August 2013: Garage, August 15, 2013

Today, I tried out my pressure washer again.  I hooked up my cheap hose--that's more prone to leaking--because my better hose leaks all sorts of water at the faucet, and it's just annoying to have water all over my patio.  Let me remind you what the garage looked like before this:

After 15 minutes of pressure-washing, it really wasn't working much better than scraping, it was damaging the wood a bit in places (that wood really needs to be replaced!), and it was bothering my carpal tunnel anyway.  This is what it looked like:

Not much different.  I got out my gloves and my putty knife/scraper and went to work.  This was done mostly with my left hand.  I think I just need to tone things down a bit.  No more working for hours per day.  Just 30 minutes.  Because after 30 minutes, this is what it looked like:

At least there was progress, if you look down towards the east side of the garage (the other side of the window).  But this scraping can go pretty fast.  It just peels off, literally.

This area came up just sticking the putty knife under it and wiggling it along, and then tore right off in that huge of a section.  Clearly, the paint didn't bond to the wood at all.  Probably half of the garage will peel off like this.  The problem will come with the other parts that don't peel off this nicely.  That will take more work scraping.  Slow progress.  I have a feeling it's not going to get done before winter, only because I can't work on it more than I already am.

August 2013: Garage, August 14, 2013

I didn't get around to posting this yesterday.  It has nothing to do with the garage--which is located at the rear of my property.  I continued to make the front of my property look better for my neighbor's that are selling their place.  (Why?  Because it's of great benefit to me if their place sells for a higher price; even though it is a completely different property from mine--a townhouse built in the 1980s versus a single-unit dwelling built in the 1950s--their property selling for more makes it a more desirable neighborhood, and should affect my house's price.)

But look at my front gardens!!

Eep.  That's not looking very good, overrun with weeds.  So, I spent some time weeding it.  I didn't get all of it, but the more visible parts look nicer!

Here you can see off more of the second hydrangea, and some of the side yard.  there's not a lot of room between my house and my neighbor's, but the small area that is there is overrun by weeds.  But I can't just spray weed killer all along it, because there are lily of the valley plants there and I loooove lily of the valley!  (There are also hostas, but I'm more indifferent towards those.  They're something, so I'll probably keep them, but I'm not in love with them.)

I pulled out a fair number of those weeds, cut down the baby trees growing there because I don't want a tree there, where it could affect my foundation.  I still need to dig up the root system, though, so it doesn't re-grow. 

I have huge plans for that side of the house, but it's a project for another day and another time, and really requires more money than I have right now.  Someone, please, hire me!

August 2013: Garage, August 13, 2013

My first project today wasn't in my garage, but shhhh!  It did need to be done.  I have a deep egress window in the front of my house.  When I first moved in it took me a while to realize that small animals were getting trapped in there.  Once I realized that, I had a board propped up in there for the animals to scurry out of, although it became quite clear that the frog couldn't quite manage to get all the way up the board by itself, so I had to crawl in there and get it out myself.  :shudder:  (Yep, squeamish girl.)  So I ended up buying a window well cover the second year I lived here.  The problem is that my window is actually above the height of the window well, so it never fit snug against the house.  I still had to take it off to rescue some small creatures from time to time.  Sigh.  Last fall I bought some foam that people put around their window air conditioner units to make them more weather-proof.  It wasn't quite long enough and was way too thick to work properly.  This morning I finally took the time to cut it in half and glue it to the window well.  The larger section (where the window is not) is super glued on, and the other part has construction adhesive.  I'll have to see what holds better.  At any rate, you can see my completed project here, where it's drying.

I but the cover back on and it turned out perfectly!  I also stuffed some of the extra bits up into the crevices at the end. Hopefully now no creatures will get caught in there.  It's a little harder now, because the cats used to alert me when there were creatures stuck because they'd be at the basement window, but now they're not allowed in that room (because of the cat with the littler box issue).  As an aside, I'm going to have to neaten up the front of my house.  The neighbors across the street are selling their townhouse, so I'm going to be polite and make the neighborhood look nicer, which will hopefully help them sell their place!

I did spend some time in the garage.  I cleaned off my workbench.  It was piled with random stuff, and piled randomly.  And, frankly, until I get around to selling the table on Craigslist or something, it will be hard to get to.  I should clean the table and chairs up and get that sold.  It would help my garage immensely!

