OK so today we had a HUGE EMERGENCY, involving water moistening the ceiling over my Spouse's office and said Spouse running frantically all over the place freaking out, and the attic was briefly investigated (from a safe distance through the hole leading up to it) and the leak was pronounced to be near the chimney where there was no flashing but since the chimney cap had been removed it now leaked more with the wind coming from the Northeast and a heavy rain all morning, and OMG we need to rent a boom lift so off we go, and now we arrive back with a rental Condor in the driveway, and OH Dear it doesn't reach to the chimney and now we have to bring it back, and the hardware store didn't have patching compound and it's still raining cats and dogs and no I am not controlling my emotions I am getting something DONE ABOUT IT BECAUSE IT'S OUR HOUSE.




( Click here for a more calm and sedate continuation.... )

Got some more paint scraping done in the upper stairwell. I did the top half of the door -- it looks like it was made to go there hehe. The blue line to the right is to protect the previously-bared wood when the second coat of yellow paint is put on the walls.



Once it is completely scraped, I can pull it out of the doorway and scrape the right-hand edge, then laminate more wood onto that so that the door can be made to exactly fit this doorway. That will make it possible to mount it on its hinges instead of having it held in with wedges. One time there was a terrific gust of wind and it popped the door off the wedges so it came crashing down. Boy did that make us all jump :D



The window that had been partially scraped before is now completely scraped. It looks great! The following day, I also washed all the Zip Strip gack off the glass and for the first time in weeks you could see through the window really well. Progress has been made! w00T!

The baby American Liberty Elm is still doing great! It's covered with small, less than 1" long leaves that make me very nostalgic since I grew up surrounded by huge elms in southside inner-city Minneapolis. I hadn't realized I missed elms.



When we got the tree we also received a nice brass plaque with the tree's breed and its propagation year, so I installed this rock to mount the plaque on. Basically I just dug a large hole and buried all but the top 1/3 of the rock. I wanted it to be stable and permanent, but also easily moved in later years if the tree starts to crowd it.



To drill holes for mounting the plaque we used a Hilti TE 16 rotary hammer drill I got at the Goodwill in Woodland Park, Colorado for $20. A lot of Goodwills are overly anal about what they'll accept and you'd never find anything that cool there, but this particular store was really great! I got a ton of good stuff there. Lead anchors were inserted after a pair of holes large enough to accept them had been drilled. Then the plaque was attached with #10 brass screws. Brass so it wouldn't rust, and lead because, according to my Spouse, that is the type to use with brass screws.



Tada! Makes me feel like I live in a fancy conservatory or something. No, really! (hehe)

Today we worked hard and managed to get the blueberry bushes planted in their new home! Mostly it involved a good deal of shoveling. First we had to shovel out the red clay dirt we'd cleared, hacked into chunks, turned over and weeded a few days ago.



Hmm, take away the green lawn surrounding it and this part would look remarkably like where we lived in Colorado! All told about 10" of dirt was removed from the bottom of the bed, leaving a pit with a wall surrounding it. (We had built the wall the previous day.)



Also we harvested the first ever batch of leaf compost from our big compost operation in the back of the yard. It has been going for a couple years now and finally starting to produce.



This operation basically consisted of pitchforking and shoveling off the top of the compost until we reached the nice black stuff with no recogniseable leaf or grass texture left, which was down at the bottom.



Although we didn't get a huge amount, it is a start and we should have continuous harvests from now on! Here's what the heap looked like after it was entirely turned over and the good bits removed.



This distance shot shows the piles of dirt (left) and compost (right) on the tarp next to the wheelbarrow. The compost is nice and black by comparison to the clay soil! If you click on that photo to see a bigger version you should be able to see the Bushes waiting between the wheelbarrow and the peat moss.



The next step was to mix a dirt recipe, doing it in batches in the wheelbarrow and stirring with a shovel. Our recipe ended up being:

5 shovels of original clay dirt
2 1/2 shovels of compost *
1/2 bag peat moss**
1/2 bag sand
1 small handful elemental sulfur
1 large handful cottonseed meal.

* Because that is all the compost we had ready! Wish there had been more.
**  Wish we could have afforded to use twice as much peat moss, but that stuff is expensive!




We spread an initial layer about 10" thick that filled in the bowl we'd shoveled out at the bottom of the bed. This was to give good drainage underneath the roots. This used about half of our supplies.



