Update #5

Here is update #5 and the last one until the fall.

I spent the week before the work weekend rerouting the electrical wires over the window on Iroquois side so I could fit in the door. I also took out the window and framed in the studs for the door. The door did not arrive on Thursday or Friday as promised and the warehouse was not open on the weekend, so there was a big opening in the wall for the better part of a week. To keep the skunks out at night I put a waist-high board across it. Ellyn arrived late Thursday evening on the last boat from Woods Hole. She tried to take the bus from Providence to Woods Hole but it would have arrived too late to catch the boat, so she and a fellow coming down for high school graduation festivities took a taxi from Bourne. It was good to see her.

Dan was not able to make it down for the work weekend, so we decided to put off reshingling the porch roof until fall. It would have created such a mess that all the good work cleaning the porch would have gone to waste. Alison, Dodie, their kids and good friends of theirs with their kids and dog did make it down to help Ellyn and me with the cleanup. The friends watched the kids while we worked. Alison, Dodie, and Ellyn washed all the porch railings and started in on the ceiling. I helped finish the ceiling. It is amazing what a little bleach can do to get rid of the mildew. On Saturday evening, while the kids were playing with sparklers and glow sticks at the beach, Alison cleaned the living room. The first night they were there it was cold and damp, so we built a roaring fire and burned a lot of scrap lumber. We borrowed a truck from one of the neighbors on Saturday morning and Dodie and I took two loads of debris to the dump. They weighed the loads at a half ton combined. It was $80 well spent. It made it possible to get access to most of the porch. While we were doing that, Alison's friend reorganized the alley, transforming the woodpile into a neatly organized stack under a blue tarp. Now, looking down the alley, it looks mostly clear instead of a disaster area.

The weekend was marred by three events. Both toilets got clogged up on Saturday afternoon. We think a lot of toilet paper built up in the upstairs toilet and when we plunged it loose it got stuck in the main line, thus backing up the downstairs toilet. Alison's friend (I wish I could remember his name) worked for more than an hour unclogging first the downstairs and then the upstairs toilets. They worked fine after that, but it is worthwhile to encourage people, especially kids, to flush away. The second disaster occurred Saturday evening when Dodie and friends took the kids and dog down to the beach to light off sparklers. The dog ran out in the street and got hit by a car. Fortunately he was just bruised up and the vet checked him out and gave him perkaset-type medicine. This is the dog who jumped over the upstairs railing earlier in the day and Ellyn thought he was going to jump off the roof to get to his owners who had gone to the beach. When Ellyn tried to get him to jump back over the railing, he raced by her, downstairs, pushed open the screen door, ran down the street to the beach and ran along the beach until he found the crew. Smart dog! The last problem was that we ran out of hot water on Sunday. When I looked at the propane tank it was empty. No hot showers that night. We heated water on the stove for dishes. Fortunately, the truck came first thing Monday morning.

Alison et al left about noon on Sunday and Ellyn continued the cleaning project while I installed the facia board over the new porch and raised the outside shower wall so one could no longer see into the shower from the porch. Bob had come down on Sunday just in time to see off Alison and family and friends. He finished shingling the back wall, making creative use of the few remaining shingles and also prepared the pink Styrofoam for a coat of black paint. I went to pick up the new door on Monday morning and got back just in time for Bob to help me carry it around to the porch before he took off for Norwell. Ellyn left on the 1:15 boat to return to South Bend and Peg arrived about 3:30 for some last minute renter preparations. She helped me set the door in place and by evening I had it fastened down - no skunk will get through that door.

On Tuesday, Peg and I went to pick out stain for the door and also the knob and dead bolt lock. We now have keys to two doors at the house. Peg finished the upstairs including touching up the wall in the bathroom that Bob had scraped while he was cleaning the bathroom. She also cleaned the kitchen, and this time the cleaning took. No debris drifted down from the ceiling to get on the surfaces. I spent the day building the framing for inside and outside the new door and saw Peg off on the 7:15 boat from Vineyard Haven. The rest of the week was spent staining and urethaning the door and framing, painting the pink Styrofoam black, and cleaning up all the stuff lying around both inside and outside from the many projects before the first renters arrived today. I can't wait to show all you blog readers the fairly finished project. It looks pretty nice if I do say so myself.

The next stage of the project is the fall tear down of the old kitchen ceiling and wall to the back room. Where we will store everything at that point is a mystery. We need to make a few decisions at the August meeting, such as where to put the new window on Norman's side (It can't be over the propane tank) and how to organize the new back room and separating wall. Joy is threatening to have the meeting at 7am to give the early to bed crew the advantage this year.

Until the fall...
Peter