Sash Locks and Garden Goings On

Installing Sash Latches
One of the results of our recent bout of weatherizing (which we totally have covered now, Mr. President. Can I interest you in replacing our HVAC system, though? I totally promise to blow the savings in a consumerist frenzy at Lowes. Hugs and kisses, your faithful constituent, Melanie) is that with our windows no longer painted shut, we needed to install some form of lock or latch on the newly liberated sashes.

Old-school windows like ours require old-fashioned sash locks (see pic below). However, the bottom piece of the top sash wasn't really designed to have a latch attached to it in the way shown in the picture--it's a narrower, beveled piece of wood--not strong enough or wide enough.

Package showing typical sash lock installation

I knew there was a way to make the darn things work, but for some reason, I had trouble figuring it out. I felt like a toddler who can't figure out the shape-holes game--I kept twisting the pieces around in different configurations and they kept not fitting together right.

The shape-holes toy

Anyway, for anyone as spatially challenged as myself, here's a pic showing how you do it:

Yeah, I know, we need to scrape the paint off the glass. Mañana, mañana...

Works like a charm. And so wonderfully antiquey. Seems like something we would have had on the camp on Grand Isle that was built by my great-grandparents. (Actually, I think the hurricane-optimized windows operated by crank, but they could have had this kind of latch. Would have matched the cracked brown linoleum with big bunches of roses and the claw-footed bath tub.)

In other weatherizing news, I added more closed-cell stripping around the windows in the living room, and that seems to have made all the difference--am now warm and snug. I also installed pieces of foam behind a bunch of our faceplates and caulked around the electrical boxes. Not sure that's really going to make much difference, but I was on a tear. Leave no faceplate uncaulked. That was my motto.

Now all that remains is to finish installing quarter round in the living room and dining room and caulk it in.

Movement on the Gutter Front
Meanwhile, we've taken another step towards gutterdom. We bought almost one whole side of the house worth of fascia (with a gift card from my mother-in-law's BFF, Lucy. Thanks Lucy! It arrived just when we were feeling motivated, which was great.) We put down one coat of primer Monday. And once again (how?! how, I ask you?!?) I got paint in my hair. I keep picking at it (and washing my hair), but I keep finding new little streaks. Anyway, I expect to get the priming done this week and maybe start on the painting next week. At which point, my hair will be completely white.

Needless to say, there is no real urgency around this project. Here's my weather station's graph of this year's rainfall, as displayed on the wunderground. That one tiny 0.4" spike of moisture? That's where I was testing the rain cup to see if it was actually in operation.


Seedlings Galore
My Recession Veggie Garden--which is entirely in containers in the greenhouse this year--is starting to look like it might add up to something.

My lettuce, for example, is looking kind of lettuce-like.

Lolla Rossa' lettuce seedling

I've got a number of artichoke seedlings coming up that are nice and stout.

'Violetto' artichoke seedlings

I have a plethora of spindly little lemon basils.

'Mrs. Burns' excellent lemon basil seedlings

And while the peppers have been very shy about popping up, I do have at least one sprout of each variety. The guajillos have been the least petulant so far.

Guajillo pepper seedlings

But my pride and joy is the radishes. Look how big they already are! I recently received a shipment of watermelon radish seeds, so we'll see if they do as well. It's probably a bit late in the season, but I'm going to try a few seeds since the D'Avignons are being such good sports.

D'Avignon radish seedlings

Other Garden News
The Meyer lemon is still blooming away, smelling lovely, and making weency little green baby fruits. I love the colors on this plant--the cool, ivory-mottled green of the leaves, the flush of purple on the buds, and the buff-colored anthers.

Meyer lemon flowers and embryonic fruit

We've also got some sort of kalanchoe coming into bloom. Not a huge fan of kalanchoe foliage, but these shiny, shell-like flower buds are really cool.

Kalanchoe flower buds

And finally, Matt has propagated something he's tentatively calling 'Louis Philippe.' It's a dear little thing, whatever it is. Like so many chinas, it manages to look spunky, dainty, and tough all at once. So endearing.

Possible 'Louis Philippe' rose cutting

Not _Quite_ Like Ft. Knox: Weatherstripping cont.

Well, I think our weatherizing efforts helped. But our problems are not, alas, entirely solved. For example, here I sit, blogging away on the new sofa, which is under a window. And although this window was weatherstripped and caulked, I can feel a steady, slow stream of cool air blowing over me coming from the window. Our indoor thermometer, sitting on the sofa with me, says it's 61 degrees here. This is especially disheartening because that vinyl gasket weatherstrip was such a fiddly, aggravating thing to install.

