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.