Category Archives: Projects

2014/08/15 (F) On The Level

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I got dressed this morning for physical work, but ended up doing very little.  I worked at my desk most of the morning, including working through the first chapter of the Intro to Linux course on edX.  I came up from the basement to have lunch at 12:30 PM after which I moved my car out of the pull-through driveway.  I then started the bus and, with Linda’s assistance, backed it out of the pull-through driveway, drove it the short distance to our straight driveway (which ties into the other end of the pull-through driveway), pulled it up onto the concrete driveway as far as it could go, and parked it.  The concrete driveway runs uphill from the road to the garage and, not knowing how long it might be there, I lowered the front end and raised the back end; not enough to level it but enough to make it better.  Linda chocked the drive tires while I hooked up the electrical shore-power.  The front bay had gotten water in it from the recent rains so we opened all of the bays to let them air out while Linda soaked up as much water as she could with a couple of old towels.

Spreading 21AA road gravel to fix the driveway.

Spreading 21AA road gravel to fix the driveway.

I got out our 8′ step ladder and pole saw/lopper to prune some large (1 – 2 inch) dead branches that were hanging over the pull-through driveway where the rear end of the bus normally sits.  I no sooner started this work when Phil from Precision Grading showed up right on time with his dump truck, tracked front-loader, and rolling compactor attachment to repair the damage done to the pull-through driveway by the recent landscaping work.

Phil off-loaded the front-loader from the trailer and then disconnected the trailer from the dump truck.  He had a small load of 21AA road gravel (with lots of fines) that he dumped in two different spots in the pull-through driveway.  He then put the truck back in the street and set up his laser level to see just what he needed to do.  He used the front loader to move the gravel around and distribute it evenly and finished by back blading it with the bucket to level it.

Rolling and compacting the driveway.

Rolling and compacting the driveway.

Once he had the gravel the way he wanted it, he removed the bucket and attached the vibrating roller/compactor.  He went over the driveway several times, always making his final pass going backwards while pulling the roller to smooth out the tracks created by the machine’s drive treads.  The roller/compactor worked the fines down into the base and by the time he was done the driveway looked and felt tight; even better than last year when Phil did not yet have this attachment.  The machine also shook the entire house, especially the rear deck which is mostly supported by tall 6×6 and 4×4 posts.  He indicated that we did not need to wait for rain, or anything else, before putting the bus back in its spot, so after he left that is what we did.

But before Phil left, he used his laser level to check the grade in the back.  Although it does not appear to the naked eye to drop very much in the first 70 feet, the laser level indicated that there was a steady down slope over that distance with a total drop of over 1 foot.  He checked all the way to the edge of the cattails marsh, at which point the ground was down 4-5 feet from the deck.  The surface of the neighbor’s pond looks to be at least two feet lower from there.

The compacting roller really makes a difference.

The compacting roller really makes a difference.

There are several implications to this.  For one, it means the surface of the pond is well below our basement slab (6 – 7 feet) and at least 2 feet below the bottom of the footings for our house, so it is probably not the source of the water that runs into our sump.  It also means there is adequate grade to allow surface water to run off once the grass grows in (although it would be better if there was more grade than there currently is in the first 50 feet).  Equally important, the grade is more than adequate for a very effective French drain should we decide to have Phil pull up the existing drain lines and replace them.  Finally, having a hole dug at least 8 feet deep for the ham radio tower base should not pose a problem as the starting elevation is at least 6 feet above the basement slab.

With regards to the tower base, Phil suggested that I have the rebar cage, mounting bolts, and alignment structure built ahead of time and ready to go.  He could dig the hole first thing in the morning with his mini-excavator (up to 8’ deep) and figured it would only take an hour at most.  The assembled rebar could be positioned, plumbed, and secured in an hour or so, and the concrete could be delivered and poured in the late morning.  He indicated that spreading the work out over more time than that, especially letting the hole sit overnight, was not a good idea

Close up of the compacting roller attachment. This thing shook the whole house!

Close up of the compacting roller attachment. This thing shook the whole house!

We discussed how to get the concrete into the hole given its location about 40 feet northeast of the northeast corner of the house.  Our two options appear to be the little dump carts or a pumper.  The carts would have to drive up the east side of the house between the house and the septic tanks, but Phil thought that would be OK as long as they put down plywood to drive on.  He said a pumper truck would be very expensive but that a separate pump is available that can be towed to the job site.  With that equipment the concrete mixer truck would simply unload the concrete into the pumper, which would then pump it to the hole.  Both the truck and the pumper would be in the east end of our pull-through driveway.  Phil suggested that I call Carl Russell in Byron, Michigan as he is a good concrete guy and probably has a concrete pump.

After Phil left we reversed our earlier steps and moved the bus back into the pull-through driveway.  It rolled right up onto the level pad area and did not leave any noticeable tire tracks.  Nice.  We hooked up the “50 Amp” shorepower cable, turned off the chassis batteries, checked that all of the battery chargers were working, and shut/locked everything.

While Phil was working, Linda went to the Howell Library to return children’s books and came back with a card for the Howell Melon Festival.  The Festival started today and runs through Sunday.  She wanted to go walk around so we skipped dinner and headed out around 5 PM.  At the first turn in our road we encountered two workers from Roese Construction.  They were working on installing the natural gas main line down the street and said another crew would be coming along behind them in 1 – 2 weeks doing the branch runs up to the meters on the houses.

The Howell Melon Festival was just getting started when we got there but parking was already at a premium.  We parked a few blocks away in an empty church parking lot.  Some of the smaller side streets were already blocked off but Grand River Avenue and Michigan Avenue were both still open to traffic.  They will be closed tomorrow and Sunday and filled with vendor booths.

The weather was perfect and all of the downtown restaurants were very busy with lots of outside seating.  In the 16 months we have lived in the new house we have never really visited most of the downtown Howell merchants.  We went into Country Squire, a business that sells fireplace logs and inserts as well as outdoor cooking grills.  They had a couple of natural gas fireplace logs that were 99%+ efficient and did not require the flue to be open.  We thought they were a bit pricey but they were actually capable of heating a room.  We don’t use our existing propane logs because they are mostly decorative and require the flue damper to be open, which just wastes fuel and money.  The Country Squire also had a couple of natural gas grills that would mount to our deck and attach to our existing quick disconnect.

We walked through the food vendor area but did not see anything that interested us.  After walking past the starting gate for the Howell Melon Run we ended up at Uptown Coffee, on the northeast corner of Grand River and Main, where we had some brew and Sabra hummus with pretzel chips.  We started back towards our car and paused at the Old Courthouse long enough to hear the first number by the band.  They sounded good and not too loud.  We had our folding camp chairs in the car but decided to pass on the concert.

We stopped at Walmart on the way home to buy a microwave popcorn popper bowl and stock up on flavors of ICE brand sparkling flavored water.  Meijer’s sells a few flavors but Walmart has the broadest selection, including my two favorites (pineapple-coconut and blueberry-pomegranate).  Our final stop was at Lowe’s for a 100-pack of bright orange marker flags.  I will use these to mark the powerline that runs under the driveway to feed the RV outlet, the propane line to the house, the drain pipe from the corner of the house into the first septic tank, and the drain pipe that connects the outlet of the second septic tank to the beginning of the drain field.

It was a long day but a good one.  We watched another episode of Doc Martin and then called it a night.

 

2014/08/13 (W) Bad Times

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Linda had a rough night last night.  The tooth on which she just got a new crown two weeks ago started throbbing and even Tylenol did not do much to dull the pain.  She finally got some sleep early this morning and slept in while I had toast with jam and coffee for breakfast.  She called the dentist when she finally got up and they said they could see her at 10:30 AM.  She tried drinking some coffee but the hot liquid immediately aggregated her bad tooth.

Linda has been following a story in the news about Ferguson, the town in Missouri where we grew up.  There was an incident there over the weekend in which a cop ended up shooting an 18-year-old African-American male.  There were limited witnesses, so the truth about what happened is obscure at best.  The town, a northern suburb of St. Louis, is now experiencing “riots” and looting.

It is difficult for me to picture what is happening.  Although Linda’s oldest brother still lives in Ferguson we have not been back there in years.  This is the kind of situation that “happens to other people in other places” not in the Ferguson of my memory from the 1950’s and 60’s.

Darryll and Alec (DCM Heating &Cooling) showed up just after 9 AM and Linda left for the dentist at 9:15 AM.  The stormy weather of the last two days cleared out overnight replaced by cool northwest breezes, abundant sunshine, and blue skies.  When the weather in Michigan is nice it is really nice.  I took a few minutes to get the trash to the curb, made sure Darryll was all set, and then retreated to my desk to work on the membership and financial records for our FMCA Freethinkers associate chapter, of which I am the current vice-president and secretary.

I got a call from Linda around 11:15 AM letting me know she had a 2:15 PM appointment with an endodontist down the street from our dentist.  She was going to go to Fairlane Mall to kill some time but since she did not get much sleep last night I suggested she go to the endodontist’s office and sleep in their waiting room.  Given her discomfort and sensitivity to hot liquids she will likely come home today with a new root canal procedure having been done.

Darryll and Alec finished the 2″ iron pipe installation, connected an air pressure gauge, and pressurized the pipe to 12 psi to check for leaks.  The natural gas pressure in the line will only be ~4 in-WC (inches of water column).  1 PSI = ~27.67 in-WC, so 4 in-WC us is approximately 1/7 PSI, a relatively low pressure.  Still, there cannot be any leaks in the piping connections.

With the pipe done for now they turned their attention to hanging the Reznor garage heater.  To support the unit Darryll installed two U-channels in the attic spanning the top side of the bottom cord of three trusses.  He determined the location of the threaded support rods from the garage ceiling side using a cardboard template and drilled the holes up into the attic.  He and Alec then assembled everything with Darryll doing the attic work.  The Reznor is not that heavy, but he prefers to hang the unit when possible rather than screw it into something.

To position the unit they set it on top of one of our 6′ tall plastic shelving units and blocked it up another six inches with scrap wood.  (We used the same technique to install the pull-down attic ladder a couple of weeks ago as described in a previous post.)  The unit is 12″ high and they set it 6″ below the ceiling near the center of the rear (north) wall.  That location will optimize getting heat to all parts of the garage and put the unit right where Darryll needed it to connect the exhaust flue pipe using the existing flue that was originally used for the wood-burning stove.

Linda usually fixes our meals, but I used to do a lot of the cooking during “tax season” when she was working ridiculously long hours as a C.P.A.  Lucky for me we had chickpea salad in the refrigerator and I remembered how to make a sandwich.  A few almonds and some of this morning’s coffee (Teeko’s Seattle Blend half-caff) made for a tasty, quick, and easy lunch.  I checked the pressure on Darryll’s gauge and it had dropped quite a bit, so there was a leak (or leaks) somewhere that he will have to find and tighten.  That’s unfortunate given the size of this pipe and the number of connections, but “it’s all part of the job” as the saying goes.

I was hopeful that Phil from Precision Grading might come fix our pull-through driveway today, but as of 1 PM I had not seen or heard from him.  There’s still a chance we could see him later today, but it was a long shot at best based on the premise that with all the rain on Monday and Tuesday he might not be able to work anywhere else today.

Linda called around 1:45 PM to let me know the endodontist was able to see her at 12:15 PM.  They did some tests to confirm it was the nerve in the suspect tooth and then did the root canal procedure.  Apparently sensitivity to heat and a lack of sensitivity to cold is indicative of a nerve gone bad.  They gave her an initial dose of antibiotics and some pain killers (Motrin) and sent her on her way with prescriptions for more of the same.

Darryll and Alec wrapped up for the day around 2:15 PM and walked me through what they had done and what was left to do.  While I was eating, talking, and working they had run the gas pipe through the back wall of the garage and installed the flue pipe for both furnaces.  Darryll needed a few more parts to finish the job and needed to get home to deal with a flooded basement situation from the recent rains.  He indicated they should be done by the end of next week, at least with everything they can do until the gas line gets run to the house and hooked up to meter.  The timing may turn out to be tighter than expected.  When Linda turned onto our street she observed that Roese Construction had started running gas line down our road and appeared to be hooking up houses as they went, but that turned out not be the case.

I was questioning Darryll about the exhaust flue for the Reznor garage furnace and discovered that it is not a sealed combustion unit like the one we had at the other house.  He assured me it was approved for use in garages and that he has installed a lot of them over the years, but would double check to make sure.  He can return this one if needed, but said the sealed unit is more expensive.  It would also require completely different fresh air and exhaust ducting that would have to go through the back wall of the garage.  I suspect we will stick with the one that is already installed.

Darryll sprayed every iron pipe connection with soapy water and the only leak he found was the cap they put on the end of the run this morning.  Apparently they did not tighten it fully when they installed it.  He snugged it down and had Alec re-pressurized the pipe to 12 PSI but did not recheck for leaks.  (Hypothetically, if the leak at the end of the pipe was big enough other leaks might not show up anywhere else until that one was fixed.)  If there are no other leaks then the pressure should stay at 12 PSI indefinitely; certainly until they come back on Monday or Tuesday.

For dinner Linda made a nice green salad and a pepper seitan dish served over white rice; simple but delicious.  I checked the pressure in the black iron pipe after dinner, when it was cooler and the sun had dropped lower in the western sky, and it was down to 11 PSI.  That seemed like a lot of pressure loss to me, but the Ideal Gas Law (PV=nRT) says that for a fixed volume (V) the pressure (P) and temperature (T) are directly proportional (by the factor nR).  We know from experience that the pressure in an RV tire changes a little with changes in the ambient air temperature even when sitting still and quite a bit when the tire heats up from driving.  If all the tire pressures are set to the same value first thing in the morning and one side of the RV is facing south on a sunny day the pressures in the tires on the sunny side will be measurably higher than the shady side at mid-afternoon.  Of course there is a lot of air in our bus tires since they run at 100 PSI, more or less.  Most of the black iron pipe is not exposed to direct sun for most of the day so tomorrow I may re-pressurize the pipe at 10 PSI and record the pressure and temperature every 30 minutes until 2 or 3 PM to see how it varies.  Or not.

Phil (Precision Grading) called back this evening and said he could take care of fixing the driveway on Friday afternoon for a very reasonable price.  Sold.  That means we will not be going to the Clio rally on Friday for the 1 PM roundtable discussion.  So be it.  We will probably drive up on Saturday after our ham radio breakfast.  While Phil is here we are going to shoot the grade in the back with his laser level if he has time and see what we really have.  He and I agree that just eyeballing it things do not look quite right.

