Hell Year - Part 2

When we left off in my previous post, our hero had just completed his planned Hell Month task list and had headed off to Wiser Times to recharge before starting prep activities for the annual Burk family picnic. We pick up the action on Saturday morning of Memorial Day Weekend, 2014.

Early that day the sad phone call came that my dad had slipped away. It was not unexpected, but you are never really ready to receive such news. Nancy and I gathered ourselves and made plans to return to Florida forthwith.

Upon our return home in early June, we headed back to the cottage and took stock of what lay ahead. To my surprise, there were a number of additional projects that appeared to need attention. That's what I get for taking inventory.

The first of these was the Wiser Times deck. This was a mild shock to my fragile system as we had taken pains in the past to make sure that both decks - home and Wiser Times - wouldn't need maintenance in the same year. However, nature, in the form of snow and melting ice dripping from the roof, had carved out a few bare spots on the deck, especially around the bay window. And there was a thriving culture of green mold threatening to take over the step down from the family room. So we resigned ourselves to our second re-staining job in two months. So much for the plan.

And since we had to stain, the Board decided to expand the difficulty just a little bit by going with a complete color change, instead of just touching up the bad spots. The argument for doing this was that we could change from the old burgundy shade, that was originally picked to match the pre-gazebo tent canopy we used to pitch on the deck, to a dark green that would blend in nicely with the natural surroundings.  Of course, the argument against was that this would require hand painting about 600 square feet of deck as well as roughly 140' of railing frames and spindles.

Now, those of you who have been paying attention are likely asking yourselves, "Why would he care? Nancy does all the painting?" Nice try, but no cigar. There's a little competition in our family called "Father of the Year". Thanks to a relatively small field, I've won the award every year since its inception. But I haven't enjoyed this run of luck by ignoring some pretty basic rules of family life.

One of those rules is "don't sit around and enjoy yourself if your bride is conducting home improvement projects" (a little tip I picked up at a Home Depot self-help session). This means that if Nancy's prepping and painting the entire deck, I better find myself something that at the very least looks like it's a nasty job. Something that requires two or three steps, a trip to the hardware store, and a power tool or two is best.

So I signed up to reclaim and refinish our pine picnic table and the deck shutter table (a sentimental favorite from Nancy's side of the family; got extra points for that). Fortunately, I was able to drag out the table work to last nearly as long as the deck work. I did this mainly through natural talent - I'm pretty slow in general - but also by cleverly adding extra coats of varnish to the shutter table.

These projects took just about four days, and turned out with very satisfying results. First below are some shots of the deck work, starting with the problems.

Here's a shot of the paint crew captain locked and loaded (or should I say plugged in and hosed up), ready for action. Note the stylish headgear. This wasn't her first rescue mission.

And some pics of the battle raging.

And a couple shots of the battle won.

Regarding my own "marriage maintenance" tasks, here I am armed for battle with my opponents strewn around the front yard. 

Here are pics of the picnic and shutter tables shortly into the prep phase. Ycch.

The picnic table was pretty beat up, so I opted to stain the top and seat boards to match the deck, while preserving the natural pine look for the frame. I think it turned out pretty well. I got an extra cherry in my Manhattan that day as a reward for "clever use of left over stain".

Due to a scheduling problem (taking the "after" photos toward the end of an extended happy hour), no shot can can be found of the finished shutter table. Just picture in your mind the side of an old Ford woody wagon with about three coats of Simonize.

Since I needed a little filler to stretch my tasks out a couple more hours to end simultaneously with the deck work, I convinced the Board that our old blue canvas wall tent needed to be pitched and aired-out for possible use during the Labor Day weekend. Here I am posing with this classic pitched in its usual spot on the north side of the cottage.

Here is a shot of the airing-out phase (this task was the only one of the day rated "easy"; if you remember from my last post, that means I could do it while sitting down and watching).

After the airing-out came the tricky task of re-stowing Big Blue. Here is a brief review of the key steps. First, removing the poles and spreading the canvas out for packing.

Then the removal of the stakes and folding of the canvas for rolling, sweeping each surface as you go.

Followed by the rolling (if done correctly through this step, the tent should be reduced to a volume slightly smaller than the capacity of the bag; that's the tricky part).

And then voila! A 13' by 10' wall tent 8.5' high at the ridge neatly tucked in a bag roughly 30" deep and 18" in diameter.

Here's a final shot of me and Big Blue complete with her poles - two old friends that have been hanging out together off and on for over 40 years.