We then placed the 2 largest bushes (Barbara and George, hehe) before we went any further. This was because they had the deepest root balls. We also watered at this point, to make sure the bottom layer got moist. Then we started adding another layer half as thick as the first one. The other, smaller bushes went in on top of that, and then a final layer of the rest of the dirt. Some of the smaller bushes were interesting to put in because they'd been growing on a steep hill at the farm we bought them from, so their roots were on a diagonal. We got around this by digging a diagonal hole for them with our hands, and adjusting them until the plants looked straight.



Here's the finished bed, with leaf mulch on top. I'll add aluminum sulfate when it arrives in the mail, as well as wood chips. Then I'll check the pH every 40-60 days thereafter, adding more aluminum sulfate until the correct acidity is obtained. It might take quite a while! Fortunately from the yellow color of the leaves I gather the Bushes were not in very acid soil before, so hopefully everything they see here will be an improvement.

These pictures don't do justice to how heavy this work was. Whew! Need I say dirty too? (Goes off to collapse in exhaustion.)

The outdoor container garden is doing great! It is now so populated I cannot fit it all in one shot in my camera.



Since the radishes are coming along nicely in the radish-and-carrot containers, I went ahead and planted 2 more of the same. According to the pkgs I should start more every few weeks in order to have harvest all summer. Also new in this picture are the basil, thyme, and chocolate mint (!!!) plants from the plant sale, celery and sage from counter rootings, and a last straggling bucket of sprouted red CSA potatoes.



More stuff. The last of the sprouted green onions (from CSA yellow onions)  are planted as well and we've eaten the last of the frozen CSA veggies from last year, so we are all ready for this year's shipments to start arriving! Alas, they won't for a few weeks yet. A couple of the more thick and robust green (yellow) onions have started to flower. I don't know if they'll all do this or just some. I need to look up more about propagating onions :)  I am not sure if this means I get to eat them next year, or 2 years from now. We'll see!




As previously reported, the retaining wall for the raised bed for our new blueberry bushes was delayed by several days. What happened was, back on Monday I phoned up Carlson Building Materials and asked if they had 10' landscaping timbers. "Oh," they replied, "those are 8 footers". OK! So my Spouse and I hopped in the big truck and drove down there, paid for 16 of the 8' timbers plus 2 pieces of 1/2" rebar and a cutoff wheel, and they took our money. It was only after we drove the truck around into the treated lumber gate of the yard that it was discovered they had no landscaping timbers in stock.



Back at the main desk up front, they were wringing their hands as I walked in to get my money back. "The computer says there are 240 in stock!" they explained. As it happens, the guy in line ahead of me was also doing something to do with out of stock items, for which he was receiving substitutes. They really wanted me to wait for the timbers to come in, instead of getting a refund, so I told them I'd leave my order intact if they'd deliver them for free on Wednesday when they promised their back order of 240 timbers would arrive. "Thursday at the latest," was their story. The days passed... apparently the timbers were being trucked in from Duluth but kept not being on the truck. Meanwhile the Bushes sit all forlorn with dead leaves packed around their bare roots, being watered twice a day.



But on Friday they arrived and we got to work. Here's a picture of the timbers, cut to size, all laid out in readiness to be put on in tiers. They are surrounding the 6" deep bed we cleared and dug several days ago. They're 3"x4" timbers so at four layers tall this wall will raise the bed up 12" up off the surrounding ground. 



All I knew going into this project was that the landscaping timbers were are cheapest available bet for building retaining walls, at least at this time and on a strictly temporary basis. Oh yes, based on the experiences and advice of my friend Debbie Bibb of Running D Ranch, I knew that using rebar to tie the pieces together was important for strength and stability even on a much lower wall than this. I did some research and found a pretty good set of general instructions on the web titled "How to Build a Cheap Decorative Retaining Wall Out Of Landscaping Timber", by Agnes Farside. After a lot of head scratching I created the above drawing, which allowed me to calculate how much landscaping timber and rebar to buy.



One thing we did do differently was that my Spouse felt (again, from personal experience) it'd be easier to stack all four tiers at once, then drill through with a very long drill bit than to put the layers on one at a time as Ms. Farside suggested.  Also since we had a four-corner bin rather than a wall on a hillside as they did, we decided not to put on the corner brackets. The thing was incredibly tight and sturdy when it was finished as-was.



