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.
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)
Seems pretty rough, I think I would just stain the twigs and rocks right along with the deck
ReplyDeleteThanks for the suggestion. I'll try to get that idea pass the "board" next time :-)
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