Yardwork, Tardwork

This weekend we continued the removal of brush and converting the yard for summer. We've lost more bank behind the garage, but we cut some ugly leaner trees and removed deadwood. Instead of burning the brush, we have piled it in gorges forming along the bank to provide a base of fill. The new toy (backhoe) ought to help speed the process once it is up and running. Sumac and wild chervil are trying to take over. It's war.

New Toy! New Toy!

I just purchased a 1973 Michigan bucketloader/backhoe. It needs a little bit of work (although not as much as I was expecting), but I think a weekend or two at the Tardhaus should have it in tip-top shape. If there's anything we can't fix ourselves, there is a place about a mile down the road called Farm-All-Fix that works on such equipment for reasonable rates. I bought it today, but it would't fit in the car to bring it back to Tardhaus, and we don't have a low-boy trailer (yet), so we're probably going to get a trucking company to pick it up and deliver it for us sometime this week.

Dryer Fixin's

Our dryer, a Maytag Neptune, has been drying clothes more and more slowly, and has needed multiple cycles to get clothes all the way dry. I had previously cleaned out the metal hose from the dryer to the outside of the house, but that didn't fix it. This, of course, means that it needs to be taken apart to be fixed. In my usual style, I didn't think about this until I was loading wet clothes into the dryer and decided I would fix it. With the wet clothes in the drum, I googled how to take apart this particular dryer, located the needed tools, and was off.


The culprit was a ton of lint that had made it past the lint trap and gathered up right in front of the blower motor that blows the air out the back of the unit. With this being clogged, the dryer just made steam in the dryer, but never blew much of it outside the house. With this problem resolved, I reassembled the dryer and ran my load of clothes, which dried nicely in a single cycle. Yay!

Life at Tardhaus

The Tards (residents of Tardhaus) do a lot of interesting projects. This blog is an attempt to capture some of the projects we work on so we can show others what we do.