More Projects

Crew wired up the "garage" and because it was so hot outside at the time, he didn't want to crawl around in the attic, so for now we are using the electricity from the back porch to light the building.  He also had built the workbenches and shelving units and had started putting all of the garage stuff from the back porch up in an organized manor so that we could actually find things we needed.

Crew working in the "garage"

When the temperature is 100, and the humidity is high, even with the insulation the "garage" is super hot to try and do anything in.  We tried blocking the attic area with pieces of foam insulation, but with no windows there is no ventilation really.  We hope to put a couple of windows in it one of these days.

One of my projects was to re screen the back porch.  The back porch is 12 feet deep and the screened section is 25 feet long.  First I had to try and power wash the porch, it was framed with pressure treated wood, but there was actually moss growing all over it.  Our cats like to be outside and we wanted to be able to let them out there, and right at that moment there were a lot of holes they could escape out of...and a lot of trash and old building materials.  We had not found a trash service and Crew had been burning some trash, but a lot could not be burned.  

The screened porch before being redone

We had to hire someone to haul all the old flooring and remodeling trash off for us, someone had also dropped off a lot of trash on the back porch.  After all of the Junk was gone I got to work on the porch. We tried to use materials we already had so I ended up screening the front part more than once.  For the bottom section of the porch I used sunshade fabric, I had it hanging on the gazebo at the Dallas house like curtains.  The top section I used regular black screening that I had gotten to cover my plants so that birds would not eat my raspberries and blackberries.  First I had to remove the old screen, the wood lattice and fifty million nails and staples.  I pressure washed the wood, but it looked bad still so I used bleach water and a scrub brush and a lot of elbow grease and cleaned the wood until it was practically white.  Too bad I had to re screen this section again...but I got a lot of practice after Kensie tore holes through the top screen in pretty much every section.  I re screened the top with pet screen the second time...no breakthroughs yet, so the moral to the story is, if you have a dog that jumps...and a screened porch, make the investment for pet screen so you don't have to redo yours a second time!