Baking and raking season

A good start

The Fall season has been mild so far. We have had a frost in most places, but with the clear skies has come generally warm afternoons under October sun. This has kept the leaves on the trees a bit longer than usual and I think has limited the Fall color a bit. We had enough leaves to rake so we did our first batch earlier this week. Limiting the amount of leaves this year was the leaf mold that attacked the Norway maples. Wet weather in the first half of the summer allowed the mold to spread through the area including the trees along the park fence at the north end of the property. These maples make up a good percentage of our trees and they dropped their leaves early which ended just getting mulched up by the mower. The rest of our trees, a silver maple, some sugar maples, linden and a hickory were unaffected by the mold and seem to be holding on to their leaves longer than usual.

First fire of the season

One night did get cold enough for our first fire of the season. The fire drafted well and it was a nice hot fire, almost too hot and we ended up sleeping with the fan on that night. I did get the chimney inspected and the report was mixed. The chimney is fine, and safe to be used, but an odd 90 angle in the flue makes it impossible to clean properly. Any debris that falls down from the top is inaccessible from the bottom due to the right angle run of the flue. The chimney guy suggests that next year we install a clean out on the outside of the chimney so they can access the entire flue. Also, he did say there was some loose brick and mortar which may need to be repaired at the same time. Stay tuned.

One batch of cinnamon buns. We made two batches. 

As mentioned in the subject, it is indeed baking season and we did two large batches of cinnamon buns. It's actually pretty easy to do. We use a recipe that came with our first KitchenAid mixer many years ago. All the mixing and kneading is done by the mixer, so we just have to roll out the dough, put down the filling, and roll it back up. We do doctor up the drizzle coating and filling a bit to give it our own stamp on them. They came out real nice.

Next on the baking list is our Christmas bread. We follow and old white bread recipe from the church cook book to make large round loaves. This is more work for me since the amount of dough overwhelms the mixer so that I have to hand knead the bread. It's kind of messy and back braking since the kitchen table is just too low for me. Another problem is our overstuffed freezer. We just don't have enough room to store the bread after we bake it so we're going to have to work on that.

Fall decorations are up. Note the empty flower containers in
front of the porch. They're filled with rocks and dirt and I'm
too damn lazy to move them.  

Cindy had the idea that corn stalks would be nice to have at the front of the house so we went out to look for them. I was shocked at how much money they wanted for those things. There are vast fields filled with them awaiting to be ground up for silage so they really should not be all that expensive. Anyway, we ended up getting three nice bundles at a local farm market for $15 bucks. I tied them to the columns at the sides of the porch and in the center. I really like the looks of them and they are appropriate right through Thanksgiving. I intend to get my money's worth out of them!

The transition to fall accelerates

Last year's leaves. Soon to be repeated.

For whatever reason, we've had some very nice fall's lately. It's a far nicer season in upstate NY than spring, generally drier and warmer, with more sun. As a meteorologist, I understand the reasons for this, but as a resident and native, I appreciate it. It is truly the best time to be in this part of the world, well, most years anyway. We tend to spend days under high pressure bringing hours of sun, but cool and clear nights. No longer dependent on air conditioning for comfortable sleeping, breezes blow the curtains gently at night, As the inversion settles in late, fog develops and sound carries distant train whistles. Even the distant thrump of tires on the highway is somehow comforting. The days are dazzling. Color develops in the trees and is set off by deep blue skies. Mums, followed by pumpkins, appear on porches adding to the unique orange of the fall season. Our cats, hiding from the heat all summer, sense the impending cold and decide they want to snuggle again, and search for spots where sun streams through windows, warming the sill and the floor.

2016's Xmas tree. I did turn the
saw around properly before cutting.

