Productive Winter

Kristen put a couple of items on my winter todo list this year (for those days when it was too bone chillingly cold to work outside).

First was the kitchen range hood. For some inexplicable reason, it was set up so that it vented back into the kitchen rather than to the outside. Kristen couldn't cook a steak without opening a window so the smoke alarm wouldn't go off.

The new hood (very similar to the old except for the stupid part).

Through the wall into the garage. It was only a couple of feet over to the outside wall. I had to cut a much larger hole through the wall because, of course, a stud ran right through where the ducting needed to go and some reframing was necessary.

The new vent.

Kristen's other todo item had to do with the dryer venting. Our laundry room is on the 1st floor in the middle of the front part of the house. The dryer vent goes through the wall into the area under the front stairs where it elbows through the floor to the basement. After passing through a number of bends and constrictions, it makes its way to the outside through an old window opening that had been replaced with plywood.

My job was to replace the entire duct system and eliminate all of the constrictions. I replaced all of the bends an constrictions with metal ducting and only used flexible ducting on the straightaways. While doing that, I realized that that plywood panel needed to go. Soil was against it on the outside and the bottom was half rotted away, allowing mice to enter the basement.

Just to complicate things, the dryer vent wasn't the only thing passing through the plywood. the electrical conduit to one of the air conditioners and a drain (from something) were also there. I managed to remove them, replace the plywood with a concrete backer-board panel and then reinstall them.

Finally, there was my brush clearing and burning. When we took most of November off to go to California and Hawaii, I wondered how much of a dent I had put into my brush clearing time. Fortunately, this has been a relatively mild winter and I've managed to clear enough for 10 brush pile burns so far. I hope to do my 11th and final burn tomorrow. My burn permit is good until May 2 but, unless we get more snow, I won't feel comfortable with my infernos.

I've found a lot of metal to remove and take to the recycler. There's wire fencing on metal poles buried in the brush along the perimeter. I've removed that as I've come to it. I found a spool of barbed wire that must way a hundred pounds. I also found what I think must be a roll bar from a tractor. It weighs so much (at least 200 pounds) that I'm still puzzling over how I'm going to get it out of the woods and into the truck.

The focus this season was clearing between the lawn and the wall along Barre Rd..and along the back wall from Barre Rd. Here are a couple of pictures from the upstairs windows:

Back wall along the treeline at the left. Barre Rd. at the left.

This is to the left of the previous picture. 

To the right of the 1st picture. Corner of Coldbrook Rd and Barre Rd through the trees.

My one last project was a raised vegetable garden bed. The old beds were in back of the garage and were out of sight and too far from the faucet. I broke them apart last fall, added the wood to my 1st burn pile and filled in the low areas of the lawn with the dirt.

Outside the kitchen.

-JC-