More Miscellaneous Activities
Wauchula, FL - Events of Tuesday, June 26 to Sunday, July 1, 2018
After a relatively quiet weekend and our trip to Clermont last Monday to see Citrus Tower and have lupper at OakWood Grill, Paul was ready for another project. The addition of gutters and downspouts to the park model was so successful at stopping the waterfall by the door when it rained, Paul decided he also wanted to install a gutter and downspout on the door side of our shed. Since we get thundershowers almost every afternoon, and since some of them pop up rather unexpectedly, Paul was tired of running through the shed waterfall as he scrambled to put away tools and materials when a storm popped up while he was working on a project outdoors.
The shed is a lot smaller than the park model, and since Paul didn't see the need to install a gutter on the back side of the shed, the work went rather quickly. He got an early start on Tuesday morning to beat the heat and had the gutter and downspout completed around noon.
New gutter above the door of the shed
Margery had an appointment for a pedicure in Avon Park on Tuesday afternoon. Paul got cleaned up and went along. After dropping Margery off, he drove to Lowe's in Sebring to return some unneeded components from the gutter project. After the returns and the pedicure, we headed to Maxwell Groves in Avon Park. Maxwell's has delicious orange-flavored soft serve during orange season (fall, winter, and spring). In summer, they switch to key lime soft serve, which we have been dying to try.
We arrived at Maxwell's around 3:50. Although they're supposed to be open until 4:00 in summer, their door was locked. Fortunately, there was still a girl inside. When she opened the door she appologized for closing early, but she explained there had been no customers for the last 3 hours. She let us in to get our key lime soft serve.
Key limes have a somewhat subtle flavor so the lime soft serve was good, but not nearly good as we were expecting. The orange has a much more intense flavor, and it's very refreshing; but at least we got to try the lime and satisfy our curiosity. It's a good thing because the girl said business has been so slow the owner had decided to close for the rest of the summer starting at the end of the week. If we hadn't gotten the lime soft serve that day, we would have had to wait almost another year for another opportunity.
Margery with her key lime cone
Instead of late afternoon, our daily thundershower didn't occur until early evening on Tuesday. The sky was just starting to clear as the sun went down resulting in some very dramatic lighting in the clouds.
Dramatic clouds at sunset on Tuesday
On Wednesday morning when Paul took Freeway outside, he was greeted with more unusual clouds. It was shortly before sunrise, and there was a brightly lit cloud circle. Paul found out later the circle was from a rocket launch from Kennedy Space Center that had occurred about 20 minutes earlier.
We previously had someone from Chariot, the company that manufactured our park model, come to address a number of things on our punch list like patching a few small cracks in the drywall, replacing a cracked piece of wood on the hall closet, replacing a couple of soft-close drawer slides that weren't working properly, and repairing the grout between the tiles on the kitchen back splash and bathroom shower. There was one thing they couldn't do at the time, however, and that was repair the bathroom floor. Many of the tiles were loose, and the grout between almost all the joints was cracked. The worker who came to do the other repairs determined the whole floor needed to be replaced because of all the loose tiles.
In addition to having to replace the entire floor, the job was further complicated by the fact the tile manufacturer had discontinued the tile used on our unit shortly after our unit was built. The factory didn't have any of the original tile left so we stopped a few weeks ago in Lake Wales at the RV dealer who sold us the park model to look at their samples of the new tile. We actually liked it much better than the original. It took them a week or so to get the tile from the factory, then they scheduled a flooring company from Lake Wales to replace the bathroom floor last Thursday.
When the workman took out the old tile, he said the reason so many of the tiles had come loose is the factory didn't use enough thin-set cement when installing it. The cement is spread using a notched trowel, and the amount of cement is determined by the size of the notches in the trowel. Apparently, whoever installed our bathroom floor must have been new because they used a trowel for wall tile with small notches instead of a trowel with larger notches.
Another thing the tile installer did while he was waiting for the cement for the tiles to set so he could proceed with the grout was to install our shutters. We were supposed to have shutters on the front and south side windows, but they were on back order when our unit was built so it was shipped without shutters. They finally got the shutters in and sent them with the tile installer. It's hard to believe how much more finished the outside looks with the addition of a couple of fake, plastic shutters.
Without shutters
With shutters
The tile guy got the bathroom floor done all in one day. We were able to use the bathroom right away, but we were instructed to walk softly because, although the cement and grout had set, it would take about 24 hours to develop enough strength for normal use.
We decided to have lupper on Friday afternoon at Wauchula Family Restaurant. It's nothing fancy, but the food is good and reasonably priced. We split a grouper dinner (lightly breaded and grilled) and a half-pound blue cheese burger. They were both delish!
We mostly puttered around over the weekend. We didn't have any definite plans for the immediate future, but we'll have another update when something develops.