The food changes as well. Cider and apples are everywhere, and even though you can get them year round, they taste better now. Soup for lunch or dinner is suddenly and option and grilling, while still an option, is less leisurely and seems more urgent as the evening sun is shorter, and the end of the season looms. Casseroles and couch time is more likely than burgers and porch time. It is a great time for walks, as the cooler air is more comfortable, and the bugs are less plentiful. Plus, who doesn't like kicking through crunchy leaves?

It's a great time of the year to be a sports fan. Football from high school to pro, is in full swing. Baseball playoffs are underway and the October classic is just around the corner. Very soon, the best spectator sport in town resumes as our local hockey team begins it's season. There's nothing better to do in January and February, on those long winter's nights, then to head to the bright lights and pulsing sounds of hockey. It's the place to be in the late fall and winter.

It's also time to begin planning for the holiday. Not just where to go and what to do, but also to begin baking. Cindy and I both work, I often on weekends, and we bake bread and cinnamon buns so we have to pick our time in advance. Cindy, first sister Karen, and first Aunt Kathie will no doubt have their annual cookie baking/vodka drinking party. I show up in time to be the designated driver, and designated broken cookie eater. We also need to chose a weekend to cut down and decorate our tree, a full two day task at least.

A full cord of firewood has been delivered and stacked, but I still must fine time to double check the furnace, and do a preliminary start up of the snow blower. But the days are still sunny and warm, so I don't feel the urgency. But winter can arrive in New York suddenly though, so I cannot let the benign weather fool me.

More windows and a door

The ugly door. Note the gap filled with
foam insulation on the left side.

The new door clamped to
the saw horses.

First, the door. When we first bought our home, we had this nasty old door to our back porch/pantry that wouldn't properly close, or even be locked. My temporary solution, was to use wood screws to secure the door from intruders. Well, here we are nearly 2 years later and we still have the same door, screwed shut. It's ugly. So, the obvious solution is to replace the door. I got my hands on a nice replacement door from a friend that no longer needed it. It was to big for the opening (better than too small) so it needed to be cut to fit. I called upon my handy Uncle Ed to help. He has more tools, better tools, and frankly more common sense and experience than I do and is good to have around when making critical cuts and decisions on things that really matter. After much consideration, including a phone-a-friend to a professional carpenter, we determined how much we needed to cut off the new door to make it fit, while allowing for a threshold and weatherstripping. After several careful measurements, we cut the door. We test fit it in the frame and it just needed to be planed then the door fit perfectly, despite the crooked frame. One problem: I forgot to take into consideration the thickness of the door. Essentially, the door was thicker than the previous door and when properly standing in the frame, it stuck out a bout a quarter of an inch. This necessitates a complete rebuild of the frame and door jam. So, I screwed the new door in place and considered my options.

The pretty door.

After discussion with Cindy, and weighing the amount of reconstruction needed, we decided to refurbish the old door, then add a screen door to increase security and air flow through the kitchen. So, a couple days later I took down the "new" door, and rescued the old ugly door from the side of the garage and screwed it back into place. Oof.  I went ahead and sanded, repaired and repainted the outside of the old door and frame. The outside frame was off by about a quarter inch so I needed to add a piece of molding to cover the gap. It actually looks pretty good now and it awaits new door hardware and return to operation.

Windows. Back in February I wrote a blog about out new storm windows. They were needed on many of the first floor windows. Before installing them, I scraped and repainted the window frames, which were in really bad shape, especially on the south and west side of the house. The second floor already had storm windows, but that didn't mean that the window frames were in any better shape. In fact, they were worse. I was able to do the attic windows, essentially on the third floor, by leaning out one and working on the other. The second floor, needed a longer ladder than I owned. After some shopping around, I purchased a 28 foot ladder from Home Depot and then had no choice then to climb, scrape and paint.

It's higher than it looks. Finished window
below. Second floor looks tired. 

