something had leaked down the wall and that the plaster around the window had come loose.  We discovered the leak is due to the HVAC system; we will add caulk to solve that problem.  We chose to remove the plaster around the window, to smooth the surfaces so they match the windows in the rest of the house, and to add some vinyl molding around the window to dress it up and to complete the look.  The picture shows the result.  We now have a weather tight, more securely fastened, and certainly better looking window than we had before.

Rick removes the paint on the back wall of the garage
and laundry room.

As soon as we were able to make noise today without incurring the wrath of the neighbors, Rick was firing up the pressure washer to remove the paint on the back wall (east side) of the garage.  He had hoped to get the east garage wall and the north Florida room wall complete.  As it turned out, he worked past the lunch hour and well into the afternoon to also remove the paint from the east Florida room wall.  He worked to the point of exhaustion.  I took over the last little bit of paint under the triple windows, and we had everything completed by 5:00 p.m.  The pictures, I hope, speak to that effort.

By early afternoon, the paint is gone from the east
garage wall and the north Florida room wall.

We had to deal with minor water seepage around the doors, but the rest of the house stayed dry throughout this pressure washing.  Of course, what awaits us is patching, sealing, and two coats of paint on all of these walls.  The garage wall with all of the electrical, water, and phone boxes needs the most work, mostly because of the numerous old phone boxes that we had to remove.  We also have various holes that anchored wires, and one large hole where the dryer vent used to go through the wall. The other walls should be easier because they have lots of windows and doors.  They are a pain to paint around, but the overall surface will take much less paint than the other walls.

We are finished blasting paint off of Gladys.  Our next step is to
make her beautiful with a fresh coat of sealer and paint.

And then there are the soffits and fascia boards.  That is just an on-going chore.  Rick has to apply two finish-coats of paint to the north soffits and fascia.  He also needs to add some caulk and patching compound to keep that wall dry on the inside.  Once that is done, he can hang the tall ladder back on the garage wall, hopefully to stay there for quite a while.  While he is working on the north side, I can continue to scrape paint off soffits on the Florida room and behind the garage.  We have lots to do yet, but with teamwork, we are making progress.  We can now say that we are finished pressuring washing off the old paint.  Now we just need to take steps to apply the new sealer and paint where it is needed.

Rick cleans the mold and grime off the
cement by the Florida room and laundry
room doors.  What a difference that makes!

One last thing that Rick did was to power wash the slab outside the back doors.  As anyone in Florida will tell you, cement does not do well in this moist and sandy area. Driveways, sidewalks, and patios all require mold removal and cleaning every few years.  What you see in the picture above is the black mold and dirt being blasted away from the slab which now looks much, much brighter and cleaner.

We are promised rain tomorrow (90% chance), and that probably is a good thing.  Rick needs to rest his back, and I need time indoors to take care of keeping the inside of Gladys clean, too.  An those inside cleaning chores, as everyone knows, are never finished.

Weather Woes

Our progress has been somewhat stifled by unseasonably wet and cold weather.  However, I should not complain because the upper Midwest and the upper East Coast both are seeing snow yet which is almost unheard of this time of year.  Lindsay said that Green Bay got a couple of inches of snow; while that is not unheard of, the unusual part is that the cold temperatures did not warm, so the snow did not melt the same day.  Snow in April usually is short-lived, but this year everyone is witnessing crazy weather patterns that we all pray will not become the new normal.

We had a good day on Monday with highs in the 80s.  Rick finished patching the north side soffits and fascia, and then we moved indoors to work on the leaky window in the garage.  When the window was put in, the installers slathered on a thick coat of plaster on the inside.  All of that plaster, due to water seepage, pulled away from the whole inside of the window.  Because it came out so easily, we were fortunate to be left with a fairly smooth original window opening.  However, the wooden supports on each side of the window showed, so we knew that we would have to take steps to seal and to cover the rough edges.

Rick chips off the last of the loose plaster around the window.

