Cold Rain

This week was accentuated with a lot of cold rain. But work continued.

Ben shingling the north wall of our bedroom.

José and José doing our front steps.

Ben’s moved to the north side of the house.

Interior trim!  This looks really good both the design from Murphy & Co and the quality detailed installation by Matt. This is from the lower level rec room looking towards the changing room. BTW, Murphy has a new website that’s worth checking out.

Our neighbors have their docks out.

Trim in the mechanical room.

Looking out the window from my Sweeties closet.

Two great books on landscaping near shorelines. We’ve had a lot of problems in Minnesota, particularly on lakes within metro areas, of shoreline landscaping that harms the water quality of our lakes. For example, grass anywhere within about 20′-40’ can be harmful, especially if it is ever fertilized. The ideal is a 20’ buffer of lake friendly (I would say native but there are some non-native plants that work well) plants and topography that prevents runoff in to the lake. Also lots of connections here. Samuel Geer and I write for the same blog, Scott from Topo is friends with Michael Keenan, and Paul Radomski has published some of my photos on his blog.

Bob Notes!

Cleaning up our gardens at home for the last time.

Since we ride bicycles for a lot of our local transportation we’ll need a ramp on a portion of our front steps to get bikes in and out of our garage. This drawing was for a discussion of if the ramp should be at the tops (solid red line) or bottoms (dashed red line) of the steps. One good option for some situations is to have the ramp slightly below the tops and then chamfer the steps to the ramp. Another bit of ramp design is ground clearance, especially for Bakfiets that have a longer wheelbase, so that they don’t bottom out at the top.

Brett Anderson and his crew from Anderson Dock & Lift Services came on Monday to pull our dock out. It was cold and rainy but they did it anyway. After some significant problems with the company we used prior it has been great to work with Brett.

I needed to be around in case Brett had any questions so I set up office in the guest bedroom.

Carpet that we’d planned for the loft. Budget concerns have unfortunately eliminated it.

Attached garage taped.

Back beveling trim.

The guys from Krause Electric terminated the lighting circuits to the dimmer panel and hot-wired several of them so that there is more temporary light throughout the house. It’s getting light later, darker earlier and during the day it’s not as light as it was just a month ago.

Floor of the lower level shower one small stone at a time.

The guys from Topo LLC began work on the front walk. The base is crushed granite which makes a good solid base and is not popular with ants so no little mounds of sand all over the walkway. The string is at the level the pavers should be when finished, the board laying across there is the thickness of the bricks, and the pipes are for running the board across. When the board runs across the pipes and just barely touches the string then they know they’ve got the base at the right height. Once that’s done they remove the pipes, fill that with crushed granite and lay the pavers.

Guys from Topo ripping out some of what they did last week. This corner is proving difficult to do up to Scott’s (Topo head dude) standards.