A Flush Is Better Than A Full House

The week of the 17th, I went to see my kids for a few days, so Ed was alone, except for pet duty. My guess is, he gets more done when I'm gone, but the meals are worse.

There was a reason we went to college. It was so we wouldn't have to dig ditches for a living. Now Ed does it for fun! He had to dig a trench for the new sewer line to go out to the septic tank. The good news is..we have a good sized tractor with a backhoe. The bad news is..because of how the garage is situated, and the slope adjacent to it, we can't get it back there to help. So out came the shovel, and Ed went to work.

After hand digging a 40' trench, 4' deep, he figured he had his back and bicep workout in for the week. In went the ABS pipe.

He finished framing in the front and rear soffits, and the returns, and put the plywood up on them. It's amazing what a difference it makes. Then he started wrapping the house. That last window is still out because it is the only easy (a relative term) access we have to bring in the sheetrock.

The fireplace and the exposed plywood are wrapped. We've been pretty lucky so far in that the weather has held off. But any minute it could all change.

If you look at last month's entry, I added a picture of the valley dressed in her fall finery. Now most of the leaves have fallen. Usually hidden by foliage, we can see the creek in the middle pasture, and the west pasture is looking pretty bare.

But that's ok. It all has it's own beauty. In December we usually get a few days of snow, and the pasture is transformed. That little duckling turns into a beautiful swan!

This last week Ed took out the laser level to check the slope on that sewer line and decided to increase the drop. As we all know from poker night, a flush beats a full house.

My job was to do something with the fiberglass door. We bought fiberglass because the west side of the building takes a beating from the weather. In the summer the sun doesn't set until 8:30 pm, often hotter than one would expect. In the winter, the storms roar up the river gorge and the west side takes all the rain and wind. I saw a youtube video by Zar stains http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rSZHQkfUFw&feature=related that said the textured fiberglass would take a wood stain, so I thought I'd try it. Actually the first half of the video is about faux graining a steel door, but in about the middle is the part about the fiberglass textured doors. So I figured if it didn't work out, I could always just paint it. Well I'll be darned if it didn't look pretty nice! You have to use a stain quite a bit darker than you would expect though. This is one coat of stain, and we'll apply two coats of sealer. We debated trying to put on a second coat of stain, but we were worried that it would dissolve the first, since the fiberglass doesn't absorb stain in the same way that wood does. I was just excited that the cats hadn't jumped up to take a look while it was drying!