I cleaned the chimney and flue pipe and laid the first proper wood fire of the season--on 15 September. Considering that we only stopped heating in July, this is a bit alarming. However, it was an opportunity to clear some waste wood from the workshop.
We stripped the vinyl siding off the North face of the house--a small triangle of wall--and today I chewed away the old flashing and the stubs of siding that lay underneath. I put up some Tyvek and BOOM! Down came the rain!
It was time. The garbage bin, now in its 25th year, has been relentlessly plowed in winter, whacked by a falling Tamarack, and finally upended (twice!) by a bear. A mother bear and her three cubs haunted the neighbourhood for a few days, and twice upended the bin, tearing out a pair of boards to get at the contents. A bizarre feature of the attacks was that on both occasions, she and her cubs carried away the bags without spilling the contents--it was like a free mid-week garbage collection!
You can see on the right a branch that went through two inches of cedar (a stile as well as the lid lumber) to protrude on the underside of the lid.
I tore off the old lid and top plate and fitted a new one--made, however, of the same cedar boards from Skinny Green's mill down the road. These ones were rescued from the old dog house we built for Freya. Once I'd planed the old lumber, it looked so good that I used spar varnish instead of paint on it. Then Jo told me the next step was to re-build the entire box, so I guess that wasn't the best approach after all.
