I was working in my shop last weekend (on the aforementioned closet shelves) and started looking around and seeing wasted space and other inefficiencies. When Sandie bought the house, the shop was outfitted with what were obviously cabinets that had at some point been in a kitchen. There was a long rank of cabinets along the back wall with a kitchen sink in the middle of it. Two ranks of overhead cabinets were mounted on the side walls. Another floor rank ran along one of the walls. And there were a few of basically stand-alone cabinets scattered here and there. They weren’t in the best places, but I guess they were fairly functional, the sink notwithstanding.
Sandie had a long workbench that her father had made, so we put that in the shop as well.
Then Sandie decided to remodel her kitchen….and I added most of THOSE kitchen cabinets to the shop. Took the kitchen island, added some casters, made it a mobile workbench. Moved the other stuff around against the walls. Made a little “L” on one wall. There was, to put it mildly, a lot of counter/bench space – and not a lot of room for anything else.
Over the past couple of years, as I’ve tinkered around with the shop layout, I’ve come to the conclusion that probably 50% of the cabinets are completely unused. And this weekend, I noticed that the long rank of overheads that had been there from the start (in which I’ve been storing lots and lots of paint) are most decidedly bowing in the middle. Add to that the fact that the paint is not very organized, making it difficult to find what’s needed, and I decided that it was time to make some changes.
I haven’t really figured out what those changes will be, but I’m sure that at least THAT set of overheads is coming down and probably being relegated to a pile of scrap wood or a dumpster. First, though, I need a place for the paint. So I build a couple of simple shelf sets out of plywood, which will hang on cleats on the wall. That was my Sunday project. Came out pretty good, and each unit holds 16 gallons of paint. Now all I have to do is figure out where I’m going to hang them. Once I’ve done that, I can commence with taking down that set of cabinets. I have NO idea how I’m going to do that without hurting myself, but it needs to be done, and it will start the process of making a great workshop.
One of the paint storage units I built on Sunday. Much easier to locate the correct paint now…
In other news, we interviewed 5 folks for the director of the GBB job last week. One more to go (next week, when I’m in Canada). No clear leader at this point, and it’s going to be tough to whittle the 6 down to three finalists, who will each take a concert series this year to help us (and the band) decide who gets the gig. Some have very strong administrative skills, others have strong brass band experience. I’m kind of hoping we can get one of the latter as the primary director, and one of the former as an associate.
The GBB finished up our 25th season last night by performing at the annual Euphonium and Tuba Festival (IET). We’ve done this many times before, and IET’s creator is currently one of the applicants to replace Joe. He’s a superb musician and has done a great job over the last 25 years or so at getting his name out there and developing contacts in the brass world, which has Simone wondering if he’s looking at the GBB job as a chance for more self-promotion. I wonder that about several of our applicants, but it’s not a showstopper for me. We need somebody who’ll be able to bring the best out in the band – particularly in terms of dynamics. If they can do that, I don’t care if they’re in it for the band or for themselves, to be honest. As long as they’re committed to actually being there and following through on band commitments, I’m good. One of the applicants let us down a few years ago – bailing as our conductor for personal reasons about a month before we were to compete. Granted, it was a big deal for him. He was to receive the GA teacher of the year award of some such on the same weekend as the competition; but it had us scrambling to find an alternate conductor, and the guy we ended up with really didn’t understand the music. One of the adjudicators was the composer. As the piece was extremely personal to him (the music dealt with an unexpected stroke that he had which left him struggling to do anything, much less compose, for a few years), he was not happy with our lack of interpretation.
At any rate, that applicant will not get my vote.
In other news, yesterday was Juneteenth, which is now a federal holiday, and my company gave us the day off.
I celebrated by attempting to electrocute myself. Actually, no, I didn’t do that. But I DID finally change out a 3-way light switch in our closet for a single-pole switch and removed the other 3-way from the kitchen. Have been meaning to do this for about 6 months, but I’m happily ignorant about anything involving electricity, and I didn’t want to do something that would burn the house down. Thank God for YouTube.’