My experience as a volunteer firefighter has given me both respect and a good working knowledge of ladders. This makes me confident in climbing them, and I have no real fear of heights, but is still tiresome and a bit nerve racking at times. Plus. I have no idea how much the ladder weighs, but moving it multiple times, to different windows, is exhausting. Of course, there's the climbing and descending the ladder multiple times as your bring tools and paint up and down. One of the bigger issues was painting around the already installed windows without smearing the paint. Bees were an issue, as the warm fall days seem to bring out the honey bees and they seemed very interested in my work. It's not pleasant to deal with bees when you're up a 28 foot ladder with tools, paint, and bees buzzing you.  Anyway, it took almost two full days of ladder work, scraping, and painting to get the window work "done". Done is in quotes because I actually did not get to the two front bedroom windows. It was just too hot and standing on the porch roof in that heat was just not an appealing thought. I will wait for a cloudy and cool day to finish the job. In any event I'm really happy with the work and how the windows came out.

Upcoming work: Chimney inspection, glazing windows, a huge pile of firewood, and plants where they shouldn't be.

Rains, trains, and automobiles

I miss my blog. More importantly, I hope someone else has. I find writing the blog to be relaxing and a good way to chart and stimulate progress, and I'm gratified when people read it. Anyway, a couple of weeks after I wrote my last blog, we went on vacation and I just haven't found the time to write, and I miss it.  That does not mean I've gotten a lot of work done on the house, but we have been busy.

All aboard! Cindy is ready to go.

Relaxing in our roomette*.
 * - train speak for tiny room 

I had a bachelor party to attend in the Florida Keys, so we decided to combine that with our annual beach vacation. Flying would have been cheap and fast, but we wanted to spend a few nights in Myrtle Beach on the return trip, which would have been logistically difficult, so we decided to take the Amtrak Auto Train. The Auto Train runs from outside of Washington DC to near Orlando, 7 days a week. They load your car on train and you sit back, relax, and about 16 hours later, you're in Florida. They unload the cars and you are on your way. The real advantage is avoiding the traffic, frustration, and  general ugliness of 700 miles of I-95. The train leaves around 3 pm and arrives around 9 am so we opted for a sleeper, a nominal charge but gives you a private room for the entire trip, and a real bed in which to sleep.

After the train got going, we headed to the lounge car for a drink. We had a very attentive bartender and grabbed a table with a big picture window. They sold Amtrak playing cards (very cool) so we bought a pack and played for a couple hours. Dinner was at 5 (included in your ticket price) and was actually quite good. I had a filet mignon with veggies and a baked potato, Cindy a pork chop. After dinner,  we returned to our room to watch a movie on my laptop. By 10, we were tired enough to have the steward unfold the beds and we went to sleep. We arrived pretty much on time in Sanford the next morning.

A soggy yet beautiful pool area at Margaritaville Resort.

Then the rain started. As we headed south to the Margaritaville Beach Resort, we drove into a tropical wave which would plague us for the rest of the trip. The resort and immediate area of the beach front was beautiful, and rather empty since it was off season (go figure), but the weather was not conducive to relaxing by the pool. So, the next day we headed to the Aventura Mall, a monument to excess and where Macy's is considered low end shopping. The good news is that Cindy was able to find a dress she needed for an upcoming wedding, and I was able to find a Chili's hidden in a far flung parking lot. They were NOT selling $10 beers. The bigger takeaway though was the traffic. Horrific. Especially when you throw in the rain. Multiple lanes of traffic at speeds completely disregarding the posted limit, tailgating, and various other traffic laws. I just don't know how people put up with this day after day. It was far worse, in my opinion, than New York City.  I'm really spoiled living in a small town.

Lunch at the wharf in Islamorada.

On Saturday I headed down to the Keys to golf with the bachelor party while Cindy stayed back. If you've ever have the chance to drive the overseas highway, I highly recommend it. It is just spectacular and so different, even from the rest of Florida. I met the rest of the party for lunch that day, and then we went golfing on Sunday. I was actually surprised there is a golf course on the Keys. These are tiny islands, most of them and land is very expensive, but sure enough a 9 hole course is out there. While Cindy stayed in the rain, it was very hot and sunny on the course and by about the 15th hole I had enough.

