We interrupt this travelogue on our trip to Michigan in order to bring you some of the things that we have been seeing and doing since we got back to Ohio.  We have been back for six weeks from our trip, but I will probably be writing about Michigan through the end of the year.  To give you a little bit of a break, and catch you up on more current events, here is what has been going on.

Tom and I used the beautiful fall weather to get some stuff done around the house.  There is something about the urgency of fall that makes those things seem more important.  We keep saying we need to take advantage of these beautiful fall days to get things done outside.  Winter is coming and, in Ohio, you never know when it will make its appearance.  So it is time to get some stuff done before the winter interrupt.

We scraped, cleaned, and then painted our two decks on our house.  The intention, when we started, was to paint the bare wood on Tom’s replacement construction.  But there were some places that had peeling paint, so we decided to do those too.  Then we noticed that some of the deck was dirty and mildewed.  In the end we scraped, sanded, scrubbed, dried, and painted.  Next time we get ready to paint, we will do all the cleaning and sanding at once, instead of piecemeal like we did it this time.

Tom and I winterized the RV.  This is our third year of doing it and we get more confident at it each year.  We expected the weather to get cold.  Aside from one cold week in October, the weather has stayed warm.  But the RV is ready for those freezing temperatures whenever they come.

We replaced the window and door screens in the RV.  When we were at Fort Frederica, we couldn’t keep our windows open on nice days because the sand gnats flew right in through the window screens.  The old RV had a finer mesh on the screens.  The new RV screens were an open invitation to the sand gnats.  We ordered some finer no-see-um mesh and a splining tool from Amazon.  I had never replaced screens before but it wasn’t difficult.

Tom took the screens out of the RV, then I dug out the spline, pulled off the mesh and set to work.  I cut a piece of the new mesh with about six extra inches all the way around the window.  I placed it over the opening, then reinserted the spline with the splining roller.  The roller was really good because it had a concave and convex side, which meant I could change depending on which was working.  After I got the spline inserted along one side, I pulled the screen taut and inserted the rest of the splines.

I had to redo some of the sides because they had ripples or pleats, but the screens ended up looking pretty good.  Tom took the screen door off the RV so I could replace those screens as well.  The door was a little harder than the windows, but I got the screens done for that in less than 30 minutes.  We also wanted to replace the screens in the ceiling vents but we couldn’t get the screens out.  Coachman glued them in.  We will take the remaining mesh with us and figure something out if it proves to be a problem.

We raked a ton of leaves and Tom mulched them so we could put them on the flower beds around the house.  I cut back all the stalks and leaves and “put the beds to bed” for the winter.  We thought we were done raking leaves until a big windstorm on Saturday blew all our neighbor’s leaves into our yard.  More leaves to rake! Yay!

Tom has done lots of little fix-it projects around the house.  They are the things you don’t really notice after a while when you are living in a place.  We put up a few more pictures and are trying to stay on top of things instead of letting them go.

When we lived in an RV full-time, we were always ready to go.  Having a house means that we have to interrupt those travel plans and take care of home.  The house and yard are looking good and are ready for winter.   It is nice to feel that we are ready to face whatever the weather brings.