It’s obvious to me after the heavy rains on Monday and Tuesday that the two plastic drain pipes running out into the back yard should have had a third drain tile line put in the trench with them (perforated with an oversock) and the trench should have been filled with pea gravel to create a French drain that would remove the water flowing into that low lying area and keep it from saturating the ground.  It would also have made the pipes better able to withstand being driven over by a vehicle.  As it stands, anything heavy that drives over that area while it is moist/soft will most likely crush the pipes (again).  I’m annoyed because I did not know enough to specify this as part of the job and because Steve, for whatever reason, did not recommend it.

To fix this correctly we would need to have Phil locate the existing plastic pipe and dig it up back past the Y-connector for the two downspouts and up into the two slopes far enough that it is out of his way.  That would allow him to re-grade the entire area properly, dig a new trench starting from the edge of the lower deck, install the three drain lines, fill the trench with pea gravel, and then finish grade the slopes and valley correctly, all of which Village Landscape should have done, in my opinion, but did not.  It would also give us the opportunity to replace the corrugated plastic drain line with PVC pipe which would better withstand the weight of a vehicle once encased in pea gravel.  The rear retaining walls and front stairs/sidewalk look nice and appear to have been built correctly so we did get something for our money, most, in fact, of what we paid for, just not everything we needed.

 

2014/08/12 (T) Popcorn And A Movie

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It rained long and hard all day yesterday and into the evening past bedtime.  Today brought more rain, though not as hard and not quite as persistent.  Although we have low spots around our yard that turn into small temporary ponds when we get this kind of rain we are not in an area that is prone to flooding.  That’s because we live just south of the boundary between two watersheds–the Huron River to the south and the Shiawassee River to the north–so water tends to flow away from here, eventually.

Phil (Best Precision Grading) stopped by around 10:30 AM to look at the pull-through driveway he built for us last year.  He said it looked solid enough to drive the bus on it, but was obviously no longer level and had a low spot in front of the new front stairs.  He will need a half day and a small load of 21AA road gravel to repair the damage done by Village Landscape Development while building our front stairs and sidewalk.  The cost won’t be too bad (although it shouldn’t have cost us anything) but getting him to find the time to come do it could be a challenge.  He’s had a busy summer and suffered the same delays as other contractors who do outdoor work due to the wet spring and summer we’ve had.

He was also here to see the work Village Landscape Development had done.  He agreed that the hardscape work looked good but the grading in the rear did not look right and the tracks in the yard from the equipment had not been raked out properly.  He suggested I let the grass grow in and the ground dry out before assessing whether anything needs to be done.

He also looked at the west end of our property, which sits lower than the east end where the house is located.  The timing of his visit was good as all the low-lying areas had water standing in them, allowing him to see clearly the exact nature of the (lack of) drainage problem.  His suggestion was a “French drain.”  Basically it’s a trench that is shallow at the far/high end and gets deeper as it goes towards the place where the water needs to end up.  Plastic drain tile, the kind with perforations and a nylon “sock” covering, gets laid in the trench and then the trench is filled to grade with pea gravel.  The dirt that came out of the trench gets spread around to cover the pea gravel and blend in to the undisturbed soil on either side.

When completed, the drain would take all of the standing water plus much more out of the surrounding soil and allow it to flow to a culvert that runs to the southwest under the road just west of the culvert along the side of the road that will eventually be the entrance to our bus barn driveway.  A French drain is cheaper to build than hauling in large truck loads of top soil and re-grading that part of the yard.  We probably should have had Village Landscape make a French Drain around the two plastic drain lines they ran out into the yard from our basement walkout.  Oh well, “can’t should‘a done it.”

We had tofu hot dogs for lunch and then Linda left to meet up with Diane to see a movie (Boyhood) and then go out to dinner at Bahama Breeze.  I stayed home and worked at my computer, taking a break mid-afternoon to make popcorn.  The worst weather of the day was happening at that time, so I stayed upstairs for a while and read the new 2nd edition of The Mobile Internet Handbook that I had just downloaded this morning.  I worked until 7 PM and then stopped to have a light dinner consisting of chickpea spread on whole grain toast and half of a small watermelon.  Linda got home as I was finishing my watermelon.

In spite of AT&T switching our phone and DSL service to all new wire pairs our Internet service went out occasionally throughout the day and evening, although it usually returned quickly.  I think the sad truth is that their landline infrastructure is not as tolerant of wet weather as it should be and most of their money is going into expanding cellular service.  We had the same problem over the years at our house in Farmington Hills.

 

2014/08/11 (M) SLAARC/WordPress

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Some of the members of SLAARC are former Detroit Edison employees (now DTE Energy) and one of them (Bruce, W8RA) currently works for Intercontinental Transmission Company (ITC).  Bruce was curious what size transformer we had and said that there were likely numbers on it that I could read with a pair of binoculars.  I went out this morning to check, but the only info on the transformer can is a metal plate that is too small and illegible to read from the ground even with our fairly good binoculars.

Darryll (DCM Heating & Cooling) had not shown up or called by 10:30 AM.  His work doesn’t make a mess of our yard or house, at least it hasn’t yet, so it is less of a concern that he is not here working today than it was with the landscaping.  When he left Thursday he had a short list of parts he needed to get and perhaps could not do that until this morning.  Or he may have gotten emergency service requests, which take priority over new installations.  Still, we would like to have the new HVAC work completed in the next week or so to make sure it is done ahead of the natural gas hookup.

As part of that work I have to complete some of the electrical pieces, finish dry-walling the utility closet, and continue cleaning, repairing, and organizing the garage while we have the storage pod.  I then need to get to work on a long list of bus projects.  I also have a lot of desk/computer work to do and I prefer to do that when I know I can settle in for a long stretch.  I tend not to be in the right frame of mind for desk work when I do not know if/when contractors are going to show up.  It’s turned out to be a busy, and in some ways complicated, summer that way.  Darryll called late morning to say they would be back first thing Wednesday morning.  That information allowed me to adjust my expectations and settle in for a long day and evening at my computer.

My main focus was working on the page content for the new SLAARC WordPress website, which occupied me until dinnertime with some e-mail mixed in.  After dinner I started uploading blog posts beginning with the one for July 7th.  I decided that I would not select and upload photos for most of the posts in July and early August and instead create more extensive gallery posts for the landscaping work and the garage/HVAC project.

One of the things I have noticed in the past week is that our Internet connection seems to be faster, or at least my e-mail processes much quicker than it used to.  That could be the result of the AT&T repair on the 4th, which ended up moving us to entirely new wire pairs, or a change that AT&T made to our DSL service back on the 3rd (when it kept going off temporarily), or it could be that QTH upgraded their e-mail server system, or some combination of these.  Whatever the case, it seems to be an improvement.

Phil from Precision Grading called at noon to see if he could stop by sometime after 3 PM today.  It was raining gently at the time but when he called back a little after 3 PM the rain had finally opened up into a sustained downpour.  He had an 8 AM appointment in Hell (Michigan) and we agreed that tomorrow morning after his appointment would probably be a much better time for him to stop by.

We ordered a “cat tent” the other day and it showed up this afternoon.  We opened it and set up in the living room with the “door” tied open so the cats could explore the inside.  They were wary, but did go in briefly.  It’s kind of like a back-packing tent but all the fabric, including the floor, is mesh.  We thought the floor would be a solid material, but it’s not.  It will be OK for use on our deck at home, but seems less suitable for use on the ground when we are RVing.  We intended to use it for both so we are not sure if we are going to keep it.

For dinner Linda made a tomato-onion-mushroom ragu and served it over a three rice blend with a dark mixed greens salad on the side.  Later she served fresh strawberries with Lotus brand cookies and dark chocolate with bits of almond and sea salt.  Seriously, what’s not to like about that?

 

2014/08/07 (R) Endings And Beginnings

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I did not sleep well last night.  I was a bit worked up about the landscaping and a bit worried about the iron gas pipe installation which looked to me like it would be difficult no matter how Darryll decided to do it.  We were both awake at 5:30 AM and finally got up at 6:45 AM and had breakfast.

The landscapers arrived early, before 8 AM, and got right to work.  Steve brought three guys and got them busy right away.  Linda and I walked the site with him, but he immediately saw more problems than we did.  There was no arguing or convincing; he seemed determined to make sure it was done right and that we were happy with the end result.  He stayed and worked alongside the crew to make sure stuff got done correctly.  They finished up around 11 AM.  We took one last look at the work and paid Steve the balance of what we owed him.  He said he would check back in 2 – 3 weeks to spot seed and fertilize the new grass.

Linda took off for the post office and grocery store around 8:45 AM and I started routing and stapling the sub-panel ground conductor along the edge of the deck by the rear library doorwalls.  Darryll (DCM Heating and Cooling) showed up a little after 9 AM with his nephew, Alec, so I took the next 30 minutes to walk through the gas pipe installation options.

Darryll decided to go with the original plan of running the pipe from the southeast corner of the house down the east side, around the corner across the back of the house under the upper deck, dropping it down and going under the middle deck, across the back of the garage just below the bottom piece of siding, around the northwest corner of the garage and up the west side of the garage to its end point behind the whole house generator.  There will be a T-fitting on the garage side of the middle deck, to supply gas into the garage for the two new furnaces, and another T-fitting at the end of the run.  One branch of the end T will have a shutoff valve and cap and will be used to supply gas to the generator.  The other branch will be capped and available should we ever decide to run a gas line to the (future) bus barn.

I determined where I wanted the sub-panel ground wire to enter the basement and drilled a 5/16″ hole an inch to the right and an inch below the water faucet that comes through the west wall of the house about 16″ back from the northwest corner above the lower deck.  This allowed me to route the ground wire around an inside corner to the hole and will allow me to tuck it up under the bottom piece of siding.

I wanted to get the ground wire into the main panel but I could not turn off the main breaker as Darryll was using electric power tools and Linda was working on her computer.  The connection will have to wait until no one is using power.  Once the ground wire is tied into the main panel I will remove the bonding screw in the sub-panel.

Linda made a different kind of bean salad sandwich spread for lunch using Great Northern beans and various other yummy ingredients.  We had some grapes and green tea to go with our sandwiches.

Having run out of construction projects for the moment I decided to work at my desk for a while, but my mind was elsewhere and I just wasn’t feeling the love.  The steps at the back door of the garage were going to be in the way of the iron pipe, so I removed them.  As long as I was out there I hung around to watch Darryll and Alec get the pipe under the middle deck.  It was a challenge, as expected, but for reasons that were unseen until Darryll tried to drill holes through the end boards.

First he encountered wet wood that kept fouling his hole saw.  Then he hit a nail, which did not enhance the performance of the saw.  It also bent his extension shaft slightly which he had to stop and straighten.  He then encountered joist hangars on each end and had to bend those out of the way.  Finally able to feed the pipe through, they encountered wood sleepers and a couple of large rocks.  They managed to go over the sleepers and push the rocks out of the way and got the pipe through.  Darryll and Alec put in a long, physically demanding day and got most of the 2″ pipe installed.  Two inch iron pipe is very impressive stuff and we were very impressed with the work required to install it.

For dinner Linda made a Farro pilaf, after which we sat on our deck and enjoyed a small glass of Riesling wine to celebrate the end of the landscaping project that has had our property torn up for the last five weeks.  We are very fortunate that we became vegans and that Linda took a serious interest in learning about whole-food, plant-based recipes, ingredients, and cooking methods just as we retired.  I shudder to think what our health would be like had we continued to eat the way we did until three years ago where, even as “vegetarians,” our diet contained a lot of eggs, dairy, and seafood, and not so much fruits and vegetables.  We watched Dr. Michael Greger’s annual summary address on NutritionFacts.org and went to sleep without the worries that interfered with last night’s rest.

 

2014/08/06 (W) Arrival And Departure

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Well, almost.  We were up and dressed by 7 AM, had some of the granola that Linda made yesterday (soooo good), and got to work while it was still cool in the garage attic.  Our first task, however, was to straighten up the garage as we were expecting a shipment of HVAC equipment sometime today.  We cleared off the north wall and moved the plastic shelving unit there.  We gathered up various tools and supplies and organized them on the shelves.  Other things got put other places and eventually we had enough space for boxes in the back and pipe on the floor.

While we were working on the garage the landscaping crew showed up but not Steve.  They worked all day trying to finish up the job based on Steve’s verbal directions but they either got bad directions, did not understand what they were told, did not understand what needed to be done, or just did not care about the fine/finishing details absent Steve’s direct supervision.

Our next task was to pull a 50′ 12-2+g NM cable into the attic from the sub-panel location and across to the west side of the attic where I coiled it up and left it for now.  This cable will eventually provide a 240V/20A circuit for the new library air-conditioner condenser/compressor on the west end of the garage.  I will complete the installation of the outside disconnect and connection to the condenser once Darryll sets it in place and gives me the go-ahead.

I turned off the main breaker in the sub-panel and started pulling five NM cables into the panel box and making the connections.  I was part way into this work when a tractor-trailer showed up from Behler-Young with our HVAC equipment and parts.  (B-Y is the largest HVAC distributor in the State of Michigan.)  I helped Bill unload the iron pipe and the smaller and/or lighter boxes.  He unloaded the palleted equipment and heavy parts boxes using the lift gate and a hand truck.  It was a good thing we had cleaned and organized the garage when we did as the boxes of stuff took up the whole east half of the north wall.

By the time Bill left it was noon so we stopped working and had lunch.  After lunch I finished connecting the new circuits in the sub-panel, put the cover back on, and turned on the main breaker.  I tested the west and northwest outlets and discovered that the three duplex outlets closest to the back door had an open ground.  Hummm; I did not see that coming.

I tested all four of the outlets closest to the door and all of them had open grounds.  I went to the next pair of duplex outlets and found that the ones closest to the door also had an open ground but the other two tested correctly.  I turned off the circuit breaker for that circuit and took the cover plate off of the pair of duplex outlets closest to the door.  The outlets were grounded but there was only one cable feeding that box so the problem was upstream somewhere.

The box with one good and one bad duplex outlet was the likely spot.  I took the cover plate off and pulled the outlets out.  The incoming power went to one pair, the hot and neutral were bridged to the other pair, and a cable ran out from the second pair, but the grounds were not bridged through.  Really?  Yeah, really.  So I fixed it, turned the circuit breaker back on, tested various outlets, and everything was now OK.

