Ah, the beach. The sun. The sand. The salty air. The sticky feeling you get from being exposed to the elements all day. The little red splotches you notice when you leave the beach and can see where you missed with the spray-on sunscreen. The peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. The people-watching. (Rhode Island is a great state for people-watching. There are all kinds in Rhode Island.) I'd love to spend my summer at the beach. How I envy those with beach houses and time to spend at them.
But anyway, back to reality. When we came home from the beach on Sunday night we discovered that something was awry with our fence. Seems our elderly neighbor across the street backed into our fence, and now it's partially knocked over. I don't have photos of it; I don't really want them to see me taking a photo of the fence because I don't want them to think I'm going to get the insurance men after them, and this neighborhood is very tiny so I figure they'll see me, or if not them then one of the other neighbors. We got home and one of our other neighbors, the family that just put in the pool, came over to talk to Doug as he was assessing the damage. The lady of that family said that she saw the older woman across the street from us back into the fence and that the older woman planned to call us regarding the fence, but we didn't get a call. The next night Doug and I knocked on their door, just to acknowledge that we knew about the fence and that there are no hard feelings, because there aren't really - it's just a fence that was (though now more urgently) in need of attention anyway. So Doug and I went over to talk to them about it, but wouldn't you know that the old woman didn't fess up to anything! The old man, Dick, answered the door and he had no idea that anything had happened to our fence. He said maybe some kids on bikes rammed into it. Doug and I didn't know how to react to this so we said sure, maybe kids on bikes, sorry to bother you, have a nice night! Then, about 20 minutes later, our doorbell rang and poor old Mr. B is outside our door saying that he's sorry but it was his wife who rammed our fence. She didn't tell him about it until just then and he had no idea and he is so sorry and he could just club her for doing it... We assured old Mr. B that there are no hard feelings, and that the fence can probably be mended. He went away, but not before telling us that we needed to install a railing at our front steps. Old people - gotta love them! So I guess fence repair is now in our future...
... just like masonry is, or was. We started to tackle the repair job to our back steps
but the job is going to be a lot more complicated than we thought. Pretty much every stone is loose, and all the mortar/cement around them is crumbling. We don't have the right tools to apply the mortar into the stone holes to patch it, and the mortar that we have was way too liquidy to do any good. We are thinking of calling a repair person. We are reluctant to do so, as it seems so straight-forward and we would prefer to do it ourselves, but we may be in over our heads. Because there are two things that we don't want:1. To have our steps fall apart while we research how to fix them and then find some free time to spend fixing them.
2. To spend all weekend, and maybe more, trying to fix the steps.
Isn't there something called a cost-benefit analysis? The cost of us doing the steps ourselves in both time and money (we already spent over $50 on tools and mortar that apparently aren't correct) may outweigh the benefit of doing our own home repair. But we haven't decided on this one yet.
What we have decided on is that we are looking forward to vacation in a couple of weeks... this time next week we'll be looking at a lakeside cottage in Maine with Chris and Chris (and baby girl chris) right in the eye. Hello vacation! I'm ready.
6 comments:
Oh my goodness, I'm cringing at the neighbor-fence story... That is very nice of you guys to not be worried or irked about it. Sounds like this lady may be a menace! Don't park your car in her path!
They are really too old to be behind the wheel. I didn't even know the woman drove - I have never seen her before, only as a little head in the passenger seat of the car on the rare occasion that I have seen them outside the house. We are annoyed that we now have to fix our fence (weren't planning on doing anything with the fence for a couple of years yet) but are more annoyed that the woman didn't tell anyone about it. She thought it could just go away... that bothers me. Neighbors!
Take her license away!
(Sorry. I have a lot of unresolved feelings about elderly drivers from the time I spent in Arizona, where the "sunbirds" take over the roads from November through April. Scary, scary stuff.)
Anyway, hope the fence repairs are minor. Maybe you could drive across their lawn (accidentally, of course) to even out the neighbor karma.
There have been a lot of incidents lately here in eastern MA involving elderly drivers and vehicular accidents... I'm just glad that she didn't run over someone's dog or kid (both of which run freely up and down our street). I'm all for having people above a certain age take regular road tests. Maybe everyone should. Sometimes getting in the car makes me very scared.
Hey, if you guys do learn masonry, can you teach me? Our front steps are like yours. My parents always tell me that tools are a steep investment up front, but they'll pay for themselves many times over during the course of our lives spent toiling over our houses.
Did they tell you what tools we should be buying? There is an overwhelming variety.
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