So after I got that done, I put in a motion detector instead of a switch (in the closet) and began building some shelves that Sandie’s been asking for.
It has been extraordinarily hot for the last couple of weeks. I entertained the thought (briefly) of pressure washing parts of the driveway over the weekend, but with the mercury hitting the 90s by 8:30 in the morning, the idea just didn’t appeal to me once it was late enough to get out there with 1}a leaf blower and 2}a pressure washer. Yeah, I could start at 7AM, but I think the neighbors might take issue with that.
I’ve been spending a lot of time in the shop (air conditioner blasting) over the last couple of weeks putting together a workstation for my table saw. For the most part, I finished it up on Saturday, although I’m still waiting on a couple of parts to complete the crosscut sled that will be an accessory for it. The workstation itself consists of a box that holds the saw (a Dewalt contractor saw), a foldable extension wing on the left, retractable infeed and outfeed support, and a fairly substantial drawer for extra blades, jigs, etc. It also has open slots for a crosscut sled and the braces for the extension (or extensions if I decide to make one for the right side (which I might do if I decide to also use it as a temporary workbench).
When fully opened, the extensions allow me to safely cut a full 4’x8’ sheet of plywood (although those puppies are HEAVY, and getting them started is kind of a bear), but when everything is retracted, the whole thing has a footprint of about 2’x2’ and sits on casters, allowing me to move the thing out of the way when I’m not using it. It’s probably the most complex thing I’ve built, and I like it a lot. In truth, I’ve been meaning to build something like this for years, but never thought I could do it. When I saw an ad for birch plywood sheets for $25 each about a month ago, I jumped at the price, had 8 of them delivered, and figured, “What the heck. No excuse not to build it now.”
Table saw workstation, retracted
Table saw workstation, extended
It works well, and I just need to put the rail on the back fence of a crosscut sled that I built for it before I can pretty much call it done. One really nice thing about it is that the board that the saw actually sits on is micro-adjustable by means of four bolts under it – so I can always make sure that the top of the saw is exactly even with all of the extensions.
About 6 months ago, my favorite laptop – a Surface Book that I bought in 2015 – finally got to the point where it was unusable. The screen had been heated up and forced out from the frame by an expanding battery to the point that it was just pointless to continue using it for as much as I had been. I bought a replacement battery and screen, but have not yet attempted the repair (it’s a very delicate and tedious process and I’m waiting to be in just the right mood before I get started on it).
I have other machines, so things like databases and email and games and whatnot were not a huge problem. The biggest issue was that I had been using the Surface Book for several years as my de facto sheet music repository. GBB music, gig music, wind symphony music, tuba and horn etudes….all of my sheet music was on the Surface Book and there was no way I was going back to using paper music. So I needed a solution.
At first, I tried using my phone. Bad plan. I’m almost 60 and my eyes have been shot for 25 years. In a pinch, I can read off the phone, but it’s strictly for emergencies at this point. After determining that the phone wasn’t going to work, I tried using a small (6”) Android tablet that Sandie had no further use for. It was a definite improvement, but the screen real estate was so limited that doing markup on the music was difficult and nearly impossible. Also, the software options for music display and markup available for Android is/was pretty limited. There’s basically one program for it, and it just doesn’t work that well. Apple, however, has an excellent piece of software for musicians called forScore, and so I finally took the plunge and bought myself an iPad – something that I’ve been swearing was a pointless thing to do since the iPad was first released.
To a large extent, I still believe that. I use my iPad almost exclusively as a sheet music organizer/editor/displayer; but I’ve started to play around with the little thing more and more trying to figure out just how much I can actually use it for. And, much to my surprise, I’m finding that I do indeed have uses for it.
For years, I kept the GBB library updated and organized using Microsoft Access. I like doing it that way because…well…because I was an Access Developer for many years and I’m comfortable building and customizing programs to do exactly what I want them to do in Access. The biggest problem with that is that if I don’t have the machine with the database on it, I can’t use the data in it. If I want to check to see if the band has a particular chart while I’m at rehearsal, for example, I can’t do it unless I’ve got a computer with Access installed. When I was using my Surface Book, that was not a problem.