I had assumed that that power from the attic went to the outlet box closest to the door and then ran around to the southwest corner of the garage but in fact it did not go to either of these first two outlet boxes.  Old houses often have strange wiring configurations.  We have one circuit breaker in the sub-panel that has a wire attached to it and the cable runs up into the attic but we have been unable to find what, if anything, it powers.  I also found a cable in the garage attic yesterday that runs through the attic above the library and disappears into the house attic but is not connected to anything on the garage end.  The cable is not energized and its location suggests that it may have been powered from the sub-panel at one time, but what it might have powered is a mystery at present.

Since the HVAC equipment arrived today as promised I figured Darryll would be here tomorrow to start on the installation.  We still had a lot of stuff in the garage that was potentially in his way so I moved most of it into our temporary storage pod.  It was 3:30 PM and I had apparently accomplished everything that needed to be done today.  That was an odd feeling but with nothing else to do, construction wise, I sat down and had a cup of tea.

Steve (Village Landscape Development) called to make sure it was OK to come by in the evening to inspect the day’s work and, hopefully, collect the final payment.  Linda and I did a walk-around and found so many little details that were unfinished or wrong that I called Steve back and suggested that coming this evening would be a waste of time as he would just have to come back tomorrow with a crew to fix/finish the job correctly.  He agreed.

No longer content to take someone’s word, we found our auto-level, elevation pole, and 100 foot tape measure.  (An auto-level is not a typical homeowner tool, but we have one, so I guess we are not typical homeowners.)  I set the auto-level up on the basement walkout deck and leveled it.  We pulled the tape straight out from the center of the deck 70 feet and took elevation measurements every five feet.  The grade for the first 45 feet was not clearly downhill like it was supposed to be.  At best it was level and rose slightly at two points.  There was an obvious high spot to the left headed up the slope, but I did not even bother taking a reading on that.  I really wanted the landscaping done before the HVAC work started but it looks like there will be at least a little overlap.  That means I will have to split my time and attention.  I spent a lot of my working life “multi-tasking” and now find it tiresome.  I prefer to focus on one thing at a time when possible.

 

2014/08/05 (T) Primary Elections

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The rain started early today with a pre-dawn thunderstorm and continued off and on the rest of the day and evening.  The area beyond the basement walkout deck is a muddy mess, but Village Landscape Development has not finished grading it.  They need it to be dry, so it may be awhile before they can finish it.

Our first construction task today was to pull electrical cable up into the garage attic for three more circuits.  I wanted to get this done early in the day while it was cool and Linda’s knee was feeling better.  I had been mulling this work over last night and realized that I had probably made an incorrect assumption about the location of the 240V/20A service for the new library air-conditioner, so I put a call in to Darryll right after breakfast.  We got a call from Karen at Bratcher Electric around 9 AM to  see if it would be OK for Mike to stop by around 11 AM to look at some electrical work we need done.  He wanted to see the job in person in order to prepare a quote.

The new cable for the outlets on the west and northwest wall was already in the garage attic but I had to crawl into the low northeast corner to reach it and get it routed in the right direction.  I then had to crawl into the same corner from a different direction to pull it to the junction box I installed last week.  I secured it with cable staples and connected it to the old cable.

Next we pulled a 14-2+g NM cable from the sub-panel to the approximate location where the garage furnace will hang from the ceiling to provide a dedicated 120/15A circuit but did not install an outlet box pending a final location from Darryll.  We then pulled another 14-2+g NM cable from the sub-panel to the north end of the new west utility closet wall.  This cable will provide a dedicated 120V/15A circuit for the new library furnace.  Again, I did not install an outlet box pending a final location from Darryll.

Darryll called back and confirmed that the new 240V/20A dedicated circuit for the new library air-conditioner had to be routed to the location of the condenser/compressor on the outside of the west wall of the garage and there had to be a weatherproof disconnect within three feet of the unit.  That meant another trip to Lowe’s, but not until much later in the day.

Mike Bratcher showed up on time and I walked him through the project.  I want to re-wire the garage sub-panel as a 100A main panel by running service entrance cable from the transfer switch in the southwest corner of the garage to the sub-panel in the northeast corner of the garage.  We may also want to run power to the bus barn if/when it gets built.  Mike suggested that they go ahead and “stub out” the barn service at the same time with an appropriate disconnect.  The plan is to have them do this work at the same time they convert the Kohler whole house generator to natural gas and do the annual maintenance.  Mike also confirmed that they can take care of the natural gas connection to the generator as long as the pipe is located near the back of the unit, has a shutoff valve, and is capped.

By the time Mike left it was after noon so we had lunch.  While we ate we ordered a dual outlet phone/ADSL filter wall plate and a few other things on our Amazon Prime account and researched candidates and proposals for the primary election.  We then went to our polling station, located about two miles from our house, and voted.

This was the first election we participated in since moving to Livingston County.  As Democrats (and liberal ones at that) in this part of Livingston County voting in the primary is an exercise.  The real contest is on the Republican ticket; whoever wins the Republican primary for any given seat will almost surely win the general election in the fall.  Still, we always exercise our right to vote and there were statewide candidates and issues.

The last cable we installed today was another 14-2+g NM to provide 120V to a junction box on the utility closet ceiling.  I mounted a round white plastic junction box approximately 8″ from the east utility closet wall in line with, and slightly in front of, the sub-panel.  I installed a plastic bare-bulb light fixture with a pull chain and 3-prong outlet to the junction box.

I did not tie any of the new circuits into the sub-panel today as we have one more circuit to pull and I want all of the cables at the panel before I cut the power and remove the cover.  We were done with electrical work for today so I turned my attention to drywall surface preparation while Linda retreated to her desk to work on tax returns.  I sanded the drywall compound as smooth as I could and wiped everything down to get rid of the dust.  I then primed all of the new and old drywall on the northeast garage wall along with the plywood platform and exposed 2×12 on the front of the base.

By the time I was done and cleaned up it was approaching 5 PM, we were both tired, and we needed to go to Lowe’s, so we decided to dine out.  We went to Lowe’s first and bought a weatherproof plastic disconnect box, a couple of watertight fittings, a 10′ length of 3/4″ plastic conduit, and a 50′ role of 12-2+g NM cable.  All of this will be used to run the new dedicated circuit for the new library air-conditioner.  We then drove to the Panera in Brighton and used one of our gift cards to have a light dinner.

We were back home a little after 7 PM.  The primer was dry so I decided to paint all of the surfaces I had primed before dinner.  While I painted Linda made a batch of her incredibly yummy granola.  We had a small glass of wine and played a few games on our iPads while the granola cooled and then turned in for the night.

 

2014/08/04 (M) Phone Problems

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My first task this morning was to sand all of the drywall compound and apply a second/finish coat to the walls I have been building/repairing in the garage.  Simple enough to describe but it took some time to do.  While the compound was drying I resumed working on electrical wiring.

Our phone went dead yesterday, or at least that’s when we noticed it was not working (no dial tone, no incoming or outgoing calls).  I got a call (on my Verizon cell phone) from Ken, the AT&T service technician, around 9 AM indicating that the phone was fixed but he was on his way to our house to verify service at the network interface box.  The phone was indeed working, but now the DSL was not.  🙁

Ken told me that he did not have a dial tone back at the distribution box and rather than diagnose why, they usually switch the customer to another wire pair.  He spent the entire morning working on the problem, making several trips between our house and the distribution box.  By the time he was done we were on different wires from our house all the way back to the switching station.  He was now getting a dial tone and an active DSL signal at our network interface box but we did not have a DSL connection at our AT&T gateway.

Ken had mentioned earlier that the phone signal requires two good wires but the DSL will run on just one.  That had raised a flag in my mind and I asked Ken if reversing the two wires might cause the problem we were seeing?  He said he had never heard of the DSL signal being polarity sensitive, but it wouldn’t affect the phone operation so he switched the wires and … it worked!  We got a momentary false alarm until we discovered that the phone cable from the DSL splitter/filter to the phone had a broken tab and would not stay plugged in.  I replaced the cable and everything was OK.

Linda was going to help me but she was on her feet a lot the last three days and her right knee was expressing its displeasure so she decided to take it easy today.  Brendan and Shawna needed to borrow the pressure washer and Linda needed a few ingredients from Whole Foods for her granola recipe, so she drove to Ann Arbor to accomplish those chores.  She stopped at Lowe’s on the way back and picked up a 50′ role of 14-2+g NM electrical cable.  Ken left around 1 PM and we had a light lunch of chickpea salad and fresh nectarines.

There are too many cables going through the wall top plate above the sub-panel in the garage for me to comfortably drill new holes to run more.  I was puzzled for a while as to what I would do, and then realized I could create openings in the ceiling (drywall) directly above the sub-panel for new wires as this area will ultimately be boxed in.  I used the Porter-Cable oscillating saw I bought a couple of weeks ago to cut a long slot for new wires.  It was the right tool for the job.  The NM cables should have fed up into the attic easily, but they didn’t.  A peak in the attic confirmed that they were running into plywood on the original garage roof.  The plywood was cut back for access purposes where the breezeway (library) roof ties in, but no more than necessary.  The sub-panel is towards the northeast corner of the garage and the original garage rafters/plywood are only about eight inches above the drywall.  I had planned to run four cables today but needed Linda’s help.  I got two of them started and then turned my attention to other things.

I had a work session of the FMCA education committee at 4 PM so I  wrapped up my construction work an hour prior to that to give me time to switch gears and get somewhat organized.  The work session was via teleconference and lasted about an hour.

We got a call around 8 PM from Darryll.  He planned to order the garage furnace, the library HVAC unit, and the 2″ iron pipe tomorrow for delivery on Wednesday and wanted to make sure that was OK.  He planned to start work on Thursday assuming the materials got delivered on Wednesday.

 

2014/08/02 (S) All Schmoo All Day

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Schmoo is one of Madeline’s nicknames.  I don’t know how much her parents still use it, but I thought it was delightfully cute the first time I heard it and I still think of her as Schmoo even though I usually call her Madeline to her face.

As I indicated in yesterday’s post, we have her all day today, overnight, and tomorrow through dinner.  Having Madeline here obviously alters our daily living patterns, which is actually nice for us.  Since she spent last night here we did not go to our usual ham radio club breakfast this morning.  It also meant that we would not get much, if any, work done on our garage project.  Linda is a very good grandmother, and has cared for Madeline by herself for up to five days/nights, so I could get some work done while she is here but I like to interact with her and do not have as many opportunities for that as Linda does.  I managed to do a load a laundry this morning, sneak in a little time to check e-mail, and download photos from Ron & Mary’s Dropbox to our Dropbox, but I did not get to start the Introduction to Linux course.  🙁

Brighton is holding its annual Art and Acoustic Music event this weekend so we decided to check it out after a delicious breakfast of oatmeal with fresh blueberries and red raspberries.  Hacker is closed at Grand River which is down to one lane in each direction for re paving, so we had to negotiate the detour for Hacker Road to Grand River Road via Bendix Road.  We were patient and we eventually got to the heart of downtown Brighton where Main Street was closed from Grand River west for a couple of blocks.  We found a public parking lot south of Main Street that we had not previously been aware of, waited for someone to pull out, and parked.  It was convenient to Hyne Street, which was about the middle of the vendor booths along Main Street.

Madeline takes a stroll at the Brighton at the AAMF.

Madeline takes a stroll at the Brighton at the AAMF.

Madeline was in and out of the stroller for over an hour and got to go for a walk along the Mill Pond where we saw Canadian Geese, Mallard ducks, white ducks, a Great Blue Heron, and Painted Turtles sunning on logs.  We found a very cute sleeveless jumper for Madeline decorated with 3-dimensional Winnie-the-Pooh characters.  It will be her “party dress” for tomorrow.

Madeline on the Brighton Mill Pond boardwalk.

Madeline on the Brighton Mill Pond boardwalk.

We were back at the house by 12:15 PM, had lunch and got Madeline down for her nap at 1 PM.  She normally naps for 2 – 2.5 hours so we used that time to work in garage.

First we finished insulating the back/north wall of the garage.  We then cut two pieces of 4′ x 8′ drywall to a length of 70″ and installed them horizontally.  We put the lower piece on first using a 2″ x 4″ stud and shims to get the bottom edge the required distance off of the floor and secured it with 1.25″ drywall screws.  We set the bottom edge of the second piece on top of the first piece and Linda held it in while I got a few drywall screws into it.  I was then able to screw it to the studs.  It was getting close to the end of Madeline’s nap so Linda got her up and dressed while I continued to work.  I taped the seams, and then applied drywall compound to the seams, screw dimples, and other blemishes on the new drywall and the section of old drywall from there to the utility closet.

I need to sand down all of the drywall compound, apply a second/finish cost, let that dry, sand it down, and then apply primer to all of the new drywall, the plywood platform, and the exposed 2×12 on the front of the base in the utility closet.  But with Schmoo here and family coming that will have to wait until Monday.

We played with Madeline until dinner time and then had a fun meal.  She’s a good eater and really enjoys mealtime.  We played some more after dinner and read books before finally getting her down for the night.  She is a persistently active and inquisitive child but is often calm in her approach to the world around her.  She is delightful and it is a joy to spend time with her.

2014/08/01 (F) Schmoo Returns

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(Note:  I have posted two photo galleries dated August 1, 2014, one for the front sidewalk and stairs project and one for the rear retaining walls and drain lines project.)

We took a break from personal construction projects today to get ready for another 2-night sleepover by our grand-daughter Madeline.  Her folks (our son and daughter-in-law) needed to do some painting on their rental house over the weekend and the most efficient use of their time was for Brendan to bring Madeline to our house late this morning.  That allowed him to return to Ann Arbor to work on their front porch this afternoon and will let them get an early start on Saturday morning and work as late as they want/need to.  It will also give them the option to work on Sunday morning if needed before coming to our house for dinner and to retrieve their daughter.  Brendan and Shawna both have birthdays in early August, and Brendan’s happens to be on Sunday.  Our daughter (Meghan) and her husband (Chris) will join the celebration gathering.

The landscapers were here early for what they hoped would be their last day on this job.  Linda left early to do some grocery shopping and was back well before Brendan and Madeline arrived or I had to leave for my dermatology appointment.  I got back on my computer for the first time since Monday, checked e-mails, off-loaded photographs from our digital SLR, and installed updates on four WordPress websites.

