Catching Up

Well, it’s been a long two weeks. The last post was basically empty, a mere shell explaining that distractions kept me from writing.

This week, well… it’s been busy. I’d better get started.

So just what was going on last time? This was part of it:

That’s an arborist way up in what they think was a Jeffrey pine, in the rain. Anne thinks it had not been all that healthy, and this is not where those trees normally live. In any case it is now gone. The needles were a huge mess, sometimes plugging the downspouts on our roof.

Also gone are two cherry trees. They were very tall thanks to the fact that they had never been properly pruned. I’d have kept them, but the local government has effectively made fruit trees illegal in an attempt to reduce the bear problem. Bears get acclimated to urban life easily, it seems. Fruit trees and garbage cans are favourite food sources, so we have restrictions on when you can put out your garbage, and fruit on trees can be cited by the district’s bylaw officers. Since the cherry trees were too tall to harvest we were at risk of being fined, and we did encounter bear scat in the back yard last year. I found some right after we moved in and Anne found more later, which means the dogs were not doing their jobs.

In any case, the neighbours are happy about this too. All three of these trees were close to pools, and all of them dropped tons of stuff… flowers, fruit, leaves in the fall, pine cones, and needles year round. The cedar trees are lovely, healthy, and don’t drop nearly as much stuff. They will not be going anywhere.

And you might remember that the previous owners of our home were very good about planting things and then doing exactly nothing with them, meaning no pruning or control efforts. Not even the bamboo. The lot remains something of a jungle even with these trees removed.

One batch of tree work remains to be done. The big maple in the front yard needs to be pruned and one large limb will be removed. We’re waiting for a permit from the district to get that done.

I’ve done my best to find homes for the wood that came from the cherry trees, but not as firewood. I have a number of rounds ready to go to friends who carve or turn, and several chunks have already been given away:

On the left Aaron Nelson-Moody (front) and Xwalacktun (back) are loading one piece of the cherry tree into a truck. On the right is the interior of the other cherry tree, slabbed open by my neighbour across the street. It’s beautiful wood, and I am sure many interesting projects will come out of it over time. I’m keeping a couple of pieces for myself as well, though when I will work on them is unknown.

A big use of my time in the past week has been the Blueridge Community Association. As their new website guy, I find myself in the middle of several efforts already. The website needs help — to put it mildly — and at the same time several new things need to be added to the site right away. One is an announcement of a neighbourhood clean up on Earth Day and the other is moving a directory of local businesses from Facebook to the website because Facebook’s rules about links are a bit weird. I get to figure out how to make it live on our website instead.

It’s exciting, I guess, and I hope to rework the entire website over time, getting it into shape, removing outdated items, and generally making it more usable and presentable. There’s a lot to learn in the process — I’m not an expert in WordPress — so it’s not a quick thing.

Next up we have this and its implications:

For my American readers, 21.5° C is quite comfortable, and it’s even been a bit warmer than that. And there’s this big bright thing up in the sky as well. No one here in North Vancouver knows what it is, but people seem to love it.

Anyway, thanks to the warm temperatures and lack of rain I got started on yet another project. (I have many going on, mostly in various states of “I’ll get back to it.”) This time, I am moving two stairs. As usual I forgot to take any “before” pictures, so all you get are photos from the middle of the job:

That’s quite a mess in the side yard. What you see where the foundation changes is an addition made to the house before permits were computerized. (I’ve looked. No such permit is available online for this addition, but one is available for the big remodel done in 1994.) That addition has a higher foundation than the original house, and this path has a couple of very clunky steps in it as a result.

Near the bottom of the photo you can see what some nitwit did. The stairs were just cinder blocks set into place with some pavers over the top. These blocks & pavers, in fact:

But they were pushed up against the wood siding of the house and back filled with gravel.

What happens to gravel in the rain? That’s not a trick question: it gets wet. And wet gravel against wood siding for 25 years means exactly what you would expect: rot. You can see the state of the siding in the photo. Repairs of some sort will be needed.

But that’s not all. Oh no. I had hoped to simply dig out the steps and move them three feet or so, to get them away from the siding. In the process I found an access point to an old drain line. I think it used to connect to a downspout. And to keep things complicated, it’s ancient drain tile, made of concrete. (For those not familiar with the term, “drain tile” is actually pipe used to carry water. It’s got nothing to do with tiles like you’d put on the floor. Don’t ask me where the name comes from.)

In the photo above you can see a black ABS cleanout. That’s the frankenfix for the situation. It is pressed into the old drain tile and held in place with silicone. There’s no room for an actual cap over the opening. Even worse is that the last people to work on this didn’t cap it either. They just set a rock on top and buried it. The level of stupidity here cannot be overstated.

As I say, I’m pretty sure that is where the downspout from the roof used to go before the room on the elevated foundation was built. When that remodel was done they simply covered the old entry into the drain tile and moved the downspout to the new end of the roof. It’s actually something of a miracle this stuff works at all. Water seeps through concrete pipe like this, attracting tree roots which push their way in and clog it up. But the system still works — I’ve tested it — so we’ve been lucky. Either that or it rains so much here that none of the local plants need to search very far for water.

Anyway, now that I have a cap on that drain I can continue to push the stairs away from the siding and clean that mess up. I’d hoped to dig out the entire path down to a single level, but one look at that photo is enough to show that isn’t possible. The footing for the addition doesn’t go deep enough. If I dug the path down to make it flat I would wind up destabilizing that side of the house. Not a good idea.

Instead I will have to put in some nicer stairs — eventually — and redo the retaining wall on the other side of the path. It’ll be a fair bit of work, but it can be done with time and effort, and the results will be much better than what was there when we moved in.

Oh, and I have to repair the siding. I suspect I will put a piece or two of Hardie Board on the bottom — horizontally — as a replacement for the wood siding that is damaged. But that’s a problem for future Jeff. Present day Jeff just needs to get the stairs put back together, the gravel redistributed, and the dirt regraded before the next rain.

In other news, Covid is running rampant here in BC, so my rare trips out of the house are reduced even more than they already were. I now make every effort to go on just one grocery shopping trip a week, and I am putting off hardware store trips except for unexpected necessities like the ABS cleanout seen above. My part of BC has a lot of the P.1 variant (aka the one from Brazil) while other parts of the province have a lot of P.1.1.7 (aka the UK variant). We continue to see over 1,000 new Covid cases a day in the province and our hospitals are feeling the strain. There might be signs of us turning the corner, but it’s too early to tell if you ask me.

That’s fun.

On a happier note, I am just starting to poke at a new and odd artistic medium.

But before I can get too far into that I have to finish sealing the table in my studio. Next week should see me flip it back over and continue putting polyurethane on it. With luck I’ll get the last coat on as well, but the grain keeps raising with each application, so I have no idea how many coats (and sanding passes) this is going to take. Then it will need to cure for several days before I can do anything significant on it, and I am avoiding going to the hardware store for lumber to finish lifting it to the height it needs to be. Eventually that will happen, but for a while I can work on it as is once the polyurethane is cured.

The experiments in question are just that: experiments with an odd sculptural material. I promise to share details when I can. At the moment, though, it’s not clear it will work and I don’t want to get anyone’s hopes up.

That’s where things stand at the moment. Wish me luck on getting the stairs done before the next rains arrive!