The holes are 1/2" in size which is the size of the rebar minus its protruding ribs. This made the holes tight enough that the rebar had to be pounded in with a sledge hammer. For most of the beginning I was employed to sit on the frame to keep the timbers still during the drilling and hammering. Ladies, I highly recommend this enjoyable experience and would definitely do it again.



One end result of this was that we ran all the rods all the way through, instead of having them staggered as shown in the drawing. This meant that there were far more rebar ends showing on top than I'd planned on. I was a little concerned that the rebar would poke out and scratch people -- this being mainly due to recollections of my childhood days playing on city playgrounds in Minneapolis. However, it turns out that the wood is much more springy than the metal of the bar, so the bars could magically be recessed simply by pounding with a big sledge a few extra times. I learn something new every day!



Here's what it looked like more-or-less completed. The next step (it will have to be a project for another day though) is to remove the loose 8-10" of dirt from inside, and mix that with peat moss, sand, dry leaves, and sulfur and install the Bushes in their new home! As a note, that's the new Liberty Elm tree lit up in the background. On the right is what I call the "south garden" of the house.



Here's another shot of the completed wall. It sure looks nice -- it is too bad walls like this don't last long. Well, hopefully it will last long enough for me to save up for a real wall :)



That south garden is finally coming into its own. I think I mentioned before that the majority of the veronicas and purple coneflowers I planted last year have survived the winter and are coming in nice and healthy. I did have to replace a few coneflowers (not shown, but they look like bare spots that break the alternating pattern) and have not quite had luck with that yet. First I planted some storebought purple coneflower seeds indoors but they did not germinate. Now I have planted the remaining storebought seeds directly in the ground where the missing plants were. If that does not work, I have one more thing I can try: planting seeds harvested from last year's coneflowers blossoms. If those don't grow either, hopefully by then Walmart will have coneflowers plants in stock again. I have been checking but they don't have any yet.



I left a 24" lane between the retaining wall and the place where the south garden wraps around the corner of the house. This was partly to set a precedent because I want to have lanes like this between all my raised beds in the future; partly to give better access to the blueberries on all sides for picking; partly to preserve that south bed instead of overshadowing it too badly; and partly to make it easier to maintain. 24" was calculated to allow the lawnmower to get in there fully.



Once the new wall was done my Spouse cut off the pointy end of the old previously existing 4" x 5" landscaping timber that had been lying alongside the deck, so that I could replace it in the corner to finish off that space. Of course, now that we have this new wall the decrepitude of our existing landscaping becomes painfully apparent. I foresee a re-do of that south garden timber border in my rather near future!

We are now the proud almost-owners of an Chance 30-30 sailing yacht by Allied. It once wowed boat racers in Lake Superior years ago. I mean this individual boat did: big and yellow and named Golden Girl, apparently it won a lot of stuff for a long time. The owners moved on to another boat and this one has been unused, though not for long enough to be neglected. It just needs to be scrubbed up and it is ready to go!



It's Federally rather than locally registered and the current owner is waiting for some papers from the Coast Guard so it can change hands. But other than that the deal is done!



Yellow is my favorite color so I am jazzed. Coincidentally my Spouse's previous boat, Caution, was also yellow. We have a history of odd coincidences like that. For instance our first two houses were green, despite green being an uncommon house color in both locations where we lived.



We are told this boat was insanely fast for its day. Although we weren't buying this for racing, the speed is a very happy bonus!

Here is a general website about Allied, and the Chance 30-30 model.

An update on the blueberry bushes, George, Barbara, Jeb, Dubya, Laura, and Jenna*: I went to the lumber yard to buy landscaping timbers and they first sold them to me, then admitted they didn't have any. So I am waiting on them to deliver... supposedly today or tomorrow. In the meantime, Peat Moss turns out to be insanely expensive, and sand only comes in small containers around here. Woe is me! The Bushes are huddling under plastic bags for now, getting water once or twice a day. I hope they make it!

Yesterday I did a pile of transplanting and stuff indoors. The winner of the Best Sprout Award was definitely the zucchini which was already about 8" tall! I also found three butternut squashes, each about 4" tall and quite robust, as well as Spacemaster Cucumbers. The cucumbers sprouted really well, but they turn out to be problematic to transplant. Out of 6 pots, 7 sprouted (heh) but I snapped 2 in half transplanting them. Oops! The five survivors immediately drooped within 5 minutes of transplanting. Luckily they lasted the night so I think they've made it, but I dread transplanting them to their final location in a week or two. I am going to make a note to wait until after frost and plant Spacemaster directly next year.



