Getting the pool ready for summer is always a chore.  I try to keep it reasonably clean in the winter, but come spring there’s always some work to do.  Yesterday afternoon I was saying how nice the pool was looking.  And then about 7:00 or so last night we had a storm.  It started with golf ball sized hail.  Then the wind picked up.  The hail stones got smaller and eventually stopped, to be replaced with a pounding rain.  It was quite a storm and made a mess out of our back yard, including the pool.  The picture on the left shows what the pool looked like at 7:30 this morning.

I cleaned the big stuff out of the bottom, cleaned out the filter, turned on the Polaris, and let the equipment run all day.  Debra hosed off the pool deck, and by 5:00 this evening the pool was almost back to its pre-storm beauty.  You can’t see it in the picture, but there are some stains on the bottom from the oak blossoms that spent all night in the the pool.  I’ll have to get some chemical or other to clean that up.

The trees at the far end of the pool, by the way, are red tipped photinia.  They make a great hedge, but they’re not such a great thing to have near a swimming pool.  The blossoms are beautiful this time of year, but the flower petals are very small and tend to plug up the works.  Besides, it’s a bad idea to plant any tree so that it overhangs the swimming pool.  Sap from the tree ends up staining the bottom.  I’m fighting with that on this end of the pool, too, but in that case it’s the pool that was placed too close to the tree.  That oak is at least 100 years old.

The plumber arrived this morning to see if he could find and repair the leak in our bathroom.  After a few hours of chipping out concrete, he located four pinhole leaks in a three foot section of the hot water supply pipe.  A couple hours later and we supposedly have no more leaks.  We do, however, have a large hole in the floor of our bathroom:

We can only guess at what caused the leak.  The plumber said that the copper pipe was touching the steel rebar in the concrete, so it’s likely that the cause was corrosion due to dis-similar metal contact.  I’m kind of surprised, though, that it took 28 years for that to show up.  I would have thought that the corrosion would be faster than that.  What’s scary is that this kind of thing often causes pinhole leaks to appear along the length of the affected pipe, so it’s possible that we could have other leaks that we don’t yet know about.  We’re going to leave the hole there for a week or more to see if we discover more water.

The plumber mentioned something that I hadn’t even considered:  homeowner’s insurance.  He said that most insurance companies will pay for discovering the leak and for putting things back the way they were, but won’t pay for the actual leak repair.  If that’s true then we should be almost fully reimbursed for the plumber’s time, since it only took him about 30 minutes to fix the leak after he found it.  I wonder if the insurance will pay for a new cabinet and new floor coverings, too.  You can bet that I’ll be on the phone tomorrow to find out.

I’ve been putting off cleaning out the garage until Debra and I had two unencumbered days.  After three days off, mostly just relaxing and reading, we got up Sunday morning and headed to the garage to get to work.  It’s pretty surprising how much stuff two people can collect over the course of almost ten years.  We’d given the garage some minor “straightening up” a time or two early on, but for the last five years we just piled more stuff in there until we could hardly get to anything.

We have a three car garage:  two bays hold cars, and the third is designed to hold lawn mowers, yard equipment, and “other stuff.”  The third bay is at the back, perpendicular to the other two bays.  We tackled that one first.  As we pulled stuff out, we tried to arrange it into three separate groups:  stuff to keep, stuff to throw out, and stuff to give away or recycle.  Once the bay was empty, we swept out the accumulated dirt, leaves, and grass, and mounted the old laundry room cabinet on the wall.  Then everything in the “keep” group went back into the garage.  When we were done, I couldn’t believe it.  A place for everything, and everything in its place.  I can actually walk to the back of the room now without having to negotiate an obstacle course.  It took us almost eight hours to clean out that one bay.

Today we pulled both cars out of the front half of the garage and tackled that.  There wasn’t quite as much stuff to go through, although I was surprised at how much we had.  All the old construction materials (doors, lumber, etc.) that I was saving “just in case” went to Habitat for Humanity.  Other stuff went to Goodwill.  The deep freeze that’s been sucking electricity for no good reason went to a friend.  After a good sweeping, the old bookshelves that we replaced in March and that had been taking space in the spare bedroom went along the walls, and everything went back in.  The only thing left to tackle is my workbench, but now I have shelf space where I can put things.

It’s hard to describe just how good it feels to walk into the garage and know that I can get what I want without a struggle.  Having that monumental job out of the way is a huge relief.  Now I can replace the two damaged doors, and I’ll be done with the garage for a while.

The Bookcase Store delivered our new book cases two weeks ago.  Since Debra and I were very busy and out of town for much of the week following, they just sat in the office against the wall for a week.  I screwed the book cases together on Wednesday, and moved books for the next few days.  We now have all of the non-fiction books and paperbacks in the office with us.  That gives us enough space in the master bedroom to put all of the novels and “other stuff.”  The whole point of this exercise is to clear books from the spare bedrooms so that I can start remodeling in there.  I’m still not sure where we’re going to put all of the knick knacks and geological samples (rocks), but we’ll figure something out.  Now all we have to do is find a place to put all the stuff that’s in the closets.  Remodeling in-place is turning out to be a very difficult problem.

We got our annual cold snap yesterday and today.  I woke up at 6:00 this morning to find two and a half inches of snow on the ground.  It was all gone by mid-afternoon, of course, but it was entertaining while it lasted.  Charlie had a good time running around in the snow, chasing snowballs and rolling in it.  Even Tasha the poodle got into the action, bounding through the snow and getting it all over her fur.  Area drivers were similarly enthusiastic, wrapping their cars around trees, landing in ditches, and generally proving that they have no business being out on the roads when the snow falls.  I find it curious that people who have little to no experience driving on snow and ice aren’t more careful.  You’d think they’d recognize an unfamiliar situation and be a little less aggressive.  But then, I suppose that’s giving people way too much credit for innate intelligence.

