Product Review Monday

I don't like credit cards. Don and I were in deep credit-card debt for many, many years while we raised our girls on a shoestring budget and an unsteady woodcrafter's income. Now we live an all-cash lifestyle with the exception of our regular monthly bills (about $500/month) which are on automatic payment on our (single) credit card. Needless to say, we pay the bill off in full the instant we receive it in the mail. Now that we no longer owe money, the sense of freedom that comes from not having revolving debt on the [bleepity] credit card never stops.

Which is why this week's book recommendation is entitled "Maxed Out: Hard Times, Easy Credit and the Era of Predatory Lenders" by James D. Scurlock. Written in 2007 just before the 2008 recession, if anything it's even more relevant today as it discusses predatory lending practices by the credit-card companies.

Some of the stories in the book are ugly. Many are heartbreaking. But all underscore the importance of not enslaving one's self to credit if at all possible. If you're vaguely aware that credit cards are bad news but can't quite pinpoint why, this book will explain. Highly recommended.

_______________________

Don's product recommendation this week is his good ol' Yankee push-drill. 

He keeps this in his everyday toolbox for those times he needs a fast hole drilled in wood or plastic. It's non-electric and fits in tight spaces.

The drill bits are stored in the top of the handle.

Don's a tool guy, and while he has the full cadre of power tools, he also has a lot of hand tools for times when batteries die or power isn't available or (in this case) spaces are too tight to permit a power drill. An excellent stocking stuffer for your DIY types.

(Obligatory disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Affiliate, if you purchase through those links, we earn a small commission.)

(Don't forget: A complete list of all our book and product recommendations are linked here and at the upper-right column of the blog.)

Requiem for a circular saw

Don has been working on a complicated project on the back porch (which will be a future blog post) for the last several weeks. As such, he has a large selection of both hand and power tools in constant use. He came into the house the other day with an expression both sad and frustrated. "My circular saw just died," he announced.

This Craftsman tool is something he's had for decades, literally. He tried to figure out when he purchased it, and concluded it was shortly after we were married, which would put it somewhere in the early 90s. "Older than the internet," he observed. You can't ask for more than that when it comes to the lifespan of a power tool, especially one he used as heavily as this circular saw.

Without much option, Don took himself into town to purchase another circular saw.

The new circular seems to be working fine, but it's not his old tool, y'know?

There's a certain nostalgic sadness at losing a trusty tool, especially since this new one is unlikely to last through a quarter-century of hard use.

So this is a requiem for Don's faithful old circular saw. May it rest in peace.

New gardening tool

We've had a few of the raised garden beds in place since last July. Two beds have garlic planted in them, but the rest are awaiting spring.

And actually, it's getting hard to wait. Except for one nasty cold snap, we've had a remarkably mild winter. As I write this, temps are supposed to climb (again) into the low 50s, rather unheard of for early February. Everywhere we go, we hear people speculating about whether spring is here.

It's unlikely. We've been whomped with snow in March before. But at least right now, we can dream.

So the gardening bug is biting. A couple days ago, I decided to scratch that itch by doing some work in the raised beds that are getting overgrown with weeds.

I also wanted to try out a new gardening tool I purchased called a "push-pull hoe."

The diamond-headed, sharp-toothed hoe promised to remove deeply rooted weeds with less work.

Vicious looking, ain't it?

So I took it up to the garden and started ripping through weeds. And ... oh my.

In the bed with the heaviest weed infestation, it tore everything up with very little effort.

You can see the difference with half a bed done.

In a bed with fewer weeds, it just zipped through. The trick, I learned, is to let the tool do the work. It's not effortless, but neither is it effortful, if you know what I mean.

Rather than taking an hour or so per bed with hand-weeding, this push-pull hoe took literally five minutes for the easier beds, and about seven or eight minutes for the beds with heavier weed cover.

Of course, this is not a one-and-done deal. I'll be ripping up the beds multiple times before planting. But with this push-pull hoe, it's a whole lot easier to disrupt the weeds' growth.

10/10 can recommend.

Don's man cave

A wise neighbor once told us, "It takes three years to move." What she meant is, after officially moving into a new home, it takes three years to figure out its "flow," its idiosyncrasies, how best to store and organize things, to build up the necessary infrastructure to suit one's lifestyle, and other considerations.

All this is a long-winded explanation of why the barn is still a hot mess and Don didn't have a proper shop.

The barn, if you recall from when we moved in, was a large empty space, full of promise.

The barn actually has a larger footprint (1800 sq. ft.) than the house (1400 sq. ft.). This structure was actually integral to our decision to purchase the property, since it had so much potential to be modified into what we wanted: shop space, hay storage, cattle infrastructure, etc.