Today was also the first day to log in to edX and start the free Introduction to Linux course, but I did not have time to deal with that.  The course is self-paced and should take 40 – 60 hours to complete.  I would like to spend two hours each day on this and have it completed by September 1st.  The timing has turned out not to be that good, but I am under no obligation to take/finish the course; it’s simply a free opportunity that I would like to take advantage of while it is available.

I left for my doctor’s appointment with time to spare and ended up needing it.  There is a lot of road and utility construction going on in our area and I did not have a good way out.  I still made it on time, but not by much.  I did not have to wait very long to see Elizabeth, the dermatology PA.  I got a thorough looking over and a clean bill of health.

On the return trip from the clinic I stopped at Teeko’s to get some coffee.  Jeff had the Ethiopian Yirgacheffe in both regular and decaffeinated, so I got our usual 50/50 blend.  He was out of Sweet Dreams (a decaf blend) that I have him mix 50/50 with his Seattle Blend to make Sweet Seattle Dreams.  He did, however, have the Seattle Blend in decaf so I got a 50/50 regular/decaf mix.

Madeline was still napping when I got home.  Linda said she fell asleep a little later than normal so she let her sleep until 4:30 PM.  Once awake, she was go go go right through dinner until bedtime.

Steve (Village Landscape Development) worked on the front sidewalk in the morning, laying rectangular brick pavers in a herringbone pattern and then cutting it all the way around for border bricks.  He finished placing boulders on either side of the top steps by the front porch and had one of his crew mix up a small batch of concrete and place it along the two long/free edges.  Another crew member finished grading out the soil on either side of the sidewalk, spread grass seed, and covered it with straw.

Steve, Linda, and I did a walk-around, and the project has come together very nicely except for the leaking drain line(s).  Steve spent much of afternoon digging in very muddy conditions and ultimately unearthed about 30 feet of plastic drain line that was punctured or completely crushed.  He replaced what he believed was all of the damaged line, but until we put water down them we won’t really know.  They were not able to finish the grading because the clay soil was so wet that it was unworkable, so they will be back next Tuesday (or later) weather permitting.  They had to come back anyway as they needed a bit more egg rock to finish a bed that we added at the last minute.  As a result of the walk-around we added another bed of egg rock at the east end of the deck to tie in with rock under the deck, and two more downspout drain lines, all of which they will do the next time they are here.

 

 

2014/07 – Retaining Walls & Drains

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Panorama of retaining wall project drain lines (looking N from deck).

Panorama of retaining wall project drain lines (looking N from deck).

Village Landscape Development of Fenton, Michigan was at our house (off and on) for the entire month of July working on two projects.  The larger project was tearing out two stacked block retaining walls by the basement walkout and replacing them with boulder retaining walls.  This involved significant regrading of the area and the installation of drain lines for the downspouts from the roof and the sump pump.  This gallery post contains a selection of photos that show the highlights of the work from beginning to end.

2014/07 – Front Sidewalk and Stairs

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Village Landscape Development of Fenton, Michigan was at our house (off and on) for the whole month of July, 2014 working on two projects.  This gallery post has a selection of captioned photographs from the front entrance sidewalk/stairs project.

2014/07/31 (W) Wrapping Up?

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We were tired and went to bed early last night.  Naturally, that meant we were up earlier than usual this morning.  Linda made her fabulous vegan blueberry pancakes to get us fueled up for a long day of work.  The landscapers were also here reasonably early and had a very productive day.  More on that later.

Our first task this morning was installing a switch controlled dual LED floodlight fixture on the back of the garage above and to the left of the door (when viewed from the outside).  The location was determined by the construction of the rear wall of the garage.  I measured and re-measured the location of the cable hole to make sure the surface mounted junction box ended up in the center (vertically) of one of the siding boards.  I drilled a 1/2″ hole through the back (north) wall of the garage just to the right of the back door (when viewed from inside the garage) and just below the top plate.  I ran a 14-2+g (NM) cable (that I had previously prepped and left in the wall cavity) through the hole in the wall and then through the hole in the back of the junction box.  This was the part of the north wall where I had to remove concrete backer board, a burned 2×4, and singed insulation, so the studs and back side of the exterior plywood sheathing were exposed and accessible.

We moved around to the outside and I caulked the hole around the wire, put a generous band of while caulk around the hole on the back of the junction box, and a half circle of caulk around the top back edge of the box and mounted it to the outside of the house with the center knockout centered over the hole in the wall.  I installed the dual LED light fixture and put a bead of caulk around the top half of the junction box where it met the fixture.  (The heads of the cheap machine screws that now come with electrical fixtures and plates strip very easily making it difficult to get a tight fit.)  I caulked the wire hole from the inside and then dressed and secured the cable.  I turned the circuit breaker on, and checked for proper operation of the switch and light fixture.  It was all good.  I like it when that happens.

Our next task was to install three round blue plastic junction boxes for bare bulb light fixtures; two for the garage attic and one for the garage end of the library attic.  I was originally going to install a switch near the top of the fold-down ladder to control the lights and run power to it from a new ceiling light fixture in the utility closet, but we came up with a better solution.

There was a three-gang electrical box in the east wall of the garage just inside the door from the library.  It had two switches installed and the cover plate had openings for a duplex outlet in the third position, but no device installed there.  We thought this would be a better place for the switch—as there was already power to the box—if we could get a wire through the wall from the attic to the box.  The drywall is missing from the lower half of the wall so we had good access to the underside of the box.  (The drywall was removed by the previous owner to repair the frozen hot water baseboard heat pipes.)  I checked in the attic and it looked like we had a good shot at making this work.  The icing on the cake was that we could install a switch with a pilot light that is designed to fit in a duplex outlet cover plate.  Not only would it be convenient, it would provide a visible indication that the lights were on.

I did the attic work while Linda took care of the garage end of this task, passing me parts and tools as needed and helping feed NM cable. We ran 14-2+g (120V, 15A) wire from the attic through the east wall to the existing outlet box.  I pulled the cable over to the location by the library attic, mounted the box, cut the cable, unsheathed it, stripped the wires, ran it into the box, and secured it to the truss.  I repeated that process with the end of the free cable.  The plastic light fixtures I bought very conveniently feature pass-through wiring terminals so all I had to do was hook up the cables, fasten the fixture to the box, and screw in the 100 W rugged service bulb.

I repeated this process for the next box/fixture which I positioned just to the west side of garage ridge 1/4 of the way in from the front (south) wall.  Finally, I repeated most of this process for the third and final (for now) box/fixture which I positioned on the east side of the ridge 1/4 of the way in from the back (north) wall.  Somewhere in the middle of all that we stopped for lunch.

With the attic lights installed I needed to pull the wire that supplied power to the outlets in the west half of the garage out of the rear/north wall and up into the attic.  Easier said than done.  The cable was originally part of the circuit that powers the outlets in the northeast wall of the garage (and now powers the new floodlights on the back wall) but I disconnected it a week ago knowing that I wanted to feed it from a separate breaker.  The cable went through a hole in the top plate and I discovered that the bottom cord of the gable truss had been set partially covering this hole with the cable pinched under it.  I cut the cable from above and ran it into a plastic switch box.  Linda was then able to pull the tail end loose from underneath.  I will run a new cable from the sub-panel to the junction box after I get more pressing work done.

On that note I also realized today that I do not have to get the cables for the new circuits through the top plates above the sub-panel, which was going to be difficult-to-impossible.  The sub-panel is surface mounted and I already planned to box around it.  With the supply air duct coming out of the new HVAC unit and running straight out along the ceiling above the utility closet door I will have 16 inches of clear ceiling space.  The sub-panel is about four inches deep so I will have about three inches of ceiling above the panel and in front of the top plates where I can run new cable into the attic.  Brilliant!

Our last attic task for today was to disconnect two telephone wires in the wall cavity to the right of the sub-panel, pull them up into the attic, reroute them, and reconnect them.  One of them turned out to be the main phone/data line coming into the house from the AT&T box at the southwest corner of the garage.  There was a telephone wall outlet to the right of the old sub-panel that this line ran to before continuing on to the rest of the house.  The wires are very small gage, are unshielded, and the cable is draped through the attic over multiple 120 VAC cables.  I need to replace this with a single run of much better (shielded) cable when I have time.  Perhaps we will get less static on the phone and faster Internet data transfer rates.  (Nah, probably not.  It will still be an AT&T landline.)

While I started working on re-wiring the three-gang box in the east garage wall, Linda made a run to Lowe’s to get a 32′ roll of 16″ x 3.5″ (R-13) insulation and a switch with a pilot light.  I got the box rewired, we energized the circuit, and everything worked.  Yippee!

The landscapers today consisted of Steve (the owner), Spencer (his nephew), and Tommy.  Steve used the excavator to place four large boulders on the sides of the new front steps.  That was the last work to be done in front that required the excavator so he used it to back blade (level off) and compact (with the bucket) the pull-through driveway.  He was not able to return it to its existing condition but did the best he could with the equipment he has.

He took time out to use his chain saw to cut down a dead pine tree, cut it up into 4′ lengths, and carry the pieces back to his truck with the excavator.  He then used it to fill/grade a large low spot just southwest of the garage.  This was the route they used to get the excavator to the back yard.  It was also where all of the construction debris was piled until yesterday, and the excavator really tore the ground up in that area over the last four weeks.

Spencer and Tommy worked in the back hand-grading the slopes beyond the retaining walls and the area that was trenched for the drain tiles.  They worked in a layer of good topsoil, spread grass seed, and covered it with straw.

Steve plans to lay the brick pavers for the front sidewalk tomorrow and have the whole project wrapped up by the end of the day.  It looked like they were on track to accomplish that until Spencer informed us that there was apparently a leak in the drain tile somewhere in “the valley.”  Leak was an understatement; we had an area at least 8′ x 12′ that had turned into a pond.

It appeared that the drain line for the sump pump was somehow discharging its water at this point rather than it flowing all the way down to the drains at the back of the yard.   Spencer dug up some of the line coming down the slope and found several holes on the top side, but it did make sense that these were the source of the problem.  Our guess is that that line, which is not one continuous piece of drain tile, has become disconnected at the valley floor allowing all of the water to escape at that point, and/or crushed, causing the water to back up through a connector (which is only designed for water to flow one way).  Fortunately we kept the original PVC discharge extension pipe from the sump pump outlet so we temporarily disconnected the buried drain line and reconnected the extension pipe.

Whatever the cause of the leak, we are sure it will be found and fixed, we’re just not sure that will happen by the end of the day tomorrow.  I had thought about “testing” the system by using a garden hose to put a significant volume of water into each of the drain lines.  As of now, I will definitely be doing that.

Our final task was insulating a section of the rear/north wall.  We got three of the four plus cavities filled and ran out of steam.  Besides, it was dinner time.  Linda made one of her “go-to” dishes; angel hair pasta with onions, garlic, mushrooms, sun-dried tomatoes, basil, and mixed baby greens lightly sautéed in olive oil.  This is a dish she can throw together from ingredients on hand without a recipe and it is always delicious.  We had a small glass of Leelanau Cellars Summer Sunset wine while she cooked and a small glass of Meiomi Pinot Noir with the dish.  No salad and no dessert; just a great pasta dish and nice wine.  I got cleaned up and we watched the first episode of season five of Doc Martin.  As we were drifting off to sleep we thought we heard the distant howl of a coyote.

2014/07/30 (W) Winter In July

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By the time we started breakfast the landscapers were back.  Steve started to dig a trench for a drain line from the end of the lower deck and hit 2×8’s on the flat about 2-3″ below the surface, so he abandoned that work and moved the excavator around front to the trash pile.

The major construction work up in the back is nearing completion and the lads were picking up some of the smaller debris, the larger stuff having been moved around front to the trash pile yesterday.  Steve used the excavator to load some of the trash onto the trailer (normally used to move the excavator), where the crew covered and secured it.  He loaded more of it into the back of his pickup truck.  They are still having tire issues with the trailer so I charged up my 200 psi air compressor (150 psi regulated) and rolled it over so they could fill one of the tires.

Steve moved the excavator to the southeast corner of the house to dig a short (10′) shallow trench for a drain line to get water from the downspout away from the house.  I conferred with him regarding the exact location because the main propane line enters the house at that corner, the electrical service for the RV outlet runs under there, there is a tree about 12 feet southeast of that corner, and that corner is where the new natural gas meter will be installed. There will be a similar short drain line at the southwest corner of the garage, but it will be dug by hand as the main electrical service runs directly under there about 2′ below the surface.

The lads continued to work in the back placing egg rock.  They were about 1/2 cubic yard short and I asked Steve to order a full cubic yard and use the other 1/2 yard on the west end of the north edge of the lower upper deck to match what they had done at the top of the west retaining wall.  Steve gave the crew instructions on how to prep that area, add a piece of edging to define where the rock will go, and install landscape fabric.  He and I then looked at the boards he hit in the back while trenching and it turned out there were only three of them 4-6′ long and they appeared to be old construction material that had possibly been used as a step off of the lower deck.

Linda gathered up household trash and recyclables and headed off around 10:45 AM.  I finally got started on my projects for the day around 11 AM, opening the garage door so I would have light when the power was turned off at the sub-panel main breaker.  My first task was to move the new outlet I installed in the utility closet the other day.  The return air duct will be installed against that wall and would cover the current location.  When we installed the door yesterday we did not put any 2×4’s above the door and up to the ceiling.  Darryll is going to run the supply duct straight out from the furnace above the door and then angle it over against the east wall of the garage.

With the outlet relocated I cut some scrap insulation to fill the lower half of the open wall cavities and then stopped while I pondered getting a ground wire into that space.  Linda got back from running her errands about then so I decided over lunch to call Bratcher Electric to see if they could give me an idea of what it will cost to run a 100 Amp service entrance cable from the transfer switch in the southwest corner of the garage to the garage panel in the northeast corner of the garage.  (I estimated it would take 40′ of cable, but have no idea what the labor will be.)

The earliest I will be able to talk to Mike Bratcher is next Monday so I decided that I really needed to run a ground wire from the sub-panel to the main panel allowing me to disconnect the ground wires from the neutral wires in the sub-panel by removing the bonding screw in the sub-panel and giving us a code-compliant, and much safer, sub-panel until such time as it gets re-wired as a main panel.