All of the old door knobs and some other leftover construction stuff that the previous owner left behind.  My house was a flip, so they had a lot of random stuff they didn't finish using.  (They also did a mediocre job of flipping it.  Apparently it had been stripped of all the copper wiring and stuff like that, so they certainly worked hard to make it liveable again, but they did a lot of finish work that looked pretty but was cheaply done.  It's frustrating to me.)

So that's my workbench now.  The table cloth was initially from holding my sister's wedding shower in my garage (because we had no where else to hold it, since she still lived at home and I didn't want to make my mom have to clean her house for a party).  And also the workbench is dirty and greasy and I was once working on a woodworking project and had to protect my project from the workbench.  I should clean that, but not this month.

I also walked around and peeled off large section of paint from the outside.  I didn't use a scraper or anything--just peeled it.  Sad, but true.

August 2013: Garage, August 12, 2013

I'm still trying to take it easy on the wrists because while they're feeling better, they're still not quite right yet.  So today I just did lots of random little things.  For example, look at the tree in this before picture.

A little time spent with the trimmer snips, and there aren't any little pieces down below that could reach out and touch the side of the garage.

 

Look up above! There are all sorts of branches touching the roof of the garage.

A bit of time with the snips and a saw, and there are less branches on the garage.  I'll need to get ahold of Karen or Darcy to come stand below with their phones to call 911 when I fall after climbing on the roof of the garage.  Plus, I'll need to call Baby Brother to borrow his pole saw to get some of the branches that are just too high up to reach.  I don't want to just trim it off the garage; I want to trim it high enough up so I don't have to make an annual trek onto the garage.

I also got out some old weed killer and sprayed all the areas of my property that shouldn't have any plants growing.  I'm not sure it will work, so I may have to make another trip around the property, but at least it's a start.  The garage has weeds all over in the cracks that simply must go away.  The area behind the garage that the neighbor so kindly cleaned already has weeds starting to grow again, so I want to get them now when they're teeny.  

But the biggest surprise was the egress window well.  I knew there were small trees growing in there, but when I took the cover off, the tops sprung up--they were already taller than the window well!  I sprayed them down, too, because I want them dead.  I need to figure out how to keep stuff from growing down there.  I can't just put landscaping plastic under the rocks, because that will just cause the water to pool, and perhaps run into the house, which would be less pleasant than having plants in my window well!

Tomorrow I may try the pressure washer to get paint off my garage.  Ohhh, I need to get a new hose for that, because mine doesn't seal nicely around the faucet, so water is spraying out all over the house and patio!

August 2013: Garage, August 11, 2013

I had a busy day at my parents, where I got to see all four of my nephews together for the first time (three of them live locally, but the fourth lives a state away).  That made for a long day.  Add to that the fact that my carpal tunnel wrists are still quite painful, and I really couldn't think of a lot I could do.  I did what I could, and while it wasn't a full half-hour, it was getting buggy out there, and my wrists were kinda done for. 

I have bags of soda cans (or, pop cans, depending on where you live).  I used to drink a lot of caffeine.  I cut myself off entirely, but a friend pointed out that I didn't seem too focused, so I figured I'd give caffeine a try again, although I'm trying it with liquid enhancers (MIO and the ilk), which I hope is better for my teeth than pop...  But nonetheless, I still had bags of pop cans sitting on my garage from my pop-drinking days.  I have a can crusher, but I just don't use it like I should. 

So I spent approximately 20 minutes crushing cans.  After the first ten or so, I had to do it left-handed because my right wrist immediately protested the activity.  To be honest, my left shoulder--which has always been weak--wasn't too happy with the change, but my left wrist handled the crushing a little better for a while.  I very much fear I will pay for this tonight.  But, two whole bags of cans are now crushed!

I'm really not sure where I'm going to go from here.  I'm just so defeated not being able to do this like I want to; and looking at renting pressure washers, they don't seem to have any greater PSI than mine already reportedly has, and I just can't bring myself to buy a bigger one for one use--I mean, besides the fact that I'm unemployed and can't actually pay for one!  I might have using mine, although I've moved that to Tuesday (I have something going on Monday night, so I'd rather not be wet and dirty then).  It's just so frustrating.