Debra and I bought three oak trees last weekend, using the 50% off coupon she had for the garden center where she used to work.  For about $75, we got a 10-gallon chinkapin oak, a 10-gallon burr oak, and a 5-gallon live oak.  Also called, I hear, a Texas oak.  I hear tell that this isn’t a real oak tree.  It’s kind of an odd beast:  deciduous evergreen with thick, tough leaves that shed in the spring.  They’re all over around here.  They grow well in stands, and also standalone.  There are some magnificent specimens of this slow-growing, long-lived tree in Central Texas.  But I digress.

The proper way to plant a tree, according to Debra (and as a Master Gardener, she knows more about this kind of thing than I do), is to dig a hole that’s as deep as the tree’s root ball, and two to three times the diameter.  For the 10-gallon trees, that means a hole that’s about 40 inches wide and 15 inches deep.  The first 6 inches isn’t much problem now that the rains have started.  But beyond that, it’s Texas Toothpick time.  A Texas Toothpick is a rock bar:  6 feet of 1-inch steel with a pencil point on one end and a chisel tip on the other.  The thing weighs 20 pounds.  Pick it up, slam the chisel into the ground, pry up some packed dirt.  Repeat.  Scoop out the 3″ of dirt that you loosened up and start all over.  It’s hard work this time of year.  In the middle of the summer with the ground dry and packed, it’s really tough.

Well worth the effort, though.  Now I have two more (albeit small) oaks in the yard.  (It started raining before I could start on the third.)  These should be quite nice trees in 100 years or so.

Finally!  I’m writing this from my new office in what used to be the garage.  The picture to the left is looking at my desk from Debra’s desk.  She has the same desk setup.  Here’s what it looked like with just the furniture.  The desks are 87 inches on each long side, and 29 inches wide.  That gives me about 4 feet for printer, scanner, phone, and other assorted hardware, 3 feet of space for my monitor, and about 4 feet of empty space for doing desk work.  Or for a piling system.  Hopefully not.  The idea of the hutch above the desk is to hold all the stuff that I used to pile on the desk and floor back when all I had was a 6 foot banquet table.  We’ll see how it works.

The room itself is 13 feet wide and 20 feet long.  What wall space isn’t taken up by desk, windows, and door is going to host book cases:  20 or 25 linear feet of 7 foot book cases, which will hold almost all of our books.  For now.

What a relief to have this addition project finished.  The kitchen is next.  I don’t think Debra will allow that one to drag out even four weeks.  Time to make a schedule and stick to it.

It’s hard to believe, but after 4-1/2 years, the garage remodeling project is done.  The window coverings went in last week and the installers finished replacing the carpet on Friday (third time’s a charm), and this morning Debra finished touching up the walls and baseboards.  This afternoon we went to Eurway and brought home the new office furniture, which we will be assembling throughout the week.

Pictures after the furniture is finished.  With white walls and a very light colored carpet, there just isn’t enough contrast to make a picture worthwhile.  At least, not with my camera and meager photography skills.  The furniture is a faux cherry veneer, which will provide some much-needed color.  Once we get the furniture in and situated, we’ll measure out the remaining wall space and contract with the Bookcase Store for book cases.  If all goes well, we’ll have the furniture built and set in place by the end of the week so that we can start moving in there next weekend.

The most important lesson I learned through this whole ordeal is to have a plan and a schedule.  Otherwise you’re just screwing around, and the project will drag on and on and on and …

We were supposed to get carpet in the new office room yesterday, but the installers showed up with the wrong carpet.  We were supposed to get carpet that’s 15 feet wide so that it could be installed in the room as a single piece without seams.  We ended up with 12′ goods, though, so Debra had to trek back to Home Depot and raise a stink.  The carpet’s re-ordered now and should be in next week.  If all goes well, we’ll have carpet on the 15th.

With the carpet going into the new office (yes, the forever garage renovation really is nearing completion), Debra and I decided to go looking for furniture.  Currently our office furniture consists of a couple of 6-foot banquet tables and a hodge-podge of file cabinets and book cases that we’ve acquired over the past 8 years.  The new office is approximately 20′ long by 15′ wide.  There’s enough space to put two desks and credenzas, a file cabinet, office supply cabinet, and 8 or 9 book cases.  We’ll even have some space left in the middle where we can put a couple of chairs.  We’re more than doubling our useable space.  We have enough room left over in the renovation budget that we can afford to buy all new furniture.  As long as it’s not too expensive.

And, oh boy can office furniture be expensive!  We’ve looked at some really nice stuff that’d run us $10,000 all told—way more than we want to spend.  There’s some middle-of-the-road stuff that looks really nice but isn’t at all functional (imagine, a computer desk that doesn’t have a cord hole in the top), and some surprisingly inexpensive furniture that looks reasonably nice (especially for a home office) and is well-designed.  If you’re looking for home office furniture, be sure to check Eurway.  We haven’t decided 100% on buying from them, but they’re the leading contender right now, and for a helluva lot less than $10,000.  My only concern is their book cases.  Their 85″ case has only 5 shelves, which doesn’t give me any more useable shelf space than does a cheap 72″ unit from Office Max.  But the shelves on the Eurway unit are fully adjustable in 1″ increments, meaning that if I can buy additional shelves I can turn that 5-shelf book case into a 9-shelf book case—almost doubling the number of books I can place on it.  With 8 of those in the office, we’ll have space for all the books that are currently in the bedroom and the office, and have some shelf space left over.