Linda and I determined that I needed about 40′ of #10 copper wire to get from the sub-panel to the main panel.  Pondering sometimes leads to good things.  I really did not want to stop working to go get wire when I remembered that I had a length of green insulated copper wire I had used for grounding a ham radio and antenna mast at the old house.  It was coiled up on the floor in garage and when we uncoiled it we discovered it was … 40′ long!  I love it when that happens.  I checked the gage and it was #8, so it was actually larger than required for the 60A cable that feeds power from the main panel in the basement to the sub-panel in the garage.

I checked the approximate location for drilling a hole and then drilled a 1/2″ hole from the inside of the garage just above the base plate and out through the siding.  I fed the ground wire through the hole from outside the garage, pulled it up into the sub-panel, and secured it to one of the ground bars.  I dressed it and fastened it to the side of a stud and coiled up the extra outside on the lower upper deck.  I will complete the run to the main panel another day.

With the ground wire installed I was able to install the insulation I had cut earlier and secure it with our staple gun, which I had managed to locate in the tub of tools we took with us out west last summer.  With Linda’s assistance I cut and installed two pieces of drywall from an old scrap piece we had.  I then taped the seams and mudded the screw dimples.  By the time I finished it was 4 PM.  Spencer came to the garage to let me know that they would all be leaving around 4:30 PM due to a severe thunderstorm that was on course to hit our area around 5 PM.

By 4:45 PM we were hearing thunder and I decided to stop work temporarily and help Linda close up the house.  The storm came, a cold wind blew, and it rained hard, but only for a few minutes and we did not get any of the hail that was reported prior to the storm’s arrival at our location.  An hour later we had a lovely summer evening with blue skies.  Linda made roasted winter vegetables for dinner.  It’s the end of July, but we had overnight lows in the mid-40’s two nights ago.  The first six months of this year have been the coldest in 21 years, so winter vegetables were appropriate for dinner even though it is the end of July.

I had planned to do a lot of other electrical work today, but it was a full day and everything that got done was something that needed to get done.  It was also work that had to get done in the order in which it was accomplished.  My original plans were obviously too ambitious, and today’s work involved details that required time to figure out and execute.

 

2014/0729 (T) Utility Closet

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It was in the mid-40’s when we got up this morning so Linda made oatmeal with walnuts, dates, raisins, cinnamon, and a little brown sugar.  It was a hardy and satisfying breakfast on a chilly morning.  I checked in with some of the blogs I follow using Feedly on my iPad and then, as we were getting ready to work, Steve showed up with four workers (Kyle, Tommy, Spencer, and Mark).  Steve did not stay and work today but Mark operated the excavator and the guys got a lot done.  By the end of the day we were finally able to see how it was all going to come together.

Our focus today was the utility closet in the garage.  Much of what we did required two people, and we made a long day of it.  We finished framing the west wall, stood it up, got it into position, plumbed it, and secured it.  We then framed the south wall with the rough opening for the door.

The installation of the door was challenging.  All the framing was plumb in two directions but our first attempt at installing it resulted in the bottom latch side not closing by almost an inch when the top latch side was seated correctly.  Everything was plumb on both jambs, the door was level and plumb, but something was obviously wrong.

As we started to break for lunch I got a call from Darryll.  He was wondering if we could run the 2” iron gas pipe through the attic from the east end of house to the west side of the garage.  I told him I would check the access and call him back.  While he was on the phone I got clarification on the size and location of the HVAC unit and the ducts for the conditioned air supply and return.  As a result I will have to move a duplex outlet I installed the other day, run a new/longer wire up the sub-panel, put insulation into the lower half of the wall cavities, and install/finish a piece of drywall.

We spent the afternoon trying to figure out what was wrong with the door installation and fix it.  Everything was plumb and we thought everything was square.  It turned out that the two ends of the wall were out of alignment which was forcing the bottom of the door out.  (The inside angle between the west wall and the south wall was less than 90 degrees.)  Once we realized what was wrong we were able to fix it.

We had a green salad and Amy’s roasted vegetable pizza for supper at 6:30 PM.  After relaxing for a while on the deck with a glass of Leelanau Cellars Summer Sunset wine I secured the plywood platform to the base with screws and then caulked the two edges where it met the back and right side walls.

We drove to Lowe’s at 8 PM to get a box of steel cut masonry nails.  I need two or three to secure the free end of the bottom plate of the west wall.  While we were there I got a set of new blades for the Milwaukee Sawzall reciprocating saw but forgot to buy more shims.  We always like to leave a reason for a return trip to the home supply stores.

 

2014/07/28 (M) Reprieve

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I was awake early, fell back asleep, and finally got up at 7:30 AM.  By the time I had the coffee made Linda was showered, dressed, and starting to assemble breakfast.  We had barely finished eating when we heard the happy sound of landscape workers.  Steve had five young men on site to do the hand work and was here most of the morning and part of the afternoon running the excavator.  By the time they all left for the day a little before 5 PM they had made a lot of progress with the retaining wall project behind the house in spite of the muddy conditions from yesterday’s rains.  It’s amazing what can be accomplished when people and equipment show up and work all day.  If that happens the rest of the week they might actually get done by Friday.  Linda and I figure it will be Labor Day.

As planned, I resumed work on the utility closet in the garage after breakfast and a brief chat with Steve.  I cut a 48″x48″ piece of 3/4″ plywood down to 46″x40″ and did some minor trimming to get a clean fit on the base we built yesterday.  I then cut the top and bottom plates and the end studs for the west wall from 8′ long 2″x4″s.  I ran out of the 3.5″, 16d nails I needed so I drove to Lowe’s to get a 5 pound box of them.  While I was there I also picked up some primer and paintable caulk.  I assembled the outer pieces of the wall and added an additional stud to the free (south) end but did not cut/install the other three intermediate studs.

The wall is taller at the north end than the south end because the concrete garage floor drops slightly towards the north wall of the garage.  I stood the wall up to make sure it fit snugly (it did) and to force the top plate into alignment.  I was pleased to see that the free end will plumb quite well in both directions.  I will measure the other three studs tomorrow, lower the wall down to install them, and then stand the wall back up, plumb it, and secure it to the north wall, the platform base, and the ceiling.  Once that is done I will secure the plywood platform to the base using screws and caulk the edges along the north and east walls.  When the caulk has cured, hopefully later in the day, I will prime the plywood and the exposed 2″x12″ base board.

I quit working on the construction around noon, got cleaned up, put a load of laundry in the washing machine, had a bite of lunch, and withdrew to my office.  I searched through my Outlook inboxes for all of the e-mails related to today’s FMCA Education Committee meeting only to discover that the meeting was scheduled for next Monday and would be an informal work session rather than a formal meeting.  That was a lucky reprieve for me and allowed me to catch up on other e-mail and work on the roster and financial records for our FMCA Freethinkers chapter.

I had hoped to spend the evening selecting and processing a few photos and uploading a few blog posts but I ran out of time and did not get to these tasks.  We streamed last week’s episode of Endeavor on our Apple TV device and then turned in for the night.

 

2014/07/27 (N) Attic Access

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We had a long day of work today.  We were up just after 7 AM, had a light breakfast of toast, fruit juice, and coffee, read a few blog posts, and got to work.  My first task was to apply a second, light coat of drywall compound to all of the divots in the wall.

Our main morning task was the installation of the fold-down ladder for the garage attic.  It was definitely a two-person job.  Per the instructions, we installed temporary installation boards to support the assembly while we secured it in place.  The installation required one of us to be in the attic and that job fell to me.  We put the assembly on top of a plastic shelving unit to get it close to the ceiling.  Once I was in the attic with all of the tools I would need, including a headlamp, Linda slid the shelving unit so the assembly was directly under the rough opening.  It was still too far from the ceiling for me to reach from above so she placed two footstools under it.  I was then able to reach one end from above and pull it up into the opening while she lifted the other end into position from below.

We read and followed the directions carefully so we already had the pull string and T-handle installed.  That allowed Linda to move the plastic shelves out of the way, carefully open the door from below, and position the step ladder.  I dropped her the cord for the worklight and then had enough light to work comfortably.  We temporarily secured the unit with deck screws.  They were cheap screws and the heads tended to strip easily, but we got them in far enough to hold the unit in place while I installed the lag screws.

The 10 lag screws got installed through pre-drilled holes, six of which went through metal hinge plates.  The instructions said to drill through these holes into the trusses and headers, but the folding ladder hardware made that difficult, and my drill buts were all a bit short to do much.  By cutting the zip ties and partially unfolding the ladder I was able to get all 10 lag screws most of the way in with my drill.  They all had to be shimmed.  The final tightening was done with a socket and ratchet.

We took a break for lunch around 1 PM and had leftover miso soup, tofu hot dogs, and fresh apples.  I made a quick run to Lowe’s to get some additional electrical parts I needed to install lights and a light switch in the garage attic.  While I was there I also bought a baby gate for our basement stairs.  Up until now we have blocked the landing for the basement stairs with a couple of chairs when grand-daughter Madeline has come to visit.  Now that she has successfully spent the night at our house we anticipate many more such visits and wanted a more permanent solution.

The device I bought had a gate with a latch.  It was designed to be installed under tension, but the directions said it had to be anchored to the walls if used at the top of a flight of stairs.  We were not thrilled about mounting it to the walls, but we did.  The installation took about an hour to complete.

Back in the garage I found an old, unopened drywall sanding/finishing sponge.  It had a 1/4″ thick coarse pad on one side for sanding.  The regular sponge side was used to wipe off the drywall and slightly wet the areas to be sanded.  I let the sanded areas dry, wiped everything down, and applied a coat of white exterior semi-gloss to the area of the two existing walls and the ceiling that will be inside the utility closet.

The probability of rain rose steadily though the day and finally resulted in thunderstorms around 4:30 PM.  Steve said yesterday he would be here today and I tried to get him to understand that based on the forecast he needed to be here early.  He wasn’t.  He showed up with the excavator about an hour after the rains, by which point the retaining wall work site had turned to mud.

He took the excavator back there anyway and we watched him work while we had dinner, which consisted of a very nice green salad with strawberries and the rest of the Pad Thai from last night.  (Even left over it was still exceptional.)  He was moving boulders and a lot of dirt trying to get rid of the small mountain range that blocked the flow of water away from our lower deck and was spreading the dirt around in an effort to create some of the final grading.  He brought a helper with him and they had long lengths of drain pipe that I think the intended to install.  But the skies darkened, the rain started, the wind came up, and the warning sirens came on.  He shut off the machine and the two of them made a run for their truck and left.  More rain is forecast for tonight with a chance of thunderstorms, possibly severe.  The probability for rain on Tuesday is currently 60%, and stays at 40% through Wednesday.  At this juncture it appears that they won’t get much work done here this week, and their machine may be stuck here until it dries out.

After dinner Linda and I finally built the base for the platform where the library HVAC unit will be installed.  It’s a 40″ deep x 46″ wide box with center cross bracing.  It’s made of pieces of 2 x 12 on edge.  We set it in the northeast corner of the garage, leveled it with shims, and secured it to the studs in the walls with 3.5″ nails.  I had to make all of the cuts with my Rockwell 8″ circular saw as the chop saw won’t cut something that wide.  I did not cut the plywood platform as I need to install it after the new (west) wall of the utility closet is in place so I can nail through the base into the wall studs.  I will, however, cut the plywood tomorrow before the wall is built as I will be able to set it on the base and trace around it on the underside to get a perfect fit.

My goal for tomorrow is to cut the platform, build the west wall, set it in place and anchor it, and install the platform.  Linda has a 12:30 PM dentist appointment, so I will have to do most of this work by myself.  By that point I will need to get cleaned up, shift gears, and get ready for a 4 PM FMCA Education Committee work session.

 

2014/07/26 (S) Climbing Ladders

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We did not go to our usual ham radio breakfast in South Lyon today so I could get an earlier start on the construction work in the garage.  Before I even got started I got sidetracked by a small rain gutter project which led to further gutter projects.

I bought a downspout elbow yesterday and wanted to get it installed before the next rains, which are forecast for tomorrow at 20% in the early morning riding steadily to 90% by 6 PM.  The elbow is a replacement for a short straight downspout section that feeds water from the end of one gutter into a slightly lower gutter that is perpendicular to the first.  The second gutter has the main downspout at one end.  Rather than dumping water straight down into the lower gutter, the elbow will direct it towards the lower gutter drain hole and away from the house.  A picture would make this much clearer, but I did not take one.

While I was installing the elbow I noticed that both gutters had a lot of “stuff” in them and the wire mesh drain hole grates were mostly clogged.  I cleaned all of the gutters last year, although I do not remember exactly when.  I expect a certain amount of organic material to accumulate in the gutters—the house is surrounded by trees after all—but I was surprised by the amount of granular material that had washed off of the shingles.  There was a lot of granular material last year, which I assumed had taken many seasons to accumulate, and I had flushed all of it out of the gutters with a hose.

The guy who inspected the house when we bought it said the roof was “serviceable” without being much more specific.  I suspect it is approaching the end of its useful life, but is not a project we can take on this year.  We have a ranch house with a low pitched roof, probably not more than 4-in-12.  It would take me several weeks to roof it myself, but it’s something I am (still) capable of doing.  Perhaps next summer, after we build the barn.

Given the condition of these two gutters I decided to check/clean all of them.  In the process I found that the gutter on the front of the house had three mounting screws loose at the west end.  I tightened them up, completing my unplanned roof tasks for the day.

There are several interesting things about “small construction projects.”  One is that they seem small because you can conceptualize the outcome and visualize all of the major steps quickly and easily.  Another is that you assume they aren’t going to cost very much; they are, after all, small projects.  Having been educated and worked as an engineer at one point in my life I tend to design things rather than jump right into the building phase.  The design phase is where I usually get my first reality check as I start to consider all of the details of the project that I was not able to quickly and easily visualize.  The next reality check comes when I am finally ready to build, which means cutting and fastening wood, only to realize that I have many days of other tasks I must complete first.  The tricky part of construction is that stuff has to be done in a certain (correct) order.  If not, you end up having to deconstruct something and then reconstruct it, or engineer an entirely different solution which takes even longer and costs even more than what you planned to do in the first place.

