Window Sills

(Window work must be genetic.)

One of my projects for this summer was to do some maintenance and repair on our window sills. For the most part, this involved a little bit of scraping and sanding followed by application of MinWax Wood Hardener. And once everything was prepped, priming and painting.

Everything went according to plan until I started on the window in our master bathroom. I knew this sill had been damaged by water dripping from a leaky eave trough because it was soft in several places. (The eave troughs still leak, but we now have aluminum triple-track windows installed so additional damage has been minimized.) Also, it is a window in a bathroom; so there's just a lot of moisture. And we see the occasional carpenter ant in this room in the spring and summer. But it didn't look as bad as it was.

I began scraping and peeling up the layers of paint. Sadly, soft wood came up with the paint, revealing several deep gouges in the sill. So after scraping the paint, removing the soft wood and applying wood hardener to everything that was left, the window sill looked like this:

And this:

Clearly beyond my skill level. Nonetheless, I decided to tackle the job. Thank goodness for the internet and the MinWax Wood Filler tipsheet. We happened to have dowels of various diameters (remnants from Abbie IV's fencing practice); I cut them down to size and put them in the gaps, as recommended by the tipsheet:

The wood filler can warns you that it will start hardening in 15 minutes. Heck, it took me 15 minutes just to think about opening the can. Scary. I mixed up the wood filler and started filling in the gaps, gouges and gulches. It was kind of a slathering mess with a smooth, thick oatmeal consistency. And it did indeed start getting hard and tacky after 10-15 minutes.

After putting on the filler and smoothing it (sort of), it now looks like this:

So now it has to finish setting. The directions say 30 minutes. I think it's better to be safe, so I'll give it overnight, at a minimum. The next step is sanding to smooth out the ridges and lumps (I didn't quite make it under the 15 minute limit); then priming and painting.

UW's Concrete Canoes

Badgers do a 'fivepeat' to rule 20th concrete canoe event

UW Badger team owns the concrete canoe event. Below is an explanation from a former team member and my fabulous niece:

Go Badgers!!!

Just the fact that I participated in Concrete Canoe and Steel Bridge is an enormous reason for why I've been hired at great firms in the past.

Alors, the UW Madison Concrete Canoe team /*follows the rules*/. This may seem quite simple however, it takes hours of dedication and some nights of sleeping in the lab to accomplish. A hefty packet of rules comes out each year which has various changes from the previous season. The majority of these changes pertain to the concrete mix itself (the amounts of water, cement, ash, glass beads, etc). We paid a lot of attention to this and up to 40 different mixes were cast into cylinders, tested under ASTM standards, and documented in the technical report - another portion of the competition. A surprising amount of teams do not entirely obey these concrete mix regulations and, thus, get disqualified.

This is all good and proper, but UW takes it 100 steps further with the amount of time each teammate dedicates to the effort. Let's not forget the races. The paddlers on our team practice together as though they were training for the Tour de France. This is clear if you've ever been to a Concrete Canoe competition.

Another thing that always makes us stick out is that our concrete canoe literally feels as smooth as glass. When I was on the team (and I'm guessing they still do this), shifts were set up so that several students were in the lab sanding the canoe - all day long for many days. This helps with the aesthetics portion of our score.

Beyond that, the technical presentation is practiced many, many times and the co-chairs always put canoe before everything else for that school year. Several sub-committees are set up to allow for more concentrated efforts on each division of the competition as well as _fund raising_! The companies which support the team are really what allow us to be so successful since, without them, we'd never be able to afford all the needed supplies for the mix and mold. UW takes it extremely seriously, but we have tons of fun (for lack of a much less cliche expression).

Joining the team was undoubtedly one of the best decisions I made in my college career, along with my beloved, but far less known, Steel Bridge Team (which demands just as much time and effort).

Well I tried to make this as brief as possible, but there is much to say about the Concrete Canoe team.

Please do not hesitate with more questions! I enjoy reminiscing.

Love,
Domi