Insurance compliant!

Well, insurance compliant till the next time the adjuster comes out, which will be sometime this month. It sucked that when we bought the house we weren't really moved in enough to catch the first adjuster. I caught the second one, and that gave me the heads up enough to have a clue. I think I can spot a couple of spots to get ahead of too.

Earl and the boys came out and whacked our trees. For 250, the maple is now fully trimmed up, the oak tree danger is now down.. They even whacked up the fallen maple into bits and trimmed the chinese chestnut too :) Now it's just hauling to the firepit all season long, lol. Now I want to learn how to use tree spikes and roping- Josh was looking like too much hanging up there. Mark might be able to get us a trailer for the lawn tractor for cheap too, yay! The guys whacking up the fallen maple means that all the stools and table stump pieces for the firepit are done now. And yeah, good for future use. Earl said he does snow plowing too. I think next month I will call him again to to a handful of estimates on more tree trimmings and how much plowing would be.
Got the trim replaced around the one florida room window- had to use 1x3, no one had the matching trim. All caulked up and painted too. I got the exterior primer and paint in one stuff, but I think I will need to do a second coat for it to look good. It's not lovely, but it is up to compliance now. Got the glass busted out of the double glaze- once again not lovely, but hopefully at least done up enough that it will pass. Geez, re-learned a lot about caulking with a gun on that window, and it shows. But between white caulk and paint, good enough for now till it's time to really re-do it pretty. Used quite a bit less paint than I expected too, so I think the second coat will catch me up to what I thought I would use. Leaves me plenty to get the rest of the exterior trim wood painting done this season. And I bought one caulk per window=4, but I seriously miscalculated. I got the 4 windows done, plus a tad left over to start sealing the outside windows of the great room doors. And I have 2 caulks left over. Helped a lot that the tops and bottoms of the windows caulk was still good. I may have enough left over to finish the great room doors and seal in the horsey doors.
Started to figure out what I will need to do to fix the great room doors and horsey doors. I had gotten 1x2 for the window, but it was really not right, so that's going to be used to trim in the inside of the mud door instead. I think I can use more 1x3 for the exterior horsey door, and that will work just fine. Not sure how I want to tackle the great room door. I think I may have to yank out the top trim of both doors and just replace the whole shebang. And there's a bit of a problem with the bottom two window panels. The plastic trim is broken, and I'm not sure how to replace it. I'm thinking I might just have to make a custom mold with foil and pipe in my filler for the molding. Backfill the gaps with foam, and lay the molding over it. Will make it pretty sound once it's all done. But I think since most of it is metal and plastic, it will probably be wiser to mask the glass and trim and spray enamel the rest of it rather than using exterior house paint. I can paint over the spray stuff if I want to- I just think spray will be better to seal the whole thing.
Effing yuck- the mudroom bathroom. That for sure is going to get attended to in the cold months. It's kind of gross, all the missing trim and the bugs getting in, the sink is just too ewww for words. The privy too. And if I ever do win a fabo tub bathroom makeover- guess which bath is getting the cool soaking tub makeover? Hell, if I am lucky with the package, I might be able to hardscape the bedrooms nook too.
Anywho, wandering...

I did locate the local Habitat for Humanity Restore. Holy crap, what a find. Paint for 5 bucks a gallon, just need to keep my eye open for the right gallons. Screens are 5 bucks too, so I need to start doing some measuring on my missing screens. Full windows are 10 bucks- and shit, some of them are big enough to do a full greenhouse side! No kidding, there was everything from a little bath size window up to one that was 8x8 ft. Bathroom sinks, 10, bigger kitchen ones, 15. Cabinets run 35, guess where all the extra oddbits for the outbuildings are going to come from? And all sorts of random furniture and building stuff like glass blocks and tiles. Found some sweet yellow 4x4s, but since I have no idea where I would put them right now, ah pass. Maybe once it's time to start garnering materials for the mudbath they will find a home :) I think if I keep my eye on the HfH, I can pull a refacing for around a hundred bucks, maybe a bit less.
And they have knobs for a quarter- think it's about time the bedroom set from my childhood gets a makeover. Crazy, with this birthday just past, I've had the pieces for 30 years now. Not bad for particle board. Left behind the corner desk years ago, and lost the headboard in the move from Racine to Chicago.
Also time to really start counting the penny jar towards a truck. I would give my left appendage for one now, but I think maybe by spring we might have the scribbins up to get one cheap. If nothing else, a good down payment on something decent from a local dealer.