I drove back to Hollywood and Cindy after the golf and the next morning we headed out on the full day of driving to Myrtle Beach and the North Beach Plantation. Unfortunately, the rain followed us. The wave was now a depression and there was a watch up for a tropical storm. Ugh. Luckily, the system started to pick up speed and moved out Wednesday leaving us a couple days of good weather before we headed home Friday.

As I write this now the entire area of Florida that we visited in threatened by Irma. I fear we are on the verge of a terrible tragedy. Settling and living in paradise does come with a price, and millions of people are about to have their lives completely changed, perhaps forever. I hope those who can, have listened to the authorities and evacuated and will wait out the storm in safe areas. Good luck to all in Irma's path. My thoughts will be with you.

I did manage to get some work done when we got home. I finished the electrical rewire of the garage, and I do keep thinking about when I might start to stack that huge pile of wood in the backyard. Then there's the saga of the replacement door, but that's a story for the next blog.

Stairs, a window, and plaster

Half painted stairs. They are completed now.

A decent amount has been accomplished since my last post, mainly due to a week off work and a decision to not to travel but to devote the time to projects. First on the list was to complete the stairwell painting. I had two readers suggest that I paint half the stairs (side to side) allowing access to the basement by us and the cats, kind of like a construction zone reduced to one lane (normal summer driving in Pennsylvania). I liked that advice and moved ahead. Now, I expected that Cindy and I would not walk through the wet paint, and for the most part , this was a correct assumption. It was however, a leap of faith to depend on Katia and Natasha to use their kitty smarts and stay off the wet paint, with a bit of guidance in the form of large objects placed blocking the "closed" section. Katia, whom I alternately call "smarty pants" and "Klutzia" because she is both smart and clumsy, turned out to be both. As I was working, she started down the stairs, carefully avoiding the wet paint (smart). As she passed me she cut over to the wet side, prompting me to yell her name. She stopped (smart), then sat in the wet paint awaiting further instructions (clumsy). I followed her down to the basement and she allowed me to inspect her feet, which were remarkably dry. Her cat butt, however, was a bit gray, so she was confined to the basement for a few hours, which she really didn't seem to mind. Natasha decided to simply avoid the staircase altogether and slept through the process, demonstrating her ability to "hold it" for several hours.

I finally installed (with Cindy's help of course), the final window on the first floor. In this blog I wrote about installing the windows, while also somehow forgetting to order one for the kitchen. I ordered the forgotten window back in the Spring and we installed it last week. If you remember, or re-read the blog, I was very proud of myself for measuring every window correctly, even allowing for "slop" since none of the old windows were perfectly square. Heh heh. Well, confidence is a dangerous thing and I ordered one window to complete the job, and it was wrong. Technically, I measured correctly but forgot to allow for a window frame that was off by a quarter inch. Rather than re-order and have a useless window, I decided to "fix" the old window. Cindy was notably impressed as I shaved down the inside of the crooked frame, smoothed and filled my work, and repainted. This essentially "squared" the frame and allowed the window to fit.

The offending wall.

Cindy proclaimed herself to be tired of looking at our ugly upstairs hallway and so that has become the next interior "room" to be repaired. Unfortunately, there are some special issues that need to be addressed in the hallway. First, on one wall, the plaster has pulled away from the lathe.  This gives the wall a spongy feel as the plaster moves. If left like this, the plaster will eventually crack and fall away. The thought of removing around 9 square feet of plaster was not comforting, so I did some research. I found a video detailing repair of such a wall at the This Old House website. Essentially, you drill multiple holes through the plaster (not into the lathe), inject plaster bonder, followed by construction adhesive. Then, you install several dry wall screws with large washers through the plaster into the lathe to pull the plaster back to the lathe. After 24 hours, you remove the dry wall screws, fill the holes, and remove the excess glue that has oozed from the holes. Then sand, skim, and sand the wall and your done. Sounds easy, right? Wish me luck.

