Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Last year we stocked up to prepare for a 3-4 day emergency so we’d still have food, water, etc. Those kits rapidly expire so we needed a way to stay on top of it. Today was the First Bi-Annual Survival Sunday. Here’s our current list of activities for these Survival Sundays:

• Pour stored gas into vehicles and buy new. Add fuel stabilizer to gas cans.
• Fill propane
• Check food stores. Eat anything that’s going bad in the next 12 months. Replace.
• Check water rations. Replace as needed.
• Go through survival kit checking expiration dates on medicine, charges on batteries, etc.
• Start up the generator and test it.
• Check ammo supplies
• Check expiration date on fire alarms and test alarm system
• Check car first aid kits for expiration dates
• Check fire extinguishers

Aside form getting a little too rambunctious with the smoke for the alarm test (our alarm kept going off), the day was a success. It’s probably totally unnecessary, but who knows, maybe we’ll be glad we did it some day. Given how often we’ve lost power in the last 12 months, some of this will probably come in handy. Bundling all this work into a single afternoon makes it a little less daunting than spreading it out over the year and forgetting everything.

The driveway/parking lot at church is part gravel and part blacktop. Our friendly neighborhood rapscallions enjoy flying around the gravel circle and throwing gravel everywhere. Over time that has led to some big ruts and potholes that collect puddles and make mud. With wet weather on the horizon, it was time to do some repairs.

I ordered 12 yards of 5/8″ minus from Pacific Topsoil and had that delivered on Friday. On Saturday, Logan and I rented a small loader backhoe tractor to spread it around. It was the first time I’ve towed anything with my truck and it was awesome! The rental website claims that this was a 6000 pound trailer and tractor combo.

Neither Logan nor I knew the best way to spread the gravel around but we figured it out as we went. By the end we had a good method going. Hopefully the parts we did at the beginning hold up ok too.

Tyla brought Elijah to church near the end of the project and he loved moving the gravel and driving the tractor. He also thought it was pretty cool that the truck was towing a trailer. He had to ride with me to pull the tractor back to Home Depot.

Being a trustee at church is a lot of extra time and work, but days like today are fun!

We had two small cherry trees along our very short driveway. The blossoms looked beautiful in the spring but the trees were ugly the rest of the year. They were pruned very oddly and were starting to die off. The one closer to the house had a crazy root structure with a number of very large roots partially above the surface. It was time for them to go before they died more and started dropping branches.

Logan was kind enough to help me out with the whole process. We made quick work of them with a chainsaw and manual branch cutters. As we cut them up, I was amazed at how many of the branches were totally dead. Taking it down was a good decision. We each took a load of the branches to Pacific Topsoil and we were done with that part.

Then there were the stumps. Oh yeah. When I was planning this project, I figured we would just dig them out and maybe use the truck to help pull them out. A little digging revealed that would be a huge project and i was also nervous about the water, gas, communication and irrigation lines that run up that strip of property. Brute force didn’t seem like a good approach so we rented a stump grinder instead.

The first stump was very quick but the second one took us about two and a half hours because of the big network of large roots near the surface. We made a mountain of wood chips but we got it all done. Now I just have to feed those chips into my yard waste bin over the next week or two if I can’t find a use for them.

This fall we will be planting at least one new tree in that spot and then next spring I think we’ll make some planter boxes to start a small garden. It will be tiny compared to our neighbors beautiful garden, but it will still be delicious.

Logan, thanks for helping so much with this project!

We have two skylights in our house. One faces is over the stairs and the other is in the master bathroom. The extra light is nice, but the one over the stairs faces south, and, on a hot day, it turns the top of the stairs into an oven. Even with our AC running and the fan circulating air 24/7, upstairs will be 6-7 degrees warmer than downstairs.

I looked into adding a shade to the interior of the window but that looked like it was going to be pretty pricey. And since the skylight is so far overhead, the pole contraption would be pretty long and we’d have to store it somewhere.

I stumbled across skylightsolarshades.com. I was wary of the site because it just feels like a bit of a scam site, but I finally decided to just go for it. I crawled up on the roof and carefully measured out the dimensions of my skylight. It required a custom order, but the total with shipping was under $100.

It arrived a few weeks later and the installation took only a few minutes. It stretches to fit over the skylight and is held on with friction. So far it hasn’t blown off and I think it would take a lot for that to happen.

Our model blocks 90% of the light coming through and wow does it make a difference! The top of the stairs is now the same temperature as everywhere else upstairs. We had a couple warm, sunny days and with the air conditioner running, it was only 3-4 degrees warmer upstairs instead of the previous 6-7. That seems like a huge impact for a $100 purchase so I want to see some more data on hot days, but so far, the results are very promising.

We’ll take it off at the end of summer to benefit from the free heat that we get from the sun in the winter (though there’s not a lot of sun in the winter around here anyway.)

I’ve written a few posts in the past about our security camera setup. It continues to work very well, but as the years have gone on, I’ve been itching to upgrade our 480p cameras to the new 1080p models. When Tyla asked to put a camera in Elijah’s room, I took that as a request for me to upgrade to a new camera.

I moved a camera from our front door into his room and bought a new 1080p Foscam model for the front door. I think I paid about $70/camera when I bought the old ones and this new one was under $100. Prices have really come down for the higher end models. The difference is incredible. Not only is the picture more crisp but the field of view is much wider and perfectly fits the installation spot on the front door. Below you can see a comparison between the old and the new. Click on the pictures to see them in full size and really compare the difference.

The only problem I have now is wanting to get more of them to replace the rest of the old cameras we have around!

Elijah’s room gets a lot of sun. It faces the south and has a bay window that extends out past the wall of the house. This is a nice feature except that his room gets extra hot. It can easily be 5 degrees warmer than our room right across the hall. We have the pull-down, solid shades but a lot of light still gets in around the edges.

To try and help with this and also to help make it darker at bedtime, I came up with a quick project to block more light. I purchased painters drop cloths and a grommet kit from Home Depot. I cut the cloth to be about 3″ wider and taller than each window and then inserted some grommets around each piece. I put nails into the wall around the window where each grommet was and voila, we have an easy way to quickly add additional covers over the windows. You can’t see it from the outside because the normal shade hides it and you can’t see it from the inside when the curtains are pulled.

It was a very cheap solution and it’s easy to store. The only problem is that my material isn’t as solid as I thought it would be. Light still shines through. We’ll see how it helps with the heat but I might try this again with some actual light blocking fabric.