Nothing Happens At Ten

Well, OK it wasn’t really a celebration. I just took down the mailbox. Slow day.

The mailbox was our builder’s idea. Instead of changing our address at the post office (and dozens of places we do business with) he suggested that we just hang a mailbox on his sign and see if the Post Office would deliver to the mailbox instead of putting it through the mail slot in the front door (which would be gone!). Here is the mailbox.

Nice, huh? White. Matches the sign post. I picked it out myself. Cost me nine bucks, cash money. 🙂

The Post Office agreed to that, so we did it, and it saved us countless hours of stress and a lot of stamps. But now we have our front door mail slot back, so we don’t need the mailbox anymore.

We ran into the mail delivery guy and told him that we would like to start having our mail delivered through the mail slot in the door again, and he agreed. He even started doing that last week, even though the more convenient mailbox was still on the post.

So, since we are not using the mailbox anymore, I took it down. I found my trusty socket wrench (finding stuff is still a challenge) and used it.

And here is the mailbox, toes-up.

RIP MBX

Here we are, stuck with yet another weekend of abysmal, snowy, rainy, windy, freezing, stormy, rotten, horrific weather. You can tell I am holding back on my real feelings about it because all of those words have more than four letters in them. Anyway, making lemonade, I took Saturday morning off and did my very first puttering project in my new basement shop. Here is the result:

The shelf is the project.

It is made out of “found materials” that I had stuffed into the POD instead of  throwing them out as I should have. The plywood is old, and was used waaaay back as a tri-fold for a National History Day presentation when somebody was in high school….. mentioning no names….  no, it wasn’t me because when I was in high school there wasn’t any history yet, much less plywood.

The shelf is flimsy because it is made out of 1/2″ plywood instead of the more sturdy 3/4″ ply, which is what I should have used. But 1/2″ ply is what I had, so I used it.

And while I was doing this project I learned some things.

Did you know that 1/2″ plywood is only 7/16″ thick? Yeah. It is. I measured it when I was cutting the dadoes for the shelf. The dadoes have to be the same size as the thickness of the boards.

I think that maybe the government has taxed away some of the wood. For example, you can figure out that 1/16″ is 0.0625″, so from that you can calculate that 0.0625 / 0.5 = 0.125, which is a 12.5% wood tax. That number looks suspiciously like the Massachusetts tax on out-of-state bank accounts, doesn’t it? This wood was obviously made out-of-state. Coincidence? I don’t think so.

Or maybe it is simply like coffee, where a “pound” of coffee now has 11.5 ounces in it. There are so many possibilities for conspiracies that it is difficult to choose one.

Anyway, figuring that 7/16″ = 0.4375″, I cut the dadoes with a 12 mm iron, and 12 mm = 0.4724395″, which is a little large , but it left a bit of extra space (0.0349395″ to be exact, but who’s counting?) for warped boards and tearout etc. and the wood is junk anyway so who cares? “Measure it with a micrometer, mark it with chalk, and cut it with an axe“. The shelf is still standing a whole day later.

What’s that noise?

The sump pump is in! They came over yesterday and installed the plumbing and a pump. As with the outlets, the plumbing was done with style, if not excess. The sump is in the farthest back corner of the house, which is where we don’t want to put the water because it might just come back into the house, so it is redirected toward the front of the house. The pipe starts at the hole:

from whence it goes up to the ceiling and across the back wall.

It then continues over to where the oil tank is located and turns toward the front of the house.

It’s a long run toward the front of the house, past the center beam and through a floor joist.

and continues past the boiler and the air handler ducts through another joist

where it comes out on the other side of that joist and takes another turn, back toward the side of the house again.

Once it is near the side of the house, it drops down to provide for natural drainage.

and finally, it goes out through the wall.

On the outside, there is a simple elbow…

to which we can later connect……….. you guessed it………. a pipe…. to direct the water away from the side of the house. Yikes.

The odd thing is that it is now pumping water out. We have been watching the sump for several weeks now, expecting the water to appear. It didn’t. Yesterday morning, the sump had the same old stagnant water in it that has been in it since it was installed in the Fall. Then, last night, the pump started working.

It seems odd that they would come and install the pump on exactly the same day that it is needed. Where does Murphy come into that sort of accident? But then, as Doug might say, “Better than installing the day after you need it”.

Meanwhile, upstairs, the sun beams into the living room.

“It’s all good”.

When we designed this house, I requested that an electrical outlet be made available in the corner of the basement where I would put my workshop. This would be just a simple outlet to allow me to use my electric drill or maybe a lamp without stringing an extension cord across the floor.

The electrician forgot to put it in.

So we put it on the Punch List along with a gentle reminder to the builder.

Today, while I was at work, the Outlet Sprites came along and put some outlets in the shop. Here is what I found after I got home.

East wall.

South wall.

Stairs

And last, but not least, over the workbench.

That is 14 outlets and a switch….. not counting the power strip that I had hung up earlier.

I think we have the shop outlet covered.

Hey! I think this stuff is beginning to melt! Really! Look! I just took this photo:

And if I compare it to a photo taken all the way back in January…

I think I can see some significant difference in the height of the snow!…. waddaya think?…. can you see it?…….or…….. well… maybe not.

Dang!

I was over at the Fallapartment this morning chopping the ice off of the front steps. The ice is about 3 inches thick now because the ice dams in the gutters over the steps melt and dribble water on them, the dribble of which freezes into a stalagmite of ice that is stuck permanently to the steps.

Well, it seems that the Fallapartment can jinx other objects as well as itself, so my ice chopper fell apart. The blade just fell off of the stick. And since it was spot-welded on in the first place, there was no hope of me fixing it.

Off I ran to the Home Depot to get a new one. I arrived just in time to see the last one go out the door with some other guy.

Here is a revised review of Home Depot.

So off I went to Lowe’s, just to find out that they had sold all of their ice choppers long ago. They suggested that I try one of their plastic snow shovels.

They were both also out of ice melt and roof rakes and metal snow shovels that might actually stand up to snow. They both did have lots of lawn gear and fertilizer and gas grilles and mowers. One wonders who decides what to stock in February at the Big Box stores.

Seeing a pattern, I gave up and went back to the Fallapartment and flailed at the ice with my aluminum shovel, which now looks like this:

The Fallapartment can do wonderous things to property. Uri Geller, eat your heart out!

Not much to blog about, so I thought I would do a couple of reviews. First, Amazon.

We bought drapery rods and some other stuff from Amazon. But then, we all know about Amazon. ‘Nuff said. Here is a less-known online retailer:

We bought a lot of our lighting fixtures from LightingDirect. What enticed me to trust them was that I asked some questions about some of the fixtures, and they actually answered them. When I called on the telephone, a real person answered the phone, and then they were actually helpful! What a concept! We had a good experience with them, and are very happy with the fixtures we ordered.

Stay tuned to this blog. It looks like there might be another opportunity for some outrageous snow photos this week. (Is it Spring yet?)

Here is another snow photo to show how much of this stuff we have.

Every time we shovel out, we have to huck the snow over that pile. A well-meaning neighbor came over on Thursday with his snow blower to help out, but the snow blower could not throw it over the mountain, so it just stuck to the side and then slid back down onto the drive. We had to shovel it anyway. I guess the old back and biceps have > 8 horsepower.

Meanwhile, since we are giving out kudos to Big Box stores, here is one for Home Depot.

Once again, the actual experience exceeded the reputation. We bought a lot of our light fixtures there, lots of light bulbs, the bathroom mirrors and medicine cabinet, shelving for the basement, a roof rake, and so on. Most of it turned out quite well. We really like the tilting bathroom mirrors. Good stuff.