RV Travels With Huggy

On Tuesday night, Feb 22nd, it started snowing and when we got up Wednesday morning we had about six inches of the stuff. I right away got the driveway and sidewalk shoveled and it started melting. The park roads got plowed and it was looking very good by evening.

That night it started snowing again and actually dumped about 12" of the stuff in a two hour period! By Thursday morning, we had between 14 and 16" all over the place. Now I know this probably doesn't sound like a lot of snow to some people who live where it snows a lot, and I like having snow around us in the mountains, but not down here where I live. That is more snow than we usually have in at least three or four years, total. This time I have some photographic proof:


This is what our road beside the clubhouse looked like, shortly after I finished shoveling (again) but before the snow plow came by. Our two cars are both small and low to the ground and we couldn't operate them in this much snow as their wheels wouldn't even reach the ground, with the car hung up on the snow!


This is the mountain of snow I built in our yard from shoveling snow from the driveway and sidewalk. Our neighbor in the next house was doing his at the same time and I suggested that we build two snow forts, then have a snowball fight. I guess we are too old for that now.

Anyway, a week and a half after that snow fell, there is still a little of my mountain in the yard. Maybe I'll go out and throw snowballs at cars as they drive by. No, I guess most people wouldn't appreciate that and my hands would get cold.

Labels: Griping, House, Photos, Weather

We have dreamed about putting a natural gas fired fireplace into our house for some time but just were not sure where to put one in a house as small as ours (1450 sq ft). But we are hearing that the long range weather forecast for our area is calling for another nasty winter, much like the one of two years ago, so we decided to finally go ahead and just do it.

We had visited the booth of a local heating supply place at our County Fair this summer so we started with them. They had a nice unit on a special price that we liked, so we ordered it. The delay was in getting the special sized hearth made, but it finally arrived last Thursday and they came on Friday to do the installation. Of course I have some photos of that process and I hope I can get them in here as Flickr has changed the way the code is copied to put into a blog. I hope I've figured it out. Here goes.....


This first photo shows part of our living room, with the hearth about in the right place. We felt this location would provide some heat into the dining area behind the fireplace and the kitchen is then to the left in the photo from the dining area. We rarely have power outages but they do happen and we wanted to be sure this stove would work, even with the AC power off. It does although not as well as it will with the AC powered blower working.


The two installers, Tim and Jake, have carried the main unit in and are placing it on the hearth. It is by Vermont Castings and has a cast iron firebox so weighs about 200 pounds. Tim is the stove man, Jake is the carpenter.


As you know, we live in a cat house with Huggy, Molly and Peewee. Peewee is the youngest and most inquisitive, although Huggy was watching most of the process from her perch on the sofa. Except when she was asleep which was quite often. Peewee has given the area around the floor a good sniff test and is now checking out the top. Better now than later when it gets hot.


Our manufactured home requires that outside fresh air be supplied to the firebox for combustion. With a gas fired unit there isn't a lot of exhaust so they are able to use a double walled chimney, with the fresh air coming down the outer part. With a fireplace that burns wood or pellets, you have to cut a vent into the crawl space under the house that comes up to the bottom of the fireplace. Gas is a lot easier.


The chimney goes through the roof inside a box that keeps the hot parts from the combustible parts of the house. For that, a fairly large hole has to be cut into the roof and it has to be aligned with the hole in the room ceiling where the box accepts the chimney from the stove. Here Tim and Jake are checking the alignment of the drill before punching the holes out through the roof.


Pat is sitting at the dining table in the background while the fireplace is in its final position, with the chimney installed. The glass front of the firebox has been removed so that Tim could place the "logs" in their proper position. These are some sort of a ceramic that glows when the flame heats them. There are also "embers" added to the mix. The iron front that goes in front of the glass is also here on the floor. You can see some of the gas controls under the firebox. We have a remote control that runs on batteries and the receiver in the fireplace gets its electrical power from some units that generate power from the heat of the pilot lite so no household electrical power is needed to operate it, although it will distribute the heat better if AC power is available to drive the fan system.


Here is the unit operating. When Jake finished hooking it up to gas he could get the pilot lite to ignite but it wouldn't stay on even after quite a long burn-in with the button depressed. Jake isn't a stove man and Tim had gone on to another job so we called in Jesse who got it working. These have a high temperature paint on much of the unit but it does smell a bit at first so they suggested that we let it burn for a couple of hours with the doors & windows of the house open. It was 77 degrees outside so we didn't need the heat but it did get the paint smell cleared.


Here's a closer view. I have been playing with using a couple of different sizes photos from Flickr and am anxious to see how they look in the blog. Hopefully they will be okay.

