Ride Home

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This video is taken inside the Delaware Seashore State Park on the thin stretch of land between Dewey Beach and Bethany Beach Delaware. The body of water in the background is Rehoboth bay.

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Drains to Bay

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New Beginnings

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I did some work on an 18 year old house over the weekend. The owners, A and S recently purchased the place and have been working very hard to move in on New Year’s Eve. I was happy to be asked to help because New Year’s is a time for new beginnings.

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My wife’s family is of Russian descent. They reside in a small town in Lithuania near the border of Latvia called Visaginas. The town was built to house workers for the giant Ignalina Nuclear Reactor which supplies power to much of the surrounding Baltic’s. The residents come from all over the former Soviet Union. The unofficial language of Visaginas is Russian as that was the common tongue amongst those chosen to work at and on the plant. You hear it on the streets which like the buildings have begun to literally crumble. The concrete that was used was not of good enough quality to withstand the sub zero Lithuanian winters. Add this to the rigorous schedule for getting the town up and running and you have plenty of opportunities to cut corners. I am told a much higher standard was applied to the construction of the power plant.

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Ignalina was built in the seventies when the massive footprint of the Soviet Union included countries, or republics, that were developing at an incredible rate. Like parents with a lot of mouths to feed Moscow had initiated the construction of Ignalina and Chernobyl at about the same time. In fact they are of a strikingly similar design. So much so that as a stipulation of Lithuania joining the European Union Ignalina must be closed. The Lithuanian government protested vehemently, citing the vast amounts of money it had spent since the Chernobyl accident to make Ignalina safe. But public mistrust towards anything which evokes the ghost of Chernobyl is understandably high and the Lithuanians government’s cries have fallen on deaf ears. Thus the Ignalina plant is slowly shutting down.

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My father in law, a plant electrician, has already taken early retirement and next year my mother in law will follow suit. They do not know exactly what the future holds. They, like the “town of the future” they helped to create, are being left behind in the woods of Lithuania with failing infrastructure and two giant cooling reactors. This New Years Eve they will put on a brand new set of cloths around one hour before midnight and meet the New Year wearing a new outfit. Like my clients who will meet the new year in their new home they are hopeful of a new beginning and that is a holiday spirit I can really get caught up in.

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Nipping at your nose

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Season's Greetings

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Ringing in the New Year

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Several months back our family made the decision to discontinue traditional telephone service and rely strictly on our cell phones for outside communication. The switch has been mostly comfortable except for the absence of a telephone answering system whose flashing light had become a beacon I watched out for to let me know I had missed a call. Holding onto my habits I have a wooden cradle I place the cell phone in when I am home but I cannot get into the habit of picking the phone up periodically to see if I have missed a call when I was out of earshot. Now, I know the idea with a cell phone is to keep the blessed thing with you most of the time but that seems a bit ridiculous to me. I am obviously a man caught in a generational tug of war with a piece of technology which is both a welcome addition to everyday life and an obstacle to the Zen attained when one is out of touch and alone with one’s thoughts.
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I have observed younger people who find it perfectly natural to be reachable at any given moment. I have seen them ignore the lure of their ringing phone when engaged in an activity they deem to be more important. I think one way they do this is by using their phones for communication that is mostly of low importance. In this way the ringing phone becomes absolutely ignorable because there is a very good chance that the call being missed would not be about anything earth shattering to begin with. In short they have lowered the importance level of communicating simply by staying so closely in touch.
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On the other end of the spectrum is my step grandmother whose landline home phone is still reachable by punching the same 7 numbers as when I was 7 years old. As for me, I think I just figured out how to have the cell phone beep every fifteen minutes after someone leaves a message.
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Problem Solved?
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Stop, Look, A Lesson - Part 9

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The road twists into shadow

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The overall title of this series, “Stop, Look: A lesson” is meant as a reminder to myself to observe what is in front of me and to deduce, by what I see, what is going on below the surface. If I had really had my thinking cap on it probably would have been obvious that a poor job of flashing on the windows would mean other important intersections would also be insufficiently flashed. I admit freely that I was wholly unprepared for what we found at the connection where the roof meets the wall just above one of the dual front doors.

Remember, this house is seven years old.
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This area was attended to in just the nick of time. We had originally told Mrs H that she could probably afford to wait a year or so before doing the job. She, like everyone else, was worried about the financial situation in the country but ultimately decided to go with the re-siding this year. It can clearly be seen she made the right choice. Tackling this corner would have been a much more expensive proposition had the rot gotten deeper into the framing.

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On writing it down, business plans and leaps of faith

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I am a documentarian by nature. When I first started working on the schoolhouse, way back when, I had a set of journals which served very much the same purpose as this blog. It was written documentation of how I was doing and my frame of mind in a very specific time. And it was a mirror for me to see what I was learning first hand.
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Yesterday, my wife and I took a trip to Washington DC to see her sister who has been working in America but is about to go home to Lithuania. On top of this huge shift of gears, she is engaged to be married in 9 months so I asked her”How does it feel to be starting your new life again”. She smiled, raised an eyebrow and repeated “again" adding a nod of affirmation. With so much happening so fast for her the changes must be entirerly traceable. Just six months ago she was arriving here to work in the nation’s capital for an internship straight out of business school in Vilnius, Lithuania. I don’t know K well enough to say how she will process this new chapter of her life but I have always felt healthiest when I was writing things down.
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One of the many changes this blog is documenting is the expansion of my carpentry business into something more. For some time now I have known that I wanted to widen the scope of the services I offered. One service I am committed to adding is home inspection. Another is property management. The term “home services” is an accurate one to describe the type of relationship I am looking to forge with clients and the buildings they partner with. I want to be able to provide services for the home or small business which range from helping a client in their search for one, to getting to know a building well enough that I can assist them in making important decisions regarding it. Decisions that, once made, I could help carry out; either as project manager or by doing the work myself. I am very interested in the concept of taking a clients property personally in this way. In fact, the whole idea feels perfectly natural.
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DC in a Day

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Stop, Look, A Lesson - Part 8

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Show me the money wall

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The South facing wall, just under the large circle top window, was the location of the one visible leak that Mrs. H new about. Finding rot beneath the trim in this area had been one of the deciding factors for our undertaking the re-siding. We expected to find something here and groaned unequivocally as we assessed the damage.

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.A sight for sore eyes.

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Stop, Look, A Lesson - Part 7

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Path of Water

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As the siding came off we began finding water damage which was far more widespread than we had imagined. Pictured is a return where roof meets wall. What fascinates me is how the water stains accurately portray the paths found by water to infiltrate the siding. Through these stains we can tell just how much water got in and we can estimate just how much longer the oriented strand board would have kept it from invading the inner structure. Soon we would find places where the sheathing completely failed.

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Discover Delaware: Bugs

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