The Great Wall - Day 2

3 Hours.

4 Pallets.

176 Trips.

600 Stones.

7500 Pounds.

By. Hand.

*flex*

They look a lot bigger than they did on the magazine. Also a lot heavier.

Yesterday we received the delivery of the stones to build the Great Wall with. Helpfully they were delivered right into our driveway. That meant 7500 pounds of stones needed to be moved, by hand, before we could park our cars again. No rest for the weary, home from work and onto manual labor!

Tried to contact this group for help but I couldn't find their number in the yellow pages.

Why by hand you ask? Well because I needed to get the stones down the house, then down a 2 foot drop from another retaining wall, then over to another pallet near the Great Wall. I could have used a wheelbarrow but that would have involved filling the barrow, moving it 20 feet, emptying it, moving the barrow down the terrace, refilling it, moving it 10 feet, emptying it. That seemed like more work at the time, so I opted for 176 trips back and forth with between 2-10 stones in my arms.

Halfway through pallet #2 I started rethinking a lot of the life choices I've made that got me here.

The exciting thing about these stones is that they, like I keep telling the wee one, are pretty much big boy Legos. They are all different sizes, but the dimensions add up so that you can just stack them in different directions and get a nifty design. I got some of your large rectangles, your small rectangles, your flat rectangles, and also some of your traditional square type rocks. Not sure what quarry they found with these magical beasts, but nature is amazing.

I've been training for this project as well. Play more video games kids, they prep you for life.

All in all, I did not accomplish much. An entire day of the project, well only 3 hours, spent entirely on moving the supplies. Moving them a grand total of about 10-15 meters. On top of that I ache. Not like a great workout type of ache, or when your high school sweetheart breaks your heart type of ache. The type of ache where sleeping hurts. Driving to work hurt. Even my hands hurt typing this. All that pain and suffering just so that I can have the stones closer when I have to build the wall. Pain and suffering and it didn't even lead to dark side Force powers. :( Had that happened, moving the rocks would have been a ton easier.

I'm no structural engineer, but that looks safe enough to me.

Assuming the forecast is incorrect and it doesn't rain for the next few days, this wall is going up. Of course if, for once, they got it correct... I'm fairly confident that rain combined with 7500 extra pounds of weight on the terrace are going to topple over lawn into the neighbors. It will be the fastest land grab in history.

- The Porter -

The Great Wall - Day 1

Warm weather and birds chirping. That can only mean that Spring has sprung! I guess it can't only mean that one thing, because it also means that it is time to get back to Porterhouse Projects^TM! We took the winter off mostly because it was flipping cold and we were buried under 8 feet of snow for a good 2 months. Now that it has melted we are back in action. The first project of the year, replacing the old rotted retaining wall in the back yard!

Even the Wee One's fake plastic lawnmower is overcome with this job.

This was not my first choice of project for the year but really one that was forced on me due to planning. We need to redo the upstairs bathroom and tile the front entry and dining area. Before I do that we need to replace the temporary jacks with permanent supports in the basement so that new tile doesn't crack due to shifting. Need to hire a dumpster to clean out all the crap in the basement before we can navigate it easily to replace those posts. Have to pull up the old retaining wall first so that we can throw the rail ties away in the rented dumpster. Have to wait for the snow to melt before we... and so on. With the amount of work travel that I'm doing, I have to get a jump on these projects now if I want to finish them this year. I mean, I can't always be in Ireland.

Lies, I totally could be there all the time.

I try to put a paragraph in between each set of pictures. It helps with the balance of the post. However I didn't do anything in between this and the last set of pictures... Ummm... Worky worky, I went to Ireland again. I didn't do any projects all winter. Purple monkey dishwasher.

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That should be good.

I tried to contact the owner, they appear good at digging and could help me out.

Alternately Mother Nature is more than capable, she just doesn't like to work on a fast schedule.

Aside from the fact that most of the ties are hollow with rot, housing the carpenter ant hives that provide our yearly swarm and who knows what else, last fall something(one?) dug underneath one of the stairs. Pretty sure it was the dead rat that I found inside one of the ties but I wasn't taking any chances. The hole looks larger than a rat though...Maybe the dreaded Rat King.

If only he was as graceful in death as I chucked him over the fence into the neighbors yard.

The (only) nice thing about rotted wood is that it makes the demo a lot easier. I was able to get the first course of ties up fairly quickly. They just kind of fell over like a barbarian who comes out of his battlerage to learn that he has lost all his blood, they gave up their final sigh and fell to the earth. Well they fell after I picked them up from the earth and put them on the pile with their dead brethren.