Anyway, we now have a fireplace so should be all set for winter. However, the pilot lite went out yesterday and it again won't stay lit. We will have to have the stove guys back out tomorrow to get it resolved. I'm glad that we did this before winter set in.

Labels: House, Our cats, Pat and I, Photos, Weather

What my brother found at the Spokane Costco store is a mulch for garden and playground use that is made of recycled tires. It is a rubber product that is a little darker than the cedar bark sold around here for garden use but offers a lot of advantages. The cedar product is beautiful when new but it quickly fades to a gray color, after just a couple of months and fairly soon turns into dirt. You have to renew it every year. It has small slivers that will get stuck in your hands unless you wear gloves always around it and are pretty lucky.

The rubber based product is a little darker brown but that color is guaranteed to stay that way for 12 years. The product doesn't break down into dirt, in fact it is a pretty good barrier to grass, weeds, etc. growing through it. There are no slivers to get stuck in your hands and it is even easy to walk on. Are there any negatives? Well, maybe in the short term as the cost is higher. Our gardeners told us our area would need about a cubic yard of bark which would cost about $50 and probably another $50 or so for them to deliver & spread it. A cubic yard is 27 cubic feet. The rubber mulch comes in 1.6 cubic foot bags for $19.49 so it would take 17 bags of it for 27 cu ft at a cost of about $331. But it doesn't have to be done every year and really doesn't have to be quite as thickly applied.

We have bought 13 bags and still have one unopened and another with a bit left. I think these will work for us for this year and next year we may want to buy two or three more to top off any thin areas. After that I don't think we will need much over quite a few years.


Here is another photo of the garden area showing the mulch. Notice the cat planter? I found that at a Hallmark Store for Pat as part of her gift for our second wedding anniversary. So I guess you could say that we now have four cats.


This shows the mulch a bit better, being a closer view. We have had it now a few weeks and really like it. I've been told that it is available from Walmart but they carry smaller bags, so if you need very much then probably Costco is a better place to look. This photo also shows the stump for the other large bush that I called a bumblebee bush that we took out after the cold winter killed them.


Another view of the arbor we placed just inside the gate in the fence.


A better view of the white post top light that is just inside the gate. In the background you can see part of our park's clubhouse. This side of it has the indoor swimming pool inside. There is also a good library with many books.

Labels: Flowers, House, Landscapes, Photos

We gave our new fence awhile for the wood to dry out and then stained it with a semi-dark oil based pigmented stain. We got the stain at Sound Cedar, the same place the wood came from. It is the same stuff they used on the cedar on the front of their building which was stained with it in 2004, about five years ago and it still looks good. And it faces west so gets the afternoon sun. We didn't want to leave the cedar to weather naturally because it doesn't do that evenly and didn't want to use a clear stain as you have to redo it about every two years. At almost $34 a gallon (we used all of three gallons) it is fairly expensive, plus the time it takes to do the work. Anyway, we both like the results.


This is the outside of the fence looking at it from one end toward the other end. The sunroom is in the background and the patio outside it with the picnic table, chairs and propane barbecue. This photo has a pretty good view of one of the solar powered lighted post caps we used on the ends of the fence. It has kind of a stained glass look. Later you'll see the one we used beside the gate which puts out a clear, white light and actually gives enough light to be a help coming in when it is dark. They all have rechargeable AA size batteries and the light comes from clear LEDs so they don't use much electric power. It will be interesting to see if we get enough sky light in the winter to charge them to run long enough after our early darkness to be useful.


This is again the outside of the fence that faces the common area in the middle of our park but closer to the gate. You can see the clear light I talked about earlier as well as the cedar post caps that we used on the other posts. We also decided that we wanted an arbor and found that cedar unit at Sound Cedar, ready made in three pieces. Our fence contractor set post holders in concrete and they hold the arbor which we stained in the same stain. Also notice Pat walking along outside the sunroom and the two hummingbird feeders. We have planted a grape plant on each side of the arbor and hope to have it grow up it and give us some good fruit.


Here is the gate and arbor looking straight at them from outside the fence. The hardware for the gate is simple black metal but it is pretty heavy and should last a long time. It is a fairly long distance from the edge of our yard where the fence is located to the concrete sidewalk that runs down through the common area and during much of the year that grass out there is so wet that it is like walking on a sponge. We asked the park managers if we could put in a crushed rock walkway to connect our yard to that sidewalk and he said we could, so now we can exit our gate and keep our feet dry to get out to that sidewalk even during the wet time of the year. The girls came from our house to the gazebo via that main sidewalk for our wedding but then they had to walk through that wet grass to get to the sidewalk.


This view is about the same as the first one but taken on the inside of the fence showing part of our actual yard. Pat is very good with plants and has done quite a nice job of setting up our yard/garden. The soil here isn't very good, just a little bit of topsoil over clay, so we have a few larger type plants that are in the ground but for many we have used planters and other containers. We took out a hill that was mostly just bark and roots from some cedar trees and put in a couple of raised beds that are over to the left, out of the picture from where this view is looking.


