Tag Archives: Jim Pipoly Painting

2013_10_02 (W) Decks, Maps, & TV

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Linda and I both worked around the house today and by dinner time we finally felt confident that the house would be presentable for the open house / house warming on Sunday.  Another half day and my office will be ready for visitors.  While Linda vacuumed, I installed new flappers in the two upstairs toilets and a new handle mechanism in one of them.  They now flush and shut off correctly without having to do anything special with the handles or take the top off the tanks to seat the flappers by hand.  Although we figured company would appreciate that, the real motivation was to make sure they did not draw water continuously through our water softening and purification system.

Jim Pipoly was back to finish the deck and had Adam to help him.  A much younger guy by comparison to us, it was nice to watch the two of them work.  Experience and attitude count for a lot, and quality paint work requires a careful yet efficient approach; you have to keep moving without ever rushing or letting your attention drift.  They started around 9:30 AM in order to let the dew evaporate and worked until about 7 PM, but they got all of the painting done, and it looks very nice.

By late morning it was sunny but not hot.  We opened all of the awnings on the motorcoach to let them dry.  A couple of weeks ago at the RV rally in Goshen we had to roll them up wet and had not had a chance to unroll them since then.  Not good, but not much we could do about it until today.

Linda needed some things from the grocery store, so I decided to try updating the maps in our Rand-McNally GPS again.  The last time I tried this it said it was going to take 14+ hours to download the updates.  It did, in fact, take that long and it hung up before it finished.  Today, however, things went much better.  The map and device update combined took about 2 hours and completed successfully.  Yea!  She brought home two Sam Adams seasonal variety 12-packs and I put them in the bus fridge to chill them down and add some mass to the refrigerator compartment.  Refrigerators and freezers work much better when they are full, as long as they are overstuffed to the point where air cannot circulate.

While I was working with the GPS, Linda decided to play with the TV sets in our bus.  We had never tried tuning in any local, over-the-air (OTA) stations.  When Ed and Betty Burns were here in their RV in late August, they were only able to tune in one station, and that was FOX, so we figured we were out of luck.  To our surprise, the front TV set found 27 digital channels, including sub-channels of the main channels.  She even picked up PBS from two different sources!  Yippee.  And this was without aiming the antenna.  Once we have a better idea of which direction to point it for each station, or cluster of stations, we may be able to pick up even more signals.

I decided to try the rear TV, which is the one with the defective rotor mechanism.  It did not find as many channels on the first try, so I rotated it to the right (I think) about five positions (maybe) and tried again.  This time we got 25 channels.  Not bad.  So much for needing satellite TV at our house!  I am sufficiently impressed with the performance of these antennas that I may get two more for the house.  Ideally I will mount them on the tower (existing or new).  The problem will be running the co-ax and control cables (it always is).

So why the sudden interest in TV?  Well…the open house is Sunday, and Sunday is professional sports day, and some of our guests are making a huge sacrifice coming to visit instead of watching their favorite sports, so….we thought making some sports broadcasts available would be a nice gesture.  Of course, that means we will have to make popcorn too.

After dinner we loaded some leftover wood from the ham shack/office remodeling project into the back of the Element and got it off the lower walkout deck.  We also moved the leftover suspended ceiling tiles and the shop vac back to the garage.  The only projects I have left in the basement are hanging a wine glass rack over the bar and reassembling the corner of the room where I removed the knotty pine wall boards to facilitate the installation of the 240V, 100A cable to the subpanel that powers the RV outlet, ham shack, and office computer outlets.  But those are tasks for another day.

Having had a reasonably productive day, I made the classic mistake of thinking I could get one more thing accomplished starting at 9 PM.  I wanted to update our Garmin nuvi 465T GPS unit that we use in the Honda Element.  The last time I tried to do this the Garmin Express client couldn’t connect to the Garmin servers.  And so it was again tonight.  Fiddle with USB cables and ports, but no success.  I finally Googled Garmin Express server problems and got a lot of hits.  After reading through a few knowledge base Q&As and trying to update some drivers (I had the Gamin website instead of the Garmin website and they wanted $$) I decided to just reinstall Garmin Express.  I downloaded it, saved, ran the installation .exe file, and voila! it finally worked again.  And my maps and other date were still there and it even recognized our specific device.  It updated the device software successfully and 10:30 told me it was “Safe to Walk Away”.  Really; that’s the message it gave me.  Apparently the map update was going to take approximately 3 hours.  The software must have known what time it was and figured I wanted to go to bed.  And so I did; right after I uploaded and edited this post.  Night, night.

