Just a spoon full of paint, helps the wallpaper go away.

  Well, perhaps a spoon full of paint is a bit of an understatement.  The other weekend we tackled the downstairs bathroom.  For years we have put up with a wallpaper selection we never would have picked for ourselves, but it came with the house, wasn’t totally ugly, and was in overall good shape.  So about once every six months or so, the misses would say “I would really like to get rid of this wallpaper” statement.  So what does it take to get motivated to tackle this project?  How about back to back visitors from out of town within a single month?

    Well, knowing that company was going to be arriving, followed by another weekend of visitors, followed by a third weekend of visitors was all it took to finally convince ourselves that it was time to take on the paper.  So our weekend project started with the removal of the old wallpaper, which went fairly well overall.  But, I have learned that it is hard to remove wallpaper without having to basically skim coat the whole wall area with mud compound to get the wall back to a smooth surface that would be suitable for the application of a fresh coat of primer.  Well, that took care of the first weekend.

    The second weekend we were ready to paint!  OH, that’s right, you do need paint don’t you.  So off to the local hardware store chain to pick out some paint.  Did you ever notice just how many paint colors there are.  Though with my picklickness of color preferences, I could have picked a color and left.  The misses picked out a good selection of various color sampled to bring home and chose from. 

     Turns out within the color selections there was just the right choice for the living room and den area’s!  Turns out we had a gallon in the basement which really was just the right thing for the bathroom.  Well, in the end, the bathroom received a nice new coat of paint, as well as the living room, den and ceilings!  Did I fail to mention that you cannot put a fresh coat of paint on walls without putting a nice new coat of paint on the ceiling.  At least the ceiling paint came in a very nice standard white, which made color selection much easier.

    One last thing.  No bathroom is complete without new towel racks and light-switch covers!

PVC Decking – A Warning! – And a cure for White Staining!

  Well, we have now had our new deck for a couple weeks and had our first scare during the first week.  In an effort to protect our deck from dripping grease from the grill, we purchased a nice protective mat to lay down underneath the grill.

   With what turned out to be luck on our side in the long run, we had a couple days of rain the first week.  Having accumulated large amounts of water, we picked up the new mat to dry it out.  What we found underneath drew heartache and fear at what the cost was going to be.  For everywhere under the map the deck had turn white!  We first thought is was perhaps minerals or reaction from the water being heated in the Sun later in the day.  We tried cleaning the deck to no avail.  The white film remainded regardless of what we did.

   Consulting the TimberTech web site, when drilling down to the XLM information page, what I found at the bottom of the page was information which struck a note of fear.  The information warned of the danger of placing a Rubber based mat ontop of PVC decking due to chemical interation between rubber and PVC.  This has nothing to dowith TimberTech, but rather to do with chemical properties of rubber and PVC, regardless of the product.  The two items just do not play well together.

   So now I knew what caused the problem, but I had no clue if anything could be done about it.  So I did what any red blooded American would do, I wrote the company a “HELP” letter.  Using the company web site, I sent a message with what had happened and a request for if there was anything that could be done to repair the damage, hoping that replacement was not the answer. 

   Replacement would not have made us very happy as we had purchased a really nice big rubber backed mat which ended up whitening over six boards which are about 20 foot long.  Estimated replacement cost would have been around $300!

    The company wrote back the very next day with instructions which were somewhat surprising and which I was really hoping would work.  What the compay said to do was:

            1.) Get a heat gun (I used the wife’s hair dyer)

           2.) Heat up the surface of the deck, taking care to keep moving the heat gun around to prevent overheating, to the point where the white coloring fades and disappears from the surface of the deck.

     Though I wondered how this would work, I figured I had nothing to loose?  So, taking a long extension cord and hairdryer in hand, I proceeded to entertain my neighbor by sitting out on the deck, hairdrying my deck.  At first nothing seemed to happen, but then as the deck surface warmed up, suddenly the white film faded and disappeared before my eyes!  Though the hairdryer was slower than a heat gun it did the trick.

   So for the last week we have once again been able to enjoy the beauty of our new deck.  Now I need to figure out a better way to stop any grease dropping from the grill which seems to happen during slow cooking from the back of the lid.  But, regardless, I have learned a lessen and a little chemistry along the way.

New deck in all it’s glory!

 After a few weeks the old deck is finially gone and has been replaced by the shiny new deck. 

As mentioned earlier, we chose not to go with the composite, but rather to upgrade to the full PVC, as it has a much better history of being a really maintenance free material.  The cost was about another 3 to 4% added onto the cost of the project, but considering the cost savings of not having to buy deck-wash, we will recoup the cost pretty quickly.  Overall, we are very happy with the TimberTec product for now.  Check back in another 10-20 years and we will let you know if we have changed our minds…..