The arbor from the inside. We are trying an upside down tomato planter thingy and that is it to the right of the arbor. By now the tomato plant is almost reaching the ground so we may have to move it to someplace higher but we are not sure, never having used one of these before. There was some crushed rock in the back yard but along both sides of the house they had used a fairly small river rock that was really hard to walk over, so we had the gardeners bring in a few yards of crushed rock and even it out all over the sides and back. It is much better now. We have some lawn in front and that is all that I want to mow- the rock is nice.


I probably don't really need to put this photo in but it does show our pampas grass plant. It was badly damaged by the cold weather over the winter but is starting to come back. It also has Pat in the background working in the garden area. Those tall cedar trees on the other side of our yard are where all those roots in that bark hill came from. I kind of wish they were a bit smaller and may trim them. I don't think the former owners of our lot planted them as the neighbors have more of them across the back of their lot but these three or four trees are on our side so I think I can trim them back.


Here we are looking through the side of the arbor toward the garden. We bought stainless steel hooks to put one on each fence post and Pat has baskets of flowers hanging on each of them except the one with the tomato plant and the two corners and ones by the gate. You can just see the grape plant starting at the bottom of the photo and the small tree is a dogwood that has about 18 lighted solar powered butterflies in it. They look interesting at night.


Here is the other corner of the back yard. You can see a stump of what we called the bumblebee plant. We had two of them, one on each side of the yard in the corners. They were quite large and had a lot of purple flowers on them that really attracted bees, especially bumblebees. The cold of the last winter killed them so we took them out and are finding that we really like how it has opened up the yard. Not to mention that you don't have to fight bees all summer out there now.

I have a few more photos but this is enough for one post. The others are a couple of photos of the arbor from a different angle, one showing the light on the post top better and a couple of closer views of the ground cover. We thought about getting more bark to use out there but it has the bad habit of turning into dirt pretty soon and that doesn't do anything about stopping weeds. It also doesn't look good for all that long. My brother was shopping at Costco in Spokane one weekend about the time we were ready to do this and he found a product he told me about that we used. More about that next time.

Labels: Flowers, House, Landscapes, Pat and I

Winter came to us this week. Over the last weekend we got about four inches of snow which isn't too bad, but then it turned cold and we had a couple of days when the temperature didn't get above freezing. The roads got cleared fairly well as the humidity was down and the city did get sand out. I had our driveway and sidewalk cleared and it was in good shape. Up to when we went to bed Tuesday night.

Then Tuesday evening it started snowing again. Hard. It kept it up until about 16:00 today at which point we had over a foot of snow. That is very unusual for our area as we normally have none over an average winter. Now our friends in Canada are sending another mass of very cold air south so it will clear up and be sunny but we'll have night temps in the teens and daily highs only up to the mid 20s for the next couple of days. On Sunday it is supposed to warm up a bit but then we will also get more snow.


Here is a photo of our house taken today about 17:00 just after I got home from getting my mocha at Starbucks (some things you just have to do, regardless of the weather.) I should have cleared the snow off the little snowmen, and the bush at the right side of the house has so much snow on it that many of the lights there do not show well in this photo, but you can see what was done by Mother Nature.

We just stayed home yesterday with me clearing the driveway and sidewalk about five times, only to have it fill back in with snow. We have something over a foot of the stuff now. I really don't like snow but we have a lot less than my brother who lives east of the mountains in Spokane. They set a new record for the amount of snow that fell in a 24-hour period, over 19 inches. They currently have more than two feet of the stuff and it has almost brought the city to a standstill. I guess things could be worse here!

Labels: House, Photos, Weather

One of our neighbors has a friend who has a radio controlled model airplane he has built that includes a Canon digital still camera. He can fly the plane over an area and take photos with the camera from his controller on the ground. Doug's friend came with that plane on August 12th, flew it from the parking lot in our senior park and took some photos of the area. I have the photos from that session as well as a couple that Doug took of them before the flight. Pat and I were down at the ocean with our RV when this occurred so we were not here but it is still fun to see the results.


Here is a fairly close up view of the front end of the airplane itself, showing the engine, prop, camera and wheels. I'm sorry that the background is a bit busy as the plane was sitting on the tailgate of the truck it arrived in and has some of the accessories used with it in view, but I think you can get a good idea what it looks like.


Here is the pilot/owner carrying it into the parking lot of our clubhouse, where he flew it from. You can see the mail boxes building at the street edge of the parking lot just beyond him on the left side of the photo, and Little Mountain in the background behind the trees that are at the edge of our park. I wasn't here to see the takeoff or landing but Doug said it flew fine from this amount of open space.


