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for want of a level and a chisel
Saturday, September 29 2018
After Saturday morning coffee, I loaded up the Prius with every conceivable tool and drove out to the Brewster Street house to make more repairs on the steps up to the front porch. Among the things I brought were 160 pounds of dry concrete, pieces of bluestone, and several different powertools. The day was cool and sunny, perfect conditions for doing this sort of work.
I soon realized that concrete was not really going to help this porch. It was going to be impossible to dig and poor a deep enough foundation to get below the frost line, and frost heave wasn't going to be as much of an issue in any case given how sandy and well-drained the soil was. It made more sense to just replace the rail posts (also called "newel posts") with the new ones I'd bought and raise up the bottom of the steps so they wouldn't all tilt so much towards the street. The old posts were badly rotten in all the places where they attached to the steps, though the steps' stringers (the notched sides on which the treads attach) all seemed sound, suggesting they (unlike the old posts) were made of treated wood. I used the battery-powered reciprocating saw to remove the old posts, which wasn't too difficult. But I ran into problems with the new posts not quite fitting the slots made to accommodate the old posts. I can (and did) make a plunge cut with a reciprocating saw, but it all would've been easier had I remembered to bring a chisel. The saw's battery was soon exhausted, and I ended up having to do some whittling with a swiss army knife (both cars are equipped with those).
The other tool I wished I'd brought was a level so that I could make the rail posts plumb. Lacking that, I used the porch posts of the adjacent house to eyeball the posts' plumbness as I set them in place. That is actually a fairly accurate method, so long as the reference posts are actually plumb. And if they aren't, it's just as well that the neighbors' posts match them.
It turned out that the most time-consuming subtask of this repair was painting the new posts, which I did in a glossy white. When I was done, it was actually kind of hard to tell that anything had changed at all.
I went out of my way on the way home to swing by Home Depot so I could buy nice wire (to conclusively fix the torn wiring of the Subaru oxygen sensor) and long zip ties (to help with the repair of the rubber CV boot). I had so much time remaining after that (before Gretchen needed the Prius) that I also visited the Tibetan Center, which, on this day, was unusually crowded with thrifters. I found nothing there that I wanted to buy.
Back at the house, I reported on the porch fix to Gretchen. That was good news, though there was also some bad news. It turns out that the woman who lives at Brewster Street hasn't been paying her water bill, and it is now over $1000. There's always something with that lady; she'd been so bad at paying her rent on time that we made her choose between getting kicked out or setting up an automatic payment plan with the bank.
Late this afternoon, Gretchen showed the 1L apartment to a number of prospective tenants. One of these had a four-year-old kid, and Gretchen was unsure whether this should be a deal breaker. I considered this for a moment and suggested that she let the tenant on the second floor (the only apartment adjoining 1L) make that decision. Gretchen thought that was an excellent idea.
This evening, Gretchen and I dined at La Florentina, having what we also eat there: soup, bread, and cabbage sformato with tahini sauce (aka "purple pie"). Normally Gretchen would've gotten the salad, but the cool weather had her wanting soup. The soup had a fair amount of squash in it, and Gretchen does not like squash, so I ended up eating all of that from both soups. I didn't think I liked squash all that much, but when it tastes like minestrone it's good!
We also shared a half litre of house merlot. Gretchen noted at some point that the way we dine out in the Hudson Valley is that we go to specific restaurants for specific dishes, and that it's only at the Garden Café where we might have any choice. This is largely a function of the fact that the Garden is the only vegan restaurant we patronize (with the exception of that one burger place in Red Hook). But the truth of the matter is that I too only eat one of two different things at the Garden: the burrito or the panini and (sometimes, if it's to my liking) the soup.
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