Springtime maintenance and history

Spring brings milder weather in our area, which is a good thing–especially since we now need to be outside more in order to get the yard back in shape and work on exterior maintenance!  🙂 

Jenny and I both worked from home yesterday.  For our lunch break, we went to the Alle-Kiski Historical Society Museum, where they had a display of photographs from the 1936 St. Patrick’s Day flood.  They had a section of photographs from our neighborhood of Parnassus, so we wanted to see what they had.  Another member of the Parnassus Civic League had stopped by last week to tell us that the museum was holding the exhibit open for another week, and there were two pictures of our house there.  An awesome bonus is that the museum was offering reprints for $2 each. 

The museum was pretty neat.  They had a lot of artifacts from the industries in our area, and a lot of other interesting historical information and exhibits.  We found the two pictures of our house (and now know that there are at least three, as there is a third picture that someone from out of the area left in our mailbox a number of years ago–sadly, it was just a photocopy, and is lacking in detail because of that), and ordered reprints.  The museum curator (actually, I’m not sure what her title is exactly, but she was the one there running things) then gave me another surprise–the museum recently had three issues of a newspaper from Parnassus donated!  The three issues are from the late 1880’s, and are extremely fragile.  The curator is making archival copies of them, and when she’s finished, we’ll be able to get copies!  This is awesome.  I had never heard of a Parnassus newspaper, but I guess that there was one, at least for some time.  I can’t wait to read them and share them with the rest of the Civic League. 

After we finished the day working from home, I went outside to prune our grapevine and start on some other yard maintenance.  There were a lot of twigs in the back yard, after a few heavy winds as winter was on its way out of the area.  I started to pick these up, then decided that I’d toss them in our chiminea to have a little fire while I worked on the grapevine.  I called Jenny outside, and she sat there and we talked while I cleaned-up the grapevine.  It was fun, and was a good way of disposing of the branches and the like lying around the yard. 

Today, the first thing on my list was to fix the couch (again).  The way this couch was designed, the legs are small diameter plastic screw-on things, and don’t provide a whole lot of bearing surface to the couch frame.  I think that two of the legs were damaged when we were originally moving the couch here, as they seemed loose when we had the couch sitting upstairs in storage.  We first noticed a problem when Jenny got up and the couch fell in one corner.  Upon closer inspection, I found that the inside of the leg had cracked, making it impossible to screw the leg on tight enough to avoid wobble.  The slight bit of wobble gave it enough freedom that it could pass its tip-over moment.  Once it did that, it was all over, and the corner of the couch landed on the floor.  I originally thought that I could fix this with a new leg, which I fashioned out of a poplar block that I was using for another woodworking project.  This worked for a while, but then it started to fail when one of the back legs started to wobble like the first leg did.  Argh.  The whole thing came to a head on Friday evening, when the back leg tipped as Jenny got up again, causing the front leg to split.  My solution, and probably what I should have done the first time I noticed the problem, was to build some gussets out of 3/4″ plywood, attach some thicker legs to those with some lag screws, and then screw the gussets into the underside framing members of the couch.

I had 2×4 material to turn into legs, and I had some 3/4″ plywood from another project, but I didn’t have any lag screws.  I also wanted to grab my grandfather’s old hand brace to bore the holes for this project, as I could imagine this eating through my cordless batteries in a heartbeat.  This started an errand run.  First to the bank to deposit a check and get some stamps, except that the bank ATM near us doesn’t sell stamps.  Oops.  So I shoot across the street to the post office, which I found out had closed approximately ten minutes before I got there.  Argh.  So off I went to the hardware store.  While there, I figured I would look at an electric weed trimmer.  I needed to get one, since I’m doing our lawn this year, and I donated my old one years ago to the New Kensington Civic Theatre.  They had a nice looking Weed Eater model for $38, so I grabbed it.  I found my lag screws, and took off for my parents’ house to grab the hand brace.  While I was there, I found out that they are doing the March celebration for my Mom’s birthday tomorrow, but nobody had told us.  We were actually at dinner on the day of her birthday, but they weren’t doing her celebration yet because not everyone could be there that day.  I didn’t have anything for her yet, so I shot down to Arnold Feed to pick up a gift certificate for her there (they are a garden center, too).  Whew.

After I got home, I built the gusset and leg assemblies, and attached those to the couch.  Meanwhile, Jenny was busy sweeping the whole house and cleaning the hardwood floors–the house looks great now!  After we both sat down, I realized that I had promised Jenny a ride tomorrow.  Oops.  We can’t be in both places at the same time. 

I went out into the yard again, and cleaned-up more of the grapevine.  I also was able to remove the rest of the fence pieces that I was unable to remove last year, and I strung a wire between the remaining fence posts to support the vine this summer.  I will build a trellis eventually, but I don’t have time to do that before the vine will start growing.  After that was finished, I went downstairs to get my push mower (a Husqvarna Novocut 64 reel mower) back in shape again.  It turned, but not well.  I oiled the blade bearings, which helped a little, but the wheels still weren’t turning well.  I decided to disassemble them, which I found to be extremely easy.  I noticed immediately that the greased ratchet gear inside was pretty gummy, as was the grease on the axle on which the wheel turned.  I didn’t have a grease gun, so I headed out to one of the local auto parts stores to get a small one.  I came back and cleaned the parts with some WD40 (which is a degreaser, if you ever needed to know that), re-greased the axles and necessary parts, and reassembled everything.  I exercised the wheels a bit to get good coverage on everything, and wow, what a difference!  It’s almost like new again.  Now I just need to wait for the lawn to grow a bit….

I came upstairs after that, and asked Jenny if she wanted to get some pizza for dinner (she had earlier suggested this, and it seemed like a good idea–I was tired, and didn’t feel much like making anything tonight).  She thought that was a good idea, so I ordered some pizza and took off to pick it up.  I first dropped-off my Mom’s gift at their house for tomorrow, then picked up the pizza.  On the way home, I tried two more mac machines to see if I could find one that sells stamps.  Having no luck, I returned home, and we ate pizza and watched Norm Abrams build a small writing desk and an outdoor dry sink/planting stand.  Fun times. 

Now I’m tired!  🙂

jonathan