House Remodelling

A Greenhouse for the backyard

2012-03-17T14:45:00.008-07:00

A neighbor moved and the new people did not want their backyard greenhouse, so they past it on to us. This greenhouse is a light-weight aluminum frame with a bunch of glass panels. It took us about two hours to remove all the glass and move the frame from their backyard to ours.

This is apparently Model 86 "Curved Greenhouse", probably from Halls Garden Products, Ltd. Aylesford, Kent, England, originally from 2004.

The first problem was figuring where to put it. We tried moving the frame around several places in the backyard, and finally decided it should go next to the South Bed, behind the stone wall and next to the raised garden. This area is shaded by several trees, but they are deciduous so they drop their leaves in the winter and so things should be sunny in the winter and more shaded in the summer.

The next problem is setting up a foundation. Since the placement of the greenhouse is still subject to change, I decided to use a relatively temporary foundation -- a box of wooden beams. The more permanent option would be a concrete slab, but that would make it hard to move. Instead I got eight 4x6 pressure treated timbers (YellaWood) from Home Depot ($132,37). The foundation box should be 101.5 by 76 inches, and I was able to get Home Depot to cut the 8-foot timbers to the correct lengths. I assembled the foundation in the garage and used 6 inch lag screws to hold them all together.

Next I had to level the ground where the greenhouse would go. The back of the greenhouse is at ground level, so the front is below ground, about 4 inches, since the ground slopes back.

After digging it out level from front to back and side to side, I poured sand (6 bags) along the edges. The idea is that the sand is easier to shift to get the foundation box level. I took the box from the garage and re-assembled it in place.

I covered the entire inside with weed barrier, running both front to back and side to side. I filled the bottom two inches of the box with decomposed granite, and then topped it off with 5 to 6 inches of rainbow gravel, from Whittlesey.

To get the rainbow gravel, which ended up being almost a ton of gravel, I rented a pick-up from U-Haul again. My calculations suggested 1/2 a ton would be enough, but after one load, it was clear I was significantly off and only had, at best 2/3 of what I needed, so I made another trip and got another 1/2 ton. The actual numbers were 1140 pounds the first trip ($66.02) and 980 pounds the second ($42.43). The pick-up rental was $55.45 plus $13.05 in gas, and $1.50 to wash out the pick-up bed.

Once this was done, we just have to put the glass back on the frame. The assembly book from the manufacturer shows how the various size panes should be installed.

We had some breakage of panes in moving and cleaning, and had to buy 5 replacement panes ($48.66). The easiest place to do this was at The Hardware Store, since the big box stores -- Home Depot and Lowe's -- don't cut glass. But the Hardware Store only had single thickness glass, and it seems the glass being replaced is somewhat thicker (maybe double strength glass). Next time we should try an actual glass shop.

The panes are held in place by little clips and "glazing spring clips". Both of these are normally grey metal, and if you drop one (or it springs off), it can be hard to find. To make it easier, I spray painted them yellow.

But after a day of washing glass and putting it up, we have it all in place.

Fixing a Leaky Faucet

2012-03-17T14:31:00.002-07:00

We have hoses attached to all the exterior faucets -- one in each corner of the house. The main one for the garden appears to have been leaking -- a slow drip -- for the past year, so I figured this would be a good time to fix it.

Unfortunately, when I went to take the top off of the faucet, to replace washer, the faucet all but fell apart. The handle shattered into 5 or 6 pieces, and the base would not come off. Of course, Home Depot (where I bought the original faucet) no longer carries this brand, so there are no replacement parts.

And the copper pipe that it was attached to wanted to turn, rather than letting loose of the faucet.

Given that it was likely that I would break the pipes, I figured it was better to call an actual plumber. I chiselled out the mortar around the faucet and the pipes. This exposed a connection which the plumber says is an electrical grounding connection.

Lanier Plumbing sent a guy out who did an excellent job. He put an extension on the pipe that converted it from male threads to female threads, and should be more durable, plus being longer. That should make it easier to replace the faucet in the future. $122.88 for an hour's worth of work plus the faucet (male hose bib).

I still have to repair the mortar.

Dirt delivered

2012-03-06T19:43:00.005-08:00

The dirt was delivered this afternoon, about 3:30. Three cubic yards.

I ordered more than was needed for the North Bed itself; I only put about 2 inches in depth on the North Bed, which comes out to about 1.2 cubic yards. But the minimum delivery is 3 cubic yards.

I put the rest on either side of the walkway, in Zone 2 or in the part that will become the lawn. Areas that had already been dug up, and have settled. I can either leave it there, long-term, or eventually transfer it somewhere else when that area is finished.

It took about 2 and a half hours to haul it all from the street to the back yard and distribute it around.

It's supposed to rain in the next couple of days, so I wanted to get this in before it rained.

Building the Stone Wall

2012-03-06T08:47:00.003-08:00

We have dug up a bunch of rocks. Linda thought we should keep them, so I piled them in the back yard.

From that Linda got the idea of building a rock wall separating the South Bed from the lawn.

We started at the end near the fence, selecting rocks that were big enough and shaped for stacking. We scattered the rocks over the yard, to make it easier to see each one.

We continued across the yard to meet the corner of the walkway at the raised garden. The idea was to make the wall two or three rocks high. It took about two days of moving, selecting, positioning.

We've moved the surplus rocks out to the front curb, to get rid of them.

North Bed Drip Irrigation

2012-03-03T13:13:00.005-08:00

I want to get my lavender planted in the North Bed, and before I do that, I should put in the irrigation. I have a supply line already run to the corner of the bed. I want to use the underground drip irrigation, like I did in the herb and iris beds.

First, I have to clear off the bed. Over the winter, I had bags of manure and rocks stacked on it, and Linda had put the leaves from the trees there. I moved all that off and cleared it to just the bed.

I measured the bed and laid out where the drip irrigation lines would go. The lines are 18 inches apart. I used examples from the Rain Bird documents on underground drip irrigation. I still had plenty of the drip lines from when I put it into the iris and herb beds. The Rain Bird document suggests a supply line up one side and a flush line at the other end. A valve at the end can be opened to flush out the lines, or closed to allow the drip.

With this layout, I can now see how many joints of what type, to buy the necessary connectors.

Then it is a day of cutting and connecting to create the irrigation system.

At the corner, where the supply line comes in, I put in a filter and pressure regulator. Since I may need to clean the filter, I put these two in a box.

At this point, it became obvious that the final connection between the output of the pressure regulator and the rest of the system would need to be made at the right height (or depth) underground. My plan was to put the drip lines 4 inches underground and then add 2 inches of really good dirt on top of the bed. This would give a good soil mix to start the lavender plants. So I needed to bury the entire irrigation system 4 inches under the ground.

While that was doable, with difficulty, it was the most complicated and difficult of the tasks for this job. In retrospect, I should have dug the trenches into the bed first (4 inches deep) where I wanted the drip lines to be, and then assembled everything in the trenches.

But in any case, I got the lines buried, and was able to make the final connection between the irrigation supply line and the array of drip lines.

Once that was done, I could bury the whole thing.

I'm ready now for 2 inches of good dirt on top of this bed. Given the size of the bed, this works out to about 1.2 cubic yards.

I had previously bought Grower's Mix from Austin Landscape Supplies for the raised bed, and that seems to have worked well. So I ordered another 3 cubic yards (minimum delivery order) of Grower's Mix ($35/cubic yard) plus delivery ($70) plus tax for a total of $189.43 to be delivered on Tuesday. This should be 40% compost, 20% sand, and 40% loam.

I also considered Hill Country Garden Soil from John Dromgoole's Natural Gardener, but at $46/cubic yard, it's more expensive, and the web site doesn't really say the blend. Whittlesey Landscape Supplies (where I have been getting the decomposed granite and rocks) has a Garden Mix, but it's only 33% compost, 22% sand, and 45% loam (plus delivery is more).

Shelves in the Utility Room

2012-02-18T13:48:00.000-08:00

While I was away, Linda got a new dog. The dog needs lots of new things -- food, toys, stuff. Since the dog gets fed in the utility room, she put them all on the dryer. That's okay for short term, but longer term, we need a place to put them.

So in looking at what we have, it seems that most of the space where the freezer would go is being wasted. We don't have a freezer, and don't expect to, so the space for the freezer is mainly just laundry baskets and a small shelf on the side wall. Our solution was to take the small shelf off, and put in two new shelves -- running the full width of the space -- 40 inches wide. To leave room for hanging clothes, we only put in 12 inch deep shelves, and to leave plenty of room, the top shelf is 14 inches below the shelf above it, and the bottom shelf is 11 inches below that. We bought one 8 foot length of shelving and cut it to two 40 pieces (plus a left-over).

We moved the previous little shelf over onto the wall next to the dryer, so we can use the hook rack beneath it.

We also got a new support for the iron and ironing board, and moved those
over a bit.

Once that had settled in, we went back and got another hock rack to put next to the new shelves. We wanted to get a white wire one, but couldn't find a simple white wire set of hooks. This particular one is $20 from Target.

Putting this hook rack up was fairly easy -- there is a stud behind both supports. But whoever designed it was an idiot. Look at how the screws that hold it to the wall have to be. Putting in the top screw is easy, but the bottom screw has the first hook, and the rack right in front of it. How can you possibly use a screw driver to put the bottom screw in?

I used a Phillips head screw bit and a crescent wrench to turn it.

More Decomposed Granite

2011-12-12T12:01:00.000-08:00

Allergy season is fast approaching, so I will be unable to work outside for a couple of months. To put things in the best shape for this, I have filled in all the holes and put decomposed granite over the rocks that fill the walkway areas.

For that section of the walkway which is not yet complete, I put cardboard down and then decomposed granite on top of the cardboard. This should allow the decomposed granite to be shovelled back up when I start digging and put to the side until it can be put down again.

The primary issue on this was then cost. How to get the decomposed granite at minimal cost. I got 1 cubic yard, for $38.02 from Whittlesey Landscape Sales. This is the same place I got the last decomposed granite. That time (September 2011), I got 3 cubic yards and had it delivered. Delivery was $80.

Option 1 was to have the decomposed granite delivered. $80
Option 2 would be to buy the decomposed granite from Home Depot or Lowe's. They have it in small plastic bags. Home Depot charges $4.27 a bag (half a cubic foot), which including tax becomes $290.52 for a cubic yard.
Option 3 was to rent a pick-up and deliver it myself. I can rent the pick-up at U-Haul for $19.95. Plus 59 cents a mile. Plus gas. Plus clean-up. It turns out to be 27.6 miles from U-Haul to Whittlesey to my house and back to U-Haul. That's $16.28 in mileage charges. Gas for 28 miles would be maybe 3 gallons, for another $9.00. $1.50 for a self-service car wash to clean the bed out afterwards. Taxes and fees of $6.59, for a total of $53.32. The second (and third ...) cubic yard would cost $25.28 for delivery.

Bigger Windows, Part 3

2011-12-06T08:13:00.000-08:00

The windows in the two smaller bedrooms (the guest bedroom and the computer room), were too small for the City building requirement for "egress", so they were replaced by larger windows. Unfortunately these were also not quite big enough for "egress", and so they need to be replaced once more.

As before, first the old windows are removed.

Then the openings were made larger, by lowering the bottom. This caused some difficulty since there was an electrical line that ran right below the window. This required some work to replace that wire with a longer one that ran lower in the wall.

Then the new windows can be set in place

The window sills had been put on and off so many times they were showing it, so I had new ones made up. The shape of the old sills is no longer available, but BMC West has a millwork operation that can make custom pieces of trim. I had four (4) 8-foot sills made of red oak -- two were used for this job, and the other two are in the attic for the next time. $380.36.

The rest is finishing. The windows are stained and given two coats of polyurethane. The wall is taped and floated, then textured, and painted.

Outside, the stone work is replaced and mortared in place.

And to finish this saga, the building inspector came by today, 8 Dec 2011, and says these windows past inspection.

With the windows passing inspection, Renewal by Andersen wants to be paid. We had agreed, for the 2nd set of windows, on a cost of $4000 for the two pairs with half ($2000) down. After getting them wrong and having to do it all over again, they discounted this to $3500, so the last payment was $1500.

Tiling the Kitchen Backsplash

2011-11-21T09:13:00.000-08:00

With the granite counter tops in place, we could turn our attention to the backsplash behind them. Originally both the counter tops and the backsplash was one continuous sheet of butcher block Formica. When the granite was put in, they broke out and remove the Formica on the counter top itself, but we still had broken pieces on the back splash.

We looked at a lot of possible tiles, but eventually decided on two. For the bulk of the backsplash an Ivory Silver Premium Travertine from Floor & Decor. This came in 18 inch by 18 inch squares. I went thru their entire inventory and picked out 25 tiles that looked the best (not cracked, broken or ugly).

For the backsplash behind the stove itself, we decided to go with a stainless steel tile. We found these at Lowe's -- a sheet (about one foot by one foot) of e inch by 4 inch tiles. They appear to be white ceramic tiles with a metal stainless steel cap on top of them, giving the appearance of a stainless steel tile. I bought 9 of these sheets to cover this section. The box says "2x4x12 Stainless Steel Mosaics".

The only thing left was to get an tile installation person. Floor & Decor has an installer that they recommended, Perfect Floors. In addition, a guy (Darrell McGuire) picking up tile at Floor & Decor overheard what I needed and said they did tile installs. As soon as he had picked up the tile they needed for another job, he came over and looked at our job.

The main problem was that the travertine tiles are 18 x 18, but the cabinets are 18.75 inches from the granite to the bottom of the cabinets. That's too much space to fill in with grout; but too little to fill in with a piece of tile. We considered several options: Cutting each piece to be 9.25 inches (so two of them, rotating the tiles 45 degrees (making the longest dimension over 25 inches), cutting pieces to different heights (so there is not a constant height joint down the middle), filling in at the top, or bottom, with a different type of accent tile, and so on.

Eventually Linda decided a 45 degree rotation would be best.

The two estimates came in at $500 or at $540 -- not a big difference. A search on the internet found one (positive) review for Darrell McGuire, and a large number of mixed reviews for Perfect Floors. So we went with Darrell McGuire.

They were to start on Friday at 9:00 AM, so the previous night and that morning I cleaned all the counters off, turned off the electricity to the outlets and switches in the area that needed tiling, and pulled the outlets and switches out of the wall.

Once this was all done, I started removing the old Formica while I waited. I stuck a putty knife up under the Formica as far as possible to loosen it, and then just pulled. I should have worn gloves, as I got a couple of "paper cuts" from the sharp edges, but got it all off before they showed up.

They used a "tile mastic" to glue the tiles onto the wall. The main thing they did was to cut all the tiles to fit in place. There were a lot of cuts. Every large Travertine tile had to be cut at least once. Plus many had to have holes cut for the switches and outlets. Even the stainless steel tiles, which are more or less one foot square mesh sheets had to have some cuts to fill in the half piece holes on the edge.

Once the tiles were installed, they had to sit overnight until the mastic had dried.

While the mastic was drying, I went and got a bottle of Sealer's Choice Gold from Home Depot. A 24 ounce bottle was $34.58. At 6:00 in the morning, I wiped it on the Travertine with a sponge to seal the stone. This was late enough to let the mastic dry, but still give the sealer 3 to 4 hours to dry before Darrell showed back up to apply the grout.

The grout was Antique White. Behind the stove, with the stainless steel tiles, he used a Delorean Gray unsanded grout.

Once things were grouted, I could put the electrical outlets and plugs back in place. The wall is now much thicker than before -- it is about 1.25 inches thick. This meant that I need longer screws to put most of the outlets and switches back in place. Once they were back, I put a foam gasket behind each switch plate and outlet plate.

A few of the electrical boxes had been added after the original work when the house was built; they were added when we changed the lighting in the kitchen. So rather than metal boxes nailed to the studs, they were blue plastic electrical boxes. These have little "flippers" that hold the box in place. But these only work for walls less than an inch thick, and so would no longer work in my walls. Home Depot has an "Old Work Switch Box Support" (I see it under different brand names -- Steel City, Raco, Caddy, ...) that is a piece of sheet metal that is slipped into the wall cavity on the left and right sides and then bent over to hold the box back.

The grout for the stainless steel tiles was harder to come by and so was done on Monday morning. At the same time, they applied a thin bead of caulk (again "Antique White" to match the grout) at the bottom of the tile to seal everything.

But by Monday mid-morning, everything was done. I paid the $500 for the work, and can now put everything back in place on the counters.

More work on Zone 2

2011-11-18T13:29:00.000-08:00

The objective in excavating Zone 2 is to get the irrigation lines in place. This involves both the Zone 2 irrigation line and the Zone 3 irrigation line. The new Zone 3 areas will be the North and South beds. We left a 4 inch PVC pipe to get the lines thru the walkway into these beds.

Running the water line to the South bed is fairly simple. I just extended the existing one inch line down a couple of inches, across the zone 2 digging and then put in a "tee" to split off for the North bed.

Going thru the 4 inch PVC pipe thru the walkway, we can then continue straight over to the South bed.

From the tee, we want to go to the North bed, and thru the 4 inch PVC pipe that goes under the walkway and into the North bed. First we need to dig out all the dirt from the water supply line to the North bed. This is taking days. We are trying to get the dirt out of the way, excavate the rocks out of the hole, and do as little damage as possible to the root structure of the tree, keeping in mind that it's been a long dry summer for the tree. We need to balance the damage we do to the tree's root structure now against the hopefully better environment it will have once all the rocks are out of the way and better soil is used instead.

Using the jackhammer, we have all of the rock out of the way, and have the sprinkler line installed. This is all 1" (one inch) PVC, and goes straight from the tee, across Zone 2 and then up and thru the 4-inch PVC into the North bed, where it is currently just capped off.

With the sprinkler line installed, we can then fill this back in with dirt -- dirt mixed with leaves and grass and compost.

Replacing the Kitchen Vent

2011-11-06T15:39:00.000-08:00

As part of upgrading the kitchen, we have new granite countertops, and are replacing the appliances to a stainless steel finish. The next item to work on is the vent hood over the range. The current vent hood was put in 25 years ago when the house was built.

After looking at a bunch of high-end stainless steel vents, trying to get a quiet and effective unit (low sones), we settled on the Broan B30 Series, specifically model B3036SS (B30 series, 36 inches wide, in stainless steel). We ordered this thru Lowe's for $453.57. Once that was delivered, we could take out the old unit.

Unpacking the new vent, we have to remove the filters and the lights, in order to install it. The lights were the most difficult, since the catch for it is not done very well.

But once these are out of the way, we can break out the opening in the back to vent into the wall.

Strangely, this opening does not seem to be centered itself. For a 36 inch vent hood, the opening would be centered at 18 inches, but instead it runs from 14.25 to 22.75 (so centered on 18.5) But it seems to match the opening in the wall.

The main difficulty is that the cabinets have a 1.25 inch piece of trim extending below the bottom of the cabinet over the range. Since the vent hood is supported by screwing it into the cabinet above it, we added a couple of trim pieces that filled the 1.25 inches between the cabinet and the vent hood.

This allows the vent to be lifted into place, secured to these two pieces of wood, and then wired into the previous electrical supply line.

Replacing the light and filter panels, we can turn the power back on at the circuit breaker and we have a new working vent hood.

Digging up Zone 2

2011-11-03T15:13:00.000-07:00

The walkway across the side yard will run from the gate to the raised garden and back to the deck behind the deck. This defines a new bed area between the house (outside the kitchen) and the walkway. This will be Zone 2 on the irrigation system, so we'll just call it Zone 2.

We want to continue and finish the walkway. But we need to be able to get the irrigation water lines from one side to the other. We put in a 4 inch PVC pipe between the two walkway walls, to allow the irrigation pipes to be run thru it. This allows the Zone 3 irrigation control valve to provide water to the North Bed and South Bed, which will be Zone 3 of the irrigation system.

But an examination of the current zone 3 supply line shows that it (a) is not deep enough -- we want it to be well down, out of the way -- and (b) sitting on top of a large rock, so it can't be moved down 5 or 6 inches to go thru the 4 inch PVC pipe.

So to get the irrigation lines in the PVC pipe, we need to take out the rock that is preventing them from being moved down to the level of the PVC pipe.

After some digging we find that this rock is quite large.

Using the jackhammer, we can begin to break it up into smaller pieces so that we can get them up out of the ground.

Several more days of work gets us a large set of rocks removed from an increasingly large hole in the ground.

We will need to get rid of these rocks to continue digging.

