Exterior – Modern Anachronist

Always watch the classifieds.

You never know when a deal is going to appear.

This is going to be a teaser because it’s too cold to work outside right now.

Raised Garden Bed

Simple but labor intensive, I told my wife she only gets one of these per year. We decided on dry stacked concrete blocks for the beds the winter after we bought the new house.

Construction complete – still needs compost & soil added.

First attempt at rust repair.

It’s been bugging me for a while that there is rust visible around my tow hooks, so I decided to try to make my first (of many {Never buy an East Coast truck}) efforts at rust repair.

The panel around the tow hook was black when it left the factory , now it’s rust, with black highlights.

Shortly after we moved to the new house, I spotted this stone in the woods behind my house. Originally, I planned to haul it out of the woods when we replaced the fence, but since the fence was down for the mulberry tree, I moved up the time table.

It took me a few hours with the come-along to get this stone out of the woods, now I need to get it to the front yard

Gutter cleaning tool

This didn’t work out as well as I hoped. I’ll probably end up modifying the design to improve the performance. It may also be that the gutters were too clogged and that this tool will work fine if it’s used on 4-6 months worth of debris as opposed to several years.

Birthday Chair for the Wife

Decided to make a nice chair for my wife to enjoy her garden. I did a google search for Adirondack chairs and asked her to pick the one she liked best. Thankfully she chose one that was within my abilities.

The fine folks at Lowe’s have the plans on their site.

The Cursed Swing Set

At the old house, we had an ancient wooden swing set for the kids to play on. I wasn’t going to move it to the new house. My wife convinced her father to buy one for the new house as a Christmas present to the little ones. All we had to do was to pick one out & he would break out the credit card.

Happy Birthday Fessick

I’ve had Fessick in my life for two years now.

Tow mirrors (part 1)

I replaced the factory paddle mirrors with some eBay special towing mirrors this weekend.

The stock mirrors had power and heat when Fessick left the factory. By the time he came into my life, the heat was completely non-operational. The left mirror moved correctly, but the right only moved left to right. It wouldn’t move up and down.

The replacement mirrors have marker lights and turn signals behind a smoked lens as well as turn signals mounted in the glass. Additionally, I can pull the mirror further away from the truck to increase the view when I’m pulling a trailer

New mirror above with built in blind-spot mirror and marker light & turn signals.
Old mirror below — Look at all that space for (viewing) activities!

Roof rack

The factory roof rack on the Excursion is a joke. In order to keep the car garagable, the crossbars basically sit flat on the roof. Those crossbars flex under any sort of a load, so when you put anything on the roof, you’re denting the roof.

I used the factory rack once and vowed that I would never use it again.

Tag: Exterior