Ahh my good friend tetanus, we meet again.

Pictures are worth 1000 words. All of those words are 'rot'.

It was the ones buried a bit that gave me the trouble. All old and stuck in their ways. First, these ties are old hard wood. The rotted bits had turned to soil, but the non-rotted parts were hard as steel. Chopping with an axe barely made a dent in it. However, I hacked away because I bought an axe and I was damn well going to use it. After not chopping them in half though, 8 feet of waterlogged rail ties are very heavy to move. They also had grown roots somehow and were holding onto the earth as though saying 'I don't want to go', before not regenerating and being heaved onto a pile.

I'm a lumberjack and that's ok.

There actually is a log in there, I'm not just chopping dirt.

Once the majority of the ties were up I dug a nice trench where the new wall is going to go. The lawn slopes slightly to the side, so I will need to make up for that by, well I have no idea but I'll figure it out. Dirt will play a major role I'm sure. I also tied a string to make it look like I was planning, but it didn't help.

We are (mostly) ready to begin the wall transplant Doctor.

Overall it was a good start to a project. I have 4 pallets of stones being delivered sometime this week, so the building will begin soon. Until then the wee one is passing the time by digging up the piles of dirt and putting them back in the hole that I am trying to dig out and the poor dog can't make it across the canyon. Also it is supposed to rain soon, so I'm sure the whole yard is going to wash away by the time I'm ready to start building. #OhGood 

However we had Chinese food that night and my fortune cookie sums it up the best:

No it didn't, Mr. Fortune Cookie Translator. No it didn't.

- The Porter -




P.S.

The little Porter helping out, when not refilling the hole I was digging.

Plumbing 101

It is a strange fate we should suffer so much fear and doubt… over so small a thing. Such a little thing.

Vacations come in all shapes and sizes. Vacations from work, from responsibility, from work, from certain foods, etc. I had decided to take a vacation from projects for a while to deal with the new Wee One. Yes, that is right. There are 2 now. I told the house that we just needed some time to get adjusted to having the new baby before I could pay more attention to it. But just like most older children when the new one comes home, they pee all over the floor in protest.

4 days after coming home from the hospital with our new bundle of joy, I went to the basement to check on some mouse traps that I set to see if we have any freeloaders living with us. Nothing so far, which is a good sign. However the bad sign was the drip drip dripping that I heard coming from the waste pipe near the sewer line. Upon further investigation I found the source. Not a standard crack from age but a crack because whomever installed this thing decided to use a piece of pipe that they had already started to cut. Yes. Because they started a cut in the wrong spot and decided to still use that segment of pipe, we had a leak. Instead of having plenty of pipe wall to deal with standard corrosion, there was a thin wall of copper keeping the water in. Laziness and ineptitude caused this.

Now yes, the hole is tiny and I could have just sealed it up. But....

Now the old and the new shall become one

As mentioned in other posts, the previous owners loved duct tape. I can see getting confused and using it on ducts... but plumbing? Since this was already a mess and that huge old drum trap was always getting clogged, I decided to just replace the entire line. Also the plumbing isn't vented so I could add some air intake valves while I'm at it. Always best to do it the right way even it it requires more effort that patching. That means ripping out everything from the kitchen and bathroom sinks on down.

Now I haven't done plumbing before. The closest I have come to plumbing is buying a new garden hose. This is a waste pipe though, hopefully no pressurized contents, so I figured it was a great place to start. It really shouldn't be that hard. Now of course I did practice, tested some (1) pipe connections, ran through a simulator a few times to get myself prepped. I've got this.

Once I got the high score I knew I was ready

So I started. This is one of those projects that, like most, I was unsure of at the start and well into the middle. And near the end. Once started though, it needed to be finished. The wife was not prepared to lose access to the kitchen and bathroom sinks indefinitely. Something about needing clean dishes and whatnot.

The demo is the easiest though. All I needed to do was remove some pipes. So remove pipes I did, starting with the duct taped one and then moving onto the fun of cutting through the old metal pipes. What I was not prepared for was the smell. The duct tape joint had a nice collection of filth which had matured well with age.

Who needs proper couplings when you have duct tape?

The smell was tremendous. Only to be topped by the fresh sewer line smell once I cut through that monstrous drum trap. At this point I knew I had to work quickly because I now had an open line at the main sewer pipe and two sinks out of order. I also didn't want that open sewer line to stay open. I've seen Ninja Turtles (not the new one, that one sucks), I know what comes out of sewers. 

