An Autumn Shed Build, A Spring Staining

Oh the joys of home ownership.  A to-do list as long as my right leg, which you know is pretty long. Home repairs, home upgrades, property preservation: all things wonderful.  It's not that I don't like doing these things, because I really do, I genuinely enjoy working on our little home and making it ours.  It's just overwhelming sometimes when I allow my mind to think of everything on my to-do list all at once.  Too many things, all at once, melt-down.  I need to maintain the advice my own twink brother often offers, 'One day at a time.'  

The good news is that once I set my mind to something I can usually focus all of my energies to it. One such occasion came last latesummer/fall when I tasked myself with building a garden shed for myself and the missus.  The house came it an old rickety metal shed with a rotting roof.  The house also came with a dilapidated garage.  So we needed a PROPER place to store our lawn and garden implements through the notoriously long and cold Ohio winter.  With this in mind, I set out to build our very own 16x12 'Saltbox' design garden shed.

No previous construction experience?  NO PROBLEM.  At least that's the perspective granted by hindsight.  In reality there were a lot of head-scratching moments that required a lot of Milliren-grade research and pondering.  But somehow, someway, I managed to keep the ball rolling and built the shed, pictured below, in a little over a month... working primarily on the evening and weekends.  I was working off of bought plans that I ended up ignoring halfway through because their lack of detail (NOT Milliren-grade) was utterly frustrating.  Some Pics:

Starting with block on compacted gravel, laying out the floor. First layer - 4x4 skids.

  

2X6 Pressure Treated floor joists, 12" On center spacing.

 

3/4" Pressure Treated plywood floor sheathing.

That's a pretty dance floor!

Laying out the front wall.

Front wall.

  

Rear wall plus door and window openings.

Sidewall time.

Now we have a wood box with no roof!

Handmade roof trusses all nailed up.

This roof can support overgrown men!

Tar paper is on, time for shingles.

Amber was a big help on the roofing, and every other thing I needed help with!

Water tight.

Handmade doors, nothing fancy, cedar trim on T1-11 backing.

Finishing up the cedar trim.

Almost done, just needs a ramp.

I managed to build a ramp a week or two later and we loaded her up for the winter!  I wanted to get some stain on it, but I had a lot of other small projects calling my name and I figured this would be good enough until spring.  So this year I had every intention of getting a coat of stain down by the end of May.  I did get gutters installed with the help of Jim, but of course things never go as planned, and I didn't get around to staining until early July.  I went with a basic red-wood stain from Behr for the T1-11, and I plan to put a natural stain on the cedar trim.  Here are some pics of that!

Jim helping with the gutters.  Notice the staining around the bottom of the
 shed from the water run-off. Hopefully the gutters put an end to that!

So far I quite like it. Also, notice the gutters which Jim helped me install!

And that is basically it, Gigi came out for the final inspection, she approved.

So, that was my fun little project last year.  I still need to get a coat of sealant on the cedar, but I will probably wait until fall, once again I have too many other things to do =).  This was a really rewarding experience, and I plan to carry the carpentry skills into a new project...I am going to patch up and fix the garage on the property.  But that will be another blog in the (hopefully) not too distant future. -M

Random Photos

Here are some random photos.  Animals and food - some of my favorite things!

Coconut Bacon BLT.  My FAVORITE!

Not the healthiest, but oh so delcious.
Coney dogs and mac n' cheeze.

Jimmy being goofy at grandma's

Peanut fight!

Gigi torture

This little guy hit the window and we feared
the worst.  He ended up flying away though!

Not a great photo, but the Pileated Woodpecker
landed on our bird feeder... he's bigger than Pal!

Trying some container gardening this year.
We're taking bets on how soon the deer eat it all.

Our neighbor's dogs are so sweet

Max is Gigi's boyfriend <3

Precious Gigi

Thug Hogie

Soaking up some sun

Bathroom Facelift

When my grandma told me that she still checks our blog, even though we have obviously slacked for a long time, I felt pretty bad.  With work being so busy and stressful on top of house projects that take way too long, blogging has completely slipped past me.  I’m not sure how many other people will look at our blog, but I’ll try to keep at least grandma updated and hope that some others can enjoy as well.  I’m not make any promises though, I tend to lose steam pretty quickly!

I figured I would post our bathroom progress.  It all started with a bath fan.  I’ve been complaining ever since we bought the house that there was no exhaust fan in our only full bathroom.  Every few weeks, mold would start growing and I would curse the whole time I’d be cleaning it.  To make matters worse, the tub area was enclosed by a soffit (I’m not sure if that’s the proper term, but there was ~2 feet of wall from the ceiling that ran along the front edge of the shower).  This created 4 perfect corners for the mold to call home.