With the iPad, however, using Access isn’t an option. And there really isn’t a decent alternative, short of putting everything online in MySQL or something and building a front end that I can use on the iPad. I actually tried this, but the MySQL clients that I could find for iPad absolutely suck and weren’t worth my time.
Next, I built a Power BI application on my work laptop and pointed it to a OneDrive copy of my GBB database, and it worked great! Power BI is available for iPad and I can fire it up and search the DB easily. Unfortunately, I can’t UPDATE data with Power BI, and I also can’t use it unless I’ve got a corporate license (that’s why I did this on my work machine), and nobody’s got the time or money for that.*
So I started looking into “database” applications built specifically for the iPad and found one that isn’t too terrible called MyStuff2. In spite of the ridiculous name, and in spite of the fact that there’s no way to do any real programming with it, MS2 has done a pretty good job for me in helping to organize and build out the GBB music library, and it allows me to have a to-the-minute reference of the library with me when I’m at rehearsal. I had to do quite a bit of initial setup to get things like I needed them and to export the information from my original Access DB into MS2, but having done that, things are looking good.
As I start building more advanced stuff in the woodshop, I’ve also been able to use the iPad to help with that.
Adding a wing to my table saw workstation
One of those tools is called Moblo 3D, which is a kind of limited CAD and allows me to model what I want to build, calculate measurements, and build shopping and cut lists. For example, Sandie wants some very specific shelving units build for the master closet. So I used Moblo to start sketching those out. Works pretty good, although I really haven’t spent enough time with it to understand all that it can (or cannot) do for me. It wasn’t totally free, but I can’t complain about $8 for this thing.
Moblo 3D rendering of a couple of closet organizers. The nicest part of this for me is that I can design what I want and then export a list of the wood that I need and a cut list for it
Another tool that I’ve been using in the shop is the iPad version of X-Tool Creative Space, which connects to my laser engraver and lets me design stuff for it. The engraver is still very much of a toy, but I’ve been able to use it for branding wooden creations (rather than using my physical metal brand), and most recently did some engraving on a baton box for a gift that the band gave to our founder/music director on the occasion of his stepping down after 25 years.
The concert, by the way – the finale of our 25th season – went really well. Joe, the director, pulled out all the stops and included a couple of championship-level test pieces near the end. A severe chops buster, but the crowd seemed to enjoy it, and it was an exhausting but exhilarating set list.
Creation screen of X-Tools Creative Space
I guess the most recent tool I’ve added to the iPad is what I’m typing this on – the WordPress editor. I installed it a few days ago after realizing that – having purchased a mouse and keyboard for the iPad (specifically to use with the GBB library database) – I could probably do a lot more with the iPad than I had been previously. Restarting the blog entries seemed like a logical place to start, so that’s what I’m doing. Since the iPad is so portable, and since it’s so much easier to use as an editor than my phone is, I should be able to do updates from campsites (or anywhere else outside of my office) a lot easier than I’ve been able to previously. I’ll put that to the test in Canada (next month) and Michigan (in November).
For today, however, this has been enough.
*Actually, the GBB may be able to get a full-blown O365 license, including PBI, for a reasonable price by using our non-profit status. That is being investigated.
It’s been three-and-a-half years since I updated this. I guess not much has happened?
Let’s see…
For starters, I moved in with Sandie a couple of years ago. She bought a log cabin in Lawrenceville on a few nicely-wooded acres and we decided that it was easier for me to just move here than it was for us to continue in separate domiciles. As it turned out, the move was pretty well timed, because a mutual friend found himself homeless shortly after I vacated my place, and he’s been renting from me ever since.
The boys, Joshua and Chamberlain, weren’t especially thrilled with the ride from my house to the cabin (particularly Josh, who managed to rip out a couple of claws in his panic during the ride), but they’re settled in nicely with their “cousin” Mojo (a Shih-Tzu dog) and have adjusted to the new things that come with a new place. Chamberlain loves nothing more than to sleep on the screened-in porch (at home, the closest he could get to being “outside” was to sit by an open window), and Joshua spends most of his time sleeping upstairs in my office. He’s had a rougher time of it – including falling from a catwalk that spans the main room of the house (scaring the hell out of me) – but he seems on the whole to be relatively content.
