All Charged Up

We recently got an electric vehicle--good timing as gas prices climb. We could charge it from the outlet in our garage with the included charger cable, but only at a rate of something like a 1-2% every hour. Fortunately, we had planned for this. Years ago, when we converted the breezeway to our sunroom and created and ran electricity to the attic, D--knowing that one day he would convince me to get an EV--had our contractors run a 240V line from the circuit box to the garage. It wasn't connected to anything, but the electrician at the time confirmed we have enough room in the circuit box to eventually activate it.

Fast forward almost six years and we had our E vehicle. We had an electrician come out and connect everything. He was impressed by our prescient decision to have that wired run back in 2016, now that copper wiring has quadrupled in price. He tied the cable into the circuit box and to our wallbox charging management system, a friendly looking glowing box that now lives just inside our garage door.

Next, we hd to get the cable outside, since our garage is really more of a workshop and certainly not a place to park our car. We laid out a garage door strip, cut out a channel, and ran the cable along it.

D created a cute little wooden guide with a copper bracket to keep the cable in place. The seal keeps the garage door about a half inch from the concrete floor and gives us exactly enough clearance for our cable.

Then D primed and painted a 4'' fence post to match the new pearl gray siding and topped with an adorable copper top. He also treated the bottom with something to protect it from the constant moisture of being buried in the ground.

I think it looks pretty nice, given that it's just there to hold up our charging cable.

For now at least, it's just sitting in probably a one-foot hole filled with gravel. This will apparently also help to keep the bottom from rotting by helping to drain rain water out into the dirt rather than sitting next to the post.

A clever and aesthetically pleasing solution to our new charging unit. 

Insert Funny Joke About Stripping Here

I could have come up with a clever title, but on this minimal amount of sleep, I'm just impressed I'm posting an update at all. Now that our garage door is pretty, it was time to put new weather-stripping on the bottom. Even though the garage isn't climate controlled, it shares a wall with a room that is, so might as well keep out as much outside air as possible. Plus whatever animals might be sneaking in under the door (as opposed to lots of other ways they probably find to come in). The old one was cracked and starting to fall off--

 The nails holding the strips in place seemed unnecessarily gigantic.

 About 12 nails later, the old weather strip was off!

And within about a half hour (helped by a second pair of hands),  ta-dah! It's so pretty! Time for the animals to find a new way to sneak into the garage.

Painted House

We decided it was about time to give the outside of our house a new coat of paint. It wasn't going to be a very dramatic change (and usually I paint BECAUSE I want dramatic change) but was going to require a ton of prep work. We know because we tried this before, and never got very far.

Of course a lot of the worst parts were covered up with vinyl flashing when we replaced our windows - most new window installations now include vinyl and aluminum capping to cover the whole exterior sill. But still we needed a lot of scraping and rebuilding.

Here's an example of a spot we tried to build up that still needed a lot of work:

And here is paint to be scraped. To the left next to the rough patch is where we tried to fix 7 years ago. Even after all this time, I can still see the "ultra" white right out of the un-tinted can and how it's different from the color around it.

In the back, you can see the difference between our older "new" windows (not as old as the originals but installed before we moved in, sometime in the 90s or early 00s, where there is still exposed sill in need of help:

Versus the ones we replaced in 2014 where the sills are fully covered:

Here's the basement door, that I desperately want to replace, but that we figured was worth painting for the time being (at least it will match until I finally get a new one - especially since I've wanted a new one for years and so who knows when I'll actually get around to it):

This blog post has been mostly delayed while I go through old photos trying to find a "before" picture for the garage, which I apparently forgot to photograph before last week's painting. It was the most dramatic transformation but you'll have to take my word for it since it seems like I have no photographic evidence. Here's my thousand words, in place a picture - a cream color that matched no other exterior color, a lock that had been removed and had the hole filled in with peach-colored putty, and a door panel that was bowed out and cracked. In short, a pretty ugly sight to see (but not one worth replacing, based on the high cost estimates for a new door).

