Thursday, June 28, 2018

Project Paint the Porch: Stage 4 almost done

I am so close to being done with the front porch, yet I have so much more to go.  I have not been able to get myself out there before the sun hits the front steps so I work a little too quickly and call it a day before I complete every stage planned for the day.  But it's still progress.  I finished all but two of the risers earlier this week.  The lowest two were smaller than my paint edger so I had to do those using a regular paint brush like a cave man.

All that is left now are the stringers., but that is mostly for using up the paint.

After I get the last sections done, this week or next.  It's time for touch-ups and clean up.  I suppose I could have done a better job of being more precise but given that this is really just a stop-gag solution, I need to remember not to be so hard on myself.


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Thursday, June 21, 2018

First Day of Summer

I finished the spindles yesterday.  I almost didn't, thinking today would be better because of cooler weather but given the rainfall on this First Day of Summer, I'm glad I did.  Now I just have to tackle the risers which shouldn't be hard at all and then do some touch up.  Followed by some cleanup.  I still need to get some quarter rounds but that shouldn't be a big deal.

We had our annual Neighborhood garage/yard sale last Saturday.  It was, as the kiddies say, hot AF.

As long as I can remember, it either rains or is unbearably hot or both.  The first time we went to this sale, we didn't even live here, but knew we wanted to.  The next year it we lived here and it was awesome.  But in the following years I noticed that the number of houses participating was dwidling.

This year the person who normally runs it didn't, allegedly being out of town.  someone stepped up nearly last minute so it wasn't well promoted.  We didn't get a lot of foot traffic so they people who did show up got great deals because we were in purge mode and priced things to sell.  We made about $150 but might have done better if the weather was cooler and the event better advertised.  The important this is...we got rid of some stuff.




Sometimes I take the kids to daycare in their stroller, which means I return home with an empty stroller.  Inevitably someone sees me and makes a funny like "hey you forgot the kids".  It's always a chuckle but somehow after the 782nd time, that chuckle sort of loses its edge.

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Tuesday, June 12, 2018

Two steps forward, one back, one sideways

Not sure how much progress I'll be able to make on the porch this week.  It rained over the weekend
and of course with my kids around, I didn't bother even trying to paint.  Monday and Today have been wet and humid.  I'm hoping that things dry up and I can do a little bit Wed/Thurs/Friday but it is expected to be hot, and maybe humid as well.

I do have a crew working on the deck rails.  This has been a bigger project than it really should be because of two reasons.  First, it's too small for deck building companies but too large for your run of the mill handynman.  I had a few people come over in late march to give me quotes and most either low balled the project, which showed they really didn't understand what was involved or ghosted me because they realized what a clusterfuck it really is, because.....

Second, I don't really want to talk about all the issues but let's just say the deck was built wrong.  I cannot be certain, but I think they put in the swimming pool (that we had removed) and then built the deck, which made for non standard length railings.  There is one railing that is shorter than the rest because of a window.  They really should have just made the deck shorter but they wanted the extra footage.



Anyway, I had one or two people give low estimates but my gut told me that either scope creep would occur and the price would go up anyway or they would take shortcuts to keep costs down and that would come back to bite me in the end.

The other thing about this, or any project really, is I don't want to learn a trade in order to get what I want.  Tradesmen aren't gonna tell you that you have option A, B and C unless you ask because Option B and C is more work for them and might cut into their bottom line.

Like when I did the electrical panel.  I really wanted to move the location but that is more work so every time I got a quote, the price got increased.  Oh it will cost X.  X is fine.  Did I say X, I meant X + Y.  That's okay.  Plus Z.

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Friday, June 8, 2018

Not much more done this week

It was supposed to rain Tuesday and didn't.  It wasn't supposed to rain Wednesday and did, albeit not too much and not very long.  I painted one of the six sections of spindles.

I didn't work on it Thursday because it was a bit warm and I had other things on my plate.  Today it rained and even though my porch roof does a great job of protecting most of the porch including the spindles, I didn't want to take a chance with the moisture in the air.




I probably won't get much more done this weekend because the kids will be in the way and it is also supposed to rain.

In my perfect world, I will get up in the morning and get everything prepped while my mom takes moose and squirrel to daycare.  Then between calls and issues, I take a break and work on one of the spindle sets.  The challenge is that the Deckover doesn't spread as easily as traditional paint so it is slow work.



It is forecast to rain a lot next week.  Figures since the people from Home Comfort are supposed to come and work on my deck railing.