I quite my job at the X company in November of 2022. Mainly because my director moved to a different job, I couldn’t stand his replacement, and when a newly-created position opened up for an overall service manager, it went to a colleague of mine who I could never see myself respecting. The story I gave them was that I wanted to “get back into tech,” and move away from a supervisory role, but the simple fact was that I couldn’t stomach the thought of reporting to either of those guys. My new job is, to put it mildly, difficult. As far as the “tech” goes, it’s fine – I work almost entirely with SQL servers, which is no big deal – but the questions that I get from the accounting companies that I support might as well be in another language. 18 months into it, I’m still constantly asking my teammates, “What exactly are they saying the problem is?” There are plenty of days that I think I regret making the jump, but then I try to imagine doing my old job and taking direction from two morons, and I wind up feeling better about the decision again.
My woodworking hobby has taken off since moving here, also. The previous owner had setup a detached garage on the property as his workshop, and Sandie and I continued that. At first, we both had workbenches in the place, but she slowly moved most of her tools and projects to a corner of the in-house garage (she calls it “the SPA” – small projects area), and I’m slowly filling the bigger shop with some serious hardware. Planer, jointer, laser engraver, router table….all the fun stuff that I would have loved to put in my garage at home, but for which there just wasn’t space. Don’t know that my woodworking has gotten any better, but at least I’m willing to try things that I would not have considered previously. Sandie, as is her wont, is methodically remodeling the house, and she’s asked me to try building things for it – benches, closet space, cabinets and the like. I practice for things like that by making shop furniture, and I do see some improvement. Maybe if I can ever retire I can make a bit of money on the side as a carpenter.
Hanging out in the woodshop. Sitting on a bench that I reconstructed from cast-iron parts I found buried in the yard.
Speaking of retirement, Sandie took that plunge a year or so ago. She’s younger than me, but when her father passed away a few years ago, he did so as a pretty wealthy guy. Sandie’s mom set her and her sister up with pretty decent allowances and they’re both living the retired life. She’s told me to make the plunge a few times, but I’m not ready yet. I want that sweet government insurance. And I want to have some structure. I think when I actually do take the leap, I’ll be looking for a part-time gig within a year just to stay somewhat focused (and also have a bit of extra scratch coming in).
I continue to play with the Georgia Brass Band, and continue to act as the librarian for that group. During the Covid lockdown in 2020, I started scanning all of our music and estimated that it would take me 6-12 months to have everything digitized. 48 months later, I’m maybe a 10th of the way through it. Granted, I had a move during that time (there are currently 11 file cabinets full of music in the basement), but my original idea was vastly underestimated – and I don’t spend as much time scanning as I probably should. The group sounds good, though. We’ve gone back to NABBA a few times (competing in the Championship Section) and haven’t embarrassed ourselves yet. May do it again in 2025. The jury is still out on that, but our director – who founded the band – is retiring after 25 years at the helm (on Sunday), and he was not into competition at all. The new guy, who hasn’t been selected yet, may be more excited about it.
So that’s a (very) brief rundown of what’s been happening for the last 3 years. I’ve said this (many times) before, but I’ll try to be more diligent about keeping this thing updated going forward.
It’s Friday morning and I’m in the 14-Foot Shoals cabin at Cheboygan State Park. Have been here with my friend Sandie Jones since Sunday afternoon, and we’ll be heading back to Atlanta tomorrow morning. It has been a pretty good week at the cabin. Temps were unseasonably warm when we arrived – like in the high 60s/low 70s – which had me concerned. I don’t come this far north to be warm. Fortunately, it started to cool down by about Tuesday night, and I’ve had a fire going in the cabins stove since then. I stormed last night and early this morning, and the wind and waves are high right now. Wonderful conditions for my wind game.