For obvious reasons, one of the first things Don did was build a shop, a building-within-a-building. In this space, he put his big tools (table saw, compound-miter saw, belt sander, etc.) that we've used for years on our woodcraft business. In the above photo, he boxed in the left-hand corner for that purpose.

Then Older Daughter took over the woodcraft business, which meant Don effectively lost his shop space. No problem, we have plenty of room in the barn. He decided to build his own shop in the right-hand corner of the above space. If you peer closely at the photo, the previous owners had a workbench already in place. Don decided to incorporate that structure.

And see, that's an advantage to this "three years to move in" rule of thumb. It allows for changing dynamics (such as Older Daughter taking over the woodcraft business) and gives us a better understanding of what kind of spaces we need.

What Don wanted to do was build an area that would allow him to organize and store his vast array of smaller tools, while still having a "central aisle" in the barn for parking the tractor. He also wanted a sturdy loft above, where we could store things we seldom need but want to keep handy (such as Christmas decorations).

Last summer, he constructed the second shop, making it extremely sturdy.

But about the time he finished the second shop building was about the time our litany of plumbing woes began, and his attention was distracted elsewhere.

Bottom line, it took him until late winter to finish the infrastructure for his own personal shop (building a second workbench, shelving, hanging peg boards, etc.). And even then, because we always seem to operate on a crisis mode with multiple projects, he just shoved his tools willy-nilly into the space in hopes of sorting things out later. This was frustrating because he knew he had such-and-such a tool in his shop, but no clue where it might be.

So, over the last couple of weeks, he's been organizing his shop. And oh my, I don't think I've ever seen him so happy. He felt like I felt when I finally opened and shelved our books that had been packed away for two years – it was like greeting old friends. He was able to find a home for every tool, edit duplicates, and discover missing items ("Hey guess what, I found the box of packing slips at last!").

Organizing the shop took at least two weeks, working at a leisurely pace. Each evening Don would come into the house and happily report on his progress, the items he was able to find, and the space he created for each category of  tools.

A couple days ago, he finished (more or less; it's always a work in progress) and called me out to take photos. And here, ladies and gentlemen, is Don's man cave.

Every detail is as organized as he can make it. While he knows it's unlikely to stay this neat – his tools are in constant use – it's nice to start with something close to ideal.

With duplicate tools he uses frequently, he's building a tool bag for when he needs to do work around the farm.

He's got things divvied into stations. Here's the battery-charging station.

He put up peg boards to organize and categorize the smaller tools...

...as well as some of the larger ones. At the center-top is the wooden-handled hammer he inherited from his father, who passed away when Don was a young man in the Navy. He cherishes that hammer.

Do you know how often he couldn't find needle-nosed pliers when he needed them? Now all his pliers and nippers have a home.

Don later joked that the only thing left to do to turn this space into the Ultimate Man Cave is a keg of beer, some 50s pinup girlie calendars, and radio reception.

He has none of those things (including radio reception), but sure seems like a happy dude for what he has.

How many drill bits do you need?

Don is, by his own admission, famously absent-minded. He came stomping into the house a week ago, fuming. He was in the middle of a project, you see, and once again he had misplaced a critical drill bit he needed.

This isn't unusual. He is forever misplacing things; and if it's something small – like a drill bit – he can generally expect never to see it again.

So, riding that wave of frustration, he got online and ordered eight new sets of drill bits.

They arrived yesterday, and he's delighted.

We laugh about it, but in fact having eight sets of drill bits may not be such a bad idea. Not just because it's helpful for absent-minded people; but because drill bits, like fasteners (screws/nails/bolts) are something everyone should have in abundance to tackle whatever project might become necessary. These days, with supply chains the way they are, having extras is wise.

Still, Don wonders how long it will take him to lose all the critical drill bits he uses on a regular basis. (As he jokes, "If I could remember where I put that death ray, I could rule the world.")

The wonderful world of weeds

Last spring, our first spring here in our new home, we noticed a lot of thistles growing. Nasty things, thistles.

So I started digging them up using a hand weeding tool. It's laborious on-your-knees work, and it was also an exercise in futility. There were zillions of thistles scattered hither and yon. Trying to lever them out of the ground one by one was impossible. We didn't want to go around spraying poison, but I can certainly understand why people do.