Here is a photo from the plane. That is our house on the far right side, just across the street. If you look carefully you can see the sunroom we added at the left side of the house as we are looking at it here on the back of the house. This also shows some of the common area behind us that is in lawn. The houses are fairly close to each other but that is fine with most of us as we don't want a lot of yard space to have to maintain! The common area is pretty big but the park maintains it.


This view is looking south, about the same direction that the photo of the two people carrying the plane to launch it was looking. You can see the mailbox building at the left side of the parking lot. The big building there is our clubhouse which has a lot of things inside including a large indoor swimming pool, a library with a few thousand books, a full kitchen, billiards and poker tables, a piano/organ, meeting space and a large mirror room such as a dance school would have. Just beyond the building there is a glimpse of the gazebo out in the yard where Pat and I were married last year and on the near side, a shuffle board court and a golf putting green that is missing it's green cover as well as quite a bit of lawn space.


This angle of view is similar but looking from a bit farther to the left (east) toward the south. The gazebo shows up better on the far side of the clubhouse here and you can actually see a bit of our house beyond the green one that is at the far side of the parking lot. I can see the front door of the sunroom, although it is easier to pick it out if you click on the photo and go look at it in a larger version on my Flickr site.

These photos show a bit about how our park is laid out. There are 120 homes here. The houses are all double wide manufactured homes that range in size from about 1200 to 1900 square feet. All are pit mounted on foundations so they sit on the ground like a stick built house rather than being three feet up in the air like mobile homes are often setup. I would love to have an airplane like this one- might be something to look into.....

Labels: House, Photos

Pat was called in to work today at her on-call receptionist job at the school district, so I said I would water the plants in the back yard. When I finished I thought it would be good to take some photos, so I got my camera, tripod and a reflector and got to work (play?) out there. I took close to 50 photos and have selected these five to prepare to post here. My process is to work a bit on them in Photoshop Elements version 6, then re size them to about 800x600 pixels before uploading those smaller ones to my site on Flickr. When they are there, I can write a post and add some HTML code that brings the photos into the blog. I read on others blogs about having some problems with photos posting correctly on Blogger but I've never had any problems with this method. Anyway, here they are:


I think this first one is a mum. It isn't one of the gigantic ones you sometimes see but I do like these. These are planted on our patio outside the sunroom in a giant pot. We like to eat lunch at the Garden Cafe at Skagit Gardens, where the Skagit Valley Mum Society has their gardens, which are beautiful and includes many of those very large ones.


Yes, I know this is a zucchini squash and probably not technically a flower, but isn't a flower really up to one's definition? I like the flowers these have and this view also includes one of the fruits (are they fruit?) We were wondering if we would ever have any squash from any of the three plants Pat set out. The little hill they are on is made up mostly of cedar bark that was put on as a ground cover over the years. She started feeding them with Miracle Grow and watering them regularly and there are now nearly half a dozen of a decent size. So, I have included it here, flower or not.


I don't know what this one is, although Pat does. It is also on the patio in another of those giant pots. I think it is getting close to the end of it's blooming season. I had to pull off quite a few of the dead petals or whatever they are before I took these photos. But it is bright and colorful and pretty large.


Last year Pat was asked by the manager of our park if she would plant four hanging baskets with fuchsias and other flowers to hang on the gazebo in the common area behind our house. This is the gazebo where our wedding ceremony was held April 28, 2007 and those hanging baskets in the photos were these that Pat planted. In the fall they were brought to our house and just left outside along the south side of the house. This spring she thought they were done for so replanted four others and just left the others there. We later noticed they were flowering so she moved them to a table on the patio and started taking care of them. As you can see from this and the next photo, they have done very well for flowers that we had not expected to grow.


Here are some of the other fuchsias that are of a different color (variety?) These have really surprised us. I wonder what they will do next year?

I have fun taking photos of flowers even though I have a black thumb when it comes to growing them. I also don't know what many of them are. I had to send Pat a text message on her cell phone to ask what the fuchsias were called as I couldn't remember. These photos were just taken with my 18 - 200mm zoom lens which will focus pretty close. I used a reflector on most to add fill light but think flash fill was used on one of the fuchsia shots. I also used a tripod and set the camera on aperture priority so that I could stay with f/11 for better depth of field. My macro lens is being used by Pat's daughter but maybe I'll retry these with it later. Our great "Indian Summer" weather seems likely to continue for a few more weeks, so the flowers should also be good for awhile longer. Of course the lawn also grows and has to be mowed, but we can't have everything perfect, can we?

Labels: Flowers, House, Photos, Weather, Wedding

I finished the last of the trim painting on the house last Monday and it looks better than before, if I have to say so myself. I should have taken a current photo before I started but didn't, so will have to pull one from the past.