Duncan Bay at Cheboygan State Park, MI
At home, work continues on the floors. I’ve pulled out all of the exisiting flooring on the ground floor (except for the tile in my kitchen pantry) and have begun putting down waterproof laminate oak. The living room is pretty much done – still need to paint the floor boards and add some quarter-round, and I’m a bit over halfway across the hall and into the kitchen. One of the first things I’ll need to do when I get home is rent a dumpster to get rid of all the crap that I pulled up from the floors. It’s currently piled in heaps in my music room and garage.
I’ve stained the decking on the deck – still haven’t done the railing. I guess I should put that on my list of things to do, also. Really need to buy a decent paint sprayer for that and for the railing over the retaining wall, which will need to be stained, too. I also plan to rebuild a section of fence near the house. It’s currently a big gate that’s falling over, and I’m just going to fence it in.
Sandie, meanwhile, has been remodeling my upstairs guest bathroom. She really wanted to do something and she’s done such a good job on her own house that I relented and gave her the bath, although I had no plans to do anything with it. She’s done a good job so far, and it’s nearing completion. Still not sure what type of floor will go in there – but I replaced the sink, so the old one is currently leaning against a wall upstairs – yet another reason I need that dumpster.
And that’s about all I’ve got at the moment. Typing this on my annoying little Bluetooth keyboard, which has keys that are really close together and sometimes in just the wrong place, so I have to go back and correct every other word, but at least it’s better than trying to use the keyboard on my phone.
Once again, I’ve managed to go a couple of months with nothing new written here – which is sort of odd, because a lot of new things have happened since August. I guess the most earth-shaking is that I’ve kinda started dating again. At the end of the last post, I mentioned that a couple of friends and I might hike up to Bob Bald since Joyce Kilmer was open. The two friends were one of my bartenders and one of her girlfriends, and the bartender bailed – so the girlfriend and I went alone, had a nice couple of days (in spite of the fact that we went up in the tail end of a hurricane), and decided to continue seeing each other when we got back to the big city.
As it turns out, Sandie (I’ll call her “Sandie” here – largely because that’s her name) bought a fixer-upper of a house several years ago, and she’s fixered-up the hell out of it since then; so she’s been very interested in making me move a lot faster with my own projects. What that means, frankly, is that she’d demolish my entire house if I let her. I’m not letting her. I’ve given her the upstairs guest bathroom as her own makeover project while I focus on replacing the floors in the rest of the house – at my own pace, thanks very much – which has been the plan all along.
The first step of that project was to buy some new power tools. Partly because I’d need them for putting down the floors, and partly because I needed them to build a new workbench so that I could clear up some space in my garage so that I’d have room in it for three pallets of laminate and my car. So I dipped into the refi money and bought a new table saw, miter saw, and brad nailer.
Yeah, so I didn’t really NEED the brad nailer, but I’ve always wanted one and I was in the store and…things just happened.
Next, I needed to buy enough lumber to make a long, sturdy workbench in the garage. The idea being that I’d be able to get rid of at least two of the three “benches” that are in the garage now and have plenty of room for the laminate. I built the bench top during the weekend of September 27th, and was moving along nicely….until I got word on the 28th that the laminate, which was supposed to have been delivered in the middle of October, would be delivered the following day. I spent much of the 28th moving as much stuff as I could out of the garage and into the attic above the garage, and throwing out a bunch of other things. Rather than freeing up room by replacing three benches with one, I actually received the pallets with FOUR benches in the garage (one being only half-built).
But I managed to get the pallets in.
I also managed to finish the bench – last night. The final glue-up for the top of it (a piece of MDF) is the subject of this post’s featured photo. The final product ended up looking like this:
So far, I haven’t actually started putting in the new floor. Sandie, however, has gone crazy on the guest bathroom. She removed the stipple from the ceiling, then spackled it (and the walls), sanded everything, primed and painted the ceiling, and has primed the walls.
