Leaky Gutters

The gutter above the front porch has been leaking for as long as we've lived in the house. It causes the flower garden to get soaked whenever it rains, and I think it's causing some of the wood on the porch to rot from the dampness.

I'd like to replace the gutter when the weather is warmer and dryer, but this past weekend was so warm, I decided to temporarily patch the hole until the weather was more cooperative for the bigger replacement job.

I had actually tried to fix it last weekend when it was somewhat warm outside (5°C), but when I got to the balcony to which the gutter was attached, I found it was filled with ice:


Luckily, by this weekend, it was a balmy 14°C and the ice had all melted, so I could get to work!


The gutter was full of decomposed leaves, which was probably making it rust, causing the hole.

So, using a garden trowel, I scooped out all the rotten leaves, then took the hose up there and sprayed the gutter clean. In the process, I found several other holes!   :-(


You can sort of see the water leaking out of the gutter in this picture:


As the gutters dried, I cut a bunch of sheet metal pieces for patching the holes using these tools:




Then, I brought out the ladder, climbed up, and started sticking the pieces into the gutter using silicone adhesive. You can see a bit of blue sky peeking through the leftmost hole (before being patched) from the underside of the gutter:



While I was patching, I found even more small holes and cracks adjacent to the big holes. I ran out of sheet metal, so I just smeared adhesive on top of all of those openings.

Here's how the end result looks:


It rained the night after I did the patching, so I don't know if the adhesive had enough time to cure. I'll have to wait until the next big rain storm to test my work.



At least I hope it's good enough to divert some of the water away from the flower garden and porch. I was concerned that my flower bulbs may have rotted because of all the water from the leaky gutter, but I was happy to discover the little buds pushing through the soil while I was doing my gutter patching:

Looking forward and looking back

Working with younger people who ask lots of questions about your career (in an attempt to foresee their own career paths) can make you more introspective.

One young person, bored with his current assignment at work, asked me what motivated me. I told him that over the years, much of the work I had done seemed pretty much like a variation on the same theme, so it wasn't the tasks that motivated me (I've never been very keen on programming anyway), but instead, it was the desire to do a good job that provided motivation. I don't think he liked that answer because it didn't give him what he needed to keep at his assignment. He's on a different project now!

However, he got me thinking about the last time I really looked forward to something on a day-to-day basis. The one thing that really stood out was music class and band practice in high school. That was a really long time ago (more than 15 years now).

I miss having something like that in my life and I miss making music, but I haven't been able to find something that can fill that hole, at least not yet. I'd like to get back into music, but I'm not sure in what form yet.

There are other things I look forward to, though, so life's not as hopeless and sad as I made it out to be! I look forward to working in the garden, I look forward to making changes to my house, and especially, I look forward to learning new things (not so much of programming-related things, though). I really enjoyed the home renovation course, and the Spanish classes I took a while ago.

I miss creating artwork too. I haven't been inspired to draw or paint in a long time. I don't know why. I used to draw all the time when I was a kid. I need to find that inspiration again.

Mini project - coat hooks

Since our home renovation course ended last week and Georges is out of town visiting his dad, today was the first Saturday that I didn't have anything to do at all, so I thought I'd take the opportunity to work on a mini home improvement project by myself.

We had a coat rack in the hallway that we'd bump into or get caught on occasionally, causing everything to come crashing down. I decided to replace it with a series of coat hooks.

I bought two kits, each containing coat hooks pre-mounted on a board with the necessary hardware to install it, so all I had to do was drill holes into the wall, hammer in the anchors, then screw the boards in. It sounds so simple and straight-forward, but of course it wasn't!

The problem was that the wall is made of plaster on brick. I bought a mortar drill bit (labelled as 1 in the photo) and drilled the holes just fine. The problem came when I tried to use the anchors that came with the kit. They had two stupid little wings on the sides (2), preventing the anchor from entering the hole and causing it to get all crushed when I tried to hammer it in (3). I tried a different anchor, but it was too small for the hole I had drilled, so it just fell out when I screwed the board into it. When I tried to remove one of the screws from the blue anchor, it broke (4)! So, I decided to give up on the screws from the kit and use totally different ones with slightly bigger anchors (5), which held on well.


BUT, the story does not end there...

Unfortunately, I used my drill to tighten the screws, so I couldn't feel when it was just tight enough, and I ended up cracking the plaster in one of the holes, and the whole board came loose. That resulted in me having to remove the board, drill new holes and reinstall the board. Luckily, the last set of holes I drilled worked and I finally got everything installed securely (by hand, using a screwdriver) without ruining the entire wall. There are a few holes that I'll have to fix, but that's for another time!

Here are the before and after photos:



And here's how the hallway looks with all the coats hung up (it actually looks kind of messy when you look at it head-on -- sigh!):



In total, the project cost me about $50 in materials, plus 2 hours of my time.

Overall, I'm happy with the end result and I'm considering installing one more row of hooks in the foyer!

Our Garden

In mid-November of last autumn, I moved the shrubs in front of the house into a new orientation and dug up a flower bed for spring and summer bulbs.