What's that I hear you thinking? "Enough should be enough; surely Hell Month - even the extended version - should be over now, right?" Oh that it would have been true.

After a couple of months of entertaining family and friends, including two quick-turnaround trips to Florida, I felt safe in the knowledge that further home improvement was finally locked into next year's planner pages. But after a few days of recovery from hosting, I realized that there was one other situation that had started to nag at me, and I just couldn't leave it alone. It was the fact that the current lighting over the family room dining table wasn't very good when the table was extended for a large crowd (something that had happened a lot during the family visits, and was going to happen again with the Labor Day party). So, I broke with protocol and decided to do something about it. What a mistake.

What I hadn't foreseen was that I was about to come face to face with one of the orneriest tasks of my cottage life - installing track lighting over the family room dining table. While on the surface not that daunting, think about it. Here's a guy who once again is going to flirt with electricity, this time working overhead while balancing one foot on a chair and the other in the middle of drop leaf table with eight castors. Further complicating the ordeal was 40 year old wiring, probably installed by an out-of-work charter-boat fisherman.

The work unfolded pretty much as I had feared - frustration with trying to pull and bend short, stiff wires inside of a small electrical box 18" above my head, all the while dropping tools and small joining connectors at the rate of about two a minute. Aggravating the ordeal further was trying to do this work while craning my neck at various angles trying to see what I was doing through the one square centimeter in my blended-lens bifocals that was in focus at that distance. I'm sure many of you over the age of 40 have had similar experiences.

Here's a shot of me sizing up the job, hoping against hope that some parts of the kit were missing so the job could be postponed for another day (or fully deferred to an electrician). No such luck, I'm afraid.

Here I'm removing the old lamp that was relieved of duty because of its limited range (something that could eventually happen to us all).

This light was actually reassigned to an easier and perhaps more fun assignment of lighting the smaller game and puzzle table in the back room. So far it's enjoying its new job and doing very well.

Here I am waging war with gravity, aging optics, diminishing fine motor skills and, not surprisingly, a chronic lack of commitment. Fortunately, having worked with me before, the Board shored up the commitment level with encouraging remarks like, "no light-ee no drink-ee".
 

I eventually muddled through to victory, as shown below with me making final placement of the new lights, which now fully illuminate the dining table even with all five leaves inserted.
 

In the spirit of full disclosure, there was one performance setback during the installation of the new lighting. Upon initial testing of the connections, the light worked fine - but the four sets of wall plugs at the other end of the family room had no power (remember the out-of-work fisherman). 

As a result I had to take the whole assembly down and rewire the connections. During this process, I removed a small wire that ran directly from one of the live wires (white) to one of the ground wires (black). Odd, I thought, as my limited knowledge of electricity led me to believe that such a connection should short things out. To my surprise, and delight, removing this wire resulted in power being restored throughout the family room. And the light still worked. That small and magical wire now resides on a nearby bookcase as a tribute to the home repair gods who after toying with me, obviously sensed my desperation and took pity. 

But my happiness that the new lights were installed and functioning didn't last long. It seems I had set an unfortunate precedent by letting my post-Hell Month concern about the lighting get the better of me. The floodgates had been opened. And I was defenseless.

In September, Nancy reminded me that we had discussed replacing the cottage kitchen floor this year. But with the deck work sneaking its way onto our list, the floor had been put on the back burner. What could I say but, "Hey, wow! Let's get to it! Great!" I know when I'm toast.  

The floor project went off just fine, and was actually chronicled in my recent Notes from the Lab post. At that time, it had become the home improvement project completed latest in a calendar year. But that record was soon to be eclipsed.

The new kitchen floor had one down side - by contrast it emphasized a couple of other undesirable room features that were long overdue for correction. So in October we returned to the lake to complement the new floor by painting the orange counter top and red fake-brick wall covering that adorned a portion of our kitchen cabinets (yes, red and orange, and fake brick veneer; this project had been percolating since the day we moved in). Also, the cabinet doors under the orange counter were made of some kind of fiberglass matting that had started to come apart. The doors had to be repaired prior to painting. Here are a couple of shots of the pain, to make the point.

My contribution to this effort was to replace the cupboard doors. But, here's where I caught one of my few breaks during Hell Year. Knowing that the cupboard doors would eventually have to be replaced, quite some time ago I had asked my handyman buddy Dave Dyle to cut new plywood panels for the doors on his table saw (I own no tools that require tables; Nancy says we couldn't afford the resulting increase in our health insurance premiums). So in September when we were doing the new floor (again to look busy while my Bride was productively engaged), I had removed the doors and replaced the old matting with the new panels. Here is a pic of that preliminary work. Note the evident glee I experience when being as one with my beloved tools.