Now, installing a bath fan should not be hard, so why did it take us so long?  We have a flat roof and the “access” in the attic is probably less than a foot.  There is no way anyone is crawling up there, not even Jimmy or Kylie.  This means that we had to bust the ceiling open to install the fan and repatch it.  Since we don’t have much experience in doing that my dad said that he would help us.  After awhile, we realized that he is way too busy to help with something that is probably something he considers to be an easy job.  That’s when Mark got tired of listening to me and decided to do it himself with the help of Jim.  On March 27th (yes, 3 months ago), Mark and Jim started busting up the ceiling and tore down the soffit thingy.  That weekend we had a bath fan installed.

Over the next few weeks, Mark worked on patching up the ceiling.  Drywall compound is not fun to work with and seems to take forever.  While he was at it, we had a lot of other imperfection in the old plaster walls, so he touched some of that up too.  The dust in this house over the past 3 months has been unbelievable.  There is still a lot of cleaning that needs to be done to recover!

I actually lied before.  It all started with a toilet.  The old toilet was stained from years and years of well water.  If you know me at all, I will scrub and scrub until I get something clean.  This wasn’t happening for the toiler.  It started to have some water spraying issues so it was the perfect time for me to insist on a new toilet.  As soon as the beautiful, new toilet was installed, it got us both motivated to keep going on the upgrades.

The second thing on my mind was the paint.  The bathroom was flamingo pink.  I’m not sure why they even make that paint color.  I wanted a nice, relaxing pale blue.  Well, with new paint and nice clean toilet, we decided that the old vanity was going to be an eyesore.  Mark and I are very bad at making decisions, so it took us longer than normal to pick out a new vanity.  We ended up going with a tall one (which makes Mark happy) that was special ordered.  Then came the sink.  That should have been an easy decision, but no, we made it complicated.  We can only squeeze a 31″ vanity into the bathroom, so we finally went with a plain white top with a smaller than normal bowl to give us more counter space.  Of course that had to be custom ordered as well.  We could have went cheaper, but it’s the main bathroom and we wanted to be happy with our upgrades.  We also got a new medicine cabinet while we were at it to gain some more mirror space.

The only other intention we had was to rip up the old flooring and lay down some new stuff.  We didn’t splurge for tile or something really nice since the floor is uneven and we were weren’t anticipating everything else we were doing to the room.  It still looks nice and fresh!  Then I started looking at the cast iron tub, which is a tan color and old.  Resurfacing that sucker would have cost a lot of money and work.  All of the kits are for white tubs, the tan would need special ordered.  I decided just to scrub the hell out of it.  It came pretty clean, but the bottom surface no longer has a gloss to it.  We will live.  The surround had to go though.  It was supposed to be a cream color, but it looked light green compared to the tub.  That was also an unexpected upgrade, but I’m glad we did it.

The rest of the struggle has been the little stuff.  Tub caulking is a total pain and I am awful at paining trim that already has layers of paint on it.  We replaced the moulding and caulking that is the only thing left to do, besides heavy duty cleaning!

Ok, here’s the fun part… pictures.  It doesn't look like much, but we did a ton of work.  Also, this is why I don’t blog, I write way too much!

Brewing Up a Storm

Ladies and Gents, as most of you know, Amber and I had been on a serious brewing hiatus dating all the way back to labor day of last year.  Well the hiatus has officially ended as of last Sunday when we brewed up an American pale ale to help beat the summer heat.  We've christened the brew as Pushmower Pale Ale......a light american style ale with just enough oomph to fortify the spirit of a man weary with exhaustion from having spent 1.5 hours pushing a little craftsman mower around our ~1acre front yard.  Perhaps when we get a riding mower we will brew a corn lager, but for now we will be requiring something a little more potent.

The motivation for a brew.

The brewday was super relaxed with truly minimal effort.  For anyone paying attention to our last few brews you might recall that we became a little distracted by trying to perfect our process.  Everything from water chemistry to yeast health came into question and subsequently led to a fairly rigorous brewday routine that always left us feeling exhausted.  Well for this batch we decided to strip down the all-grain brewing process to it's barest of essentials.......that's right, we did a brew in a bag (BIAB)!  Now, please don't be mistaken, we still took the brewing process very seriously and made every effort to ensure that this beer would turn out well, we just didn't get uptight about the things we used to get uptight about.

