One year ago today, I bought this house! The house and I are very happy together, and we have made so much progress in the last year. We celebrated with cupcakes from Cakelove (an important feature of my neighborhood), presents, and quality time.
First, I spent about 5 hours cleaning this morning and I also finally finished painting that hole I patched in the bedroom like 2 months ago. It was quite a mess over here. I don’t know how neat freaks live with dogs. The fur everywhere drives me crazy, but I am not motivated enough to make myself vacuum every day. Plus the dust! It’s always desperately time to clean each weekend, and by this morning the tumbleweeds of fur were rolling around everywhere.
As for presents - since moving a painting from my bedroom to the basement, I’ve had an open spot that bothers me every day. Today, I stopped by Pier1 and found this pillar candle holder which goes very well with the votive holders by the bed and the sparkly red theme.
I got home late last night so I didn’t get to check the buckets until dinner time today. In the roughly 30 hours they’d been hung, I got about 2 cups of sap, maybe a bit more, in each of my four buckets.
You can see that it looks almost like water with a very very faint tint to it.
Basically, at this point in the process, we just collect sap. Once the buckets start filling up more, we transfer it to a bigger holding bucket and keep going. The weather is mixed for the coming 5 days, so I’m not sure how fast these will fill up, but it’s going to take a while. It will probably be a couple weeks before I move on to the next stage.
So that’s where sugaring stands - collecting all those little drips for many days until I have full buckets.
I was going to wait for the weekend, but the weather seemed right and I needed to get outside, so today I decided to see if it was time for sugaring. We had a good freeze last week and it’s been over freezing the past couple days, so I went out to see if it was time.
Is it time?
Trees for sugaring should be at least 10″ in diameter (some people say 14″). The bigger they are, the more buckets you can hang from them. You can make syrup from a lot of trees (e.g. birch), but we all like maple. I’m tapping a boxelder tree (a member of the maple family) and a sugar maple. There are good guides to identifying trees in winter on the web. Maples, I found out, have opposite branching (the branches split off opposite each other) rather than alternating (where you have one to the left then a bit further down, one to the right, and so on).
Once you picked your tree, drill a little hole in it. You should tap the south side of the tree, so that’s a good side to pick for your test hole. Wait about a minute. The sap should start flowing and it’s easy to tell that this is happening- your tree will get all wet by the hole you drilled.
So this tree is obviously flowing! Now, we tap the tree.
Tapping the Tree
Step 1 is to drill a bigger hole for the spile (that’s the spout that the sap will drip out of). I drilled my first hole over the test hole.
Drill it an inch or two deep, just enough to get the spile in firmly so it will support the weight of the bucket (about 10 pounds when it’s full of sap). Make sure to clean out all the wood bits from the hole or else they might clog the spile.
Next, put the spile in the hole. Push it in firmly and give it a few taps so it’s in there tight but not mashed in.
Then, hang the bucket on the spile. The ring around the end of the spile is there for the bucket handle to nestle into. I did two holes on this tree, and here it is with my two buckets.
You are supposed to cover the buckets to keep bugs, bark, twigs, melting snow, etc. from getting in there. My dad does not see the need for covering. The Vermont hard core types have buckets with lids built in. Me - I just use foil.
Now the trees are tapped and ready.
What happens now? The sap flows out of the hole, through your spile, into the bucket. It is a beautiful thing.
What to do next?
Now, you wait. Check the buckets a couple times a day. I’ll get to that in tomorrow’s post when I should be able to show you what’s happening
This was pretty exciting. More so because I almost killed myself walking (and falling) to do this over the sheet of ice that is my back yard.
If you haven’t done the quiz yet, don’t read this first! See if you can figure it out!
Ok, so the question was what project is this stuff for:
The kitchen item is a pot. Does that help?
The solution: I’m making maple syrup.