Here's the five after they started to droop... OK today though.



I found 1-2 each of tiny basil, oregano, thyme and sage sprouts from my most recent attempts. Let's hope I keep them alive this time! A couple of them are shown above, along with some very robust Pepper sprouts. The little pepper plants are mostly from seeds from grocery store peppers, including small Mexican sweet peppers, and a red bell pepper. Also I have some Hungarian Yellow Wax peppers that did grow from seed, but I'm having a heck of a time getting Jalapeño to sprout. Maybe I will just buy one of those as a plant, lol.



Here are some grape tomatoes I grew from seeds from grocery store grape tomatoes too. I don't personally like this kind of tomato but they are my Spouse's favorite so I figured I'd put in the effort. There sure are a lot of them... in addition to the six I transplanted last night there are 4 more little pots with several underdeveloped sprouts apiece. 



Here are some "heirloom" Brandywine Red tomatoes from seed. I wonder at what point they stop being "Heirloom". These came from the regular old seed rack at the grocery store. Sounds pretty mass production to me!



Here are morning glories. I was supposed to plant them 4 weeks before last frost but they are already huge and there are still a week or two left to go. I am thinking that I might move these outdoors now and just replace them if they die, because they aren't going to be very happy growing this fast indoors.



Braeburn apple sprout! This was just sort of a "for fun" sprout.



The avocados need to be moved outdoors soon too. They also need to be transplanted into larger containers. We had a very warm day (80 degrees!) the other day and two seeds that had been sitting on the counter in water for months suddenly split and started growing. Woo!

Today I found a plant sale put on by volunteers who work on gardens in a local city park. Everything was make-a-donation with proceeds going to keep the park beautified. I got 2 basils, 2 thymes, and a chocolate mint (!) plant, as well as a horse chestnut tree I didn't really want but she insisted nobody else would comprehend what it was or take it. I also got a large number of small plastic planting pots, and a fair collection of large pots suitable for planting stuff outside too. All in all a good haul for the donation.

* It has come to my attention that some people are afraid I might be seen as making a tribute to the Bush family by naming my bushes after the Bushes. Never fear! It's not a tribute, they just had to be ID'd somehow and it was more fun than A through F or 1 through 6.

My Spouse and I both have the habit of perusing the local Craigslist listings for good deals. The other day my Spouse spotted a small farm selling off 200 mature blueberry bushes at $5-10 apiece, all cold hardy low bush cultivars. By the time we managed to get there a day later, we were the very last stragglers, picking off the final 6 bushes available. We got two Northlands and four North Blues, each about 10 years old. The farm was an interesting place, where the 2 guys were a sheep herder and an artist respectively. They had a number of sheep type dogs about the place. The ex-blueberry field was going to become a formal garden.



Here are the blueberry bushes -- George, Barbara, Jeb, Dubya, Laura, and Jenna -- resting in our back yard after a journey in our pickup truck. The first two, the Northland cultivars are much larger than the others and take two people to lift. The others are only 2-3 feet tall.



We spent a bunch of time today preparing the base of a new garden bed for the Bushes. This is the 6' x 9' area we selected. After marking it off with string we used a mattock to chop away the sod, then again to break up the clay soil. A hoe to break up the clods the mattock left, and then a spade to turn it all over once. I did a pH test and it came out between 6.5 and 7 -- way too high for blueberries which prefer 4.8 to 5.2. We're going to build up a 16" high retaining wall of landscaping timbers, then mix the old dirt with peat moss and aluminum sulfate to lower the pH. It'll need elemental sulphur added each year thereafter to keep it down. Ideally you're supposed to start preparing a bed for blueberries a year in advance, but this was all so sudden we didn't get that option. The Bushes do have some of their original dirt with them though which should help a little. Cross fingers!



The deck container plants are doing nicely. Everything that was sown outdoors so far has sprouted. I am having to water these once a day and I am thinking that maybe twice a day will be necessary for the potatoes in the wood crate. I've already eaten several thinned-out sprouts from spinach and radishes... yum! I also stole some of the more spindlier yellow onions for Chinese Foo tonight. There are still a ton of small sprouts and things in the house that cannot be placed outside yet. Tomatoes, peppers etc. We had a 20 degree night last night!