She also managed to talk me into buying bead board for the walls, a new sink, new sink hardware, new light fixtures, and a new fan cover. Somehow, she convinced me to take out the toilet – which I did yesterday, which resulted in a whole new set of problems and necessitated my having to buy a new Dremel multi-tool in order to get the busted closet flange out of the main pipe (in addition to buying a new flange and the ever-popular wax ring). I also determined that the sub-floor around the toilet might be suspect, and I may have to replace that (leading to removing the bathtub and vanity). I dearly hope not. The bathroom will end up looking amazing. Of that, I have very little doubt. I’d never planned to spend so much time or effort on it, however. I just want to put the floors down, to take my time doing so, and to deal with whatever comes up next….NEXT. Some people like to do everything at once. I’m not one of those people.
In the good news department, I’ll be heading back to Cheboygan next month and spending a week in the 14-Foot Shoals cabin at Cheboygan State Park. I opted for a “staycation” last year – worried that I waited too late and I might have a problem with snow at the Straits of Mackinaw – and I was unable to get the kind of relaxation that I needed. Combined with my health issues at the beginning of this year (along with other pandemic-related things), missing that week away really took a toll on me this year. I’m really looking forward to just going to my little cabin on the shore, putting a nice fire in the stove, and doing absolutely nothing for 6 days. If I get snowed in, I’ll find a way to dig out. Nothing’s stopping me from going this year.
And that should bring everybody pretty much up to speed. I’ll try (again) not to wait two months to update this – but maybe I’ll wait a month and update it from my phone when I get to Cheboygan.
Two more months have gone by, and we’re now officially well into the hottest part of the summer in Georgia. I’m quite settled into the work-from-home routine – though I’m actually at the office today because my internet crapped out at home and AT&T isn’t sending a technician until Friday. Yes, I do have a mobile hotspot, but it’s just barely sufficient for doing my job at home.
The routine for the last few months has been pretty much set in stone. I get up at 5:00, feed the cats, drink a cup of coffee while watching the news or some YouTube videos. Shortly before 6:00, I’ll head out for a 5-mile walk, which gets me home at just after 7:00. At that point, I’ll have another cup of coffee (decaf, by the way – always), will watch the tube a bit more, and might eat something for breakfast – egg white omelet, bowl of cereal, or some fruit. As often as not, I’ll skip the food altogether. At around 7:30, I’ll take a shower and start work. Somewhere between 4:00 and 5:00, I’ll turn off the computer, feed the cats again, take another walk, put something on the stove for dinner, and drink a couple of rocks glasses of bourbon while looking at Facebook or playing a game on my phone – generally sitting in the screen house on my deck, though it’s recently gotten so hot that it’s uncomfortable to sit outside for too long.
The “Bourbon Barn” on my deck – a screen-house with removable wind/rain panels – is where I’ve taken to spending most evenings. I took this picture the day the roof was being replaced, which explains the rope on the roof.
After an hour or so, I’ll wander back inside, eat whatever was cooking, watch part of a movie or something, and generally hit the sack before 9:00. Lather, rinse, repeat. It really shouldn’t be surprising that I quite often do not know what day it is. Seriously – it’s not unusual at all for me to start the day by saying, “Alexa, what day is it?”
There are some highlights and banner days, however. For example, I had my gutters replaced last Thursday. After getting quotes from three different roofers to do the job – and after all three of them gave me quotes, but never followed up to schedule the work even when I sent them emails, I called a fourth company who was recommended by my bartender on Sunday. They came out and took pictures on Monday, gave me a quote on Tuesday, and did the job Thursday. The gutters look great, the work was done in less than three hours, and I’m not sure why the first three companies didn’t think it was worth three hours of their time to make $1500.
Another example: yesterday was Tuesday the 11th – and on Tuesday the 11th, my new retaining wall was completed. While it was expensive, it came out looking great and I’m confident that the erosion that has claimed about a foot and a half of my backyard over the last 20 years will now stop. I ended up hiring a hardscraper who lives in my neighborhood, and he went to town: 85-pound blocks, a few tons of gravel, two large drainage tubes, another ton of fill dirt, another ton or two of large rocks….the upper yard is not going anywhere anytime soon.
The new retaining wall shortly after it was finished.