<...performing further research...>

Good news! I ran my hands all over the window. The gasket is working. However, the top sash needs more caulk, and I need to nail a strip of gasket to the top of the bottom sash, at the seam where it meets the top sash. In addition, the D-profile weatherstrip on the underside of the bottom sash doesn't appear to be accomplishing all that might be desired. I'll have to nail another strip of the vinyl gasket to the sill, flush with the bottom sash, to compensate for the D-profile's underperformance.

I am reminded as I ponder all of this that the wood of this particular window was more than normally tough, and most of the little finishing nails that I was using buckled instead of going straight into the wood. (Which is one of the reasons I won't be taking pictures of the window--it's best to keep my handiwork decently out of sight behind the blinds.) What fun to get to spend more quality time with this window! Once again: if I had just had the sense to buy an air compressor back when we began the bamboo project, I'd no doubt have a power nailer by now and this whole problem would be non-existent. Moral of the story: always buy the air compressor.

On a happier note, I also ran my hands over the windows in the study, and they are doing a much better job keeping out the cold. So success is possible, if I just apply myself.

Perfection has also eluded us in the area of the doors. Somehow, I failed to get the vinyl bulb stripping perfectly flush with one side of the study door, so it will have to be reinstalled; the spontaneously new kitchen door needs some refinement in terms of its fit; and the front door has to be slammed in order for the knob to catch, so we'll have to adjust the tongue holes (or whatever the proper word is). Also, the kitchen and study door sills still have leaks at the bottom corners.

This project consumed an entire weekend, and it looks like it's going to chew its way into another. But I guess if it will prevent the tip of my nose from turning into an ice cube, it's worthwhile.

Update on the Recession Garden
I've got several sprouting artichokes, one tiny, hesitant guajillo pepper, as well as the basil, radishes, and Lolla Rossa lettuce I mentioned before. I also sowed some eggplants 2 weekends ago, along with another batch of D'Avignon radishes and some Harmony butterhead lettuce.

In a similar spirit of frugality, I have discovered (and begun to use) the cutting swap feature of a rose site called (weirdly) helpmefind.com. They set up a system to allow users to post the roses they're looking for in order to swap for cuttings of roses they're growing. Brilliant! I've arranged for a 10-rose swap with a lady from Georgia (I think). Since her Fortune's Double Yellow won't be big enough till spring, I'm going ahead and rooting the roses my correspondent wants from my garden. By spring, they should have a nice root system and be ready to mail.

Do you know what would make a really kick-ass accesory for a Recession Garden? One of these. A residential wind turbine. There are a number of issues (it's only recommended for properties larger than 1/2 acre--ours is .48 acres--and it needs to be hoisted on top of a 50-foot tower), but it's way, way cheaper than solar panels (PBS says that even after California's generous incentives, Bill Nye the Science Guy still paid something like $32,000 for his solar panels. Which he apparently has to mop regularly.) In general, one small turbine won't let you live a comfortable, first-world lifestyle "off the grid," but it will--apparently--reduce your power bill to the double or even single digits. Sweet! Still pondering whether to add this to my I-really-want-this-for-real list, or tack it on to my well-it'd-be-nice-if-I-could list, where it can keep the solar panels company.

Weatherizing Weekend

Our old house is incredibly porous. You don't have to worry about us dying of carbon monoxide poisoning or a gas leak. Hypothermia, possibly. But the ventilation in here's terrific.

However, now that the temperature's been repeatedly dipping into the 20s, our feeling is, to heck with fresh air. We want the toasty, hot canned air, and we want it stuffy and hermetic. Last year, our power bill was between $100 and $250 dollars higher in the winter than in the cheap months of April and November. And we would still wake up to a bedroom whose temperature was in the 50s. I gather that most people's entire electric bill is less than $250, plus they get to wake up to a bedroom in the 70s.

So we took the first step in January 08 and had insulation blown into the attic. The insulation helped a little, I guess, but it's still been frigid, especially in the living room, which quickly descends to the 60s or lower in cold weather.

So this weekend we finally embarked on a quest for weatherization. We spent about $215 in supplies and prepared to fill every gap we could find, caulk anything standing still, and stick insulating foam strips on every orifice.

It went fairly well. We got a lot done. I kind of broke the kitchen door in the middle of operations, though. That wasn't really part of the weatherization plan.

See, one of our big problems is that our doors had these big gaps underneath. Partly because the doors don't quite fit right, and partly because there is no threshold on the inside of our doors to bridge the gap between the flooring and the door frame. And we can't solve the problem by installing a sweep on the underneath of the door because our newly tiled and bamboo'd floors are too high for the doors as it is: we wouldn't be able to open them if we added any thickness underneath. Anyway, I thought the solution was to install a new threshold for the kitchen door, throwing out the shattered old rubber one that was too narrow to cover all the gaps. And, of course, caulking the whole area like mad.

Distressing gap, new fancy threshold, with nasty old rubber threshold at top.

Matt caulks in the distressing gap.