The Walkway across the yard, part 2

2011-10-28T14:46:00.000-07:00

The second part of the walkway across the yard is pretty much a repeat of what we have been doing. We start by digging the dirt out, exposing the rock that lies just below the surface.

Using the jackhammer, we break the rock up into manageable pieces and clear out all the rock and dirt down about 2 feet deep, to another layer of rock.

For this section, we need a lot of concrete.

We ended up using 52 bags of Quik-crete, from Home Depot $120.36, framing the walls using Masonite sheets with plastic bags of mulch and manure to hold everything in place.

The one notable part of this was the tube for the irrigation lines. We will want to run 2 irrigation lines, for two different zones, from the water line and valves on one side of the walkway over to the beds on the other side. We put a 4 inch PVC tube in to allow these to be run later. At the moment, we can't put the lines down as far as we want because of the rock on the house side. Since the rock is so close to the surface, the irrigation lines are not deep enough. We ran the PVC tube at the level we want the irrigation lines to be, and we will need to dig the rock out of the house side to get them down low enough.

The next section will be a bit more difficult, because it has the irrigation water supply line (and zone electrical wires) in it. We need to dig it up, and then re-bury it without damaging it.

Bigger Windows for the Bedrooms

2011-10-16T09:11:00.000-07:00

We have replaced all of our original metal framed windows. Well, all except the one in the garage. We did this in three steps. First 4 small ones in the closets and bathrooms. Then most of them in the bedroom wing. Finally, all of the remaining ones. It's been expensive and time-consuming.

Also, it's been varied. The first set went pretty well. The polyurethane on the second set was so bad I had to redo it myself. The third set seemed to go much better and they improved on the trim.

Another difference with the third set was that they took out a building permit, which they had not done on the first two. The city building inspector failed the job because the windows next to the sliding door to the deck were not tempered. And then looking out over the deck, he saw that there was another window in the back bedroom also next to a door. This had been part of the second set of windows, but he failed that window too. And tacked on a failure for not getting a permit to replace the first and second sets.

In addition, he saw that the windows (from the second set) in two of the bedrooms did not pass "egress" -- emergency exit requirements. Originally these windows were sliding windows, but we had them changed to double hung to match all the other windows in the house. Sliding windows can be opened to expose half the window space as an exit. Replacing them with two double hung windows means that only one-fourth can be opened for an exit. The salesman from Renewal By Anderson should have known this and raised this issue when the original second set was contracted (as they should have known about the need for tempered glass next to a door), so while I made the decision to change from sliding to double-hung, they should have caught that and not agreed to do it.

Changing to tempered glass was fairly easy. The company just re-ordered a new sash (the window part with its frame) for the two windows next to the door, and with the magic of interchangeable parts, swapped out the non-tempered windows with tempered glass windows. It was just a couple of screws and then stain and polyurethane to match. That was done in September. The main problem was communication and follow-up. Someone came out in February to measure the windows for replacement, but that apparently got lost. By June, it was clear that nothing was happening, so I started calling, pretty much every day, until I got someone's attention. They had to come out and re-measure the windows -- having lost the original measurements. By July the new windows were supposed to be in, but when they came out to install them, there was only one set -- a lower sash for one window and the upper sash for the other. So they took those back and the sashes were swapped out for tempered glass on September 1.

For the two bedroom windows, it was more difficult. The window needed to be bigger, to have a larger area for egress. The framing for the window has a "header" on the top that supports the weight of the building with supports along either side. To expand either up or to the sides would require removing this framing and installing all new framing. So the easiest thing to do is to make the window larger by expanding it down. Since this is an exterior wall, both the inside (sheetrock) and outside (stone facade) would need to be modified. Let us use the window in one bedroom as an example -- the other was done exactly the same way.

The original window on the inside and outside looked like this.

The first step is to remove the sheetrock from below the window on the inside and the stone from the outside.

The insulation was removed. At this point, a problem arose. There are electrical outlets on both sides of the window. A wire connects them right thru the space where the window is to go. This was solved by grooving one 2x6 support and moving the wire down to be out of the way.

With that out of the way, the blue Styrofoam exterior insulation can be cut out and the new windows put in place.

Once both windows are in place, foam insulation is put in place all around the window, to seal it off.

The next step is to patch the sheetrock in the room, to cover the hole that was cut for the electrical re-wiring, and to extend it down the wall to the new, lower window sill. On the outside, stones were selected from what had been broken out to fill up underneath the window and create a new exterior window sill.

The interior sheetrock, once patched, has to be taped and floated and then textured. When this dries, it can then be painted. The inside wood surface of the window is stained ("Golden Oak"), and two coats of polyurethane applied.

The same sequence of changes was necessary for the other window, with the same result. The smaller window was replaced by a larger one.

The process took 3 days. The first day replaced the window. The second day did the exterior stone work and interior sheetrock patching and tape and float, and staining the wood. The last day did the mortar work around the window on the outside, while the painting and polyurethane work was done on the inside.

The estimated cost of this was about $7800. The company agreed to roughly split it, so we will pay $4000 for this. I've paid the first half -- $2000, but will wait to pay the other half until it passes inspection.

And it turns out, these windows also fail the building inspection. The inspector says that egress requires an opening of at least 5 square feet, or 720 square inches. With the bottom window completely open, we have at most 27 inches high by 26 inches wide, or 702 square inches. The inspector measured 26.5 by 25.5, or only 675 square inches. So if fails egress.

The company, Renewal by Andersen, agrees that this is all their fault and will come back out and do it again with a window that is 6 inches taller. With half the extra space in the top window, and half in the bottom, that should give us an extra 3 inches in height, or 29.5 by 25.5 or 752 square inches -- room to spare.

Dishwasher Detergent Dispenser Replacement

2011-10-07T15:44:00.000-07:00

We bought a Kenmore Elite Dishwasher in February 2009. Linda was willing to pay extra for a really quite system, and it has done that.

But when we bought it I thought that the contraption that dispenses the dishwasher detergent was badly designed. It has a little lever that is caught behind a small plastic tab. During the proper point in the wash cycle, the lever moves and the door holding the detergent in place flings open. It seemed clear that the small plastic tab is bound to break.

And so it did. So now the problem is how to replace this part of the dishwasher. The first step is to go to the Sears web site. This takes you to the Sears Parts Direct web site, where I can plug in the model number (665.13153K701) and get the list of parts for this model. Since the dispenser is on the door, we look at the "Door and Latch Parts". Part number 8 is the "Dispenser". The part is sent UPS, and 3 days later, a box shows up with the new dispenser.

Before we begin, we cut power to the dishwasher. We have an on/off switch on the wall near the sink, but you can also cut it at your circuit breaker box.

To replace the old one, the first problem is to remove the door. This is held on with a set of screws around the inside of the door.

These are a Torx screw, and need a T-10 Torx bit to take them off. Take all of them off except the second from the top on both the left and the right. The second from the top holds the electronics panel in place at the top of the door.

There are two types of screws -- along the top they are about an inch long; along the sides, they are only about a half an inch.

The door then just lifts off.

Now you can see the back side of the detergent dispenser. There is a black plastic flap covering it. It's held on by another set of screws. This time they are 3/16 hex head screws, about 6 of them around the perimeter of the dispenser.

Removing those screws, there are two tabs, one on the top right, one on the bottom left, and the dispenser just pops right out. Be sure to disconnect the wiring. There is a little tab that holds it secure. Pry the tab a little and the wiring plug pops out.

Now we just reverse the process.

Push the new dispenser in from the inside of the door. The two tabs should grab it and hold it in place. Reattach the 6 hex-head screws. These also hold the frame and the black plastic flap at the same time.

Reattach the wiring plug.

Put the door back in place. Use the Torx T-10 screws to reattach it.

Turn the power back on, and test it out to see that it works.

Need a new Hoe

2011-10-04T14:35:00.000-07:00

Unfortunately, my hoe broke.

The handle is welded onto the blade and the weld gave out. This is just after I put the 3rd or 4th wooden handle onto this hoe. It has been a very useful hoe.

I, of course, have a back-up hoe, but it's not as big. The broken hoe has a blade that is 8 inches wide. The back-up hoe only has a 5 inch blade.

and so it is not as effective as a hoe.

I also have another, different design with a rake and a hoe, but this is really small, and I use it mainly for mixing cement and mortar.

Finding a replacement for my big hoe is not easy. Home Depot, Lowes, Sears, Ace all only have the 5 inch wide hoes.

I finally found a wider hoe at Callahan's. They list this as a "Meadow Hoe", and it is 7 inches wide. $24.99. Not as good as my 8 inch hoe, but better than a 5 inch one. It's made by Ames True Temper. Callahan's had a nice selection of hoes.

Breed and Company, had a smaller selection, but they had a hoe that was 7 inches wide, like the meadow hoe from Callahan's, but is 5 inches tall, instead of the standard 3 inches tall for all the other hoes.

They call this a "Cotton Hoe". $26.75. It's made by Razorback Professional Tools, which is another brand on the Ames True Temper web site.

Looking over the Ames True Temper web site, they also show an "8-in Meadow / Blackland Hoe" which looks like what I originally had.

And the fellow at Breed also suggested that I just take my old hoe to a shop and have them weld it back together.

Decomposed Granite

2011-09-22T17:32:00.000-07:00

We have 3 of the four sides of the raised garden prepared for the walkway, plus the section from the gate to the raised garden. These areas have walls defining the walkway edges, with limestone blocks to give it a finished look. Eventually, we want to put flagstones over them, but that will wait until the entire walkway is finished. We will put the flagstones on a base of decomposed granite over the rubble rock that fills most of the walkway. It seems like a good time to go ahead with the decomposed granite. It will make working in this area much easier.

We bought 3 cubic yards of decomposed granite from Whittlesey Landscape Supplies. To see how large this is, each of the bags below is one yard by one yard by one yard -- a cubic yard. Plus we got a palette of the white limestone 4x4 blocks that we use as edging for our work. We will need them along the walkway, plus all around the yard along the fence.

The cost of this was: decomposed granite $94.35, the limestone blocks $222.60, plus $80 delivery. Including taxes, the total was $435.14.

The rest of this work was fairly simple -- shovel the decomposed granite out of the big white plastic bags, into the wheelbarrow, and then out onto the walkway sections that have been filled with rock rubble.

Hours later, we have the walkways filled in. We have about a half cubic yard more than we needed; it's stored behind the raised garden and we can use it on the section in front of the raised garden, as soon as we have that well-defined and filled in with rock rubble.

And we expect that this will settle, especially if/when we get some rain.

The Walkway across the yard, part 1

2011-09-22T17:14:00.000-07:00

We have decided to dig out the first layer of rock for the walkway that goes from the raised garden to the back patio. When David was here, we started this work, but didn't really have time to do much. Our approach is to define the inner curve of the walkway, and dig out from the other side, leaving one side to use for framing the wall that defines the walkway.

So here, we can see the initial digging, going from the edge of the walkway, digging South. We encounter rock (and the sprinkler line) just below the surface, so we have only a couple of inches of dirt to remove.

As we expose the rock, we need to break it up and get it out of the way. The easiest way to do this is to use the dirt as a ramp, allowing us to roll the rocks up and out of the growing pit.

Days of this sort of work, gets us a roughly triangular pit two to three feet deep with a well-defined edge for a wall to define one edge of the walkway.

We are now in position to be able to frame and pour the concrete for this wall.

First we form and pour the wall along the remaining dirt.

Then we frame and pour the other wall. This is more difficult, since we have to simultaneously support both sides of this wall.

We have to make sure that both walls are about the same height and will form a level walkway from the gate to the back patio walk.

Once that sets for a couple days, we can put the limestone blocks on the top and the walls are done.

Now we need to dig out the yard, and fill the area between the two walls with rock rubble to create the stable, filled area for the decomposed granite and finally the flagstones.

Granite counter-tops in the kitchen

2011-09-18T12:23:00.000-07:00

We have finally upgraded the kitchen counter-tops from Formica to granite.

Linda looked around and found some granite that might work at Austin Stone Works. It turned out those slabs were already taken, so we had to look further. There are 4 or 5 major yards that have granite in Austin, and we went to all of them. Repeatedly.

Eventually we found some granite called Copper Canyon Exotica.

We reserved it at the yard and told Austin Stone Works about it. They quoted us a price and started work to cut and shape the stone in their shop. They called and told us that installation would be on the 15th.

On the 14th, I then started clearing off the counter tops. All the drawers and kitchen ware under the counters was removed. The gas stove top was disconnected and removed. The sink and faucet were disconnected.

I also removed the disposal. The City had been indicating that they didn't want us to use our disposal -- they suggested putting food scraps in the trash to lessen the difficulty in processing waste water. So I figured we would just not put a disposal back in. I put an electrical box in under the sink and put the electrical wiring into it.

On the morning of the 15th, two workers showed up. First they removed the old Formica counter-tops.

And then they installed the new granite counter-tops. All the space had been carefully measured, so that the granite pieces were just put in place and fit.

As part of the counter-tops, we also got a new sink. It's a 16-gauge stainless steel sink from Soci.

The contract with Austin Stone Works was for $7245.83. That covered removing the old Formica, the granite (getting the granite, cutting it to size and installing it), and the sink.

I got a new faucet from Lowe's for $246.81, a Delta Ashton Stainless Steel Model: 19922-SSSD-DST. It comes with a soap dispenser, but we didn't use it, so we only needed one hole drilled in the granite for the faucet.

Finally, I called Sully's Plumbing to connect the new sink to the drain pipes. That was $220. I figured that with the new sink and the now missing disposal, it required more skill than I have to design and implement a new way of connecting the sink and dishwasher drains to the old drain line. Now that it is done, I can see what is involved -- maintenance is easier than creating the initial system.

The next day was spent with putting in the faucet and getting the plumber and with putting everything back in place -- all the drawers and kitchenware, reattaching the gas stovetop and cleaning everything up.

The main missing piece now is a new backsplash.

Switch land-line phone service

2011-09-18T10:01:00.000-07:00

AT&T was providing our land-line telephone service. It was about $20 a month after the base service plus taxes and fees. But then they raised the base cost by $2 a month in January, and then another $3 a month in August, which put the total monthly cost to more than $30.

Time Warner Cable provides our cable TV service and our internet service. We can throw the telephone service to them too, and get their "triple bundle". The triple bundle would provide both land-line phone service and long-distance. Normally we pay little for long-distance, about $5 to $10 a month, but with the higher cost of the AT&T service, it becomes cost effective to switch to Time Warner.

And now that AT&T has dug up the back yard and repaired our land-line connection, we at least know that it is possible to switch back and have working service.

So we made the move. In theory, our phone number is "portable", and we can continue using it. According to Time Warner, all we needed to do was switch out our previous internet cable modem with a new cable modem that also provided phone service and then wait for the magic to happen that would switch our service.

Originally our service was to switch over on 13 September, but that came and went with no apparent change -- picking up our phones still gave us a dial tone from AT&T. When I called, they said there were "technical" difficulties and the switch would happen on 15 September or no later than noon on the 16th.

Nothing seemed to happen on the 15th, but on the morning of the 16th, our phones were all dead -- no dial tone. To check, I plugged a phone into the Time Warner cable modem, but got no dial tone there either.

Waiting until after noon, I then called Time Warner. It took all afternoon to get the phones working. First they thought it was a problem with the modem, so I
took the old "new" modem back to the service center and swapped it for a new "new" modem. No change. Then there were issues with their data base, and several fields and "codes" that had to be changed. Around 5:00 pm, they got the phones working. It took over an hour of cell-phone minutes to make this happen.

Once the modem provided phone service, it was fairly easy to plug that into a nearby phone outlet, which takes the signal upstairs to our phone switch board. I could then run it to the distribution bars and then back down to the active phones downstairs.

Two problems developed. First, the phone line cords that connect phone equipment -- the kind with two RJ-14 clips on the end -- reverse the red/green wires. That reverses the polarity of the signal and causes problems with some telephone equipment.

The other problem was that one of the connectors was shorting out internally. By taking it apart and adjusting the position of the internal wiring, I was able to get it working correctly.

Walkway for the South Pit

2011-09-01T08:09:00.000-07:00

To complete the walkway, we need to put it on the South side of the raised garden. We have it already excavated, walled, and filled with rock on the back side (East), North, and West.

As we excavate the yard, it would be useful to have the South side ready to accep the rocks we dig out.

Also, the South Pit has been excavated and filled back in, so all we have to do is shovel out the dirt and put in the wall. A couple of days of digging gets us almost there.

We need to trim up the dirt next to the South Pit, so that we get a clean vertical wall under the string, which would be 36 inches from the raised garden. Then we can frame it and pour the retaining wall. The retaining wall took 23 bags of Quikrete.

To finish this section of the walkway, we poured the corner that connects the South wall to the West wall.

Using mortar mix to attach the 4x4 chopped/sawed limestone blocks to the top, we have a finished wall separating where the walkway will be from the South bed.

Now all we need to do is fill the walkway area with rubble rock and top it with decomposed granite and flagstones.

Adding a shelf over the workbench in the garage

2011-08-04T15:00:00.000-07:00

I had 4 feet of a wire shelf left-over from another project, so I put it up in the garage, over the workbench.

The wall area over the workbench is covered with a 1/2 inch or 3/4 inch piece of plywood, so it was easy to attach directly to it with wood screws. I had a little bag of clips left over from other wire shelves (in the closets, utility room and garage). I had to buy the two diagonal shelf supports. This took about an hour and a half to install -- the hard part was getting it to be level.

Changing Zone 1 irrigation to just bubblers

2011-08-04T14:18:00.000-07:00

Earlier, we changed the Zone 1 irrigation to add bubblers for the crepe myrtle trees, described in the posting Changing the irrigation in the driveway peninsula. That left Zone 1 with 4 spray heads, as well as the 3 bubblers.

But the only things that are being "watered" by these heads are the two Barlett Pear trees, and maybe one crepe myrtle -- there used to be ferns and lamb's ear plants, but they have all disappeared. Either they were eaten by the deer or died from lack of water or sun.

And -- observing what happens when the sprinklers run -- only the top of the mulch gets wet; the water does not seem to get under the mulch to the dirt.

So we are replacing the three heads that are for the two Bartlett trees with bubblers. These will saturate the soil itself, under the mulch, and (hopefully) get water more directly to the trees roots.

This took half a day, but was relatively simple. I dug down to expose how the sprinkler riser was attached to the buried sprinkler lines.

Then we removed the long riser, replacing it with a shorter one that just comes up to ground level (or slightly less) and then put a bubbler on top of it.

Now when the sprinkler runs zone 1, there is no visible trace -- all the watering is being done by bubblers underground. At least we have little water wasted by misting and evaporation.

The fourth head (which really was not watering anything) was just capped off underground.

The main problem with this is going to be finding these bubblers if/when we need to do something with them. And then there is also the issue of whether it will be enough (or too much) water for the trees.

Finishing the Headwaters of the Walkway

2011-07-29T15:17:00.001-07:00

With the telephone land-line working and re-buried, there should be limited activity going in or out of the gate, so I went back to finishing the walk way from the raised garden up to the gate by the garage and the driveway.

This was pretty much straight-forward excavation. Break up the dirt. Separate the rocks from the dirt. Haul the dirt in a wheelbarrow to a storage pile, to use elsewhere later. Put the rocks in a pile to use to fill under the walkway once it is defined by the two walls on each side.

It took a couple of days.

But now we have the digging done.

The one thing we had to be very very careful about is the irrigation supply line. This is a large white PVC pipe which supplies the water to all the sprinkler system zones. This supply pipe is attached directly to the city water supply (thru a back-flow valve). If we were to nick it, we would have a flood of water gushing from it (we've done this elsewhere). But (so far) we've avoided problems so far. This supply line starts at the street and goes all the way around the house.

Once the digging is done, we can then frame and pour the concrete.

To help protect the irrigation water supply line, we surrounded it and the control wires with a 4 inch drainage tube. This should give us a bit of warning when we get close to it.

Then we can lay the white limestone blocks on top of the concrete.

And finally, we fill the trench created by the two walls with the loose rock that we found while we were digging.

This should make it usable for awhile. Longer term, we want to cover it with decomposed granite and then flagstones.

Extending the Walkway to the Back Patio

2011-07-25T16:08:00.000-07:00

The landscape plan shows the walkway going from the gate to the raised garden and then around to the back patio. This creates a landscape bed between the walkway and the house, next to the garage and kitchen. I decided to go ahead and start this work, since it ties into the walkway in front of the raised garden, and I'm almost done with that, ready to pour concrete and fill in with rock.

