Week of April 21, 2025

Cool photo I found this week: One of our neighbors put their house up for sale, and the listing included an aerial photo of our street. You can see our house and a great view of the town and the river. We feel very grateful to live here.

Three big projects occupied my time this week:

Charlie’s play fort

Leaky shower

Siding replacement

Charlie’s play fort is coming along nicely. I finished the main structure on Monday, added a bucket + pulley on Tuesday, and added the slide, handles, and a pirate ship’s wheel on Wednesday. Tuesday and Wednesday nights the three of us had picnic dinners up on the play fort, and it was lovely.

The leaky shower was less fun. As I was showering Wednesday morning, Amanda came upstairs to let me know that she could hear water running into the kitchen ceiling, directly below the shower. I opened up the access panel, and sure enough, it was wet.

It looked like it was mostly coming from around the lip of the tub, so I recaulked where the tile meets the tub and around all the escutcheons. While that was drying, I decided to double down and fix some of the small tiles that had popped up by the tub. I glued them down and regrouted.

I was feeling accomplished until later that night when I tested the shower and found a new leak I hadn’t noticed before, this time coming from the water volume control knob. It took some architectural archeology to find the source and some internet sleuthing to find the solution. I ended up replacing the cartridge in the middle of the volume control and that solved the problem.

Side note tip: Kohler doesn’t publish PDFs of their parts diagrams like everyone else. It is locked inside a javascript app at scout.kohler.com and under the hood they are in SVG format. Kind of annoying, but at least they are available online.

Let me tell you, the 30 seconds between turning the water main back on in the basement and racing back up to the second floor to see if there were any leaks were sweat inducing for multiple reasons. Thankfully no leaks. Now I need to cover the access back up and put Charlie’s closet back together.

The siding project took less work on my part, but more coordination. We hired a siding company to do it for us. I don’t have much to say about the company, they are on par with other contractors we’ve worked with. We wanted to start the beginning of April, then that was pushed to this week, and they finally started Friday. Despite those delays, I think they completed about half of the work in a single day.

Unfortunately, we had a severe thunderstorm Saturday night, while our house was without gutters and only half the siding was on. Water started coming in around the sliding glass door. Not the contractors’ fault, just bad timing. Hoping to have the work wrapped tomorrow.

This week revealed to me just how much DIY work as been done on our 97 year old house. It has had many, many owners. Three different layers of siding, the sliding glass door was clearly added long after that back wall was built, cut off pipes abandoned under the tub, the access panel cut into and patched over multiple times, the shower valves screwed in from the now-tiled-over side instead of the access panel, etc.

And I’m certainly not making the problem any better. Just adding another layer, more holes, new screws, and fresh grout. I guess that’s just how houses evolve.

Charlie has found the siding project very exciting. He ran to grab his camera when the materials delivery showed up and he wanted to be outside when the crew started working. Sunday he helped me pick up nails with a magnet bar.

I fished one of the wild quality streams in the Croton watershed on Tuesday. I had some strikes, but didn’t land any fish. It was good to explore that new-to-me stream and take notes of the good holes for the future. I noticed a few Blue Quills hatching, so I tied some at home later that night, intending to try them out the following day, only to be waylaid by the leaking shower. So it goes.

I helped with another trout release on Thursday. I caught some large Dobsonfly larvae and Stonefly nymphs, as well as a blacknose dace in the kick net. Saw another water snake! This time the students were a bit younger, so I kept my waders on and stood in the river while they released the trout at the bank, just in case. I spotted some nice 8in trout coming out from under the far bank to feed, perhaps on the newly released fingerlings.

Friday night we had our friends Colin and Hayden over for dinner. We were all too engaged in conversation to take photos. Colin recommended An Immense World.

Saturday was a rainy day. We did some grocery shopping, got our sillies out on the pier between raindrops, and visited Transom Bookshop in Tarrytown.

Sunday Charlie and I went to a carnival with the Crisantes. Our very big 3.5-4 year olds rode a lot of rides themselves! Some we still had to ride with them, though. They are still little after all.

It is the official start of Hose Season.

This is Charlie’s “Stew Stick”.

I got a grommet kit and made a couple loops with grommets to go on my fishing belt for things to clip on to. I have a drawer full of things like webbing, different threads, a speed stitcher, and various other DIY materials. The grommet tool is a great addition. That drawer makes future projects possible.