This one was taken March 25th while the roofers were here re-roofing the house. The sun wasn't shining so the lighting looks quite a bit different between the two but this one actually shows more detail on the porch which is in much deeper shadows in the photo taken today in the sunshine. Note that the trim is a lighter shade of gray then in the next photos. In some places, especially along the roof gutters & down spouts, that gray looked like it was showing a previous color through the paint.


This view is from about the same place but I painted out the telephone hookup box. You can see there are also a lot more flowers but the forsythia isn't in bloom any more. Also you can see just a glimpse of the new roof on the peak to the left of the front porch. Anyway, the trim is about the same color but a darker shade of gray. The house itself is finished in vinyl siding in a very light gray shade.


A view of the front porch with more detail showing. You can also see the very large begonia and it now has about 3 white blooms and some of the red one that is growing in the same pot to the right. There are yellow ones behind the white ones at the left side but they are not yet as large. The stock on the white one is at least an inch across.


We have some yard decorations. There is a family of odd birds and this is one of the babies.


Here is the mother bird. These do not go south for the winter but just move into the garage for the cold and snowy part of the year. It is an easier trip for them that way.

Pat is a collector of toads and also has some frogs, some of which I'll post later in photos. Anyway, you can see what I spent about a week working a few hours on almost every day this past week. I do need to touch up a few spots with white, like in the back of the garage where the roofers had to replace one of the plywood roof panels and part of it shows. I'll get to that next week. For now, it is time to relax a little, drink a few mochas, and enjoy our nice summer like weather.

Labels: Flowers, House, Photos

I don't have any photos to post today but thought I'd do a quick update. I've gotten started on painting the outside house trim and have found a bit of dry rot that we will have to get fixed. I have been trying to paint on the shady side of the house but that has been a problem on the south side as it is almost never shady there. So, this morning I didn't go to the YMCA for my exercise class. I figure that I am getting more exercise than normal with this project and this way I was able to be out on the south side early in the morning before it got too hot. Now I am waiting for the sun to move around to where the east side is in the shade again.

I do have an extension ladder but it is down in Arlington at my son, M's house. He needs it more than I do but now I do need one for some of the higher places. Pat talked with my ex-neighbors who live only a couple of blocks away and they loaned me theirs which we walked over last night to pick up. So, today when the sun gets around far enough I'll use it to get the peak trim done on that east side. That is the street side of the house and what most people see.

There turned out to be an interesting tale on picking up the paint. We went on Saturday to Parker Paints. They have short hours on Sat, only open from 9 to 1, but got our two gallons ready before closing and I picked them up along with a 1 1/2" brush (I already have a good 3" one) and I bought some of that blue masking tape used by painters. They had a stack of 9 rolls of 1" wide tape with a price sticker of $4.59 on it. When I got home and looked over the invoice I realized that the price was PER ROLL, not for the whole stack. I didn't need that much and the tape cost more than the two gallons of paint.

Pat & I took it back to have the $43.64 (tape plus tax) credited back into my checking account (purchased with a debit card) and I bought just two rolls. The fellow working there wasn't too sure how to credit my account back so called another store for help. He did it, then brought me the slip to sign. I always look them over and noticed that he had hit an extra zero so had credited my account $430.64! I pointed this out to him and he said he would correct it. Then he asked me to just write a check for the two rolls of tape I was buying.

These transactions didn't show up on my banking online until Monday, when I found the $430.64 was still there and he had charged another $43.64, then credited $43.64 back. I got started painting Monday and didn't have the chance to go over to the store but we did make it yesterday, when we talked with the store manager (who seemed glad to see us) and got it corrected. They charged my account the $387.00 difference between the return payment of $430.64 and the $43.64 that should have been put back in. I guess I actually made a little money since that money was there from Sat until Tue but any money over $500 in checking only earns 1/2 of one percent interest so we won't be getting rich over the error.

That mistake gave us more money than we should have had but it could just as easily have been the other way around. I am not sure that all business' would quickly return the money to the customer, so it is important to check these transactions on a regular basis. I like my debit card but there are a lot of ways mistakes can be made with it. So, check your transactions on a regular basis!

Labels: House, Humor

Well, so much for good intentions. I don't think it has ever been this long between posts on my blog. I have no excuse but do seem to have been busy all of the time. Of course part of that being busy is working on a project on my computer and not all of "us" really count that as being busy. But it does take a lot of time.

