Still Fixing, Upping & Shingling

and knitting!

It's been at least a month now that we've been working on the Little House and we're still fixing, upping & shingling. I suspect it's gonna be a couple more months before the house is ready for a renter, but we will see how it goes. There's so much to do and be done that I've not even bothered to make lists. It would be way too depressing to make a 'to do' list.

This was the beginning point of the shingle project. The whole idea was to make it easier to get the outside of the little house neat and tidy. It had a whole lot of issues which would have made painting it problematic. There were changes in the types of siding, there were various holes from previous wiring, plumbing, etc., there were various holes from assorted damage, etc. It would seem being able to cover them all up with shingles would make the whole project easier? No real prep work other than prepainting the trim.

This is about three days worth of shingling work, maybe more. I don't work all that fast and there's only one of me, I suppose if there were a crew, this project would go a lot faster. Even an extra person to hand things up to whoever would be on the ladder would make things faster. But, oh wellos! It would be pretty boring for the ground guy to wait around and hand up shingles, I suppose.

At first, I thought the lower drip edge of the house would look nice in white. Kinda enhance the horizontal look of the 'racing stripes'. Technically, those 'racing stripes' are 'belly bands' and they're a structural component to the house, not just decorative trim. Well, they're also decorative trim, but their primary use is to hold the vertical tongue and groove 1" x 8" boards together that make up the walls. In Hawaii that type of wall is called 'single wall construction'. The entire wall is 3/4" thick since 1" x 8" boards are actually 3/4" x 7.5" when you measure them. When walls are made up of 2" x 4" studs (which are actually 1.5" x 3.5" when you measure them) with some sort of plywood on the outside and drywall or some sort of sheet material on the inside it's called 'double wall construction'. I don't think folks on the mainland use the term 'double wall' since almost all the walls over there are made that way. Unless they're brick or something else like that, but we have too many earthquakes to build many brick walls.

We got some brown paint for the plumbing as well as the posts under the house so the lower drip edge got painted brown, too. The white trim showed too much dirt although it did look nice in white.

In Hawaii, we don't have to worry about pipes freezing. Add that to the single wall construction - which doesn't have any handy hollow walls to hide pipes in - where are the pipes supposed to go? Obviously, outside the house and hung like jewelry on the side of the house. The electrical meter and the breaker panel are also hung on the outside of the house. Hawaii construction can be pretty odd, although, this is mostly the older houses. The newer construction is becoming more mainland-like.

This 'easy' way of making the exterior of the house look nice is taking a lot longer than planned. Once done, it should stay done, though. No maintenance of asphalt shingles. Our other house has shingles installed on the sides probably around 1952 and they're still in good shape. No need to paint anything other than the trim.

Posts are supposed to be set on some sort of metal plate or at least tarpaper under the ends. When they are set directly on concrete, the moister wicks up through the concrete and into the ends of the posts. Which, of course, then rots out the post.

This was part of the prep work to get ready to shingle and also to get the windows to shut properly. The front corner of the house was down by 3" so there was still a big gap when the windows were shut. It also needs to be done before the shingles are installed so they will lay flat after it's put back level.

Personally, I find a lot of amusement in using an automotive 'floor jack' to jack up the floor of the house. Not sure how many other folks would find that hilarious, though.

Hmm, well, this is a webpage and it's kinda a blog, so I suppose in this circumstance one would expect something different when discussing a 'new post' but in this case, it's an actual post. We had the 4"x 4" wood for the post, the metal Simpson fitting and the 2"x 4"s to make the 45 degree 'braces' so replacing the post didn't require a trip to the hardware store.

Usually, when doing the next part of the project we do a lot of thinking of the best way to do it, contemplate details, even write down lists of materials and drawings of how to do it. For some reason, this post project just happened almost instantaneously. I was trying to shut the window, it didn't shut properly because the window frame wasn't square. Put the level on the window sill and then the floor and figured it needed to come up by three inches. Got the automotive floor jack, a post, a metal fitting and about an hour and a half later, there was a replacement post. Still needed some paint, but other than that, it was done. Maybe we need less thinking and more doing?

Too bad we don't have underground electric along our road. Oh well, can't have everything, I suppose. I'm not even sure if underground utilities were all that common in the 50's? We did remove the scruffy tree which had been blocking the view. Still need to remove the stump, repair the stairway up from the little carport in front - not to be confused with the big carport/workshop not quite completed up in the back or the carport at the back of the little house where we've got the table saw set up. This newproperty has three carports! No driveway, but three carports. Very strange.

Rainy days have rainbows. Even when the rain is just a few passing showers out to sea, there's still the occasional little rainbow.

Well, food sorta falls from the sky, we have to go at it with a machete for a bit before it does, but there's all kinds of food from the new property.

This type of banana won't be found in a mainland grocery store. It's a local banana which is sort of most likely a mix of several varieties. There's about fifty named variety of bananas around here. About twenty years ago, I think the Bluefield was the typical mainland grocery store type banana. Then there was some sort of South American banana blight and I think they switched over to Gros Michael or some other type. I don't really track banana types much, usually I just eat them.

I do like the Chinese Dwarf banana and have one or two of those growing at the other house. Chinese Dwarf is a short banana plant of less than about twelve feet tall with huge stalks of bananas produced by it. Sometimes the bananas will be so heavy the plant falls over.

Bananas are a strange plant, they're not really a tree at all. They send up a stalk from an underground rhizome which makes fruit and after fruiting, that particular stalk will die off. In the meantime, several other stalks will be starting up from the rhizome. We call the young starts 'banana keiki' and they can be cut off from the parent plant/rhizome and transplanted into a new place where they will proceed to become a new banana patch.

So the banana plants on the new property are some sort of mutt banana, not a particular named variety, but they're still pretty tasty. They are sweet, not mealy at all and are about half the size of a mainland grocery store banana. They don't have the taste of the local 'apple' bananas, that's sweet but has a bit of tang to it. Frequently when you find bananas of this size, they are the apple variety. But for eating out of hand, slicing into cereal, freezing for smoothies, banana bread, banana pancakes, bananas in Jell-o, whatevers, these are pretty useful bananas. And they fall out of the sky without us having to do much other than go collect them.

This is the stalk hanging up to continue to ripen. We've already taken the ripe bananas off, that was the pile of bananas in the earlier picture.

The new property has all kinds of fruit trees on it. Avocado, bananas, guava, lychee, coffee have all been found so far. Currently, we seem to be in avocado season. Hmm, I should plant some pineapples, too. And some citrus trees.

There's a whole tree full of avocado, they're falling into the underbrush and we don't even find most of them. The smallest one of these is at least twice or thrice the size of mainland "Hass" avocadoes. These are just the ones we had left after we gave the nicer ones away. There's still plenty left for guacamole, salads, omelets, etc.

These are a pretty good avocado, but they're not as good as the 'Lehua' avocado we have at the other rental house. Those are lovely creamy avos, these are still lovely avo, but they aren't quite as creamy as the others. They're still way better than those tiny watery Hass type, though.

This is White Hen, she doesn't really have an official name. She's half White Leghorn but the other half is feral rooster, so she doesn't lay or act like her White Leghorn mum. Instead of letting her set and hatch her own eggs, we took those away and gave her Araucana eggs, so the two little chicks she hatched out are pure Araucana and won't act like a feral or half feral hen at all. At least, that's what we're hoping.

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