Winterizing the garden

As some of you may know, I recently parted ways with my employer and have struck out on my own. It's been really nice from a time perspective, now I have all day to work on the house! (ok, well that and find a new job, but let's be sure we get our priorities straight here). So far I've organized the pantry (who knew we had salad dressing from 2010?), gotten the laundry in order, and been busy getting the garden ready for winter.

If you remember, Matt very nicely cut down all the posts so that they were all the right height. And then I've been spending my afternoons applying the same waterseal that we used on the swing. It doesn't make for a before and after with much wow factor:

Little bit richer color, much better water resistance :). You can also see that I pulled out all the vegetation to prep for next year. We also have plans to mulch the leaves in the yard and add them onto the beds to help replenish the soil, but haven't quite gotten there yet :)

Winter is coming!

When we were fixing the basement last November (I'm almost ashamed to write that being as we didn't get to this project until now) we had to punch a big hole in the foundation to get the largest beam in. We chose this spot because it was the site of what we think was the original coal chute and the foundation was thinner there anyway. In any case, the hole has been there, plugged with towels and insulation, for quite a few months now and with winter coming, we didn't just want to leave it.

So we got our trusty kitty litter box and mixed up some mortar and went to work.

We had most of the stones we took out still in the basement and the first layer went in pretty easy. Matt was in charge of shoveling in the mortar while I fit the stones together and smoothed everything out.

We added some pink plastic insulation to protect the wood beam for the next layer.

And in no time, we were done! We did have to take a short break to mix up another bag of mortar and to scavenge some more rocks from ours and the neighbors yard, but I'm pretty pleased with the result. If you weren't looking for it, you wouldn't' notice at all. 

Then we went outside and patched the rest from there to make it look all pretty and smooth from the outside.

Also looks pretty good, and it dried even lighter. And then Matt had a great idea for the extra mortar. He used it to fill in some of the cracks on the other side of the house where we had some water come in during that 2-3 weeks of torrential rain this summer. (haven't seen any since then, but while we had the mortar out, didn't seem like it could hurt)

And now we're all buttoned up and ready for the storms. Yay!

Our first foray into gutters

I knew summer couldn't last, but those 70 degree October days had me fooled, for a while at least. But the time has come and, while I love a good bout of denial, it won't stop winter from coming. So, we've been trying to button down the hatches a bit here at the house in preparation.

One thing we've been trying to fix, unsucessfully so far, is the leak in our garage. See the "shop" part of the garage was probably an add-on to the original garage. And while we love it for the extra space, we don't love the fact that where the two roofs join there's been a leak we can't seem to fix.

And it all came to a head when that leaky roof leaked on our new table saw, causing it to rust up quite badly. :( (it's ok, we think we can buff it out, but still, sad)

So, since we've tried a number of times to fix the leak by fixing the roof with silicon and all other sorts of leak stopping measures, we finally decided we needed bigger guns. Enter the indoor gutter. Yes, you heard me right, we put a gutter up inside our garage. Overkill? Maybe. White trashy? Maybe a little. But at least the roof doesn't leak on our stuff anymore.

So, decision made, we got going making it as pretty as we could. We went to menards and bought a bunch of bits of gutter and then glued them together one at a time. First we attached the downspout and a bit of extra gutter (since they don't sell 12 foot stretches and even if they did we couldn't fit it in the truck)

And here's the complete gutter. Then we just had to attach it to the garage wall.

The problem there is that unlike other parts of the roof, there wasn't really anything to attach it to. So we sort of created one by attaching the gutter to a 2x4 (above) and then putting up some more 2x4s along the overhang to support the gutter.

 

And voila! we have a gutter. Then the only part left was to rig up the downspout.

Now since this gutter would be draining inside the garage, we had to figure out a way to collect the water. So we ran the downspout down a wall and into a trashcan.

Works like a charm :)

Now, we still have a small problem with the roof leaking in over by where the downspout is, but that runs down the wall and won't get on much but the wall. A problem for another day, for sure, but at least our stuff is now protected.