Bee-have!!!

Disclaimer:  Yes, I know that ALL bees are pollinators and we really shouldn't kill bees, however, when they are chewing up my house, all environmental considerations are off!

--------------------------------------

I'm spending a lot of time lately on our front porch.  Not lounging around drinking wine spritzers (well, maybe a LITTLE).  I’ve been working on carpenter bee damage off and on for over ten years,  and I’m finally making headway.

We made a major addition to the house, including adding a big front porch, twenty-six years ago.  It held up pretty well for a long time, but about ten to twelve years ago, we had a problem with carpenter bees divebombing anyone who came up onto the porch.  They weren't really aggressive, but it's pretty disconcerting to have helicopter-sized bees buzzing around your head.

A typical bee hole.
They are perfectly pencil sized!

They had bored holes in the porch railings, and you could watch them arrive and depart all day long.  If it was quiet when you sat on the porch you could hear the little creeps munching on the wood.   I bought some bee spray and attacked them in their holes.

It worked - temporarily.

A couple of years later, they were back in force.  Ugh.

Since then, we've tried various approaches.

Spraying every year is a pain in the bee-hind, so that was abandoned fairly quickly.

The beginnings of a couple of holes.

Then That Man discovered carpenter bee traps!  They're basically a block of wood with a few inviting pencil-sized holes drilled into its sides at an upward angle.  There's a larger diameter hole drilled straight upward from the bottom of the block of wood that intercepts the smaller angled holes.  There's a Mason jar attached to the bottom of the block where the captives end up.  You empty it by unscrewing the jar and dumping out the dead bees.  We caught a lot of bees, but it seems that the traps, just like Japanese beetle traps, tend to attract even MORE bees to your vicinity.  Not good.

A couple of years ago, a family of pileated woodpeckers decided to tear up a portion of the porch railing.  They were going after the bees' larvae, and they threw chunks of wood all over the place.  To discourage this bee-havior, I put a metal baking sheet over the spot until I was able to repair the holes.

This is where the bee tunnels broke
through the railing.  The entry hole is
on the underside of the railing.

This year I read on a local neighborhood website that some people had tried a dummy hornet's nest to discourage carpenter bees because hornets and other wasps are their natural enemies.  So I stuffed a brown shopping bag per instructions I found online and hung it on the porch.  The carpenter bees just flew circles around it and when they tired of that, crept into their holes in the railings.  Good grief.

After all that, I was fed up.  Stick a fork in me; I'm done.

So the major household project this summer is repairing all the carpenter bee damage and staining the porch.  A big project, but I'm approaching it like eating an elephant - one bite at a time.

I bought a couple of cans of Spectracide Carpenter Bee and Yellow Jacket Killer.  It has a long thin tube to attach to the spray nozzle so you can get the spray up into the cavities.  I hunted for entry holes and sprayed like mad.  I've used up three cans, and they aren't small!


One of my friends gave me instructions on how to fill the holes so the bees wouldn't want to reenter - stuff steel wool into the holes as far and as tightly as possible, cover the openings with wood putty, sand it all smooth, then stain or paint.  I had been using a regular old pencil to stuff the steel wool into the holes, but for the bottom rail, there wasn’t enough clearance to get a normal-sized pencil, so I broke it in two, to make it short enough to fit.  A custom-made steel wool stuffing tool!


The problem is I keep finding more and more holes.  I’ll think I’ve found them all, but there will be more.  So frustrating!  Just when I'm SURE I have them all filled, I find another.  They aren't new; I've just missed them.  UGH. 

So I feel a bit like Sisyphus, continually rolling his boulder uphill, only to have it roll back down just before he neared the top, probably rolling OVER him on the way down!

I'm making progress, and I WILL get it done.  I swear it.

Think good thoughts while I'm sanding and staining during this weekend of sweltering mid- to high- 90s temperatures! FUN.

A comparison between before staining (left) and after (right).  A HUGE difference.

The Jet in My Laundry Room (More Adventures in Home Ownership)

That Man walked into the house from working in the garage and asked, “Isn't the washing machine kind of loud? It sounds like bad bearings.”

I had started a load of laundry, and the machine was going through a spin cycle.  I had noticed a few days earlier how loud it seemed, but I wasn’t positive.  I could be imagining it, right?