So even though I worked all day I did not build the platform.  Here’s what I did instead:  removed some drywall to expose a wire that was a little too short to get the sheathing into the new sub-panel; installed an outlet box and duplex outlet using the old wire and ran a new wire to the panel; filled out the panel with circuit breakers I will eventually need for new or rewired circuits; patched holes in drywall; cut and installed two studs in the north wall to provide 16″ on center spacing for new drywall; bored holes through the new studs for an old wire; installed a switch near the rear garage door fed from the old wire; ran a new wire for a new outside light; went to Lowe’s and purchased a 36″ exterior grade door (steel), a fold-down ladder for the garage attic, an exterior LED light fixture, and a light fixture for the new utility closet; enlarged the garage attic access opening from 22.5″ x 45″ to 22.5″ x 54″; read and pondered the installation instructions for the fold-down ladder; and decided to call it a night.

Somewhere in all of that we had orange/grapefruit juice, Teeko’s Sweet Seattle Dreams coffee (a blend that Jeff does just for us) and Linda’s homemade granola for breakfast; tofu hot dogs for lunch with sweet cherries, and; vegan Pad Thai for dinner that Linda made from scratch.  The Pad Thai was a complicated dish but Linda’s efforts really paid off; it was outstanding.

By the time I showered, worked on this post, and caught up on some blogs I follow it was time for bed.  I was tired but, having exerted myself physically and mentally and accomplished tangible things, it was a good kind of tired.  I no longer climb corporate ladders.  Today I was up and down real ones.

 

2014/07/25 (F) Assessing The Situation

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We finally got a letter yesterday from Consumer’s Energy requesting payment of the $200 fee for hanging the natural gas meter.  The letter included a rough drawing showing where the meter will be located (south end of the east side of the house where the propane currently enters).  It also shows the route the gas line will take to get there from the opposite side of the street.  The drawing did not correctly show our pull-through driveway in relation to the house, so the actual path will be different.  This was also the first indication we’ve had that the main line will be run down the opposite side of the street, which we prefer over running down our side of the street.

At 9:15 AM we still did not have any landscape workers on site so I went to my office to continue working on assessment items.  No one from Village Landscape Development showed up today and we never got a phone call.  It’s a way of doing business that I simply do not understand.

I finally got around to making my annual appointment with my dermatologist only to find out he is still on medical leave.  I didn’t know he was on medical leave in the first place.  They scheduled me with someone else in the same clinic.

After lunch I had a nice chat with our financial advisor / stock broker at Stifel-Nicholas even though we just saw him three weeks ago.  We got a post card a few days ago indicating that he and his assistant were moving to a different S-N office.  He had not mentioned this when we met in person so we wanted to see what the reason was for the move, which he gladly explained.  No cause for concern on our part, which left me free to worry about other things instead.

As long as I was making phone calls I called Butch to see how things were coming along following the sale of a large portion of their business assets to a company in Nevada.  They still have a lot of loose ends to tie up and a bus conversion to finish, so they are not sitting on their hands.  When the buyers were there a week ago they loaded up as many parts and as much material as they could transport in the vehicles they had, but by Butch’s estimate it wasn’t 20% of the total.

I also had a series of TXT messages with Joe Cannarozzi, the mobile mechanic who has taken care of our bus the last four years.  Joe is relocating from Chicago, Illinois to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina and giving up the mobile aspect of his bus repair business.  Apparently his new place has a garage where he will continue to work on rigs, but they will have to come to him.  I hope that works out for him, but it leaves us having to find a mechanic closer to home or willing to travel here.

I finished writing the assessment items for the three remaining Michigan Assessment Consortium Common Assessment Development modules and got all seven sets of items e-mailed to the team.  With that task checked off, at least until I get some feedback, I was free to go to Lowe’s after dinner and pick up some of the materials I need for the HVAC projects in the garage.  There’s a better than even chance that we will not go to our ham radio club breakfast tomorrow in favor of an early start on the garage work.

 

2014/07/24 (R) Back To Work

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We were up earlier than normal.  Linda went into the bakery today and likes to be on the road ahead of the worst of the morning traffic rush.  Since she was working I figured it was a good day for me to also do some paid work (plus a couple of loads of laundry).  Earlier in the summer I agreed to write assessment items for some of the modules in the Michigan Assessment Consortium professional development series on Common Assessment Development.  The items are needed for use with the Lectora platform, which Bill Heldmyer at Wayne RESA is using to re-package the modules.  These are modules that other team members developed, so I have to spend some time with the content before I can write the items.

I did some work on this in June and then got busy with contractors and out-of-town trips.  I am still tied up with construction, contractors, and other projects but a timely completion for this work would be early August so I spent much of today working on it.  I already had one module done and hoped to finish the other six but only managed to complete three of them.  I am anxious to get back to work on the HVAC prep in the garage but I plan to continue working on the assessment items tomorrow as I would like to e-mail them to the team for feedback before the end of the day.

I have a lot going on at the moment.  I like being busy, but this is starting to feel like “work.”  I have a growing list of “must do” bus projects that I have yet to start:  1) fogged window replacement; 2) auxiliary air filter / water separator replacement; 3) Aqua-Hot expansion reservoir replacement; 4) Aqua-Hot exhaust leak repair; 5) motorized windshield shade repair; 6) finishing the installation of the ZENA power generator (for charging the house battery bank while driving), and; 7) redoing the water bay (that’s a big one).  I have an optional project to replace the rear view camera system.

Butch is building new ride height linkages for his bus and wants to build some for me as well, so that makes nine “bus projects” I would like to accomplish before the weather turns too cold to work outside.  Some of these are projects I can do with the bus in front of the house once I can move it back into its normal parking spot.  The rest are things I will work on once I get it down to Butch and Fonda’s place in Twelve Mile, Indiana, probably this September.

The FMCA education committee work is ramping up and I have three websites I am trying to launch, one of which has an August 11 target date, plus our own website/blog to maintain (as of this writing I am over two weeks behind on blog posts).  I am also supposed to be writing a “featured bus” article for Bus Conversion Magazine on Marty and Pat Caverly’s MCI MC-5B conversion “Scooby Doo & Bookworm.”  It’s a great conversion that has taken 20 + years to build and will be the cover/centerfold story when it is published.  I have 1,500 photos from Marty and the only way I will make sense of the project is to sit down with Marty, select images, and make notes.  Once I have a sense of the chronology of the work, and the images to illustrate it, I can weave the words together to tell the story.

Kyle and Spencer were here working on the landscaping for most of the day.  Steve stopped by in the morning to go over the work from yesterday and outline the work for today.  It’s coming along, albeit much more slowly than I think it should.  For a job that requires a lot of manual labor we normally only have two guys on site, sometimes three and sometimes only one.  And, sad to say, they simply do not work as hard and as persistently when Steve is not here.

Linda got home ahead of the afternoon traffic.  We had leftover potato and lentil curry and naan for dinner and both the dish and the bread were still excellent.  A few black grapes and dark, sweet cherries for desert and we were off to bed early.

 

2014/07/23 (R) My Platform

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The primary elections are just around the corner but my platform has nothing to do with politics.  My platform is a 46″ x 40″ surface 12″ above the floor in the northeast corner of the garage, or will be once I build it.  This platform will be the base for the new HVAC unit for the library and I need to have it built before the equipment gets here and Darryll shows up to install it.  Once the unit is installed I need to enclose it to isolate it from the garage to prevent explosive vapors or noxious fumes from entering the combustion chamber or fresh air circulation.  That will require the construction of two walls one of which will have an exterior grade door.

John’s chop saw, which I borrowed the other night, allows me to make more accurate cuts (clean and square) than I can with my circular saw.  In the meantime I have some work to do removing/installing a few studs in the north wall of the garage and running some new electrical wire.  I need to run 120V 15A circuits for the furnace portion of the library unit and for the ceiling mounted garage furnace and a 240V 20A circuit for the library air-conditioner.  Eventually I will have a 240V 30A outlet for our radial arm saw, which would be great for the woodworking aspects of this project, but that’s a project for another day.

Three landscapers showed up a little before 8 AM (Tommy, Matt, and Spencer).  Tommy was on the phone with Steve getting their instructions for the day and then they got to work building an additional section of the west retaining wall with medium size boulders and preparing the area under the east end of the deck for a layer of egg rock.  They took off around 9:45 AM for some unknown reason, but the sound of their truck reminded us to put the trash out at the street for pickup.  They were back in a little while, worked until noon, and took their lunch break.  By 3:30 PM they had the boulder wall built, the egg rock placed, a strip of edging set into a small trench, and small boulders placed on the eastern slope below the large boulders.  That certainly looked like progress.

Linda worked at her desk until mid-afternoon and then started working on dinner.  Although simple in presentation at the table, she put a lot of time into our meal.  She made a potato and lentil curry that was very good with deep, complex flavors, and garlic naan bread.  Both were as good as anything I have ever had at an Indian restaurant and the naan was vegan, made with unsweetened soy milk in place of dairy milk and olive oil in place of dairy butter.

I spent most of the day taking the measurements I needed to turn my mental concept for the utility closet into a set of design drawings from which I could produce a material list.  By supper time I had a good set of drawings to guide the carpentry work but was still puzzling over some electrical issues.  By the time Linda had dinner ready I was ready to set thus project aside for the night.

It was after 7 PM by the time we finished eating and cleaned up, but that left us plenty of time to sit on the deck and enjoy a cool northwest breeze and the muted light of scattered clouds.  It eventually got too cool to stay outside so I worked at my computer until bedtime.

 

2024/07/22 (T) A Quiet Day At Home

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We ran the air-conditioner all day yesterday and well into the evening.  It cooled off into the mid-upper 60’s overnight so we turned the A-C off when we got up this morning and opened up the house.

Ron and Mary were mostly packed before breakfast.  We all had some of Linda’s yummy homemade granola with fresh blueberries for breakfast and everyone agreed it was superior to any store-bought granola they had ever had.  We visited until 9 AM and then helped them load their car for the trip back to Pennsylvania after an all-to-short visit.  Still, it was nice to see them for the time they were here and they got to see our grand-daughter for the first time and chat briefly with our children.  They had a nine hour drive ahead of them, plus or minus, depending on traffic, construction zones, and number/length of stops.  The day was forecast to be sunny and very warm, with a high temperature at our house of 90 degrees F, but with no precipitation along their route.

Only one landscaper (Spencer) showed up this morning around 10 AM.  Steve had some hand work for him to do.  I checked to see that he had water and he assured me that he brought plenty to drink.  With the outside air temperature rising, we closed the house up and turned the A-C on.

We were both surprisingly tired but wanted to get something useful accomplished today.  Linda worked at her desk while I cleaned the concrete driveway leading up to the garage from the street.  The landscapers have been using the driveway to stage some of their bulk materials such as crushed limestone and egg rock.  They got all of that material moved to other parts of the yard over the weekend but there was a layer of dust, small rocks, and other debris left behind.  I swept most of it off the driveway with a large push broom and then finished the job with a leaf blower.

There was a lot of crushed limestone left so over the weekend I had Steve push it into a 8′ wide by 15′ long parking pad 4″ – 6″ deep off the west side of the driveway and adjacent to the woods that run along the road.  The pad still had tracks in it from the excavator treads so I raked those out, filled in some dirt around the edges of the pad, and tamped the edges down.  The pull-through driveway from the front stairs to the concrete driveway was also rutted from the Bobcat front-loader being driven on it so I raked that out as best I could.  By the time I was done it was noon, it was hot, and I was sweaty and thirsty.  I decided I’d had enough for the day, closed up the storage container and garage, came in, and drank a bottle of ICE brand water.  This water is lightly carbonated and lightly fruit flavored, and I find it very refreshing.

I had a phone message yesterday from Darryll of DCM Heating and Cooling with some information I needed in order to prepare the corner of the garage for the library HVAC unit.  There were a few things I still needed to know, so I put in another call to him and left a message.  For lunch Linda served the left over salads from last night’s dinner along with hummus and chips.  We sat on the back deck for a while enjoying the slight cooling effect of a warm summer breeze, but eventually went back inside to escape the heat.

We did not do much the rest of the day.  I apparently broke our grandfather clock on Monday while winding it and spent a little time looking for information online.  I found a Sligh manual that included some troubleshooting tips but did not get as far as trying to diagnose and fix the problem.  We were both tired and took naps in the late afternoon.  That was unusual for us but could easily become part of our daily routine, especially on hot days like we had today.

I worked on bus barn drawings while Linda prepared dinner.  I then called John to see if I could borrow his chop saw and if he had time to look at the drawings.  Linda went along and visited with Diane.  We stayed until almost 10 PM.

 

2014/07/20 (N) Company

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The landscapers were back at 7:45 AM as promised.  We were up and ready for them and I was back working on the new sub-panel in the garage by 8:30 AM.  I finished the work (for now) and cleaned up the mess as best I could.  Electrical work, especially panel wiring, is very physical and tends to produce a lot of scrap.  Once the garage was cleaned up I applied the same treatment to myself.  By 1 PM I was ready for part 2 of my day, which began with a load of laundry, and then off to my desk to put a little time into our much neglected blog.

I have been taking photographs and writing daily blog posts all month but have not been taking the additional time to select and process the images and upload the posts to our WordPress site.  The last blog post on our website is from July 6th.  During the early afternoon planned to upload a few of the posts while we waited for Ron and Mary to arrive.  I ended up filing and deleting e-mails, which I have also neglected for the last few days.

Ron (Linda’s brother) and Mary (Ron’s wife) arrived at 3:30 PM.  They are on their way back to Pennsylvania after a week in Madison, Wisconsin participating in day-long bicycle rides.  They are fairly serious bicyclists; a few years ago Ron rode from Seattle to Boston with a large group over the summer.  This was their first visit to our new house so they got the full tour of the house and the property.  We were sitting on the deck enjoying cool beverages and good conversation when the landscapers returned.  They were still working with their heavy equipment, so we went back inside to talk.

Linda started pulling dinner together at 5:30 PM with Mary’s assistance.  We had a green salad with cut up vegetables and seitan stroganoff served over white rice the way I like it.  A glass of Merlot balanced nicely with the richness of the stroganoff.  Linda, Ron, and Mary went for a walk after dinner while I loaded and started the dishwasher.  When they returned we talked into the evening and Mary showed us pictures from family gatherings and their just-completed bicycle rides.  Linda had baked a vegan chocolate cake this morning and served slices with fresh cut strawberries and vanilla coconut milk ice “cream” for dessert.