First we lay out the location and shape of the walkway extension, using a garden hose to define both the left and right sides. Once that is correct, we spray paint the lawn along the hose.

Then we remove the grass from where the walkway will be. This gives us a good view of what the walkway will look like.

The real purpose of this, at this time, is just to see how it interacts with the walkway in front of the raised garden. We will need to dig it out at least for a short section where the two intersect, so we can pour the cement wall that defines the boundaries of the walkway.

Continuing to dig out the dirt, we are struck by how little depth there is to the dirt before we hit solid rock.

But we continue digging it out, exposing the rock where the walkway will be.

Our first attempt was to pour a cement wall directly on this rock outcropping.

Then the idea was to dig out the dirt yard behind the cement wall, and use the jack hammer to split the rock in the yard, so we could lift it up and out -- creating a deep dirt-filled yard.

Unfortunately, it didn't work out. We dug out the dirt, exposing the rock. But when we went to jack-hammer the rock and pry it out, all the rock moved and came out, including the cement wall, leaving a big hole.

Part of the problem was probably the sharp straight edge of the wall in front of the raised garden, as well as the real shallow depth of the wall on the rock.

But this changes the approach we will use. Rather than trying to put the walkway on the rock directly, and then dig out the yard on either/both side, we will dig out the yard and the walkway, and then pour the support walls for the walkway, as we did for the North Pit and South Pit. It's more work, but it should be a much better result.

So the next step is to dig up the yard just south of the new walk-way area and get that rock out of the yard, using it to fill in the areas around the raised garden.

The Walkway in front of the raised garden

2011-07-14T17:02:00.000-07:00

While waiting for the telephone company to fix our land line phone cable, I've started digging out the area where the walkway will go in front of the raised garden. We already have the area behind and to the North of the raised garden, so we have the front and to the South to do.

The first problem is to mark the area to be excavated.

Next we remove all the grass, exposing the dirt to be moved.

We dig down with the dirt. In some places, we only go a couple of inches before we hit rock. One day of digging gets the first half.

A second day of digging gets the second half.

As you can see, rocks lay just below the surface. So now we need to take out those rocks. We were hoping that we could use the dirt edge as one side of the framing for pouring a vertical cement wall, but it looks like the rocks do not happen to separate where we want them to, so we will need to extract rocks that will leave a void under the ground in the yard. Eventually we will want to dig out the yard too. It may be sooner for parts of the yard than we wanted.

So far we've done pretty well with just taking the rocks out of the desired area. Most of these rocks are too big to manage as is, so I've brought out the jackhammer and split them at the edge of the trench.

We have about half the rocks out now, and just need to continue to split them and remove them.

Continuing with the excavation, we are down to one (big) rock to remove, right at the corner of the walkway and the North Pit. In preparation for the cement wall defining the boundary of the walkway, we have to consider how the walkway continues from the raised garden to the back patio, so we have laid that out and will need to excavate the extended walkway, probably 3 feet or so, to provide the right support and connection to the extended walkway.

The objective now is to fill this trench with rock, ready for flagstones to make it a walkway. To do this, we need both sides of the trench well-defined. So we are going ahead and putting in the retaining wall that will separate the yard (dirt) from the trench (rock). Once we have that wall in place, we can fill the trench with rock. We use our standard technique of using the dirt for one side of the frames and the masonite boards as the other, separated by multiple 1x4 boards, and held in place with our bags of compost/manure.

Replacing our Telephone Line

2011-07-14T09:15:00.000-07:00

We've been having problems with our telephone for some time. This is our AT&T land-line telephone, the one that was installed when the house was built in 1986.

For a couple of years now, the amount of static and noise on the line has been increasing. Last year (September 2010), when Hurricane Hermine came thru, we got 14 inches of rain in one day. A couple of days later, the phone line was generating so much static that we couldn't dial out, or hear much when someone called. At that point, a couple of guys came out and said the problem seemed to be below the concrete pedestal in the back yard with the electrical transformer. Then they went away, and gradually, the problems with the phone line went away.

This year, the static and noise increased again (and we've had no rain). Eventually it got bad enough I figured we needed to try again. I put in a trouble report with AT&T. In retaliation, the phone line decided to just die altogether. No signal. No dial tone. So at least it wasn't a subjective or transitory problem.

After 4 days, a repair person came out and agreed that the line was dead. The next day, a locator came out to (a) agree the line was dead, and (b) mark the lawn with where the line went and where the problem appeared to be. They can apparently send a signal down the line and when it gets to the break, it reflects and comes back. From the time it takes to get the reflection, they can compute how far down the wire the problem is. 39 feet. Which put it pretty much at the electrical transformer.

Another 4 days later, a crew of two guys showed up to dig up the lawn, to get at the phone wire at the point where the problem should be. They dug down and found the trench in the limestone where all the utility lines are (phone, cable, electrical). But they could not find the telephone line.

So this digging crew left, needing another locator. F days later, another locator person showed up, and found a spot on the other side of the electrical box. Another dig crew came out and dug down and found where our phone line was split off from the main cable.

Since it was now some 14 days without a dial tone, the installer put in a new telephone line by opening up the main line and splicing on a new cable, and then ran that cable across the yard to the interface box on the side of the house and attaching it instead of the old line. The old wiring is still there, buried in the yard,
but useless, and detached. The new wiring is just a black cable running across the yard. Another dig crew needs to come out and bury the line.

Turns out two dig crews came out. On Wednesday, a crew of two guys came out and filled in the holes and removed the plywood and orange plastic fence.

This left the telephone cable coming up out of the ground on the right side of the electrical box, and then going back down on the left before coming back up and crawling across the lawn to the house. And they said that another dig crew would come out and just "shove the line under the grass", which is what the cable people did when they needed to replace the cable.

This seemed short-sighted, so I went out and dug up both sides, to find the cable, and then along the front of the electrical box, down to bed rock (which isn't very far right there), and threaded the telephone cable from the one side (where it attaches to the main telephone trunk), over to the other side, where it will continue to the house. There was lots of extra cable, so I coiled the extra on both the left and the right sides.

Then I buried all this, so that the right side of the box is completely finished, and the cable just comes up out of the ground on the left side, and then runs across the yard to the house.

Literally 5 minutes after I finished this work, the final dig crew showed up and 3 guys pushed the cable under the grass in about 10 minutes.

That should hold everything until this entire area of the yard is excavated.

Head waters of the new Walkway

2011-06-14T12:38:00.001-07:00

The landscape plan shows a walkway from the gate past the North Pit, joining a walkway around the raised garden and then extending back to the walkway around the deck in the back. One side of the walkway is, effectively, the North Pit, so we are going to start excavating it, using the North Pit as a working area.

We've "outlined" the walkway using the grubbing hoe on the one side and have expanded the North Pit over to the curving edge of where the walkway will be. The next step will be to dig all the dirt out, put in the two "walls" below ground level that will define the two sides of the walkway, then fill the space between the walls with rock and put down decomposed granite, as a base, and the "Oklahoma Thin" flagstones that we used for the walkway around the deck.

First step is to dig. I'm starting the excavation near the raised garden, working towards the gate. That way the gate can continue to be used until I dig out the part just in front of it. If I then back fill at that end first, the gate will be unusable for the shortest period of time.

The excavation goes thru the traditional (a) dirt under the grass, (b) construction left-overs, and (c) native clay. All of these layers, especially (b) and (c) have random rock in them, which we pull out. Then we hit the first layer of rock. We could use this as the base of our walkway, or we could take it out and go down another 6 to 8 inches to bedrock.

Part of the last 6 to 8 inches of rock comes out easily, so we removed it. But we are planning on leaving most of this layer in place and putting the walkway on top of it.

Once we have this much excavated, we can start putting the walls in that will separate the dirt beds from the walkway. We start with the outer wall, next to the un-excavated area. We use a piece of black plastic on that side to separate the concrete wall from the dirt. When (if) we eventually get to digging up that side, the plastic should allow a clean separation between the wall and the dirt.

Putting the wall between the North Pit and the walkway is more difficult because it has to be supported on both sides. It's hard to get either wall up high enough because our forms are only 16 inches tall. I'm doing it in layers, so I can pour concrete, wait for it to firm up, then remove the forms and raise them up to pour the next layer.

I added a piece of 4 inch PVC irrigation pipe stretching from one side of the walkway into the North Pit. This is to allow wiring or pipe to be run from one side to the other in the future. It is expected, for example, that we will want to run 3/4 inch or 1/2 inch irrigation for Zone 3 from the valve controller on the once side into both the North and South Pits, to provide a water supply.

Once the concrete was built up enough, I can then mortar on the limestone blocks on the top, to finish the wall off next to the North Pit. Now I could put the dirt back in, and let it settle before planting.

This should finish the North Pit, with the exception of putting in irrigation and planting. Both the North Pit and the South Pit should be Zone 2 of the sprinkler system.

Removing the Last Juniper Tree

2011-06-14T11:57:00.001-07:00

In 1993, I removed all the male juniper trees on the property. Over time, I've removed the female trees too. All except one. Linda put an "owl box" on the least female juniper tree, and so we were keeping it. But Linda says the owls, if there were any, have left for the summer, so I took the opportunity to move the owl box to another tree and cut down the last juniper tree.

At first, I was going to leave the tree -- just sort of trim it up a bit, so I took off the lower limbs, to "raise the canopy", leaving stubs for the birds to land on.

But then Linda said I had butchered it so badly, why didn't I just take the entire tree down? So I did.

This works out reasonably well, since the City is picking up "Large Brush" and tree trimmings. (The neighbor across the cove cut down 3 juniper trees, and has a much bigger pile of branches as a result.)

The owl box was moved to the Monterey Oak outside the kitchen.

Partitioning the North Pit

2011-06-12T08:03:00.000-07:00

With the master landscape plan in hand, I know what to do with the North Pit. Next to the raised garden, we want a walk-way, similar to the walk-way around the back deck.

The back part, between the fence and the raised garden is already basically in place. We have a cement wall under the fence and the whole area is filled with rock. Now we want something similar next to the raised garden and the North Pit.

The first step is to dig out the remaining dirt next to the raised garden.

Next we need to build the wall that will separate the North Pit from the rock-filled walk-way. We first clear a path for it.

We could pour a pure concrete wall, but computing it out, it appears to be less expensive to use concrete blocks. The concrete blocks are 8 x 16 x 4 inches. With the limestone block on top, the wall should be about 20 inches tall. With blocks of 8 inches, I can do 16 or 24, but not 20. So I figure I'll pour about a 4 inch base in concrete, which will even out the uneven rock surface and give us the right height.

Once the cement base has set, I can mortar on the cement blocks. I leave a gap in the lower rank of cement blocks, in case water needs to flow from one side to the other. This is not expected to be a problem, but just in case. I can't finish the entire wall, since it needs to tie into a similar structure that I haven't excavated yet.

Once the wall sets, I can put all the rocks on the right side and start to spread the dirt on the left side.

A landscape plan

2011-06-05T18:39:00.000-07:00

Once I started working on the North Pit, it became more obvious to me that I needed a long term plan of how to work on the yard. While I feel there is value in digging up the yard, removing all the rock, and improving the soil, I'm not sure that it should be returned to just grass once all this is done.

So we contacted a Landscape Designer, Liz Klein, from DesignMyYard. This started in March. Ms. Klein came over and walked the yard with both Linda and me, listening to what we wanted and seeing what we had. There were several sessions where she presented ideas and listened to our comments.

The result was a landscape plan for us to work on. While Ms. Klein normally seems to both come up with a plan and then arrange for it to be done, in our case we were happy with just the plan, and our own intentions to implement it over a longer time period. I'm not sure I care about reaching the goal of the entire landscape plan, but it gives me a direction to go when I need to make decisions about current work.

This plan shows that, for the current work, I will put a walk way from the fence next to the garage, past the North Pit, joining for a moment with a walk way around the raised garden, and then on around to the existing back patio/deck walk.

The area between this walk way and the house will become a bed for plantings. Part of this bed has already been excavated, but I will need to expand that. In addition, I can expand the North Pit slightly to lay the foundation for the walkway.

It's getting very hot now with Summer coming on, so most of the plantings should probably wait until Fall. That gives me several months to get things ready.

Changing the irrigation in the driveway peninsula

2011-06-05T18:13:00.000-07:00

One side-effect of the digging in the North Pit is that it exposed part of the irrigation pipe for Zone 1. Zone 1 is mainly the peninsula of dirt that is between our driveway and the neighbor's driveway. I dug it all up and redid the sprinkler system for Zone 1 some time ago. The controller for Zone 1 is near the fence between the front and back yard.

It turns out one of the sprinkler lines started in the front, went under the fence, into what is now the North Pit, then over, parallel to the fence and back under the fence to in front of the fence. When I excavated the North Pit, I removed that line, leaving me with 3 stubs -- one to a head in the monkey grass in the back yard by the house (the garage actually), one that went to a sprinkler head in the front, and the supply line from the controller. The obvious thing to do was to move the supply line back to in front of the fence, and then run a line to re-attach it to the sprinkler head in the front. The head in the monkey grass should be re-routed to Zone 2, with the rest of the heads in the monkey grass.

So to get the stubs of the sprinkler lines out of the North Pit, I took a week to re-do these lines in front of the fence. Looking at this area, however, it seems silly to do a general spray head. The only thing in this area, near the fence between the front and back yards, are 4 crepe myrtle trees. Most of the peninsula is a few trees -- crepe myrtles and Bartlett pears -- and rocks. The dirt is covered with mulch. Nothing much will grow there, because of all the shade from the trees.

So rather than re-routing a line to the spray head, I took the spray head out, and put in bubblers for the 3 crepe myrtle trees that it should be watering. This gets more controlled amounts of water directly to the base of the trees, which should be much more effective.

The first thing to do was to run a water supply line over to the middle of the crepe myrtles.

Then, we ran a line down the middle, between the trees. We branched off this middle line to run a line to each of the trees, and put a bubbler on the end of each of them.

Then we covered the entire area with mulch. It took 10 bags of mulch to cover this area, where we had been digging.

It took 15 more bags to cover the rest of the peninsula.

This little back corner of the front yard, although it is adjacent to the rest of the peninsula has apparently never been excavated. This makes sense, since doing so would damage the root system of the trees. But for this limited digging, I found a lot of construction level rock and debris. I removed everything I could, and added a bunch of leaves and compost in putting the dirt back in.

Finishing the North Pit

2011-05-16T11:41:00.000-07:00

With the trench behind the raised bed pretty well done, I need to extend the cement wall along the entire length of the fence. While the bulk of the digging in the pit is done, the edges need to be finished off. We have left about a foot of untouched dirt next to the fences, for stability while we were working.

For the cement wall, this means taking the edge of the excavated pit right up to the fence.

Continuing around the edges reveals more big rocks and also some irrigation pipes.

We need to decide if we take out the newly exposed rock, or just cement it in place and leave it there. Take it out. We took out all the rock along the edge of the pit next to the fence, and then, using our masonite pieces, made forms and poured a concrete wall down to bedrock.

It took 22 60 pound bags of Quikrete concrete mix for this wall (Home Depot, $51.92). Once the concrete was poured, we then mixed a bag of mortar mix and put the white limestone blocks on top.

We will wait a couple of days to let everything set, and then remove the bags of compost and forms, and then start shovelling dirt over into this corner. We will need to re-do the irrigation system where it comes under fence by the gate, and then back under the fence over in the corner.

Behind the Raised Bed

2011-04-22T12:29:00.001-07:00

With the North Pit mostly done -- I'm still not sure how to finish it off -- we turn our attention to the strip next to the fence, behind the raised garden that would connect the North Pit and the South Pit. This strip is really weedy. It's only 4 to 5 feet wide and 16 feet long. It has no water supply (no irrigation), and is of variable sunny-ness, depending on what is in the raised bed. If I dig it up, I can continue the cement wall topped with a limestone brick on the top along the fence -- I'm inclined to do this treatment around the entire lot at the fence line.

But what to put back there? It's a pain to mow, and trim, this area. It's too small to really grow something; it mainly is used as a walk area to be able to get to the raised garden.

So, instead of putting in grass or a ground cover, the suggestion is to make it a walkway. In fact, to put a walkway all around the raised garden. If we put in a walkway that matches the sidewalk around the deck, it would match. That sidewalk was dug out, and then filled with stone and sand and decomposed granite, with flagstones put on top. That seems like a reasonable treatment for this area too.

The first step then is to dig it out. Starting on this, we find big rock from 2 to 8 inches under the soil. The soil is very dry, and easy to dig out.

At the moment, we will continue just taking the dirt off the top. But we need to decide whether we take the big rock out, or just cover it over, using the big rock as fill. If we take the big rock out, we will need to replace it with smaller rock to fill the space. The easiest answer is to leave the big rock there.

If we remove the big rock, however, we effectively trade the few big rock for lots of smaller rock. The big rock is easier to get rid of than the smaller rock. Plus there may be more dirt under the big rock, so removing it would give us a more stable finished product -- all inert rock and sand, without any shifting clay soil. On the fence side, we can do our cement wall with limestone block on top. I'm not sure what to do next to the raised bed.

A couple of days later ...

It was very easy to take out the big rocks.

The next step was to straighten up the fence side of the trench, to pour the concrete wall and put the limestone blocks on top. We needed to buy more limestone blocks (Whittlesey Landscape Sales, 640 pounds for $51.88). Plus I would need concrete (24 bags of 60 lb. Quik-crete, $56.64 at Home Depot).

As before, I draped some black plastic on the outside, to keep the concrete separate from the dirt on that side.

Then I used a set of 1x4 pieces of wood to keep the masonite form spaced from the black plastic, and poured the concrete in between. I used the bags of cow manure that I've been buying to mix in with the dirt (60 bags so far at 1.40 a bag, from Lowes and Home Depot). to keep the forms in place. I had to take special care around the fence posts.

And when the forms are removed, we have our wall.

Next, a little mortar and we put the stones on top.

And now we need to clean up the trench, getting it down to rock with both sides straight and clean, so that we can fill it up with rock.

The raised bed should be all pretty good dirt, so we want to partition it off from the trench and keep the dirt in/under the raised bed. We will use landscape cloth -- a weed barrier -- as a curtain to separate the dirt from the rock.

Once the weed barrier is in place, we can start filling the trench with the rock that we dug out of both the trench and the north pit. All that rock that we wheel-barrowed out to the driveway now is wheel-barrowed back. While it was on the driveway, we were posting it to Craig's List and so most of the larger pieces are gone; we have apple-size (and smaller) pieces left, which should be good fill.

This cleans off the driveway. We need a bit more rock for fill, and then to cover it with sand and decomposed granite as a base for flagstones.

Drip irrigation for the herb beds

2011-04-10T18:42:00.000-07:00

One of our major expenses is for water. Specifically for watering the lawn and garden during the summer. We have a full automatic sprinkler system, but we would like to see about improving it -- being more efficient in how we water.

I went to a talk put on by the City of Austin which suggested drip irrigation. In particular, this was using a drip line, rather than the individual lines to each plant. I've been adverse to doing the individual plant lines since plants come and go and it seems like a lot of maintenance to keep up with it. A drip line, on the other hand, can be used to saturate an area, but from underground, rather than by sprinkling it thru the air. This should cut down on evaporation and misting and all that. We apply the water directly at the roots, in the ground.

At the talk, the speaker said I could find all the stuff at Lowe's or Home Depot, but I couldn't. I could find the area, and some of the micro-irrigation equipment, but not the drip line and all it's supporting units. But checking on the web, I found http://www.rainbird.com and it has provided what I need. It was not easy finding the information on drip irrigation, but there is more under "Professionals" instead of "Homeowners". In particular, if you ask for a Retail Store, you get the standard Home Depot and Lowe's, but if you go under "Professionals" and "Find a Distributor", you can get the name of places that sell actual drip irrigation equipment.

I went with the XFS Subsurface dripline. This allows me to put the irrigation line under the ground and saturate an area at the root line. Plus in this part of the country (Central Texas), it is not going to freeze below ground and it's out of sight. To start with, I simply want to do 3 beds -- the beds around the back porch with my Irises and Linda's herbs. When I put those in, I used Zone 5 just for them. So I have a complete zone dedicated to these beds and can switch the entire zone.

In the following photo, notice the 3 sprinkler heads -- one in the top bed and two in the bottom bed.

Similarly, in the Iris bed, there is one sprinkler head in the back corner.