 

 

22 x 16 feet of outdoor living space!

“London Bridge is Falling Down”, or “Year of the Deck”

    Some of you may remember last year I had a few days entries regarding the replacement of the back yard fence.  Ok, it was really over a couple weeks.  Oh, you actually read it?  Well is was under two months I think?

   Anyway, with the fun of removing a full back yard worth of wooden fence, this is the year of the “Deck”!  Let me begin with a little regressing back to about 1976 when we bought our very first house up in the rural backwoods of Wisconsin.  At that time we were able to buy a two bedroom ranch with a third room addition and a full basement for the outrageous price of $21,000.   Now keep in mind this was a real house with plumbing, running water (both hot and cold), a full bathroom with tub,  kitchen and a single car attached garage.  And “yes”, it did have a real roof and both a front and back yard.

   So what does this have to do with a deck you may ask?  Well, as you may have guessed, that with just a few extra options, our deck would have cost about the same as our 1970’s house did.  Bottom line, we have just invested an addtional 10% of total value into our 30 something home.  And for this investment we get no new running water, no new plumbing, and no new bathroom or kitchen’s. 

   So why replace the old deck you may ask?  Well, the main reason was safety.  Though we had a few boards here and there that had broken loose on the ends, I have come to realize the there was a little tune of “London Bridge is Falling Down”, playing in the background.  Luckily we decided to replace the deck before the last line of the song was played.  Having four different contractors express, “Your deck is in REALLY BAD condition”, was somewhat of a suprise, as I thought is was just “really poor” in condition!

   Another couple days and the new deck should be in place.  In the next entry, I will take a little time to explain what type of deck we chose and why.  There are many questions you really needed to ask.  Such as, type (wood, composite, PVC), style, colors, and the all important issue of Size.  After all, you don’t just want to have the same thing do you?

Things so large. It’s all relative in a Quantum Sense.

   After trying to grasp ones mind around the immensity of the size of the universe, perhaps looking the other direction would be easier? 

    Instead of a telescope, perhaps using a microscope is the answer.  It should be easier grasping the very small, right?

   That’s what I started thinking until I was reading an article regarding particle physics and and the realm of subatomic particle physics, otherwise known as Quantum Physics.

   Did you know that if you were to take a building, lets say the size of a football stadium which can hold something like  20,000 fans for comparison.  If the nucleus of an atom were the size of a gum ball, the electrons orbiting the atom would be up in the nose-bleed seats, with nothing but empty space in-between.

    So if every atom has this much empty space within itself, this means everything is made mostly of nothingness.  With so much of nothing making up everything, it’s amazing there is anything?

   And then we go even smaller in the the absolute realm of quantum particle physics were even the parts of an atom are made up of many more things, with space inbetween each of these parts.

   So if we look to the large, things just keep getting larger.  If we look inward to the smallest of the small, things keep getting smaller.

   I have to go lay down now.  My head is hurting again.

Time and Space?

  As lay in bed the other night, after a day long consumption of at least one full pot of coffee, I found sleep totally evading me.  Not being one to try something as arcane as counting sheep, I instead entered into other forms of mind exercises in an attempt to find the Zzzzzz’s which were eluding me.

   Having spend a few evenings browsing Hubble images on the Web, things started to make less sense then normal.  If Hubble is able to capture an image from which the light originated over 13 Billion years ago, which is closing in on the time of the big bang, a thought occurred to me. 

   First some assumptions:

    1.  The universe is expanding outward away from the source of the big bang.

    2.  Our Milky Way is at least half to three quarters of the way, away from the big bang source.

     3.  We are in the Milky Way, so we are also around 3/4 of the way toward the edge of the universe.

    So, if we are this far away from the source of the big bang, the Big Bang has to be in one direction away from us.  But, as the Hubble images have shown, no matter which way we point Hubble, the images look the same.  In other words, we can see over 13 Billion light years in every direction we look.  Shouldn’t the universe be shorter in one direction over the other?

    So this would mean that space is not uniform, and thus must have curvature to it.  But what form or shape this curvature is in the shape of, has yet to be explained.  Perhaps space is compressed in one direction and stretched in another, but to us, due to light speed limitations appears to more uniform than it is.  Perhaps also, the effects of the the first moments of the Big Bang, which having an expansion speed faster than the speed of light has impact?   After all, if a Black Hole can pull light into it with effects we do not fully understand, then perhaps expansion exceeding the speed of light would also have impacts beyond what we would normally be expected.

   So I managed to arrive at absolutely zero answers, but I did fall to sleep with something interesting on my mind.