Where I've Been and What I've Been Up To

It has been a hot minute since I posted, I know.  I'm sorry to worry so many people.  I made a post on Facebook to hopefully reach some and put up a comment in response to a reader as well, but I've been so "hair on fire" hectic, blogging just was NOT on my radar.

First, I want to apologize to Ranee, as I did not respond to her comments earlier and it appears they have been deleted now.  I'm sorry I didn't get to them sooner and I hope you are doing well, Ranee.  I responded to your last comment that you deleted, so hopefully you can read my response.  Please feel free to e-mail me to talk if you need or want to (you can find the e-mail under the "Contact Me" page)...a lot of times that is the best way to get ahold of me as I check that a few times a day in case I get something important in.  Responding to comments on the blog takes me a bit as I have to set up my computer to do it as the blog comment responder thing doesn't work on my phone, but e-mail I can do on my phone when I have a second during the day.  I'm sorry about your loss and about having to go through all you have gone through lately.  Please, let me know how the whole insurance situation turned out.

Right, so let me get down to what is going on around here.

My father-in-law passed away in May.  He'd been in declining health for a while, but his final decline happened so fast, it was a shock.  We got through the funeral (I'm still not sure how much Alvah has processed about the whole thing as he was sick and he and I didn't make the funeral as a result) and my husband especially has been super busy trying to go through things with my mother-in-law to find homes for stuff that needs to be found homes for, and there is a lot of stuff to go through in other ways as well as my father-in-law owned multiple businesses.  We are slowly working our way to a new normal without my father-in-law, but it is like peeling an onion.  It always seems like there are more layers to go through.

All the while things were happening on top of that.  Our home owners insurance came and inspected our home back in March (you know, the guys that screwed up the insurance renewal process every year so my mortgage consistently went up?  Yeah, those guys), in the middle of a snowstorm, when you couldn't see much of anything because it was all buried in snow still.  They came back, in the beginning of May, telling us if we wanted to renew we needed to replace our roof (our roof is fine) by July (like even if we needed a new roof, a window like that wasn't going to happen).  

We sealed around the chimney so it was professional quality work to take care of that "loose shingle" issue they were claiming we had (two shingles...I mean, really?), so we got that done (which in the heat wasn't fun for my husband).

I had just said to heck with it and found someone to do our gutters beforehand and just put it on our home equity loan because the way finances were going I knew I wasn't going to get it done if I waited to just cash it out.  Unfortunately they were so booked and so busy that we had to wait and we ended up getting the gutters put in the same week my father-in-law passed away and everything was going on at once.  But, the gutters are in, the company did a great job (highly recommend Denali Gutters to anyone local), make the house look about 10 bazillion times better and I am so relieved we got them in before we had to worry about the roof rotting around them.  

After the gutters were in, it was time to fight the moss.  Moss had grown in the old broken gutters and was contaminating the garage roof, so I spent a ridiculous amount of time out on that roof in May and June, scraping off little bits of moss from around shingles and spraying them with a bleach solution (1/2 bleach to 1/2 water works!  It does kill the moss once you scrape it and stops it from coming back...at least for the small amounts we had).  This was to cure the "active moss growing on roof" claims the insurance company was throwing out (the only real sizeable moss chunks we had growing were in the actual gutters before we got the new ones in, mind you).  Once we had cured what they had said leaded us into needing a whole new roof and had cleaned up the back area around the house (it did need it, so we cured that one right away without issue), I called the insurance company to see if they would reinspect the property.  Their response was "call us when you get a new roof".  So, yeah, at that point we were done with them.  It just got nuts after that as we scrambled to do as much as we could to the house to make it right so we could get new insurance without tons of issues needing to be cured to get insured.

Side note here in the current time:  Our only experience with home owners insurance was with SageSure/Occidental over the years and when we first got the place we had some pretty weird hoops we had to jump through to get insurance so we assumed we would have the same problem with all insurance companies.  Turns out that wasn't true and our new insurance company was WAY nicer and more laid back about everything.  I hope that continues in the future as well.