(These pictures before the change are not current -- the irises are doing badly from the freezing weather, and, I believe, the lack of water, which is why I need to get this new drip irrigation in place.)

We started with the dripline (XFS0912250) and 3 1800 Retro units.

The 250 feet of dripline was $110.50, while the 1800 Retro units are $23.60 each. The idea is that the 1800 Retro units replace a pop-up sprinkler head. They thread onto a normal 1/2 threaded PVC pipe and contain both a filter and a pressure regulator to lower the water pressure to 30 psi. That means that we get out of the two outlets on the top (the "tee") clean water of the right pressure for the dripline.

I dug down in the bed to the bottom of the sprinkler risers that were there until I found the connection to the underground water supply. For the iris bed this was already a 1/2 PVC female connector, so just putting a 1/2 PVC nipple to connect the two female threaded pipes, I was able to thread the 1800 Retro unit right in.

Then I cut 8 feet of the XFS dripline and pushed it onto the tee. This was the hardest part. The designers at Rainbird made it easier, because the top of the 1800 Retro unit screws right off, revealing the filter.

With the tee separate from the filter and housing, I was able to shove both ends of the 8 feet of dripline onto the tee, creating a loop. I could then put the tee back on the top of the filter housing, and screw it on, and then bury the loop of dripline, up along one side of the iris bed and back on the other. Then a bag of mulch to cover everything up.

The same sort of thing for the other beds. First dig down and find the bottom of the sprinkler riser to get to the water supply. In this case, it turned out the connection was a 3/4 inch female threaded PVC, so I had to get two 3/4 inch male to 1/2 inch male adaptors. Using them it was simple to attach the 1/2 1800 Retro to the 3/4 inch water supply, about 12 to 14 inches down from ground level.

The upper bed needed about 12 feet of dripline, but I mis-measured (at the bed) and thought it was 13 feet. Once I had put the dripline on the tee, it became obvious that the dripline was too long, so I had to take it off one end of the tee and cut it a foot shorter. It was extremely difficult to get off the tee, so for the lower bed, I only put it on one end, then laid out the dripline to the right length, and put it on.

The bottom bed was much the same, but longer -- 24 feet of dripline. And it originally had two sprinkler heads, so I used one and capped the other off.

As with the iris beds, I buried the dripline a couple inches underground and then put a bag of mulch (4 bags altogether), over the top, to cover the dripline.

Everything went pretty smoothly. I started at 11:00 AM and was finished by 6:00 PM, and that included two trips to Home Depot for the 1/2 to 3/4 adaptors and for the mulch and lunch. There were two problems.

Just as I was screwing on the top of the last 1800 Retro, for the lower bed, I tightened it down and heard a "snap". Something had broken under ground. Luckily it was not the $24 1800 Retro, and it was not the water supply, it was the 1/2 to 3/4 inch adaptor. I was able to get it out of both the ground water supply end and the bottom of the 1800 Retro and had to go back to Home Depot to get another one (I got two to be sure I had an extra). So that was a delay, but worked out fine.

The other problem was that when I turned on the sprinkler zone, at the box in the garage, to test it out, it seemed to do nothing. Which is sort of what is expected. But walking over to the iris bed, I could hear a noise coming from the corner where the 1800 Retro and tee are. Digging it back up, I could see it was spraying water all over from the joint between the housing and the screw on top. I took it apart, cleaned it off and put it back together, tightening everything by hand. Same problem. I eventually used a pair of channel-locks (a very large pair of pliers) to tighten the head on as much as possible and that stopped the leakage. I dug up and checked the others; they were all right. I'm not sure why 2 of the 3 worked fine with hand tightening, but the third needed extra tightening.

Now the system is in place. You can't tell if it is on or not. After running it about an hour, most of the beds still seemed very dry, so maybe it needs to run longer or maybe this is not the best solution. The sprinkler system is set to run twice a week and zone 5 gets to run for an hour each time. We'll see if that is enough to keep the plants happy.

Measurements suggest that zone 5 uses 60 gallons an hour when it's running. I measured it twice. Once it used 57.6 gallons; the second time it took 66.8. With about 45 feet of dripline, this would be about 1.3 gallons per hour per foot.

Removing Rock from the North Pit

2011-03-31T13:11:00.000-07:00

We dug all the dirt out of the pit north of the raised bed, resulting in a trapezoidal hole 12 feet wide and between 11 and 13 feet long.

Now we need to remove the rock, so that the pit is deeper. At the shallow end, it is only about 8 inches deep; we want it to be about a foot and a half. This requires removing a layer of rock from the pit. We are assuming that, as with the rest of the yard, the rock in our yard is layered, and we can remove just the top layer or so to get the depth that we want.

On Thursday, we used the jackhammer to start breaking the rock up, using what appears to be a natural fracture running diagonally across the pit. This works pretty well, and in the first day's work, we extract two large rocks, and a big pile of smaller ones in the corner of the pit.

We still have to lift one of the big rocks out of the pit, separate the smaller rocks from the dirt and move the rocks and dirt out of the pit.

We spent all day Friday lifting the rock out of the pit and cleaning up. Then on Monday, we went back to breaking up the rocks with the jackhammer. Tuesday was (a) moving the rock around to the driveway, and (b) moving the dirt over to the dirt pile.

On Wednesday, we were able to just use the pry bar and grubbing hoe to loose the rocks and take them around front. After moving the dirt to the dirt pile (and mixing it with leaves), we had a complete ditch from one corner of the pit to the opposite corner.

Thursday, we used the jackhammer to break up the smaller corner and start on the larger one.

And Friday was just hauling all the rock out of the pit and out to the front of the house.

This left just the one corner with rock. Using the jackhammer, we broke it all up.

And we then took it around to the drive way, leaving us with a level, empty pit.

This took another week, so the rock extraction from this pit took about a month. As long as it is empty, we need to think about how to finish it off, before filling it back up with dirt.

North of the Raised Bed

2011-03-16T19:38:00.000-07:00

When I drove thru California, I stopped in Corning (Olive City!) and bought two new olive trees. I bought two olive trees over the internet back in February 2007, but one of those died. This seemed like an easy (and cheap) way to get back to having more than one. The suggestion is that you may need two to cross-pollinate in order to get fruit.

One of the new olive trees has been planted in the pit that I just excavated South of Linda's raised bed garden, which puts it near the just-moved Shin Oaks, and the first olive tree. It looked like the best place to put the second new olive tree would be North of Linda's raised bed garden. That way it would be close to the other two, but more or less out of the way. This area used to have an Asian Pear tree, but that didn't do well, and we took it out. So to start, this area is just grass.

First thing we do is remove the grass. It seems a shame to waste the grass, since it seems to be growing fairly well, so I'll try to take it up and transplant it to another part of the yard. In this case, I'll move it over the French drain, along the fence.

After the first day of digging, I have roughly half the grass removed.

To transplant the grass, I'm cutting down with the shovel, and then trying to take just the grass and maybe an inch or two of dirt for the roots, using the grubbing hoe, coming in horizontally just below the grass. Doing so allows me to peel off the grass and move it more or less intact.

Another day of work, and we have all the grass stripped off, and transplanted.

Now we can start digging the dirt out. As we do so, we encounter a fair amount of rock -- mostly loose rock of small to medium size -- no larger than a loaf of bread. The very top layer of dirt must have been put in with the grass; it's fairly good, clean dirt. But below that is a layer of construction debris and rocky, sandy from the house construction. We are finding pop-tops, some broken glass, wrappers, and even four foot sections of electrical wire.

Also chunks of asphalt. The asphalt is always the same thickness, about 2 inches thick, but is then broken up into random sized pieces.

Under this construction debris is the dark, heavy, native clay dirt. This can be harder to dig. When it is damp, it is heavy; as it dries, it becomes very hard. But we mix leaves in with it, and mix all the dirt -- the top layer, construction dirt, and the native clay -- mix all this up with the leaves and cart it off.

Because about 6 to 8 inches down, we hit rock -- the native limestone. It's fairly flat, but with some cracks and erosion. Once we get the the dirt removed, we will try to remove the rock.

The dirt that we remove, we are taking over to the area near the electrical box, where we were digging last. We'll pile it up there, and later, after the rock is removed, we'll bring it back.

Tuesday, more digging

And then Wednesday, more digging

And again Thursday, more digging.

Finally, on Monday and Tuesday, we finished with the digging.

The next step will be to start removing this bottom rock layer.

Summing up, it took 2 weeks to dig out all the dirt, separate the rocks and debris, for an area 12 feet wide and 11 to 13 feet long, from 8 inches to 24 inches deep. It's deep enough at the far end that I really don't need to remove any rock, but I do need to at the 8 inch deep end, and it's the ground that slopes, not the rock layer. The rock layer seems pretty level.

Moving the Shin Oaks

2011-02-20T15:14:00.000-08:00

The purpose of digging up the pit was to provide a place to move the Shin Oaks. It has also been suggested that moving the trees should be done while they are relatively dormant.

The first step was to dig them out. I started on Monday. One day to dig the dirt out of the way -- remember that at least part of the dirt had been dug up before, and so it was fairly easy to dig it out again. By Tuesday, I could start with the jackhammer, trying to get the rock out. The objective was to dig down, more or less to bed rock, all the way around the trees. Wednesday and Thursday was more jackhammer work.

Once I was through the rock all around the trees, the trees themselves were sitting in a big ball of dirt on a layer of rock about a foot thick. Friday, I worked at breaking the rock up underneath the trees and their dirt. I managed to get the rock out of one side, and with effort to tip the trees over into the space where the rock on that side had been.

This exposed the rock on the other side, allowing it be broken into pieces and moved out of the way. With a lot of work, and two people, we were able to then roll the trees out of the hole, and drag them across the yard to their new home, leaving nothing but a big hole where they had been.

With the trees over in the new pit, I dug a new hole big enough for the root ball. Again, since this dirt had been recently (December) dug up and put back, it was fairly easy to dig a new hole for the trees. The new hole was roughly 70 inches by 40 inches and about a foot deep.

Pushing the tree into its new home, I then poured two trash cans of really nice composted dirt around the roots. Most of the dirt on the roots (but not all) had come loose in all the movement. I went back to the old home and got a wheelbarrow full of the old dirt and added it to the compost, then put back the dirt that had been dug out of the new hole, and shaped it into a berm around the trees, to allow water and mulch.

The main problem in the new location was that the trees wanted to fall over instead of standing up straight. They had tilted significantly in their old home -- I think to avoid the cedar tree that had been near them. I pulled them as close to upright as I could get them, poured the dirt around the roots to support this new upright posture, watering it and stomping it down.

But, to be sure, I got some straps and hooked them to the fence, pulling both trees to a nearly vertical trunk. The top of the trees still slides over, but it's a pleasant arch. I think if (a) the trees will live and grow in their new home, then (b) in some time -- probably months -- the new roots will hold them in place and I will be able to remove the straps. But I should probably wait until October or November. November sounds better; hurricane season would be over, and the trees should be going dormant again.

We'll need to see if the trees like their new home. These are hardy trees not used to water or good soil, so their is a possibility that the new location will be "too good" for them and they will not survive.

An update from March 31. The trees are alive. They are putting out new leaves. It's hard to see in the picture, and it's not a lot, but at least it's something!

Filling in the South Pit

2010-12-12T07:45:00.001-08:00

December 2010

The pit is done (at least in the short term). Several days of shovelling dirt from the dirt piles in the back yard into the wheelbarrow and then dumping it into the pit has both eliminated the dirt piles, and filled in the pit.

The dirt in the dirt piles was what I saved from digging out the pit (and other parts of the yard). Mostly it would then be the heavy clay that is native to this area. But it also includes some amount of sandy loam that some contractor would have brought in, and some amount of better, composted soil that we brought in later. But still the bulk of the dirt is not very good. So to improve the soil quality, I mixed in 32 bags of leaves, and about 30 bags of "organic humus".

The "organic humus" is the least expensive soil additive from Lowe's. It's mostly semi-composted wood products. It looks like pine needles plus other stuff. The leaves were from the neighbors. It being Fall, lots of people rake up their leaves, put them in bags and leave them on the curb for the City to pick up. I picked up some of these bags and brought them home.

As I was breaking up the dirt piles and shovelling it into the wheelbarrow, I mixed both the leaves and the humus into the soil. The theory is that this will add organic compounds to the soil, and make it better soil. It certainly makes it lighter and airier. I expect it to settle quite a bit over time in the pit.

The two spots in the back yard where the dirt used to be piled are now just barren dirt spots.

I've tried to spread some grass seed and put down a layer of organic humus on the top of each area. If we were to get any rain, the grass might grow and help keep the dirt in place. If this doesn't work, I'll try something else next Spring.

I have receipts for 30 bags of the humus from Lowe's this month $46.76, plus there were probably a dozen from a previous purchase. In addition, it was taking days to move the dirt from the piles into the pit, so, since time was of the essence at this time of the year, I hired a day laborer to help with shovelling. $80 for a days work. This allowed me to finish up the digging in one day.

Finishing the South Pit

2010-12-04T14:55:00.000-08:00

So first we take the rocks out to the curb. Line them up along the curb.

Then we put a notice on Craig's List and wait for people to come take them away. In this case, I put the notice up on Saturday. On Sunday, we drove my daughter back to college. In the four hours to do that (from 1 pm to 5 pm), all the rocks disappeared. All of them plus 4 or 5 that were to the left of the above picture, from our own rock garden.

Now the pit is empty. We have, occasionally over the past decade, had problems of things digging under the fence. Dogs, cats, possums, armadillos, skunks -- don't know what it was, we could just see the hollowed out area that they used. When we dug out the Bamboo Grove, we put a stone wall around it at ground level next to the fence. Since we have it all dug out, let us do that here too.

First we pour a cement wall down to bedrock. Just as with the bamboo grove, we use a 1x4 for spacing, and a piece of masonite cut down to eight feet by 16 inches for the framing. We stack up bags of dirt next to it to keep the framing in place. The bags of dirt are just mulch and compost plastic bags filled with dirt from the pit shovelled into them. This picture shows the result on one fence.

And here we see the process in progress on the other fence. When we were digging straight down from the fence, to get the back side of the cement wall, we hit a couple more rocks. In particular the really big one in the following picture. I was able to move it out with a pry bar, but it was too heavy to move. Before pouring the cement, I used the jack hammer to break it in two pieces and rolled them up the pile of dirt in the pit to the edge, then out to the front to take the place of a couple of our missing rocks.

It took 29 bags of cement (from Home Depot at $3.10 each), and 4 bags of mortar ($3.77 each) for this work. The limestone rocks for the top were left over from the previous work on the Bamboo Grove

Once the cement wall is poured, I can then mortar limestone blocks on top of it to finish it off. Once the dirt is back in the pit, all you will be able to see will be the top of the limestone brick, as an edging. It should keep things from digging under the fence, including animals and roots from trees or anything. It may make it easier to mow or edge the lawn.

It is not clear what effect it will have on drainage. In theory any rain in the yard will sink down and be stuck here, unable to soak under ground down the hill. But it's well away from the house, and I assume any plants in this area would welcome any extra water. (Plus, at the moment at least, any water can just go to the right and around the wall, since the wall is only at this corner (and the opposite corner, where the Bamboo Grove is).

This gives a pit about two feet deep and 16 feet by 24 feet. The next step is putting all the dirt that I dug out back into the pit. To increase the quality of the dirt, I will add compost and vegetation. Luckily it's now Fall, and the trees are dropping their leaves. I should be able to get bags of leaves from the neighbors to add to the dirt as I put it back in.

The bags of dirt from the Bamboo Grove that I used for the forms were mostly limestone rock dust, from when the utility trench was put in thirty years ago. Apparently when they are bagged up, get wet, and sit around for 6 months, they get hard and are not of much use. So I took them to the Travis County Landfill, $18.60. I had previously taken a load of loose rock out (another $18.60), but am now trying to get rid of the loose rock on Craig's List.

The final rock in the South Pit

2010-11-21T09:23:00.001-08:00

I spent the last couple of days raking the rocks out -- all the rocks that are produced as a side effect of breaking larger rocks into smaller rocks -- the debris that's left over. Now all that's left is the one big rock in the middle of the pit.

After two hours of jackhammering and pried rocks apart, the big rock is gone, replaced by a bunch of smaller rocks and the accompanying debris.

Tomorrow, we haul all these out to the curb and try to get rid of them.

Replacing Windows (Part 3)

2010-11-11T16:22:00.000-08:00

November, 2010

We are having the last set of the old metal frame windows replaced with wood frame windows. This is the third time we've done this and finally replaces all the windows in the house.

We are again using Renewal By Andersen, a nationwide chain of window replacement companies. A phone call to them set up a meeting for a person to come out and measure all the windows, settle on options (color, trim, screens) and provide a cost. We had 17 windows left to replace.

Mostly it's a one to one replacement, but in the dining room, the current windows are two very large windows, and while it would be possible to replace them with two new very large windows, our experience with very large windows is that they are hard to work with. So I suggested that they replace the two windows with three. That meant we were replacing 17 windows with 18 new windows.

The total cost was $25,705. This includes the windows, the labor and materials to remove the old windows and install the new ones, and finish them. We went with an exterior aluminum cladding (Terra Tone), with an oak veneer interior. The actual window is a mix of wood and plastic that is supposed to be very stable. The oak interior will be stained to match our current oak floors and window trim, and then sealed with a coat of polyurethane. I expect to go back and sand everything down and put a second coat of polyurethane on since I believe everything needs two coats.

I put $13,000 down on 11 Oct 2010. The local company then sends the measurements off to the factory (in Minnesota or some place) which makes them to order and then trucks them down here. I got a call on 3 Nov that the windows were here and scheduled them to install them on Wednesday 10 Nov. The rough schedule suggested it might take 3 days to install them (Weds, Thurs, Fri).

Come Wednesday, no one showed up. I got a call that the crew was running late on the previous job they were doing, but would be there on Thursday.

On Thursday, 3 guys show up, and today they replaced 12 of the windows. As an example, here is a picture of the old dining room window.

First the window panes were removed, and then the frame was removed. This created a large hole in the wall where the windows used to be.

Now the new windows can be put in place and screwed in place to the framing around the old window. Spacers are constructed and put between the two windows, or in this case between the three, since we replaced these two big windows with three windows, to make them smaller and easier to manage.

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Once the windows are all securely in place, oak trim pieces are attached to cover the space between the windows, and quarter round put all around the frame where the windows meet the sheetrock to finish it off.

The outside of the window is filled with an expanding foam sealer, to keep it air tight, and a finished trim piece attached. Since some of these are in a stone exterior wall, someone will come over and mortar around the windows on the outside, to blend it in with the existing stone exterior.

Today, Thursday, all of the windows except the ones on the back porch were replaced and sealed. The exterior trim will be done tomorrow (Friday), as will the remaining windows. At least that is the plan.

December 2 Follow-up.

The inspector from the City of Austin came today. A building permit had been taken out to replace the windows, and the inspector came to check things out. By and large things went well. There were two (or three) problems. One was that the windows next to the door have to be "tempered" glass, not regular glass. So this means that the window next to the sliding patio door needs to be replaced. Someone said this requirement is because you can really slam a door, and vibrate the wall, and a window within two to three feet could then break. Not at all clear that this reasoning applies to a sliding patio door.

The other problem was the windows in two of the bedrooms. We didn't have these replaced this time, but apparently the third problem was that Renewal by Andersen had failed to take out a building permit for the previous window replacement work. In the second part of the window replacement, we took out the sliding windows that were in these bedrooms, and never really worked very well, and put in two side-by-side double hung windows. These work much better, and look better. All in all, a substantial improvement. Except they apparently do not meet code. The problem, as explained, was that in a fire, they are not big enough to get out. So the inspector said they had to be sliding or casement windows. I've had both before and prefer these double hung windows.

We'll see what happens on these issues in the future.

Back to the rocks

2010-11-01T16:06:00.001-07:00

Having finished the back deck, it's back to the rocks. The general approach is to break all the big rocks into smaller rocks -- small enough to be moved out.

As an example, here is the big rock in the South-Western corner of the pit.

We use the jackhammer to split it into many smaller pieces.

and the result is a jumble of rather large rocks, probably weighing over 100 pounds. In this case, I think we broke the original rock up into eight smaller rocks. The intent is to make them as large as they can be, subject to the constraint that I have to be able to move them.