I planted several varieties of bulbs in groupings and layers, so I'm eager for spring to arrive so I can see how it all turns out. This is the first time that I've put some thought into the heights and bloom periods of the bulbs I've planted, so hopefully they won't look awkward and out of place while they're coming in or fading away.

I chose flower colours in purples, blues and creams. I hope they'll look nice against the red house. Here's a rough plan of the layout:


(1) 40 crocuses (cream, blue & purple), 4" tall, blooming Feb - Mar
(2) 24 tulips (cream), 14" tall, blooming Mar - Apr
(3) 12 tulips (purple with white edges), 22" tall, blooming Apr - May
(4) 10 alliums (purple), 30" tall, blooming May - July

The yews and euonymus are the shrubs.

It's already March now, and I don't see any sign of the crocuses. I hope they survived the winter and are just being a little lazy!

This week, I also started to germinate some seeds. I have always wanted to grow Astilbes, but I've never had any luck with them before. Has anyone successfully grown Astilbes from seed?


I put the seeds in soil in a plastic egg carton. The carton has two layers of cups, so I pulled one layer off to put on the bottom to catch excess water, poked holes in the other layer where the soil and seeds go, and kept the lid attached so it works like a greenhouse cover.

My brother gave me this little sprinkle spout that attaches to a regular water bottle. It creates a very gentle sprinkle of water that's perfect for watering those tiny seeds.



If the Astilbes successfully germinate, I'll probably plant them in the backyard. They're a little too tall for the front garden at 2' to 3'.

According to my layout above, I still have a bunch of empty spaces in the front garden that I'd like to fill with other perennials. I've flipped through a couple of mail-order plant catalogs, but I still can't decide what to get and in what colours.


If I stick with the purple-blues, I could go with variegated vinca (8" tall & forms a dense mat).

But I kind of want to introduce a different colour, like orange or yellow. So, I thought maybe oranges & lemons (18" tall)


or black eyed susans (not sure how tall these get), but maybe those colours are too strong.



Any suggestions on what kinds of plants I should fill the gaps with?

February's Project

Wanting to accomplish something before the month's end, I decided that Sunday, February 26th would be the day that we would work on the plumbing in the basement's laundry area. We went to Home Depot on Sunday afternoon and picked up a bunch of plumbing supplies (some of it we already had), amounting to almost $100.


The leaky old faucet was soldered to the water supply pipes. So we had to cut them to install the new faucet, which meant we'd have to do something to reconnect the faucet. BUT, we couldn't find the compression valves we wanted, which meant we'd have to solder most of our connections. We thought, "Yeah, sure, no problem! We can do it!" In retrospect, we were a little ambitious. However, without that blind ambition, we would not have had this enriching experience! ;-)


Here's Georges, after cutting the pipes. He installed the new faucet first so we could figure out what to do with the rest of the stuff hanging above. There was no going back at this point! So, we hacked away at the pipes, and tried to replace a bunch of stuff. After about 5 hours of working, we ended up completing the cold water connections and putting a cap on the hot water side because we couldn't properly solder the T-connection on that side, and we didn't buy any extra Ts. It was already late on a Sunday night, we were feeling a bit despondent about the whole project, and the hardware store was already closed, so we shut off the hot water (because the cap was leaky too!), and gave up for the night.


The next morning, we discovered that our cold water connections had sprung a leak (yay!), but by the size of the puddle, we knew it had only started leaking (thank goodness!). Since we had to go to work, we each took turns showering while the other stood guard of the leaky pipes to make sure nothing burst, then shut off the water and went to work.

During the day, Georges consulted his co-workers who told him the leaky cold water joint could be resoldered. There was some hope after all!

At the end of the work day, we went straight to the hardware store and bought a bunch of extra plumbing supplies, and a couple of expensive compression valves, just in case (dropping another $80 in the process). We tried to solder a connector to the hot water pipes to extend the length (after cutting off the cap), but it kept leaking. We tried at least three times with three different connectors, but had no success. After yet another 4 or so hours, we finally gave up and installed one of the expensive compression valves, which worked pretty much right away. That's why our hot water supply has TWO shut off valves. It looks non-sensical, but it works!


Finally, we connected the flexible hose to the faucet, and the laundry hoses to the laundry valves. Everything worked and didn't leak. It has been two days now and everything is still dry where it's supposed to be dry. Yippee!

Here are the lessons we learned:

1. Don't start a plumbing project on a Sunday afternoon. Start on a Saturday morning, so you have the whole weekend to rescue the mess you'll make.

2. Do the dishes before you start, in case you have to keep the water shut off for longer than you expected. Our sink was full of dirty dishes by the end of the second day.

3. Do the laundry and take a shower if you need to, BEFORE you start your plumbing project.

4. Plan out what you're going to do before you start. Make all the measurements and make sure you can find the parts you need. Draw it on paper.

5. Buy lots of extra joints, connectors, and caps! And extra copper pipe, solder, flux, propane tank, etc...

6. Be prepared to redo things, unless you're a master solderer.

7. Your initial estimate for the length of the project will be wrong. Multiply that number by about 3 or 4!

8. You can fix a leaky joint by reapplying flux around the leaky joint, reheating the area with a torch, and adding more solder.

9. We are not very good plumbers, just mediocre plumbers, but we are learning!