MacGregorSailors.com

Hi Russ!

I still miss my pale yellow two door pebble green vinyl top 1969 Dodge Dart Swinger and its slant six 225 cubic inch engine with dealer installed air conditioning… I could fix just about anything on it with the tool box carried in the trunk. Nowadays the current cars (since the late 2010s) have gradually gotten beyond my interest level. They run better and longer than my old stuff and get better gas mileage too! But servicing them has really moved to the qualified and outfitted shops and dealerships … it hard for the local owned shop to tool up now… never mind “normal” folks like you and I.

Yeah, the boxing and moving them around bit was really taxing but I try to do the smarter not harder routine… I brought a combo hand truck/cart… I think the wheel and inclined plane along with the lever are the most under appreciated tools we have available.

Boy that was a lot of dumpster to fill!
That must have been an epic effort on your part!

We’re sorta guilty of some of the same problem to a lesser degree but we’re trying to shed some of it so our daughters won’t have so much to contend with later. Thing is all the tools and equipment that has been acquired are sorta useless to the both of them. Downsizing is a challenge after all this time. What to keep, what to toss, what to donate, what to sell, what to simply scrap out just to be free of it… one box at a time, one box at a time, make progress….

Gotta go… the dealership just called and the car is ready for it’s 100-to-150ish mile roadtrip…

Best Regards,
Over Easy

My in-laws were married over 60 years and accumulated a lot of stuff. They also once operated an antique/gift store and accumulated a lot of wares that never sold. We held multiple estate sales trying to sell that off dirt cheap to avoid tossing it.
They threw out NOTHING. I mean NOTHING. Not hoarders, but savers. We found stuff from the 1950s. My father-in-law was a film maker. He kept EVERY PIECE OF FILM from every project he ever made. He recorded everything. I found reel to reel tapes from when he was a child. I felt bad throwing out hundreds of tapes and films, but what do you do with them? We have all his works on DVD so the films have no value.

We felt bad just tossing so much stuff, but there is no market or demand for much of it.

I stacked one dumpster so tight and to the brim, when the guy came to pick it up he said "Wow, I've never seen one done this well. You should make a video of how to fill a dumpster for training purposes". He's right. I should have taken photos. I was quite proud of how I used every inch of that thing.

Then of course OUR house absorbed much of their stuff that we just couldn't toss. We have a big eBay listing now of anything of value. That is another big chore. Boxing and shipping some stuff is a challenge. He had some BIG recording equipment that just wont fit in a box. I'm researching freight shipping for eBay.

We vowed to not do this to our son. It's just not fair to your kids. So we are now in "thinning" mode. We are going through OUR stuff and purging that which we haven't touched in years.

Enough venting. It's been a busy Summer. Whew!

Tomorrow looks like a great day to go sailing. I think we will look forward to some of that.

Hi Russ!

Wow! That must have been a real project.
Your in-laws sound like some very interesting people to know.
There are bound to be some fun and intriguing stories within their lives.

But yes, we agree with you…

Russ wrote: ↑Wed Sep 04, 2024 5:30 pm It's just not fair to your kids. So we are now in "thinning" mode. We are going through OUR stuff and purging that which we haven't touched in years. .

Hi All!

Hope everyone had a great summer season! Especially August and September (when we had to become land bound ).

As is the case with most of life things a,ways take longer than you expect…. We’re “nearly finished” with emptying the last storage locker!
Thought we’d be there at the end of August but things got shuffled around and priorities got changed…. Fortunately our younger daughter has been able to help us move / sort / repack / donate / dispose of nearly all the boxed contents of this last storage locker. A monumental task for which I am very very grateful she has been able to help with!!!
Today we were able to disassemble one of the two 12x4 ft lofts that I added to the storage unit.
Tomorrow maybe we can knock down the second one after my stress test… oh yeah, the stress test is one of those ‘gotchas’ in life… at my physical earlier this month the doc noticed something and so now I have a stress test to take tomorrow… and I can’t even study for it!
Fribble!

