A Path in the Front Yard (Part 1)

 Linda likes her front yard of native grasses and wild flowers, but it's difficult to get from the front of the house -- the porch or the sidewalk -- to the other side of the front yard -- the water hose -- because of all the grass and flowers.

 So the thought is to put a path that runs from the stairs in the retaining wall by the sidewalk to the water faucet at the corner of the house.  While we discussed a rock path, we are uncertain about it, so our first approach is to just put down mulch to make a path.  If that works out, we can come back and put down stone.

The other problem is that the ground in the front yard continues to subside.  My explanation for that is that the dirt that we put in had a high compost ratio, and as the compos decomposes, the level of the lawn sinks.  To counter that, we first want to bring in more dirt, to get the path level back to where we want the front yard to be.

 We are buying the dirt from Home Depot -- Texas Native Enriched Topsoil at $2.87 for a 40 pound bag.  The path is about 40 feet long, so I estimate I will need 46 bags, and it will take 3 trips to get it all.

 One advantage of this approach is that it allows us to lay out the path in 40 pound chunks which can be moved to get the shape we want.

 Linda decided the path should bend out a bit more.

 And once the path was located in place, we could see that it would have a negative impact on the irrigation system -- cutting one of the central sprinkler heads off from the front of the yard.  So we decided to split the line and add another head on the other side of the new path.

First we dig out from the existing irrigation line to where we want the new head to be.

 Then we cut into the existing line and add a Tee to run water to the new head.

 We run the new line out to where the head will be.

 Screw in the new head -- the same sort of head as all the other front yard heads; we had a couple of spares -- and then put all the excavated dirt back over the new line.

 With that taken care of, and the new path in it's approved location, we can start removing the plastic bags from the dirt and leaving only the dirt path behind.

 Once we have the dirt path started, we can get the Mulch.  We use the standard native hardwood mulch in the 2 cubic feet bags, but find they are cheaper at HEB ($2.99 a bag) instead of Home Depot ($3.67). Ten bags, plus sales tax, comes to $32.37.

 With the mulch spread over the new dirt, we have, effectively, a raised path going from the stairway at the sidewalk,

 across the yard to the retaining wall near the corner of the house.

 The only down side is that it produced a large number of dirty, empty, plastic bags.

 But we have a simple dirt/mulch path from the sidewalk across the yard to the water faucet.

 

 

Painting the last walls of the Garage

 With the ceiling painted and the left and right walls painted, and the front, we are left with just the back walls to be painted.  

 First we have to clear off all the stuff hanging from the walls.

Then we use the Heavy Cream that was left over from the ceiling and paint everything.  Two coats.

 

 This looks very bland.  Everything is just white.  But once we load all the stuff back on the walls, you hardly notice.

 

 

Garage Ceiling

The garage ceiling needed to be redone.  It was the old popcorn finish from when the house was built.  There had been two minor leaks in the roof that caused the popcorn to fall off in two places.  Plus there were 40 years of accumulated changes to the lighting and other changes that had left holes and bad patches in it.  We had repainted most of the walls, and redone the sink in the corner.  The ceiling was next.

I could take the popcorn off, but once that is done, it needs to be re-textured and I don't have the experience or equipment to do that.  So I hired it out.  From the whole house repainting, Hernan Diaz of HD Paint & Home Remodeling impressed me, so I called him out for an estimate.  He said $1800 and 3 days; could start in about a week.  That sounded reasonable, and gave me a week to get things ready.

I moved a lot of the stuff in the garage out onto either the front porch or the back porch -- stuff like ladders and the lawn mower and anything that looked to get in the way if you wanted to work on the ceiling.  And I removed the light fixtures.

The biggest problem was the grate that I had installed into the ceiling.

 The original idea was that I would install a similar one right above it in the floor of the attic and air could then flow up from the garage (with the doors or window open, at least) and thru the attic and out thru the ridge vent, helping keep the attic cool.  Once I got it in, however, I found that the air in the attic heated up during the day, expanded and flowed down into the garage from the attic.  You could stand under the grate and feel the warm air coming down into the garage.  So I removed the grate from the attic floor and sealed that off, but didn't bother doing anything with the garage grate.  Now I needed to.

I removed the grate, and trimmed the hole in the sheetrock back an inch or so to expose the bottom of the ceiling joists so that I could attach a new sheet of sheetrock to them.

 After a couple of days of sanding and applying sheet rock "mud", I thought I had it pretty well fixed.  It didn't have to be perfect -- it was going to be textured with the rest of the ceiling.

I was wrong about how good a job I did.  Once HD got to work, he quietly redid the tape and float for this patch and did a much better job -- the difference between a professional and an amateur.

Anyway, when HD showed up, he first went around and applied plastic to all the walls and floors.