Ugly, poorly installed molding. I plan to replace it with
prettier, poorly installed molding.

The other problem is common through the house. There is a large gap between the wall and the ceiling that had been covered by cheap molding. I removed the molding and will fill the gap with spray foam insulation and replace with a better quality molding. That is rather tedious and although I'm getting better at mitering and installing molding, the additional difficulty of nailing the molding to exterior walls, which are masonry, will cause me to take more time. I will not be installing the fancy crown molding that we have downstairs, perhaps something closer to what I installed in the vestibule.

One step at a time...

So the title of this blog is the answer to a question. The question is: How do you paint stairs? I've never actually done this before and it requires thought, especially if it is a stairwell that provides the sole access to an important part of the house, in this case, the basement. To go back to the beginning, in my previous blog I wrote about painting the stairwell walls. Well that was done and it came out nicely. I expected to paint the stairs all along, so I allowed my self to drip everywhere on the old stairs. Now it was time to think about painting the stairs. First, color. My initial thought was a standard grey, which would match the kitchen. Cindy was more interested in keeping a brown shade of some kind, better matching the theme in the rest of the house. So, we went out and purchased a sample, then another, then another, then...well you get the idea. We couldn't find a shade of brown or tan that we liked, and thought it would hide dirt being dragged in from the side door. Cindy then agreed and we tried a shade of grey and we liked it. Nice being right for a change!

Exciting photo of the underside of our basement stairs. 

Now, the logistics of painting stairs. Keep in mind the walls were done last month, so this is just the steps themselves. At least two things must be considered: How to paint them and in what order. For starters, when the painting is complete, we must keep off the stairs for at least a day and have no access to anything in the basement (including litter boxes). Then there's the how. I decided to paint all the "trim" areas, like the undersides of the steps, the risers and stringers, along with the railings first. For the undersides and other trim work near the bottom, I used my crawler which is normally used for under car repairs. There's also the issue of painting the underside of the stairs at all. I don't know if the stairs were original to the house, but clearly they had never been painted and looked to be in pretty good shape. No one is likely to see them, so I was inclined not to paint the bottom of the steps, but one raised eyebrow from Cindy changed my thinking. Anyway, all the sides, bottoms, and rails have now been painted twice and I await a time when I can close off the stairwell and paint the surface of the stairs. They will need two coats so at least a couple days to paint and properly dry.

Very professional looking installation,
don't you think? 

The issue of security continues to come up and I am dragging my feet on a decision of what to do. The immediate area around our home is good, with good neighbors, but frankly, there are some pretty shady areas and people in Binghamton these days and I work a lot of nights, leaving Cindy and the cats alone. In fact, we have some squatters living in a home down the street that have had the police called on them at least 50 times this year already. In any event, I think I have settled in on a security solution, but haven't decided on which (self installed) package of equipment suits us best. More on that in a later blog. In the meantime, I went ahead and changed out one of our (broken) interior cameras for an exterior grade camera. Nest gave me a nice discount on the camera since the other had broken. I decided to mount the camera on the garage, facing the driveway and the backyard, mainly because we already had a car broken into, and our garage is not secure (I know, I know). The camera itself is interesting. You screw a metal plate onto the mounting surface, then stick a cup shaped magnet to the plate. The metal, rounded back of the camera holds it to the mount and is infinitely adjustable as it slides around in the magnetic cup.

The view from our new security camera. Anyone steals
our garbage, I got'em. 

The camera is set to find your WiFi network so before mounting you use the camera, and your smart phone or tablet, to find out if the signal at your chosen spot is strong enough to be useful. That's a bit tricky while standing on a ladder. The camera does have to be plugged into AC power, which we have in the garage. Unfortunately, like so many other things in our home, the electric is not properly installed so I have yet another job to do re-wiring the lights and installing proper outlets on the second floor. In the meantime, I have an extension cord running to the camera's plug. So far, the camera has been working great. I look forward to keeping an eye on things when I am away from home.

