The Neighborhood (rain or shine) · · PAGE 6.

February 14, 2014: The neighborhood is beautiful to see with its majestic oak trees and Spanish Moss blowing in the breeze.   This end of the street is covered with them.

My old Cadillac sits in the shade most of the day when it is parked in the street that used to go to maintenance shed on the abandoned golf course.  Our driveway connects to this short side street, not the street in front of the house.

June 14, 2014: Here is a view looking east on our street.  The mail box has doors on the front and rear, but the vertical post blocks access to that rear door.  You can see I have to step into the street to collect the mail.  This photo was taken on a day that had rain showers.  The grass is also greener than it was last September when we first came here.

All I need to do is remove the mail box and cut off the vertical post above the cross arm and the back door will open.

The hurricane season in Florida begins in June and my thoughts have turned to the possibilities of damage to the house.  All the windows to the rooms have metal accordion shutters than can be closed and locked in the event a major storm or hurricane comes this way.  Here is the outside view of the sliding doors on the north side of the Florida Room.  There is nothing here to protect the glass doors from the flying objects that are part of every hurricane making landfall.  I built a house in 1993 down at Palm City, Florida north of West Palm Beach.  It had clear Lexan corrugated panels that could be installed when a hurricane threatened the area.  The house was build to updated standards after Hurricane Andrew hit Miami in 1992.  The winds were blowing at 59 MPH that night where I was living in Palm Beach Gardens on the north side of WPB.  There were a couple of hurricanes that hit that house in Palm City a few years ago.  I drove by there to see if it was damaged.  I sold the house in 2001, but I still wanted to see how it looked.  Not a single shingle was missing due to the building code in effect when it was built.  That house had multiple sliding glass doors opening on to the swimming pool deck and all of them were protected by the Lexan shutters when those hurricanes passed directly over the house.

Here is view looking at the other doors near the guest room which is behind the gas grill.  That light on the wall is switched on from inside the guest bathroom.   The gutter on the old part of the roof was cut off when the Florida room was built.   The soffit and facia were both modified to fill the gap under the roof over the Florida Room.  That area will need to be modfiied again if storm shutters are fitted to protect the sliding glass doors.

This view shows the gas grill better and a better view of the accodion shutters on that window.

The west side of the house has only one set of windows in the master bedroom.   You can see the accordion shutters behind the shrubbery that I ended up trimming the day after I took this photo.

This view of the west end of the Florida Room shows how leaves have been blown into the area between the windows and those blocks behind the plants growing here.   That tall one is rooted in between two of the blocks and I removed it the same day I trimmed the tall shrubs seen in the photo above.  The leaf blower cleared all that stuff out that that could not be shoveled out and put in the yard waste trash can.   We get visits from three different garbage trucks on Tuesdays.  The first one to come by on Tuesday morning is collecting yard waste.  That truck is a "normal" garbage truck with two guys loading the back of the truck by hand.   The other two trucks are automated side loaders for the recycled and other garbage from two different colored trash cans provided by the city. 

The other thing to notice in that photo above is the one vertical blind that is not at the same angle as all the others.  I took this photo of the vertical blinds on the west end of the Florida room from the inside and it really shows the odd angle of that one shade.  I went by Lowe's to show them this photo with my problem.  They sent out the guy who originally installed the blinds to correct the problem.  I had already tried to fix it myself the same way I keep the ones inside the house working correctly.  The older ones inside turn easily, whereas these new ones are very stiff to turn and I did not want to risk breaking the new blinds.

June 17, 2014: I sawed off he upper post and cleared the mail box rear door for easy mail access without stepping into the street.   I fashioned a handle from plastic-coated aluminum clothes line wire that is holding the door up above the cross post.  I had to completely disassemble the box to remove it before the skill saw could do its job.

July 4, 2014: The fireworks in the sky came from THUNDER STORMS and not local Independence Day celebrations.  The water on the patio was lapping up against the metal frames for the sliding glass doors to the Florida Room.   The water did not get into the room itself.

The tile in the Florida Room is dry with just some seepage of water coming past the door, but not enough to overflow the track as seen below.

This is the last sliding door at the northwest corner of the room.  The water coming from the downspout was a trickle, not a flood.  That told me the gutters need to be cleaned again.

I opened the door since there is a large overhang above to take this photo showing how deep the water is in this area as it flows away from the house at the top of the photo.  I have since cleared some of the plants and the decaying leaves from this area to improve drainage.  The camera flash has stopped the rain drops and splashes on the concrete walkway and the paver stones.

I grabbed my umbrella and went to mail box since the rain was quickly filling the street.  The time stamp on this photo is 3:55 PM on July 4.  I was using my flash to illuminate the mail box not thinking it would "stop" rain drops falling in the near field of the camera.  I also realized the wire handle on the back door of the mail box needed to be bent downward to keep water from running inside the box.   There is a large storm drain up at the side street.  The drain pipe is huge under the street and empties into the Tillman Canal behind the house in the upper right corner of the photo.  That is a major drainage canal that stretches for about 12 miles from west of here near the headwaters of the Saint Johns River to the Indian River which is between the mainland and the barrier islands on Florida's east coast with the Atlantic Ocean.

The date at the top of the page is February 14th (Valentine's Day) and July 4 (Independence Day) for the bottom half of the page.  This one page shows the dry season up there and heavy rains down here.