Something tells me not all sewers are so well maintained and have inns

With all the pipes removed it really was just putting the new PVC together. I had purchased enough straight pieces and differently angled joints that we just needed to figure out which ones went where. Much like an artist saying that just need to remove the parts of the stone that aren't part of the sculpture, I needed to know which pieces of PVC 'belonged'.

My entire rationalization of doing this project was that I can put together a puzzle and this is pretty much the same. Yes you have to prime and glue the pieces together so you need to do it perfectly, but Perfect is my middle name. 

Lies. Its Ronald.

So I set out all the pieces and dry fit them to make sure it would all work. In the pic above you can see an air intake valve. Neither sink was vented properly which meant lots of noise coming from the drain when water goes down. Also the sewer stink that I was mentioning before, that has a tendency to make an appearance in non-vented sinks. Repairs and improvements all in one! The rest of the afternoon was spent doing a giant white jig saw puzzle.

Doesn't get much easier than this

This project was a lot more measuring and cutting than normal. We really needed this to work correctly so I changed my method of eyeballing and praying. In the end, it actually worked out. I was shocked. The pieces mostly lined up. It only took a little muscle at the end to get the final pipes connected. With that I ran upstairs, turned on all the water and then sat. I waited and waited but no water came out of the pipes. I even checked the next two days and the water is still draining properly. We have even been able to use the garbage disposal since that drum trap isn't there. Now I just need to replace the leaky sink and the downstairs plumbing is all set, until I find the next problem....

Leveled up to master plumber. Koopa, look out.

- The Porter -

Let there be Heat! The absence of Heat shall be called Cold!

It took a week and a day but it is finished. We now have 2 zones of electronically cleaned, humidity controlled hot and cold air coursing through the veins of our house. Fairly good timing too since we have had a few chilly evenings where the Wee One woke up looking a little ice blockish. It was only when I had to chisel him out of the bed that I began to worry.

Bask in the glory of this 100,000 BTU behemoth

What a week it was. My favorite part was when they started ripping out all the old ducting. None of the pictures really convey the message of how poorly designed this duct work was. Firstly it was low, because in a 6 foot high basement we don't need to worry about conserving head space. The second part was that is ran everywhere. Every. Where. All the wheres had pipes. The best part is that the pipes ran directly through the walking corridor instead of against the wall, so you always had to hunch over to get anywhere. 

Artists rendition of whomever installed this originally

Once the crew had fully removed everything I had a brief moment where my basement wasn't horrible. It had space and was brightly lit. The air smelled cleaner and even the massive amounts of termite damage that was uncovered couldn't detract from the glory. This moment ended quickly however as they did have to put in new ducts. There was a slight difference though. They hung them out of the way.... They ran ducts near the edge of the basement or up between floor joists. They had an intelligence to it almost as if they looked at the entire basement, made a plan to effectively utilize space, and executed it. Clearly planning a project is an invention of the past few years otherwise I'm sure the people who installed this monstrosity would have tried it.

One full sized trunk dedicated to one vent..... Efficiency.

Shiny veins and arteries carrying the lifeair of the house

My motto is, if it is worth doing it is worth doing correctly. It is also worth getting overly frustrated with yourself as you try to do things correctly but constantly battle a very distracted mind that would rather play video games and drink beer than do work. Honestly I'm amazed I ever can get out of my own way enough to be productive. Imagine this scenario. You are trying to do a puzzle but each time you pick up a piece there is a random checklist of 5 things that you need to look at and think about before you can place the piece. Also each of the items in the checklist have 10 sub-items that are remotely related to be investigated. And you are thirsty. That is what its like being trapped inside this brain.

And all the while this is going on in there too

I mentioned cold in the title of this post and was intending on talking about 'doing it right and adding air conditioning' in the last paragraph but it kinda got away from me. Also the cat is out of the bag. We have central cooling now too. Why go through all the hassle of adding multiple zones and air cleaning and whatnot if you aren't going to put in cooling as well. I'm also sick of hauling the window units out every year and risking dropping them out the window onto someone walking no the sidewalk Looney Toons style. There are stories of bats nesting in them during the summer too and causing quite the scare when you go to move their new house. I have enough pests to deal with.