Our first step was to clean out all of the loose plaster and to smooth the area.  Rick then squirted in some Great Stuff to seal the cavity around the window.  He always tends to overdo the Great Stuff, so we both spent some clean-up time getting rid of the oozing, excess Great Stuff.  Rick then climbed the ladder a little higher to discover that the leak in the wall was due to the HVAC pipes and wires that were coming into the house.  Those pipes and wires are supposedly protected by a galvanized cover outside, but the rain still seeps in and gets into the garage wall.  We are going to have to caulk the edges of the covering to keep the water out.

Great Stuff will keep the cold and bugs out, but we still have
to plug the leak in the wall to keep water away from the window.

On Monday, we called in Art, the arborist for the city, to look at our trees and to offer us some suggestions.  The good news is that the live oak on our property is healthy and in very good condition.  Art suggested that we just put in posts as close as we can to the tree when we build our fence, and then cut out the panels to follow the contour of the tree with temporary supports on those sections.  With temporary supports, we can move and adjust those sections as the tree continues to grow.

Art told us that the bottle brush tree in our front yard was dying, and that we should have it removed.  He suggested replacing it with a live oak -- which is NOT going to happen because I do not want to rake up leaves from the front yard forever -- or with a Florida elm.  I have not had a chance to check out how messy a Florida elm might be, so our decision on that is pending.  He also suggested a rigid bottle brush tree for elsewhere in the yard, and perhaps a palm or two near the street.

The bad news from Art was that the large palm in our front yard was too close to the house (which we knew), and that it was unstable in a storm.  OK.  That one will have to go because I do not want it falling on the house some day.  He suggested a smaller palm in its place, but we are hesitant to do that since a smaller palm there would block our view from the kitchen.  We might just use some smaller, flowering shrubs in that area to hide the plumbing fixtures and clean-out drains.  Why the builders could not have put those connections on the side of the house is beyond me, but we will deal with them as is.  What choice do we have?  Some shrubs, bushes, and perennials will solve our problem once we have the time and the money to plant them.  Maybe next year...

Art also suggested a Florida elm for the middle of our backyard, and he thought that a weeping bottle brush tree would be appropriate for the area behind the guest room and south of the Florida room.  I would like to see a tree there, and Art said the location was sunny enough for the bottle brush to grow well there.  Those two suggestions are something that I would like to see happen when we come back in the fall.

We have reclaimed water in this neighborhood.  That means that for a very economical price, we can tap into the treated wastewater that the city offers for landscape irrigation.  For a little over $1800, we can have the city come out and install the necessary equipment for us to use the water for the next 20 years.  We would have to put in our own pipes and sprinkler heads for our yard, but doing so would allow us to automatically set up timers so our trees, vegetation, and grass would be watered year-round.  Homeowners who have irrigation systems have beautiful yards; the rest of us have sparse grass that turns brown for most of the summer months.  Right now yards are green --either with grass or weeds-- but that will change by the time July arrives.

Rick was really excited about the possibility of an irrigation system. I was not so sold on it, not only because of the labor and cost that it would entail, but also because neither of us has any idea how to properly set up such a system.  Research shows, however, that professional companies, for a small fee, will design a system for us.  Yesterday Dan, from the city's water department, came out to assess our reclaimed water hook-ups.  He found that the supply line to our property was plugged, but that we could have the system unplugged and a meter installed with little problems.  We are going forward with plans for using the reclaimed water when we return in the fall.  This is just one more thing that we will somehow work into our budget.

Yesterday delivered the promised rain that weather forecasters predicted. Dan had come out in the morning while the skies just threatened rain, but by noon they delivered with a couple of good downpours.  That gave Rick time to research which irrigation systems to use, and it gave his sore arms and back some much-needed recovery time.  We have been pushing to finish the house really hard, and it is starting to take its toll on our aging bodies.

Right now Rick just finished sanding the soffits and fascia on the north side of the house.  It was very cold (in the low 50s) when we went out this morning, so we waited a bit for the weather to warm up.  While he did the sanding outside, I slapped on some masonry sealer around the inside of the garage window.  We bought molding yesterday to frame the inside of that window.  Once the sealer dries and I can add a couple of coats of paint, we will be ready to complete the inside trim on that window.