We have been doing things and I'll (try to) get something posted about some of those but for now I thought I'd just post a couple of photos of one of Pat's flowers. This is a begonia that she has grown from a bulb given to her by one of her daughters. It started in a pot in our yard but she worried that it might be drowned in all of the rain we had this spring so it and it's pot was moved onto the front porch, along with a bunch of others. I think it likes that location as it sure has grown, both leaves and bloom. And there are other blooms that are developing on this plant. There is a slightly smaller one that has red blooms coming in behind this one. Here is the first photo:

This flower is a good 8 inches across. You can't see all of it because it's large leaves (like elephant ears) have part of it covered. You can just see a hint of red to the left of this flower, just below that upper leaf, and that is the red begonia starting to bloom.


Here's a closeup view of the flower. It is large and really looks good.

Pat is good at raising her garden and much of it is in pots so that we can move them around to different locations. I have some other photos of different flowers she has grown and will try to post them occasionally.

Today we picked up a couple gallons of paint and the stuff to go with it so I can paint the trim around the outside of the house. The basic house is finished in a light gray, almost off white, vinyl siding. The trim has been gray but it looks like it was painted at different times as there is at least two shades of gray involved. We wanted it to look better so will get started with this. I'll probably start in the front of the house as that is what most people will see. Between that and working on my computer project, plus trying to occasionally take photos and we do want to take the RV out for a few days, I know I will be busy. But I will try to not take so long before the next post and also try to get around to visits to my blog friends more often. I'll try.

Labels: Flowers, House, Pat and I, Photos

I'd like to wish a Happy Easter to everyone. I hope you are all able to spend at least part of the day with family and loved ones. We had breakfast with one of Pat's daughters and the other one is coming by this afternoon with her two kids to see the new sunroom. Her husband is in sunny Arizona to watch a Mariner's Cactus League baseball game with his brother.

Speaking of the sunroom, we and the cats have been enjoying it, especially when the sun shines. Friday morning we woke up to actually see snow falling, although it didn't stick nor amount to anything. But you know it was cold. We have heat out there set for about 48 degrees so that is what the temp inside it is in the early morning. In the afternoons it has been getting up to the mid to upper 60s if overcast and mid 70s with at least some sunshine. That is with outside temps of around 50. Spring officially came this past week but you'd hardly know it from our weather and the long range projections are not much better.

Peewee, one of our cats, has been making herself very unpopular around our house by wanting to go out into the sunroom whenever she is awake. And that seems to always be from about 3am on, while we are not ready to get up until closer to 6. She is very vocal about it and is pretty loud in the middle of the night when the house is quiet. Pat has been talking to her about that, trying to get her to listen to the cuckoo clock and wait until it cuckoos six times before coming in to "talk" to us. So far that hasn't worked too well. I guess she needs more training in math so she can count to six (Peewee, not Pat.) Then too I can visualize her hearing the one cuckoo at 03:30, four at 04:00 and another at 04:30 and figuring that makes six.

We had a water leak a couple of weeks ago that had water slowly dripping from one of our kitchen lights that are recessed into the ceiling. We had a guy out to find and fix the leak but have decided it is time to re-roof the house. The house was built in 1994 but these mobile homes, even the better ones, seem to use the cheapest materials they can get away with. All of the houses in our park are within a couple of years of being the same age and there have been a lot of them re-roofed over the last couple of years. Anyway, we got a couple of bids and the work starts tomorrow. That is almost $6000 we hadn't planned to spend right now but it needs to be done. So things will be pretty noisy around here for the next four days or so. At least it will be quiet at night. If we can get Peewee to cooperate!

Labels: Holidays, House, Our cats, Sunroom, Weather

The carpet was installed today. The sunroom is now pretty much finished, except for things we want to add to it, like plants. There are now a few pieces of furniture out there and the little TV. I have a few photos to post including one that is rather odd but pretty amazing to me.


This is a pretty standard wide angle lens (12mm) view of the sunroom, taken from about the door that comes out of the house. I just bought and assembled that bookshelf that is ahead on the left, with the small 19" HD LCD TV on the top of it. I have to find one of my hole saws to cut an opening in the back of it so I can feed the power cord & connecting cables through that go from the VCR on the top shelf to the TV. A DVD player is built into the TV. Past it you can see our little electric fireplace/heater. It gives nice "flames" while operating that look pretty realistic. Further over to the right is a boombox for radio/CDs, etc. although we may put a different music source out here that has better speakers. Next is the oak table I kept from my old house just for this room and a couple of chairs. Notice my Starbucks mocha cup on the table. It was ready for the photo. Below the table, actually in the corner behind, is an electric heater with a thermostat. We will probably use that one overnight to maintain a minimum temperature in the room as the little fireplace has no thermostat, so heat is either off, on low or on high, all the time, but you can run just the "flames" without any heat. This view shows the new carpet pretty well. We wanted fairly natural colors and a nylon material as it could have a bit of moisture at times since there is an outside door into the room.