My schedule is further compromised as I’ll also need some additional surgery in early November which is as far out as the Urologist would go. Seems that the bladder stone issues are still a problem even after the surgery in June. Fribble! Is what it is..just gotta roll with it. The Doc isn’t too keen on the heavy lifting or heavy vibrations aspects of second floor deck removal / rebuilding or the dirt working with our new mini digger, mini front end loader or plate compactor. She nixed the compactor right away!

It’s a nice gently used one from Harbor Freight …just perfect for the projects I’d hoped to get a chunk completed before the weather turns cold here in NH.

At this point I’m focused on finishing emptying the storage unit then getting the new hydronic heating system finished by mid October. I’ve gotten all the major bits and bobs together except for the system anti freeze called Rhogard which is now my pacing item. No heavy lifting involved so the Doc should be happy with that vs the balcony and land work.

I’ll still try and get some welding projects finished while it’s still warm enough to work outside like a removable ball hitch on the John Deere 318 and a pin install/deinstall for the snow plow blade as well.

Hope all had a wonderful summer!

Best Regards,
Over Easy

Hi All!

Hope everyone weathered Helene in good shape and without significant issues or injuries. For a hurricane with an “inside” track she sure seemed to pack a shallow in coastal Beaufort SC!

They say a miss is as good as a mile…. and I have to agree things could have been much worse after a neighbor checked on our SC home after the storm passed through. A good sized branch about 8” in diameter from one of our large pine trees dropped during the storm. It caught the roof over the rear garage doors by a foot, bounced then slid off taking the gutter and marring one of the steel faced doors. Yeah, it’s a “Fribble” but nothing like what it could have been if it had cracked the roof open! I’ll take the incident as it is only an inconvenience and something to be addressed when we get back down there.













We’re fortunate this didn’t happen to Over Easy! That would have been really disappointing. She “sailed” through the storm without any issues only collecting some pine straw.

Our little runabout Scrambled did well but the tar ping took on a little water at the bottom folds. That’s on me… I should have done a better job of curling the excess inward when setting it up. Live and learn. I asked my neighbor to knife the “balloons” to drain the water and lessen the strain on the tarp and its sopports.





All in all I think we did ok considering all the other damages our area suffered. I hope others weathered this past storm without incident or injury and are doing well.

Best Regards
Over Easy

That is good news all considered. You have good neighbors to look after your place and things.

Glad all were safe and minor material damage.

Hi All!

It’s amazing how much stuff one accumulates over the years until one packs it into storage lockers!!!
Selling our old home in the Spring of 2019 was controlled chaos …. Things moved so rapidly we had to pack everything away as quickly as possible so storage lockers were our best option back then…little did we realize the challenges the world would face in the following months and years with COVID-19, travels, family, as well as various minor and major health issues (like a couple of back surgeries amount others).

The following sort of give an idea of where we started with our 4 storage lockers back in the Spring of 2019.














Each year we’d whittle away at it getting stuff moved to our new New Hampshire home and also to our home in South Carolina.
The 4 units turned into 3 then to 2 and then to one very very full unit.
A lot of things got donated to those in need and to those who could enjoy them.
A lot got tossed… it’s hard to let go of the debris of a 40 year consulting and contract engineering career …. But to be honest it’s all in the past and many of the clients have been bought/sold/merged/disappeared over those decade spans… just ghosts of things once important now relegated to boxes of memory files of yesterday that have little relevance to today or tomorrow since retiring back in 2016.

BUT TODAY IS RED LETTER DAY!!!
The very last storage locker has been emptied with the incredible help of our younger daughter!
This has been quite a month long effort that I could not have done without her fantastic help!


I’m SO glad that she took time out from her schedule and activities to help bring this project to a successful conclusion!
We are finally free and clear of this storage lockers!

Now we’re down to a manageable remainder of boxes that have pretty much been culled down to things that are of value to us, are useful to us and/or we can find new homes for where they can be useful to others.

(One take away that we’d like to share is it’s never too soon to start lightening the load … we would have planned on a more controlled downsizing into retirement but the rare opportunity to retire early was not something that we could afford or wanted to pass up on.)

