The great green north??

For once I’m in Minnesota and it’s not frozen and covered in snow!! It actually does turn green in the spring! Who knew?!

Yeah, hello from Minneapolis! Well, actually a suburb called Edina and I’m working closer to Bloomington, but they’re all right in the same general area. It’s been chilly and wet since we got here but the sun is supposed to start coming out tomorrow.

The work part is surprisingly going very smoothly (of course I’ve now just jinxed it), and it’s actually quite boring, but in this game boring is a very good thing. Hopefully if it remains this way for a few days, I may be able to move up my departure date and head back. The guy who came up with me is learning fast and should be able to keep it going. Besides, if there’s trouble later on, I can always come back.

I have a ton of work waiting back in Florida. We have hundreds of hours of flight testing to get done and I would imagine that several parts of it will have to be run multiple times. My biggest concern is doing all of that in July and August when it’s so brutal hot in that plane. I would love to get as much of it done now while it’s still bearable. So getting out of here is a high priority.

I did make one super nice milestone this month. I’m now making extra principal payments on the house mortgage! It feels nice to be able to fast-track paying off the house and get that much closer to doing the RV thing. It will still take a while for the extra payments to start to make a difference but I have to start somewhere.

I also got a house renovation project completed right before I left. The faux lap siding around the front two bedroom windows had failed some years ago and was really getting bad. I was hoping to put it off until after the kitchen renovation, but that just wasn’t to be.

So last Friday I set about tearing into it to do a rebuild. Wow, it was far worse than I had thought. The faux lap siding was made out of what is known as OSB or Oriented Strand Board. OSB is made by taking wood chip pieces, gluing it all together under pressure and then planing/trimming to size. Sounds wonderful right? Well, not really. Over time if it gets wet, the wood swells and rots, the glue tends to fail, and insects just love this stuff.

Guess what I found? Rotted, swelled, and ant infested failed OSB. It was certainly a ton of fun pulling all of that disgusting mess out, not. It was so bad that I put it directly into the back of the truck and to the dump myself rather than stacking it up for the trash. I ended up stripping all the way back to the concrete block. It would have been super easy to replace the windows at that point as I essentially had half the window frame completely exposed. The problem was that I didn’t know I would be that close and I hadn’t looked into windows and couldn’t spend the time right then.

The rebuild was actually quite fast and went very well. I replaced the OSB laps with a concrete material that looks exactly like real wood. It’s impervious to water and won’t rot. Since its concrete, insects aren’t interested in it. It’s the same material that the north and south gable ends were replaced with many years ago and has held up very well. Plus, it’s cheap.

I installed a plywood backer, then a layer of tar paper, a layer of Tyvek, another layer of tar paper, then the lap siding, and it was all buttoned up. I was even able to get the exact same trim paint from Richards that was purchased years ago so it matched up exactly. Scratch one more project off the list!

So here I sit in Minneapolis where it’s raining, chilly, and I’m bored out of my skull. I have very little to do while the test is running so I figured I would do an update. I’ll very likely do several more because of the boredom. Maybe I’ll take some pictures so everyone can see what the great green north looks like.