Moving: Day 1

The movers arrived at our house in Kansas for the first time today.  After running around with our collective hair on fire over the weekend organizing our considerable amount of stuff to ease the process, then still feeling underprepared and overwhelmed as of this morning, the day went much more smoothly than we anticipated.

I'm sure you've all wondered what a Sprinter van towing a 6x12 U-Haul trailer looks like, so here you go.

You're welcome.  That's Abi's leg sticking out of the U-Haul.  We stashed the stuff we're taking with us in the trailer and the van to get it out of the movers' way.

Of the things that didn't go so smoothly, the funniest was that when one of the movers picked up our VCR, she heard something rattling around inside.

Yes, we still have a VCR.  We also have cathode ray tube TVs.  In case you don't remember what those look like (or - if you're one of my nephews - have never seen one), this is one of ours.

You're welcome.  I'm also writing this blog entry on one of these.

Naturally, the movers refused to pack the VCR.  Aimee suspected the culprits might be - not broken VCR parts - but little toys inserted into the VHS slot by little toddler fingers.  Tonight, I disassembled the VCR, and this is what I found.

I wish I'd thought to shoot a photo when I had the VCR completely disassembled, because I've never actually looked inside a VCR, and it's fascinating.

I love the reliability and resiliency of solid state media, and I understand the reason for it is that SSMs have no moving parts, but there's something nostalgically elegant about mechanically operated things.  Or maybe I'm just getting old.  Thus, my Royal.

By the way: have you ever tried to cancel your Dish Network service, even long after your contract's run out?  They are tenacious about trying to keep their long-time customers!

Height Chart

As you all know, we're leaving Kansas and going back to Washington.  That means we're leaving the house we've lived in for the last four years - the first house we've ever owned.  Or mortgaged, anyway.  It's amazing how much sentimental value we've built up in such a short time here.  Eli was four months old when we moved in.  He learned to crawl, walk, run and talk here.  So did Jer-Bear.  We brought Jer-Bear and Pumpkin home to this house.  Then there's all the work we've put into this property.

One sentimental item in this house is the kids' heights we marked onto a wall in the dining room.  Obviously, we couldn't take a chunk of the wall with us, so Aimee asked me to make a wooden height chart we can take with us wherever we move in the future.

The height charts we saw online were all painted, but to add a feeling of permanence to ours, I decided to engrave names and numbers into ours with a Dremel tool, then burn them.

Now I know why most people choose paint.  That was a lot of tedious work!  Especially with the length of our last name and some of our kids' names (Hadassah, Jeremiah).

I started with a 1x24x96 inch board (click on the pics to enlarge).

It's actually a bunch of narrow strips of spruce edge-glued together.  I didn't even know they made such a product, until Aimee and I stumbled upon it at Menard's in Manhattan, KS. 

I shot this photo late at night; thus the blue tinge.  Note the practice piece.

I started with the inch and foot marks on the left hand side and kids' names across the top.  I used a basic Dremel series 100 tool with a high speed cutting bit and the collar from the 565 multipurpose cutting kit attached to maintain constant depth.  It works really well, but with all the practice pieces I made, I had to switch the bit before I finished engraving the kids' names. 

The following morning, coffee became a necessity.

I engraved our family name across the very top, but the height marks and years were too fine for the Dremel, so I burned them in with the finest tip from my wood burning tool from Hobby Lobby in Manhattan, KS. 

I stained the height chart with a shade called "American Maple".  I normally like to use dark stains on light-colored wood like pine, fir or spruce.  But as you can see...

This stain is a bit much.  You can see a lot more detail in person, but not as much as I'd like. 

I tried the stain on a practice piece before applying it to the finished product, of course, and it looked good to me, but it didn't turn out that way on the finished product.  I guess I'll have to sand it down and re-stain it with a much lighter shade, but there's no way I'm undoing all that work any time soon!

Here's a more detailed photo of the names at the top.  Each kid has his or her own vertical section on the height chart. 

And here's a more detailed photo of the ruler on the right side, and the height marks underneath the kids' names. 

It might grow on me and I may leave it as is.  Or I might get more frustrated the more I look at it and decide to sand it down and re-stain it.  Stay tuned! 

Dirt!

Before going back for shoulder surgery, I went into a home improvement frenzy to finish a few projects while I was able.  One of them was to spread some top soil mixed with compost from Britt's Farm on our yard to help the grass grow.  When the contractors prepped the ground to build our house, they pretty much stripped the top soil off and left low-nutrient clay.  We've had a rough time growing grass using store bought seed, fertilizer and weed killer.  The weeds have no trouble growing, of course!  If this doesn't work, I give up.

Anyway, the reason I asked Aimee to shoot these photos is that the kids' neighbor friend, Emily, volunteered to help the kids in their chore of helping me.  She even brought extra shovels!

Most of the kids helped fill the wheel barrow.

Hadassah spread the soil/compost mixture I dumped with the wheel barrow.

Who says you can't get kids to do chores these days?  The skinny brunette isn't even ours!

She worked pretty hard, too!

Eli "helped" fill the wheel barrow too.

With all this help, we spread the mixture, seeded and watered in one afternoon.  See you next time!

Planter Box Project (Continued)

Yes, that's my pregnant wife shoveling dirt.  The horror!

I built 10 planter boxes for Aimee to plant a garden, but we didn't want to buy potting soil to fill them all, because that would be terribly expensive.  Aimee and I went to Britt's Garden Acres outside of Manhattan, KS and ordered six cubic yards of top soil from them.  It's not as nutrient-rich (and therefore black) as potting soil, but it's a heck of a lot better than the nutrient-void, yellowish-tan clay in our yard.

