Joys of Home Ownership

Shoot, I Still Need A Chute

In Aiken, we used to be able to pile our yard waste at the curb and the city would come around with a truck armed with the Jaws of Death to remove it. In Klamath Falls, Waste Management takes care of the yard waste along with the trash and recyclables. But here you need to bag the waste and put it out on the curb with your plastic trash & recyclable bins. You get three 30 pound bags a week for free. The first few pickups we used some bio-degradable lawn bags, but when we ran out we bought some paper ones from Home Depot. They are kind of tall and hard to get to fully open. And once you do, they don’t stand still or stay open while loading them, but still nicer than the plastic bags.

A couple weeks back we noticed that our neighbor uses the same Home Depot bags too, but to go along with them she had this cool green plastic chute that fit perfectly inside the bag. It both held it open and standing up straight. It also made it easy to make sure the debris got into the bag…

I just had to have one of those. It was Sunday afternoon and we were in for the evening, so I figured we would just go to the store early on Monday and do Store Pickup. I checked for local availability and the web site said there were 43 of the Plastic Leaf and Lawn Chutes on hand. Since I was paying by charge card online and the chute is a mere $8.97 I thought maybe I should order something else to make it come to something over ten bucks at least. We were down to just one yard bag, so I added a 5-pack of the bags, of these they had over of thousand in stock, for a whopping $2.47 more.

I placed the order and my confirmation came within seconds. A few hours later I received another email from Home Depot, they were cancelling part of my order, the Leaf and Lawn Chute. I guess their inventory was off, way off. So now I had a charge on my credit card and a Store Pickup for two dollars and forty-seven cents.

When we finally made it to Home Depot on Tuesday morning, I almost pulled into the “Pandemic We’ll Bring It To Your Car” parking spot, but my not wanting to be not rude about it made me go ahead and enter the store. When I arrived at the the Customer Service Desk there were two representatives working and both were helping people. So I stood back my six socially distancing feet and waited. And waited. And waited. Finally someone came free and and helped me, but it seemed like it took so long it might have been quicker if I had walked back outside, moved the car, called the number and had them bring it to me.

I still need a chute, but I guess I can hold off until fall when maybe they actually will have some in stock (the web still says 43 on hand in Klamath Falls.)

We’re Doing Our Part

Our CARES Act check arrived unceremoniously into our savings account a week ago, exactly 2 weeks after I had the IRS deduct almost half of that to pay for 2019’s taxes. Since then we have been doing our part to stimulate the economy by spending the other half on buying:

  • A battery for the Miata from NAPA – the old one was done it by the car sitting for 2-1/2 months awaiting shipment to Oregon.
  • A 15″ Dell laptop from Amazon – the old one was limping along with a dead battery and was mortally wounded by a liquid spill.
  • A lawnmower, a weed whacker and a leaf blower from Home Depot – the old ones were left behind for the new owner of 778 Boardman Road. The mower and trimmer couldn’t be shipped anyway as they were gas powered…

1025

Our new house number is 1025 and back in late December I found some steel circles with three of the four numbers cut out of them on a shelf in the garage. We wondered what happened to the #1? Thinking that these looked a lot better than the generic bought at Walmart house numbers that already adorned the place, and after an extensive search didn’t turn it up, we set out to find someone in town that could make a matching number one.

Our first stop told us that it looked like it was made using a plasma cutter and he didn’t have one. He thought for sure he could make something just like it, but it would be expensive in both time and materials. So he directed us to a place he thought could do it a lot cheaper. “Heck,” he said, “They might have even made these existing numbers.”

Stop number two was a heating and air condition business. They had a plasma cutter, plenty of material, and said they thought they could do it for on the cheap. They didn’t do the ones I had in hand, so the fellow asked if I knew what the font was. I told him no, but I bet if I searched on the Internet I could find a font that looked very similar with a little research.

I called him back the next day and gave him the names of about 4 fonts that I thought would be good enough. He told me it would a quick job to do, but it it had to come after all the other jobs on hand or that came up that profited the company a heck of a lot more that the sawbuck I was willing to pay for my #1. I told him I understood and that I’d give him a call once a week to check in.

Last Monday, after around four weeks he called and said that I could come get my number one. I’ve have painted them in the same red color as we painted our plain front door and will mount them just above the garage door on the next nice afternoon.