 

2013_10_01 (T) Nets, Decks, & Weeds

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Today was deck day 1 of 2.  Jim Pipoly has done a lot of painting for us over the last few years.  He painted our old house, inside and out, including the garage and the addition over it.  He painted the main floor of our new house a couple of weeks after we closed, and six weeks before we moved in.  He repainted some walls in the old house after we moved out to make it look better when we listed it for sale.  He was here on the 21st and 22nd of September cleaning and stripping the deck along the back side of our new house and now he’s back staining and painting it.  Today he stained the deck boards using Benjamin Moore TWP116 transparent stain in a “rustic” color.  It gave the boards a reddish-brown patina while allowing all of the grain to show through, preserving the look of the wood.  Tomorrow he will do the railings using Benjamin Moore ArborCoat, a solid stain (more like a paint) in Marine White, which is very close to the color of the paint used on the Hardy Board house siding.

Meghan (our daughter) came over mid-morning to help Linda weed the planting beds around the house and spread around the remaining bags of red rubber mulch that the previous owners left us.  The house didn’t look bad, but it looks better now.

In the ham shack/office I relocated a computer and printer.  I also relocated the Netgear 8-port Network Switch (8pNS) and the Linksys Wireless Access Point (WAP).  I then brought another printer and Network Attached Storage (NAS) device down from Linda’s desk.  I how had everything in the office along one wall except the WAP, and I had the new 100’ Cat 6 network cable running to same wall.  This allowed me to reconnect all of the hardwired equipment without any network cables running across the floor, eliminating a potential trip hazard or major equipment catastrophe.  I put the WAP on top of a cabinet and used the old 50’ Cat 6 network cable to connect it back to the AT&T Gateway by Linda’s desk.  Everything checked out, and the only things left on Linda’s desk are her laptop computer and adding machine (it’s an accounting thing).  That will give her more room to work at her desk.

Linda made an ad hoc dish for dinner with beans, rice, and tomatoes and the usual assortment of seasonings.  She used the Italian Seasoning she bought some time ago from Milford Spices at the Howell Farmers Market.  This blend includes just the right amount of red pepper flakes to add slight bit of “heat” to a dish.  She used this seasoning last week when she made the marinara sauce that I liked so much.

Jim finished up as it was getting dark.  We took Linda’s laptop to the basement and connected it to the TV/monitor using an HDMI cable.  We selected that port as the input and voila, her computer screen was now on the TV.  She navigated to her photo directory, started a slide show, and we sat and watched pictures of our summer trip at the rate of 20 per minute (3 seconds each).  It sounds fast, but it’s actually a pretty good speed.  We are going to set this up for the open house.  Linda may try to edit the pictures down to 200 – 300 as that would allow visitors to see all of them in 10 – 15 minutes.

 

2013_09_01-04 Driveway Success, Raspberries, And Old Friends

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Sunday September 1st found us at our son and daughter-in-law’s house for a Labor Day family pot luck along with our daughter, son-in-law, and step-grand-daughter.  Grand-daughter Madeline handled the crowd pretty well, but still was still wary of Grandpa Bruce, so I had to be content with mutual admiration from a distance.  She is starting to crawl and pull herself up to a standing position, and is fascinated by books, especially ones she can try to eat.

We awoke Monday morning (Labor Day) to overcast skies and the threat of rain.  We had planned to drive to Middleton Berry Farm near Ortonville to pick raspberries and decided to go in spite of the weather.  Ed and Betty, our RV friends, were working/staying there and we had said we would try to stop by.  The rain never materialized and the overcast skies made the picking experience more pleasant.

Neither of us had ever picked raspberries, or anything else other than apples, pumpkins, and Christmas trees.  We enjoyed the experience, collecting 12 pints of fruit between us.  At $4.00/pint it seemed expensive until we checked raspberry prices at the grocery store and Door-to-Door Organics and saw them ranging from $5 – $6 for 6 ounces.  We didn’t weigh our pints, but Linda estimated that it would take three of the 6 ounce contains to match one of our pints.

It seemed appropriate that we were laboring on Labor Day, even though this is the one day of the year that labor typically doesn’t labor, but rather relaxes and celebrates importance those who labor and the work they do.  Although we have been sourcing fresh fruits and vegetables from local farmers markets when we can, it was very satisfying to personally harvest even a small portion of our own food from a living plant.  It also gave us an appreciation for those who do this kind of work for a living.  As we were checking out we also bought a fresh pepper and tomato.

