Monday, December 3, 2007

What's this Cold White Garbage?

Saturday. 6am - 10pm. Snow.

Saturday. 7am-3pm, 5pm-10pm. Nate. Work.

I hadn't moved my car since 7am and when I left work at 10 I got stuck in several places in the parking lot and stuck IN THE MIDDLE OF THE STREET TWICE in front of my house. Apparently Fargo forgot how to plow streets and parking lots. I'm sitting in Studio right now working on my project so I can't take any good photos, but here's a photo of the parking lot outside from a 4th floor window.
You can't really see the damage, but we got about six inches of standing snow in one day. I have yet to shovel out my 100+ foot driveway. The next big purchase for this guy? Snowblower. I found a couple on craigslist for $200-$300, so you better believe one of those is coming over to play! Anybody know some minimum requirements I should be looking for? I really don't want to get one that sucks and is going to take me all day to clear out my snow.

I have yet to get the fireplace wall's storm windows back up or decorate the house for Christmas. I'm so glad I get to do this all in the snow now. Just another lesson on the evils of procrastination? I'd say so.

3 comments:

Omar said...

Wow, just read through your posts from where I last read you progress a few months ago. You've been busy! Nice work. :)

Kelli said...

If you can get one that is self-propelled on your budget, then do it! Also, caterpillar treads are better than wheels. I inherited my kick-ass snowblower from my Grandpa, so I have no idea what he paid for it, but if you can find these two features, you should have it made.

Another option is to run an extension cord out with your heat gun and melt it all away. I've been coming up with all kinds of great new uses for my heat gun. Look for pictures of a grilled cheese heat gun sandwich on my blog soon!

Muskego Jeff said...

From personal experience, a good running older snowblower may well last forever.

In my opinion, stay away from 2-stroke engines that need gas/oil mix. They're lighter duty than 4-stroke.

Self-propelled is nice, but a lighter snowblower isn't hard to push around. Tracks can pull through snow nicely, but I can't see them being as easy to maneuver as wheels. Either one works.

Make sure that you get a big enough auger to match what you can get for snowfall. A smaller snowblower can be overwhelmed by deep, heavy snow while a big tank of a snowblower (like mine) is overkill for 1 inch snowfalls.

My opinion: get the biggest snowblower you can find and test it out to make sure it runs well. Electric start is probably one of the best features you can find, since cold engines tend to start harder.