Anyway, that scrambling to get EVERYTHING done to the house that needed to get done well...cue, what I have been working on ALL summer long.   This is seriously the project that just doesn't seem to end.  I'll get to everything else we've been working on and all the things that decided to break and need to be fixed this summer in another post (it's been a bombardment and believe it or not I've gotten a bunch of other stuff done too), but let me give you the details on what I've primarily been up to.

The deck and front porch.  Yep, that's the big projects I've been doing.

Unfortunately, my husband hasn't been able to help me with this much at all, so I have done it all on my own.  He did replace the few rotten timbers we had in our front porch (the water from the broken gutters had just poured down for three solid years onto the front porch in one area and the wood just gave up).  He also helped me to chisel out the rotten wood as I'd find it on the deck and repair what we needed to (a few places where there were knots, and there was a LOT of knots in the deck wood, had just absorbed water the last few years and rotted around the knot, so we chiseled the wood out and put a paintable two step epoxy in the holes to stop it from getting worse and then I just painted over where the holes used to be), but otherwise he's just been busy with everything else, everywhere else.  Lucky for me Armina has turned into a really good babysitter for Alvah this summer (mind you I was right out the door, but he does need someone to help watch him) and I was able to work on this before everything just rotted away...it was getting close, I'm not going to lie.  The wood on the deck and front porch that wasn't rotten and was still hard, was distressed to say the least.  

Bright side, I inadvertently stumbled across a great product that helped to make the whole thing work without me needing three different products to get it all done.  Last winter I had bought a five gallon bucket of "Dock and Deck Super Coating" from Sherwin Williams on super sale (it was down to like 120.00 from 400.00 normal price) and had grabbed it to work on the deck this summer.  I thought it was just deck paint, but I was wrong.  It is way more than that.  It turns out my husband loves this product more than I do because the stuff goes on SUPER thick, sets up super duper quick (so you can get this stuff down and have it dry before a rain shower wrecks it) and it cures into a kind of rubberized coating that is super tough.  It ain't cheap, but just the amount of cracks I was able to fill in with the coating versus having to go over everything with wood filler, waiting for that to cure and then paint it and hope it matches?  Worth it's weight in gold.  And it, of course, being dock paint, is textured (so I won't be sliding across the deck with a small layer of ice this winter if I need to go out there) and is waterproof (obviously), so hopefully it will last for quite a while.  Man, I hope it lasts quite a while as this has been so much work.  

Guys, I've been working on this project all summer long and I'm STILL NOT done!  I have gotten to a point where I need to paint between the slats on the deck (as it was starting to rot in between the planks, so I want to make sure that part gets sealed well) and the underside of the deck and stairs as well as hard to reach spaces and I'll finally be done.  I'm getting there.  I was able to work pretty constant up to the fourth of July and then it just started raining.  We've had a few breaks in the weather, but have been so busy with other things that I haven't had an opportunity to get back to the painting.  Hopefully I can get a bunch done this weekend as it is supposed to clear up, if it dries out underneath fast.  Here's hoping.  

First there was sanding the deck.  I had to sand in between the railing uprights by hand as I didn't have a sander that would fit in an area that small, but otherwise I used a belt sander or a detail sander to do it all. 

I killed two belt sanders working on this sucker (my husband is not pleased, but it was truly accidental) and ended up finishing it up with a SKIL detail sander (I really like that little sander and they are pretty cheap to get as well).  Thank you again to those who buy through my Amazon link on the blog as the associate fees from that helped to pay for the detail sander, which really helped, especially with the stairs as I was out of other sanders to use by then.

Sanding took forever.  There was wood that had become saturated with water and had to be sanded down until I could find hard wood to dry out (thank goodness the weather got nice, or I don't know if it would have ever dried out).  The uprights on the railing...Lord those things take SO LONG between sanding and painting.