August 2013: Garage, August 10, 2013

I learned something early this morning: the garage scraping has to end.  I can't do it.  I woke up with severe wrist pain from carpal tunnel syndrome.  Normally, when I wake up with that severe of pain, I can get it to calm down quickly (I found what works best for me is to let the arm dangle) and put my wrist brace on.  Yes, it's happened before (in fact, it happened Friday morning).  The difference this time is nothing was calming down the intense pain, and I already had the wrist brace on.  That's not good at all if my wrist pain is getting that severe.  I was at the Carver County Fair today (my cousin called and said they had an extra ticket) and my aunt and dad's cousin were putting on a quilting demonstration, and I really wanted to help, but I knew I'd get about two stitches in and not be able to feel my hand, so I declined.  It was sad.

So I knew when I got home, I couldn't scrape paint off my garage.  Do you know how frustrating this is?  So, I decided to take my rainy-day plan, and clean inside the garage.  It needs it.  I mean, this is more or less right in front of the door--I can still park in the other half of the garage, because I'm lucky enough to have a two-car garage.

Some time ago, I cut up a lot of cardboard in my garage, and piled it up here, but I never actually did anything about it, so it's sorta messily piled now, with stuff on top of it.  Ohhhh, and that's not even a true before picture, because I wrapped the extension cord (imagine 150' of extension cord all tangled up on the floor here!) before I remembered to take pictures and start my timer.  (And my timer got all messed up because I put my phone in my pocket without locking the screen, and it started pushing weird buttons.  But I'm pretty sure it was about a half-hour in total work.)

I piled up the cardboard and tied it with rope from re-doing my cats' scratching posts, threw away a lot of pots that my plants came in, folded the tarps, and in general took care of little things.  Now all I have to do is bring the cardboard out to the street next recycling day!

Further back in my garage was a lot cans and bottles I'd throw out of my car when I'd realize they were cluttering things up.  On the plus side, it keeps my car neater.  On the minus side, it doesn't do much for my garage!

I picked up the bottles and put them in the recycling bin, and I picked up the cans and immediately crushed them with my can crusher.  Ahhh...much better!

And there's a start to cleaning my garage.  We'll see what I get done in the near future.  I will be renting the pressure washer next week to remove the paint entirely, I guess.  It's really too bad.  There were areas of the garage I was looking forward to scraping because the paint scrapes nicely and it's fun to see progress like that.  But sometimes, you have to listen to your body, or you will pay for it.  In the wee hours of the morning.

August 2013: Garage, August 9. 2013

It's Friday, and after sending my resume off to be checked by my unemployment counselor (after working on it too long!), I decided it would be a good day to spend some time on the garage.  The south side of the garage.  The south side is harder to scrape than the north side.  On the north side, in many places the paint will peel off in large chunks--there would be no adhesion to the wall in large areas, so I can get quite a bit off in one go.  The south side has better adhesion, so I can only peel paint off in small section. 

This is what an hour and a half--or was it two hours?--of scraping looks like on the south side of my garage.  Yuck.  I've got a long way to go.  I think this side will be much easier to take care of using a power washer to blast the paint off.  But I'm going to try scraping for at least a little while.  It got warm being in the sun, though, even though the weather is not warm.

This evening I went back out and worked on the north side of the garage for an hour and a half.  Some of the boards are nearly done, which is very nice.  It's harder to work on here because of the shrubs.  Perhaps two summers ago I should've re-painted the garage before planting the shrubs!  (The shrubs were re-located from the front of my house.  I didn't like them, they reportedly are not plants that take sun well, and the front of my house faces west, getting the full brunt of the afternoon sun.  I planted Pinky Winky hydrangeas there, because I was told they were the only hydrangeas that could take the brunt of the sun.  This summer at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum, I saw some snowball type hydrangeas in full sun and blooming beautiful.  Rats.  I'm not overly fond of the Pinky Winky with their cream-turns-to-dusty-pink cone blooms, because I love the large white snowball blooms.  But that's neither here nor there.)

I did a little research on peeling paint.  Paint can peel for many reasons, including improper preparation (dirty walls), moist surfaces, the wrong type of paint used, or too many layers.  I really don't know the problem here is, but it doesn't matter.  It's important for me that the wood be clean, dry, and scraped before I prime before painting.  And that the primer is dry before I attempt to paint!  You can see the green of my house (half of the front is still wood, and painted) on the trim around the door, above.  I have seen pictures of my house blue, and have seen blue on the house, so I know it was blue previous to this green.  As I'm scraping, I'm seeing evidence of a darker green color (forest green), so I have a feeling that was another previous color.  It's a little research!  And while I'll be painting the garage white again, I am starting to think of what color I want to paint the front of the house and the trim.  Since it's not a whole house, I'm wondering if I can go a little bold with the color--maybe a bright blue or even yellow.  Some of it will depend on my front door situation--and what color I decide to paint that!