So I did. And then I pushed the door closed. It was a little tight. No problem--I pushed harder. Uf--there it goes! No gaps there! Now let's just open it back up-- wait a minute. It won't-- the door's stuck. The door's stuck on the new threshold. Babe, can you--?

--Stand back.

WHAM! WHAM! WHAM!

I'm not sure he enjoyed it at the time, but how many men actually get to experience the action-movie thrill of kicking a door in? And he did it very effectively, but of course the bottom of the metal door got all torn to hell in the process. So technically, Matt broke the door. But I set this particular train in motion, I'm afraid.

But here's the funny thing. We had a spare door just kicking around.

On Friday, Matt was given some used building supplies, including this rather nice metal door with a big window.

So we moved the hinges, replaced the knob, and hung that sucker. (It wasn't that easy. Aligning the door was what the project managers at work like to call an iterative process. Interestingly, their workflow models aren't embroidered with all the colorful language that was required to iterate this mother.)

SIDE NOTE: We needed to remove the doorknob from the destroyed door, and we couldn't figure out how to uninstall the darn thing. We eventually called the manufacturer, Kwikset--on a weekend, mind you--and after a not-horrific wait, got a human here in the States who asked 3 or 4 easy questions to figure out what model we had and then talked us through the un-installation. Just. Like. That. Who gives you help like that anymore? Nobody. If only Kwikset had built my laptop.

Other weatherizing tasks completed

• We also installed the kind of weatherstripping that has a metal strip on one side and a hollow rubber tube on the other ("tubular gasket", AKA "vinyl bulb with metal flange") on the outside of our front and study doors.

Caulking in the weatherstripping makes it less obvious (see bottom half of picture) as well as more weather-tight

• We installed puffy "Kerf Fit" weatherstripping on our new & improved kitchen.

I have no idea what a "kerf" is, but presumably, it's somewhere in this picture. Fun word, anyway. Kerf... kerf...

• We caulked two vertical pieces of firring in the gap between the front door frame and the bamboo flooring (it's almost the color of bamboo, so it looks surprisingly reasonable. Nevertheless, we will ultimately cover it with a piece of 1/4-round).

We did eventually wipe up the extra caulking. Voilà! No more nasty crevice.

• We nailed this round rubber tube with a flat piece of rubber on one side ("Vinyl Gasket Weatherstrip") in our window frames flush with the sash.
  
• We put flat, adhesive, double-celled stripping ("D-profile weatherstrip") on the bottoms of the sashed where they meet the frame.
• We caulked the tops and edges of the top sash.
  
• We caulked the corners of the door frames where all the pieces of weatherstripping meet.
  
• We caulked the line where the door frames meet the stone facade of the house.
• I used that Easy Cheese puffy foam-in-a-can stuff to fill in a random hole in our bedroom wall.
• And--very big deal--Matt liberated 4 of the old wooden windows that had been painted shut (which is how I was able to put weatherstripping on their bottoms.) Now we can have all the fresh air we want, but only when we want it. (My, I'm feeling italic this evening. A result of all the emotional highs and lows of the day, I think.)
• We Easy-Cheesed many (all?) of the holes where water pipes come in through the walls.
  

Remaining weatherizing tasks

• Caulk the junction of baseboards and hard flooring
• Finish insulating windows
• Finish unsticking 4 remaining stuck windows
• Install latches on all functional windows
  
• Replace broken/ugly/missing faceplates for switches and outlets
• Caulk around outlet boxes

Long-term energy goals

• Install storm windows on the 8 antique windows
• Finish installing baseboards in hall, mbed, and study
• Hire HVAC person to examine heater, ducts
• Perform an energy audit (Ecorate)
• Replace solid hall door with with one made from wooden screen
• Replace cracked window panes

The experts speak

HydroOne--whoever they are--offers these numbers, which I pie-charted for your/my edification:


And, one final thought for the day, courtesy of the Louisiana Dept of Natural Resources:

"There is more to sealing than smearing messy beads of caulking over everything."

Maybe. But smearing messy beads of caulking over everything is a pretty darn good place to start.

Season of Mists and Malevolent Fungalness

Up till around 9am today, I would have said that this was a pretty darn good weekend. Let's start with the good stuff.

Turkey Fryers for Everyone!

Care to fry a turkey? Or three? Bonus points if you can spot the naughty kitty.

I ordered a turkey fryer for Matt for Christmas. As of last night, three turkey-frying sets had shown up on our front door step. I had initially ordered a set from 1 company who told me that the model I wanted had been discontinued. So then I ordered a different model from a 2nd company. Apparently, the first company found a couple of the discontinued units and mailed the to me anyway (Why 2 though? No one knows). Meanwhile, the second company shipped me their model. I'm supposed to mail the first 2 back (and get a reimbursement) but until then, if you have an urgent need to fry 3 large turkeys all at once, you know whom to call.