So all I had left to do on this task was to reinstall the doors.

Nancy successfully transformed this cabinet with the magic of paint, reducing the variety of colors found in our kitchen to an acceptable range.

Now, the Hell Year story would not be complete without the telling of the final chapter (at least what I hope will be the final chapter, as I have a few more weeks to sweat out). And this has to do with - the garage.

Way back in September, shortly after Labor Day, Nancy and I decided to build a garage. This is a rather involved story that will be told in detail at a later date, when the garage is complete. But for now suffice it to say that we obtained the needed permits and hired a builder by the end of September, and asked the builder to proceed with the cement work as soon as possible, to beat the coming freeze. We then went off for our October visit to Florida, confident that the garage construction would proceed in our absence.

So what does this have to do with Hell Year, you say? As according to my own definition of work, this would qualify as an "easy" task, with me watching the entire endeavor from a variety of sitting devices. That was my original intention. But, as has happened throughout the year, things didn't quite go according to plan. 

When Nancy and I returned to Wiser Times to complete the kitchen painting work, we were happy to see that the 16' by 22' concrete slab for the garage foundation had been poured. However, in order to locate the slab in the proper spot, the builder had to push our shed and its 10' by 10' wooden base about four feet out of the way. As the shed is scheduled for removal once the garage is done, the damage the shed suffered in this forcible eviction is not the issue. 

The real problem is that the shed was jammed with tools, toys, bikes, beach furniture, lawn and snow equipment, and more, all packed away awaiting installation in the new garage. Moreover, there was about two face cords of wood stacked next to the shed. As a result of the shed being unceremoniously shoved four feet (by back hoe), a modicum of disarray arose. The shed was about 30% off its moorings, the contents looked like something you normally see on the Weather Channel's storm chaser series, and the wood, well, the wood was everywhere. A little photo evidence.

My original plan, clever boy that I am, was to leave the contents of the shed in place until the garage was built. Then, move everything one time, including the wood, to its new home inside of or suitably around the garage. But with the shed teetering on collapse and the wood pile in ruins (and sort of in the way of the building crew), I resigned myself to a tedious Plan B - moving everything to a temporary storage location and then, when able, moving it all again to the garage.  In retrospect, Hell Year having been what it had, I should have seen this coming.

So, while Nancy painted, I spent two full days lifting, sorting, packing, piling, and stumbling over wood, cement blocks and piles of dirt, executing Plan B. Here are some shots of the action. Note - none of this activity involved me sitting in a cushy chair watching someone else.

 

Here's a pic of the new temporary shed contents storage site in development. Before it was completed, another row of cabinets and equipment was added, as well as a second tarp and a bevy of bungy cords.

   

And the new (and now likely permanent) home of first the hardwood stack (suitable for use in the living room fireplace) on the south side of the house,

And the pine wood stack (beach use only) on the north side of the house.

And a final shot (I hope) of the shed, free of contents and firewood, sitting idle, prepared for removal to a better (or at least another) place. 

Well, that about does it. After the kitchen painting and what I call "the great shed caper", Nancy and I self-medicated, packed up, and headed back to Grosse Pointe to convalesce. I'm happy to report that as of this writing, no additional home repair projects - at home or at the cottage - have reared their ugly heads. And with any luck, my Hell Year of tools, toil, temper tantrums and trips to hardware stores is over. Just in time for 2015 to start.

Thanks for listening. I feel better now.

--Grosse Pointe Charles (marginally successful retiree)

Hell Year - Part 1

Okay. Nobody pay the ransom yet. I haven't actually escaped, but I've almost wriggled out of the duct tape. Let me explain.

In a previous post I discussed the Burk family notion of Hell Month, during which Nancy and I conduct an intense program of house and yard cleanup projects along with a slate of home improvements, in anticipation of our annual spring picnic. I've also made a reference or two to Heck Week, a simpler undertaking of similar tasks at our cottage. But this year has been different. Painful, even. The clean-it/fix-it/replace-it/or upgrade-it projects exploded much earlier in the calendar than normal, and haven't yet ended. And as I'm sure you are fearing, this scary development has lowered my DCT ratio (dawdling to chore time) to its lowest levels since retirement, with some of the calculations actually involving decimal points.