Once we have them broken up, we can move them out to the front of the house and put them on the curb. We post this on Craig's List under the "Free" category as "Landscape Rocks". In this case, our post is dated 6:00 pm on November 1.

Refinish the Backyard Porch

2010-10-29T08:10:00.000-07:00

The weather has been warm and dry, so it seems like a good idea to refinish the back deck. The deck is made of ipe, and has turned silver almost everywhere.

First, we move everything off the back deck. Everything except the gas grill. It took 3 or 4 guys to get it up on the deck, and it would be very difficult to get it down. But since it is on wheels, I can just move it around to work around it.

Next, I pressure wash the whole deck. This takes a day or two. I have a small consumer level power washer, and that seems to work well enough. It then takes 3 or 4 days for the deck to dry completely.

We use Australian Timber Oil by Cabot to finish the deck. I rub it on with a lambs wool applicator since that is what the can recommends. The deck has a lot of splinters, suggesting that maybe I should have sanded it after the power wash.
It took 2 full gallons to cover the deck.

I still have the corner under the gas grill to coat. I have a small quart can to use for that area.

Extracting the rock

2010-10-26T06:07:00.000-07:00

Now that we have dug out all the dirt, we need to get the rock out. We start with all the exposed rock.

We start breaking the rock up into smaller pieces.

And once it is broken up into manageable pieces -- 80 to 200 pounds -- we can pull it out, leaving behind a lot of smaller pieces.

What to do with the larger pieces? We haul them around to the front of the house and put them on the curb. We started with two rocks from before the heart surgery.

and now we have a much larger crowd. We should be able to get rid of these by posting them on Craig's List as "Landscape Rocks". But we may wait until we get even more out of the back.

Completion of Excavation in the South Pit

2010-10-17T18:32:00.000-07:00

October 2010

I've finished excavating the rectangular area between the fence and the raised garden. By that, I mean that all the dirt has been removed. This exposes the
underlying rock structure.

Notice that from the other angle there is clearly a round hole in the rock.

Let's look at that up close. This hole was put in for an ornamental cherry or peach tree that was part of the original landscaping. The tree died a couple years ago, so it lasted about 20 years. One problem might have been that it just did not have any place to grow to other than it's hole.

There are actually two holes -- there is another one closer to the fence that I put in a couple years ago for an olive tree. It didn't last thru the first winter.

The next step will be to remove this exposed later of rock. There are some probable seams between the rocks, but even so, the rocks themselves are much too large to be lifted out. I'll have to use the jackhammer to break them up into more manageable pieces of no more than a couple hundred pounds each.

Once the rock is removed, I will be able to put back the dirt, upgraded with as much organic material as I can get -- leaves and grass clippings. Then when we want to plant another tree, there should be a lot of space for it to expand into.

Digging in the South Pit

2010-10-08T12:48:00.001-07:00

October 2010

I'm back to work digging. I was out for awhile with heart surgery, but they say I can go back to digging now. When I left off in June, the corner of the back yard looked like this:

So getting back to work, I enlarged the area that had been excavated to a rectangle.

We had a problem that the dog fell into the pit and couldn't find her way out, so I build a short PVC fence to keep her out.

The next few days were just expanding the excavated area.

This morning (Friday, 8 Oct), was more of the same -- expanding the area that we have dug down to rock.

Of course, we need a place to put all the dirt being dug out. We get about two or three wheelbarrows of dirt for every one of rock.

The pile of dirt just gets bigger, day by day.

End of work for awhile

2010-06-30T15:07:00.000-07:00

Sprinkler system repair

We have been having a minor water leakage problem in the back yard. The initial problem was there was a damp spot in the back yard right at the fence. I tried to read the meter at the street, and then read it again 3 hours later with no one home but me. No change in the meter. So I wasn't sure it was ours.

But when I started to dig there, I found a sprinkler head. So I took the head out and capped it off. That stopped the leak. Or at least it did at that spot. Now there was a new wet spot out in the yard. Again, this was another head and I capped it off. I want to excavate and rebuild this section of the back yard anyway.

This worked for several weeks, then a new wet spot showed up about where the
zone control valve should be. I have never replaced a control value, and it turns out I need to have open heart surgery, so I called Jonathon Griesheimer, who had previously replaced the main sprinkler control value for me. His phone is 512-836-6539. I didn't have the time to figure out what the problem was before I went in for surgery.

But while I was in the hospital, he came out, figured out the problem and put in a new valve. There was an indirect comment, thru my girlfriend's daughter that the value is too far underground. Which would be expected, since we have been raising
the level of part of the back yard in this area. This then took 3 hours of labor to dig everything up and replace the leaking parts. $260.

So that solves that problem, and I'll just have to wait for another 6 weeks or so before I can consider going back to work.

Replacing a toilet in the guest bathroom

2010-06-14T19:00:00.000-07:00

We've had a suspicion that the toilet in the guest bathroom leaks, at a low level. But it also has a tendency to get clogged, and it's a 25 year old model, so the current ones should use much less water. And that bathroom is next up on interior remodelling, so rather than repair it, we will just replace it.

The unit we have in the back bathroom seems to be working fairly well. It's an American Standard Champion 4 model. We can get this from Home Depot, but only in white. Linda says she wants "Linen" which is an off-white, and that needs to be special-ordered. I order it on 22 May 2010. $500.93 for the Toilet -- Right Height, Elongated Bowl, plus the matching toilet seat. It finally comes in on 8 June, but then my have Lauren's high school graduation, so I don't get to installing it until 13 June.

Everything goes very well at first. Removing the old toilet is as expected. Removing a bunch of bolts. Turn the water off at the wall. Take the pieces outside, with as little water leakage as possible. Clean out the old wax ring that was under the old toilet.

Turn off the water supply to the house, and replace the cut-off valve at the wall with a new one. I have trouble putting the new wax ring in place. The box with the wax ring says to press it on the up-side down toilet and then "set it in place". But when I flip the toilet over, the wax ring falls off. And positioning the new toilet bowl over the bolts is difficult, since you can't see the bolts when they are under the toilet bowl.

Finally get it set in place, and bolted down. Then attach the tank, and a new water supply line. Everything goes together just right -- no leaks.

Then flush the toilet the first time, and it leaks under the bowl -- flowing gently out along the floor.

So I take everything apart. The water supply line. The tank. Remove the bowl. The wax ring had shifted and half covered the hole into the floor. Remove it. Back to Home Depot to get another wax ring. Reinstall just the bowl. Test it this time by pouring water into the bowl with a bucket. Still leaks. Take it apart. The ring is pretty much in the right place. But normally when I've put in toilets, after installing the wax ring and putting the bowl on top, it's squishy as the bowl compress the wax ring into place, sandwiching it between the floor and the bowl, spreading out slightly and sealing everything. I had not noticed that this time. So it would seem that this unit is a bit further from the floor than a normal toilet bowl.

Back to Home Depot again. In addition to the normal wax ring, they have an "extra thick" one. Costs an extra dollar, but it's about twice as deep. Put that in place around the hole in the floor. Position the bowl on a couple of pieces of wood to hold it up until the bolts show through the bolt holes, then pull the wood out and lower the toilet bowl. Feel it squishing the wax ring as I press down on the bowl and tighten the bolts. This time it works; no leaks. Put the rest of it back together.

Altogether it took about 6 hours, but that included three installations, two removals, and two trips to Home Depot.

Digging in the corner of the yard

2010-05-24T18:42:00.000-07:00

Not much to report for this weekend. I was able to dig for a couple of hours on Sunday. I'm starting in a new corner of the yard. The objective is to clean out this section of rocks, and upgrade the soil, so we can move the oak trees from the area by the box over here.

I'm starting in the corner and working my way out. I'm still a foot or so away from the actual fence line, so that it holds the fence in place while I dig. Once I get it in the condition I want, I'll pour an edge wall with rocks on top next to the fence, to keep things from digging in or out under the fence.

So far it looks like a classical dig. Lots of smallish rocks -- smaller than a watermelon -- and a couple of really big ones. I've pulled them out of the hole, but I still need to move them out of the way. I'm not sure yet how much dirt is under the big rocks; I'll work more on it next weekend, with any luck.

Changing the Stovetop

2010-05-16T09:34:00.000-07:00

Ever since the house was built, it's had a Thermador electric stove top. It's showing its age. One light doesn't work any more, and the pans under the burners are in bad shape. I've replaced them at least twice, but still they get baked-on spills. And Linda believes that a gas stove is better, so we are going to switch it out for a gas model.

Consumer Reports lists the Sears Kenmore Elite 3249 as its top ranked 36-inch gas cooktop, and after looking at several places, we choose it. We were unable to find one in stock, that we could actually look at, so we went over to Sears to order one. As it happens, just the day before, someone had returned a new one, and so they had an open box of that exact model, in Stainless Steel, on display for half-off. So we took it.

As you might expect, things are not perfect, as it was missing the installation instructions. With some work, I found a PDF file of the installation instructions on-line and printed them out. I started the installation early on Saturday and finished up about 8 pm, so it took all day, and three trips to Home Depot.

The first problem was to remove the old cooktop and make the hole in the counter larger. The depth is okay, but we are replacing a 30 inch cooktop with a 36 inch cooktop, so I needed to make the hole wider.

Once that was done, I dropped the cooktop in place. This looks like it is almost done, but most of the work is still ahead.

The obvious work is attaching the gas line to the cooktop. The builder had put the gas line in, but just capped it off. I had to remove the cap and put a cut-off valve on. Then I could run the line from the cut-off valve to the cooktop itself. That was actually fairly easy. You have to be careful to seal all the connections, and then test afterwards with soapy water to look for any leaks (which will make bubbles).

The really difficult part was providing it electrical power. The electrical cooktop had a 220 volt direct connection. This same circuit runs the wall oven next door to the cooktop. It would be possible to use half the 220 to get the 110 that the gas cooktop needs, but not safe. Since the oven runs on the 220 circuit, I had to just cap it off and seal it away.

There are some 110 circuits that run around the counters to provide power for kitchen appliances, so I tapped off one of them and ran a wire down under the cabinet and put in a new outlet. That was the most difficult part -- running the extra wire down in the exterior wall behind the cooktop. But it didn't have to be pretty; it just had to be right.

So with these tasks complete, we now have a new gas stove top.

The next project in the kitchen should be new counter tops. Granite, I assume.

Another spot to dig

2010-05-16T09:10:00.000-07:00

I dug back to the fence line along the right side of the electrical box, getting all of the stump and it's roots out. Going all the way down to bed-rock, I found the trench that runs along the fence (from the corner of the Bamboo Grove that holds the electrical, telephone and cable wiring.

Then I filled it back in, at least partially.

This has accomplished the basic goal for this section at this time -- removing the stump, clearing out the rocks, and making the soil better by increasing its organic content. I've mixed a lot of last Fall's leaves into this dirt as it was shovelled out, and then shovelled back in.

It appears that we will want to move the remaining trees. These are Shin Oaks -- a small native oak for Central Texas. It likes full sun, has low water requirements and likes the limestone based soil. So it's a nice tree, and we don't want to lose it, but it's sort of in an inconvenient place. My idea is to move it over to the corner of
the yard.

So that will be the next area to dig. We will dig this area up, to get down to bedrock, clean out the rocks and improve the soil, then move the Shin Oaks over to that area and see if we can get them to live there. That will allow me to continue the excavations by the electrical box.

This area is where the compost pile was -- we've moved it now to back by the Bamboo Grove. Also we have had a couple of trees planted in this area, so the soil is somewhat disturbed and uneven; after the trees were put in or out, the soil settled. So part of the goal is to even up this part of the yard. We will need to be careful, since it will settle after we are done.

Digging out the stump

2010-04-08T19:12:00.000-07:00

Having gotten down to bedrock, the primary goal is to dig out the stump, so we start to dig back towards the stump. First we dig back to the concrete slab that the electrical box is on, and then we start to dig around the stump, counter-clockwise.

With daylight savings, it's lighter in the evening, so I've been coming home from work earlier and trying to dig from about 6:00 to 7:30 in the evening. After the weekend, and 3 or 4 evenings, we have dug our around half the stump.

Another weekend of digging and we have most of the dirt from the back side moved out. Once you get about 3 or 4 inches down, you hit the roots. I use the "axe" part of my grubbing hoe to chop at the roots next to the stump and at the edge of the hole that I've dug to get the roots out. This disconnects the stump from the roots out in the yard (which will eventually be dug up or die).

And this evening, having chopped my way around the stump, I could just reach down, and use the longest remaining root to lift the stump up and on its side.

It's really heavy. I can't think of any reason anyone would want a stump, so the next problem will be to break it down into manageable pieces and haul it out. I have a couple of wedges and a sledge hammer that I will try to use for that this next weekend.

Another weekend of digging

2010-03-29T05:50:00.000-07:00

Not too much progress this weekend. I got the rocks out of the hole from last weekend, and dug some more.

I've put the rocks out on the curb to get rid of them. Craig's List seems like a good way to get people to come haul them off. They use them as landscape rocks, I assume.

After getting the rocks out, which required using the jackhammer to break several into smaller more manageable pieces, the rest of the time was just digging, and moving the dirt out of the way.

There is a solid layer of rock about 20 inches down. I expect several weeks of just digging, to get the soil cleaned up, removing rocks and mixing in compost.

Starting The Box

2010-03-18T07:31:00.000-07:00

The next area to work on is a planter/bed area just off the porch. It was dominated by a large cedar tree, which we had cut down. So now we have a stump to remove. I've started by clearing off all the previous plantings, and removing the little stone edging around it.

Here's what the tree looked like before it was removed.

And that leaves me with the following to work on:

And in particular the stump.

I expect to dig around this until it's isolated and then break it up into smaller pieces to get it out.

After a couple of days of digging, I have exposed a couple of big rocks in a 5 foot by 7 foot hole. I managed to pry the small one out and put it on the stump to get it out of the way. I pried another larger one up on top of another. I may need to break these into smaller chunks to make them manageable.

Under these rocks, about 21 inches from ground level, it appears I have a solid, smooth unbroken layer of rock, so that's about as deep as I can go.

After this work, it has rained, so I can't really do anything more until it dries up. And Spring Break is over, so it's back to digging only on the weekends.

Last work on the Bamboo Grove

2010-03-18T07:18:00.000-07:00

I'm off work on Spring Break, and it's stopped raining for a few days, so I was able to go out and shovel more dirt into the bamboo grove. This should fill it back in. The wall is done, and other than needing to bring in more dirt as things settle, the Bamboo Grove is done. All the dirt has been dug up, the rock removed and the dirt quality improved. As the dirt settles, I will probably need to bring in a bit more.

Finishing the Bamboo Grove Wall

2010-03-07T16:07:00.000-08:00

I was able to get back to work on the Bamboo grove -- the Cedar Allergies are gone, it's above freezing, and there was a break in the rain. It's been since like November that I was working on this. So first, we have to establish where we were. We need to put a concrete wall, with rock topping under the back fence. We will use the jackhammer to go straight down under the fence. That will provide one side of the concrete wall.

It turned out to be easier to just use the pick axe (really a grubbing hoe) to even it up under the fence. Then it's the standard approach. Staple black plastic on the fence, to provide a water proof barrier on one side. Use a high pressure water hose to spray the bedrock down, to get it as clean as we can. Then put up a masonite form for the other side, keeping them separated by a 1x4 piece of wood. I have all these bags that used to hold compost that I've filled with rock to use as sandbags to keep the forms in place. Then mix up the concrete (I use just 80 pound bags of ready-mix) and shovel it in, removing the 1x4's as each section is filled with concrete. After a couple days, remove the forms.

Another day of mixing up just mortar and using it to put cut limestone rocks on the top, to make it look better than just concrete. Let that dry and we are done.

Now we are ready to fill the space in with dirt. We have a big pile in the bamboo grove, but given the amount of rock we have taken out, we will need to bring in more.

March 6 and 7, 2010

I spread the dirt pile around and filled in much of the area, but still need more for the complete area. I've been mixing in all the leaves from last fall as I shovel the dirt back, so there should be some organic matter mixed with the soil. It's a very heavy clay soil and still very wet. It was marginally reasonable to shovel it in this condition -- it seemed with every shovel full, more stuck to the shovel than was moved. But the forecast says more rain tonight and tomorrow, so this is the best opportunity in a while.

Winter 2010

2010-03-07T15:51:00.000-08:00

It's been really wet this winter. And cold. So not much done outside during this time.

I put up a ramp for the dog, to get down from the back porch to the ground. The dog is getting very old (16 or 17 years old) and has developed a limp. She is now having difficulty going down the stairs. So this should make it easier for her. I made it out of two 12 foot 2x4's from Home Depot, plus some leftover siding/plywood from the attic. I ripped the plywood into 18 inch pieces and screwed it down to the 2x4's. Then to keep her from jumping off the side, I put a short piece of siding on the side, Since I had the siding and screws, the total cost was just the $9 for the two 2x4's.

March 2, 2010

The other activity was to trim the trees. The trees are so thick, especially in the front, that the grass is dieing (or is dead). We went with Crawford's Tree Service (http://www.happiertrees.com). $750 to have most of the trees trimmed. Below is the live oak in the front (named Fuzzy), before and after.

First half of concrete wall

2009-12-08T05:52:00.000-08:00

Now that the digging is done, the next step is the concrete separating wall. We are going to put in a concrete wall, down to bedrock, to keep the bamboo in (or out) to this specific area. To be a bit more attractive, we put a rock edge along the top.

So the first problem is to get the rock. Whittlesey Landscape in Round Rock has some 4x4 rock for 7 cents a pound. I got 520 pounds for $39.40 (27 November 2009). This should be 50 linear feet or more. In the photo below, I just laid them at the base of the fence to get an idea of how much length I have, and what it will look like.

In addition, I will need concrete and mortar mix -- the concrete for the wall and the mortar mix to attach the rocks to the top. The process is fairly simple. I put a black plastic sheet on the "dirt" side, to keep the concrete from mixing with the dirt. I use 1x4's to keep the forms 4 inches away from the dirt, and then put the forms on the outside. For the forms, I just bought a 4x8 sheet of masonite from Home Depot ($12) and cut it down to 3 16-inch tall pieces. I use the plastic bags of bad dirt as sandbags, to hold the form in place. Then I mix up a bag of concrete and shovel it into the space between the plastic on the far side and the form on this side. As I shovel the concrete in, I can pull out the 1x4's -- they are just there to keep the form from collapsing next to the black plastic.

It's a dirty messy job. Part of this is because the weather was sort of wet, but also just the water to clean the bedrock, and to mix the concrete.

Once the concrete is firm, the forms can be removed (and re-used for the next section). The black plastic can be trimmed off (but you can't get it out from behind the wall -- that's intentional; it should help seal the wall from anything coming thru it). Mix up the mortar mix and use it to put on the top edge of rock.

In the photo above, I don't have all the rocks attached yet, but the part that is done looks good. I have to finish all the way around to join up with the first separating wall, and close the wall around the bamboo grove.

But there will be a delay -- I seem to have acquired "tennis elbow", and the doctor says to lay off this work until I get better. I would still hope to be able to finish by the end of the year, but there is no rush. And with the wet winter weather, it's difficult to work. And cedar allergy season is about to start.

Final digging in the Bamboo Grove

2009-11-26T09:15:00.001-08:00

It's still pretty wet out there, but seems to have dried up enough to work. I think that the French drain is actually working, and over the past week or more, the water has worked its way into the French drain, down the pipe to the retention pond and then out the drainage holes into the trench from digging and down the
yard to the corner.

But despite that, and the dirt being wet, I dug out the last part.

This gets me all the way from the drainage pond to the fence corner and then back to the retaining wall that should seal the bamboo grove off from the yard.

The next step will be to pour a concrete wall under the fence and put rock on the top to match the retaining wall. This will prevent the bamboo from escaping under the fence, and confine it completely to this one area of the back yard.

I've started collecting together the rocks to go on top of the cement wall. I need to get some "forms" to outline the wall. Previously, I just used some 2 foot by 8 foot pieces of masonite. It's light weight and smooth on one side, and flexible, so it's easy to work with. And I need concrete mix. I'll need to figure out how much.

.

More Radiant Barrier

2009-11-24T15:57:00.000-08:00

The back yard is still too wet to dig, so taking the opportunity to finish the attic today. The first step was to finish putting the radiant barrier over the finished part of the attic over the garage.

Next we used the last roll of the radiant barrier material to run down the area over the living room. The living room has a vaulted ceiling, so the framing of it is a bit more complex than for the rest of the attic.