August 2013: Garage, August 8, 2013

I spent an hour today outside scraping my garage.  It didn't bother my carpal tunnel (which was really bad last night; I woke up from the pain), and was a very serene time.  The next door neighbor mowed his lawn and did other work (there's a fence between our properties, so I didn't actually see him. He had a radio on--it was on my favorite station as a kid (he's probably my age, but has two young daughters, who may have set the station), but it was playing music I like today.  I think they play more adult-friendly music during the day--still trendy, but not the really popular teen music.  It was cool.  The neighbor behind me was pulling out his fence posts.  I talked to him a bit.  He said he's replacing his fence with a vinyl fence that has a transferable lifetime warranty.  This will help his property value, PLUS my property value, because that's something valuable to my property, as well.  We talked about my being laid off (I'd like to put vinyl siding on the garage, but it's expensive!), and how he's actually NOW retired, but had been laid off from his previous job about five years ago (but got a good severance package) because the entire company moved to NYC.  It's a tough world.

He also said that indeed he had cleaned behind the garage.  As he was cleaning around his fence, he figured he might as well go all the way.  He found the nicely laid bricks behind there--he said it was under a few inches of dirt.  I knew there were a few back there, but I didn't realize it was almost a fully done project.  Nice!  I need to dig them all out, and level them all with good sand and landscaping cloth (and put in some nice landscaping cloth to keep weed from growing again!).  But it's nice to have all of the weeks cleaned out!  That's one step closer to a finished project.  Plus I'll have a beautiful fence back there!  I'm pretty excited about that, but alas, I don't think that will get done in August.  It's too bad, because I'm really inspired!

But after another hour of work, this is what it looks like.  What you can't see from this picture, but when you get down and look at it, the pipe that brings the electrical in (bottom right) shows how much the cement foundation for the garage has sunk.  This is what prompted gutters being put on my house and garage (all my friends/family said I didn't need gutters on the garage, but really, the garage needed gutters more than the house!  The only problem with water in the house is under the front steps, but that problem isn't solved by gutters--it's just a temporary solution).  Hopefully the gutters keep the cement from sinking more--or at least slows it down.  But really, that's something I need to take care of, because the pipe should go into the garage, but it no longer lines up with the hole into the garage.  I'm not sure whether I should drill a new hole, or shorten the pipe a little, but one of those two needs to happen.  Any ideas?

 

 

I really need to get moving on this scraping, or August will be over and I'll only have a half-complete garage, and that's just not acceptable.

I just realized that I don't have pictures posted of the area behind my garage.  I had sprayed weed killer before my neighbor cleaned out the area, but it hadn't killed all the weeds.  I need to keep up on that to keep the weeds down!  But let me try to find some pictures!

I don't have any before pictures.  But where those fence posts are, imagine a wooden fence.  (It was 20 years old, and I thought it looked okay, but the guy said when it got damaged in the storm, the insurance company said it was too old to repair anymore, so they gave him a check to replace it.  They okayed going with the vinyl.)  Also, imagine it completely covered in weeds, so much that you couldn't walk through there.  I had seen a few of those bricks the few times I sprayed weeds, but I had no idea there was such a large area of them.  You can see it dips down on the far side.  That needs to be fixed.

August 2013: Garage, August 7, 2013

As it rained yesterday, I realized that I needed to clean the gutters on the front of my house, plus if you look at my previous garage pictures, you can see the twigs from the glass trees next door are sticking up from my gutters (I don't know what kind of trees they are, but they will find any excuse to drop branches, as if they were made of glass.  Actually, it might be better to call them German trees, because the Germans will find any excuse to invade Poland.  Thunderstorm on Tuesday?  Invade Poland!).  So, today I did it.  I apologize for the lack of "after" pictures, but you must understand that even with gloves on, my hands were kinda icky and gross, and I didn't bring my phone up on the ladder with me, because I was afraid of breaking it if I fell.  Let's look at the garage gutters:

 

Eww!  I filled two five gallon buckets between the two gutters (South and North sides).  It was disgusting.   I was not looking forward to cleaning the gutters on the house, because I had a reasonable level of comfort on the step ladder.  (It's not my real ladder, but I treat it like my own.  Thanks, I'll be here all night!)  Well, as much comfort as someone scared of heights can have standing on a ladder.  But the house is taller, so it required my extension ladder.  And was scary.  The front of the house, I had to lean the ladder against the house and kinda reach over and grab the goo.  Ick.  The back side, I could only read the lower of the two gutters.  As pictured below, the ladder was too short for the bent gutter area.  On the other hand, I did realize as I went to put my ladder away that I may not have had the gutter fully extended.  Oops. 

 

 On the plus side, the shorter gutter (on the edge of the picture above) was mostly cleaned out when the tree branches fell on my house in June and my dad was up on the roof cutting it up (which is when that gutter got bent).  There was only a little bit of "junk" by the spout.  (Oh, I think I forgot to reattach that spout.  I'll have to remember that tomorrow.)  The front of the house--which was overflowing with the rain yesterday!--was almost completely empty.  It was only a pile-up of junk by the spout that I needed to clean out.  WIN!  And there's no tree there, so hopefully there will be less leaves falling into it this fall!  :fingers crossed:

Tomorrow, I'm going to head back out to scrape more paint off the garage.  Because that's how I roll.

August 2013: Garage, August 6, 2013

I spent probably two hours scraping my garage today.  Plus an hour or so power washing it.  (Oh, I forgot to take a picture of the South side of the garage.  Hold that thought.  Okay, I'm back.  I had to go out barefoot because my cats are suddenly in love with my sandals.  My youngest male cat is *licking* my shoes.  Ooookay.)

Here's probably an hour of power washing plus another two hours of scraping.  Yeah, I'm tired.  But there's very clear progress made.  I'm really debating renting a good powerful power washer (mine is electric and only 2000 psi.  A lot for electric, but according to the internet, 2500 is the minimum for removing paint).  It's something I'm thinking about, because if I could get this all done in a day or two, that would be FANTASTIC.  This is hard on my arms, hands (carpal tunnel), back, and neck (I definitely need the ladder for the top two rows here.  I can reach the second to the top row, but I have to be looking up, and my neck has been wrecked too much for that).  But on the rows that have most of the paint removed, the stuff left on doesn't scrape off easily.  The bare parts the paint just peeled off--in large chunks, usually.  It simply is not stuck to the wood at all.  It was kinda like a piece of plastic covering the garage than paint adhered to the garage.

 

I also power-washed the South side of the garage for a few minutes.  It's harder to do because I need to have tarps there to catch the paint, since the garage is right on the property line, and the paint flies all over my neighbors lawn.  I really need more tarps put up next time.  It would just be nicer to have a nice powerful pressure washer that would take the paint off easily.  Because this represents, I dunno, twenty minutes of power washing?

And not a lot of progress.  I didn't do any scraping on this side today.

I'm thinking I also need to get up and clean these gutters, and actually crawl on the garage and trim that tree there, because it's resting on the garage, and that's not good for the shingles, and frankly, I'd rather wait to shingle.

 

August 2013: Garage, August 5, 2013

After a couple of days working on the North side of the garage, I moved to the South side of the garage.  I picked the North and South sides first because they're at least somewhat protected from the rain by the eaves.  There's no hangover on the East and West sides.

So, here's what it looked like before:

And after a half-hour, it looked like this:

The progress isn't quite as dramatic as yesterday.  Partially because the paint stuck better on the South side of the garage, I think, so it doesn't want to come off as easily as the North side of the garage.  But I can tell you I'm going to need more than a half-hour each day to get this project done this month.  I have no other plans for tomorrow, so I'll be getting out the pressure washer and seeing what it can do with this project.  I really really really hope it works well and I can just get rid of most of the paint with pressure washer, with just some scraping in the end.  We'll find out, I guess. Keep your fingers and toes crossed.