What's next? Well, it's not on the list...

A beautiful late Spring sky. 

I almost named this blog Miscellaneous Part 4, but decided to be a bit more clever. I'm not sure I succeeded. In any event, this edition has no particular subject, mainly since I've not worked on any projects that would fill a blog. That's not to say that we haven't made progress.

Fixing up this house sometime feels like I'm trying to bail out the ocean. Long range projects compete with short term repairs and on going maintenance. Also, there's that pesky work thing in which they expect me to show up at least 5 days a week and perform tasks for them, if I expect to be paid. Considering all this, Cindy and I are discussing which major project we need to take on next. The two in the running are the kitchen and the bathroom. I'm pretty comfortable that I have finally fixed the chronic tub leak, so the kitchen ceiling below needs a repair and paint job, as do the walls. In the bathroom, a major renovation is somewhere in the future, but in the meantime a paint job and tile repair is in order. Cindy preferred to do the bathroom first and I didn't feel strongly either way so the choice was made. The decision having been made, naturally I went on and did something else.

Cindy kind of surprised me with her utter disdain for the stairwell going to the basement. On the list of things to do, this stairwell was not even on my radar but when she pointed out how dirty and dingy it was, I realized she made a good point. The cream colored walls were smeared with hand prints and general dirt. Whoever had painted it, had used a flat wall paint making it look even uglier and better at catching grime. I already had a gallon or so of pure white satin finish paint so this should be an easy and quick job, right? Oh you optimistic fool!  It turned out taking two full days of difficult work.

This stuff is the best.

First, I took the handrail down. Easy enough. I put it in the basement and assigned Cindy the task of cleaning nearly a hundred years of hand grime and grease off the railing. It turned her wash bucket water black. Yuck. I began to look at the walls and quickly realized two things: There were a lot dents and holes in the walls, and, I had several different surfaces to work with. For the holes, it was a fairly simple matter to get out the patch repair stuff and fill them in. The surfaces, and general poor condition of them, required more thought and work. The wall types were standard plaster on lathe, our famous exterior wall finished block, poured concrete, and finally a wooden wainscoting type surface on the lower interior section. All were stained in one way or another, but the concrete especially had water and rust stains that would never be covered by regular paint. So, I decided to go with BIN. The stuff smells bad, is a pain to work with, and it destroys any paint brush you use with it, but it really does a good job sealing and covering stains. It's not cheap either, but I decided to do the entire block wall and the poured concrete with BIN before painting. Luckily, it dries quickly and I was able to get the first finish coat on before the end of the day. The next day I did a second coat to even out the job. It looks great.

Of course, there's the stairs themselves. The paint on them is worn, plus now there's a bit of white wall paint on them as well. It looks like the last time they were painted they used standard semi gloss wall paint in a deep brown. I already have the light chocolate floor paint I used on the porch, but that may actually be a bit too light for the stairs. We still haven't chosen a color yet so that job remains open.

Elsewhere, I did manage to plant some flowers in two huge pots we had sitting around. I did a red, white, and blue theme in flowers and they actually look pretty good. They sit in the yard at the front corners of the porch. Around back, I did some more weeding in the "flower" beds and added some fresh while marble stone after spaying some weed killer on the edges. The weed barrier I laid down last year apparently lasts only one year. Rats. Next year I may have to remove the stone, double down on the weed barrier, and put the stone back.

I've been carefully avoiding the tree roots with the lawnmower so I've had no more problems. We've had a pretty wet year and the grass is really growing, so naturally I'm quite pleased with the new mower. Instead of pretty much using up a day, I can finish the entire thing in less than an hour, and not be tired. In fact, I can do it easily after work now.