Garage Flooring Part 2B

I didn’t hear from RaceDeck for a full week, so I called the 1-800-NUMBER again this last Monday. When a person answered I told them I placed an order a week ago, but have yet to be contacted by a Sales Rep. She said, “Hmmm. I don’t know what happened, but I can transfer you to someone that can help you right now.” Next thing I know I’m placing my order.

This afternoon the UPS man dropped off 4 big boxes. I managed to get the second half of the floor down in a couple hours. All except for the last 4 tiles by the door into the laundry room. I will need to trim about and inch and a half off the left edge to get them down to lay down flat because of the threshold.

Because the garage entry is flat, unlike Aiken, I bought the small leading edge pieces to finish off the front of the floor. When I got through, I thought that maybe I should buy them for the other end facing the “shop area” as well, so I wouldn’t trip on 1/2″ elevation gain. What’s another thirty bucks? Not going to get finish edges for the sides as they are close enough to the walls that it isn’t really that noticeable.

New Roof, Day 3

Just 10 months ago we put a new roof on 778 Boardman Road. That process took literally one day. We knew going into buying 1025 Pacific Terrace that it needed a new roof and, well, we are now 3 days into the process with at least 2 more to go.

The difference is, that the house in Aiken had one layer of shingles to remove and nothing else before laying down shingles because we took care of that house. The previous owners of this Klamath Falls house were not so diligent, I think they never took action until there was a problem.

At inspection we were told that there were two layers of shingles on the back and one on the front, turns out it was three and two. The the top layer in back was a lot newer and not in bad shape aside from the shoddy boots surrounding all the plumbing vents pipes. The front needed replacing badly as there was hardly any mineral left on the asphalt of the shingles. The hidden base layer was the actual original shingles installed on the house in 1964 when it was built 56 years ago!

The reason it is taking so long is those half a century old shingles don’t tear off like they should, they disintegrate, requiring 3 or 4 times longer to get off than usual. Add that to the time it is taking them to cut out all of the bad plywood sheathing, it is slow going. The whole roof is stripped finally and the back, the front half and half the gable side is repaired, but there is the other gable side still left to repair. Every bottom section of the sheathing has had to be replaced because when the bottom edge drip lip was installed it was put on top of the wood, instead of underneath, which led to water accumulation…

The last gable side is the one with the chimney in it and the guys have told us that the wood all around it will need to be replaced too. So the job won’t be done until at the earliest next Thursday because the work crew has some special training they need to attend that is in Grants Pass next Tuesday and Wednesday.

Garage Flooring Part 2A

Last Friday I went to the RaceDeck website and used their floor design tool. When I was done I clicked the Submit for Quote button. Like last time I did this we have revised the design a couple of times over the weekend, playing with the check size, adding more carpet pieces, etc. By Monday I had still not heard back about the request for a quote, so I started calculating costs based on the pricing I received back 2-1/2 years ago. In the end I have decided to keep those 24 carpet tiles in between the two “designated” parking areas, it didn’t seem like it was worth and extra $90 (in 2017 pricing) to buy the blue and silver free-flow tiles to make one big checked area.

After finalizing the design for the last time, I called the 1-800-NUMBER to go ahead and place my order. Turns out this is sort of a misnomer, the person who answered the phone was just a front person. She took my information and what I wanted to buy and said she’d be passing it along to a Sales Representative and they would get back to me. Twenty-four hours later – crickets… I’m not real sure, but I think this might have been the way it went in July 2017 too.

Garage Flooring Part Two

The new house has a two-car garage compared to our old one-car back in Aiken. When we moved, I packed up the RaceDeck tiles and brought them with us. I had tossed a few of them out that I had to cut up to fit around the cabinets we had in Aiken.

Today we had a nice sunny mid-forties day, so this afternoon I backed the Mini out of the garage and installed the tiles that I brought with us for it to park on. The existing free flow tiles will help hide the water we are bringing in with us when we have been driving on the snowy roads. Because the Miata is just sitting for now, water is not a problem, yet.

Tomorrow we will order the flooring for the other half of the garage. The one side of the garage is deeper than the other because somewhere along the way a previous owner stole several feet to add a downstairs bathroom. The deeper side is even deeper than the RaceDeck flooring will go and that is where there is a workbench and shelving for tools and storage.


This is what it looks like now.

This is what it will look like finished.