June 13 - 25, 2026 Replacement Floor Tile in Homer - Alexa Garage Shingles - Wiseman Family Visit - Father's Day - Alexa's Garage Soffit

My Blog Reflection

What strikes me is that there's a very fine line between success and failure. Just one ingredient can make the difference.

Andrew Lloyd Weber

June 13, 2026:

We went to the movies in Cape Girardeau. While in Cape we ran by Menard's so to purchase some replacement floor tiles for Homer. The tiles I put down about seven years ago yellowed terribly. Last year I replaced all of the easy tiles with new ones, i.e. the ones that did not require me to unbolt the couch, the dinette, and the toilet. This left a visible row under the couch. Here is a picture, although it doesn't really pick up how yellow these tiled turned.

Here is a picture after I replaced the yellowed row. It looks a lot better. I'm hoping these replacements will not yellow. I hate doing things over and over.

Here is a picture of the yellowed tiles left under the dinette. This picture better highlights the yellowed tiles. Ugly!

I had to unbolt both dinette seats to replace the yellowed tiles that were visible. Here is a picture when completed. A big difference.

I also needed to replace a couple of tiles in the bathroom. Unfortunately this meant taking up the toilet. There were twenty tiles in a box and I was short by four tiles. The project went on hold.

This is a good picture to show just how yellowed the tiles became. Isn't that awful? I hope they were a new batch and that doesn't happen with the replacements.

June 15 - 16, 2026:

While waiting to obtain more floor tiles, I went over to Alexa's and we worked on replacing the broken and missing asbestos shingles on the back of her garage. 

Here are some "before" pictures.

Asbestos shingles are very brittle to work with, even when new. These fifty year old shingles were worse yet. These shingles are no longer available but Alexa found four from the house (which are a little different) in the garage that we could use.

I reported some time back that on the left side of the back of the garage a vine had grown between the downspout and the wall of the garage. This vine was in excess of four inches thick and had made its way up under the wall shingles, under the soffit, and even under the roof shingles. Earlier in the year we had cut off what we could get to. This still left some vine wood clinging to the downspout on that side of the garage. Here are a couple of pictures. You can see how the vine grew under the wall shingles. 

Before we could put up any shingles we had to patch a large hole in the wall and cover everything with felt paper to make it waterproof.

Using a couple of the the "newer" shingles and pieces of the old shingles we were able to complete the wall. Here are two "after" pictures.

The final repair was replacing one broken shingle on the bottom of each side of the front of the garage. 

The entire project took about eight hours and was frustrating due to the materials we were working with. Now we need to repair the rear soffit that was torn loose when the vine was cut out and replace the two back downspouts.  

Kelly was taking a friend to Cape Girardeau today so she picked up six more tiles from Menard's so I can finish the Homer floor tile project. I will be glad to get it completed as well.

June 16 - 17, 2026:

After finishing up at Alexa's I started working on finishing up the floor tile replacement in Homer. Here is a picture in the bathroom after I pulled up the toilet and the tile under it. You can readily see the ugly yellow tiles left to replace.

The new pieces went in quickly and this is the final result.

As I was cleaning up I noticed that two tiles by the top step were yellowed so I decided to pull them up as well since I now had extra tiles.

The new tiles, although the exact same lot number, have a little more gray color in them than the last batch. Even though the color is off a little the gray looks better than the yellow.

A few days ago I had painted the yellowed vertical tiles under the top step black. This gives the steps more depth when stepping in and it solved the yellowed tile problem forever.

June 17, 2026:

It was EXTREMELY windy all day. As luck would have it, the wind tore part of the seam on the sun sail we had just put up on the 12th. The sun takes its toll on the thread on the seams. I took the sail down to keep it from getting torn any more. I laid it out in the garage out of the wind so I could work on it. I then went to Ace Hardware and got two tubes of a construction adhesive that is rated as having the best adhesion even on vinyl. I laid down two beads of adhesive on the seam. Here is a picture of the sun sail. The arrows point to where the seam came apart - on the end and ended in the middle.

The adhesive has to cure for twenty-four hours. The sun sail has some age on it so probably next year we will need to buy a new one.

June 19, 2026:

I put the sun sail back up. Construction glue has done the trick.

June 20, 2026:

The Wiseman Family, consisting of my daughter, Annie, husband, Adam, and daughters, Violet and Wren, arrived from California for a visit. The ladies flew in and Adam pulled their pop up camper here on a road trip with his mother for company. 

Violet did not feel well and, upon going to bed, vomited up violently. It was a nasty mess to clean up but Annie and Kelly got everything changed and washed in no time.

June 21, 2026:

For Father's Day all three grandparents gathered at our house for a brunch. Here is a picture of the group. The back row: Aaron (Alexa's friend), Mike, Kelly, John (Adam's step-dad), Kathy (Adam's step-mom), and Adam. Front row: Alexa, Wren, Carol (Adam's mom), Jay (Adam's dad), Violet, and Annie.

We had a great visit.

June 22, 2026:

The Wiseman pop up camper is named "Poppy". A camper is a new experience for the Wisemans. I showed Adam and Annie how the water system worked. 

We turned on the gas and could get anything to light. We put on a different LP hose on but no change. We then put on a LP hose that had a regulator and all worked great. The regulator on the camper was obviously bad. It was a double regulator. I had never seen one before. We spent the rest of the first day chasing down parts. We found everything we needed except one fitting. We were able to rig up the new double-stage regulator and everything tested out fine. I then showed them how to light the gas water heater and how to turn on the gas furnace. 

Inside the camper there are two plastic tracks that the door slides in when the unit is folded down. The glue holding up the strips had failed in several places. I cut wooden wedges to hold the plastic track in place while the new glue I injected set up. 

Adam and Annie both noticed that the trailer springs squeaked so we jacked it up and put grease everywhere we could get it inserted in the leaf springs. It should take care of the problem.

The camper came with two interior movable fans with lights. Adam replaced all inside bulbs with LED bulbs and found one fan light did not work. I took it apart and found a bad ground connection. I replaced the connector and all works well now.

June 23, 2026:

I was glad to help them get acclimated to the camper and to be able to help fix a few things that needed attention. It is a ten year old camper but has been used very little and is in marvelous condition. 

Here is the "Poppy" and the tow vehicle as I sat in a chair and watched Adam load everything up before folding it down and locking it up for travel.

Here are Adam and Annie ready to roll out.

From Perryville they travel today to St. Louis to visit with relatives. Tomorrow or the next day they will drive to Table Rock Lake in Southwestern Missouri to meet up with California friends who own a cabin there. After a few days they will camp their way back to California with a number of tourist stops to make on the way. This will be their first camping road trip in "Poppy".

Violet was still not feeling up to par and had been running a low grade fever the entire time they were here. Upon arriving in St. Louis they took her to an Urgent Care and found out she has a mild case of strep throat. They started her on antibiotics. Hopefully she will recover quickly. Adam said it is not a Wiseman vacation unless someone gets sick! 

It has been great fun having them here.   

June 25, 2026:

We got back to finishing up the work on Alexa's garage. We had to reinstall the soffit, which we damaged by pulling out the vines under it. We also had to reinstall the downspouts.  Here are a couple of pictures of Alexa pulling out the vines from beneath the soffit. We couldn't believe what was still up under there. One section of vine was as thick as Alexa's arm.

Here is a picture of me working on getting the soffit back in place.

Here is a picture of the back of the garage with the downspouts re-installed. All that is left on the garage project is to powerwash the garage and paint it when the weather cools off a little.

I have a project of installing a garage door opener some time soon.