NOTE: This is a shorter post with no photos.
THURSDAY 15 and FRIDAY 16 August 2024 — BdW guests, oak floor, ACI addition to HH/BW
Thursday 15 … Deep-cleaning, wood floor refinishing project planning, blog work, and BdW guests
Mike & Sheila returned to Greenfield Village today (in Dearborn) and visited The Henry Ford (Henry Ford Museum).
Linda continued deep-cleaning, turning her attention to the cabinets in the hall and master bathrooms. She was on a mission. I spent most of the day at my desk working on blog posts.
As part of refinishing the oak floors in the house, we want to remove the existing railing around the basement stairwell and replace it with something more attractive. The product that we would like to use is Cable Bullet. It’s a clever system that uses stainless steel cables, installed horizontally or vertically, between/through posts, and includes a tensioning system. The posts can be wood (existing or new) or metal, which can be purchase from the company, along with top handrails. The product can be used inside or outside, and even on stairs.
Linda revisited the Cable Bullet website and saw that they supply online estimates, but you have to submit a sketch of your project; limit 10 MB. No problem. They will accept a hand -drawn sketch, but why would I do that when I have CAD software? I wouldn’t, of course, so I started working on a simple CAD layout of this project. I had already done a CAD layout for the floor refinishing, so I simply reused that portion of the drawing, which was already to scale. I eliminated all unnecessary details, and added necessary ones specific to the railing.
FedEx delivered the replacement hinges for Mike & Sheila’s Dometic refrigerator. The hinge that holds the bottom of the upper/freezer door and the top of the bottom/refrigerator door, broke in half while they were driving to our house. The only place they could locate a replacement part was Panther RV in Washington State. They had it shipped FedEx 2-day, and it arrived this afternoon. They got back from The Henry Ford (Museum) in Dearborn around dinner time, and came over to chat, but it was a shorter visit as they were tired.
Friday 16 … Different day, same stuff as yesterday
Linda spent most of the day on her deep-cleaning / reorganizing project, and I did a load of laundry while working at my desk. First up was finishing the CAD drawing for the Cable Bullet railing estimate. I saved it as a PDF, which turned out to be 27 KB file, much smaller than the 10 MB limit. To upload it, however, I had to go through a whole series of options and specify my “design” choices. I had not really studied the complete product line enough to know exactly what we wanted, but I was only interested at this point in an approximate cost, so I consulted with Linda and we made choices that were probably close to what we will actually want. I received confirmation that the request for estimate was submitted successfully and waited for a reply. My understanding was that an actual person would review what I submitted and assemble the quote. The company is based in Indiana, which gave it a nice, local touch.
In light of the-mail I received on the 13th from the Airstream Club International (ACI) about the immanent release of the ACI/HH CPP joint venture, I e-mailed Kathy G, the ACI coordinator for the project, to ask a few questions and reiterate a few concerns regarding just how this will work for existing Boondockers Welcome hosts.
I spent the rest of day working on blog posts, doing final clean ups and adding to the one for this week.
Mike & Sheila were due to depart tomorrow, and came over after dinner for a long chat, a lot of which was about travel. They were headed “up North” (northern lower peninsula) from here, with numerous stops planned in nice areas. They would then cross the Mackinaw Bridge into the U.P. (Upper Peninsula and head west through Michigan, with a detour up to Copper Harbor, before going through Wisconsin and into northern Minnesota. They will be doing much of this trip in September, which should be a beautiful (and cool, literally) time to be there.
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