The biggest disappointment with the new wall, however, is that my lawns were absolutely destroyed by the equipment and materiel needed to build it. As you can see in the picture, both the lower and upper yards are now little more than dirt. I’m fairly certain that it’s too late in the year to try planting grass, but I’m going to give it a shot anyway. Wendell (the guy who built the wall) really wanted me to hire him to resod the yard, but I’m not doing that anytime soon. The plan all along has been “Roof then wall then floors,” and I’m sticking to it. My floors – at least downstairs – are getting replaced next.
And I think the upstairs will get replaced sooner rather than later, too. Since I’m going to be working out of the house for the long term, I really want to get my upstairs office into better shape, starting with a new floor. It’s okay right now, but I need to make it feel less like a spare bedroom and more like an office, so I might as well start at the bottom, rip out the floor, repaint it, replace the lights, then put in a new floor and start getting the furniture laid out like an office. I think it will help me put some distance between home and work, and make the days a little less monotonous.
I did drive up to the NC mountains last weekend – mainly to find out if they were open and people could camp there again. I went to the Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest and drove along the forest road next to the Little Santeetlah River, where all of my favorite spots did indeed have people in them. So that’s a good thing. I stopped for 45 minutes or so just to sit by the river and soak up the sound of quiet. Now that I’ve established that the place is open, a couple of friends and I may hike up to Bob Bald in the next couple of weeks and spend a night up there. That should be really nice.
A while back, I opined that it was time to get the retaining walls in my lower yard replaced, and pondered doing it myself vs. hiring somebody who knows what they’re doing to take care of it.
I opted for the latter, and had a number of people come out to take a look and give me some estimates. While they were here, I also asked each of them to give me an estimate on rebuilding my deck. One guy, basically a handyman who came highly recommended, stood out with his estimates for both the walls and the deck, and so I hired him to replace the deck. I didn’t have the money to do both, the deck was a bit cheaper, and I wanted to get something done that I’d be able to SEE right away.
So, as of May 23rd, I have a new deck. Not only is it not falling over. Not only does it not have a horrible paint job. Not only does it not have those stupid built-in benches that some decks have. Not only is it not attached to the side of my house (it’s attached to the foundation). But also – it’s 8 feet longer than my old one was. It’s a really nice deck. The guy was able to re-use a lot of my old deck (most of the supports, for example, were fine – they just needed to be set in concrete), got everything leveled up, extended it to the end of my house (where it logically should have gone to begin with), and built a new set of steps there. It looks amazing, and – now that I’ve put up a screen house on it that my neighbor calls, “The Bourbon Barn,” I’m spending just about every morning out there drinking coffee and watering the lawn, and just about every every evening drinking bourbon and reading. In short, I’m using the deck, which – honestly – I really haven’t done in 20 years.
The new deck as it was being built. The edge of the old deck can be seen where the color of the support beams changes. Everything to the right (8 additional feet) is the expansion.
At the same time that I was getting estimates for the walls and deck, I was working with a roofer and State Farm (again) to try to get my roof replaced. I first put in a claim with State Farm in about 2008 because water was leaking into my master bath. It was declined. Since then, I’ve tried two more times to get my roof replaced, and State Farm turned me down both times. A few months ago, I replaced my front door, and saw water literally pouring out of the front wall of the house once the door was removed. I took the opportunity to rip up a large section of my water-damaged foyer floor. I also vowed that State Farm was going to replace the roof THIS QUARTER or I’d be insurance shopping.
State Farm sent a guy out to look at the roof. He found a few large holes. I also showed him the foyer floor, the garage ceiling and walls (evident water damage to both), and he went on his way. And about two weeks later, miracle of miracles, State Farm agreed to replace the roof.
Working from home while all this was going on was not fun – but it’s so nice to have a roof that isn’t an eyesore, and should actually keep things dry!
That is being done today. The roofing crew was onsite by about 6:20 this morning. It is now 3:40 in the afternoon, and I believe that they’re finishing up on the ridge vents and getting ready to start cleaning up. After 12 years, I’ve got a new roof. It looks amazing, and – assuming that I don’t have water in my foyer after the next heavy rain – I can now begin focusing on replacing the floors in the house. I’ve wanted to do this for years, but could not until I got the leaks taken care of for good.
