The week of housework

I'm behind enough on housework that I've decided to take every¹ evening this week and spend each doing some sort of manly around-the-house thing. I thought of this yesterday, and it still seems like a good idea. So that's a good sign.

On Sunday I removed all of the ivy from around our bigass tree. You can see the results in the picture at right; compare this to the "before" picture—which was taken long enough ago that the ivy had grown another 20% along the ground.

It turns out that underneath that huge mat of leaves was actually a decent layer of mulch, a bunch of 2x4s arranged in a ring around the tree, and this little guy.

This ivy is nasty nasty stuff and took a ton of digging and chopping to remove. In fact, I still haven't removed it all from the yard, because it's supposedly illegal in Washington to throw this particular variety of ivy into the compost bin along with the rest of your yard waste. So sometime soon I have to bag it all and take it to the dump. Which will cost me $15.

On Monday (that's today for all you video game players) I finished rehanging a bunch of doors in the house. These doors were originally hung with hideous brass hinges, which wouldn't bother me enough to replace them, except that whoever hung the doors had stripped out the wood, the screw, or simply omitted fasteners for lots of hinges. The bottom hinge on my garage door, for example, had only one screw holding it to the door, and one screw holding it to the jamb—and the jamb screw was loose.

So I've been replacing these hinges for a while, and the combination of new hanging angles and local increased moisture (cached) means that a bunch of them don't close correctly anymore.

I started out with a palm sander but, after determining that it's really the wrong tool, switch to a hand rasp/plane thing that I usually use for trimming down bondo.

That worked nicely, so now I've got doors that actually, you know, close.

¹ With a break on Wednesday, because some huge nerd Mouser will be in town.