Halloween Total

One Thousand, Four Hundred and Thirty-Se7en

Mo' Autumn Leafses

Sunday involved more work with leaves. We have managed to bag up 5 large trash bags packed tight with leaves. As I looked out on the yard this morning, it looks as though we don't even own a rake.

Yesterday was extremely windy and the first really cold day of the season. The leaves are piled everywhere. I was going to take my bags of leaves to the dump this week, but I have decided to wait until the weekend when I will clearly have more bags to take with me.

We got the rest of the Halloween stuff down from the Carriage House and the special hideaway where we keep the fake pumpkins.

All this crap will be sitting around the house for the next few days and until it is placed out in the yard on Thursday.

I still haven't achieved Flying Ghost yet. I'm still messing with the posts and getting the post anchors securely pounded into the ground. I think I have discovered something important as far as pounding these post anchors into the ground.

I have been using short lengths of 4x4 posts to place in the sleeve of the post anchor and then pound with my sledge hammer. The short length really takes a beating and is generally destroyed and splintered apart before I get the thing completely pounded to the ground.

If I use a longer length of the 4x4, it doesn't seem to get destroyed like the shorter length. Hence, it is easier to remove the 4x4 post when I am finished.

I have yet to complete all my experimentation with this theory and will report back when my findings are more conclusively definitive.

The Autumn Leaves

There was a ton to do today and very high on the list was to get the leaves in the front yard raked up. But there was also the installation of a new cover lift for the hot tub, getting more Halloween decor into position and doing something with our Cabernet wine. The must has been sitting in pulp for nearly two weeks now and it's time to get the rest of the juice out of the pulp.

But first, let's stop and take note of the birthday of my sister, Sherry. She would have been 51 today. Oh well, I guess forever 50 is better...except for the part where you are dead!

The first job we tackled was the wine. Yes, that is the way our priorities go.

I took the wine that was sitting in a se7en gallon bucket and poured it into a clean ice chest. As I poured it, Susan held a large mesh bag and collected the pulp. There was still a lot of juice in that pulp and we aim to get it.

Then we let the juice in the ice chest drain into a six gallon carboy. It looks like we got about three gallons. 

Next I tied the mesh bag to my camera tripod to allow the juice to run out.

I squeezed the bag throughout the day but this is a very inefficient way of getting that juice. We really need a fruit press.

We next had to do some maneuvering of furniture and carpets in the Dining and Living spaces. We still have the piano up on casters so we can move it around as we need to when we get back in there to really finish the project.

With that accomplished, I moved to the backyard and the hot tub.

There is an earlier post that shows the old lift and how it has pulled its screws right out of the side of the tub.

We purchased a side mounted lift, which is what we really should have had from the start.

It was clearly made in China because the directions were really bad. I had to figure most of it out myself. The directions provided lots of useful information but it left out giant parts, like how to install the hydraulic struts onto the brace arm.

In the end, I won.

My next task was to get the Flying Ghost display set up. I had pounded the post keepers into the ground earlier in the week so all I had to do was drop the post into the sleeves and tighten them up.

At that point, I could no longer ignore the leaves. I got out my Power Vac and my Leaf Blower and went to work. 

I'll have to pick them up tomorrow. Today I was only able to get them in piles.

Susan had to work the Hockey game so I had the evening to myself.

I had gone over to Jim's Home Brew to price a fruit press. They had one there in stock but it was much larger than I would ever need and it cost $700. I came to find out that even a smaller one was going to run about $300. That's too much for something I would use once, maybe twice a year.

I decided later in the evening to cover that mesh bag containing the pulp. I untied it from the tripod and was going to move it to a different bucket and pour off the juice we had when it slipped from my hand and plopped down hard in the bucket of juice.

A giant funnel of juice was unleashed upwards. My face and body took the brunt of the impact and then the remaining juice distributed unevenly all about the adjacent area. I'm certain I'll be cleaning up sticky dried juice for weeks to come.

Another typical Saturday on Corbin Park!

One Week to Halloween

We have a week to go and lots to do. But that is not why I'm writing today.

Years ago, I bought a poster that displayed all the different chords and the fingering positions on the keyboard. I also bought a corresponding poster for guitar chords. I always thought it would like nice next to the piano.

Now that the Living Room is finished and back full of furniture, I thought it was time to hang that poster.

We've been in the house almost nine years now and we still have not hung a lot of pictures. We've been very weary of putting nail holes in the walls.

We would love to get a bunch of our family pictures up on this wall on the stairs. But again, we've not wanted to punch a bunch of holes in the wall. Especially after all the plastering work we put in getting it smooth and great looking as shown above.

I've been looking into these stick-on hooks that 3M makes. I bought a couple a few months back and put them in my closet to hang my bathrobe and pants on. They have been working really well and I think they will work for the pictures we hang in the stairway.

