Tammy having been gone to Virginia and back the last five days to visit Fran Viko’s newborn great granddaughter (Fran is Tammy’s longtime partner), Tammy and Roy came back to work here shortly after 9. By noon we (again with much help (sic) from Dino) had finished rebuilding the stone wall on the north side of the house and removed multiple bucket loads of extra rocks from the lawn. How did we end up with so many extra rocks, you wonder? Well, so do I! After lunch we put the very last of the A-stone in the trenches alongside the new / rebuilt walls, covered that with filter fabric cut 2′ wide, spread Bob’s topsoil overtop, raked everything smooth, then cast 5 pounds of Paris Farmer’s Union sun & shade grass seed hither and yon. An hour after Tammy and Roy departed, Pikey Many (you’ll remember him from the Woodshed and Barn roofing sagas) came by. He now works for Durasol Systems, an awning manufacturer in Middlebury, who just happen to have the only powder coating facility in Vermont. Pikey brought me a sample of a Red Oxide colored powder coated metal, which he thought would best match the Colonial Red standing seam roofs an all the Triangle Square Circle buildings. Why would I need such a thing, you again wonder? Well that’s because a half hour after Pikey left, UPS showed up with the 71 Berger SG-1 EBK snow guards I ordered last week. Those snow guards were primed with black epoxy at the factory (which used to offer Colonial Red powder coating as an option, but, alas, no more). As originally desired, snow slides off the 6:12 pitch standing seam metal roofs just fine. The problem is that those avalanches severely compress when they hit the driveways / front & side walkways, to the point that sometimes the big, commercial-duty snow blower on the Kubota can barely remove the piles. Since the roof structure on the house and barn were enormously over-engineered, the time has come to keep the snow on the roof rather than let it come plummeting down where people regularly walk / drive.