I fooled around with my PlanGarden plot tonight and added the Bushes (each one labeled with his or her name) where their new plot will be. I also changed my overall plot to show our entire yard, and segregated the container plants in a to-scale outline of the deck. I then altered the containers and their plants to match what is actually out there, so this should match the photo now. I still have a whole lot of "to be planted" stuff that was shown on the original PlanGarden plot so I could figure out which size containers to use for what. Those are kind of stashed off to the side of the picture out of sight for now, but ultimately I'll be placing outlines of the house, garage, shed etc. where they can be shown wherever they are throughout the year.

Be sure to click on that to see it close up, it's much better ;-)

The container garden is coming along nicely. The number of containers planted as-planned is getting closer to what is shown on my PlanGarden plot, though there are a bunch yet to go. It is still officially 3 weeks before last frost here! I had to bring in a couple things overnight the last two nights.



I still have a lot of sprouts in the basement, mostly peppers and tomatoes that are sprouted but can't be brought out yet, and melon and squash type things that are too recently planted to have sprouted yet:



A lot of these are in this new potting soil my Spouse got me from Wal Mart, that is supposed to be 100% organic. I'll say! The other day I found these little volunteers in my lettuce sprouts (see inside the orange circles):



They looked like small round seeds growing up on long stalks. Trouble is I hadn't planted anything with seeds like that. Here's a closeup:



Pretty soon there were one or two in every pot! Well, a few days later, boom:



They are tiny mushrooms! LOL. Guess I'll try not to eat those, no idea what they are except they apparently like organic matter. Alas, the Shiitake mushroom log I bought on Amazon did not work out and I have to send it back. Hopefully they will send me a new one that sprouts actual mushrooms! I'll let you all know what ends up happening there.



So here's a little tour of what's outside on the deck right now. First here's the bok choi heart I rooted, looking insanely happy. There's almost enough leaf there to make chinese foo for two again! The center now has a tiny cluster of buds. I think that means it is going to bolt right away. I'm not really surprised since it was basically a mature plant (sans leaves) to begin with. I read that the stalks and buds are edible (inf fact the best part of the bok choi) but I might also like to keep the seeds to plant next year. The alternative would be to harvest these leaves now immediately before it bolts any further. Decisions, decisions!



The red potatoes are starting to sprout and leaf up. These are from CSA potatoes from last fall, that started to sprout over the winter and I kept them sitting on the light table until now. They are planted in layers of shredded paper to give lots of space for potatoes to grow. When the greens get taller I am suppose to keep backfilling the buckets until the dirt and paper reaches the top, for max amount of potato harvest. Cross fingers! Also note to self, find better way to store potatoes next winter.



These green onions are probably the next most ready to go crop after the Bok Choi. They're from white storebought sets. I foresee a harvest of at least a handful of them soon!



These leaning onions are transplanted from large yellow CSA onions that sprouted over winter too. They lean over because I let them grow bigger and bigger in the sheath of their old mother onion, and they leaned way over so they could get more light on the light table. I have since figured out that they can be removed from the original onion as soon as they're clearly seperate entities, and well before they get that big. So in the future I won't have any more leaning ones like this, but hehe this first batch is oddballs. They seem to be getting bigger anyway despite their odd shape.



I hope these will be large round onions also... they are red and white ones from grocery store sets. Just starting to sprout now! They are planted 3" apart from one another in the pots.



Here's the first round of radishes and carrots. I read that I should keep planting new rounds every X number of weeks in order to have continuous harvests. These containers have radishes (showing) and the little guys between them are carrots. The carrots will be big enough to want the extra space by the time the radishes are ready to pull. I hope. The carrots are half-longs so the pots should be plenty deep enough for their growth.



Spinach sprouts. These were the first things I sowed outdoors. The ones in back are co planted with peas. The ones in front don't have their buddies yet.



I really have no idea what to expect from this tiny rosemary sprig. I had no luck growing rosemary from seed but this leftover storebought piece unexpectedly rooted in water. I think it succeeded because it was in the same water with other herbs, one of which must have convinced it to go. I don't hold out a lot of hope that I'll be able to keep it alive, but heck... it's worth a try!!