The brewday went off without a hitch, and we had a lot of fun brewing.....so much fun that I(Mark) decided we needed to brew a couple more beers.  Friday night Amber went to a concert up in Cleveland. So I stayed home, had some friends over, and brewed up another BIAB......an English ESB.  But i didn't stop there, Saturday night I decided to brew up a Belgian pale ale just to round out the collection of the three primary ale brewing regions in the world.

All three of these beers were brewed with our unfiltered, unsoftened, unfettered well water.  It's really delicious water.  We recently had a water analysis done by a local water treatment company, and the gentleman said that we have some of the best water he has seen.....so good we could get away without any treatment at all(that is what the previous owners did for the past 60years anyway).  Knowing that it would have been in his best interest to sell us a water treatment product I knew he must be telling us the truth.  The only thing that concerned me(as a brewer) was the iron content.  At 0.5ppm it's slightly above the recommended threshold for brewing.  If these beers come out tasting metallic I will know what caused it.  I digress, all three of these beers were also BIAB, all three are ales, all three will be around 5% ABV, all three will have less than 50IBU, and all three will be blonde/golden in color.  The true differentiator for these beers will be yeast and hop character, each reflective of it's brewing region.  I have great respect for the brewers of America, England, and Belgium, and I hope that these three beers stand up to the great brewing tradition of those three countries.

Pushmower Pale Ale
6.5 lbs pale 2-row
1 lb Vienna malt
0.5 lbs wheat

0.5oz Amarillo at 60minutes
0.5oz Amarillo at 20minutes
0.5oz Simcoe at 5minutes
0.5oz Simcoe at 0minutes

Wyeast 1272 American Ale II

lESBaru
8 lbs Marris Otter
1 lb Amber malt

1oz EKG at 60minutes
0.5oz Fuggles at 40minutes
0.5oz Fuggles at 20minutes
0.5oz Fuggles at 5minutes
0.5oz Fuggles at 0minutes

Wyeast 1098 British Ale

Belgo PaleBlonde Patersbier
8 lbs Dingemans 2-row
0.5lbs Dingemans Caravienne

1oz Styrian Goldings at 75minutes
1oz Styrian Goldings at 15minutes

Wyeast 1214 Belgian Abbey Ale

I'm looking forward to tapping into each of these beers as the weather really heats up.  Come over and share with us?

Every brewday starts with a crush.

A lazy BIABer will tie his brewbag to the cabinets above the stove.

Amber's favorite part......the hot break!

Teaching Gigi the process.....someday she might fill in for our dearly departed Brewmaster Dinx.

Hogan wants to help too!

Subie doobie doo

With Mark's persuasion, I caved in and got a new car. I have the mentality that if it's not broke, don't fix it. Well, as much as I enjoyed my Corolla, it had a lot that needed to be fixed. Plus, I was never as close to it as I was with my prior '98 Tacoma or the inherited '90 Plymoth Colt from my great grandfather (sadly, it was a short lived car).  The Corolla had hit the 10 year mark and was getting to the point where it wasn't the most reliable for long trips. Especially since Mark doesn't get the loaner perk from his old job anymore. My check engine light had been haunting me for months now and was looking like a $300-400 fix. Both bumpers needed replaced or repainted, the hood was dented from a large branch, etc... Mark loves his Civic and may have had a harder time selling it due to age, manual everything and no ac. I whined a little bit, but ultimately knew we needed a dependable car that won't keep giving us issues.

My first thought was to buy used, but Mark had some good points about the risks of used vs new. Neither of us had a car payment, so it was easier to rationalize a new car. You can't beat that scent :)

I wanted to stick with a manual transmission which is apparently a test of patience when buying a car.  Although it is the standard transmission, it is impossible to find at the dealer.  Luckily, there was one that was being shipped to another dealer in Ohio.  We were able to secure it, but had to wait 3 weeks to get it.  We posted my Corolla on Craigslist last Monday, thinking it would take awhile and few tries to sell it.  The next day, a couple looked at it and said they wanted it.  It took one day!  We officially handed it over last Friday.  They bought it for their son as a surprise birthday gift.  I settled for a little less than we were asking because they were going to get the engine light issue fixed, repaint and fix the dents.  I was so happy to know that someone was going to put the work into that it deserves.  Hopefully their son loves it!  This whole past week, Mark has been dropping me off a work.  I'm way too tired in the morning for him to put up with my backseat driving. We made it through the week though and it was nice to spend an extra 20 minutes together in the morning.

So, here it is... We are now proud owners of a Subaru Impreza! The only thing that might make next year's winter somewhat enjoyable. 

I love it!

I was a little worried about a white car, but it's a pearl white and beautiful.

My old Colt.  I was so upset when it was totaled.  Hopefully this white Subaru is my second chance!