Saving One Penny at a Time: All Hands on Deck!!!

I hereby declare that these days shall now be called Weekbegins. I have no idea who decided that these days should be called weekends, for that just does not apply to a man who works during the week and then works some more when he gets home!

Saturday was a productive move forward, though!!!

But it was not without its share of frustrations...and blood.

Dad and I decided to tackle those pesky fence posts that are still in the ground from the short fence. And I DO mean pesky. They are set into concrete 2 1/2 feet below the ground, and that simply means that they do not budge ever the slightest until you get all the way down to the concrete.

Well, today we decided to see if we could remove them. What a terrible, terrible idea. Over the last 20 years of being set in place, I think they kind of liked where they were set, for they refused to move. We dug, we pried, we implemented a plan that worked for us last time we faced this obstacle (yes, you may remember that we had a similar issue on the Yellow Foreclosure!). But unlike our success on those, these just didn't move.

I went out and purchased a 16-foot "leverage board" to try a simply physics trick, and the board buckled and broke under pressure. Twice. Then three times. I was left with splintered wood in my hand. And we thought WE could lift it out?! ha!

The depth of the posts! This was WORK digging these out!

What failure and success looks like! Notice the broken board used to try to "pry" the posts out! They wouldn't budge! But notice that two posts ARE gone! Only from back-breaking old-fashioned hard work.

We talked about cutting the posts below the surface of the ground and just letting them lie in their grave for an unknown amount of years, but I just hate the idea of items left below surface. With future gardens, tilling, a homeowner planting bulbs, and on and on, you just never know when these posts will rear their ugly heads again. I wanted to do the job right.

Until I started trying to do the job right.

After much digging, MUCH back-breaking lifting, and untold amounts of sweat, we managed to walk away weary and limping with two (just TWO!), posts out of the ground. But we were done. We could quite simply do no more. We dreamed about bringing a tractor or backhoe or homemade hydraulic device inside and fence and having them out in minutes ("delusions of grandeur" is what my psychiatrist calls these thoughts). We talked about the $300/day rental fee for renting a small backhoe, and all of a sudden, it sounded great to both of us. But deep down, we both knew that these posts were coming out of the ground simply off of our muscles. And so we quit. For another day. Two down, four to go. ugh.

Two gone, four to go...ugh.

Mom was working her own project inside, and I must say she is quite the help! I have an office room that has 1991 wallpaper as an accent piece. Umm, no thanks. With any house I buy, the wallpaper is the first to go, this one being no exception. With a steamer in hand, she made quick work of the process! The high-quality paper left behind its high-quality glue on the wall, but she would have none of that! So she started scraping all of that off, too. I am going to have to keep her around!

Mom destroyed the wallpaper room! Nicely done, Ma!

Perhaps the most-frightening aspect of this house, though, is the continual smell. Ever since I walked in those doors for the first time, I have smelled what smells to me like a veterinary clinic. Some people smell it, others do not. One of the termite guys smelled it like me. My sister smells something but not pets. My mom smells something but not pets. Well, until today. She smelled poop when she walked by the dishwasher. Dad doesn't smell anything. But it's over-powering to me. Well, the dishwasher DOES smell, so we decided to see if maybe that might be the culprit for the whole house. Mom couldn't even be inside when the dishwasher was opened. Dad described the smell as spoiled milk. I nearly threw up with my face close to the unit. So we turned the water back on to the dishwasher and ran three cycles WITH detergent! I know this may sound crazy, but when I walked back inside this evening, for the first time ever, I didn't smell pets. Could it REALLY have been just the dishwasher?! This is exciting!!!

The smell was so repulsive when you opened this up...

After noon, we started to tackle one of the larger projects on the list: the deck! I have a lovely-sized deck on the back of the house, but for whatever reason, the previous owners decided NOT to stain it! The deck boards are actually fairly new (many still have the tags on the wood), but the wood had started to weather. I would estimate they were probably one year past being able to just simply stain and go. So in order to do the job right, I had to get that original wood back...which meant power-washing the deck!

The deck was NEVER stained!!! C'mon, previous owners, you're killin' me!

Oh, my, did we have our work cut out for us.

I started power-washing after lunch with my little power-washer I picked up for $25 at a garage sale (ummm, best purchase ever?!). The results were quite simply astounding. The weathered wood just went away, exposing a gorgeous color! Unfortunately, you had to power-wash every square inch of wood, and that just took a long, LONG time.

All in all, Mom and I would alternate shifts, and that power-washer ran a solid six hours that day. But the deck looked new!

Mom in the middle of the tedious power-washing.

Can YOU see a difference?

Before...

And After!

Before...

And After!

Dad started tackling another massive project while we basked in the sun and water. He started clearing out a very dense pile of wood along the western side of my privacy fence. This area had become a catch-all for whatever the owners threw over the fence. It appears that it started out as a place to store firewood, but over the years, the stacks of wood became piles of wood became piles of trash became home for termites became a dense forest. As we picked up the massive logs (two men per log), some crumpled away from termites while others exposed even more logs. We had our work cut out for us the next several days.

Where to even begin? It's simple...one log at a time.

Little by little...two loads of brush and wood removed.

The ol' truck is weighed down! LOTS of stumps in the back.

Two loads of old termite-infested wood to be burned.

I also tackled a very important project. It seems kind of silly to call it important, but it really is! When I bought the home, my beautiful front glass entry door was missing a cylinder. So when you opened the door (or when ANYONE opened the door), the door just kept on going out of your hands. We are all expecting the door to come back, but time and time again, I watched as the door was opened and just kept going back until it hit the house. If I didn't address the problem now, I wasn't going to have glass much longer! And a $10 easy fix is certainly much more welcomed than a $200 difficult fix when the door breaks. So I installed a cylinder on the door to prevent the door from running out of ALL of our hands.

Now I wish I could tell you that that project took 10 minutes and went perfectly. I wish I could tell you that the screws came out easily from the wood. I wish I could tell you that the rusty heads didn't break off. I wish I could tell you that my screwdriver didn't slide off the screw and bury itself deeply into my left index finger. I wish I could tell you that blood didn't start pouring out from my finger. I wish I could tell you that I didn't have to walk outside and ask to see if Mom had a Band-Aid. I wish I could tell you that I didn't have to call and ask Dad to return from dumping the first load of wood with a Band-Aid. But, alas, I cannot. I REALLY did some damage to my finger. The screwdriver went deep...to the point of me questioning if I needed to buck up and go get stitches. But I had work to do. And so I covered up the flap of skin with a wet paper towel and waited for my Doctor Dad to arrive with professional cover-up pieces of Band-Aid. Probably the part that frightened me the most was the lack of pain. Just a flap of skin exposing a hidden and I think second hidden layer of skin. yuck.

But as with any man, I went back with a bloodied hand and finished the door. You know, so the glass doesn't break and all...

Notice the lack of cylinder...the door just swung freely. WAY too freely.

The door now closes on its own AND doesn't swing wide open!

Too nice of a door to let break.

But we had progress! My hired painter came by today to start work on the garage, and he finished up his first coat. It looks great (the yellow wall is gone!), but it's definitely going to need another coat. So the garage is looking sharp, two posts are out of the ground, the deck is fresh and new, the wallpaper is gone, the front door is protected, and the stumps are beginning their march to a fiery death. We ended up loading up two truckloads of brush and stumps tonight.