These two sage plants also rooted in the same container of water. Since I've never had luck with rooting sage before either, I'm convinced there must have been some plant in there that was greatly benefitting these guys. Either that or the rosemary and sage were benefitting each other. Hope they live! That round green guy in the back on the right is a boston red lettuce heart. No roots on that yet... but it hasn't shriveled either.



While at WalMart we splurged and got some potted stuff too. Cilantro (I still haven't managed to sprout any from seed), strawberry (which I had planned to get storebought all along there) and the middle one is a wacky tomato my Spouse took a yen to. It's called Mr. Stripey and the fruit apparently looks like this:



It appears though that the fruit can have any of a huge variety of different kinds of stripes. It'll be interesting to see what we get, assuming I don't kill it first. Since we now have Brandywine Red, grape tomatoes and berry tomatoes in cultivation as well I predict a very tomato-ey summer :)  Homemade salsa, here we come!



In other outdoor yard and garden news, I have been transplanting a few of these bulbs each day (see orange arrow in picture). They had been growing over in a very dark corner of the yard that is OK in spring but totally shaded in summer. As a result I have no idea what kind of flowers they are -- they never get a chance to bloom.



Here's the old location with the other half of the bulbs still there. It's a surprising amount of work to move them and keep them safe but the already-transplanted ones are doing great! Maybe 2 more days to get the rest, and then I was thinking maybe plant something else that is more shade-loving in this dark corner.



The newly planted American Liberty Elm is starting to show leaves! Yay!



On the back lotline the Toronto Tulips are now in full bloom, with the pastel regular tulips coming up nearby (not budded yet).



This picture doesn't do them justice but there are also dozens of these tiny blue Glory of the Snow which actually came as part of the same collection with the Toronto ones. I can't wait to get more this fall and support this little collection to make it bigger next year!

I'd been putting off cleaning this pair of old oil lamps for... years. In fact it has probably been decades, although I didn't personally own them that whole time! Finally I got around to it and it ended up taking all day. I soaked the glass parts in hot soapy water and came by once an hour or so to scrub them again. Mainly it was the inside that was toughest -- where old yellowed fuel had left sediments. I stuffed a white washrag inside and used a knife to manipulate it to scrub the indentations inside. Luckily while it took a long time, noticeable progress occurred each iteration so it wasn't frustrating at all.



What really took the elbow grease was polishing the brass. All parts had a very thick black coating, or greasy dark brown dots that took several polishings to remove. I thought I did a pretty good job but as I look at this picture I realize I missed the lowest part on the left hand one. LOL... I'll have to catch that separately I guess! I put in new wicks, but not fuel as these ones are just for emergencies. We have fuel for them in the basement.



Here's the one we use regularly, as erm... hehe... "mood lighting". It's way newer and we inherited it from the previous owners when we moved into our house in Colorado. The frosted glass shade (found separately on eBay) is real nice on the eyes. I cleaned this one out the same day as the other two but it didn't need as much. I noticed the brass on this one had way less copper in it than that of the others. Sign of the times I guess. They sell fuel for these for very cheap at WalMart. They also have scent oil you can put in. I think you are supposed to burn the scent oil directly but it comes in very small bottles so we add 2 bottles of that and fill the rest up with regular lamp kerosene to save loot. Mainly what the scent does is prevents kerosene stench from gassing the room after you blow the lamp out at night. LOL. So worth it!

Got the door hung in the lower end of the server room. I am rather proud of myself as it is the first door I've ever hung and it ended up just fine. The definition of "just fine" in this case being, comparable with all the other doors in this house :D



Starting with where I left off on the previous post about this door, the next thing I did was use a hammer and chisel to mortise the replacement hinges on the door. These hinges were replacing the old ones because those were missing their other halves. New mortises were needed because the previous ones were gone due to the door being trimmed an inch on that side.

Here's an article by Tom O'Brien on how to mortise the hinges, since I failed to take pictures when I did mine. It was my first time and they were quite easy. Once the hinges were mounted on the door, I stacked up a computer and some boards and used them to hold up the door at the right height so that I could mark the matching hinge locations on the door frame. Then I used hammer and chisel to mortise those as well.

It turns out one of the new hinges was subtly bent, which might explain why they were cheaper than usual. I remember the clerk at the Reuse Center being puzzled, but declining my offer to pay the full price anyway. When I mounted the door the first time it was subtly atilt, with the top farther from the door frame than the bottom. After puzzling over this for a bit, I discovered the bend in the hinge and modified one of the mortises to match the bend and cancel it out. Viola!