Now, as I wrote in my earlier post Wendell, I lost my father this year. That was a difficult and sad period for our family. But that's not what I'm talking about here. My father had a full and active life, including a nearly 30 year retirement, and was mentally alert and fun to be with right to the end. His passing was difficult for us all, but we accepted it as part of life and have moved on, taking much joy from remembering and sharing our good times with Pop. No, that isn't what has made this my Hell Year.

It's been nearly nonstop (meaning almost weekly) use of an array of complicated and dangerous implements, chemicals, techniques, unnatural positions, undignified language (what Mr. Spock would refer to as "colorful metaphors") and even - power tools. It has not been pretty.

It all started with a classic empty-nester undertaking - converting a former live-in-kid's room to a guest room. The Board concluded (with one abstention) that redoing Christy's room couldn't wait until the normal Hell Month program for two reasons. The first was that we might have guests before then that would need a fitting place to sleep. Actually, since we had already converted Cathy's old digs to a perfectly fine guest room a couple of years ago, I guess we were really worried about having multiple guests at the same time that would need suitable accommodations.

Yeah. I know. Pretty thin. But that brings us to the second and more defensible reason for the early conversion - it was a chance to buy another new bed, continuing our tradition of buying ourselves new beds and moving our current models to the new guest rooms. Oddly, as our bones continue to age, we have found ourselves preferring softer and softer sleeping equipment. Counting our cottage upgrades and redos, it would be our third new bed in the last five years. But I will admit that with this last purchase we have finally solved the problem. Our new "marshmallow pillow top" (I think that's what it's called) is roughly equivalent to climbing into a hammock lined with memory foam. It's fabulous.

But back to Hell Year. Buying and moving the bed for the new guest room was the easy part. I define easy, by the way, as any job I can sit comfortably in a chair and watch someone else do. Any job that I have to actually participate in myself must be rated on a scale of "difficult" to "nearly impossible" or on the medical scale of "a couple of Ibuprofen tablets" to "overnight at the Alpena Regional Medical Center".

Fortunately, nearly all my tasks involved with the room redo were just of the "difficult" variety, owing to my Bride's cool-headed management (she is routinely in charge of such activities) of the limited resource available to her (me). This included moving old furniture out, new (non-bed) furniture in, assembling the new headboard, upgrading electrical plugs, mounting power strips, and organizing bookshelf items in alphabetical order (one of my specialties). Despite this grueling list, I have to admit that Nancy did have the more arduous task of prepping and painting the walls and ceiling back to one, mood-friendly color (under the previous administration - my creative and artsy elder daughter -  each wall and the ceiling were different colors. It was sort of like living inside of a solved Rubik's cube).

For the record, here are a couple of after shots of the new guest room, now complete with cable TV, clothing management facilities, 40 years of National Geographic magazines (for those tough-to-get-to-sleep nights) and a feng shui-approved crystal demon-blocker by the door (can't be too cautious about what goes bump in the night).

Having survived this early, pre-Hell Month burst of productivity, Nancy and I embarked on our great out-west adventure, chronicled in my series of posts last February and March (starting with The Getaway). This trip was planned with a leisurely pace, to afford a bit of R&R from the January ordeal and recharge for the normal Hell Month period set to gear up upon our return. Unfortunately, the trip was extended a few thousand miles due to my father's illness. The extra time on the road with my parents was a very positive experience for me, allowing involvement in family support activities and decisions that I was very glad to have. But I have to admit that I didn't return home quite as rested and ready for Hell Month as I might have been.

So after getting home from my 28 days and 8000 miles on the road, I unpacked, had a big honkin' Manhattan, and attended the Hell Month planning meeting. The usual task list was generated and plannerized. But before actual Hell Month tasks began, there was a little more road work to attend to. Nancy and I were so happy with our new bed at home, we decided to connive a reason to get yet another bed - a similar super-softie for Wiser Times. Our solution was, of course, to upgrade the second bedroom.

This project was also in the range of "difficult" as I did have a couple of tasks to perform myself. The easy part - watching the Oscoda furniture delivery men relocate our current bed (a fairly new but only medium soft model) into the second bedroom followed by placement of our new bed in the master bedroom - went just fine. Our new cottage bed isn't quite marshmallow grade, but it's pretty good. I'd describe it more like sleeping on a giant Dr. Scholl's gel insole.

But back to my part, which was to assemble the new headboard/bookcase combination and changeover the old broken, foam insulation-stuffed electrical outlets with shiny, grounded new ones. Both of these tasks were tricky. The headboard assembly because it had way too many steps (which is more than two), and the plugs because it involved playing patty cake with electricity. But with a slight excess of proper supervision, I muddled through. Here are a couple of shots of the fancy new second bedroom which has morphed from the original bunk beds, to a daybed-with-trundle arrangement, to a fairly new queen bed complete with storage capacity, reading lamps and smartphone charging facilities.  

