You will never meet a dull arborist. With their peculiar blend of strength, agility, endurance, and problem solving skills Cirque du Soleil has nothing on these guys. They’re also a bargain compared to what can happen if you try to do the job yourself. On a fine clear morning after […]
This House
13 posts
Raven stories: The raven is a mystical bird among indigenous peoples across the northern world. In Southeast Alaska where I live, Raven is the central figure of creation mythologies and Tlingit society divided back in the mists of time into two moieties; eagle and raven, with complex cultural conventions […]
Ron Hynes: a great Newfoundland singer/songwriter, was born on December 7, 1950. He was The Man of a Thousand Songs. And there are at least a thousand stories about the man himself. Here are four: 1) How Ron got his handle: Ron became The Man of a Thousand Songs when […]
Back in the days when carpenters built the whole house on site from start to finish, they’d start by building a couple saw horses which they’d leave for the new home owners when the house was done. Not many carpenters still do that but you can. A sturdy saw horse […]
What’s up with all these people not shoveling out their fire hydrants? Friends and neighbors, we are not down south where everyone expects the city to do it all for them. These flags sticking out are so someone can find the hydrants when we get a big dump of snow […]
The neighborhood hoarder Part 1. Introduction: So, you’re living in the long shadow of a hoarder’s house with never a bit of maintenance on the outside in twenty years. No paint. Gutters fallen off. Yard full of dead cars, old tires, an unplugged freezer with God-knows-what in it. Moss, bushes […]
The neighborhood hoarder Part 2. The Players: Owner, Leader, Neighbors, The City, Saboteurs working against you The Owner: The first and most important thing in doing a clean-up is, you have to get the owner’s permission. And get it in writing. Without that, you’re nowhere. For good reasons, private property […]
Neighborhood hoarder Part 3. The Clean-up Organization: Once we got permission to clean up, we simply went over and dove in. No firm plan, no set schedule. We have about 18 hours of daylight in mid-June so helpers could carry on long before, or after, the regular work day as […]
The neighborhood hoarder Part 4. Junk Car round-up “We break in to cars when we gotta. With pickaxe and hammer and saw. They say this garage has no license, yet it’s little care I for the law. Ta me weigh hey tow it away, the Lincoln Park Pirates are we, […]
The neighborhood hoarder Part 5. Landscaping Satisfying as it was to clean up the junk and cars. A little bit of landscaping after was like one of those makeovers you see where they give a street person a shave and haircut and turns him into cover material for Gentleman’s Quarterly. […]
The neighborhood hoarder Part 6. Maintaining the groove and breaking into cars During the clean-up someone raised the question, “What’s to stop it from going back to the way it was?” My thought was that it wouldn’t happen. Almost none of the stuff in the yard had been Dave’s. […]
When I was a kid my grandfather built a tool shed at his camp. I thought that was the coolest thing. Someone in my gene pool could decide to put up a building, by himself, and do it. It was big, clean, orderly and pleasing to the eye. And it […]