Rick just went outside to start the prime coat of paint on the soffits, so I had better get out there to help hold the tall ladder.  If there  is one thing that we do not need, it is for either of us to be injured.

Rain is predicted both for tomorrow and for Friday, so we will have to see what we can accomplish in the time that we have left to work outside.  This weekend is Easter, so maybe we can take a little time to connect with family members and to help them celebrate the holiday weekend.

"The Best Looking House on the Block"

When I look around Gladys and into the yards of some of our neighbors, I see what used to be in this neighborhood.  In the overgrown backyard of the house behind us, I see the kumquats drop from a tree and rot.  At one time, perhaps the homeowner planted that tree so he could have preserves and other kumquat delicacies.  An abandoned clothes line pole awaits a mate across the yard so fresh lines can once again hold laundry.  Before the time of dryers, that must have been the standard way of drying laundry in the early 1960s.  A broken and forlorn stack of rocks that formed a waterfall stands buried amidst plants and ferns in the back yard of the neighbor to our north.  Closer examination shows the outline of a large pond that at one time gurgled with a relaxing sound.  Too bad all of that has been left to the elements or to neglect. This neighborhood was a showcase at one time, and I am happy that many of the neighbors have taken steps to keep their homes neat, landscaped, and in good repair.  We are working hard to make sure that Gladys does not again fall into the realm of disrepair.

Our goal yesterday was to patch the cracks we discovered in the north wall and to get a good coat of masonry sealer on the wall.  The stubborn areas of paint that would not come off yielded little way when I attacked them with a scraper.  Meanwhile, Rick was high on the ladder patching the numerous cracks that he found in the upper part of the wall which is backed by the wooden trusses rather than concrete block.

Rick adds a coat of tinted masonry sealer to
the north wall.

On this particular wall, we found numerous tiny cracks.  Rick figured that at one point in Gladys' life, this wall was scraped and repainted below.  Those areas that would not come off this time show evidence of that work.  A masonry wall takes a minimum of 28 days to cure, and Rick's guess is that this particular wall, since it faces north, did not get the sunlight or time it needed to fully cure before paint was added.  That could account for the rough shape it was in when we removed most of the paint.

Gladys before we added the bedroom and kitchen shutters...
 

and Gladys after the shutters adorn her front windows.

While the patching and the masonry sealer was left to dry, Rick moved on to finishing the soffits at the front of the house.  We were eager to get them done so we could hang shutters.  Shutters add so much to a house, so putting them on the front windows was a huge step toward adding some curb appeal to Gladys.  Before evening fell, we had added those shutters to the north bedroom wall and to the kitchen windows in front.  (Note to anyone who is interested: although not bad, we discovered that masonry window openings are not perfectly square!)

Now everyone will have Gladys' number!

The crowning touch to our efforts was the addition of the Michael Healy address plaque for which we waited five long weeks.  The plaque is brass and heavy; thankfully, the green background that we ordered turned out to match the green shutters and doors even better than we had hoped it would.  We are pleased with the results.  I cannot wait until next year when I can add some flowers and bushes to further enhance this house's curb appeal.

The completed front of Gladys just needs a few flowers
(and a paver sidewalk) next year to complete our vision.

Last night we went for a short drive, and Rick took a peek at the house on Victoria Lane.  Huge cement trucks were pouring concrete into the insides of the block foundation walls while other large equipment stood ready to backfill those walls with dirt.  That is certainly not the way something would be built in the north (where we love our basements!), but this is Florida, and the house is in a prime flood zone.  We both suspect that the house will be raised and surrounded on all sides by huge verandas that will give the homeowners both a shady place to sit and marvelous views of St. Joseph's Sound.  We can't wait to see what will be built there, but we probably won't see much before we leave for Wisconsin.  Seeing the house on Victoria Lane will be something we can look forward to when we return.