It wasn't just thistles. Having now completed an entire growing season, we discovered the horrors of hound's tongue. Not only does this plant have nasty burrs that take great delight in leaping across the space-time continuum for the simple pleasure of clogging one's socks or matting a dog's fur, but the leaves are poisonous to livestock as well. ("Ingestion can cause severe illness and possibly death in horses, swine, and cattle. The alkaloids are potent liver toxins that under some conditions can be carcinogenic...")

Here's a close-up of the hound's tongue nutlets, not yet dried out. Nasty, aren't they?

So weed control is on our radar.

Last May, rather impulsively, we purchased a four-claw stand-up weed puller made by Fiskars (a brand associated with high-quality scissors). To be honest, I didn't have a lot of hope for this product, but I was anxious to tackle the thistles, and at $56, it wasn't going to break the bank.

Their product description seemed ideal for what we needed: "The Fiskars® stand-up weeder makes it easy to permanently remove invasive plants without sore knees from kneeling, back ache from bending or harsh, costly chemical herbicides that need to be applied multiple times. Just place the head over a weed, step down on the reinforced foot platform, and the four serrated, stainless-steel claws will grab the weed by the root for clean removal. An offset hand reduces wrist strain, a viewing window in the pedal makes claw placement mistake-free, and an easy-eject mechanism clears the head between uses for quick and easy cleanup."

Here's the foot-pedal and the claws.

You can see how the claws are serrated.

Simply put, the claws grab the plant at the base, and the foot platform levers the plant out by the roots. Sounds simple. But does it work?

Yes. In fact, it works phenomenally well.

Here's the process. Place the claws over the center of the weed:

Step on the foot pedal to make sure the claws are as far down as they can go:

Then lever back and let the weed puller pull the weed.

Voilà. Notice the taproots? This thistle isn't growing back.

This is the gizmo to eject the weed from the claws:

Using this tool is actually quite fun, and it's immensely satisfying ("Die, hound's tongue, DIE!!") to pull up a noxious weed and see the long taproot follow.

Here's some young hound's tongue:

Moments later, it's out of the ground.

Here's another one:

Take a gander at that taproot:

And here's a nice fat thistle that met its demise. Again, notice the taproot:

It even works on young blackberries. A few vines had sprouted near the base of our porch steps.

On impulse, I tried pulling them up with the weed-puller. And it worked! Look at those roots!

This weed puller has its limitations. Since we purchased it in May of last year, by that point many of the thistles were already too large and/or the ground was too dry to sink the claws into it. Nor does it work well in rocky soil, where the claws can't be pushed into the ground. For obvious reasons this tool works best in damp soil when the four claws can be centered over the exact middle of the plant (impossible to do when the thistle is already two feet high).

But here in March, with the snow just off the ground and early weeds starting to grow, it is the absolute perfect time to use it.

We've started parking the weed puller by the gate on the deck, and grab it whenever we take Mr. Darcy for a walk. As we go, we casually lever out any hound's tongue or thistle we see. I've also started taking solo (meaning, without the dog) excursions onto the steeper wooded parts of our property where the hound's tongue is more likely to grow. It's a bit too early in the season yet, but you can bet your bottom dollar I'm going to be vigilant about eradicating this weed from our property.

So there you go. Another tool in our arsenal.

A **bang** in the night

Yesterday I spent time doing some fall clean-up chores: gathering wood debris, raking leaves, and tidying up the driveway.

I finished stacking the overflow firewood on the porch.

I also brought all the kindling I had split during my woodsplitting marathon onto the porch, stacked in a metal water tank for the winter.

Needless to say, the wheelbarrow was in constant use during these chores. At one point I noticed a bolt had gone missing and one of the legs had worked loose from the handle. Don found a replacement bolt and repaired it. He also noticed the tire was nearly flat, so he pumped it up a bit. I thanked him and finished my tasks.

Many hours later, around 9:15 pm at night, Don and I were peacefully reading. The dog was asleep on his bed. All was quiet.

Suddenly we heard a loud BANG on the porch, followed instantly by a softer metallic ting. It made us all jump. We scrambled for flashlights and poured out onto the porch to see what made that commotion.

We saw nothing amiss. No animals. No intruders. We were about to shrug our shoulders and go back inside when I remembered the ting. I looked closer at the wheelbarrow parked next to the water tank.

As it turns out, the tire on the wheelbarrow had split. When Don pumped it up, the tire held for a few hours before it simply exploded, throwing rubber shrapnel at the water tank.

It also spewed this horrid fluorescent green goo on the porch. I wiped it up so Mr. Darcy would not be tempted to lick it. (No idea what it is.)

Impressive, no?

I guess the wheelbarrow is out of commission until we get a replacement tire.

But at least the mystery of the BANG in the night is solved.