When we got back to the house Linda washed, dried, and froze all put three of the pints of raspberries.  With that task initiated, we turned our attention to the pull-through driveway.  It had not rained for the past several days, and it was time for the BIG TEST.  We unplugged the electrical power from the bus, pulled the chocks, fired it up, and backed it out of the driveway and down the street, positioning it to drive in to the pull-through driveway.  Linda watched the tires as I drove in, and seeing nothing more than tread marks I brought in, across the pad, and out the other side, back on to the concrete driveway.  Success!!!

We inspected the pull-through driveway.  In some places there was no evidence that the bus had just been there, in others only tread marks, and in a few spots a slight channel of not more than 0.5 inches.  Phil had told me previously that compaction of up to 1 inch might be possible but would indicate that the driveway was finally locking together, so we were very pleased with the result.  I pulled the bus out and around again, but this time I tried to go back and forth over slightly different paths on the approach and then again on the parking pad area.  I did not pull the bus all the way this time, but got it lined up on the pad with Linda’s help and parked it with the entrance door opposite the front door of the house.

I e-mailed Phil Jarrell (Precision Grading) to give him the good news.  Phil has been an absolutely outstanding guy to work with, standing behind his work, and doing what was needed to fix what turned out to be a problem with the load of 21AA road gravel used in the project.  Besides building this pull-through driveway for us, he dug up and repaired our septic tanks and regarded an area in the back yard to help move water away from the area outside out basement doorwall.  We plan to eventually put up a bus barn to house the motorhome, and we plan to have Phil do the site prep, driveway(s), and final grading.

Linda spent Tuesday baby-sitting Madeline while I worked around the house, trying to clean up and arrange the ham shack/office and get all of the technology hooked up and working.  I made good progress, but I didn’t get it done.  It’s never done.  I took time out to have a long chat with my best friend from high school.  J. C. has lived in Olympia, Washington for years with his wife, Julie and their three girls, but we have managed to stay in touch.  He was my best man at our wedding and I was his best man at theirs.  In the early years we corresponded by letter with an occasional phone call, but that was in the days before cell phones and “unlimited local and long distance” plans.  Eventually it was by e-mail.  We tried instant messaging, but it doesn’t work well for me.  We’ve even Skyped once or twice, but it requires broadband to work well, and we don’t have that at the new house.  We’ve even had an occasional but all-too-rare face-to-face visit.  I drove to Ypsilanti to meet up with Linda and our good friend Kate de Fuccio for dinner.  Kate is a former colleague from my educational service agency days, the graphics designer for the agency and a very talented photographer.  She is also a kindred spirit traveler, excellent researcher, and perhaps the most considerate person I know.  We don’t see her enough.

Kate had suggested Nirmal Indian Cuisine in Ypsilanti and Linda had checked out their menu online, which has become standard practice for us.  Nirmal has several vegan dishes, and others that can be made vegan, so we agreed to give it a try.  They also serve chicken, but their specialty appears to be goat.  They place is a bit “preachy” about the health benefits of Indian food, but the way they do it is kind of innocently cute and we enjoyed that aspect of the place; it’s true after all, and we are sympathetic to the sentiment.  Most importantly, the food was excellent, and the staff was very attentive.  We had a leisurely dinner which was fine with us as it gave us lots of time to talk.  We adjourned to the Starbucks just up the street and continued our conversation.

Wednesday was errand day for us.  We picked out stain and paint colors for the rear deck, which Jim Pipoly is going to redo later this month.  Jim did all of the painting on our old house and new house.  He’s the only guy we use, and friends and family use him too.  When you find a good contractor you stick with them.  We dropped off old prescription and over-the-counter drugs at the Livingston County jail, where they have a special “no questions asked” collection barrel.  The Howell Recycling Center is only open on Wednesdays and Saturdays, so we stopped there.  We don’t have curbside recycling like we did in Farmington Hills.  We’ve been recycling for so long that it doesn’t feel right to throw things in the trash that can be recycled so we gladly paid the $22 annual membership fee.  We picked up some drawer cabinets for the office, a free-standing cabinet for the basement bathroom (which has no other storage), and unpacked the wine refrigerator and plugged it in.  We always seem to have just enough bottles of wine that they can’t all go in the regular refrigerator so they end up in the pantry where they take up space we need for other things.  They are not cooled, which is bad for storage, but even worse in terms of limiting our choices when we decide we want to open a bottle.  It’s one of those things I’ve always wanted and it just wasn’t that expensive.  I am now trying to figure out where the popcorn machine will go in the basement rec room.  After dinner Linda continued to work on finding an RV park/campground where we can meet up with her brother and his wife in October and I worked on configuring our e-mail SpamExperts and updating this blog.