Today’s entry for boring project announcement is the installation of deck lattice! Yay!
I didn’t post about this, but the deck had been recently painted. Originally the goal was to strip and re-stain the deck, which Liz contracted out due to the time and effort investment which was lacking in-house. But project companies and their sub-contractors never seem to get along. For some reason, there’s always a disconnect between the 22 year-old blonde marketing major who promises everything in a job quote, and the grizzled old Mexican migrant workers who actually do the work. Becky may have some experience in stripping, but I’d guess it’s of a different type.
In the end, Liz settled for paint instead of stain. But not after a lengthy back and forth discussion to confirm colors and timing and price adjustments. Were the goal to only paint, that would have remained in-house. We should have canceled outright on principle, but this wasn’t my project. In the end, Becky got her pay day, and we got an overpriced paint job. But it does look nice, I’ll admit.
The final stage, which we did not outsource, was the lattice. The original lattice was that cedar stuff commonly sold for cheap at every hardware store. 10 years of removal and re-installation for each deck staining had left them in a sorry state. They also wouldn’t match the new paint without painting of their own. Not worth the effort. So we replaced them with vinyl.
Just one more improvement to Easement Acres. I don’t anticipate them keeping the groundhogs out, but maybe the skunks will be deterred.
Southwest Ohio is naturally a woodland. Suburbia fights this for what I gather are a few reasons: 1) Trees make mowing more difficult, 2) Tall canopy trees don’t make much in the way of pretty flowers, 3) Homeowners are paranoid about falling branches, 4) Trees interfere with utilities, 5) Trees create yard waste. 6) Trees shade out grass. Etc., etc….
But they’re a natural aesthetic and blocker of the merciless summertime UV death rays! So I will continue working with nature for the perks, instead of focusing on the negatives. I also want to expand the hosta patch, and that requires more shade. So I present to you, the Japanese maple:
Okay, maybe it’s not a true native, but neither are the honeysuckle. It’ll work. I speak for the trees, dammit!
Transferable skills are not always met with enthusiasm once employed outside their initially-intended realm. However, resistance does not negate their usefulness. In the context of a home, estates are, in fact, businesses that old money maintains. The revenue stream must continue, and so must the maintenance. And without careful management of assets, the estate will fall into disrepair.
I do not own a large estate, and neither am I from old money. My quaint half acre “estate” must rely upon family income, but even so, I too must take care to not exceed that which is available. I also am not in the possession of a butler’s services, nor his accompanying staff. Any work done here must be at the hands of those who reside therein. Neither of these resources are inexhaustible.
Therefore, I have applied my project management background, specifically Agile; or more specifically, Scrum Agile; into managing the eternal backlog of estate-oriented projects. It was not initially well-received by the family, but we need a system.
So I present to you: Estate Agile! Here’s the breakdown:
A time period is defined. I chose a month because that’s generally how financial plans align with recurring bills.
Each member of the family agrees to a personal time investment for the period, in hours, per week, because most projects are accomplished on weekends.
The investment is multiplied by the number of weekends in the time period. This becomes the individual’s total time pool.
A financial allocation is defined for the time period.
Projects are groomed for priority, personal time investment, and cost estimate.
Projects withdraw from each available time pool and the total financial resource pool.
Priority is defined as: High = health hazard, structural issue, or otherwise time sensitive, Medium = research required, potential long-term financial/structural/health issue, Low = cosmetic/home repair.
If the grooming cannot fully define all parameters, then it is not considered DOR (definition of ready). It is reduced in scope until it can be defined as DOR.
Projects are added to the commitment plan based on priority, followed by cost, then personal time commitment. The goal is to maximize the total number of projects for the time period without exceeding either the financial or time pools. If a project does exceed one of the allocations, then the next available project is selected until no more projects can be added to the time period. Unused time and finances do not carry over to the next time period.
Anyone can add a project to the backlog for future grooming.
A snapshot of June’s plan
We shall see how successful this is. So far it has, at the very least, curbed the insanity into manageable goals. Rather than forcing myself into project schedules, I can approach actionable items as defined by reasonable time and financial investments. If sanity is all I get out of this, then I’ll consider it a win.
I can’t find a post about this, other than a brief mention elsewhere, but at one point I updated the back door with a modern lock and security film on its window. The frame, having degraded with time, was barely holding the door in place. I corrected the problem temporarily with hardware reinforcements. It worked for the foreseeable future.
Then I got COVID and Liz used my compromised mental state to convince me that the door itself needed replacing, after she tried and failed to strip it of paint for a fresh coat. An indifferent and barely conscious self agreed.
The back door, before I ripped out those ugly curtains.
To be fair, the steel cladding on the bottom of the door had recently warped and was catching. The seal around the frame itself had long since cracked and fallen out. There was definite water intrusion damage, but with so many priorities on a house’s upkeep, the door had remained as deferred maintenance.
So when my bout of COVID finally broke, we acquired a replacement door. It remained in the garage for a week on sawhorses while Liz applied goofy bee-themed designs. I will note at this point that we bought a pre-hung door, not because the included hardware is ever top-notch, but because I had learned the hard way that doors and frames shrink and warp at the same rate, and it’s almost impossible to match up a new door with an old frame. It can be done, but it’s definitely worth the cost/time offset. This lesson was learned with the inner garage door. Frustrating times, those.
Of course, installing a pre-hung door necessitates the removal of the old frame. And I’m glad I went through this trouble, because what lay beneath would not have been seen otherwise.
Mind the gap.
When the former homeowners installed the deck, as with all things they did to this place, they took the quickest and cheapest route to address any hangups. In this instance, in order to support the door base, they attached a piece of particle board vertically against the house frame. This wood was neither rated for moisture exposure nor sufficient to close the gap against nature’s intrusion. The particle board only succeeded in holding moisture against the house, resulting in rot and carpenter ant damage. And to further exacerbate the issue, it also formed a trench on top of the old concrete patio into which yard waste had accumulated.
Fortunately, the house joists were insanely solid, despite the ant damage. I suspect they were hardwood, not the usual pine, so I left them as-is, but not before we added a spray sealant for good measure. Then I layered planks of pressure-treated boards to replace the particle board and support the frame, stacked in a tile formation to prevent water ingress, complete with outdoor caulking on the joints.
That’s not going anywhere.
The door itself, complete with frame, fitted as good as could be expected with only a few angry bouts of profanity. And as per my usual creed for upgrades applied to fixes, the strike plate was replaced with a security version, using 3.5″ screws through the frame and into the joists, in addition to the hinges. And the lock was given a proper upgrade as well.
I guess a beekeeper lives here, who’s also conscientious about weather-proofing and security.
Full sealant applied to the frame, the last external door has finally been addressed.
But not before a bronze bee knocker was added too.