Well, here’s your sign.

That Man said, “Well, do you want to buy a new washer?”

Oh, no.  I’d REALLY rather not!  But, another unplanned project - oh, joy.

So I powered up the computer and Googled “Whirlpool Cabrio washing machine loud spin cycle.”  I read some articles (most described the sound as a jet getting ready to take off) and watched some YouTube videos and eventually bought a repair kit on eBay.  It included a drive shaft, upper and lower bearings, a seal, adhesive, grease, and installation tools.  They would arrive by the end of the week.

The old drive shaft

The following Sunday, immediately after church, we began.

I pulled up a couple of YouTube videos and we watched guys open up the top of a washing machine.  Not the lid, mind you, but the entire top of the machine.  One guy, in what was supposed to be a training video, working on an obviously new, pristine machine, took a putty knife, slid it into the narrow crevice of the machine top, released the catches (one, two!), and popped the top open - voila!  Like magic!  So easy!  Another guy, obviously working in his garage told us the catches were hard to release, and to not use the standard flexible putty knife, but to use a stiffer putty knife or a flat screwdriver to get at those stubborn catches.

He was right.

The top was eventually opened, the ring around the top of the tub where the detergent, fabic softener, and bleach dispensers are was removed, and the sorta-kinda agitator bump in the bottom of the machine was also removed.

Now all we had to do, according to the training video was to reach under the lip of the tub and lift it out - easy peasy!!!

We worked at that for a couple of hours.  HOURS.  Yes.  Hours.

That Man periodically asked me whether I wouldn't rather just buy a new washing machine.  But by now, we were committed, by gosh!  We are not quitters!  That stupid machine was NOT going to win!

I went to the garage guy’s video.  He said he had trouble getting the tub out.

No!  Surely not!  You’re kidding, right?

But he had a solution, involving a car jack and a piece of 4x4 lumber.  We worked at that for a bit, using the jack from one of our cars, and a scrap piece of 4x4, but got nowhere because of how the jack’s base was shaped.  That Man retrieved a bottle jack from the garage and we tried again.

Oh.  My.  Gosh.

It was like magic!  The jack and 4x4 got the tub released from the drive shaft, and out came the tub, just as easily as the training video showed.  Then we turned the washer on its side so That Man could knock out the drive shaft and bearings.  There was more to it than just that, but by that point of the process, it went pretty smoothly.

One thing about the garage guy’s video - after he got the tub out, he said he could hear water sloshing around, apparently trapped inside the tub walls.  He couldn’t figure out how to drain it, so he intended to DRILL SOME HOLES IN THE TUB to get the water out!  NO! NoNoNoNoNo!  That water is part of how the washer balances the load during spin cycles!  I hope he didn’t do it.  All that work, and then to ruin the machine.

Anyway, back to us.  The reassembly went well until it was time to install the seal.  It wasn’t the same on both sides!  All right, which side goes which way?  I looked at more videos and examined the old seal and drive shaft closely, and figured it out to MY satisfaction.  So I got the dubious honor of greasing and putting adhesive on the seal and installing it.  According to That Man, that’s so if it had been done incorrectly and the washer leaked all over the floor, the fiasco could be blamed on ME!

After getting it all put back together, one of the videos said not to run a load through the washer for 24 hours.  I waited two days.  Oh, the suspense!!!

I ran a short cycle with no clothes to test it out.  It was quieter and no leaks!  But it was just sloshing water around.  I needed a real world test - jeans. So I loaded it up and ran a normal cycle.  I stood there and watched it during the first spin cycle.

It was quiet.  There were no leaks.  It powered through the whole cycle and worked like a champ!

It took us about eight hours to do what is supposedly a four-hour job.  But we did it ourselves, and we saved a ton of dough!  Instead of buying a comparable new washing machine for $700.00 or $800.00 (MSRP of about $1,100.00) on sale at Lowe’s - yes, that’s JUST the washer - I checked, we paid less than $76.00 for the repair kit.  And if we’d had someone come fix it, we still would have probably been charged about $400.00 for the repair.

Yes, our time and effort are worth something, but we learned some things, got the satisfaction of doing it ourselves, and saved $325.00 to $725.00 to boot!

It WAS worth it!