Luckily it only looks like a rocket but sounds like the soft whir of air passing over exchange coils

This was my first time working with a contractor too. I was definitely worried too, unknown guys in my house while I'm not there, cutting holes in the house, critiquing the huge collection of left over scrap wood in the basement. They were amazing though! Incredibly polite, hard working and honest. They busted a few things, I'm not going to lie. They broke the valve for the water line to the fridge, they broke a mirror that the wife got 5 years ago and has made me drag around forever claiming she would frame it and hang it up someday. One of them even put a hole in the ceiling in the babies room. Right in the ceiling. They patched it all up though. Except the mirror. They get the bad luck, not me. Although I carted that thing around for 5 years.... so maybe I already have the bad luck.

It was a good thing the guy had square shaped arms or the hole might have been harder to patch

So there it is. We now have a 100% brand new, fully insulated, properly balanced and efficiently installed HVAC system in the house. Something I could never have done myself. They even came back and fixed the water line to the fridge so that it works better than it did before. If you need cooling or heating work done I would recommend giving Cooling Unlimited a call. I would tell you to speak to my guy but he left half way through. Pretty sure I caused him to leave with my thousands of emails back and forth. On top of this all, since it is done correctly, I didn't have to resort to my backup plan for heating the house this winter!

Plan B.

- The Porter -

The Agony of De-Heat

I may or may not have sampled the local wares. Purely for scientific research. Several times. Each night.

So I may have traveled to Ireland for a bit which prevented me from doing any home improvement. You know. Work stuff. Now I'm back though and we have started anew, this time with the heating system. I'm not too proud to admit when I need help and in this case there is no amount of DIY I am able to do to get this heating system done correctly. I'd just as soon light a fire and hope for the best.

We have a team from a great HVAC company, Cooling Unlimited, in this week redoing our entire heating system. Not just updating, but a complete rip out and install. It is very important for this to happen for two reasons:

1) The furnace won't turn on.

2) There is no safe heat on the second floor.

With another Wee One on the way within the next few weeks we wanted to make sure that we had quality heat in our house. Since it is all forced hot air, we wanted quality air as well. No point in breathing 50 years worth of dust and dog hair being cycled through a furnace that is held together by rust and duct tape.

I'm sure I could have just fixed it myself

Duct tape. Duct work. Makes sense to me.

As they are going to be here the entire week working on everything, I figured I would give a few small updates instead of one massive post, because that would not accurately capture the scope of what is happening here. We are taking a poorly installed heating system and ripping the entire thing out for a new, properly sized one that is efficiently designed. This goes back to my promise to this house. 

I will not cover up mistakes. I will never patch something improperly done. I will never route new work around unneeded pipes. I will rip anything out that is bad and build it from scratch the right way.

Which is what we are doing with this heating system. Bye bye duct work that is more duct tape than plenum. So long 100 meters of unnecessary gas pipe. Sayonara closet in the nursery.. Wait what?

Baby clothes are tiny anyway

Yes, because there is no heat on the second floor we had two choices. Run pipes up from the basement or add a second furnace into the attic to handle the second floor. 

Pro Tip: Two furnaces will cost twice as much as one furnace.

So we had to compromise and run the duct work. That cost us half of a closet downstairs and all of the closet in the nursery. Luckily I am use to one project spawning various little demon projects that continue to plague my life. Like those stupid slimes in every RPG ever. You kill it and then two more slimes appear. At best you hope that the two slimes are smaller than the original. Even then they usually group back up into a big slime if you aren't quick.

Slay the project with my +5 hammer drill

I'd better put a new frame on that closet before it gets out of hand.

With day 1 completed we have a host of new vents in the second floor. Those vents will eventually deliver electronically cleaned, perfectly humidified cool or hot air. Right now all they are delivering is a draft from the attic and copious amounts of blown-in insulation. Also bugs. Lots more bugs.

The wife is concerned about rodents getting into the bedroom now. I accidentally said that if rodents are in the attic already they would have had no issue getting into the bedroom before and most likely would head right for the kitchen through the walls. Now I need to buy traps for 'various sized rodents'....

I'm thinking bear traps in the attic should do

The last great update is that we no longer have a maze of gas pipes! The lengths of both unused and improperly connected gas lines have been completely removed! That isn't to say that we just have a basement full of leaking gas now, but a fancy flexible hose gas pipe that is, *gasp*, installed to be as out of the way as possible!!!

This guy got paid by the foot of installed pipe

This guy got paid to do it right

Children, this is why we do things correctly with current technology. Flexible pipe is flexible.

Hopefully the rest of the week goes ok. Only one worker fell through the ceiling in the poor nursery so far, I would like to keep it that way. There are too many holes in this house already for the rodents to come through.

- The Porter -