A Tale of Vise

Now that my workshop electrical outlets are installed, the refinisher shipment has arrived, and the piano is delivered, I can get back to stripping the window trim on the first floor.

Yesterday I removed the varnish from the last two long pieces from the dining room windows. And last night I pried off all the trim (barring the stool) from the first of the dining room piano windows. I had visions of getting all those pieces stripped today, before I had to dress and go sing in a choir concert this evening.

Didn't work out like that.

In the first place, I had to spend an hour or so this morning packaging up my digital camera I dropped on the floor yesterday, and taking it to the post office to send to the FujiFilm factory service center in Joisey. Maybe it can be fixed and I won't have to buy a new camera.

Or maybe not. Got it posted, anyway.

Something after 11:00 AM I got down the basement and started stripping the paint from the window trim I took down last night.

Uh, no. Ever try holding a two-foot piece of wood, aiming a heat gun at it, and stripping off the old paint, all at once? Definitely a three-handed job.

Which means a vise to supply the third hand. In my case, the clamp-on vise my dad gave me years ago, with the 1/4" plywood on each face to keep from marring the workpiece.

But I couldn't use my heirloom vise with my present set up. My workbench has no lip to clamp it to and my collapsible steel sawhorses had no wood beams on them. I'd been intending to put some on ever since I bought them nine or ten years ago, but somehow I never . . .

Until today. There comes a time when the time has come. When a girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do. When the annoyance of not doing an annoying job is more annoying than doing it.

I had to get those beams on my sawhorses if I wanted to make any progress with the woodwork stripping.

And I was well-fixed to take care of it. Some previous owner had left me a couple of likely-looking 2x4s to choose between, and I have a whole hardware cabinet of miscellaneous fasteners.

But I couldn't take care of it, not right away. The brick foundation wall of my workshop is the happy home to a few dozen colonies of sidewalk ants. Harmless, the exterminator tells me, but they attract spiders which festoon the wall with their webs, which catch all the frass that the ants dump out of their nests. The 2x4s were covered with it, and so was a lot of everything else.

Naaaaassssty.

So before my work on the sawhorses could proceed, I had to take the shop vac and clear out all the spiderwebs and their loads of eggs and ant poop.

Not what I was planning to do today.

But I did it. And got the chosen 2x4 cut to the right lengths, five inches longer than the sawhorse tops.

And considered how I'd attach them to the steel sawhorses.

Now, you'll laugh at this. This is the biggest reason why I hadn't put the wood beams on the sawhorses years ago. I had the silly, over-wrought idea that I had to attach them with bolts and nuts, with the bolt heads countersunk into the top surface of the wood.

And I don't have any countersinking drill bits.

Well, I thought, I can improvise.

So I turned over the sawhorses, the better to see and feel how big a bolt I needed for the predrilled holes.

And it hit me: "You silly idiot! All you need is four washers and screws driven up from the underside of the sawhorses into the bottom surface of the 2x4s! That'll hold just fine!

So that's what I did. Though being me, I had to make heavy weather of using the portable drill to drive the screws in. I'm not too proficient at keeping the driver head straight on with the screw, and I end up with metal shavings all over.

Still, they went in well enough to hold.

And now I have a nice wooden overhang at each end of my sawhorses, and I can clamp on my vise!

And my vise can hold my short pieces of window trim while I heat-strip them!

I got three pieces done this afternoon. Probably won't be able to do any more with it till Friday-- tomorrow, I've got other things I have to do.

Working on the Edge

My new Neuton cordless electric lawn mower with the edger/trimmer attachment came on Tuesday.

Wednesday I put it together and mowed the lawn. Yesterday, I read the instructions (yes, really!) and found out how the edger/trimmer works. But with the thunderstorm we had yesterday, I had to wait till today to try it out.

Started with the backyard path, which was pretty overgrown. What kind of a line I could get?

Better than with the string trimmer I once borrowed from a neighbor.

Even so, in some places, oops!

Then, around to the front.

Uncovered the brick edging I'd forgot I had along the walkway to the front door.

Then I tackled the public sidewalk. Can't say how this mower-attached edger compares overall to your typical hand-held string trimmer on that job. That one time time with my neighbor's machine, I got so annoyed at not being able to keep the line on the back walkway even, I gave up and did the front sidewalk with my dad's old yard knife, by hand.

Wish I could say my new edger cut through all the overhanging turf in one pass, but nothing doing. I suppose it's no surprise-- the string only extends out 3" or 4" at the most, and in some places the turf, including grass, was 6" thick.

So my dad's old yard knife (a cut-off and sharpened stainless steel dinner knife) batted cleanup again.

Then there was the everlasting issue of having the string break and having to undo the spool housing and find the end and poke it through the little hole then put it all back together again . . . Yeah, par for the course for string trimmers, but don't you think they'd figure out some way that wouldn't be necessary all the time?

Eight hours, several new calluses, a bodyful of sore muscles, and a sunburn later, I was finally sweeping up the last of the mess.

And I look at this job and I think, "Eight hours? For what?"

For a job that's Just Supposed to Be Done, that's what. It's not exciting or sexy like pulling the carpet off the stairs and finding good hardwood underneath or laying tile with perfect grout joints. Edging the sidewalk is like emptying the dishwasher or doing the laundry. You get no kudos or credit if you do it; in fact, you're a lazy slob if you don't. There's even a local borough ordinance requiring homeowners to keep the grass and so on off the public footpath. Don't wait for applause, just Get It Done, and about damn time, too.

And before you know it, it'll be time to do it again.

I've got some Dutch ancestry in the usual American mix, and something in me still admires the industrious huisvrouw of old who was out scrubbing her doorstep at 7:00 o'clock every morning. I still sometimes wish I could be that on top of everyday housekeeping and yard care chores. But it ain't gonna happen.

So big boring routine jobs like edging the sidewalk wait for some momentous event, like company coming or the purchase of a new power tool or God forbid, a citation from the local authority. I fear my Dutch great-great-great-great-grandmother would be sadly disappointed in me.

Though if she could see me using the new shop vac to sweep the dust off the sidewalk, I think she'd commend my ingenuity. So efficient. And very effective.

How I Spent My Birthday

It's wonderful what you can justify when it's your birthday.

And when you've got family coming and you don't want them to know what a lazy, disorganized slob you've been . . .

So I went shopping. First, at a nursery over in the next county that I only get to when I have other business over that way. A lunch meeting was my excuse today.

It's not the cheapest source of plants, but they've got great variety. It's owned by a man I know in my presbytery, and he's known to give pastors discounts. He wasn't in today, however, so it was full price for me.

Oh, well. I came home with three good-sized tomato plants, one cherry, one Roma, and one regular round; two flats of torenias in various colors for underneath my maple tree, two alstroemerias for my front steps, and a wrought iron hanger to put up a set of windchimes my mother sent me last Christmas.

They are none of them planted yet. Soon as these were home and stowed, it was off to the Home Depot to return the stock painted wood medicine cabinet I bought there last March.

Yes, last night I finally got around to starting on the tile surround for the bathroom medicine cabinet. Made good progress-- till I tried the new cabinet and discovered it was about 3/8" too wide.

Took it back today, then promptly wiped out the credit buying a 2.5 hp Ridgid shop vac.

Well, hey, I need one, don't I? I can't go on ruining my regular vacuum cleaners, can I? Besides, it was on sale.

And it's my birthday.

(Never you mind which one.)