Weekend Plans Post: Burrowing In
Blackbird
The Super Bowl is behind us. Apparently, the good weather is behind us too. We had a single day of 65 degree weather last Sunday and the one lone patch of snow in the shade of the house that is the last to melt finally melted.
Then the cold front came in. Sunday was 65. Monday was 48. Tuesday was 12.
Dang.
Dug out the flannel-lined jeans from the back of the drawer. Moved from eyeing the one or two short-sleeved shirts I keep around just in case to grabbing the denim-lined flannel shirts. The big thick wooly socks instead of the white ones. And the heavy blankets, the thick ones, the ones that make it tough to roll over instead of the lighter ones more appropriate for April than when the temperature drops 50 degrees in two days.
Luckily, we did most of our errand running last week (I couldn’t believe how crazy the stores were on Saturday and how all of the weird stuff was gone off the shelves…they were out of my favorite shredded cheese! Then I remembered “oh, yeah…the Super Bowl…I wrote about that.”)
So this weekend, if needs be, we can go out to more places than just the big grocery store for staples, but, honestly, I’d rather just burrow into the basement and wait to see if I see my shadow. I probably won’t. That’d involve going outside. So I can spend this weekend cooking in the kitchen and making various dishes for the coming week (breakfasts, lunches, the occasional dinner) and otherwise cocooned up wearing fuzzies and drinking hot toddies and pleased that we don’t have to do anything.
It’s next weekend that we’ll have to pay the piper.
So… what’s on your docket?
(Featured image is “Blackbird” by Manx John. Used under creative commons license.)
Here on the other side of the Palmer Divide, our swing was from 72 (Denver loves the first day of spring so much we do it seven or eight times each year, as they say) to -2, plus three or so inches of snow. Woke up to find the snow falling briskly again this morning. Supposed to snow on and off all day. I’ll have to decide when to take my sinusitis out to do the shoveling.
OTOH, the mountains are getting snow measured in feet, so Denver Water’s reservoir system should fill again this year.Report
Maribou is a human barometer. A 70 degree swing for me can be fixed by a second can of caffeine. She has to turtle and turtle hard. (Which brings us, again, to the weekend plans.)Report
We’ve been lucky in the DC area. Rainy and a low of 32. A couple of degrees different and the city’s paralyzed. Still, cold rain somehow feels colder than snow. Big drops versus light flakes.Report
We’ve just cleared 30+ days of straight precipitation, thanks to a rather persistent Pineapple Express. The past week has been pretty heavy, and all the local creeks have finally realized their dreams of growing up to become rivers (this is why I NEVER live near water at it’s own level).
Flying out to Detroit for the week (work trip) on Monday.Report
As the rain the Oscar mentions is pretty persistant here (not to mention rain is Oregons state passtime) it is inside projets for me. So, I am tackling the stairs. When we bought the place, the stairs were the one part still carpeted. So, that alone told me there was an issue. Well, sure enough, four had been replaced with MDF and the rest has some weird mastic residue on them from where someone had put some sort of stair runner on them. And decking screws
to hold them down and keep them from squeeking. So, I had replaced the MDF treads before we moved in, and now it is time to strip and sand the remaining parts. And let me tell you, scraping the risers when there is nothing to really brace against is a royal pain. And very tiring! Next comes pulling them off and injecting construction adhesive to stop the noise. Old home ownership is so fun sometimes.Report
Our remodel is moving apace (because we paid to have a shell constructed around the house to avoid rain delays), with the framing completed, exterior sheeting up, windows in, & roof installed. They just finished the HVAC additions, and now the plumber should be getting to work, then the electrician comes in.
If the weather breaks, the new siding will go up.
Once the electrician is done, we wait on the city to send an inspector.Report
I hadn’t realized you were going that far with things! Once I rewired the place, most things were just cosmetic in nature, so I am kinda choosing based on weather and what I feel like doing. Though I did have someone paint my dormers last summer as I don’t like messing about on rooftops anymore. Money well spent.Report
Adding a master suite requires a lot. So far I have limited myself to doing some of the demo, arranging for a few things, and when it’s time, painting (painters charge way too much when I have a spray gun).
The contractors have been on the ball and we’ve so far only had to use a day or two of the slack in the schedule.Report
Yes, I remember my father doing something similar back in the ’80s. And that is where I picked up a lot of my “thriftyness,” to use a politer term than my wife likes to use.
And yes, painters do charge way to much.Report
I’m thrifty, up to a point. I enjoy doing remodel work, but at some point, the job is big enough, or specialized enough, that even if I know what I am doing, hiring a pro saves me enough time and aggravation that it’s worth it.Report
I am in that same boat. Cheap, as my wife calls it, is only so good. If it costs you time, which is very precious, then it might not be worth it. Even worse, if it has to be redone. So both time and money.Report
It continually amazes me how people cheap out when fixing their homes. MDF for stair treads? Good Lord!Report
What surprised me was they were obviously pre-cuts too. This neighborhood was pretty run down not too long ago, and people tended to cheap out on things like this over the decades. We bought this house as it had the most of the original interior left of the houses we looked at, most having been Home Depoted/HGTVed over time. But it was owner (I suspect) remodled in around 1960.
At the rate I move, I have around 20 years of projects.Report
We are like minded men. My typical project gets to the it looks pretty good and don’t mind the missing quarter round stage before I lose the will to continue.Report
Semi working weekend – I have 15 job applications (for a position to replace someone who jumped up to admin) to review, and a dozen or so letters for scholarship applicants. And some grading. This afternoon I’m home – trying to clean up my pigsty of a house (it got BAD* in the couple weeks since I last tackled it).
Right now I have electricians here replacing the porch light that died a couple weeks ago with a snazzy new one. It was expensive but it is aesthetically pleasing to me, and the ones closest to the “builder grade” (or whatever you call it) one that was there are now made of plastic, and I kind of feel like that’s not good for long term survival of the fixture.
I hope to get a little free time this weekend to relax, this was a hard, hard week for me for various reasons. Sunday I need to bake a cake for a thing Monday….
(*My executive function and gumption for doing stuff *still* has not returned after everything that happened in the second half of 2019. I would hope I’d be “better” by now but several friends who have lost parents tell me that it took them a year to start feeling something like normal again. Well, I can feel something like normal for a span of a few days, then I hit a wall hard and run out of energy. This week it was having to do long-distance assistance with paperwork for my mom, trying to redeem some 15+ year old traveler’s cheques that only had my dad’s signature on them and wow, do you get the third degree when you do that, even after she sent in a copy of the will naming her executor and everything….it just never ends)Report
When I woke up, before I went to work, I swept the deck and shoveled the sidewalk and driveway.
When I got sent home due to weather, I swept the deck and shoveled the sidewalk and driveway.
Just now, at around 9:30PM, I went out and, once again, swept the deck and shoveled the sidewalk and driveway.
Seriously: It’s fixing to be time to quit doing that sort of thing.Report
When did you get sent home?Report
I was told I could go home as soon as I got in.
I had too much stuff to do, though. I actually went home around 1ish.
I should have gone home around noonish.Report
Ah. I ended up staying until around 2.Report
This is the second year in a row we had balmy weather in December and January only to get nailed at the start of February right when we think things are about to improve. I do not like this weather pattern at all.
Son#1 put his car in a ditch a couple days back, he’s thankfully ok and the car was repairable, but it makes me very irritated with Mother Nature.Report