 

With hopefully all of our bedroom work done for awhile, we returned home in late April to take up the traditional Hell Month challenge. In my previous post on Hell Month, I included a sample of the typical project task list. 2014's was no different. This year included the usual cleaning, sweeping and varnish touch-up chores, plus a few special items. One of these was re-staining our new deck of only two years. Despite how vigorously we attacked the grime and leaf stains that had accrued, we couldn't get the new surface back to its original state. So we opted for a power wash and application of a slightly darker stain.

As the primary painter in the family, Nancy was responsible for the actual application of the stain. But she did save a couple of especially fun tasks for me. One of those was clearing out all of the furniture and equipment that normally resides on the deck to a temporary storage site. This wasn't too onerous and only barely made it to the "difficult" level. But the second task more than made up for this good fortune.

Our deck surrounds a large maple tree whose favorite pastime is to drop leaves and small twigs into the cracks between deck planks. The base of the tree rises through an opening in the deck filled with dirt and pea gravel. Not to be outdone by the falling leaves and twigs, the pea gravel likes to join in the fun of finding its way into the same cracks. You see where I'm headed, right? The deck couldn't be stained properly until all of the leaves, twigs and pea gravel were removed from the cracks.

So, with a deck roughly 30' in length and 40 planks wide, that comes to approximately 1200 linear feet of crack to clear. Now the uninitiated might say, "What's the big deal? Why just not take a stiff broom and sweep the deck? 15 minutes, right?" Uh, no. Tried that. The pea gravel and little knobby joints in the twigs (which are ever so slightly larger than the cracks, keeping them from just falling through to the ground below) just laughed at me from their snug hiding places. The broom phase removed about 10% of the problem.

But like Billy Murray's character "Carl the groundskeeper" in Caddyshack, I was not to be deterred, though I didn't resort to plastic explosives. Rather, a flat head screw driver, a utility knife, and a shop vac were my weapons. Stealthily, methodically, and with Navy Seal-like tenacity, I ferreted out every last twig, leaf and stone. It was intense, at times rising past the level of "difficult" to "I can't take it anymore" (the mid-point of the difficulty scale). But with patience and something called a garden scooter, I endured the nearly 12 hour ordeal and prevailed. Here's a shot of the newly stained deck, complete with all of the accoutrements restored including new deck furniture. And not a leaf, twig or stone in sight.

Another part of this year's task list was some reworking of our new putting green, installed during last year's Hell Month. As some of you noted during attempts to use the new surface, it was a bit bumpy. Or as one former acquaintance declared, "This is like putting on firewood." So we rolled back the turf carpet and added another six bags of crushed stone. We then replaced the surface and had at it with a power tamper (that weighs about 150 pounds) for a good 30 minutes. If you've never used a power tamper, it's sort of part floor polisher and part jack hammer. Fun, but not recommended for people with a lot of dental work. Here's an action shot of me holding on for dear...I mean operating the tamper, with aplomb.

The result of the extra stone and power tamping were a distinct improvement in puttability of the surface, from "firewood" maybe all the way to "patio block".

To be sure, my Bride has not been sitting idly by while fate has had its way with me. She has been very helpful with my activities (front office support is always a plus) while coping with her own Hell Month agenda. In addition to the heavy lifting on the deck refurbishing, she's completed a number of independent assignments. One was a thorough power washing of our fence gate, which was crusted with years of green mold. Here are before and after pics of her handiwork.

An even more impressive undertaking was Nancy's refinishing of her Grandmother LeRoy's dining room table; it had been in deep storage under our stairway for at least 15 years, waiting for a new opportunity to shine. The restored table is now sitting proudly in Christy's apartment, serving a new generation. Here are before and after pics of this family classic.

This brings my sad tale to just about the end of May, when Hell Month generally ends. Nancy and I usually look forward to spending the rest of the year (or at least the rest of the summer) lollygagging our lives away in deck chairs, Adirondacks, beach floaties and the like. But no. Not this year. Hell Month has refused to fade away and leave us in peace.

Unfortunately (perhaps fortunately for you), break time is over for now and I must return to my labors. So I'll have to wait for a follow-up post to share (as Paul Harvey used to say) the rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrest of the story.

Until then, toodles.

Grosse Pointe Charles (or at least what's left of him)