October 12 - 16, 2023 - Home Maintenance Project While Homer is in the Shop and HOMER COMES HOME!

While Homer has been at the transmission shop, I decided to take on a much-needed home maintenance project - scraping and painting the deck. I had put this maintenance issue off all summer because of the heat. I just don't do well in heat anymore. 

We have a large wooden deck, approximately 750 square feet. It was last painted in 2020. The deck is over 25 years old so as the wood ages it needs repainting more often. There was a lot of prep work this time scraping off loose paint and putting putty in some broken out areas. I tackled the rails first. Unfortunately, I did not take any before pictures to show how bad they looked. A lot of the rail prep work was on my knees. Being on my knees with knee pads isn't too bad but getting up is. LOL 

The rails are wood and painted gray while the balusters are black metal. After scraping all the rails I taped off the bottom of each baluster to keep from getting paint on it. This was time-consuming to do and time consuming to get the tape back off. The rails and posts all had to be painted on all sides. Scraping and painting the outside required me to stretch all I could while standing on my 8-foot ladder. Here is a picture of the painted rails and posts.

The next few days I tackled prepping the deck floor. I power washed it, I blew it off with the leaf blower, which really helped lift off loose paint, and, on my knees, I scraped off paint by hand. Here are two pictures of the deck surface after all that was done.

The plan was to paint it on Sunday the 15th because rain was forecast for Saturday the 14th. However, the forecast changed. The rain was called off for Saturday and moved to Sunday. My daughter, Alexa, had volunteered to come down to help with the deck painting so I contacted her to come Saturday instead. Luckily, she was available.

In the past I had always painted during summer weather. Now, it being October, the weather was much cooler and we had to deal with constantly falling leaves. Alexa did all the trim work and removed leaves as they fell on the deck before I painted. In the past I had painted the entire deck with a four-inch brush. I then went to an 8-inch-wide paint pad to speed up the project. This year I decided to try rolling the paint on. It went well. Here are a couple of pictures of the finished deck. I am happy how it turned out. I will not put the furniture back on the deck for a couple of days to let the paint cure well in this cooler weather.

HOMER FINALLY CAME HOME:

Homer has been at the transmission shop for weeks the second time. The technicians were still not able to duplicate the problem of it falling out of gear and into neutral. It would not do it even one time for them. Whenever they drove him, he shifted perfectly, never dropped into neutral as we experienced hundreds of times over the last two or so years and dozens of times on the way back from the Natchez Trace last month. No fault codes were ever detected using their diagnostic equipment. Without being able to verify the problem they did not want to rebuild the transmission at a cost of $3,500.00 - $4,000.00.  After much diagnosing and studying by several different technicians, they came to the conclusion that the transmission module must be causing the problem, although that is rare. I authorized them to put in a new transmission module at a cost of $800.00, parts and labor. If this solved the problem, it would be much cheaper than a transmission rebuild. If it did not solve the problem, WE WOULD ALL KNOW IT IS THE TRANSMISSION.

Friday, the 13th, I received a call from the shop advising that Homer was ready to go. The old transmission module never put out any codes. Once the new transmission module was installed it immediately threw a code indicating that the MLPS switch on the transmission, which has something to do with telling the transmission to drop into neutral, was faulty. They replaced this switch as well and are confident they have found the problem. The bill was $1,133.97. There was an earlier bill of $201.00 for cleaning various connections hoping to correct the problem. A total of $1,334.97 spent.

Today we picked him up and brought him home. Here he is raring to go on a trip somewhere. I powered up the generator to exercise it, which I do monthly when he is home.

I doubt we will have good weather and/or time to take him on a trip before he needs to be winterized and stored for the winter. While he is here at the house I have several items to repair. The first is the broken window blind, the second is fixing the passenger door arm rest/handle that has pulled loose, the third is the TV antenna not working, the fourth is the bathroom sewer vent seal, the fifth is making new AC filters, and the sixth is revamping the bathroom closet to better accommodate how we use it. Tomorrow Homer is scheduled to be inspected for new license plates before we head South next month. I hope to have all the little items fixed soon.