 

2014/07/19 (S) A Busy Day

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At 7:30 AM we were about to leave for our usual Ham radio club breakfast in South Lyon when we realized some of the landscaping crew was already in the back yard.  I talked briefly with Steve to see if he had any questions for us and to let him know we would be gone for the morning.  We arrived at the Senate Coney Island a little later than usual to find a big group, some of whom were not regular attendees.  We would normally have lingered and enjoyed conversation over coffee, but we needed to get to Ann Arbor for a quick visit and to pick up my socket wrench toolbox from our son.

When we arrived at Brendan and Shawna’s house Madeline was outside pushing her push toy around the front yard.  As soon as she saw us she took off down the sidewalk towards the park.  Shawna retrieved her and got her stroller ready while Brendan and I transferred things out of and in to my car.  We then walked to Burn’s Park where Madeline played for about 45 minutes before we headed back to their house.  We had hugs all around and left.  We stopped at the Whole Foods Market in our way back to US-23 and then headed for home.

Back at the house, four landscapers were working, including Steve, and lots was getting done.  Hurray!  I got busy working on the electrical sub-panel in the garage while Linda made a run to the recycling center.  When she got back she did a load of laundry, which is normally my job, while she cleaned the lower level of the house.

I had to make a trip to Lowe’s for electrical parts and Linda had to make one in the evening to buy some 15 Amp single-pole circuit breakers, but I managed to get the old sub-panel removed, the wires labeled, the new panel hung, and all but one wire reconnected.  That wire needs to be replaced and I will do that first thing in the morning.  We turned the breaker on in the basement that feeds power to the sub-panel in the garage, turned on the main breaker in the sub-panel, and then turned each branch circuit breaker and checked to see that it was working correctly.

The reason Linda had to go get 15 Amp circuit breakers is that I discovered the old sub-panel had 14 gauge (AWG) wires “protected” by 20 Amp circuit breakers.  14 AWG wires are only rated to carry 15 Amps.  If allowed to carry more than that for any length of time they will overheat which could melt the wire insulation and lead to a short or worse, arcing, which can start a fire.  I will be placing those circuits on 15 Amp breakers in the morning.

 

2014/07/18 (F) Tracing Circuits

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When I talked to Steve from Village Landscape Development (VLD) yesterday he explained that they had not been out to work on our project because one of his employees had not shown up on Monday or Tuesday and late Tuesday informed him that he was done for the season for personal reasons.  Unfortunately for us, that employee was the crew chief for our project.  Steve said he spent Wednesday rearranging his crew assignments and assured me there would be people and materials at the house today.  When I left at 10 AM there was no sign of either, and no phone call letting us know when we might expect to see them.

I stopped at AAA Appliance to pick up the HVAC filters I ordered yesterday and then went to Lowe’s and bought the Square D Homeline electrical panel value pack.  It’s a 100 Amp main breaker panel with 20 slots and came with five 20 Amp single pole breakers.  I bought two ground bar kits, as well as a 20 Amp and 30 Amp 2-pole breaker (for 240 VAC devices).

As I was getting in the car to come home Linda called to see if I remembered to buy the weatherproof outlet covers for the outside outlets by the deck.  I had not, so I went back in to get them.  Apparently I forgot to buy some other electrical things I needed because I ended up with a non-contact voltage sensor, an outlet tester that works with GFCI outlets, and a system for determining which breaker supplies an outlet with having to turn breakers off and on until you find the right one.

When I finally got back to the house we installed one of the new filters behind the large return air grill in the living room.  We had to trim pieces of foam weather seal and pack it in to the small gap around the filter to force air to flow through the filter rather than around it.  We turned on the A-C to check the airflow and decided to check all of the registers.  There turned out to be return air ducts in all three bedrooms, which actually makes more sense than a single return in the living room.

The return air duct in the master bedroom had fiberglass insulation stuffed in it, presumably to cut down on winter heat loss, but there was no filter material.  Of the two supply ducts only the one farthest from the air-handler seemed to have airflow.  We removed the return air grill and cut a piece of the old living room filter material to fit and screwed the grill back on with the filter material behind it.

The return duct from the small bedroom had a thin piece of filter material behind the grill and adequate airflow from the supply duct.  We removed the return air grill, cleaned the filter material and re-attached the grill with the filter material behind it.  The middle bedroom had good air flow from the supply register but nothing to filter the air going into the return air duct.  We cut another piece of the old living room return air filter and installed it behind the return air grill.

I think we now have filter material on all of the cold air returns.  It strikes me as very odd that all of these air return ducts do not come together and then feed through a single filter.  We turned the A-C on and let it run while we had a quick lunch.  Except for the poor airflow to the one of the two supply registers in our bedroom, everything seemed to be working so we turned our collective attention to our next task.

The Coleman compressor/condenser unit was noticeably out of level.  Linda weeded around the base and trimmed back the rhododendron as the leaves of the closet ones were being sucked up against the heat transfer panels (radiator fins).  Once we had a little space around the base of the compressor we lifted the low side with a 3′ crowbar and slide a couple of bricks under that edge to hold it.  We had an old, unopened, bag of paver base so we used that to fill the large gap under the compressor base.  I scooped and placed it with a garden trowel and packed it with the end of a 1 x 2. We raised the unit a little and pulled the bricks out.  A minor tweak and we had it level.

We used the circuit tester to finish checking all of the outlets in the garage and the library and map what each circuit breaker supplied.  We discovered that the switch to the left of the sub-panel controlled an outside outlet mounted very high on the wall just under the soffit.  We have no idea why that outlet is installed where it is; perhaps it powered deicer cables or some other roof/gutter-related system at one time.  I was getting some very strange voltage measurements at the switch and at the outlet so I replaced both of them, but that did not change the readings.  I put a weatherproof cover plate on the outlet while I was at it.

Steve showed up mid-late afternoon with the excavator, his nephew Spencer, and a large role of plastic drain tile.  He used the excavator to move a couple of large boulders around back and then dig trenches for the drain tile.  He assured me there would be a crew here all day tomorrow, and he would be here to supervise them.

I needed to trim a stud in order to install the new electrical panel in my desired location but was unable to cut it with any of my existing tools.  What I needed was an oscillating cutter, so I headed back to Lowe’s and got one.  I was about to use it to trim out a section of a stud when I double checked a measurement and realized it was supporting the drywall that formed the northwest corner of the library.  Removing it was definitely not a good idea and that forced me to rethink the installation of the new panel box.  I do my best thinking when I’m asleep, so that was the end of my work for the day.

2014/07/17 (R) A-C Service

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Allen from TOMTEK arrived a little before 9 AM to do the annual maintenance service on the air-conditioning system.  The A-C system looks to me like it was retrofitted to the house, but it’s hard to say how long ago.  The house has a hot water baseboard heating system so the air-handling portion of the A-C system (evaporator, blower, and flexible ducts) is all in the attic.  The air delivery registers are all in the ceiling of the main floor (it’s a ranch style house).  There is one air return grill in the living room with a 12″ flexible return duct a smaller register and duct from each of the three bedrooms.  The system does not supply conditioned air to the finished basement.

To service the air-handler Allen had to use a step ladder to gain access to the attic through an opening in the ceiling of a hall closet and then work his way through the trusses to the west end of the house.  He had to work by flashlight while lying down, having pushed insulation out of the way to make space.  It was a cool, but sunny, morning so at least the temperature in the attic was pleasant.  He cleaned and inspected the unit and checked it for refrigerant leaks and then had me turn it on.  He checked its operation while running and pronounced it good to go.  He also indicated that there was no evidence of an air filter anywhere in the attic.

The only other place there could be air filters was behind the return air grills.  The living room grill is up high on a wall in the northeast corner of the living room (cathedral ceilings).  I set up my 8′ step ladder so Allen could remove the grill and have a look.  Sure enough, there it was, only it wasn’t a typical furnace/A-C filter with pleated material surrounded by a frame and held in place by a wire fence.  Rather, it was just an oversized piece of loose fiber mesh filter material pressed into the square box that the return air duct attaches to inside the top of the other hall closet.  He removed it, took it outside, cleaned it, and re-installed it.  It was dirty but not completely clogged and Allen said the system was now drawing air better than before.  He then turned his attention to the outside compressor (condenser) unit.

The outside unit is a Coleman, and that is about all we know.  The information plate was so badly faded that Allen was unable to get any of the information he needed from it.  He cleaned and inspected the unit, checked it for refrigerant leaks, and then hooked up his special test fixture.  He said it was working properly and did not need refrigerant, which was a good thing because refrigerant is very expensive and is not included as part of the pre-paid service call.

After Allen was done and had left I climbed back up and measured the return air box.  It was 16″ x 16″.  We checked Lowe’s and Home Depot online and could order one that size but it would not get here until next week.  With company coming Sunday I wanted to complete this project and put the furniture back in place and not have to move it again.  I drove into Howell to check the local stores but they did not stock that size filter.  The guy at Lowe’s suggested I try AAA Appliance (AAA Service Network) just down the street.  They did not have that size in stock either, but they could order one and have it by Monday.  They were cheap enough that I ordered four of the 2″ thick ones.  (I got a call at 5 PM that they had arrived and were available for pickup.). While I was out I also shopped for a new electrical panel for the garage.  I checked Home Depot, Lowe’s, City Electric, and Standard Electric Supply.  I did not buy anything, but that’s a story for another post.

While I was out Linda moved a few more items into the storage container and dealt with much of the stuff we had moved into the library yesterday.  When I got back we worked together to move even more stuff into the container.  That, in turn, freed up space in part of the garage that allowed us to move three of the large stationery shop tools out of the area where Darryll and I will be working.  The whole impetus for the storage container is to clear out the east half of the garage so Darryll can install the garage heater and the new HVAC unit for the library.  As long as we had to make space for him to work, it was an opportunity to further empty out the garage, repair some things, and rearrange where/how we have things stored.  It seems sometimes like a never-ending process as there isn’t really a place for everything so it isn’t possible for everything to be in its place.

In the center area of the back (north) wall the previous owners had removed the drywall and installed Wonderboard to act as a heat shield for a wood burning stove.  The husband restored old cars and used the garage as a shop.  We saw the stove when we looked at the house in January 2013.  Wonderboard is normally used as the substrate for laying tile but contains concrete, so it also works as an insulator against heat and doesn’t burn.  I wanted to drywall this area and decided to remove the Wonderboard.

I removed the Wonderboard and discovered two things:  There was another layer of Wonderboard underneath and there was visible evidence of a fire.  When I removed the second layer of Wonderboard the extent of the damage was fully revealed.  One 2×4 stud was burned almost completely through for about 12″ and the paper facing on the insulation on either side of it was charred.  An electrical wire also ran through that wall and the insulation was discolored.  Such is the nature of remodeling projects; you never know what you are going to find.

I spent a little time after dinner trying to figure out what each of the circuit breakers in the garage sub-panel controlled.  There are 12 breakers occupying 14 of the 16 positions.  I figured out that four of them controlled about 90% of the outlets in the garage.  It dawned on me later as I was discussing this with Linda that the other breakers might supply power to the library.  I will have to verify that tomorrow.

 

2014/07/16 (W) Rat Packing

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Today was not a trip down memory lane, although some good Rat Pack music would have been a nice accompaniment while working.  Tim called around 8:30 AM to verify the delivery details for our 16-foot Pack-Rat storage container and confirm that we would be home around 10 AM.

We wanted to get the container as close as possible to the garage while still being able to open the doors.  In that location it would also be out of the way of the pull-through driveway in case we wanted/needed to get the bus out.  The potential problem with this location was that the container had to be unloaded underneath and then behind the main phone line that hangs across our driveway.  The vertical clearance from the driveway to the phone line is just under 12′ 6″.  I was told when I ordered the container that they needed 13′ 6″, minimum.

We had not seen any landscapers by 9:00 AM so I called Steve at VLD and left a message.  The previous owners of the house left a large (bulky) projection TV which we had the movers bring up from the basement and put in garage when we moved in last year.  Linda called Alchin’s,  our trash collection company, to see if they would pick it up.  They said they would so we rolled it out to the curb with the rest of the trash.  I called Steve (VLD) on his cell phone and found out he was in our backyard.  Apparently he arrived just as we finished putting out the trash and went back in the house.  The landscape crew was supposed to have been there at 9:00 AM.  He called them and then left.  A Two-man crew showed up a little while later.

I placed our 8′ fiberglass (non-metallic, non-conducting) stepladder under the phone line and used an 8′ 2×4 and some short pieces (as blocking) to temporarily raise the line to 13′ 7″.  Tim showed up right on time and, after taking care of the paperwork, surveyed the situation.  He said it would not be a problem placing the container where we wanted it and it turned out that lifting the phone line was not necessary.  Here’s why…

The truck that delivers these containers is very specialized.  It has a built in crane with two long arms, kind of like a forklift, that extend down the sides of the truck and then make a 90 degree bend and connect to the main telescoping mast.  The mast is normally just behind the cab when the container is loaded and ready for transport.  To unload the container the arms are swung out away from the sides of the truck a couple of feet and then raised.  Four lifting bars are inserted into the base of the container, two on each side, and attached to the arms with chains.  The arms are then raised, lifting the container free from the truck bed (after it is un-strapped).  The entire crane assembly then slides backwards until the container is clear of the rear bumper, allowing it to be lowered.  Before final placement, however, the truck can still be moved back and forth.  (This is only true if the container is empty.  If it is loaded, the rear stabilizing jacks on the truck have to be lowered, preventing the truck from moving.)

I helped Tim position the truck so the crane mast was just in front of the phone line and the front of the container was just behind it.  We are only using the container for on-site storage so it will be empty when we finally have them come back and pick it up.  Positioned where it is they can retrieve it without raising the phone line so we won’t necessarily have be here at the time.  We will be, but it will still be less work for us.

With the container in place we started moving things out of the garage.  Some went into the container, some went into Linda’s car to go to the recycling center, some got set aside for donation or sale on Craig’s List, and some got designated to go in next week’s trash pickup.  I really hate throwing anything away that might be useful, but our limited experience with things like Freecycle have not been good, and selling things on eBay or Craigslist has never seemed worth the effort the small monetary return.