When we put the radiant barrier over the living room, we had to remove the light that we had hanging there. So we installed a fixed fluorescent light fixture on the wall between the carpeted cat walk (on the right in the photo below) and the area over the living room.

And finally, we put a shelf in the area over the utility room (the hot water heater and the vent over the stove top) to put the telephone equipment (wiring, plugs, tools, outlets). That gets the box up off the floor and out of the way.

I think this finishes almost everything in the attic. I guess I need to go back over the Energy Audit and see if anything else comes up.

Radiant Barrier for the Attic

2009-11-23T18:09:00.000-08:00

I'm off for the Thanksgiving holiday. It's much too wet outside to dig -- standing water in the trench I've been working on, so it was up in the attic to try to finish the area over the garage.

The Energy Audit had identified the area over the garage as having no insulation and no radiant barrier. I last worked on this September 20, and put down a layer of 6 inches of fiber glass insulation between the floor joists. This time I installed radiant barrier on the inside of the roof, and then put R-30 fiber glass rolls down on top of the previous insulation, running the new rolls perpendicular to the old insulation.

I put the radiant barrier up first and then filled in with the insulation. That should finish off the unfinished part of the attic, over the garage. I am left with the finished part over the garage, which needs a radiant barrier, and some other random places which also need radiant barrier. I needed to get more over the material. The radiant barrier comes in rolls of only 4 feet by 25 feet, so I needed another 4 rolls for these areas. These were about $184 at Home Depot.

I'll need a step ladder or something to install it over the finished floor part of the attic.

That should be tomorrow's work.

Into the final stretch

2009-11-16T20:00:00.000-08:00

October and November 2009

It's been dry now a couple of weekends and I've been able to get out there and dig. I've turned the corner of the fence and started digging along the back stretch. The bedrock is somewhat less smooth here. Part of it is the utility trench. When the development was put in, all the utilities -- electrical, telephone, and cable -- were put underground. Apparently code says they should be 16 to 18 inches below ground level. Of course, as we've seen, bedrock is only 4 to 8 inches below ground level.

So they brought in a rock saw and cut a trench into the rock and put the cables in that. The chewed up rock was just dumped along side the trench and then dirt put over the whole bunch. I take off the dirt, then I'm putting the rock debris into compost and mulch plastic bags. In the short term I will use them like sandbags to hold the cement forms when I pour the cement wall, and then I'll haul them off.

I actually dug deep enough to find the cables near the corner. In the actual corner the rock formation is very different. It goes very deep in dirt. I wasn't able to find the underlying rock. But I did uncover the cables. They are in a big (probably 4 inch diameter) grey PVC pipe. Which is good, since it probably would not be good for me to break into a high voltage power line.

Having gone as deep as I figured I have any reason going, I continued on along the fence. Pretty standard digging, except for a strange notch in the bedrock. It's too rectangular to be natural, so I guess someone did this when the trench was put in.

All this digging has produces a big pile of dirt, but I think I'm just a couple (digging) days from finishing the excavation, so I should have enough room. Once I get the wall poured, I can put it all back (and more!).

I used some of the ground up limestone from when they cut the trench to cover over the electrical pipe, and fill in the corner to a level.

So, a bit more digging, then I can start framing for the concrete work. And I need to get rocks to put on top of the concrete, to make it a bit more "natural", so it will match the other exposed rock walls. I may be able to finish before Christmas. Depending on the weather, of course.

Turning a corner in the Bamboo Grove

2009-10-04T17:45:00.001-07:00

September 2009

A couple of weekends of work, digging in the Bamboo Grove. We widened the trench that we dug back along the fence so that we got the most of our work. As long as we were digging in this area, it seems we should get as much dug up and the rocks removed as possible.

The technique we are using is fairly simple. We use the pick-axe -- actually a combination grubbing hoe and axe -- to break up the dirt. We pick out any rocks in the dirt and put them in the plastic tray. They get transferred them to the wheelbarrow and taken around to the driveway to get rid of.

In addition to rocks, we find roots. Bamboo roots. These are cleaned -- knocked against something hard to shake off any dirt -- and then thrown in the plastic garbage can. This is taken around front on Wednesday mornings to be collected by the City as "organic debris" along with any lawn clippings, or leafs. The City grinds it up into compost.

Once everything is separated from the dirt, it is then hoed back out of the way. Eventually there is reasonable pile of dirt, and we shovel it back onto the pile of dirt that we have dug up. This process -- pick axed, hoe, and then shovel -- means that all the dirt is pretty well mixed up, and we avoid having significantly different types of dirt.

In addition to the native dirt that I'm digging up, I buy bags of composted dirt -- the cheapest kind of stuff I can find. This has been stuff called "Organic Humus" at Lowe's. It's about $1.10 per 40 pounds. Mostly it looks like dirt with a high concentration of shredded trees. Each bag is 40 pounds, so I can get about 7 bags in my car, or I take the Forester and can get up to 20 bags.

The only down side of this is the plastic bags that it comes in. We have gotten better, bulk stuff from the Organic Gardener, but it's much more expensive, and further away, so it costs more in both time and money.
I've actually found that the plastic bags become a convenient way to package up and then discard rocks and debris. For example, the ground up limestone that came from the trench they put the electrical, cable, and telephone wires in, seems really useless. It's too fine to be rock, but has no real nutritional value for the trees and shrubs. All it would do would be make the soil really alkaline, and it already is pretty alkaline. So I put it in the bags that the humus comes in and then put it in the trash pick up on Wednesday.

Right now, I'm accumulating these bags. I plan to use them as weights (sort of like sand bags) to hold the forms for the cement wall that I will pour along and under the fence.

So having dug along one fence to the corner, the next job will be to continue digging around the corner and along the other fence. I went out yesterday and used the electric chainsaw to cut down all the bamboo in a swath along the fence some 3 to 4 feet wide. This defines the area that is to be dug next. In the picture below, there is water in the trench that I have been digging. This weekend it has been raining a far amount.

Insulating the Attic over the garage

2009-09-20T13:27:00.000-07:00

19 Sept 2009

Too wet outside to dig, so it's back to working in the attic.

I had an Energy Audit on 31 August. The audit was by Green Footprint Solutions who came in and tested the A/C ducts (less than 10% leakage), and a blower door test, as well as checking out the insulation of the windows, doors and in the attic. The audit pointed out that I had not quite finished the insulation and radiant barrier installation in the attic.

The missing insulation was mainly over the garage. Since the attic is uninsulated and the garage is uninsulated, it wasn't clear to me that it mattered, but the suggestion was that it would help cool the garage.
The supports for the garage ceiling are split into two halfs, left and right, by a beam running the length of the garage. I added 6 inches (R-19) in both the sections. This was John Mansville insulation from Lowe's. It slid inbetween the ceiling joists just about perfectly. I needed 3 packs, about 270 square feet.

This area is behind the knee walls that I installed previously. I was careful not to push it too far out, so that there is still ventilation from the soffits up to the ridge vent. There had been some plywood flooring tacked down that I had to remove to get it fully insulated.

If you look at the end of this section, where it abuts the attic area over the utility room, you can see that this is much less insulation than the rest of the house has.

So the next project will be putting up radiant barrier on the roof joists and then adding more insulation to really seal this area off. I have the materials. I had to buy more radiant barrier -- they don't make the kind that I used on the rest of the attic -- and I have R-30 batts to roll out over the new R-19 in this area. This
will bring this area up to R-49, better than the R-38 that is "standard" for this area. Most of the rest of the attic has another R-30 over this, which I guess would make it about R-80.

The R-19 (3 packs 87.18 square feet each) was $61.48 from Lowe's on 6 Sept 2009; the R-30 (9 rolls of 15 inch x 25 feet each) was $115.74 on 17 Sept 2009. The radiant barrier (2 rolls of 4 feet by 50 feet) was $95.99 on 19 Sept 2009.

Energy Audit

2009-08-31T14:09:00.000-07:00

The City of Austin is requiring an Energy Audit for the sale of any home. While we don't expect to sell any time soon, it raises the question of what an Energy Audit would tell us. Have I done all that I can, or is there more that I can do?

We checked with the City for the list of officially sanctioned auditors, and chose Green Footprint Solutions. They came out on 31 August 2009, and checked everything over. The cost was $499. Thomas Pardue was the inspector.

The inspector walked around the house and checked on the contents of the house generally. Specific attention was given to:

Appliances -- check the hot water heaters, the clothes washer and dryer, the dishwasher, the A/C system (both indoors (the fan, furnace and evaporator coils) and outdoors (the compressor).

Lighting -- check that all lighting was CFL (Compact Fluorescent Lights).

Windows -- check double pane windows.

All these checked out fine. There was a suggestion that some of our appliances, such as the A/C system, which is 6 years old, could be replaced with a more efficient system, but this is always the case.

Next, he checked the insulation in the attic. All he was interested in was if the insulation was adequate, which in our area means R-38 (12 inches of fiber glass insulation). So those places where I have more than that didn't matter.

A pressure test of the A/C duct system went well. He taped over all the duct vents in all the rooms. Then he used a fan to blow into the ducts to see how much air was leaking out into the attic. As expected (since we had the ducts sealed in 19xx), there was no problem with the A/C ducts.

The inspector did notice that the area of the attic over the garage had no insulation, and no radiant barrier. We need to finish this.

The real value of the inspection was a series of Thermographic images. These look at the temperature of the house in the infra-red range, rather than the visible light range. Actually, the camera they had did both visible light and infra-red at the same time, so it is easier to see what the infra-red image shows. Since this was August, it was pretty warm outside, so any problem spots show up as high temperatures. For example, an image of the sky light in the guest bathroom (which is hard to get to directly) showed a temperature of 108.4 degrees on the wooden frame, but this is an extreme case. The main issues are with the metal window frames and the thresholds under the exterior doors.

We might also consider replacing the interior wood doors to the attic and to the hallway utilities. If we could get these to be foam-filled, it might insulate those areas better.

Continuing in the Bamboo Grove

2009-08-30T11:57:00.000-07:00

30 August 2009

Continued digging along the fence, and made it to the back corner.

Things were very predictable until I got to the corner. The rock base is fairly level and smooth, and only 6 to 10 inches under the ground level. There was one area where the material just about the rock was pulverized limestone; I've separated that and will get rid of it.

But the corner itself drops way down -- a foot or more. I haven't hit rock yet. I know that the utility people trenched in this area to put the underground power, telephone, and cable wires. I believe the pulverized limestone was the debris from that trenching down into the bedrock. The drop off into the corner is very sharp; in my mind it is artificially sharp, and I believe this is then the result of the trenching tool -- a big rock saw (more like a rock chainsaw).

Which raises the possibility that I am digging in the area with the buried utility lines. Just to be sure, I called the number for marking the utilities -- 1-800-DIG-TESS -- and will wait until they come out to mark where things are supposed to be. They said that would be by Wednesday, so I'll just continue digging next weekend.

Also, I'm going to cut down more of the bamboo, so I can continue with the digging, getting the rocks out of the soil, and improving the soil. I've posted on Craig's List to see if anyone wants the bamboo stalks that I have.

I got a response from Craig's List (a couple, in fact), and someone came by today (Monday 31 Aug) to pick up the bamboo. I used the neighbor's electric chain saw to cut them off just at ground level. It makes a big difference! It is much sunnier now in this area. This gives me the room needed to dig up a larger part. There is still a healthy patch of bamboo over in the other corner. I'm sure it will spread, in time, to reclaim the whole area, but, for now, I can dig up the ground and try to make it a much more fertile area -- more compost, fewer rocks, more uniformly mixed.

Starting along the Fence

2009-08-02T15:25:00.000-07:00

2 August 2009

Worked for a couple of hours this weekend, both Saturday and Sunday. Despite the August heat, this work was in the afternoon both days. I'm starting to work back along the fence. If I keep up this pace, I think I could be back to the corner by the end of the month.

The digging is fairly unremarkable. I dig out a section and pull the dirt back into the area where I've already dug it out. As I do that, I separate out the roots and the rocks from the dirt. The rocks go in the wheelbarrow and are taken around to the driveway to, eventually, be gotten rid of. The roots go in a plastic trash can to be recycled by the City (into mulch). The dirt gets shoveled up on the pile to the left in the photo, filling in the area that I've dug out already. As the volume of material that was there is decreased by the rocks and roots, I get more space to work in.

The above photo shows the type of soil I'm digging in. There is a top layer of maybe four inches of brown dirt. This is good soil that we have brought in over the past 20 years. Then there is maybe 2 inches of "sandy loam" as it was called -- a lighter colored dirt that the builder brought in. Underneath that is 3 to 4 inches of native soil -- a combination of dark dirt and light colored limestone rocks. So the top layer has roots that need to be removed; the bottom layer has rocks that need to be removed. In the process, all the dirt that is left is mixed up, along with leaves and such, and then thrown on the pile. It should settle down as the organic material (leaves) decompose, and the soil compacts.

At the same time, on Sunday morning, I took advantage of the lower temperatures and added more insulation to the attic, over the kitchen area -- probably mostly over the utility room. I rolled out another 9 inches of fiberglass roll insulation. Should be R30. This was four packs of 15 inch wide, 25 foot long rolls of insulation. This should take it to about R90 total. The blue Styrofoam are left-over ventilation pieces and the shiny foil is an old water heater blanket. These are left over from other projects, and shouldn't hurt, might help.

My plan at this point is to get a home energy audit, since there is almost no place left to over-insulate in the attic and I'm not sure what else I can do.

Garage door repair

2009-07-26T12:14:00.000-07:00

One of the springs on the garage door opener broke on Friday morning. Linda opened the garage door and it flew off. At the end of the spring, the wire is bent 90 degrees to form a hook, and that broke off. You can see by examining the broken spot that the wire is cast iron or steel. This is at least the second time this has happened, on these doors, since these are replacement springs. The other door still has the original springs.

So I went to Home Depot to get a replacement spring. They only sell them in sets of two, so I got two. The box suggests that both springs be replaced at the same time. The problem is that there are 7 different "sizes" of springs, and how do I choose the "right" ones for my door? The springs seem to be categorized by the weight of the door. I have two doors -- roughly what, 8 feet by 8 feet? That's not an option, but it's close. The largest size is for 16 ft by 7 ft doors -- that would be like most of the neighbors that have one large door for two cars. But I have two doors, one for each car slot. The size below 16x7 is for 8x7 and 9x7. So I must have doors that are eight 8x7 or 9x7.

Then for the heaviest 8x7 or 9x7 doors, the package lists a 130 lb spring. But since I have wood doors, they may be somewhat heavier, and I expect it is better to error on bigger springs, rather than under-sized ones, so I bought the 140 lb springs.

It took about an hour to remove the old springs and put on the new ones. The new ones come with cables that can be threaded thru the springs so that, if (when) they break, the pieces are "contained", and don't fly all over the garage. I probably had those for the previous set of springs (the ones that just broke), but it seems that I decided to put the cables on the other door, the one with the original springs, from when the house was built. I probably figured that they were more likely to break than the new ones, and it would be better to then be protected with them. Now I have cables on both.

The new springs look to be better designed too. Instead of just the last half of the spring turned 90 degrees for a hook, the new ones tilt out the last two loops of the spring. This should mean less stress on a given point of attachment, and it means there is a complete loop (two!) to thread the cable thru. If it does break, even the little loop should stay put. I still haven't found the piece of the old hook that broke off. It's probably embedded in some wall or ceiling spot in the garage.

Digging more dirt.

In addition, on Saturday, 25 July, I mortared another line of stone onto the rock wall around "the Jungle" where it meets the Bamboo Grove, and then today (Sunday), Lauren and I moved dirt from the big dirt pile (that has accumulated from my various excavations) and put it into the newly dug out area by the Bamboo Grove. I mixed a lot of leaves in with it, to try to increase the organic content and make it better soil. We worked for about 3 hours, digging dirt, moving it, and spreading it out.

Summer in the Bamboo Grove

2009-07-05T11:45:00.000-07:00

June and July 2009

So far this summer has been mainly digging in the Bamboo Grove. The wall dividing the Jungle from the Bamboo Grove is in place. The rocks are on top. I need another layer of rock, to make the dividing wall a bit taller, and I have those, although I have not yet put them securely in place. So I've been digging out the Bamboo Grove, at least in those places where the bamboo is not growing right now. I have a ground level wall/divider between the Bamboo Grove and the other area behind the Jungle. I started at that end, digging up the Bamboo Grove.

I can dig down to bedrock. Bedrock is only 6 to 9 inches deep. In doing so, I dig up a bunch of bamboo roots and a bunch of loose rock. The loose rock gets put in the wheelbarrow and taken out to the driveway. When I have "enough" rock on the drive, I have to get rid of it.

The dirt gets piled up in the back. I basically do a trench and fill approach to digging. I dig down to bedrock and then move the edge forward, digging the dirt out and piling it behind me. As I move forward, the pile behind me gets bigger and bigger.

I'm trying to dig out all of the rocks and roots and get to just soil. I mix a bunch of leaves from last Fall into the dirt that there is, and sometimes some compost. I get the cheapest compost in 40 pound bags from Lowe's -- about $1.10 -- and mix that in. In addition, we have our own compost pile, but it takes a long time and doesn't produce very much.

This particular area, the area on the left in the photo above, was a very thin layer of dirt on top of a big mass of mostly crushed limestone. I think when they dug the trench for the electrical, phone, and cable lines, thye cut right thru the limestone bedrock, to get the lines at least 18 inches deep. Most of the rock that was cut out of the trench was just dumped on the ground here. Later the builder put an inch or two of dirt over it, so he could place sod and get things to grow, at least until the house was sold. Normally there is not a lot of debris, and I can just mix it in with the dirt, but in this case, it seemed really excessive. So I shoveled out the
solid limestone "soil" and put it in the plastic bags that the cheap compost comes in. I'll dispose of it, and fill this area back in with real dirt.

I got most of the central area to the left dug out and then continued up on the right. Once around a clump of bamboo, I'm almost to the fence. The objective is to clear out all the dirt up to the fence, over to the rock pond, and make it better dirt -- mostly rock free.

The excavated dirt, mixed with leaves and compost is filling in the area where I started to dig. It will compact over time, so the area needs to be "over-filled" to start with. And I may need to bring in even more, it if subsides too much. And, as you can see, there is still a lot of empty area. That should represent all the rock that has been taken out. I have a pile of dirt in another area that I will bring over to fill in, once I have the rest of the area dug up.

I am thinking now that I should continue to wall in the bamboo on all sides with the concrete wall down to bedrock. The easiest way to do that now would be to finish this section of digging and then trench all the way around the bamboo, next to the fence, down to bedrock and fill it in with the same sort of 4 inch wide concrete wall, topped with a white rock level with the bottom of the fence.

More work on the Bamboo Grove

2009-05-31T18:24:00.000-07:00

May, 2009

It's been raining the last two weekends, so it was hard to get much done outside. But this weekend was nice, so it was back to work!

I've got the cement wall poured from bedrock. The cement wall will all be underground. It took about 15 to 20 bags of Ready-Mix concrete, to pour the wall around the back half of the "Jungle". I dug out about 2 feet around it, down to bedrock. I went straight down from the previous stone edging, which allowed me to use the dirt on the Jungle side as one half of the forms. I used simple (cheap) masonite for the other side, with a 1x4 between them to keep the two sides apart. As I shoveled concrete in, I pulled out the 1x4. Let sit overnight, remove the masonite and it's done.

Now the problem is to put the stones back on top of it. I hired a day laborer with some masonry experience to do that, but, all in all, I think I could do as well. And it seems that the one row that he put on is too low, so I'll put another row on top of them. We were low on rocks, so I went to Custom Stone and got another 30 or so (Blanco chop). These were from Austin Custom Stone 400 pounds for $23.82. I've got those placed, but figure I'll put most of the dirt back in before doing the rest of the masonry.

So this weekend it was digging again. Try to go down to bedrock and get the smaller rocks out, and mix the dirt up with compose and leaves, so that it will be more organic and less rocky wasteland. Remember bedrock is only 9 to 12 inches down, so it's not a lot of digging. But it's rocky and rooty.

Another problem that I had forgotten about was the old sprinkler system. There are still PVC pipes for the old sprinkler system. I've taken out most of it, and will work on getting more, but there is at least one piece that goes from the current working area over to the far corner of the fence. I guess it will have to stay until this whole area is dug up.