Here the camera has turned a bit to the right from the last view, showing a bit of the outside patio and some of the common area in the park behind our yard. The barbecue unit also shows at the right. We haven't used it much since moving it here from the other house but I hope now to use it more. It was awkward to get to the patio in the past so we really didn't go out there very much.


Here the camera is behind the table, looking back toward the door from the house. The light on the wall outside the door is controlled from a switch in the bedroom and actually does a pretty good job of lighting the place at night. I have placed an old "bankers light" on the table but am not sure if it will stay there in the long run. We will probably look for other things to do in the way of lighting, especially mood lighting.


Okay, here is the odd one I mentioned. I put the camera on a tripod and in about the middle of the room and took 12 photos around a full circle with the 12mm lens. I then had Photoshop Elements version 6 stitch those 12 photos into a panorama photo that does show the whole circle. You can see from the way perspective goes that I was not in the exact center of the room and it really gives it an odd look, but notice the Starbucks cup on the table on the left side of the photo, then look across it to the other side of the photo. That is the same table and Starbucks cup on the far right side. So, the photo actually shows a little over 360 degrees. Does it help to see how the room looks? Maybe not. It is a bit hard to decipher but I find it very interesting from a technical point of view and it does kind of show how the whole room is setup.

There will probably be some photos in the future from this room and perhaps some of activities out there. I hope and expect that we will use it quite a bit, especially during the 2/3 of each year that has better weather. Keeping it comfortably warm may turn out to be too expensive in the winter. We will see, but at least it is now FINISHED!

Labels: House, Photos, Sunroom

I don't know if that post title is correct English or not but at this point we are so happy to finally have an almost finished sunroom that I really don't care if the word is a real one or not. We got the electrical part finished Sunday evening and all is working fine. It is soooo nice to be able to just flip a switch in the bedroom and have a good light out there. We are also appreciating having two 20 amp circuits so that we can run an electric heater without risk of blowing a breaker on the house circuit that the light out there is on. The heater we plan to use is a small electric fireplace with flames to watch.

Also on Sunday I located the web site URL for the company in Canada that built the sunroom kit and sent them an email about our missing window cranks. A guy named Bob called from there yesterday morning and talked with Pat about that and he said he would put the cranks in the mail right away for us. I don't know if they will come from Saskatchewan or from their US head office in Reno, Nevada, but either way it sounds like they will be here soon. It is nice to find a business that tries pretty hard to have good communications with their customers. He told her they have not heard anything from Royal Solariums of Everett, WA, where we bought the unit, about the cranks missing even though I have been told at least twice by them that the company would be contacted and those cranks ordered.

Last week we picked out a carpet and pad to be installed in the room and the guy doing the actual measuring came yesterday morning to do those measurements and prepare a quote for labor costs. He said we should be contacted by Home Depot within 72 hours to setup a time to have it installed. Of course I'll have to go there and pay for it before they come to install. Once that floor covering is in we can really start moving things in. The cable installer did come last week so the TV connection is there ready to use, but I do need to get something to put it onto. It is a small one, just a 19" HD LCD Sharp brand unit with a built-in DVD player so nothing very large is needed to support it. I'm thinking a small two shelf bookcase would work well and give space to put some other things on also, like DVDs. I will take some photos and post them when we get to that stage, with the carpet in and some furniture in place. But at least it does finally look like we can see the end of the tunnel with this project.

Labels: Griping, House, Internet, Sunroom

Last weekend I ordered a Tokina 12-24mm F/4.0 AF DX extreme wide angle zoom lens to use on my Nikon D200 Digital SLR camera. It came yesterday from the store in New York and I couldn't wait to test it, so took it outside for a few photos, then a few inside photos including the one here from the sunroom. I didn't have a lot of time to play with it as yesterday was also Pat's birthday and we did have some activities planned.

I love this lens! I didn't realize how much difference I would see between the other lens I have that goes to a wide angle view at 18mm focal length and this one. It doesn't sound like a lot, just 6mm less, but it is a big jump when you look at it from the point of view of percentage change. Anyway, here are three test photos from that short experimental shooting session:


For this photo I was only about two feet from the back of the VW Bug. The view shows from all the way on the left side of the house clear over to the right edge and has most of the Bug in the photo, too. And the vertical lines at the sides are pretty straight up and down. I could have bought a lens that is 2mm wider but it is a Fisheye lens and the verticals at the edges curve. By the time you crop it to fit into a standard view you do not have much more of a wide angle than I have here but you have given up a fair percentage of the pixels in the original image, thus limiting how large you can go with that photo. So, I thought this lens would work better for me and the way I like to take photos. My friend, G, in Fort Bragg, CA has the other lens and I've seen some exciting and different photos he has taken with it. I wonder if I need them both.....


