Tag: projects

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Journal

Christmas Project

doll house front view
December project for my granddaughter

My daughter’s dollhouse rebuilt

I was quite  busy in the weeks before Christmas.  Four days in the hospital for tests for heart arrhythmia didn’t help.  But enough about that.  This post is about the very grandfatherly project that consumed my last week before Christmas.  Of course, my birthday is that week too.   Many years ago-likely in the early eighties- I had made Keely a dollhouse for Christmas.  Well, we had preserved it in  attics for decades and Keely decided that this was a great year to rebuild it for Annabelle.   So I did.   

 

Outside redo

I repainted the outside and added the acrylic windows with trim.  I made new pillars and added the walkway.  The ground trim and trees were Keely’s idea.  I removed the old red plastic roof and installed the individual cedar shakes – about 1200 of them.   

The Inside

doll house rear view after Keely and Annabelle filled it
Annabelle’s Christmas doll house

I also removed the felt that imitated loud 70’s era shag rugs and installed modern floor imitations that Keely provided.    Keely bought the furniture you see and she and Annabelle filled up the empty rooms.   The one piece of furniture left from Keely’s childhood (JoAnne had saved the original dollhouse contents) is the homemade brown wooden bed in the upper left bedroom.   

Grandpa’s reward

For Annabelle, this is totally the year of the unicorn.  But this Christmas present even got her off topic.  She was fascinated.  Of course, she has no idea how much work went into it.  But it is enough to to know she enjoys it and it has a prominent spot in her bedroom.   I think Keely was glad too.   

 

Categories
Church Leadership Journal Joy Notes

Rose Arbor Project Completed

JoAnne has always wanted a rose arbor
JoAnne has always wanted a rose arbor

 

 

When I was a boy there was a white rose arbor in our side lawn. Pictures were often taken there. It marked the entrance to one of the flower gardens on our rural farm property. When my wife was a girl, she often spent summers at her Grandparents’ house. The entrance to the sidewalk was a white rose arbor with a gate. She has always wanted a rose arbor.

The opportunity did not present itself in either of our previous pastorates. Neither property had a spot that was conducive. But when we moved to West Granby, there was a fenced in area with a broken-down gate which needed to be replaced. Being a gardener, I immediately thought, “What a great place for a small garden and a rose arbor!” I no longer want a big garden anyway. I just want to grow a few strawberries and some cucumbers so we can make pickles. And I needed to replace that gate with something that looked better. A rose arbor would be perfect here. A friend said it looks very “New-England.”

First I needed to knock down the poison ivy which you can see growing on the fence in picture two. Fortunately, I am only very mildly allergic, which helps as the ivy keeps coming back and I am not bothered as I fight it. They I began planting roses where I thought the rose arbor would be as I knew it would take a couple years for them to really become established. One was a a transplant from Keely and Mark’s as it was in a place they did not want it. Others I ordered. If you look closely, you can see that I timed it well because by this fall, I had one rose cane growing over the top of the arbor. There are several colors and one white.

I wanted to make the structure durable so it is all made of treated lumber. Some of it is donated re-purposed decking. Eventually I hope to stain it all white and add a gate. The design underwent a few changes as it was being built as JoAnne and I looked at it and decided what looked best. I have worked on it little by little for a couple years, collecting and buying materials and cutting pieces. Then this summer, I knew it needed to come together.

Already it has become a photo spot as you can see from the photo I included. This is us posing in the Victorian costumes we wore to celebrate Copper Hill Church’s 200th Anniversary.

Rose Arbor completed
The old gate with poison ivy on the fence (2013)
Rose Arbor is the new entrance to the enclosed garden area
Rose Arbors are a great photo op

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Categories
Journal Joy Notes

One small drainage project

Picture 1
Picture 2
looking north -- completed improvements

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Lots of projects

One of the facts about our new parsonage home is that there were lots of small or not so small projects to be done.    The house had been continuously occupied but …     Fortunately, I enjoy DIY (do it yourself) projects and so I have been tackling them.  That’s the main reason why I haven’t been writing much on my blog lately.  I probably shouldn’t take time to write today, but I decided to anyway.

Brush had to be cleared first

One of the projects involved the drainage at the east end of the house.  When we arrived, this end was completely enshrouded with brush so tall that it cascaded onto the roof of the single story rear addition to our cape house.    The Northeast corner had sumac, ash, raspberry, forsythia and poison ivy mixed together to a height of sixteen or twenty feet (see picture one).  The Southeast corner was simply a thicket of forsythia.   You can see in picture one which shows the area of north east corner that the house is barely visible. Under all this is a rock wall partway up the wall of the rear addition.  It appears to be without mortar.  The top of this wall is visible in picture two. Inside the house, there was a small bit of mold on the inside bottom of the east wall that I was trying to eliminate.    

The first step was to remove the brush.  Using a saw, mattock and electric hedge trimmers borrowed from my son-in-law, I went after it.   I have to pace myself on such physical projects but after several partial days of hard work over a period of a couple weeks, the path that you see in picture two emerged, along with a huge brush pile in my north lawn.   (This was my second north lawn brush pile actually as the first one had been created when I cleared brush from the north wall and improved drainage there.)  These projects are probably partly the cause of a good increase in my physical conditioning too.

Improving the drainage

Once the path was open, I could see that some of the water running down the slope above our house on the East side was going into the rock wall instead of around it.  So I began to dig the trench that you see partially completed in picture two.   I also added rock to the wall to help keep the dirt and water away from the house.   While picture two looks south and shows the trench partially done, picture three shows the finished new trench and is taken looking north. 

Every little bit helps

As with many little DIY projects the effect is cumulative.  When we arrived, during hard rains, water cascaded into the basement from two sides and dribbled in other places.  The roofers eliminated the first basement waterfalls by adding a new eave trough and new downspouts by the dining room windows on the south.  I corrected the second worst one by rerouting the water on the north side.  Now after this third drainage project I went into the basement one day and was very gratified with the difference we had achieved.  It was so much dryer than it had been all summer!   One small project at a time makes a big difference.   

 

Categories
Church Leadership Forward Look

Plans continue for Community Wesleyan Extreme Makeover 50th Anniversary projects

Tonight the Local Board of Administration (LBA) at its regular monthly meeting voted unanimously to recommend to the upcoming semiannual church conference that our church undertake an Extreme Makeover project as a part of our 50th anniversary celebration.  Such unanimity on such an important item is a sign of blessing.  We are already well on our way toward our first 50th anniversary goal of 50 4 50—that is 50 outreach and service ministries accomplished in the 30 months prior to our 50th anniversary at Easter 2012.   Now we would like to add to that a goal of updating our facilities in crucial ways to be ready for the next decades of the new millennium.  The four sub-projects chosen by the board to be recommended to be included in the overall Extreme Makeover project are as follows:

  1. Finish the kitchen makeover project
  2. New carpet for the sanctuary & adjacent rooms (possibly including some small alterations to the vestibule and platform)
  3. Improvements to sanctuary lighting
  4. Repaving the entrance driveway and paving the unpaved section of the parking lot including a new area in the back extending behind the pole to give added space.

The recommended idea is that these projects would be completed in this order as the money is raised.  While the last one might not be finished before the anniversary, the idea is that it will be made possible by this Extreme Makeover project.   The board has had sub-committees working on each project for some months.

I am personally very excited about this Extreme Makeover combined project.  We will be discussing it at our semi-annual meeting but do not plan to make final decisions then, but rather at a later special conference.   I believe that just as we are already seeing with the kitchen makeover, the other projects also will enable ministry excellence for years to come.