There is a trench along the back fence that has telephone, cable and electrical lines in it. But that seems to be quite a ways down. They cut thru the limestone bedrock to trench it down at least 18 inches. I dug (carefully) into the trench at least 10 inches and found nothing. So this area should be clear of anything except roots and rocks and the occasional PVC sprinkler pipe.

I got two wheelbarrows full of rocks today, and a pile of dirt. My approach is effectively to dig a trench and then move it forward, putting the dirt behind me, pulling out the rocks (which go in the wheelbarrow) and the roots (which go into a plastic trash can to be taken to the curb for lawn waste recycling once a week).

At the moment I am digging in the Bamboo Grove itself, mainly because I have the opportunity to clean the dirt that is not yet overrun by the bamboo. This will probably take another 2 to 3 weeks of digging. Then I can do the same on the section that is next to it. This area is separated by the cement wall and stones that are to be at ground level (not an edging), to just contain the bamboo. Since this area is behind the Jungle, it's not visible from the house, so we will move the compost pile to this area when it is done.

Replacing a Solar Panel

2009-05-05T19:24:00.000-07:00

Our solar system was in the direct path of the hail storm of March 25. Almost every house in our neighborhood is having its roof replaced. The hail was literally golf ball size. We took a direct hit on one of our 24 solar panels. Davis Elementary School, just blocks away, has a much larger solar system, probably twice the size we have. Two of their panels were visibly damaged by the hail.

Immediately after the hail storm, I tried to contact the company that installed my system to have the panel replaced. Our system was installed in August, 2006, but the company is no longer here in Austin. Of the eight companies that I worked with in getting our solar system, only two are still on the City's directory of participating companies now. Once I was able to find another company to work with, we found that the panels I have are no longer being made. The panels are different sizes with different specifications; it's not clear if how they can be mixed. We eventually found a panel in a warehouse somewhere that had been forgotten about and had it shipped here.

When they brought the panel out to install, they found that it was wired differently, but were able to use parts from the broken panel to re-wire the new panel and install it.

We have 24 panels, arranged in two rows of 12. Each row is electrically separate, so losing one panel meant that we were generating only 50% of our normal power. Think of it like Christmas lights -- when one goes out, everything in that strand goes out. But replacing the broken panel did not improve our power output. Testing the broken panel, once it was removed, showed that it was working fine. The glass cover was broken, but not the silicon -- it had continued to generate power. (Of course, it was not thought to be working when it was removed, so it's really not functional now).

But why then were we only generating half power? Since January, the City has been printing how much we generate each month on our utility bill. Those numbers have been consistent, but it turns out, they have been at 50% for months. How long I can't tell. When the system was installed, I carefully monitored it for several months, recording the power generated every day. But that proved really boring ... another day, another 14 kilowatts. The system requires no maintenance. I don't need to add gas or check the oil or change the filter or mow it or water it or anything. Or so I thought.

After a couple hours of investigation, we determined that something -- most likely a squirrel -- had chewed thru one of the power cables. That short circuit was what was causing the problem, not the hail-damaged solar panel. We expect to have that repaired tomorrow.

So I have learned several things from this episode:

1. Solar power is still in its infancy; companies will come and go with great frequency. Any customer needs to be prepared to switch companies as necessary, or take over maintenance and repair themselves.

2. While solar systems are very hardy, they are not indestructible and they will not last forever. A solar system needs to be designed to be maintained, monitored, and repaired.

3. The parts that are available now will not be available in the future (not unlike just about anything else in life). So if panels need to be replaced, they will not be compatible in size or appearance (at the least). On a long-lived system (these are
supposed to last 20 years or more), expect it to become non-homogeneous -- not all parts will be the same.

4. Even a system that requires no maintenance will need regular monitoring.

5. Squirrels are evil.

Hail storm

2009-04-12T15:29:00.000-07:00

March 2009

There was a major hail storm on 25 March. Lauren collected some of the hail stones from around the house. They were quite literally the size of golf balls. My visual inspection didn't show major damage. A lot of small tree limbs and leaves. But both cars were in the garage (mine was still at work); no skylights broken.

There was damage to our photo-voltaic solar system -- one panel (out of 24) has a large white area of damage.

I went up on the roof and checked for obvious damage and didn't see any. But I did notice that the roof vents were being chewed on by squirrels, so I needed a roofer to come repair/replace those. So I called my roofer, Drury Roofing, to take a look.

I also tried to find the company that installed the solar system, but they no longer seem to be in Austin. I tracked down the person who used to be in charge of their Austin work, Kenny Grigar, who is now with another Austin company (Green City Austin), and was able to talk to him. He had me e-mail pictures of the damage. kgrigar@greencityaustin.com

Kenny said that someone would be out to check on the system on Saturday 4 April, from 10 to 12, but no one showed up. I've been leaving phone messages daily but am not getting any response.

The roofer finally came out tho, on Monday 6 April. It will run $200 to $600 to repair the roof vents. But he also showed me significant damage to the roof. It's not visible if you don't know what to look for, but once he showed me, I could both
understand the damage and find it myself. He said that it will show up more as time goes by.

So I called my insurance agent, State Farm, and they said they would submit a claim and have an adjuster come out, probably not for a week (given the heavy load).

Weds, April 8, I got a call from Mike at State Farm. He had an opening from 10 to 12 on Tuesday 14th. I called back and left a message that included my cell phone number and work number with the mention that I am only 10 minutes away from home and would like to be there.

PostScript: The adjuster from State Farm walked around on the roof and pointed out the same sorts of problems that the roofer had pointed out. He declared the roof "totaled". We will need to replace the roof, the gutters, everything. The damage may not be obvious now, but in a couple of months or years it will show up. He wrote us a check for the damage on the spot. We have two years to replace the roof. Given that it still looks in good shape, and there may be more hail, or other problems, I figure we will wait until there is less roofing frenzy in the neighborhood.

Another point. To reduce the cost of our home insurance, we talked last year (just about a year ago, yup!) and raised the deductible to 2% of the value of the house. We pay the first 2%; State Farm covers anything over that (to the amount that the house is insured for). Replacement cost for the house is apparently $550,000, so we will pay the first $11,000 to replace the roof. (I also switched to a high-deductible medical insurance plan, since I for years have had no major medical issues. Sure enough; skin cancer, diagnosed at about the same time as the hail storm. Probably from working outside on the house and yard in the Texas sun.)

Spring arrives for 2009

2009-03-09T18:35:00.000-07:00

March 7, 2009

It's a little early for Spring -- the average date for the latest freeze is near the end of March -- but the plants do not seem to know. The trees are blooming, the daffodils are coming up, and the irises are starting to look perky. So it seems like it would be a good time to do something about the lawn. The lawn, especially in the front is looking worn out. Linda thinks it gets too much shade. But I figure it can not hurt to make sure it has good dirt. So I got 8 cubic yards of Farmstyle compost from The Natural Gardener for $430.40.

They delivered about 9:00 AM on Saturday and I spent the rest of the day putting it in my wheelbarrow and spreading it around on the lawn. Did not have enough for the full yard -- just the front and one side. Probably needed another 4 cubic yards. And another day to spread it. We went back and got another 10 gallons to put in the herb and flower beds.

March 9, 2009

A plumber came to fix the sprinkler system. About two weeks ago, when I went out to get the newspaper, I notice that the driveway was wet -- water was seeping up from near the water meter and running down the driveway. I dug that area up and it was coming from the sprinkler system valve. All the water for the sprinkler system comes off the main line and goes thru this large valve that only allows water to go one way. It has two cut-off valves, one on each end. I turned the water off and then went looking for a plumber.

The plumber was Jonathon Griesheimer, doing business as Accent Sprinklers. He did a good job of taking out the old pieces and putting on new pieces. It took less than an hour, since I had already dug up the spot and identified the problem. He was easy to work with and did not seem to mind me watching everything he was doing.

The Bamboo Grove

2009-02-15T13:35:00.000-08:00

There is a bed area in the backyard that James Conner designed and implemented. His original design was for a two-level planting around the edges, with Nandina and another plant around the existing small oak trees and a couple of mountain juniper trees. He did this in December to January 1990, and over time, it became quite overground. Linda calls it "the jungle".

There is a small triangular area behind the jungle, bounded by the jungle in the front and the fence in the back, that then becomes pretty unused. You really can't see it from most of the rest of the yard, or from the house. There was one old mountain juniper tree in that area, but nothing much else.

So I planted bamboo in that area.

Initially, the bamboo was planted in August 1997. One plant marked as Phyllostachys Aurea (golden bamboo). There are a number of descriptions of it on the web. It likes full sun, and is hardy to 0 degrees F. It seems very happy in this corner of the yard. It took years before it started to spread, but has since become "aggressive".

To contain it, I have been digging around it. The French drain terminus forms one wall to stop it from advancing into the yard. I cut down the mountain juniper and in late summer 2008, dug up the stump and the area around it. This produced several barrels of bamboo roots which I separated from the dirt and recycled. The ground in this area is only 6 to 12 inches deep before we hit bedrock. So it can't go very deep. I poured a cement wall down to bedrock, with white limestone rocks on top at ground level to keep it from expanding to the yard in the other direction.

So the bamboo has only three directions to go -- under the "jungle" bed, or under the fence. Current plans are to extend the cement wall under the rocks that encircle the jungle bed. At this point, I have dug a trench down to bedrock along the jungle bed edge. The trench is about 18 inches wide, and should allow me to work on replacing the edge of the jungle bed.

22 March 2009

Continued work. I used the jackhammer to break up the stone wall around the "jungle" in the back, next to the bamboo grove. I used the chisel point to go down between the stones, in the mortar, so that I can re-use the stones. Then I switched to the big flat blade to go vertically down thru the rock and dirt to bedrock. This gives me a very clean vertical surface from bedrock up to the ground floor of the "jungle". My intention is then to put a concrete wall in to hold the vertical surface while also providing a clean strong separation between the "jungle" and the bamboo grove. I have a little more clean-up to do -- separating out the rock from the dirt and getting a good clean bedrock surface -- before I can pour the concrete.

New Door to the Garage

2008-12-23T13:44:00.000-08:00

December 2008

We've had an on-going problem with the door between the garage and the house. This particular wall has settled, and the frame around the door is no longer square. As near as I could tell, it was no longer possible to seal the door -- there was a visible gap between the door and the frame near the door handle. In addition, the heavy wooden door was having problems with its surface -- parts of the veneer have chipped away.

So I decided to replace the door completely. Both the door and its frame. I checked on the web about how to replace doors, and figured it was probably something I could do, but we use this door several times a day, and it would really be better to make sure it was done right. I first checked with Lowe's and Home Depot to see what sorts of doors were available. Home Depot had a nice one -- a steel exterior with a small window. Doors and frames come in several sizes, so I needed the right sizes to get the right door.

I had been real pleased with the work that Dillo Construction did on rebuilding the gable on the back of the house, so I contacted them. They agreed to do the work to install the door. $600.00

I ordered the door from Home Depot, on 7 Dec 2008, for $284.21. It was delivered on 18 Dec 2008. It's a white steel door with a "fan" shaped window at the top, with hinges and frame. The replacement process mainly consists of taking off the old trim around the door, removing the door and frame, putting in the new door and frame and putting on trim.

So one problem was the trim. The old trim may not fit or may be damaged in removal, so I needed to have new trim available. The trim in the house is not standard, so I had to have some more trim made. BMC West Millwork can do that, so I had them run 100 linear feet of trim. That should give me enough for any future projects. This was $526.10. I took in a piece of the existing trim, and they made more in a red oak.

The next problem was the hardware. It would have been possible to take the door knob off the old door and put it on the new door, but instead, we got a new door knob, switching to a nickel finish with a lever door knob. I put that on myself. $48.40 from Home Depot, 23 Dec 2008.

The result is very nice. I've been meaning to paint the door, but haven't gotten around to it.

Sidewalk replacement

2008-12-17T15:20:00.000-08:00

December 2008

We have a sidewalk from the front of the house to the street out front. This was put in at the same time as the concrete porch and the driveway. Over time, however, the tree by the curb apparently put roots out under the sidewalk and lifted it up. It was an inch or two higher than the curb. This seemed to me to be a safety issue and for several years now I've been meaning to take out the old sidewalk and put in a new one.

The sidewalk is actually 3 or 4 sections -- broken up by 1x2 pieces of wood. The wood lets the concrete expand in the summer without breaking. So I only have to replace the one section that goes to the curb.

The first problem is to remove the old sidewalk. I used my jackhammer to break it up into 8 pieces, roughly square, each about 2 feet by 2 feet. These are just small enough to be manageable by me so I could move them out of the way. I eventually posted them on Craig's list and offered them as concrete pads, suitable for making a walkway. I got several responses, and a guy came and took them away, saying he was going to put a path in his backyard with them.

Next I dug down to bedrock and took everything out. Mostly it was the sand and gravel that they had put under the sidewalk, but once I was under that, there was native dirt and then rock. I dug out everything where the old sidewalk was, plus a little more to leave room for the new framing, going all the way to bedrock. In this area, that's only about a foot.

Next, I put in framing to pour a concrete wall under the edge of where the sidewalk will be, next to the tree. The idea is to create a barrier to prevent it from sending roots under the sidewalk again. I used masonite boards to frame the wall and then a couple of bags of Quikcrete cement to fill it in and make the wall. I only did this on the one side -- next to the tree.

I filled the excavation back in with rock and cement pieces and sand and gravel that I had been accumulating for this sort of project. I used a pile of decomposed granite on top, and watered it all down to try to get it to fill the area. The idea here is to (a) get rid of debris that I've dug up, and (b) make the contents of this area unlikely to support anything growing (like tree roots).

To do a good job on the actual pouring, I asked Dillo Construction to send out a couple of guys to do the final pour. The rest of the sidewalk is a "pebble finish", and they matched it very well. $520.00

To customize it a bit, after it was all poured, I threw a handful of some blue rocks we had on the top. Just sort of randomly tossed and then pushed down into the top of the concrete. Once it set, the top layer of concrete is washed off to create the pebble finish, and these blue rocks are then part of the pebble finish. It adds a nice touch, in my opinion. A minor distinguishing feature.

Excavating the Front Flower Beds

2008-07-07T15:09:00.000-07:00

May to July 2008

The initial landscaping put in a stone edging around the front of the house to create two landscaping beds. But things didn't seem to grow very well in these beds. I suspected it was the result of poor soil. So I decided to excavate these beds, down to bedrock and then fill in with much better dirt.

First I dug out the bed next to the garage. I was able to dig down to bedrock (about 2 feet) in most of the bed -- digging around the crape myrtle which seems to be doing well.

I rebuilt the sprinkler system in this area, and brought in better dirt. Then Linda planted a mixture of Lamb's Ear and Ferns, with hardwood mulch.

Now we turned our attention to the other bed in the front, in front of the bedroom. This had been landscaped with liriope, an ornamental grass. But the deer liked to eat the liriope, so it never managed to grow very tall; it was normally chewed down to the ground.

So we have two options -- just dig it up and start over, or transplant the liriope, to someplace where it would have a chance to survive. If we wanted to keep it from the deer, it should be behind the fence. And the area just around the corner, on the side of the house by the air conditioner, which we had partially dug up to put in the French drain, had nothing really growing.

Transplanting the liriope on the one side of the fence was easy, since this ground had been dug up for the French drain.

But the other side, next to the house had not been dug up before, so we needed to excavate it.

and then we could fill it in with better dirt and transplant to it. Trying to learn from the work done on the other side of the house when we moved the monkey grass, we built up this soil quite a bit, so it could settle and we would not go below "level".

This worked out well, as the liriope has grown and seems happy on this side. The other side, however, almost all the plants died. Either too much shade or not enough water.

With the liriope out of the way, we could get back to excavating in the front, keeping back from the Nandina in front of the bedroom window and the Mountain Laurel at the end.

And again, we put back better dirt, and covered it with hardwood mulch. Linda says she will eventually put in Lamb's Ear and ferns, but it's too hot now (July).

The French Drain, Part 2

2008-01-05T17:19:00.000-08:00

February 2007 to January 2008

Back in 2003, we put in a French drain to get rid of water from the front and side of the house, allowing it to drain to the back yard. But the French drain just stopped in a hole in the back yard. That clearly wasn't a final solution -- it just solved the water problem. We had to, at the least, continue the drain down the back yard until it could be terminated in a reasonable way.

So we started to dig again. We continued to dig along side the fence, down the back yard, from where the pipes ended towards the end of the lot.

We continued to dig.

As we continued, the rocks, which had been very level, and just 8 inches or so below the ground, began to become upeven and broken into more irregular surfaces.

Using the jackhammer and pry bar, we got down below this layer until we had a trench that was about 2 feet deep. We continued it until we got to the narrowest spot of the yard near the fence, where the large planter area we call the Jungle narrowed the yard to just 8 feet or so. There we excavated everything down to bed rock. Using cement, cement blocks and and rocks, we constructed a pit, roughly 8 feet square, by a foot or two deep. We extended the drainage pipes, enclosing them in rocks and landscape cloth as before, so that they emptied into this pit. The rock for this cost $307.37 from Custom Stone Supply in November 2007.

Then we filled the pit with rock. The rock is loose fill, so there is plenty of room for the water from the drainage pipes. And in the worst case, the pit can just fill up with water and then overflow, running down the hill.

To make it look attractive, we filled it with rock, but made the top layer of rock, Mexican Beach Pebbles, fairly large, bluish rounded rocks.

The main cost of all this was the Mexican Beach Pebbles which are fairly expensive. The two loads of them were $575.16 and $204.75 from Austin Custom Stone in December 2007 and January 2008.

Rebuilding the Back Gable

2007-12-21T09:04:00.000-08:00

December 2007

While working in the backyard, I noticed that the back gable on the house was not what I would have wanted. The original construction was masonry (stone) for the first floor, but all the gables are a stained rough cedar. When we had the loft room remodelled, I had the gable over that room removed and rebuilt with windows and stone exterior.

So in comparing the gable for the loft room with the gable at the back of the house, I wanted to replace the wood gable with a stone gable.

I contracted with Dillo Construction for this. The contract was signed on 26 November 2007, and they started work shortly after that. The cost was $5120,
with half down, half on completion. Dylan was my main contact. They did a really good job.

First they took off the existing wood gable, exposing the insulation in the attic.

They framed a new exterior wall, and covered that with Tyvek, then put the new stone exterior on.

This took two or three days and was done by 22 Dec 2007.

The stone and mortar should age over time to be less noticeably lighter in color.

Can I grow Olive trees?

2007-02-20T07:42:00.000-08:00

20 February 2007

With global warming, the climate should get warmer and dryer, more like the Mediterranean. That might mean that we could grow plants from that region. Specifically, maybe we can grow olives.

I ordered two olive plants over the internet from www.growquest.com. Two Sevillano olive trees. Just small ones. $77.38. They should be okay if we can get them thru the winters. The winters here are still getting below freezing, and that should be okay once the tree is established. For the first three years, I've been covering them whenever it threatened to be below freezing.

One of the trees died, but the other is still doing okay.

Now, January 2011, I have bought two new ones. We were driving thru California and the signs for Corning said it was the olive capital. I asked at the Olive Pit if they sold olive trees and she directed me down the street to Martin's Gardens, 530 Solano Street, where I bought two 1-gallon Manzanillo trees ($7.95 each). I will keep them in their containers until Spring, and then find a place to plant them.

A Sidewalk around the Back Deck

2006-12-06T16:35:00.000-08:00

Sept to Dec 2006

Once the back deck was replaced, and the area under it excavated and then stoned in, we wanted to put a stone sidewalk, or walkway around it. Our layout that showed the planters also shows how the flagstone walkway goes.

The work for this was relatively straightforward. First we have to remove any dirt and grass from this area.

This leaves us with rock, sometimes all the way down to bedrock.

Now we put a concrete wall down all the way to bedrock, and top it with a layer of limestone blocks, to give it a "natural" appearance. I started to do this, but it was clear that I don't have the skill to do it right, so we paid Lupe $1200 to do it.

Now we fill all the area which will be under the sidewalk with rock and sand and concrete to fill the space.

Then we smooth it all off with sand and put flagstone rocks on it.

The flagstone rocks are Oklahoma Thin from Austin Custom Stone. They also provided the sand and decomposed Granite that went under the flagstones, for a total cost of $895.04.

Guadalupe Zarate did the work again, for $3000. Again, an excellent job, level and stable.

This same work was necessary all along the sidewalk, including over by the iris planter.

Along this stretch, we had to move and redesign how the lawn sprinkler system was laid out.