Around noon the landscapers wanted to know if we knew of an urgent care facility nearby.  That’s not a question you want to be asked on a construction site.  One of the guys was bitten by a spider and thought it might have been a Brown Recluse.  When they first started working on the retaining walls in the back they identified what they thought was a Brown Recluse (fiddleback) spider.  Although Michigan is farther north than their normal range they do occur here, so it was possible that’s what bit him.  The nearest medical facility we knew about was a hospital about five miles away, but Steve wanted them to go to an urgent care facility because he through they would get quicker service.  (They had called Steve before even asking us for assistance.)  Linda got on her computer and located one in the same area as the hospital.  They left to seek treatment and did return.

We did a little online research and found that there are a lot of spiders that resemble the Brown Recluse, which can range from gray to almost black and from the size of a penny to slightly larger than a quarter.  The name “fiddleback” comes from a pattern on the dorsal (upper) side of the spider, but is not a definitive identifier.  The most definitive characteristic is the six eyes; most spiders have eight.  Unfortunately they crew did not have the spider, so a positive ID was not possible.

After lunch Linda went to the recycling center and did some grocery shopping while I continued to work in the garage.  We had cleared out the east wall and the northeast corner which allowed me to remove wire shelving that was installed there.  I also had clear access to the electrical sub-panel so I removed the cover to have a look inside.  There were 11 load wires connected, nine to single-pole 120 VAC breakers and two to a double-poll 240 VAC breaker.  The power feed from the main panel in the basement was three-wire (2 hot, 1 neutral) not four like it should be, and all of the branch circuit ground wires were bonded to the neutral conductors.  This may have been OK at one time but is absolutely not current national electrical code (NEC).  Grounds and neutrals in an electrical system should only be bonded (connected together) at one point, usually in the main panel or at the service entrance.  For remote sub-panels, such as in a separate building, the ground wires can be connected to a pair of ground rods at least 8 feet long driven into the earth, but this is not an ideal arrangement.  If the resistance is not low enough it will limit the current flow through the ground wire to something less than required to trip the circuit breaker.

After dinner I got a phone call from Gaye, the chair of the FMCA Education Committee.  We talked for quite a while about the committee and RVing in general.  The whole committee has never met for a face-to-face meeting and many of us do not really know each other, so this was a chance to get better acquainted.

 

2014/07/15 (T) Files Files Files

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I have been concentrating on getting my ASUS laptop set up as my primary computer.  I have most of the software (apps) installed and configured that I need, at least for now.  My focus recently has been copying files from my older Dell laptop to our network attached storage units, but it has been a bit more complicated than that.  I have to compare the folders and files I already have on the NAS units with the ones on the computer and consolidate them in such a way that I do not inadvertently “lose” some along the way, while at the same time trying to eliminate duplicates to the extent possible.  Once I have the files on the two NAS units I delete most of them from the Dell laptop and used Defraggler to defragment the HDD.

I (we, but mostly me) have what Linda considers to be a ridiculous number of files.  One backup directory related to the work I did in my 12 years at Wayne RESA had over 147,000 files with almost 15 GB of data.  That’s a lot of files, and I have them stored on both NAS units. I am NOT moving all of them to my new machine; only the ones I need, as I need them, and will probably move new/revised documents back to the NAS units and take them off of my laptop.  I’m retired, and do not feel the need to have work-related “stuff” on my laptop.  Besides, we travel with one of the NAS units, so it’s always there if I need it.  Yesterday I moved most of the RV-related files.  Today it was ham radio and then K-12 education, which included all of the aforementioned work files.  I have been putting off a couple of projects until I get the ASUS set up.

I chatted with Dan Fregin, the treasurer of our FMCA Freethinkers chapter, at length on the phone this evening.  Our chapter has existed since June 2010, but most of us have never met more than a handful of other members face-to-face or even talked with them on the phone.  We are a group of approximately 70 people spread out over North America (Canada, Mexico, and the U. S.) so we mostly interact via e-mail.

 

2014/07/14 (M) Education

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Linda was up at 6 AM and was out the door and on her way to Twelve Mile, Indiana at 6:30 AM.  She decided last night not to have breakfast at home in favor of getting on the road.  I slept in and got up at 7:30 AM.  Lind’s homemade granola made for an easy, tasty breakfast.

Two landscapers showed up a little before 9:00 AM as I was getting ready to leave to run some errands and said Steve was on his way, so I stuck around until he got there.  We looked at a few things together and then I left.

On the way home from running my errands I got a call from TOMTEK reminding me that we have an annual service contract with them for the main house furnace (hot-water base-board heat) and air-conditioner.  I agreed to have them come on Thursday to service the A-C.  Perhaps while they are here they can figure out why it makes a noise that sounds like the thump, thump, thump of a helicopter blade.

About a mile from the house I spotted a small Painted Turtle trying to cross Hacker Rd.  A truck going the other way spotted it at the same time.  We both turned around and came back.  I got there first and put it on the front passenger floor mat after assuring the other driver that I was going to take it to our property and release it near the (neighbor’s) pond.  Turtles have very little chance of successfully crossing a road most places, including around here.

The two landscapers worked into the afternoon.  They could only go so far before needing Steve to inspect and approve their work.  He did not make it back today and I think they quit working around 3 PM.

Education is what I did professionally for the last 21 years before I retired, and I am still doing it to some small extent.  Back in the late winter I agreed to serve on a newly reconstituted FMCA national education committee.  There are 6 – 10 people on the committee, depending on how you count, and except for a couple of staff at FMCA headquarters in Cincinnati, Ohio we are spread out all over the U. S.  Our meetings are, therefore, conducted by telephone conference with ideas and information shared via e-mail in-between.  I also set up a folder in our personal Dropbox as a place to put documents so the committee can retrieve them.

We had our third meeting today from 4:00 to 5:30 PM EDT.  I spent the rest of the evening creating an outline of a possible RV curriculum and dealing with e-mail related to our meeting.  Linda got home at 8:00 PM and we had leftovers for dinner, after which I returned to my work and she headed to bed.

I have one, maybe two, days to concentrate on desk tasks.  Once the Pack-Rat storage container arrives on Wednesday I will be tied up with house-related chores through the 19th and then company through the 23rd.  I expect delivery of some HVAC equipment and materials during that window.  With any luck Darryll will be here starting on the 24th and I will be tied up working with him through the end of the month.  I’m hopeful, if not optimistic, that the landscapers will also be done with their two projects by the end of the month.

 

2104/07/12 (S) Natural Gas

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You might think that this would be a reference to the natural by-product of having breakfast with our ham radio friends in South Lyon this morning at the Senate Coney Island, but that is not the case.  We had a 10:30 AM appointment at the house this morning with Darryll Mech of DCM Heating and Cooling to finalize the work that needs to be done to get the house ready for conversion to natural gas.  The natural gas contractor for Consumer’s Energy (Roese Construction) started installing the main lines in our area a couple of weeks ago and they expect to have the project completed by September 26 (of this year).  That means we will have natural gas to the house sometime between now and then and we need to have everything as ready as we can before they hang the meter so the final conversion will be minimal and quick once the natural gas is turned on.

The work at our house breaks down into three pieces.  The first piece is running black pipe on the outside of the house from the southeast corner down the east side, across the back, under the upper and lower decks, along the back of the garage, and up the west side of the garage.  The gas meter will be installed at the southeast corner of the house where the propane currently enters the house.  The existing house piping will be used to supply natural gas to the house furnace, kitchen range, and outside grill connector.  The whole house generator is by the southwest corner of the garage and is currently on its own propane tank.  After the natural gas is hooked up everything needs to be on a single natural gas service/meter.

As the gas pipe runs along the back side of the garage there will be a T to supply gas into the garage.  That has to do with the second piece of the work.  We are having a ceiling mounted garage heater installed and a small furnace/air-conditioner for the library.  The HVAC unit will allow us to heat the library in the winter without cycling the main hot-water baseboard heating system, which is at the end of a long run through unheated attic space and is not particularly efficient or effective.  More importantly, it will allow us to control the humidity on humid summer days (it’s a library, after all, so it contains a lot of books and other humidity sensitive paper materials).  As part of that work we need to remove a propane space heater that is mounted in the wall abutting the garage and cap the line.  We also need to remove a window mount air-conditioner in that same wall.  Yes, that’s right, the current A-C for that room exhausts into the garage.

The third piece of the puzzle will be disconnecting the propane and converting the appliances that currently run on propane; the kitchen range, the main furnace, and the generator.  We will have Darryll take care of disconnecting the propane from the house and connecting the natural gas to the existing house piping and start up the two new furnaces once the gas is available.  We will then have TOMTEK convert the main furnace since they already service it for us.  Depending on timing we may be without our main furnace and domestic hot water until TOMTEK can complete their work.  I may convert the range, have Darryll do it, or have TOMTEK do it.  Regardless of who does the conversion I will need to get the conversion kit.  Bratcher Electric will connect the gas line and convert the whole house generator and do the annual service at the same time.

While Bratcher Electric is here we are going to have them run a 100 Amp, 4-wire cable from the outlet of the transfer switch in the southwest corner of the garage to the panel in the northeast corner of the garage.  The existing setup has the 200 A main panel in the basement of the house with a 60 A / 240 V breaker supplying the cable that feeds the sub-panel in the garage.  That means the power to the sub-panel goes from the garage all the way to the house and then all the back to the garage.  That’s a lot of unnecessary forth and back.  In part because of that, and in part because of the electrical needs of the new garage furnace and library HVAC unit, I am going to replace the sub-panel in the garage with a 100 Amp main breaker panel in advance of all of this work.

The current sub-panel is a General Electric but the main house panel is a Square D Homeline.  Lowe’s and Home Depot carry both the Homeline and QO product lines from Square D, and Home Depot also carries GE and Siemens.  If I installed a GE main panel in the garage I could potentially reuse the existing breakers and save a little money.  On the other hand, they have been in an unconditioned space for who knows how long, and they are not physically compatible with the Homeline breakers.  Indeed, the four different products are not generally interchangeable.  But the main consideration is selection and availability, and the Square D products win on those criteria.

Once the new furnaces are installed we will still have some work to do.  We will have to repair the walls in the library, insulate the hot air duct in the garage (although Darryll may take care of that), and enclose the library HVAC unit.  Because the library HVAC unit will be installed in the northeast corner of the garage it has to be in its own little sealed room to prevent automotive engine exhaust or other noxious fumes in the garage from being drawn in to the conditioned air or explosive fumes, such as gasoline vapor, from being drawn into the combustion chamber.  The furnace will have its own air intake and exhaust tubes.  The garage heater uses a sealed combustion chamber with a special concentric intake and exhaust tube, so it does not have to be enclosed.

Darryll indicated he could start the last week of July and would need about a week to do all of his initial work.  We have company coming the 20th through the 23rd, so we have the upcoming week to prep (clean out) the garage and library for Darryll.  This is the kind of situation that could give us gas if we weren’t used to it and enjoy it.  There’s nothing like a construction project to get you up and moving first thing in the morning and keep you up late at night.

 

20140711 (F) Nice Weather Lately

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Steven’s nephew, Spencer, was here a little after 8 AM and spent some time cleaning up the driveway.  He was joined by Tommy, who was only available for the morning.  Tommy got instructions from Steve by phone and they tried working on the retaining walls, but I’m not sure what they accomplished.  One of the large boulders Steve positioned yesterday on the lower west wall had dropped 6 inches and they were unable to re-position it.

It was another pleasant day, so I decided to work outside during the morning.  I cut up some previously trimmed tree limbs and then started pruning our apple tree.  I tried to cut all of the dead limbs and branches I could reach from the ground using our new Fiskar’s ratcheting lopper.  With that material removed I was able to use the pole saw and compound lopper to remove some larger and/or higher limbs.  By noon it was getting warm and I knocked off for the day and had lunch.  Linda made the chickpea (garbanzo bean) salad that we both like so much and served it on a bed of greens with red grapes and sweet Bing cherries on the side.

Tommy had to take off for the afternoon and left Spencer to start moving smaller rocks onto the slope of the east retaining wall.  We would occasionally hear one thud against the foundation and I decided I should check on his progress.  He was doing a fine job of tossing rocks into place, but I did not like the way the earth was pitched as it appeared to slope back towards the house.  I examined the west wall and it appeared to have the same problem.

Since the whole reason for this project was to get water to flow away from the house, I asked Spencer to take a break while I called Steve.  I told him that something just did not look right to me and that I could not see any evidence of a drain tile behind the upper wall on the west side.  He was running the excavator at another job site and wasn’t able to come look at our job so he sent Kyle over to pick up Spencer, who did not have a car.  With a chance of rain in the forecast for Saturday through Monday it is looking more and more like this job will not be done until the end of July.

In the afternoon I continued working on configuring my Windows 8.1 laptop.  My challenge today was getting Outlook 2013 to preview PDF files.  I used the search feature on the Start screen to locate information, some of which indicated I would have to create and/or edit the registry.  In the end the solution only required two steps:  installing Adobe Reader 11 and then setting it as the default program for PDFs.

With that problem solved I edited my blog posts for July 1 through 9 and started uploading them.  I managed to get the posts for the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd uploaded before dinner.  I also got a return call from Darryll at DCM Heating and Cooling and we agreed he would come to the house tomorrow at 10:30 AM to finalize the work we need done and pin down a start date to prep the house for natural gas and install a small HVAC unit for the library and a furnace for the garage.  We also need the main air-conditioner serviced.  Luckily it has been a cool summer so far.  The conversion of appliances will have to wait until the natural gas line is connected to the meter and turned on, which could be as late as early October.

I got a call from Gary at GM Construction sometime in the last few days.  He finally had all of his supplier quotes for our pole barn / bus garage project and had a price for us.  It was higher than I would have liked, but less than the quote from Morton Buildings, which was for a much smaller barn.  Last night I called Phil from Precision Grading to update him on the status of the project and to see if he would swing by and look at the pull-through driveway which the landscapers have torn up more than I expected.  My best guess is that we will get a barn up somehow, but I’m not sure when or how.

For dinner Linda made pan-grilled sliced tofu with onions and Bar-B-Que sauce served on a toasted sandwich bun with a side of lightly oiled and baked potato wedges and a few fresh strawberries.  Of course, that meant ketchup with Tabasco sauce.  We split a can of cold Yuengling beer which was the perfect beverage for this meal.  Sometime in the last two days Linda made a raspberry sauce from frozen raspberries we picked last year.  Earlier today she made a vegan chocolate cake and this evening the cake and raspberry sauce came together for dessert.