I had the truck driver dump the dirt on our front lawn.  Eli and Jer-Bear, of course, immediately wanted to play on the dirt pile.  It may be worth the cost and effort to buy them a dirt pile just for play, if only I could get it delivered directly to the back yard so I don't have to move it there myself.

Speaking of which, we moved loads of dirt to the planter boxes with the wheel barrow.

Candace was the official dirt spreader with the rake.

These photos are from Friday.  You wouldn't think it from looking at the sky, but we got rained out after filling only two boxes.  We continued the job on Saturday, after it stopped raining, and finished it on Sunday.

I used some of the leftover dirt to fill in where our soil receded from the foundation.  I was surprised we had any leftover dirt.  I really thought I'd underestimated how much we'd need.

In the photo bellow, you can see Aimee already planted two blueberry, and two raspberry bushes she had ready to go in pots.  We worked in some potting soil here to give them a better shot.  You can also see in the background the new plum tree that replaced our dead one.  Hopefully this one will fare better.

We had some landscaping fabric laying around, so Aimee covered some of the boxes to prevent weeds from growing.

This is all that's left of our dirt pile.  Isaiah spread it out as much as possible with a rake.  I think we'll have one really nice spot of grass in the front yard next year.

You can see our apple trees in the photo above.  Despite some trouble with disease, these two produced a whole bunch of apples this year.  Their pitiful little branches were bent low with apples.  We had four apple trees, but two died because of disease.  Hopefully these are strong enough now that they'll continue to fight off any disease in the future.  I have no idea why that one plum tree in the back yard grew so much better than all our other trees.

I suppose this project isn't really done until we plant some veggies, but that'll have to wait until next year.

Workbench Project

I should've done this a long time ago.  There have been many times when I needed a good, sturdy surface to work on various projects and had to improvise.  I made it work each time, but the project often went slower or didn't turn out as well as it could have.

I started out by making plans in Google Sketchup.
That took for ever!  It was easier to build than it was to draw!  I guess I should've read the instructions first!

I find it much easier to draw rough sketches of my projects on paper, but as I tackle more complex projects (this was a very simple one, obviously), I'll probably need the precision of a digital program.  I'm learning on the free version.  Maybe later I'll spring for the "pro" version.

This is the finished product.  It's not pretty, but I don't need it to be, so i didn't intend it to be.  It is, however, very sturdy and over-built, which is how I typically build stuff.  It's also at the perfect height for me, which a store-bought bench would never be.

The casters make it easy to move around the garage and they lock.  I think it could use a vise, a lamp, a power strip for tools and battery chargers, and an extension cord.

Note the pallets in the background left over from the compost bin project.  I think we already need another bin, so I'm glad I kept them.  Also, I miscalculated somehow and ended up with two extra 2x4x8s.

Shed Project

I finally got around to adding a shelf/work bench to my shed.  I built the shed to get some of the clutter out of the garage, and to store flammables (gas for the mower, propane, paint cans, etc.) away from the house.  This way, if one of those flammables bursts into flames, the shed burns down, not the entire house.

Unfortunately, the shed quickly got cluttered.  Also, a bag of grass seed broke open and spilled in there.  That attracted mice.  There was mouse poop all over.  Isaiah and I found two big, fat mice and their cozy little nest in my pile of scrap lumber.  It Must have been their dream house - warm, dry, safe and with unlimited food.  Oh well.  Sorry, meeces!

Take a look at it now!

The three flower pots covered with lids are full of the grass seed Isaiah and I salvaged from the floor and wood pile.  I threw out a bunch of scrap lumber, but I keep finding uses for it, so I can't bring myself to throw it all out.

I finally got my garden tools off the floor and organized.

I put this overhead shelf in right from the start.  It's handy, but using the whole thing isn't practical because the stuff in the back is difficult to reach.  The work bench will be more useful.

The only trouble is that, because of all the projects I undertook this week, my garage is a cluttered wreck again.  I'll have to work on that next weekend.

Planter Box Project

We like having a lawn.  We don't buy into the idea that lawns are non-functional.  Our lawn is expensive and a lot of work to maintain (especially because the soil here is so poor), but it provides our kids with a safe, fun place to play.  And nothing is more functional for kids' development than good, old fashioned, unstructured play.

We prioritize growing kids over growing plants, thank you very much.

That being said, because of the shape of our house, some sections of our yard aren't all that useful for play.  Aimee and I tried to grow some veggies in those sections, but because of the low-nutrient soil, we mostly failed miserably.  This year, after redeploying from Afghanistan and returning from leave in Washington, we decided to make some planter boxes.

This was the section of the yard that started it all.  As you can see, it's a tiny chunk of ground that really didn't add anything to the kids' play area.  Now, maybe we can get some use out of it. 

This next section required the most digging, because the ground is so steep, which made it very labor intensive.  I'll have to plant some new grass around the boxes.  We painted all the boxes next to the house white to match all the accents on the house. 

I had a hard time taking a decent picture of this next planter box with my phone because of the sharp contrasts between light and shadow.  It was kind of early.  We painted this one brown because I will (eventually) paint the fence and shed that color.  Aimee plans to put some berry bushes in this one.  The tree next to it is a dwarf plum tree.  We have no idea why, but the other plum tree we bought died.  This one, however, is thriving. 

The next two are 2' x 12' each.  My phone's camera lens creates some weird angles here. 

The next two sections are also pretty much useless for play, and if we were sure to live here for several more years, I'd probably put in the work and fill them with planter boxes.  But we're not sure how much longer we're going to live here.  Besides, we probably already have all the garden space we can handle.

 

Bonus: I made a compost bin from two pallets and some scrap lumber I had laying around from my other projects.  I have enough material for another bin, but after looking at it, Aimee and I decided it's probably bigger than we really need.  

We'll see.  I'll hang on to the other two pallets just in case.