First half of concrete wall

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

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.


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More Radiant Barrier

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.