This view shows another corner of the sunroom but it also shows the full length of the house from the back corner of the sunroom all the way to the front, plus the street in front! And it is all sharply in focus, from the nearest thing in the photo, the corner of the sunroom that was about four feet in front of the camera, to the clouds and trees on the hills behind our town. This is another thing that wide angle lenses do, give a vast amount of depth of field where everything is sharp.


This view inside the sunroom is somewhat similar to others I have posted earlier, taken from the door into the house, but this shows the full left side, all the way across the back and almost up to the sliding glass door on the right side. Notice how much of the ceiling is included. This also shows how a wide angle lens exaggerates perspective, making things look farther apart than they really are. It is only 12 feet to the back of the sunroom from where I took the photo, the same distance that it is across the back of the room, but notice how the wall to the left side looks so much longer than the one across the back. They are the same length.

I think I am going to have a lot of fun with this lens and hopefully get the chance to go out and use it soon. Our weather has been great here for the last week and I hope we have turned the corner to where winter is behind and spring is actually here. But there are things still going on that demand time so I can't just go shooting with the camera. Tomorrow the electrician is coming and I hope we can get the wiring finished in the sunroom. About Monday I can put the final coat of three of Danish oil on the stained wood parts, and then we can setup to have the finished floor put in. We also will go shopping for lights when we look for the flooring. This project may actually be finished within the next two weeks or so!

I did do something else this past week and the thing I ordered should be here Tuesday. That is the same day the guy from Comcast cable TV is coming by to run the cable out to the sunroom. We will soon have HD TV on a much larger screen than the 19" unit I have for the sunroom! More on that later.

Labels: Birthdays, House, Photos, Sunroom

This sunroom construction project sometimes has felt like it would never be finished, but yesterday The Contractor and his helper finished their part and left our house about 15:00. We have some things to finish including the electrical and the final floor covering in the room, plus some painting and oiling of some of the wood parts. This room was ordered August 25, 2007 and was supposed to be finished by Halloween. It is three and a half months late but I do like it and think we will get a lot of use from it. I do of course have a few more photos to post of the project:


I took this photo while they were working on the room on Valentine's Day. It shows the new door that is to be installed in the wall behind where it is sitting in this photo, where the large window is in the photo. You can see some of the wood planking that is going over the old wall of the house and the same material is on the ceiling of the little brow roof above in the photo. You can also see the screen for the sliding glass door that goes out onto the concrete patio from the sunroom.


The rest of the photos were taken today. What this one shows is pretty much completed. There is a usable amount of space left on the outside patio that we can enjoy it when the weather is good enough to be outside. It will also give us a nice direct way to get from inside the house to the back yard, through the master bedroom and the door into the sunroom. Before in order to get back here we had to either go through the garage and walk along the north side of the house or out the front door and walk all along the south side. I think the BBQ may get used more often now.


A view looking at the south west corner of the sunroom from the common area behind our neighbors lot. This is a bit of a telephoto shot- it really isn't quite that close to the camera position. They did a pretty good job of picking out new vinyl siding that matched the siding on the house.


The camera is looking toward the original house wall and the new door into the master bedroom, after it was installed. This shows pretty well the tone of the wood on the walls after it was stained and you can see that we decided to paint the ceiling part of the little brow roof at the top of the sunroom wall in white. It seems to look better and matches the overall look of the sunroom ceiling than if it had been stained like the walls. There will be a wall light and an electrical outlet on this wall but they still need to be cut into the wall. And we haven't decided what we want there for a light.


I left this photo in the larger size as I think it will work okay without messing up my blog template and it shows detail better. The roof of the sunroom is a poly carbonate plastic that is divided into four compartments so it is very well insulated. The vertical walls are 1/4" acrylic plastic and not so well insulated but we may add a plastic membrane during the winter. The support structure is aluminum. The knee walls have R19 fiberglas insulation and the floor deck is also insulated with R19 fiberglas. The 3 opening windows and the sliding glass door are all tinted double pane glass. The unit is pretty well insulated.


Here is Peewee coming out the new door into the sunroom. She likes it!


In this photo she looks like she is saying, "Alright, where is my food?"

We actually had some broken sunshine today with outside temperatures that got up to the mid to upper 40s. With the sunroom door closed the inside temp got up to 70. It was very comfortable to be out there working on it and tomorrow is supposed to have even more sunshine and be a bit warmer, too. Peewee likes the room and I think we will too. Now we have to get those window cranks before it really gets warm out there so we can open them for ventilation.

I probably won't be putting more photos of this project up here until we have it all finished. I am setting up a set of photos on my Flickr site and putting them in order so if anyone wants to follow the project through, click on one of the photos here and go there. There will be photos there that I have not posted here.

Labels: House, Our cats, Photos, Sunroom, Weather