That does not appear to be the case for a larger poster in a heavy frame.

It's my own damn fault! The package says that the weight limit is 5 pounds. This frame weighed about 7 or 8 pounds. I thought I could mitigate that issue by putting up two hooks. Math doesn't work with sticky hooks. At least, not the way I use math.

It ended up holding for about 4 hours. Susan got home late from the Arena and was taking a bath when she heard a loud crash around 1AM.

The poster is okay but my $20 frame is toast.

Countdown to All Hallows Eve - Nine Days To Go

With the completion of the Living Room, we can now move on to the next most pressing issue facing us. Halloween!

With nine days to go, we have hardly decorated at all. People are starting to wonder.

Now that the furniture is back in the Living Room, and all the crap that has been packed into the Dining Room is cleared out, Susan has started laying out her decorations in the house. She completed a major goal today and had the carpets cleaned.

The white one in the Living Room has been rolled up for the past nine months so it was in pretty good shape. 

But the red one in the Dining Room has had nine months of sitting under a covered Dining table, with cats lolling about the place and barfing all around. It was in bad shape. But it sure looks good now.

My efforts to Halloweenize the house have included getting the posts out in the front yard for the flying ghosts, and getting some lights up on the house. I've also got the skeleton hanging from the noose upstairs.

*Because I am a well known environmentalist, always concerned for the well being of the planet and my impact on it, (*Text in italics should be considered sarcastic.) I have started replacing outside lights with L.E.D. bulbs. These bulbs have finally technically caught up with the basic desire of the light bulb consuming public in that they can dim. They are still wildly expensive and the lights classified as "Daylight" emit a tone of light that Emergency Room Technicians would covet.

This picture of the new bulb over the back door does not do the light justice. It actually looks pretty good here. 

Anyway, I have written today's date on the bulb and we shall see how far the $18.95 I spent on it shall go. It had better last at least two years (and more five) or I'm going to get even more sarcastic.

Deadline Day

Susan and I both agree that the Living Room is not finished. We also both agree that the Living Room is finished. 

Yea!

Here's the deal! The main stuff we wanted to get done is done. The ceiling is drywalled and painted to a satiny smooth surface, the crow molding is up and looking good, the trim is up, the wall paper is in, the radiator is back from the powder coater and looking good, and the stenciling, while not complete, looks awesome.

The stenciling needs to be completed, the radiator needs to be re-installed and all the woodwork needs to be varnished. But it's done!

The statistics are that it took 275 days for us to complete this two month remodel. I have not figured out the cost yet but I'm thinking we are around one thousand dollars. That does not include the hours and hours we put in.

But who couldn't be happy with these results.

I should point out that today was a particularly beautiful autumn day. This is what it looks like out of doors.

One might notice that pile of leaves in the yard. It is my first raking of the year. More to come. I must admit that the pile of leaves is gone now and gone to the same place I took them last year, as chronicled in a post on Oct 4th. let's never speak of this again, again!

Two Days to Deadline

Pictured above is the last piece of my chair rail puzzle to be installed tonight...and forevermore, for that matter. The whole installation went very smoothly except for the part where I seemed to be missing a section of base shoe. 

I looked all over for it and cannot find an extraneous piece that I have seemed to forget about. So, my mission for Saturday is to get a piece of base shoe and get it stained and installed. October 20th is coming.

In the meantime, the rest of my chair rail looks great!

I am very pleased with my coping joints. 

Potpourri of Stuff

As reported yesterday, I remain on schedule for finishing up the Living Room Remodel by applying the second coat of stain to the chair rails. I turned up the heat in the Carriage House in order to promote drying in a more efficacious manner.

Susan continued her progress with stencils. She might have everything up by this weekend. While we have set a deadline for finishing the Living Room for this Sunday, that deadline does not include all of the stenciling Susan plans. But it does include the stuff I have left to do.

We are also working on our Cabernet. I need to punch it every day in our to prevent a cap of pulp for forming on top of the juice and preventing it from breathing properly. I have been using my drill with a wine stirring bit attached but that is really more movement than I need.

Approaching the Finish Line

I pulled all the trim that is ready to be replaced in the Living Room out of the Carriage House and put it into the aforementioned Room of Living. 

In turn, I hauled all the chair rail into the Carriage House and put down the first coat of stain. Tomorrow I shall put down the second, darker coat and then EVERYTHING will be ready for installation on Friday night. Or Saturday. It all depends on Friday afternoon and beer consumption.

In any event, I shall get the compressor and brad nailer in there and do everything at the same time in one fell swoop and caboodle.

I should also mention that Susan has started putting up more stencil work with this little gem in the corner.

Craftsman Corner - Tip # 477

Today on Craftsman Corner, we are going to discuss the crafty way of joining corners.