What about the retaining walls? Well, they’re on the docket, too. While I’ve been doing all this other stuff, I’ve also been in the process of refinancing the house and pulling some money out to do all of these improvements. I’m now in the final stages of that project – waiting for the mortgage company to give me a closing date. They’re at the point of verifying my employment and insurance, and I’m fairly sure that I’ll be able to close within a week or two. As soon as that happens and the money is in my account, I’ll get one more estimate on the retaining walls and then pull the trigger on that project. The floors downstairs will come next. Then upstairs. Then I start looking at the kitchen.
So I’ve made good progress on most of the things I mentioned in my last entry. I actually completed one of those things, if you count “walk 100 miles in a week,” as I managed to get in about 105 miles between the 27th and the 3rd. I did not attempt a repeat of that this week – I haven’t even taken my walk yet today. I think I’ll end up at around 75 miles, which is plenty. I did the 100-mile week just to see if I could.
On the house front, I’m happy to say that State Farm finally came through for me on a home insurance claim! They’ve made things as difficult as possible, but they are going to pay to replace my roof (minus my deductible), and I’ve got a contractor signed up to do the work. Actually sent the signed contract back to him this morning. State Farm started things off by telling me that the replacement value of the roof was just over $9,000 and that the depreciated value was just over $5,000 and then said they were sending me a check for $2,600 – which has to be endorsed by me AND by Chase Manhattan, because they hold the mortgage. I started to lose my mind when all that happened, but after a few chats with the claims agent, I managed to deduce that they’ll send me ANOTHER check (again, to be endorsed by Chase…sigh) either after the work is done or (hopefully) when I send them a copy of the contract to do the work.
If they decide to wait until after the work is done, I need to figure out how to pay the contractor out of my pocket while waiting for the insurance (not sure how I’ll do that), or convince him to wait for it. He and I have discussed that, and he’ll probably be okay waiting if necessary.
He may not have to, though, because I’ve started the process of refinancing the mortgage and pulling out some money for the other projects. This process began as complete fiasco. I initially put in an application with Chase because they’ve had my mortgage for close to 20 years, they’ve been spamming me for the last three with offers to lower my interest rate, and I figured it’d be a piece of cake. And it was at first. Did the online application, gave them all of the relevant information, said that I wanted to lower my rate and pull out some money for home improvements. All good. Got a call back from a banker and everything was pleasant.
Until he mentioned that, because of COVID-19, anyone who wanted to pull money out during a refi had to show that they had 18 months of mortgage payments in reserve, and 12 months of those had to be liquid reserves. You following me on this? In order for me to pull out $20,000 in a refi, I had to have about $14,000 in liquidity. I was like, “Dude. If I had fourteen grand lying around, why would I be asking to borrow twenty?”
So he offered to lower that amount by adding two points on the loan, and rolling those into the loan. You following this? Because they’re so concerned that I’m going to either lose my job or die because of COVID, they insist that I have enough cash on hand to pay my mortgage for a full year, but if I DON’T have that, they’ll be happy to give me a BIGGER loan and only hold me to having enough to pay for nine months.
So I said, “Screw you,” and went to Quicken Loans. Fired up a RocketMortgage application, took 2.5 percent off of my existing interest rate and pulled out $25,000. Changed from a 30-year mortgage to a 15 and lowered my payment to boot. That took a morning. Now I’m just going through the follow-up stuff with my loan agent and he thinks we’ll close within a couple of weeks.
That will make things interesting with the State Farm checks…
Anyway, I also settled on a contractor to replace my deck, and I’m waiting for him to send me a contract for that. Going to tear the whole thing down, replace it with a few modifications, and extend it about 8 feet so that it takes up almost the entirety of the back wall of the house. Since I do have enough in savings to cover that work, I’m hoping he can get started as early as this week.
I might use the same guy for the retaining wall, as he’s given me a pretty attractive estimate for that work. Going to see how he does on the deck before I make that decision. I also need to call one other hardscaper who lives in my neighborhood and see what he’d charge me for that work.
So things are moving forward and I’m excited about the upcoming changes at home. Here’s hoping I survive the pandemic long enough to enjoy them!