A juvenile aside: check out the logo from company #1. Is that as wrong as I think it is?

I'm not sure this is legal in Texas.

Let There Be Light
Matt installed the new dimmer switch for our chandelier and got everything up and running. It looks terrific, I think. We still have to patch the sheet rock, but this project is very close to happy completion.

Our new chandelier

You can also see in this picture that I've finally pulled down the tissue paper we'd been using as curtains. As a temporary but less objectionable solution, I draped a couple of panels from previous residences over suspension rods. It's less déclassé than the paper, and it should hold us through late spring, when I will (hopefully) be able to buy custom shutters.

At the same time, I dragged out all the Christmas stuff and altered it to fit the new house--we have garland out front with twinkle lights and faux luminaries (I have mixed feelings about these, but they were just so much more practical than the real thing. And Santa Fe uses faux luminaries, so I guess if they're good enough for Santa Fe, they should be good enough for me and Elgin.) So the house is looking all pretty and illuminated.

Our modest Christmas decorations

New Knobs
It is a curious fact that the four exterior doors on our house are not keyed to the same keys. In fact, the deadbolts and knobs on some of the individual doors don't even match each other. When we moved in, we were given a key that opens the kitchen knob and the living room bolt and that's it. The rest of the locks effectively operate as deadbolts. We could have just gotten everything re-keyed, but they were also in mis-matched finishes, and none of the finishes were at all stylish, so we are instead replacing them.

So on Saturday we picked up our first installment of brand-new knobs and bolts in utterly au courant oil-rubbed bronze finish. The installation was more or less painless, and our house is now that much more genteel.

A new knob

The Orangery
Meanwhile, the Orangery is making good progress. Matt used pipes from the old hurricane fence that he had dismantled as the frame and today attached PVC pipes to hold up the roof. He'll hopefully have it covered by tonight, keeping our citruses and his propagules nice and warm.

In future years, we hope to build a more permanent structure out of cinderblocks and recycled windows (following the example at the San Antonio Antique Rose Emporium and the smaller, cuter version at the Independence ARE), but this early prototype will do for this winter.

...And that brings me to the bad news.

Rose Death
That horrible fungus that attacked the roses earlier this summer has returned. I noticed this morning that our lovely mystery red rose had a bunch of dead stems; when I investigated the rest of the garden, I found signs of this supercharged canker/dieback on most of the roses. Some were minor; I could just cut back the stems and the plants will probably be good as new. But some of them had developed fungus in those little short stems right near the crown; I can cut off the stems, but the fungus has probably already begun to invade the rest of the plant through the crown.

The mystery rose was pretty far gone; I didn't really have any choice but to dig it up. I did take some cuttings from the healthy side of the plant, but I think we need to be prepared for the worst. In imminent danger due to the location of the canker on the plants are one of the Cramoisu Superieurs, Graham Thomas, both Duchers, Buff Beauty, and one of the Green Ices.

I also dug up the roses that had already died this year (which I obviously should have done a long time ago). Here's a roll-call of the honorable dead:

2 gorgeous red cabbagey mystery roses

1 Spice

1 the pink miniature that John & Ann gave us (neighbors back at Wolverton)

1 Belinda's Dream

1 Climbing Peace

1 Penelope

1 Will Fleming yaupon (possible victim of same disease)

The only roses that appear untouched are the neat striped rose that was here when we moved in and the thrice-accursed Knockout. I know I shouldn't hate Knockout. I mean, how perverse is it to resent a plant on the grounds that it is healthy, has an attractive form, and blooms constantly? Particularly as these are the same reasons I love roses like Mutabilis, Cramoisi, and Old Blush. But it's such a strident shade of pink, and the flower form is so bleh; and because it blooms so much, it feels somehow artificial. It's not a sincere rose, like those old-school Chinas that I love. Which is perfectly ridiculous and utterly Luddite, but there's nothing I can do about it. I don't like Knockout, and I don't think I ever will. Although in 6 months' time, it may be the only rose left in my garden.

In other News of the Weird...

The Ladybugs are Swarming
I didn't know ladybugs could swarm, but they're crawling all over the kitchen and study doors (perhaps they came to admire the new knob and bolt in stylish oil-rubbed bronze?). We also have some 2 or 3 dozen inside the doors, which conclusively answers the question, "Are my exterior doors weatherproof?" They're not even laydbugproof, so I guess fixing the weatherstripping and trim around our doors needs to go on my to-do list.

Many, many ladybugs inside the house

Hmmm... hadn't quite realized how this pic would show off the remaining tissue paper shades... A little shaming. The study is the last untamed room. Everything else had assumed some kind of order and has moved on from the tissue paper stage; the study is still a bit of a wilderness. I'll get to working on that... sooner or later.