And now the afters:

A garage that actually matches the white color of our new addition, with no weird peach-colored putty. The bottom left panel is still bowed out, but the painter was able to fill in the cracks and leave it mostly unnoticeable (and at a fraction of the price of a new door):

Rebuilt, primed, and painted area under the soffit:

Scraped and painted picture window:

Freshly white area around the front door (he's actually coming back this week to give our blue front door a fresh coat as well):

 Back window sills:

 Basement door (when he comes back to do the front door, he'll go over the panes with a razor):

Since we were giving the house a nice whitening refresh, it seemed like a good time to power wash as well. We have one power washer that needs the O ring replaced, and we borrowed a neighbors that also didn't have quite enough oomph to safely get to our upper floors. So since the painter had to scrub and clean the wood areas to prepare them for painting, he also was willing to power wash the siding areas as well. Here's a before and after. Obviously his power washer had a bit more, well, power. Also he actually used some detergent, which we didn't. Green slime:

No more green slime:

A nice, relatively cheap refresh for our house that has been much needed all these years. We probably should have done it sooner! And now we have a guy to call for similar jobs, and who we'll be recommending to all our local friends.

Empty (?) Basement

We briefly tried keeping tools in the garage, once. But separated from the house by 3 locks and a messy breezeway that required shoes to pass through, not to mention a coat, meant that we never wanted to go out there. So we would bring in what we needed - a screwdriver, hammer, etc. - and then it would in the kitchen or otherwise inappropriate spot for weeks before we finally put it back. That got old quick. So when we acquired a fancy tool chest, we agreed we would use it more if it went in the basement.

Now that the garage is so much more accessible to the rest of the house and separated by only a simple toggle lock, we wanted to start making more use of it. And thanks to our new attic over the garage, we've been able to clear out some space. That meant the tool chest could finally migrate to its rightful place.

We love it there, and it makes so much more sense. D even hopes that with better organizing and as we move more upstairs, he can really start to use the work bench area along the back wall. It's already been built, we just have to clear it out.

And that suddenly meant more room in the basement, too. We cleared out the additional drawers (and moved what we couldn't trash out to that oh-so-spacious attic) to create another totally empty basement wall. Plus not having a giant metal tool chest full of sharp tools made the room a lot more child friendly. So what did we do? Immediately buy a gigantic jungle gym.

We don't really intend to make the basement into "the playroom."  We'd rather have the kids playing up on the main floor and don't want the toys stored on a separate floor where we'd have to haul them up and down. But it is a really nice space right now to let her climb and run and spin and get out the energy that, this time of year, she might not be able to exhaust by playing at a playground.

Find new space, fill new space.

We really have to start clearing out from what feels like a massive accumulation phase.

Garage Spring Cleaning

It's no exaggeration when I tell you that our garage made us look like we were hoarders. We didn't even manage to get a proper "before" picture because we honestly couldn't walk inside. The front half was filled with giant flower pots for our container gardens, bags of potting soil and mulch and seed, the weed wacker, and the mower. Our "things on sticks" (i.e. rakes, shovels, thrasher, hoe, etc) were all supposed to be leaning against the right wall, but since we couldn't always get there, we mostly just threw them vaguely in the correct direction and let them land wherever. We were saving our old window sashes because "one day" they might make a cool craft activity. We still had various old paint and trim and junk the previous owner had left.

This picture is actually from after we'd already spent about an hour or two clearing the back wall. Imagine it about twice as bad, at least.

It's still far from perfect, but fast-forward two days and we can now walk in (a huge improvement!) and find what we're looking for. We'd planned to donate a lot of what we cleared out to a local non-profit building charity but unfortunately the list of things they would accept did not match the things we had to give (we had a lot of light fixtures and ceiling fans, but not necessarily in their original boxes, for example). So sadly most of the items we cleared out went to the trash can.

Even actions as minor as folding the tarps and stacking them, really improved the way it looked in there. Plus we finally cleaned out the dozens of drop clothes the previous owner left. Many were such thin sheets that the paint seeped immediately through them and onto the floor, making them totally useless. So we saved some as rags and ditched the rest.

Going through the paint was a much-need update too. It had been stacked against the back wall of the garage since we bought the place. There are still a few cans we need to open and evaluate (for example - they still have our dining room/kitchen paint! So if it hasn't dried out I want to pour it into a jar and save it, inside the house, for some touch-ups) but we were able to get rid of most of it. It took them a few days to dry (some of the cans were almost full) but they finally solidified so we could toss them.

(Notice anything else about the driveway??? The piles of mulch and compost are gone! We've been very busy.)

We have bigger plans for the garage, like possibly removing one of the shelves and installing some kind of hanging system for our rakes and shovels. We still have more shelves to clear out, too. And some random hardware like hooks, nails, and screws that can now come inside to be closer to the tools. But at least everything is off the floor and grouped together.