Today was spent adding two coats of paint to the north wall of the house, and then running around getting downspout extensions in anticipation of the rains coming next week.  While we were both painting the north side this morning, our neighbor Barbie (yes, she even LOOKS like a 60-something Barbie!) came over.  She is a very nice woman, and she came to tell us that we had "the best looking house on the whole block."  She asked us what the grey stuff was that we sprayed on the house.  We explained to her that what we were spraying was water, and the grey that she saw from across the street was the bare stucco that covers the house's concrete masonry blocks after we had blasted off the paint. She was surprised, so we explained why we took Gladys' walls back to the basic structure.

The paint on the north wall makes Gladys appear to be all one
color when someone sees her from the street. 

Barbie said she really liked the color and what the shutters did to dress up the house.  While I don't know if we have the best looking house, I can agree that we probably have the cleanest and most newly painted house.  Seeing something new that looks good always adds to the overall appeal of the property.  All in all, her comments were very appreciated.

And so our work continues. Shutters and a house number may not seem like much, but in my mind, they are transformative enough to show anyone who passes by that Gladys is not just a somewhat old and neglected house,  but truly a work of love as she becomes our home.

Pots and Paint

A couple of rainy days at the beginning of this week gave us a chance to have a little down time, so we used the time to let sore muscles heal and to do a little shopping.

We went into Tampa on Tuesday to go to Ikea and to The Container Store.  We bought a few things for Easter that we packed up and sent to Wisconsin. We added those items to the other "goodies" that we had which will let our daughters know what really happened to the Easter Bunny.  We also bought a few little items for Gladys to bring some more color into our lives.

Bright flowers fill my colorful vases in
the Florida Room.

One of the things that we bought was flowers for my little vases in the Florida Room.  We also bought some greenery and bright flower pots to add to the color scheme in the otherwise light blue and white room.  I like the room now.  It is bright, clean, and uncluttered.  It's even better now that we were able to move the remaining paint cans out to the garage.

A little greenery in colorful pots enjoy the sunshine
on the shelves on the southern side of the room.

Yesterday I started the day by vacuuming, scrubbing, and drying all of the floors in the house.  While that may not seem like a task, it is.  Getting all of the floors back to a grit-free, clean condition took me almost three hours and a full morning's supply of energy.

While I was doing that, Rick took a trip down to the Social Security office to arrange tax deductions when he starts to collect Social Security this summer.  We have made an adjustment in the past couple of years since our bi-monthly paychecks were replaced with retirement income coming in once a month.  Once he starts Social Security, he will get his retirement check at the beginning of the month and the Social Security check the fourth Wednesday of the month.  OK, time to adjust the budget again.  The good news is that we will get a slight raise this year, so we will have income to cover our plans for a different car.

Yesterday we worked on getting the front soffits ready for paint.  Rick spent time removing the rest of the old caulk that had pulled away from the vents and patching the soffits and fascia. By the afternoon, he was able to put on the primer coat which greatly changed the look of the soffits.

Today he started by completing the primer coat on the soffits. I worked on the back window sills, so we were able to complete two painting tasks at the same time.

While our initial painting dried, Rick moved on to blasting off the paint on the north side of the house. The paint on the upper part of the house peeled away like the shell from a hard-boiler egg.  As we got to the lower part of the wall, we had to be careful because of the electrical boxes and vents that belonged to the HVAC system and our clothes dryer.  We covered as much as we could with tarps to protect the HVAC system and also to keep the chipped paint from flying into the neighbor's back yard.

The north side of the house awaits a bit more work, lots of
patching, and a seal coat to make it water-tight.

The north wall is just as high as the south wall, so Rick once again was on the tall ladder.  We have some serious cracks to patch on the upper part of the wall, and we have some major patching work to do around the window on this wall.  Neither of us are sorry that we are taking the paint back to the basic plaster structure.  Doing so allows us to see what needs repair, and we know that we have the materials and the skills to make Gladys water-tight and secure again.  Do we want to do this work?  No, but we have no choice.  We will do it once, and we will do it right.  That will save us repair costs in the future.

Each day we accomplish a bit more and move a little closer to our goal.  We have about five more weeks to complete the painting of the house and soffits.  If we keep going at this rate, we should have Gladys secure before we go north for the summer.