Here's the round wooden plug I made for the old deadbolt hole, now in place. This photo is showing the stairwell side of the door which is ultimately going to be stripped and stained. I did not touch this side of the plug since I will need to do a lot of work in that area and figure it'd be less trouble to fill that gap after scraping than before.



Since the server room side is going to be painted, I went ahead and sanded and filled the plug there, and also on the door-edge where I'd inserted a smaller piece of wood in the deadbolt hole. If you compare the above two pictures you may notice the window trim doesn't match. The server room side has some cheap simple molding that is poorly fitted. I think whoever replaced the glass must have put that there. I would like to replace that with something that matches the rest of the door but all I've discovered so far is I can't get what I want locally.

Probably the most painful part of this whole process was dealing with the latch and lock. As pointed out in my previous post about this door, the inner casing of the doorknob and lock assembly was broken. I had superglued the broken piece then stabilized it with a big piece of black gaff tape back then. When I took it apart now, it seemed to be quite repaired. Cross fingers! Luckily the plate itself doesn't need to withstand much force, it mostly needs to not fall apart again and drop bits of itself into the mechanical works.

Anyway, because the door was being mounted reverse swing of how it had been originally, I had to take the lock apart and reassemble it in a mirror image of itself. Also because the door had been trimmed a little on the latch side, I had to move the doorknob holes and plate screw holes, and deepen the mortise for the latch plate so that it would be flush once again. Whew!



Here's a picture showing some fill work I need to do on the hinge side of the door. These were exposed when an inch got trimmed off that side. Luckily the edges are being painted, not stained, so I can have a variety of options for the fill. The door opens all the way flat against the wall, because we move a lot of stuff through there between the basement and the garage.

I also did a lot of filling and such on the server room side so that I could maybe do some painting soon. I am getting really tired of seeing that bright white door in the "albino white" room. LOL.

That's all for now!

I am pleased to report further progress on scraping the paint on the trim in my office. The windows are definitely the most difficult part left and those are now 1/3 done:



It looks like about half-done in this picture, but in reality the inner parts take a lot more work than the wide outer parts. The inner part of the left window is about half-done and the right hand one has not been touched yet. Like the rest of the woodwork in this office, the windows have about 5 layers of old paint on them... purple-pink over paler pink over 3 shades of greenish brownish. The shelf underneath is unfinished pine, something I built long ago when I was still living in apartments and moving around all the time. I had been holding off on staining or painting it until I found out where I was going to live long-term. When I stain this office woodwork, this shelf will finally be stained to match! :)



Here's a closeup of the inner part being scraped. You can click on the picture if you really need the gory details. There are a lot of layers and crevices. I am not scraping the trough where the weight ropes are because my intention was to paint that a more saturated green color that goes with the walls and complements the golden brown that the woodwork will be. For this purpose I've selected a Dutch Boy G026 sample. 



Here is the sample shown with the wall green behind it, and my wood stain practice piece underneath. The practice piece, upon which I perfected how I was going to stain the woodwork to get the effect I wanted, has really come in handy for figuring stuff out color wise.



In other office news, I finished the 2nd closet door and put its hardware back on and remounted it for the time being. While it was off it "fell over" 2-3 times which I think may have been cat related. Oddly enough no cats were to be seen nearby after the loud crash of the it hitting the floor. But I still have my suspicions!

Today I attacked the old wooden transom on my rowboat. It is too thick for my small outboard to clamp onto, and it was also very rotted and had various odd handles and what not screwed onto it.




Here's the boat with the transom removed. I was somewhat disappointed that there was no manufacturer's plate underneath, because I'd read that if this boat had one, I'd find it on the transom somewhere. The plates were apparently not required until 1972 though, and this is probably years or even decades older than that.



Rotted wood splinters (if anything that soft could be called a splinter) littering the boat floor after transom removal. As can be seen in all of these photos, the paint job on the boat needs help. I am not planning on painting the outside of the hull, only washing it. However my past experiences with canoes make me want to repaint the inside since it's not much fun to be blinded by a reflective boat bottom for hours while on the water.



