Week 27 - Outside

This week started out with rain, but was supposed to clear later, so I decided to hold off painting for a while. Instead I worked on a variety of little jobs: finishing the floor in the office; getting stuff into the dumpster, since I'm having it picked up next week; retrofitting my garage sale find into another rain barrel - and modifying my existing rain barrel so they could be ganged together. I also picked up and dropped off a variety of materials, including a couple of mirrors from the The Rebuilding Center. One will go in the hall and the other is for the bathroom. Later in the week I moved back outside.

The biggest task was the cement/vinyl siding transition, which I couldn't do until I got the necessary j-channel, but I had saved a lot of the old vinyl siding and I wanted to get everything I didn't need into the dumpster. For better access, the first thing was to drain and remove the existing rain barrel.

As it turned out, the siding itself was relatively easy to replace, except where I had to work it under an already installed piece, but even that wasn't too difficult. I also wanted to remove the second unused ground drain and re-capping it because it obstructed the rain barrel. In the end I decided to pull up the pavers and cap it low enough that I could replace the pavers right over the top of it, which I did.

I put the first rain barrel back all the way into the corner, and ran the roof gutter to it. If I were feeling more ambitious, I would move the first and second elbows to the top of the pipe so that I wouldn't have such a squirrelly combination of joints at the bottom ... but I'm not. Maybe next year. Hopefully it will look less odd when it is painted.

Then the second barrel was hooked up to the overflow from the first one, and the overflow from it was run into the remaining drainpipe with a short piece of hose. Voila! 110 gallons of rainwater to use in the garden. Eventually, when my side yard garden is back in shape, the overflow will be switched to a soaker hose.

While I was working in the side yard, I decided to close the opening in my fence to the neighbor's driveway that had gone in early in the project.

The first step was to roll it back into place. I repaired it by weaving in a few spirals from a discarded section of chain link, actually a pretty easy process.

Then it was just a matter of weaving the slats back into the chain link.

After that I moved around to the back of the garage, which will also have vinyl siding for the time being.

This area was even easier than the side transition because I wasn't working around any existing siding.

At the end of the week, once the floor in the office was done, I started cutting baseboards and door casings and getting them ready to paint.

Week 28 - Move In