Finishes and Fun

Springtime awarded us today with another gorgeous day-- the type of day were the warm breezes, bright sunlight, and high 70s temperatures just begged one to get outside.  We took advantage of the day by accomplishing some tasks and by enjoying ourselves outdoors.

Rick works on the sealer coat on the bedroom wall.

Naturally, this great weather will not last.  Rick worked to the point of dropping yesterday just to get a sealer coat of paint on the back guest bedroom wall.  We wanted to get that room sealed both because of our experience with the internal leaks and because rain is predicted for Monday afternoon and all day Tuesday.  While he worked on that, I finished scraping the soffits and fascia across the front of the house.  I must admit that I am very glad Gladys is not any larger than she is.  At a little over 1350 square feet, she is large enough inside to accommodate our needs and long enough outside that I would not want to scrape or paint any more.  If she were larger, that also would mean I would have more to keep clean inside.  Nope.  Gladys is just the right size.

The finish coat shows the true color as we dress us Gladys.

This morning I took a little time off to go to church while Rick put on the first finish coat on the bedroom wall.  Then he switched to the front of the house and filled in the bad spots on the soffit in preparation for paint.  He also removed the rest of the hurriedly-and-poorly-done caulk from a couple of years ago.  We had to get it sealed at the time; now we can remove it all and do it right so it looks as it should when visitors come to our front door.

After lunch today, Rick and I added the second coat of finish paint on the bedroom wall so that all that is left are the soffits and the window sills.  Thankfully, the soffits are flat and lower in the back, so we both can work on them and share the burden of that task.

Those chores were the work part of the weekend.  The fun part of the weekend started with Saturday morning when we went to Craig Park in Tarpon Springs for their annual Art Fair.  (Bonnie, this is the Art Fair that you attended with us a couple of years ago.)  As usual, the Fair was huge with a great variety of vendors.  We by-passed the $1,000+ double hanging hammocks and chairs and ventured on to original oils and metal sculptures.

The copper art sculpture adds the finishing touch to
our living room wall.

I wanted to add one small piece of original art to the living room wall to complete that room, and I knew what I had in mind.  After looking at a couple of copper art booths, I found exactly what I was looking for: an ibis wading through a marsh with lilly pads and cattails.  It was the perfect size, was very well-made, and was just slightly north of what I wanted to pay for it.  However, I knew that if I did not take it, I would certainly regret that decision.  So home it came.  I called the bird "Ichabod" as in Ichabod Crane of "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," even though I know the bird is really an ibis and not a crane.  Rick just refers to it as "the goony bird on the wall."  Whatever it is called, I like it.

Meet our living room "goony bird."

On the way out of the Fair, we passed a booth selling tablecloths.  Although I had no plan to buy a cloth, I found one that we both really liked.  Had I been shopping for a tablecloth, I would have measured the table!  As it was, I mis-guessed the size, so the cloth is just slightly too large, but I would rather have that than one that is too small.  I have not washed it yet, so perhaps it will shrink a bit in the dryer.

Our new tablecloth for when guests dine with us.

Tonight the weather was so beautiful that we decided to treat ourselves to a picnic in Weaver Park.  A beautiful sunset and entertaining wildlife (including jumping fish in St. Joseph Sound) gave us plenty to watch as we dined.

On the way home, we took a detour down Victoria Lane.  For those of you who follow this blog, you know that Rick is fascinated with the mansion someone is building on Victoria Lane.  The progress on this house has been excruciatingly slow, but tonight we actually saw some results.  The batter-boards are up and the corner block walls are in place.  The house is supposed to be built in the turn-of-the-century style to fit the other 1890s - 1920s houses on the street, so we are excited to see exactly what the owner will build on the site.  Once again, stay tuned...

The stack of sand and cement blocks are the foundation
for another mansion on Victoria Lane.

Each day we accomplish something more on Gladys.  Our progress may not be setting speed records, but in the end we will get her painted and finished before we head north for the summer.  We have the north wall and three back walls left with six weeks to finish them all.  With perseverance, we will meet our goals and hopefully still have some time left to enjoy springtime in Florida.