My dad and I used to make syrup when I was little. Now, as an adult, I’ve found that most of my very intelligent adult friends have no idea where maple syrup comes from. Most of them know it has something to do with maple trees, but they don’t know how to get it out, and they think it comes out in syrup form. NOT TRUE!! Explaining how to make syrup is one of my party stories that is appreciated almost as much as the stories of my really terrible dates. It’s really not as lame as it sounds.
So, step one in sugaring is that you need days above freezing and nights below freezing. This week seems to be the week we get there, so this weekend I will tap the trees. The wood things in the picture are the spouts. We drill holes and stick the spouts in there. Then we collect sap out of the spouts into the buckets. It looks like water and feels like water, but is slightly sweet, and then we boil it forever (outside, hence the hot plate) until it becomes syrup. 10 gallons of sap make 1 quart of syrup.
I’ll document the process very well for those of you in slightly colder climates with a maple tree or two who want to give it a try!
I spent this weekend in Miami because I ran the Miami Marathon on Sunday morning. It was 75 degrees and sunny both days. Basically, it was completely perfect and a great dose of happiness into the midst of this winter-induced funk I’ve been suffering.
And WOW are the houses there fabulous. Miles 15 - 20 of the race took us through Coconut Grove. There are houses there that are just the right size - around 1500 sq. ft - on nice sized yards. They were all beautiful and perfectly taken care of with amazing architectural details and great style. If I didn’t have the career ambition that I do, which seriously restricts where I work and thus live, I would be saving and hunting for one of those houses for myself. Even accounting for the big flying cockroaches that I hear live down there, I could see a very happy life for my warm-weather-loving self down in Miami.
Well, the paint and trim promised back in October still aren’t here. Cabinet Guy is still not responding to my email messages. Basically, everything is the same. My guess is that he hasn’t even bothered to order anything for me yet. What a dork.
It sure looks like Tom and Michelle are on track to finish their kitchen renovation before mine is done, even though they started 8 months later. They got their granite (black pearl) installed today. With a few more steps, they will have as much done as me!
The toilet in my basement has had issues for a long time. Sometimes it works fine. Sometimes, it acts clogged for no reason (e.g. I will clean it and flush to wash down the cleaner, and it won’t flush completely). It’s gotten worse lately. I’ve tried liquid plumber, I’ve plunged, and I’ve played plumber with my pipe snake getting it about 13 feet into the pipes, but nothing helps. I figure it’s time to call in a professional. I’ve never had to get a plumber before. Do any of you have experience and can you give me a rough ballpark of what I would expect to spend? I know it depends on what’s broken, but let’s say it’s just a blockage somewhere that they can clear out.
Thanks
EDIT: After writing this, of course, everything is working perfectly fine now. Perhaps the double dose of liquid plumber finally worked. Perhaps it’s just temporary. I’d appreciate the advice either way.
I planned to escape my crushing workload early today and work on the basement. It was not to be, alas, and I was pushed into working on things all day. I still made it out to pick up those painting masks, and I also stopped at Sherwin-Williams and got a gallon of Fun Yellow to replace the Road Stripe Yellow in the basement.
My sprayer had some issues getting back to work. It wasn’t priming. It would blow air, but couldn’t get even water up the spout. I ended up priming it by hand by pouring paint into the tube each time I refilled the jug. It was kind of a pain, but it worked.
I did another coat on the ceiling in places that needed it. If this were going to be a finished basement, I’d do a good second coat and maybe even a third. As it is, I think this looks good (and I’m out of motivation anyway). I also used the sprayer to apply the new yellow. Yellow #2 is still bright, but much much better.
I still have things to do by hand here. I’m going to leave the top level of bricks white as a kind of border, so I need to do that properly. I also have to get in to all those divits in the cinder block with the yellow. And there is a LOT of cleaning to do. I don’t really want to discuss how much paint I spilled or splattered in this project.
After that - lighting. I was thinking a globe light but I’m flexible. It has to have a pull string. Any suggestions?