He then used his compressor and spray gun to apply a light spray of water onto the popcorn ceiling, let it dry and then did it again.  Doing this a couple of times, the popcorn separated from the sheetrock and fell to the floor when he scraped it off with a wide blade. He did an amazing job of removing the popcorn and leaving a ceiling in great shape.

 

Of course the garage doors obscure access to the ceiling above them, so they needed to be down/closed when he was working on that part of the ceiling, and the garage door opener and chain and track needed to be covered in plastic, so much of the time they were closed.  With the water, and sheetrock work, and later the texture and it drying, there was a lot of water in the air.  And the outside temperatures were in the high 90s at least.  So it was very hot and humid in the garage, surrounded by plastic, with limited light (I had removed the light fixtures).  

Once the ceiling was prepared, a light texture was applied.  

 That was allowed to dry overnight.

The last day was all painting.  First a primer coat of Kilz to seal the sheetrock.  HD wanted the original, oil-based, Kilz.  It took 3 gallons.  I bought that at Home Depot ($107.10).  Next came 2 coats of the final paint -- Heavy Cream again, is what we are using for ceilings.  For this I picked Behr Marquee Interior Satin, 5 gallons. $272. 

 

 The result? A beautiful ceiling.  Both the front of the garage

 and the back of the garage

 look amazing!  I was so pleased with HD's work that I paid him $2000 instead of the agreed upon $1800.

Of course, that was just for the painting of the ceiling, I still had to restore the garage to working order.  The main part of that was the lights.  I replaced the three lights with new light fixtures -- LED strips, from Home Depot.  The two over the cars are from Lithonia Lighting,  MNSS 4 ft. 120-Watt Equivalent Integrated LED White Strip Light Fixture 4000K High Output, Model # MNSS L48 7000LM MVOLT GZ10 40K.  These put out a lot of light -- 7000 Lumens.  Each.  About twice as much light as the previous lights. 2 at $54.97 = $109.94.

Installing them was a bit of a trick.  From the package, I first removed the plastic cover and then the metal piece holding the lights.  That piece was attached to the back by a grounding wire and the wires to the LED driver (looks like a small transformer).  Both of these were removed by removing a screw each.  Separating the top from the bottom.  That makes it fairly easy to install the bottom onto the ceiling, with the light  power supply wires coming thru a knock-out hole.

 Once the bottom of the light is firmly attached to the ceiling, the fairly lightweight top part can be reattached by screwing back in the grounding wire and the LED driver.  These will support the top piece while the power supply wires are attached to the light fixture -- black to black, white to white, and bare copper ground to green.

 

 And then the top can be snapped back onto the bottom; careful not to pinch any of the wires.  And the top plastic cover can be put back over the LED strip to produce the installed light.

 Turning the circuit breaker back on, we can test it, and it works!

 We repeat the same for the second light fixture, over the other car.

Back over the workshop area, we do the same but use a slightly lower output fixture.  It looks exactly the same but is only 5500 lumens. Model # MNSS L48 5500LM MVOLT GZ10 40K. $49.97.

Cable to the Kitchen

We want to move the WiFi router to be closer to the middle of the house,  It seems like the easiest thng to do would be to put it where the phone used to set (back when we had a landline) on the counter between the kitchen and the living room.  The WiFi router takes a (short) ethernet cable from the cable modem.  So we need to move the cable modem.

To move the cable modem, we need a cable drop in the new home for the cable modem.  We already have a telephone jack in the wall of the kitchen next to the counter, and without a telephone, we really don't need it, but that would show us where to drop the cable down into the kitchen.

 So our plan is to replace the telephone line with a cable drop.  First we need to find where the telephone line comes from the attic into the kitchen wall.  We remove the cover plate from the telephone outlet, and expose the electrical box behind it.

 We measure that this is about 20 to 24 inches from the peak of the ceiling in the living room, and roughly in the middle of the skylight.  Going into the attic, we remove the radiant barrier that covers the insulation for that wall and remove the insulation to find the phone line going down into a hole in the top plate of the wall.

 The hole for the phone line is really small -- too small for the cable -- so we drill another larger hole in the top plate next to it. 

We find a new wall plate that has a cable connection, and a cat5 and an empty square hole in it, and figure, as long as we have everything open, rather than replacing the phone line wiring, we'll just add the cable, and a cat5 connection.  

Which means we need a connection for a phone line to the wall plate.  So off to Home Depot to get a Voice Grade Jack from Commerial Electric (1000 023 234).  The instructions (online) show how to wire it for a normal phone line (cat3).

 While we are at Home Depot, we get a brand new 12-foot run of coaxial cable, since we only need to run from the kitchen straight up to the attic and over a bit to the cable connection board, which is all but right overhead.  

We already have some spare cat5 cable (the yellow cable in the picture above), so we run all those down into the kitchen wall, and out and into the electrical box.  The hard part is conneting all three to the back of the wall plate and putting it all back into the wall.

