It worked out well, however. I feel better, and got a ton of work done on the garage. Here's what it looks like now ...
... and while that may not yet look very good, you should have seen it before. If there was even a path through it before I started this morning, I don't remember it. All of the stuff in the garage either went upstairs in the Imaginarium, or downstairs in the basement ... which meant a lot of trips up and down stairs today, carrying stuff. I'm finally building up a tolerance for it, a couple trips up and down no longer make me feel like chewing a Bayer aspirin and calling 911, just in case.
There are obviously still some things to deal with, but it's really very minor. The few things left all have a place to go, I just finally ran out of steam before they got there. The rest of the stuff is gardening and lawn stuff that stays in the garage, just needs stored a little more neatly so I can get my truck into a space that only leaves me a few inches of clearance. It'll be interesting, and require some creativity, to see where and how I can store stuff I need in the garage, and still be able to use it for the truck.
The back half is another story - it's still a disaster, but ... one thing at a time. Today accomplished the goal of being able to get my truck in the garage again, which I wanted to do before winter. Also, the garage door opener needs fixed, but I couldn't have someone in to look at that until I could clear a space for them to actually get to it. (I'm hoping the home warranty covers that ... it may).
We'll worry about the back half another day.
Meanwhile, Greg was up on the roof ...
... doing some little repairs. I'd noticed awhile back that some shingles were kind of popped up, as if there was something underneath them - and that didn't seem right. When we bought the house there was an issue near the front door which had caused water to get into the closet just inside that door. It wasn't a roof issue per se, it was an ice dam issue at the gutter. So as part of the negotiations, the sellers hired and pre-paid a roofer to come out when the weather was better, to install a moisture guard on that section. We finally just had him out last month, and while he was here, we asked about those popped-up shingles. Funnily enough, he told us exactly what was causing it (nails popping up), and said he was too old to be climbing around on a steep-pitched roof, so he showed Greg how to fix it instead. Nice guy. And that's why Greg was on the roof today.
This roof is not in the best of shape. It's been patched and repaired quite a bit, and has a lot of moss growing on it. We're going to look into having the moss cleaned off, but even so, the roof is not in its prime. I had estimated it would cost between $7,000 and $10,000 to have a new roof put on this house, and our roofer guy confirmed that was the ballpark.
Ouch. Well, the good news is, he said with care and maintenance we can probably get another 5 to 7 years or so out of it, and in that amount of time we're hoping to be able to either (a) save up the money to pay for all or part of it, and / or (b) get a home equity loan for the rest. If we can finance less than $5,000 payments should be relatively low (I had several loans at the old house for that amount or less, like when I remodeled the kitchen, and the payments were very reasonable) and we'll have a good, brand new roof for another 20 to 25 years before we have to worry about that again (and by then we should be living in North Carolina anyway).
Meanwhile, I found this in the garage today ...
... my old 10 gallon aquarium. Yeah, it's looking pretty raunchy, but I'm debating on cleaning it up and setting it up again. Part of me wants to - I always loved aquariums - and part of me dreads the massive amount of work involved, even in a small one - sometimes worse in a small one, as it's harder to keep the pH and other levels right. I used to really go overboard, though, studying it like a scientist, stockpiling hundreds of dollars worth of chemicals, and really getting kind of O-C about it. Maybe there's a happy medium of doing what needs done, but not getting excessive about it. I could set it up with a nice sea theme, and then only have a couple of really nice fish - not try to get a tankful, as I used to try to do.
This also got dredged out of the garage today ...
... my dad had bought me this telescope for Christmas some years ago. It isn't a super high-end one, of course, but it is a fairly nice amateur star-gazing one. It has a built-in star finder computer that does a lot of neat things, and amazingly still works, for the fact that the telescope is somewhere between 7 and 12 years old, and had been stashed out in the garage since February. You input your location, do a few orientation settings, and then when you point the telescope at anything you can see in the sky, the little computer screen tells you exactly what star or planet or whatever, that you're looking at. Also, if you want to find a specific star, planet, nebula, or what-have-you, you find it in the computer's list and the screen will guide you in moving the telescope to center whatever you're looking for exactly in the view. It's pretty cool.
Anyway - I never used it much, because at my old house there was so much ambient city light that I really couldn't find anything with it. Several times I considered taking it out to a local state park or something, but I never did.
But here, though we still live in a city which is never the ideal situation for viewing through a telescope, it's much, much darker at night. I mean, our back yard is inky like being out in the middle of nowhere. So when we unearthed it today, Greg brought it out and set it up, and once it gets dark, we're going to see what we can find. I'm pretty psyched - one thing I do know is that I was able to see some pretty amazing detail on the surface of the moon with it, and the moon's full right now, so we should at least get some awesome looks at that tonight.
And now that's it out and functioning again, I think I'll take it to North Carolina when we go ... we ought to be able to see amazing things with it from the deck of the beach house at night!
Last but not least, the Tangier antique shop owner finally got back to me, and sadly, my Moroccan veil has been sold. Bummer. Well, I'll just have to study the pictures, and embroider my own.
And that's all my news for the day.
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