Best Regards,
Over Easy

OverEasy wrote: ↑Mon Sep 30, 2024 7:01 pm(One take away that we’d like to share is it’s never too soon to start lightening the load … )

This^^^

Your journey is similar to ours. We moved in 2020 and to prepare, loaded 3 storage units to the brim with stuff.
Later did a similar reduction from 3, 2, 1 ..... 0 units. It is quite liberating to empty the last one and close it out.
In the reduction we learned that much of the stuff was never missed and ended up being trashed.

My Mother-in-law moved into assisted living 2 years ago and this summer my wife and I were tasked with emptying her house to get it put on the market. They both had lots of hobbies and my late father-in-law was a film maker and had tons of films and such from projects.
We filled 3 x 20 yard dumpsters to the brim. Such a task. I felt sick tossing hundreds of cans of film and stuff we couldn't sell. But it had to go.

We vowed to not do this to ours.

Thin junk while you can. If you haven't used it in years, you likely never will.

Hi All!

It’s currently Wednesday evening October 9th and hurricane Milton is bearing down on central Florida. Land fall expected during the night/early-morning hours. We sincerely Hope all those about to be affected by Milton’s approach have gotten all their preparations taken care of and have evacuated as may be appropriate. We hope that you weather the storm with as little disruption as possible. Our thoughts are with you.

Meanwhile we’ve made some progress on our other projects here in New Hampshire.
I’ve gotten all the equipment and fittings together for our new heating system. We’ve been getting along nicely so far using a single 1500 watt electric heater using only one of the two elements with the fan on low. So that may be only 750 watts. House is Warm and Cosy at 70-74F for the current time. The electric is only a stopgap until the new heat system comes on line. Currently parts wise we are only waiting on 20 gallons of hydronic antifreeze fluid which should be here by the 13th of October.

Painted the new equipment mount board. This will allow me easy access to the circulator pump, domestic hot water heat exchanger, isolation valves, auto control valves and electrical components. We are replacing an ~30 year old combi-boiler that gave up the ghost last winter with a 50,000 BTU propane fired hot water heater system. This approach is nearly bullet proof maintenance wise. The old combi boiler consistently cost us one to generally two service maintenance plumber calls per year at about $450+ a call. This type of propane water heater we are going to be using generally has ZERO maintenance required. (We’ll see…)

Heat load capability of the new system should be more than sufficient as last winter using only two 1500 watt capacity electric heaters at a low setting were more than capable of keeping the house at 65F even during the coldest nights. Assuming that the heaters were at max capacity (which they were not) there would have been a max of 3000 watts (between the two units) which is equivalent to about 10,200 BTU.

> For those interested in the engineering, You get about 3.4 BTU/hr for each watt/hr. So if you connect this through a power meter and it says 1500 watts, you are getting 1500 x 3.4 = 5100 BTU/hr of heat. Times 2 heaters this is about 10,200 BTU total. The water heater heating capacity is stated as 50,000 BTU which is roughly 4(+)times what is needed to maintain a more than comfortable house temperature of 68-74F for our home. (Our backstop option is our electric space heaters should that ever be necessary…)

So that project is finally moving along. Looking forward to virtually unlimited hot water showers (instead of using our interim boat type pump showers).

Another project that I’ve gotten to start on is our new driveway/parking area project so we can appropriately park Over Easy when we bring her North. To get started I’m digging out an old large oak stump with the HF Backhoe/Trencher. Boy is that thing capable! Here are a couple pictures of when I first broke ground:




Here we are after about 2-1/2 hours. Much of that time I was fussing around getting used to the machine and working in the soft surface ground after the recent heavy rains. I currently get a fair amount of the street runoff into this area…As you can see there are several good sized rocks that the HF Backhoe had no trouble lifting and moving to the side. (Note: I really should have removed the scrap boat trailer before getting started for maneuvering room… my newbie error…it’s my first tree stump excavation…I’ll do better on the next one. Overall so far I’m really impressed with it …especially for its size and cost. More to come.





Doubt we will be getting to the balcony tear down and replacement this trip… I have another surgery scheduled in early November so from then to when we head back south to South Carolina I’ve been told in certain terms that I’ll be on ‘Light Duty’ assignments only by my Admiral and daughters and doctor. Things are what they are… so I’ll probably finish retiring the basement, add a radon under floor suction vent system and sort through the boxes we moved from storage. Step by step…inch by inch… moment by moment..making progress on that “To-Do-List”..