I owe today's tip to my neighbor Lou who told me how to do this. Gary at work tried to tell me about this but I was too dense to figure out what he was talking about.

I mentioned a few posts ago how I was putting up chair rail in the Living Room. I am pre-cutting all my pieces prior to staining them and I am cutting coping joints rather than 45 degree angle cuts at the corners.

The picture I showed back on the Oct 7th post shows a pretty sloppy joint. I haven't been too worried about my crappy sloppy joints because they will be dark, puttied and in remote corners.

The method I have been using is to trace the image of the profile of the chair rail with a pencil on the back of the piece of trim I'm going to cut. I have not had good results. The pencil line gets lost and cut up as I go and it is hard to follow. Also, it loses a lot of the detail of this particular profile.

What I should have been doing is this:

Take your piece of trim and cut a 45 degree angle at the end you want to cope.

This reveals a nice crisp profile line for you to follow with your coping saw.

The result is a much more accurate cut and a tighter fit. It's like magic! 

Thanks, Lou!

Return from the Quest for Cabernet

We are back with our Wine Booty. We bought a bunch of different bottles of wine at various wineries and a case of "Lady in Red" at Kestrel Winery.

We started Sunday out with breakfast at the Barn. It's a place in Prosser that looks like it is the all round fun place to be. Restaurant, bar, night club!

The lady working the bar was not very happy we were there. Her overall attitude told us she would have preferred we went somewhere else, or at least to someone else's section. But we made her struggle through and had a highly serviceable breakfast.

We headed to Kestrel to pick up our case and then to Mercer for a bit of wine tasting.

Then we were off to pursue the real reason we were in Prosser.

We got 108 pounds of Cabernet Sauvignon grapes from our grape dealer, Patricia and George O'Brian of Vineheart Vineyards. We left them a bottle of our Tempranillo that we made from the grapes we got from them two years ago. We hope they liked it better than the judges at the fair.

We were ready to hit the road after that and it was only 1:00. We managed to stop at a couple more wineries on our way out of town and then we just motored our way back to Spokane. We got home about 4:30.

Patricia was unable to crush the grapes for us this year which led to a giant dilemma. We have hand crushed this amount of grapes in the past and it is not fun. It took us four hours and we were dead tired afterwards.

Fortunately, I was able to call on my friend John, who operates a small winery east of downtown. He let us bring our grapes over today during an extended lunch and we got them crushed. The set up took about 15 minutes, the crushing took about 5 minutes and the clean up took about half an hour.

I'm going to keep my eye open for a used crusher/destemmer but it is hard to justify the expense for something we would use once a year. Still, I might come across something.

Wild Wine Weekend

We started the day yesterday with breakfast. We really had no idea where to go so we just drove around a bit. With no luck with that plan, we hit the highway towards Prosser. 

On the way, we saw a sign for the 10-4 Cafe in Grandview. They were packed and it took a while to get our food, but it was worth the wait and our day was underway. We appeared to be the only ones in the place that spoke english.

Our first stop was at this little wine shop we discovered a few trips back. We always find some fun drinking toy to buy.

Next we went to DavenLore Winery. We started our tasting day with a bunch of tasty wines they offered and the heavy pouring hand of the kid serving us. At this rate, we weren't going to get very far before passing out.

Our next stop was Horse Heaven Hills Brewery. We sampled some beers and watched a little football. Oregon was beating Washington, but it was just underway.

The next bunch of wineries we visited were Airfield Estate, Thurston-Wolf, Apex, and then Kestrel. That meant we sampled a lot of wine and ate a good amount of food. But we really sampled a bunch of wine.

Then we stumbled back to the Sunnyside Country Inn and fell asleep. That was at 5:30PM!

 Here's a nice picture of the crusher they have at Thurston-Wolf. I estimate that is worth about ten grand...possibly a bit more.

Here are few more pictures of the trip featuring the Amazing Spider-Man.

 

The Quest for Cabernet

We awake today in Sunnyside, WA. It is our annual pilgrimage to acquire grapes. We are scheduled to pick up 100 pounds of Cabernet Sauvignon from Vineheart Vineyards, our source for grapa in Prosser. 

We drove here last night. It takes about two hours and 20 minutes to get from Spokane to Sunnyside. This whole valley down here is loaded with wineries...from Richland to Yakima. Prosser appears to be dead center of the valley, but we've never found a place to stay in Prosser that we liked. And so we stay in Sunnyside, which is not so sunny today.

The B&B we usually hunker down at was not available so we are at the Sunnyside Country Inn. It's okay but it's no Sunnyside B&B.

There also appears to be a very busy rendering plant very near to our motel in Sunnyside. The smell isn''t as bad today as it was last night when we rolled in, but it's out there.