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Tuesday, June 5, 2018

Caught a Weather related break today

It didn't rain as expected so I was able to get a second coat on the steps.  The railings look fine with just the one coat so except for touch ups I'm essentially done with the Mountain Spruce part of this paint job.  Though I'm debating if I want to tackle the lattice or skip it entirely.  I seem to have overestimated the paint I needed though I probably saved some hassle by getting the 5 gallon instead of single gallons.  I was lucky that I waited until Home Depot had a pre-Memorial Day sale which was exactly like their Memorial Day sale and got some rebates on the paint, along with a 10% off coupon I had because they think I just moved or something.


If the weather is cool as expected tomorrow, I can work on the spindles.  These I need to take my time with and use painters tape so it might be a case of working one set at a time.  If i can finish the north end of the porch, I can put the porch swing up.  I should be able to the other porch furniture out now since it shouldn't be in the way or can easily be moved when I'm working on a section.

 I'm settling into a New Normal around here, or at least trying my best.  Weeks ago I cleaned out my desk and moved everything that is staying at the office into my storage cabinet and now I work 100% from home.  If I have to be downtown for something or a friend wants to met for lunch, I can go into the office and hunt for a seat or just use the cafe areas off the breakrooms.


The good news is I can log in at 7 and check emails so I'm not as ambushed when I get started as before.  My hours are still 8-5 CST though but I figure the extra time justifies when I run an errand during lunch that goes over an hour or the Traffic Gods don't favor me.

 On that note, I tried to cancel my gym membership.  I expect the process to be painful but not as bad as some of the lower end gyms in the world.  They wanted to charge me for June's billing cycle even though I let them know well before the end of May (they would try this even if I canceled May 1).  luckily the credit card they have on file expired though I'm sure they will still try to go after me for it.

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Monday, June 4, 2018

Project Paint the Porch: working as I can

As expected, the porch painting is going slow.  We were out of town for Memorial Day (including the days that bookend that weekend for traveling), though the weather was so hot I would not have been able to work on it anyway.



At least as far as the steps are concerned, I want to work under the required conditions of not too hot or humid and no chance of rain for 24 hours.  For various reasons, I decided to skip to Stage 3 and finish the railings before the spindles.  I still have to do a second coat on the steps though I'm debating if I need to do a second coat on the railings.



I'm hoping that I can do the spindles with more patience and care so I don't drip paint all over the green part.  I want to be finished by Father's Day so it looks good for the neighborhood yard sale.  Plus I want to get our front deck furniture out.



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Friday, June 1, 2018

Doing my due Diligence regarding Your Data and GDPR

I’ve had no one ask me how the European Union’s new General Data Protection Regulation law affects this site, but I do get the prompt below within the internal admin part of Mysteries of Life, so, let me talk about that very briefly.

European Union laws require you to give European Union visitors information about cookies used and data collected on your blog. In many cases, these laws also require you to obtain consent. 
As a courtesy, we have added a notice on your blog to explain Google's use of certain Blogger and Google cookies, including use of Google Analytics and AdSense cookies, and other data collected by Google. 
You are responsible for confirming this notice actually works for your blog, and that it displays. If you employ other cookies, for example by adding third party features, this notice may not work for you. If you include functionality from other providers there may be extra information collected from your users. 
Learn more about this notice and your responsibilities.

I am not collecting any information about anyone, other in the very general sense of reading and comprehending whatever bits of personal information people leave in their comments. Even so, I don’t do anything commercial with any of that — I don’t mine my comment threads for personal data, and certainly don’t comb through them for sales, advertising or other commercial purposes. It’s not that kind of site, and I’m really not that interested.

And if we are being totally honest here, I don't get the volume of visitors here that would make that sort of thing useful in the first place.  I don't get many visitors here and the ones who do generally comment anonymously so I don't have much relevant user data.

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One reason I don't like to travel


Since meeting Nightingale, I've logged more trips to Michigan than Missouri in a shorter amount of time.  Actually I'm not sure about that statement but too lazy to fact check.  It's probably about even.



Anyway, the hardest part about the drive is getting in and out of Chicago Metro traffic.  It doesn't seem to matter what time we leave here or Grosse Point, there is always traffic and it's ugly cousin Construction to impede up. 



Take our return on Tuesday. 



With our GPS app telling us we had 43 miles and 1 hour 9 minutes to go. 




Eight minutes later we have 33 miles to go.  Then with only 15 miles to go, it is still estimating another 43 minutes!  even with only 10 miles to go, it will take us 38 minutes to get home.



The closer we get, the slower we move because of traffic.  Oh and guess what!  There was a car accident that closed 3 local lanes to punish us for not taking the express lanes both chances we had. 


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