August 2013: Garage, August 4, 2013

After church (and lunch--an older couple invited me to join them for lunch.  They have traveled a lot--which is neat to hear their stories--PLUS they are old enough that they remember World War II--rationing and it being over.  They were children at the time.  One of their mothers was paid to raise hemp for the government.  She recalls her mother telling her brothers not to chew on the leaves.  This wasn't bushy hemp, like we see now as marijuana plants, but tall stalks similar to corn.  Speaking of marijuana today, one of my friends used to have a marijuana plant in her weeds in her back yard.  She had no idea until a neighbor told her.  That inspired her to finally get rid of that patch of weeds that included weed.), I stopped at Menards and bought a putty knife scraper.  This afternoon, I spent another half-hour scraping paint.

As you can tell from the end of the day yesterday until the end of the day today, a LOT of progress was made!  Hooray!  I'm still going to try the pressure washer tomorrow or Tuesday, but failing that, it's nice to know that I have a better option.  One of the chunks of paint ripped off a whole strip of wood along the bottom of one of the siding pieces.  Sigh.  I need to re-do my garage.  I would loooove to put vinyl siding on it, but that's not a project in the budget right now.

August 2013: Garage, August 3, 2013

So, I decided to try scraping the garage.  This is what it looked like before I started:

And after a half-hour of scraping, this is what it looked like after:

You can't really see, but there's still a lot of scraping that needs to be done in that small section.  I put a call out for help on Facebook for a sander, and while I got one, I got many responses telling me not to.  I was told to rent a power washer to take care of it, or scrape it by hand.  On the plus side, it never occurred to me to ask Uncle Dan for help on this.  He's a professional painter.  He should either be able to give me tips, or come and help me do this. 

But I'm going to drag out my power washer tomorrow or Monday and see what sort of progress I make there.  Because this scraping by hand is kinda for the birds.  Which is a dumb saying, because birds wouldn't scrape the paint away!

August 2013: Garage, August 2, 2013

My walk to Home Depot yesterday afternoon consisted in purchasing two things: an electric tester thingy and a new security light.  At this point I'm fairly confident the problem is with the light sensor, based on reviews and the fact that they sell the light sensors separately for replacement purposes.  (Since I wasn't sure of the brand of my fixture, and it wasn't that much less than a whole new fixture, I bought the brand that had the replacement sensor, so in the future I can replace it myself.  I bought the light in hopes that I could return it if the sensor proved that the problem was the wiring.)

See?  New toy!

Yay!  Now I can test electricity when needed.  I first went out and tested the wire from the source box to the light box.  There was electricity a-flowing.  I then went and turned off the breaker (and confirmed no electricity), and took the old fixture off of the garage, leaving the wires connected.  I went back in and turned on the power, and tested the fixture wires.  Power was flowing through them, eliminating the idea that there was a wiring problem.  Drat. 

So, I turned off the power again, took off the old fixture entirely, and got out the new light fixture.

There's all the parts of my light.  I didn't need to use some of them, because I could re-use the old light's pieces, saving me some time.

I then installed the new light.

I was a bit concerned, because while it was pretty awesome that there was light right away, it was worrisome because the setting was on "test" initially, and the lights came on as soon as I screwed in the bulbs (part of the instructions had me turning the power back on before screwing in the bulbs for reasons that probably made/make sense, but I don't recall them right now).  And then when I flipped the settings to a more reasonable light setting, the lights didn't turn off.  Erm, that's going to waste bulbs.  But the lights did eventually turn off (as evidenced by them not being on in the picture.

I have a problem with the lights, though.  You can't adjust up and down.  When I got home tonight, I was excited for the light, but the light facing the driveway blinded me, too.  On the other hand, my entire backyard was lit very brightly by the other light, and the light does brightly shine down the driveway.  My biggest concern is that the houses in this neighborhood are very close together, so I'm hoping that the lights aren't annoying my neighbors!  I hope they let me know if they are annoying, so I can try to figure out a way to adjust them.  But...I had light when I came home!  I could park in my garage without being too frightened by the darkness!

August 2013: Garage, August 1, 2013

The stupid garage security light.  Oh, the pain and misery.

I don't know what to do about it.  So, I decided to check the wiring.  The first step?  Turn off the power!  I might be an idiot, but occasionally I have moments of genius!

The person who wired it was kind enough to not only fill out the guide on the door, there is actually a "G" labeled on the break itself!  So, I could easily flip it.

And then I went and checked the connection in the garage, and all the wire nuts were in place.

