Category: House

projects and other things related to our house/garden etc.

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Seb Part II

Flat Screen TV Installation
Our new flat screen TV integrated into the
shelve wall…. Thank you Seb!

Seb came in on the red-eye from San Francisco and called around 7:30am but of course I missed it. I found the call a little later and we hooked up. I started working on the patio extension and even got the entire lawn mowed before Seb appeared in his rental. He had a good flight but had not slept a second and was tired even after a quick cappuccino.
So we needed some action for him and that’s what we did. The TV we had bought the last weekend turned out to be broken and we went back to the store to exchange it and we even decided to go for a better version with not too much additional cost. An LED versus the LCD we had before and instead of 60 Hz now we have120 Hz refresh rate. And a better known vendor. After having completed that part we installed the TV into the existing shelve.  Instead of completely sawing out the pieces we just took out the first 3 inches which allows the TV screen surface to be just at the front of the shelve…. Nice idea from Seb. After the installation was complete we had a beer on the porch and some Nachos baked in the oven with salsa and cheese.

BlakeAndAntiMosquito
Blake in front on our porch with our new anti-
mosquito device….. an oscillating tower fan.
Well, it does not work! but we tried.

Now of course Seb got even more tired and we quickly developed another task. We packed the kids into the car and went fan hunting…. as it was amazingly hot under the roof. Tower fans and a ceiling fan were on our plan. After target was out we found a nice 52 inches fan at the home depot but also there, not tower fans. Ana insisted to drop by the bad bath and beyond a few meter from the HD but I was sure tower fans would be sold out there as well. It turned out Ana was right. We got two nice tower fans.
When we got home Seb took a shower and drove to the airport with plenty of time to catch his flight. In fact he must be boarding as I write this post.

Following a facebook post from one of my friends in reference to a NYT article, fans in particular oscillating ones are an excellent ‘low-tech’ mosquito deterrent. That sounded like an awesome coincidence, I have a porch with tons of mosquitos and love to sit there when the sun goes down and I have a fan. As an experimentalist I put the theory to the test…. Initially I thought it worked but it turned out Boston mosquitos have figured out a way to find the victim even with a oscillating fan blowing at full blast.

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Flatscreen integrated

Seb (my brother) came by and we integrated our new flat screen TV nicely into the existing shelve wall…. All to make sure that when Motz (my other brother) and his kids visit in August they have a good time…. one brother for the other.

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Day at the beach with Seb

CraneBeachDay
View over my feed towards the ocean and the kids.

Today is the last day of my brother’s visit. Uncle Seb has been here since Friday night and today is Sunday. After we put up the over the ground pool we went to buy a piece of astro turf to put up in front of the pool and a flatscreen TV for the play room to finally get ride of the big CRT monster…. when we were finished with shopping we dropped of the goods checked the water level in the pool and then took off to Crane Beach…. it was green-head-fly season but it was only $12.50 to park 🙂

The kids played at the beach as usual while we after a quick dip chilled in the seats. What a wonderful day!

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Yard work

Worked today in the garden and am reminded that it can be harder than a long squash match. Everything hurts…. but I moved three huge bushes from an ugly to their new very nice locations. My hedge now is nice and dense and gained at least 10 sqmeter of valuable space for the kids to play.

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Dressing the Skylight

Last weekend and this weekend I used to dress the skylight from the inside and I know now why the people we hired originally to install the skylight did not want to do it. The work is not very hard but it takes some time as the pieces have to fit and properly match up to the window on the one hand side and to the hole in the roof on the other hand side. It took,me 2 itterations to match both aspects and the product is certainly not perfect but it does not look terrible either. I am writing this while I am waiting for my flight to leave to Seattle and cannot add the picture but I will do that later. Some painting will still be required to make the attic look beautiful. It certainly is functional right now.

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Clearing the Big Oak Branch Over the House

After cutting down the last of the oak triplet in the back yard I had to do some cleaning as there was lots of uncut wood on the ground. It took a while to cut it to pieces and carry it to its final storage location. This gave me some time to gather my senses and my courage and start seriously thinking about the big tree cutting job of this summer: the big heavy and long branch right over our roof.
I did not measure the length of the branch but I estimate it to be well over 10 m if not 15 m long. Since we bought the house it had attracted my attention as it really extended right over our roof not very high above it. It was in my opinion the reason why the roof on that part of the house was collecting lots of moss and the roof was decaying quicker than the rest. The branch has two effects: it would drop dirt on the roof and prevent the sun from shining on the roof. Both effects obviously promote moss growth. This branch has therefore been on my list of things to fix as soon as we would get our new roof. On the other hand we had investigated with arborists how much the removal of this branch would be and together with the triplet it came out to be not under $3500. Of course this was a large sum and we did not hire professionals.
Finally now it was the time to get started and I figured getting up on the branch was not going to be difficult but walking out on the limb to be able to cut down one small piece at a time would require some skill I was not sure I had. I would have to walk along the limb pretty much all the way where the piece to cut would be small enough so it would not hit our roof when cutting it off. I figured pieces of about 2 m would be the maximal length. I had the rigging technique down but checked out my book for how to walk the limb. It all looked very straight forward in the book but from below in reality it looked very daring. Finally I took my throwing kit and started tom install the rope in the best position I could find. It took me the better part of an hour to even have the rope in place. By far the most complex rope installation I had done so far, but finally the rope was in place and I was ready to start. I had come home early from work to get the project going but when I finally was up in the tee sitting on the big branch I was wondering how far I would get before the sun would have disappeared. Walking the limb turned out to be easier than it looked from below but difficult enough to dispense the proper amount of adrenaline in my body. I was able to position myself reasonably quickly and rigged the end of the branch I had figured to be the simplest to cut. I triple checked the rigging and estimated the length and figured it should work, but of course was not 100% sure. In my mind I saw the branch hitting the roof and leaving a hole …. but I finally started the sawing. The branch came down pretty quickly and it went perfectly as planned. Only the very last soft tips of the branch touched the roof and I carefully lowered the branch were Ana passed it my the roof and dropped it to the floor. It was starting to get dark at this point, but I quickly took care of 3 more pieces which all went very well. Finally when the furthest 23 had been cut down I came down. Meanwhile it was pretty dark and i was glad to finish to leave the rest for the next day or the weekend.

…. to be continued