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.