And then the painting started.  It took a long time as I had to do the deck floor, each of the uprights on the inside AND the outside and in between (I still have to take a ladder and get the very bottom of the outside as I can't reach between the uprights from the deck landing itself).  

I also had to take a break in the middle of painting the deck and switch to the front porch because my husband decided we needed to get a new insurance company lined up ASAP for our home owners insurance (I wanted to get as much as I could done and THEN get a new insurance company, but he won) and the front porch looked...well terrible honestly and needed some serious work.  So, after my husband fixed what was in big time need of repair (ironically the old insurance company never mentioned the porch or the deck and I was like "What????"), I got to work sanding and painting it.  We used the same coating we used on the deck to do the front porch and I have to say...it might not match our original paint (it used to be yellow and brown just like the house), but I think it turned out looking really nice.  Oh and please say "hi" to our cat Sepp who decided to photo bomb the picture I took.

I also, when I was out front painting, now that the weather was actually not raining and snowing constantly, started to clean things up.  The sod from the yard, with little maintenance being able to be done to it the last three years, had overgrown so it was up against the stairs and completely wiping out our front concrete walkway.  I am still ripping up sod, in places, but I got a lot of it taken care of.  Please ignore our overgrown yard.  With constant rain the last few weeks, the yard weeds have gone bonkers and started to take over again.  Our yard WAS looking nice up until now.

Bright side, the home owner inspection guy showed up in the middle of me painting the front porch (after the major stuff was take care of and looked WAY better), so I was happy that the insurance company would at least see we ARE actively working on the house...maintenance got delayed for sure (earthquake, Covid, weather, not to mention finances), but it IS getting done now.  We passed the inspection (thank goodness) which is the most important thing for me and our new insurance policy starts today (yay!!!).

Here is a shot of the deck at about 80% done (since I'm still working on the underside and stuff)...

And another angle...

If the deck looks speckled in the photo, by the way, it is because it is raining again today and I took the picture in the rain.  I moved the wood furniture (I bought a set of chairs and small table to match our ones from last year with a Christmas gift card and I'm so happy I did as it allows us to sit on the deck together as a family) under the eaves to protect it from the rain the last bit as the old set of furniture needs to get treated with oil before it sits in the rain too long.

I moved the grill around so that we have the nice wide open space on the deck to sit and eat dinner. I found a side benefit of moving the grill to its new location is that I can see it from my kitchen window so I can run in to work on getting the table set and things while, say, chicken is cooking, and be able to quickly see if the grill is having a flair up or something, which is great.

And here is a shot of my own version of "The Exorcist" stairs.  I had to show my daughter the actual "Exorcist" stairs as she didn't get the joke.  The deck is on the second story so we have a lot of stairs and when I was sitting on the stairs working on them I'd look up and think, "Gee, those suckers are steeper than I thought they were".

I'm really glad I got the stairs done as they were really starting to suffer from the water damage even as I was working on the main part of the deck as we'd get rain storms and things.  I'll feel tons better once I have the underside of them completely painted and sealed (I'm about 3/4 of the way done with that), but at least I made it better than it was.

I've  been grilling a lot out on the nice painted deck the last bit (it's been hot a bunch this summer) and it is supposed to get hot again this weekend, so I'll be grilling out there again so I don't heat the house up.  It is nice being able to enjoy the deck without feeling sick about how it was just was getting worse and worse and worse.  I'll probably do a final reveal of the deck when it is 100% complete, if for no other reason than to document my progress and what I've gotten done this year.  So far.  I'm actually impressed with how much I've gotten done so far this year, especially with all the stuff that has happened.  For now, though, I'll leave you with the mostly done pictures of what I've gotten done so far.

I hope you are all doing okay with the hot weather that has been hitting down south and are able to have at least somewhat of a good summer.

I'm off to bake bread before the heat picks up again tomorrow.  See you, hopefully, soon!