Here are the chunks of rotted wood transom that got removed. It was so squishy with rot and water that when I inserted a Wonder Bar to pry it off, it compressed and water ran out of it in all directions, like a sponge. Yecch! The larger piece standing up is the inside piece, which I'll use as measurement for the replacement boards.



I didn't start it today but there is also a piece of broken plywood that needs replacing at the boat's bow.



Since the boat is now resting rightside up on the trailer, and since it has been raining, I got a chance to find out how my patch job is working. Note the tiny white patch under the bow, against the blue tarp.



Here's a water droplet that formed. Since the plywood underneath the droplet has only a small moist spot, I take it not very much water is getting out. I'll still try to stop that though. As my Spouse pointed out, there will be a lot more pressure on it once it is actually underwater.



Here's the water that had collected. Based on the paint wear (and the state of the transom wood) I gather this is not the first time water has been in the boat. I am going to use one of the silver tarps to cover it in the long term. For now, the bleach bottle bailer I made cleared it out handily.

The weather was great today! I was highly tempted to go fishing, boat or no, but the local bait shop had fresh fish in so we got some whitefish caught by somebody else for grilling tonight.

Today was another big day of work on garden stuff. I planted the sprouted grape-tomato seeds and some blue morning glory seeds I'd been soaking, in little 1" seedling planters. I went through the Ziploc bags of planted seeds and transplanted into 4" pots a number of sprouts that had appeared since the last round, including Mexican sweet peppers, a red bell pepper, Brussels sprouts, and a berry tomato. The light table is changing quite a bit in layout as the season progresses and different stuff gets started:



Probably the biggest job I did gardening wise was to separate out and transplant a lot of the yellow CSA onions that had sprouted over winter, and that I had been rooting in 4" pots. Here's how I did it:



They had all grown multiple "green onions" out of themselves, still wrapped in a pulpy old onion body from the former sprouted onion, as well as long roots.



First I used what I am used to calling a matte knife but which I guess is officially a "utility knife" to slit the extra layers up near the top where it's easy to see, and avoid, the green onions inside. I keep the knife edge pointed outward and use the blunt side for feeling between the onions for their safety.



Then I grab the extra layers and peel them off in one piece, or as close as possible. Depending on the onion these can be pretty squishy and disgusting.



I put the pulpy remains in the compost heap. I assume they would have functioned as compost for the small onions had they remained there in the same soil with them.



The green onions inside are stuck together at the disk shaped base, that the roots come out of the bottom of. There seem to be 3-5 green onions per big onion on average.



I use the utility knife to gently cut halfway through the root disk from the top between 2 onions, then carefully twist the knife to encourage the onions to snap apart along natural lines so they each get their own roots. If they don't want to snap apart, go around and cut between some of the other pairs as well before trying to separate. I did a lot of these today and only had a couple that had no useful roots of their own after separation. These had undeveloped root nubs though so I just placed them in a glass with some shallow water for a couple days.



These are fully separated. As you can see they're already trying to form the bellies of big round onions but there wasn't enough space to develop them quickly when they were stuck together.



These are nice sweet yellow onions so I planted them individually in larger pots so they will hopefully grow large and round like the parent onion by fall. I did a total of about 25 yellow onionlings today. Right now these are all out in the garage being acclimated to the outdoors weather. I'll bring them out onto the deck next week.

Of the stuff already out on the deck, there are lumps and bumps where potatoes and white onion sets are ready to bust through the surface of the dirt, and the tip of one tiny green onion already showing. Fun!

For my Spouse's birthday which is coming up in a few days, I bought an American Liberty Elm tree. These are special elms from native North American stock that are not as susceptible to Dutch Elm disease as the imported ones. They are being specially bred and our elm came with a brass plate with a serial number and the propagation date (in 2002) on it, for attaching to a rock or pedestal nearby. I guess a lot of people who purchase them must be collectors or parks.



It arrived and we planted it today. At 14 feet tall and 3" in diameter it is the largest tree I've personally had any involvement in planting. It really completes the backyard which had formerly had a huge shade tree in it, the stump of which was still here when we moved in. The backyard never looked quite right with nothing there, even though we hadn't seen the other tree with our own eyes.



Already this tree feels like one of our "children". Planting it gave almost a sacred feeling. It took me a while to get photographs that evoked the same feelings as I get when looking at the tree itself. The above is one of the ones I finally got. Both of us will really enjoy watching it grow large in the years ahead.