Best Regards,
Over Easy

Nice work. You get to relive the sandbox from your childhood.

Yup!

Hi All!

Slowly making progress on the ‘Northern To-Do List’…

A) It’s nearing the end of October and so far the infamously long over due emptying of the storage lockers has been completed
——> Never could have gotten it done without the help of my younger daughter who took time out of her plans for the month of September to help with this!
—> Still have a lot of boxes to cull through here at the house but it’s considerably less than what we had before!!! Still hoping on reducing what we have left by half before the end of the year…

B) The acquisition of the (all used in good condition) John Deere 318 w/Front End Loader, the HF towable backhoe and HF plate compactor have been accomplished They all have been tested on preliminary projects and seem to be just right for what we’re planning on accomplishing.

C) The removal of the 30 year old house combi boiler system has been completed
Boy was that a task! I did make a mistake when draining the system hydronic fluid… I should have saved it for reuse with the new system… that stuff has gotten a lot more expensive over the years $$$… live & learn…
—-> Note: while it’s nice to have gotten this out of the way it’s good to remember it’s always somewhat easier to tear something apart but generally harder and more time consuming to build back the replacement…

D) The installation of the new house heating system is actually progressing along reasonably well… there have been the inevitable delays getting parts found, ordered, delivered ….as well as the figuring out where the actual parts will actually functionally fit… and how they can actually be plumbed together into a serviceable functioning low maintenance system that meets the heating and hot water needs of the house. Looks like it just might be possible to have this working before the end of the month!
—-> Sometimes it’s the little things that eat up time like a brass water flow sensor I ordered that finally came in with the pipe threads not completely cut…spent an entire fruitless day attempting to find a 3/4-14 NPT tapping die all to no avail … I’ll attempt to make one of my own tomorrow from a 3/4 FPT black iron coupling by filing notches in the coupling threads and carefully try to tap the required threads into the brass sensor. If that doesn’t work I’ll just have to bypass the sensor for now and order another one that I can splice in later… just an annoyance— not a deal breaker.

E) Surgery… yeah the Doc says I need to have something taken care of again and she has it scheduled for early/mid November. She really wanted to do it sooner but held off so I could get some of these projects started/completed/tucked-away … (Not what I had planned for on my ‘Northern To-Do List’ but it’s on it just the same. So it looks like I won’t be able to tear up the driveway and parking areas nor start getting the retaining walls built this year. Oh well… … it is what it is… at least the equipment has been procured and tested ).Better to deal with the surgery in a calm planned controlled manner than as an immediate crisis in the middle of hospital shutdowns due to a pandemic!

So for now at least it looks like things are a bit more like a glass a little more than half full rather than empty.

Our plans are still to head back south in January after the year end holidays and still hoping to meet up for the ‘Meeting of the MacGregors in Philadelphia

I’ll try to post some pictures of the heating project after I get it wrapped up

Best Regards
Over Easy

Hi All!

Here are some nearly finished photos of the new hydronic heating system I’ve been working on for house.
The system not only provides heat for the house but also the on-demand “tankless” domestic hot water (DHW) through an isolation heat exchanger.
Another feature of the system is that it has an “auto-stir” capability so that when there is no demand from the two house zones or DHW the circulator pump stays on to make sure the 40 gallon boiler doesn’t stratify which helps with the thermal efficiency. It also helps with the longevity of the circulator pump.
Given we regularly shut down the house in January after the holidays to get down south we are filling the hydronic system with Rhogard Aluminum/Stainless Heat Transfer Fluid. It not only acts as an excellent heat transfer fluid but also as a full system corrosion inhibitor as well as a -60F antifreeze. A lot better than plain water.
While it’s not cheap it sure beats having any hydronic system/pipe freeze breaks while we are away or during any power outages.























Right now I’ve got the system on an overnight pressure check. Once that passes I’ll finish up with the remaining tasks left to do.

Note: We also backfill the domestic tap water system with a food safe/RV type antifreeze to protect the general house plumping while away from the house.

Best Regards,
Over Easy

Sounds like you've made amazing progress despite the challenges—impressive work on the heating system, and good luck with your surgery and the remaining projects.