 

Painting above the windows

 Some of the windows are in the middle of solid stone block walls.  To do this, they put a metal plate from the stone wall on the right to the stone wall on the left, and then put the stone blocks that go above the window on top of that metal plate.  For example here is the exterior view of the small window in the master bathroom.

 Notice how this is not a problem when there is no stone above the window, then they just put a 1x4 piece of wood, as in this example of the small window in the central bathroom which opens out onto the deck.

 All the windows with the metal plates are on the West and Southwest sides of the house.

The plates were painted, at some point, to try to match the color of the stone -- an off-white.  But the paint is weathered and peeling.  For example, here the small double-hung window in the loft.

 

There are 3 colors that might be reasonable for these bars -- trying to match the stone, trying to match the trim around the window, or trying to match the wood trim of the house (which we just had re-stained and is Behr Chocolate SC-129).  We used a photo-editor to select and change the color of the metal plate in the above photo, and Linda selected the Chocolate color to match the house trim.  So off to Home Depot to get a quart of that.  $37.76, including masking tape and plastic film.

Each of the plates is at most 4 inches deep, and the window lengths are 24 inches for the small windows and 30 inches (times two) for the larger windows.  With 4 of the small windows and 4 of the larger double windows, we get a total of 36 lineal feet or 12 square feet that need to be painted.  A quart should cover about 88 square feet.

 The first task is to scrape and clean the metal plates.  Then we had to mask off the window and the surrounding stone.  That took 2 hours. 

 Then there was the actual painting, another hour.

There were a few spots where it seemed the underlying white paint from the previous painting was showing thru, so we put a second coat  on the center part of the plates (staying away from the edges).

 

 

 

Sealing mortar joints in exterior stone

 When the painters were here, they pointed out that there were cracks in the extrior walls, mainly where the stone meets the trim.

For example, the window in the library out to the front porch, on the exterior, has these two huge beams vertically on each side of the window.  There is a large gap between the beam and the stone work.

 And there were other, minor, places where there were holes, along the fascia boards where they meet the stone.

For this long gap in the front, the main painter supervisor suggested a caulk that is colored to look like mortar. Loctite PL Concrete ($10.80 at Home Depot).

That seems to work pretty well, although you do have to be very careful of where it goes -- it does not clean off well.

I used just mortar (and water) on a couple of other places.

Update: 17 July 2025

I also noticed that there were left-over holes that had been drilled in the stone, but were no longer being used.  For example, there were 4 holes that had been drilled near the North West faucet, to hold a hose reel, but it must have broken, and been removed, leaving nothing but the holes.

 We could try filling them with mortar, but mortar is grey and the limestone stones are more white.  So I went looking for an outdoor permanent caulk to fill the holes, that would match (mostly) the color of the stone.  I found Vulkem 116 Exterior Polyurethane Sealant which comes in 16 different colors. Comparing the color samples on the website to a photo of the wall, it looks like "Stone" is the closest match.  And the hardest to purchase.  But I found it available at Metro Sealant, for only $6.99 (plus $1.68 CA sales tax).  And $13.38 for shipping.  

But it does a passable job.

 There were also holes like this at all the other faucets, and also in the area where the solar system inverter and such was removed for the first solar system.

Some of the holes went into the mortar between the limestone stones.  In that case, I just filled it in with mortar.

 

Update: 22 July 2025 

In the front of the house, there is a pillar  with a large crack in the mortar.

 We used another tube of the Loctite PL Concrete to fill it in.

 That seems to have worked okay.  Of course, you can't get up close to see it without a really long ladder (16 feet).

 

 

 Update: 26 July 2025

We had a wasp problem in two corners of the house.  The wasps were going behind the fascia boards at the North and South corners on the West side of the house.  We discovered this when we were starting to paint the house, as far back as June 2025.  But we worked around it by spraying with a Wasp and Hornet spray.  That would kill one or two (out of the 6 or 7) wasps hanging around, and scatter the others, at least for a little while.  Within a day, or maybe only hours, they returned.  We used 5 cans of the Wasp and Hornet spray, and we still have a problem.

It seemed they must have a nest inside the walls, and were just going to and from it via the joint between the stone facade and the wood fascia board. So the theory was that sealing the joint would prevent them from entering and solve the problem.

We first used a can of the Great Stuff foaming sealer.  That did a good job of sealing almost everything, but the wasps hunted around and found small holes that were not completely sealed and contined to go in and out.  So we turned to the Loctite PL Cement caulk and used it, over the spray foam, to seal the remaining areas, both the South West corner

 and the North West corner.

 We worked at night (the wasps seemed to not be present at night), and the North West corner could have been done more carefully to avoid getting it on the trim.

While this seems to have stopped the wasps from going into the space behind the stone facade, they are still hanging around both corners, presumably confused by the disappearance of their entry ways, but not having anywhere else to go.  We assume that over time the problem will go away.