Solar Panels on the Roof

2006-09-08T06:59:00.000-07:00

Working in the back yard one day, I looked at the roof of our house . There was no shade on it. The sun was just beating down on it. And I thought, this would be a perfect spot for a solar system. We have a 3000 square foot one-story house, facing North, with the longest axis going East/West. So we have a large roof facing South in the back of the house, between a chimney on one end and a skylight on the other.

The City of Austin provides a lot of help to home owners with their utility bills, both water and electricity. One insert in our utility bill mentioned "Solar Energy for Your Home", a meeting at an elementary school. It was a short presentation followed by a question/answer session.

Austin Energy is the electrical department for the City of Austin. It has a rebate program to encourage the installation and use of solar systems. The rebate program will pay up to 75% of a system, up to $12,000 (at $4 per watt with a 3KW system).

A solar system produces electricity from the sun. But at what cost? And how much would we need? The system promoted by the City is a "grid-tie" system. We are still on the normal power grid, using power provided by the City. When the PV system works, it produces power. If we are using more than the system provides, we get the difference from the City. If it produces more than we need, the extra (above what we can use) goes back to the City.

With the City's program, we have "net-metering". We pay for the net amount of electricity we use from the City. That means that the City will buy the electricity we provide, at the same rate that they would charge us, at least as long as we don't produce a total amount which is greater than we use.

This is about the best arrangement we could hope for. We don't need to store the power we generate and don't need. We just give it to the City, and later, at night, we can have it back. The meter runs forward, backwards, forward, and so on, and we just pay for the net amount that we use: the amount the City delivers to us minus the amount we give back to them.

To look at the economics of the purchase, I looked back at the last 12 months of electrical usage.

Month	KWatts Used	Cost
May 2005	715	$61.55
June 2005	1014	$93.77
July 2005	1447	$140.44
Aug 2005	1249	$119.10
Sept 2005	1305	$125.13
Oct 2005	903	$81.81
Nov 2005	573	$44.91
Dec 2005	634	$50.39
Jan 2005	750	$60.78
Feb 2005	605	$47.78
Mar 2005	586	$46.09
Apr 2005	674	$53.96

12 months	10,455	$925.71
Average month	871	$77.14

A 3KW system will produce 4050 KWh per year, or 337 KWh a month -- about half our minimum monthly usage. This would be a savings of $30 a month. If our system costs $21K, and the City pays $13K, and we get a $2K tax credit, we end up paying $6K. At $30 a month, this is 200 months, or 16 years to get it back. Without interest. Assuming power costs stay the same.

But we expect power costs to go up. And installing and using the system should help create demand and a market for these systems. And more demand should mean more supply, which will help bring costs down. It's a good thing to do and the economics aren't too bad (as long as someone else is paying 2/3 the cost!)

The first step was getting the City out for an inspection and approval for the rebate program. They want to make sure that the system will work. You need to own your house. There has to be a place to put the solar panels, facing South, that is not shaded. They filled in a form and then approved us with no problem.

The rebate program requires that the system be installed by an installer registered with Austin Energy. There were 8 companies on the list at the time that we started to work on it. I sent e-mails to each company, saying I had been approved by the City for the rebate program, attaching a photo of our house and asking for a proposed 3kW system.

Two companies did not respond. Two companies said they were so busy they didn't want any more work ("Unfortunately our installation crew is booked out for the next several months."). That left 4 contractors. Each of these came out and looked at the house, took measurements, and sent me a proposal. This process took about a month.

	Panel Manufacturer	Configuration	Inverter	Total Watts	Cost
1.	Kyocera	24 panels x 130 W	Xantrex GT3.0	3120 Watts	$19,500
2.	BP 170	18 panels x 170 W	Xantrex GT3.0	3060 Watts	$19,887
3.	Isofoton	21 panels x 150 W	PV Powered PVP2800-XV	3150 Watts	$23,356
4.	Sharp	16 panels x 208 W	Fronius	3328 Watts	$21,983

As you can see, each bid had a different panel manufacturer and configuration. The sizes of the panels is quite different. The costs also vary.

So, we went with Proposal 1, which was Armadillo Solar. Armadillo computed that the City of Austin rebate program would pay $11,793.60, leaving a balance for us of $7,706.40. We accepted this contract on 26 June. By 6 July, the City had approved the rebate application, and notified Armadillo. On 14 July, we paid Armadillo our part, as a deposit. At that point, they ordered the panels and inverter.

The materials arrived in late August, and the installation was done 23 to 25 August. Everything seemed to go smoothly. An inspection by the City was scheduled for 10:00 AM on 5 Sept, and by 8 Sept we had our new meters and were operational.

The solar panels went on the roof, and the controls on the side of the house.

The power from the solar panels is in Direct Current (DC). It comes into the panels from the left, in the metal pipe. The first box is a cut-off that allows the panel to be turned off. Next, the black box, is the inverter, that converts the DC power (about 180 volts) to 240 volts AC to match what the house uses. Then there is another cut-off switch. After the cut-off switch is a meter which measures how much solar power is produced. From that meter, it goes into my electrical box, so it could be used by the house, or if there is an excess over what we need, it goes out thru our standard electric meter, but running the meter backwards.

Metal Stairs to Attic

2006-04-08T08:29:00.000-07:00

After all the usage for remodelling the attic, the wooden pull-down stairs that the builder installed was really showing the wear and tear. So I replaced them with a new set of pull-down stairs. Lowe's had a metal unit ($132.12), which seemed like it would last much longer.

We removed the old wooden unit, and installed the new metal stairs. Notice that the legs are separately adjustable, so I have a short one and a longer one to match the garage floor.

Replacing the Patio Door

2005-12-28T09:41:00.000-08:00

The Patio Door is a sliding door from the Living Room out to the Back Porch. It seemed to be a fairly standard unit when it was installed by the Builder (1986). When the house was broken into (1992), they pried the door open. The lock was a simple cast-iron piece that just broke. It only cost a couple of bucks to repair the lock.

So when the door started to not slide easily, I figured it was time to upgrade to a much nicer door. From the advertising I see, Andersen and Pella would be the main choices. Home Depot carries Andersen, and those doors looked very nice. Pella had an office on Burnet, and they also had very nice doors. We went with Pella. They could do the whole job -- removing the old door and installing the new one. We got a triple-pane glass, wood door, with Argon-Filled Low-E glass, Satin nickel hardware and duets between the glass. $3620.29. The contract was signed 11 July 2005; it was installed on 23 August.

This Pella door was so well built that it introduced a problem. When we let the dog out in the back yard,
we couldn't hear it bark at the door to be let back in! To fix this, we got a baby monitor and put it outside the door. When the dog barked, the baby monitor would pick it up and transmit it to the inside of the house.

But, incredibly, despite all the thought and work that went into the door, I found the locking mechanism so badly designed that it made the door unusable. In our home environment, it is a disaster waiting to happen. The basic design of the lock is flawed. All doors have 2 basic independent attributes: they are either (a) open or (b) closed, and they are either (1) locked or (2) unlocked. In the following picture, the door is unlocked.

The Pella door's design introduces a new state: (*) primed to lock, but not locked. The locking mechanism moves the door from the (2) unlocked state to the (*) primed to lock state. The next following change from (a) open to (b) closed will also cause the door to move from (*) primed to lock to (1) locked. This violates many obvious design criteria which are necessary for any well-designed general door:

(A) There is no visual cue or clue as to what state the door is in. If the door is closed, and the locking mechanism is down, the door may be in either the (1) locked or (*) primed to be locked state. So you cannot tell whether the door in the following picture is or is not locked -- it may be locked, or it may be only primed.

(B) A (b) closed door cannot be put into a (1) locked state. The locking mechanism must put into the (*) primed state and then it must be (a) opened and then (b) closed to lock it.

(C) The exterior key cannot put the door into a locked state, unlike probably any other lock in general use.

This design means two undesirable common situations will frequently occur:

1. A person will approach the closed door, and put the locking mechanism down and then leave, thinking the door is locked. In fact, it is not locked, but only (*) primed. This creates a security risk -- the house is unlocked although it looks locked.

2. A person will open the door. Since a locked door will not open, they will then go thru the door, closing it behind them. But since the door may be in the (*) primed state, closing the door will then lock the door, locking them out. This happened to us twice in the first week.

As I said, this is a disaster waiting to happen. This is a door is unlike doors that most people will have encountered. Children, guests, visitors. It is unreasonable to expect these people to be taught how to use the door before they use it, nor is it reasonable to expect that they will remember the peculiarities of this design.
Unlocked doors that look locked (and should be), doors that lock behind you, and doors that are not locked when you want them to be, and then lock when you don't want them to and not well designed.

This locking design is apparently used on all the high end sliding doors -- the Architect Series and the Designer Series -- from Pella, and it was beyond their ability to replace it with just a simple lock.

So we had Pella come back and take the door out.

We replaced it with an Andersen door. Basically the same, but only double paned glass (not triple paned) and so without the built-in duet blinds. $1597.68 on 19 November 2005. It was installed on 28 December 2005. $400.

Astoundingly, even the Andersen door did not have a simple lock. The Andersen door has a hook type latch and if the door was closed, there was insufficient clearance for it to swing and latch. So to lock a closed door, you had to first open the door a bit and then latch it closed. But the Andersen people were just bad builders, not bad designers, so taking a file to the latch, I was able to file it down so that it cleared. Now we can lock a closed door without having to open it. I really do not understand how these two major door manufacturers can be so clueless in what is an acceptable sliding door.

But finally, we have a nice sliding door. I put two coats of polyurethane on the wood trim.

Under the Back Deck

2005-12-27T15:42:00.000-08:00

June to December 2005

When the back deck was replaced, it was also enlarged. The deck is level to the house. Since the ground slopes from the front of the house to the back (from North to South), the deck is 2 feet or so above the ground at the house to some 4 feet at the farthest point from the house. The builder had cleared off the area under the deck, put down landscape cloth and put pebbles on top of it. This keeps things from growing under the deck.

Since the new deck extends out further from the house, something needs to be done under the new part of the deck. One approach would be to just throw some landscape cloth over it and put more pebbles on it, but much of this area was a mixture of dirt and rock.

Rather than just cover it up, I decided to dig it all out, down to bed rock (which is just another two to three feet down. This took months, and involved both removing the dirt and rock, carefully, to avoid disturbing the supports for the deck, and then replacing the deck supports. When the deck was extended, they just dug down a little, poured a concrete pad, and put the deck support on that concrete pad. The result was that the deck support was on a concrete pad which was generally on dirt and rock. Dirt and rock that I was removing.

To keep the deck in place, I used a number of steel pipe jacks to hold the deck on both sides of a support while the rock and dirt under the support was removed and a new concrete support pour which went all the way down to bedrock.

Otherwise, the process was mainly just the work of digging out all the dirt and rock under the back deck.

Once all the dirt and rock was removed, I went in and built a retaining wall under the edge of the back deck to bring it back up to ground level. Behind the retaining wall, we put down landscape cloth and pebbles, to match what the builder had done under the original deck.

Now we wanted something that was beyond my amateur capabilities. We wanted to brick up the space under the back deck and create planters. The smaller planter would be for my irises, and the larger, two level planter for Linda's herbs.

Notice the area under the deck near Linda's herb planters. When we were excavating this area, it went quite deep, almost deep enough to stand up in. Rather than just filling that in, we put up a stone wall to hold back the pebbles further in (from the original builder), and left it an open space -- what we call "the dungeon".

To do this work, we called someone who had done stone work for Linda before, Guadalupe Zarate. He found someone to do the work for $4400, mostly using the rocks that we dug out from under the deck. They did an excellent job.

Hot Water Heater

2004-10-17T09:34:00.000-07:00

March 2004

The hot water heaters that were installed when the house was built were getting old. We were beginning to experience not enough hot water for showers after Lauren took her shower and then Linda and then me. So the idea was to stay ahead of an actual problem and change out the hot water heaters to avoid a problem later. There are two hot water heaters -- one in the garage for the kitchen, washer/dryer and garage and one in the hallway for the bathrooms.

There are a couple of steps to this:

1. Find a new hot water heater.
2. Switch out the old one with the new one.
3. Haul off the old ones.

There aren't that many different hot water heaters. I found six or so to consider. I'm looking for two 50-gallon gas hot water heaters. I can check locally at stores and on-line.

I checked locally at Lowes, Home Depot, Sears. Online at State, Rheem, and Maytag. Looking at warranty (8 to 12 year), BTUs (40K), Energy Factor (.58 to .64), recovery (40.4 to 44.9 gals/hour). The best of the bunch seemed to me to be the GE unit from Home Depot. It was slightly more expensive than the Whirlpool unit at Lowe's, but had a higher Energy Factor (.62).

The next problem was step 2 -- how to actually do the switch. Looking at the way the old units were installed, it became clear to me that I couldn't do this myself. I can so some plumbing, but I don't sweat pipes; I just don't have any experience or training in doing so. So I would need to get a plumber. That changed the whole problem of getting the hot water heaters.

Most plumbers wanted to do the whole thing -- provide the hot water heaters and do the work. Buying the hot water heaters from Home Depot would be about 400 each, or 800 total. Plumbers wanted much more for the hot water heaters and then the installation too. Sears wanted $1700 for the two. Custom Plumbing quoted $1275 (each) for the hot water heaters. And almost all of them were for the State brand of gas water heater, but not the better version (Premier) but for the Standard.

Eventually, I went with Fox Service Company. They would do just the installation.

So, on 18 March 2004, I rented a truck from Home Depot ($20.90) and bought two 50-gallon GE Hot Water Heaters ($904.13) and brought them home. On the 19th, Fox came out and installed them ($765.00). There was one "minor" problem -- we apparently had two 40-gallon heaters before, so it was a bit of a tight fit, but they got it done just fine.

Or it seemed that it was fine. There was one minor problem that didn't show up for another 7 months. In October, I opened the heating closet and found that the hot water heater was sitting in a pool of water. There is a pan under the hot water heater, so that if it leaks, the leak is contained. The pan then needs to drain, and Fox had connected the drain for the water heater to the drain for the air conditioner, so it didn't overflow.

Of course the unit was still under warranty, so I spent the next couple of days on the phone trying to get this hot water tank replaced. This was not easy. I notice the problem at 12:30 AM Friday 8 October and called at 7:30 AM to report it. I was told that "Someone will respond within one business day", but by 5:30 no one had responded. For days, I got the run-around. Since it was the weekend, everything was time and a half. By Monday, I was told "We are really backed up on our warranty work; maybe Thursday. Maybe."

With lots of calls, I was able to get Sully to come out on Tuesday 12 October. I had previously gone to Home Depot, rented a truck and got a replacement (40-gallon) hot water heater. In two hours, the work was done. ($170.00). Then I had to rent another truck and take the leaking hot water heater back to Home Depot to get credit for the replacement unit I bought.

In retrospect, it would have been much easier if either (a) I learned how to install the hot water heater myself, so that I could do the whole job, or (b) I had the plumber do the whole job. Even with a warranty for the unit, we were without hot water for 3 or 4 days, and it took a lot of coordination to get it done.

And it probably wasn't necessary. While there was water all around the hot water tank, in the pan, and the rust suggested the hot water heater had been sitting in water for a long time, there was the suggestion that the water came not from the hot water heater, but from the A/C system. Remember how Fox had tied the hot water heater pan drain into the A/C drain? The suggestion was made that the water from the A/C system was going down its drain and then into the hot water heater pan. To prevent that, the last plumber cut the connection and sealed it, so the hot water heater has no drain. I got some battery operated alarms that are
supposed to warn of water in the pan.

Remodelling the Back Bathroom

2004-06-29T08:06:00.000-07:00

Lauren wants to move into the back bedroom, and Linda took an interest in remodelling the bathroom and bedroom before she does. Linda worked with some people at Materials Marketing which sells lots of different types of stone tile and pieces. They laid out a design for using their stone work to tile the sink counter top, the floor, and the bathtub/shower areas of the bath.

The material for all this was $1983.08. We then contracted with Fox Tile to take out the old tile and install all the new stone tile. This was $2000.

The installation was not as good as I would have preferred. The tile was supposed to go all the way to the ceiling, but they stopped about 8 inches from the top.

And once the tile was in place, we replaced all the fixtures in the room.

The toilet was replaced by an American Standard Champion. This is a higher toilet than normal (they call it "Right Height"), an elongated bowl, in a "Linen" color. $477.38 from Home Depot.

The tub/shower fixtures were American Standard 8630 in Nickel Satin finish $415.50 from Home Depot. I needed help from Fox Services to install the tub/shower fixtures. $85.00

The sink fixtures were "Iris", again in a Nickel Satin finish $402.00 from Home Depot.

The light fixture was from Texas Light, $162.55.

The towel rods were from Restoration Hardware, their Chatham line, again in Satin Nickel. $132.07.

The builder had installed a ceiling heater, but no vent fan, so I took out the ceiling heater and put in a Broan Model 683C Deluxe Fan. This required installing a vent in the exterior gable wall and running a vent duct thru the attic.

And finally, we painted the walls and ceiling. The ceiling is a Premium Plus Interior Eggshell paint, a pastel base with "Restful" tint. The walls are a green Behr paint.

And once the bathroom was done, we repainted the back bedroom. We removed the original "popcorn" ceiling, and textured it to match the walls. $550.00. Then I sanded the wood floors and put a coat of polyurethane on them.

A New Roof

2004-04-21T19:00:00.000-07:00

It was time to get a new roof. We had had one leak which we patched, but now we had another leak, this time in the garage. We could have patched that one too, but at some point we would just need to put on a new roof.

We got four estimates. Each estimate involved talking to a roofing company. They would come out and look over the roof, and give options on what kind of new roofing material to put on. The original roof, from when the house was built, has a 50 year warranty. Now, 18 years later, it needed to be replaced. And, of course neither the original installer (the builder) nor the company that produced the shingles were still around. But if we could get another 20 years out of this roof, we probably would not be here to need to re-roof again.

Each estimate covered the same basic job. Take off the old roof and putting down new felt underneath it, new flashing, and the new roof. 30-year warranty shingles. We also asked about a metal roof. A metal roof should be long lasting.

Company A bid 7278 for the shingle roof, but didn't do metal roofs.

Company B bid 7696 for the shingle, and 21,687 for a metal roof.

Company C bid 8912 for the shingle, and 18,900 for a metal roof.

Company D bid 7292 for the shingle, and 24,292 for a metal roof.

We liked the idea of a metal roof, but for the price difference, it just didn't make sense. We could re-roof with regular asphalt shingles 3 times for the price of one metal roof. Even supposing that it would last 3 times (or more) longer, we don't expect to be in the house that long.

So we went with Company D -- Aztec Roofing and Siding. Once that was decided, there were various details to contend with. We went with a 30-year GAF Timberline Cedar Blend shingle. They knew that we had a ridge vent along the top of the house, and would have to consider that.

At the same time, however, they took out the wind turbine vents and covered those holes. I had been reading that the wind turbines are both not helpful and can be problematic. They may be better than nothing, but a ridge vent combined with soffit openings will provide a smooth flow of air from the soffit openings to the ridge vent. The wind turbines cause turbulence in that flow, and reduce the cooling effect.

At the same time, there were a couple of panels of plywood roof decking under the shingles that needed to be replaced -- these were in the location of the leak. I asked them to use a replacement plywood with a radiant barrier attached to the underside. Radiant barriers are supposed to help keep the heat down in the attic and thus prevent the heat from building up and being transmitted into the house. So we have a patchwork of roof decking -- most is normal plywood, but we have 4 sheets of radiant barrier.

The result was a total cost of $7390.42.

The company did a good job. They tore off the old roof and dropped it into the back of a truck parked on the driveway. Then they replaced the roof decking that needed it, put down the new felt, and then the new shingles. It took all day -- they were cleaning up by flashlight after sundown, but they got it all done in one day. Since they were working so late, they missed some of the clean up items -- I found a number of shingles and nails the next day in the light. But it was adequate.

In fact, it suggested an additional income possibility for them. They probably did the standard "magnet" sweep of the yard. They have a strong magnet on a pole and push it or wave it around to pick up nails. Only works on iron and steel nails, of course, and only if you cover the entire area close enough to the ground for the magnet to work. If you really wanted to do a good job, you probably would want to use one of those metal detectors that some people use at the beach to find coins and watches and such. If you could rent one for a day, and use it you might get a much better clean-up job. For more time, of course, and so it would be an extra-charge item -- the cost of renting the detector and the time of the person that operated it.