We have slept in today as is our want on a vacation and then we will be going to wineries. I expect we'll be good a drunk and back in our room by 3:00!

One Step Closer to "Done!"

We are not quite finished in the Living Room but we are close enough to begin a looooooooong overdue clean up. We also took down the plastic barrier between the Living and Dining Rooms for the first time in 10 months. It sure makes the Living Room look bigger. Every time I walk into either room now, I'm momentarily taken aback.

One can see from these pictures of the Living Room that the chandelier is back in place. We have been apprehensive about re-installing it because neither of us was sure it was very well centered on the stenciled medallion Susan did.

We are both pleased with the result. It's not perfect, but we'll take it. With all the variations in the stencil and the number of things that could have gone wrong, we both think it looks good enough that it won't be bothering us because of an ever so slight mis- alignment with the center. 

My concern right now is that one of the lights had a problem of intermittent illumination. It didn't always come on or stay on. Upon closer investigation I found the receptacle to be faulty and cracked. I hope I can get to Luminaria before they close tomorrow so I can acquire a replacement.

Cleaning up the Living Room led to a modest cleaning effort of the whole house. It wasn't the massive, intense cleaning that Susan would have preferred, but it will do for now.

I was just happy to get some of my many beer and wine stains cleaned up  in the kitchen.

Curiosity & the Boiler Game 2013

I could have gone longer with the gas turned off but curiosity got the best of me. I had to know that the system was filled and heated up and NOT leaking. And so far, that appears to be the case.

Me happy!

So this year, if you had October 8th, you win the prize jackpot for the Boiler Game...a beautiful little diamond of 8 to 12 carats. I can't be more precise on the carat weight because right now, the diamond is just a lump of coal.

I stained a bunch of base shoe tonight. Other than the chair rail, the base shoe is the one remaining piece of the Living Room puzzle I have yet to re-install.

Base shoe is kind of like quarter round but more tall than wide. I have another coat of  stain to apply tomorrow, plus the rest of the chair rail to cut to size.

I'm really trying hard to make the coping joints fit tightly, but I'm afraid I'm limited by my skill level and tools. I'm going to try some carving tools on my next attempt.

Chair Rail and Gas

I am pleased to report that the pipes, radiators, and boiler are filled and ready to be fired up. I am really tempted to fire it up and bring it up to temperature, just to make sure everything is tight and working properly. Then I would shut off the gas until I was really ready.

One advantage of doing that would be to get a read on how much gas it takes to heat the house for a day. I would be able to see it in my bill when it came around.

Unfortunately, my bill comes around today and so heating up the system one time would not be reflected in it. By the time the statement comes around again, I'm quite sure the system will have been fired up for a while.

The alternative is to write down the readings on the gas meter before and after the system test. But I probably won't do that.

In the meantime, with 13 days remaining to the deadline, I started cutting the chair rail trim tonight. I thought it would be better to cut everything first and then stain it. Then it would go right up when it's ready to be installed.

The pieces I've cut so far are so tight and snug, I don't even have to nail them in place. I will of course, when the time comes, but right now, it helps to see them in place and figure out the correct height to place them.

I have been attempting to put the corners together with coping joints. That's where one follows the profile of the trim in order to snug it up really tight and professionally.

I got the "tight" part but not so much on the "professionally".

First Weekend in October Update

We have just completed a very nice weekend as far as the weather is concerned. Both Saturday and Sunday were classic Autumn days with sunshine and a bit of nip in the air. It's still getting damn chilly at night.

So that brings us to the first item on the agenda; the Boiler Game.

I have not heard back from the people who are powder coat painting the Living Room Radiator. We are getting very close to needing the furnace but we're not there yet. Nonetheless, I would like to have it available for when it is needed.

As I look back through my archive of pictures, I am amazed to find I don't have one of the radiator or the pipe I have been trying to plug. Well, there it is, shown above. 

That was after I had a guy from church (usually the best people) come over and help me remove the elbow that was on top of that pipe. Shaun came equipped with the heavy duty pipe wrenches that I did not have. It made short work of the removal and the pipe is now plugged. I'm going to fill the system tomorrow but not fire up the boiler just yet.

Susan continued her work on the ceiling stencil, having completed her wall papering tasks yesterday. She has some touch up to do on this portion of the stencil, but it is essentially finished.

The light will hang in the middle of that circle. Remarkably and to our great relief, it is pretty well centered. Not perfect...but pretty well. I guess it remains to be seen once we hang the light. 

She has other stenciling to do, but it may not happen right away.

We have decided that October 20th is the deadline for being done in the Living Room. I only have minor trim to replace and then the installation of the new chair rail. I haven't even started staining yet but I think I can make the deadline.

Holy Crap! I just realized October 20th is two weeks from today.

Holy Crap!

I will leave you now with some pictures of some of the trim replacement I did today.