Otherwise, not much else going on with the getting shit done action.

Future house plans? Looked outside the upstairs bathroom window today. Think I know what the leakage problem on the west side of the greatroom where it joins the meow-nook is. There was shingle cornering put in- but it lays UNDER the shingles  along the down side of the slope. AND the slope up the wall is totally unfilled, leaving all sorts of little wells for water seepage. So, looks like a couple 5 gal buckets of tar and some flat roofing rolls will solve both the garage leakage and the upstairs/greatroom leakage too. Not pretty again, but at least this time I could readily identify it and know a solution.

The chickens.. Well, they are pretty smart. I started tossing them bread crumbs several days ago... Now they are to the point where some of my morning coffee time is spent tossing them some chicken bread :) I got to touch Mr. Tastys tail feathers today- he was too busy eating to notice. It was cool. Ruby hops up on the porch and starts making a fuss to let me know it's time to go tend to them. They show up later in the day too, but don't make much noise. By the time faire season is over and my sister can come calling again- she's gonna have a kinipshon about being able to feed the chickies.
The goldfinches and hummingbirds have really been popping up too- time to get to work on some extra feeding action for them.

On the tec front- That super cool robot cruiser I posted recently that my love is printing out?
The good news- he now has the programming action set up for it's movements, and all the components to make a exceptionally nice reader. Yeah yeah, it's to check out the safe environs of the indoors for now- but if I can get in some of the gardens next year that I want to, you can bet your ass that thing is going to be following me around then for notes :)
The bad news- the site that prints off other folks stuff for a fee- charge almost a grand to print the same thing off. That's about the price of a printer. Yep, we are skipping that.

Cooking- Well, today I'm doing a test run on what to do with apples. I know we are going to have tons of them to process. Had a bunch of little ones from last weekend that haven't been eaten. So about ten of them went to drying. I peeled, halved, and cored them. Then into thinnish slices and onto a couple cookie sheets. I put them on around noon, and have flipped them twice so far. They should need one more flip, then be done before bed tonight so I can kill the oven and let them just cool. Oven has been at 200 the whole time.
Had 4 apples left over. So I peeled, halved, and cored those too. Tossed the halves in a bit of lemon juice till I was ready for them. Then I took all the apple scraps into a pot, added water to cover with a couple cinnamon sticks, some cloves and allspice berries, and a couple grates of nutmeg. Simmered it all for a while till it tasted right. Strained off the solids, retaining the liquid. I then quartered the apple halves, tossed them in the lemon juice again, then dumped it all in the liquid to poach till tender. Strained off the liquid again, reduced by about a third, then thickened with sugar, remixed it with the apple slices. Perfect bit of apple filling or topping. Yum, to top a hot stack of pancakes or a belgium waffle. But these slices are going into some crescent roll dough I got on sale for mini popovers.

A weather aside. The weather has been unusually active this year according to local gossip. We get storms till now usually, but not quite so fierce. And huh- normally most of our power outages can be blamed on the lakeshore folk. The wealthy. They like they way their trees fill in better than paying attention to power line clearance. So the rest of us have to pay for their stupid and have no power while their tree downed lines get fixed.
Wandering again... gonna go get some grub..


TIP OF THE DAY:
ALWAYS OPT TO BLOW THE BUCKS ON A PAIR OF GOGGLES AND SOME SAFETY GLASSES. GLOVES AND BREATHING MASKS TOO!!
Cheap gear or not- it can save one from a lot of grief.