So I took the light off the wall, checked all the connections, cleaned out a ton of cobwebs, and put the light back up on the garage.  I tested it, and it didn't work.  Drat.  And then I got a brilliant idea!  I went back to the breaker box, turned the breaker back on, and came out the garage, and flipped the switch to text again, and voila!  Nothing happened.  (I later took a walk to Home Depot and bought a new security light, as well as a thing to test for power.  That way I can see if power is getting to the light at all, just to narrow down the problem.)

I wasn't going to let my day end up completely unproductive in terms of nothing changing!  I had some holes in my wall--remember the previously mentioned ants?  I guess the wood peckers in the neighborhood like to eat those ants--or some other bug that lives in the wood in my garage.  I had two beautifully drilled holes in the garage.  See?

The one on the South side (the lower picture) I noticed from inside my garage.  It was a moment of, "Hold that thought.  Is that daylight?!"  Well, alright.  So I took clear caulk from a project this winter, tried to clean out the tip, and put caulk in.

Alas, my hands were too dirty for a picture, but I managed to squeeze caulk out of the bottom of the tube, all over the caulking gun, which resulting in my getting it all over my hands (so I just used my hands to finish filling the holes).  Cleaning caulk off of things is harder than you might realize.  Nevertheless, my garage is now hole-free, and hopefully ready for cleaning and scraping now!

August 2013: Garage Preview

What can I say about my garage?  It really should be torn down and re-built.  But I'm doing everything I can to keep it in decent enough shape until I win the lottery (or something) and can fix it.  The real goal of this project is to get the garage painted.  It needed it last summer, but never happened, and time is slipping away.  Alas, the whole nature of, well, nature is that we can't control it.  If it rains, I won't be able to be doing much for painting it, so I'll also work on some other projects.  Cleaning and organizing it would be one example of work that needs to be done, but it's a lower priority.

Last summer I did replace the windows.  The East windows were broke out two winters ago, and I put in plexiglass where the glass was, but the North window had a crack in it, and the frame was rotting away.  More specifically, we discovered, carpenter ants were eating the frame away.  We--my dad and I--replaced the windows, sills, and moulding with vinyl.  It's a slow process.

But one of my higher priorities is getting my security light fixed.  The placement of my garage--in the far back of the property--means it's very dark.  I'm scared of the dark.  I don't like walking from my garage to my house in the dark.  My dad and I installed a motion sensor security light not too long after I moved in. However, it quit working a month ago.  In a large surprise, we realized the interior lights weren't working, and had to replace those sockets before we could test the bulbs in the security light.  They worked.  However, after checking all the wiring, my dad switched the lights to the test mode, and they turned on.  Fabulous!  Except when it got dark, they didn't turn on.  When I drove up, they didn't turn on.  When I got the ladder out and turned on the test mode, they didn't turn on.  I really need to get that fixed.

But painted.  That garage needs to be painted.  As far as I can tell it either was never primed, had the wrong primer used, or was painted when it was wet.  The paint is peeling off like it's a snake shedding its skin or something.  (Ew!  I hate snakes!)

From my research, the steps I will need to take is to power wash the garage, scrape the peeling paint off the garage (which, as far as I can tell, is ALL of the paint.  I'm not sure any is sticking), prime the garage, and then paint the garage.  No big deal....  :sigh:

So, here's a few before pictures.

That's the front of the garage.  I'm standing by my house there.  There are no lights from the neighbors houses, and with the fences and trees, it gets pretty dark.  Plus, that tree back there?  It really needs to be trimmed so it's not actually touching my garage!

I really need a new garage door, but for now, I'm going to try to fix it as best I can.  In positive news, the other parts of the garage door seal were falling, and I've managed to glue them up with construction adhesive.  When I finish with the adhesive, I'm going to use some caulk to seal out the moisture in hopes of making the garage door last longer.  If I'd paint the garage door and trip, it would only be because that color green doesn't do anything for me.

You can see the peeling paint in this picture.  Plus the branched hanging from the gutter (which I removed after taking the picture--I still need to clean the gutters, though!  I'd like to add some leaf catchers on the gutters so they don't get jammed up and need cleaning regularly.  I'm lazy!).

I don't know what this is.  Maybe the garage door used to be bigger, and they just made it smaller by adding a piece of plywood.  In fact, I'm fairly confident that is the case: it was a larger door, and rather than special ordering, they changed the opening for a standard sized garage door.  But, even that needs painting!

I've got my work cut out for me.  Join me on my wild ride!