Plans, Progress, Pools, and Pipes

Today has been an interesting day, filled with plans, progress, pools of water, and pipes.

First, the plans.  We have been waiting almost six weeks for our address plaque to arrive.  Finally, it did!  We are pleased with the results because the plaque is VERY heavy, is well-made, and the background is almost identical to the green on our front doors.  We cannot wait to put it up, but we must have patience because we still have to finish the soffits on the front of the house before we can add anything else to Gladys' "face."

Although fairly plain, this address plaque will finally let
everyone know Gladys' number.

Soffits were first on our agenda today.  While Rick put a second coat of paint on the north bedroom wall, I started to scrape the front soffits.  Not fun, and definitely too much work for me to do all in one day.  Actually, my doctor would have a coronary if he knew I was doing as much as I am, but I cannot sit around and watch Rick work all day either.

The soffits need a lot of scraping, patching,
and paint before they look good.

The front wall turned out well, but the soffits promise to be a lot of work.  We could not scrape soffits too close to the fresh paint, so at a certain point we ceased work on the front of the house and moved to the back.  Actually, we wanted to take the paint off the north side of the house next, but our neighbor was sitting in his back yard sanding paint off of an antique bench. (I know.  Removing paint from an antique is not a good idea, but to each his own.)   Since the wind was coming from the south, we were afraid that if we started to blow paint off the wall, we would be blowing both water and paint chips onto his newly sanded work.  Doing that would not make us good neighbors, so we moved on to the back of the house.

Rick worked too hard and too long, but by mid-afternoon he had as much paint as was going to come off removed from the guest bedroom wall and the south side of the Florida Room.  Rick came into the house through the garage, jumped into the shower, and left his wet clothes for me to deal with.  I have long preached the benefits of simplicity, and Gladys came through with a simple solution once again.

The paint came off, but it was slow-going, coming off
inch-by-inch.

Many of our belongings here came from our camper, and my non-electric clothes drying system is a part of our camping past.  The rack in the picture is one that we used to prop up in the tiny camper bathtub when drying clothes outside was impossible.  Rick's socks and jeans were soaked, so they had the opportunity to bask in the Florida sunshine.  Simple, free, and effective.  After his shower and a change of clothes, Rick came back outside to sit for a few moments in the back yard.

Sometimes, simple is best... and free!

Then I came into the house through the Florida Room, and my heart almost stopped.  A pool of water was seeping out from under the low cabinets on the south wall of the Florida Room, and a second stream of water came from the living room corner, past the palm tree, under the new couch, and onto my new rug!  Argh!!!  As Rick power-washed the walls, Gladys peed! One step forward, and two steps back.  I yelled for Rick to come in and help, and the two of us spent the next 45 minutes moving furniture, sopping up water with old towels, and flipping the rug so it would dry.  Rick put the AC up to remove moisture in the house, so now we are in the "drying out" stage.

Water seeps into the Florida Room from
a tiny opening in the concrete wall.

Since our house was in total disarray, Rick suggested fish and chips at our favorite restaurant next to the bike trail downtown.  While we have had wonderful meals there in the past, fish and chips are not their specialty.  The fish were greasy, tasteless, and definitely overpriced. I ordered a "half order" and received half the food.  That was fine (especially since it was not that good), but we were charged only two dollars less (rather than half price) for my entree.  I have had better fish from a fast-food restaurant, and the food was definitely more reasonably priced elsewhere.

Our new rug needs fans to help it dry.  Ugh!

However, we learned from the waiter, much to our delight, that Dunedin was holding a parade through downtown to kick off the annual Highland Games festival.  Dunedin, as the name implies, is a very Scottish town, and they are very proud of their heritage.  This year, for the first time, they decided to have a bagpipe band parade.  Bagpipers from New York, Georgia, and area communities all gathered to pipe and drum their way through our fair city.  We thoroughly enjoyed the whole spectacle of the parade even though it was not very long.

So we have had an interesting day.  Plans, progress, pools of water, and pipes.  Where else but in Florida would we experience this kind of life?