Tag Archives: Village Landscape Development (VLD)

2014/05/07 (W) Plumbing

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After breakfast Linda headed to Ann Arbor to babysit our younger grand-daughter.  I had a long list of things to do at my computer today, and planned to spend the day inside at home doing them.  I did not manage to do most of them as I ended up doing other things instead; so much for plans.

Wednesday is trash day (sorry, Prince Spaghetti), so I got the trash to the curb.  (I know, I know, how have I managed to arrange such an interesting life?)  A box of Bus Conversion Magazines arrived yesterday, so I opened it to check the contents and then e-mailed the publisher that all was well.

We do not have curbside recycling at the house the way we did in the previous one, so we have to take our recyclables to a drop-off center run by Recycle Livingston.  The center is open Wednesdays and Saturdays.  On her way out the door Linda reminded me that I had to take the recyclables to the center.  We keep a set of cardboard boxes on the floor in the pantry and sort our recyclables as they become available.  I loaded them in the car for later.

At some point in the past the shower diverter in the bathtub quit working, so that had been on my “to do” list for a while.  Coincidentally, while we were in Florida I had seen an episode of “Ask This Old House” that dealt with this exact repair!  I had to use a large pipe wrench to unscrew the old bathtub spout/diverter as the threads were corroded.  With the old diverter off I now had a fairly good idea of what I needed in the way of a replacement part.

I had been putting off fixing the leaky dishwasher fresh water connection but today was finally the day to tackle that project.  As I was thinking about heading to the recycle center, and then to Lowe’s for plumbing parts, I got a call from Steve at Village Landscape Development (VLD).  He wanted to swing by and go over the front stairs and rear retaining wall projects again and get us on his schedule.  We agreed on 1 PM.  It was 11:30 AM, so I had just enough time to drop off the recyclables and get a new diverter from Lowe’s.

Steve (VLD) came by and we walked through the two projects.  We were on the same page and settled on tentative start and completion dates, so we signed an agreement and I gave him a deposit.  After he left, I called Wayne (KD8H), set up to get the tower tomorrow at 11:00 AM, and then e-mailed Steve (N8AR) to let him know the date/time.  He had permission to use Bruce’s (W8RA) closed trailer to help me with the tower.

Back at the dishwasher I turned the water supply on and the connection didn’t just drip, it spurted.  I redid the connection with pipe thread compound instead of Teflon tape but it did not help at all.  I tried tightening it and it got worse.  It was clearly time to rethink my approach.

I find that a good way to rethink my approach to a problem is to do something else, so I installed the new diverter for the bathtub/shower in the hall bathroom.  It only needed to be threaded on hand tight as it is not a pressurized fitting.  Water either flows out the spout into the tub or gets blocked and forced (diverted) up to the shower head; a pretty simple device, really.  It was not quite the right length and left a 1/2 inch gap between the base and the wall tile.  At least this way I could see if any water was leaking out the back end.  🙂  It wasn’t, so I let it go for now.

I returned to the dishwasher problem and took another look.  It appeared that the rubber seal (O-ring) in the end of the hose may have gotten nicked or mis-shapen, perhaps from over tightening.  There was no indication of a leak between the 90 degree elbow and the dishwasher inlet.

I headed back to Lowe’s for a new 8’ dishwasher connection hose.  I could not purchase just the hose; it only came as a kit with the 90 degree elbow and another adapter, which turned out to be fortuitous.  I noticed that the instructions did not call for Teflon tape or pipe thread compound and I verified that with the associate in plumbing.  I also picked up a decorative filler plate for the diverter.

The flexible water line connects to the lower left front corner of the dishwasher, loops underneath the unit, goes through a hole in the adjacent cabinet at the lower left rear, goes through the other side of that cabinet into the space under the corner sink cabinet bottom, and finally emerges through a hole in the floor of the cabinet along with a water pipe.  The only way to run the new flexible line, without removing the dishwasher and disassembling cabinets, was to attach one end of the new line to the dishwasher end of the old line and use the old line to pull it through.  Zip ties have lots of uses, and this is one of them.

Before making any connections I read the instructions again.  The connections at the end of the hose were to be “finger tight plus 1/4 turn.”  Although “finger tight” is an incredibly imprecise term–some number of inch-pounds would be precise–these directions clearly indicated that over tightening was a bad thing to do.  I connected the line at both ends following the directions as best I could and opened the supply valve a little.  No more spurting but I still had a drip leak and shut off the water supply.  I knew the hose was OK so it had to be the elbow.  I had to pull the dishwasher part way out to get to the 90 degree elbow.  (This why I installed an 8 foot hose.)  After I got it out I examined it and did not see any obvious thread damage or cracks, but there was some pitting and one pit in particular looked like it might be a through pinhole.  No matter, it was trash.

I installed the new elbow using pipe thread compound on the male NPT pipe threads that go into the female NPT fitting on the dishwasher.  These kinds of fittings are always a bit tricky.  They have to be tight enough to not leak, without overdoing it, and they have to be oriented a certain way to allow something else to connect to them; in this case the supply hose.  I reattached the flexible hose, turned on the water supply, and voilà, no leaks!  As long as I was on a roll I unscrewed the bathtub diverter, slipped the decorative spacer over the pipe, and screwed the diverter back on, lining it up carefully with the spacer and getting it snug but properly aligned.  Even though it took most of the afternoon I had successfully completed two plumbing jobs in one day.

 

2014/05/02 (F) A Day At Home

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Linda went into the bakery today so she was up early and left at 6:30 AM to get ahead of the worst of the morning rush hour traffic headed into Detroit from the northwest.  She took my new laptop to have some critical software installed.  With the 17″ screen, the computer does not fit in any of our existing padded carry cases, so that is an accessory I will need to get.  I also have my eye on an external BluRay/DVD/CD optical media drive (read/write).  The BluRay disks will store anywhere from 25 to 45 GB of data which is more practical that CDs or DVDs for non-volatile /off-site storage of photographs and critical documents.

We only have one car at the moment, so I was stuck at home today (I don’t use the motorcoach to run errands).  Being stuck at home on a chilly, overcast, rainy day is not necessarily a bad thing.  After a light breakfast and my morning coffee I started a load of laundry and worked at my desk for a while.

I took a break from desk work and opened the front of one of our APC Smart UPS units that had died while we were away.  I had replaced batteries in a couple of these units but could not recall if this was one of them.  It was not.  When I opened the batter compartment I found the batteries badly swollen and I was unable to remove them from the case.  The tags on them indicated that they were from 2010.  The only thing I can think of that would have caused this was a failure in the battery charging circuit which continued to charge the batteries after they were already fully charged.  That would cause them to gas and swell as they are sealed AGM batteries.  We were probably lucky they did not explode.  Given this situation I will replace the whole UPS rather than put new batteries in it.  APC usually offers a trade-in allowance (called Trade-Ups) for the same or larger UPS.  Otherwise I have to dispose of the whole thing as electronic hazardous waste.

Steve Degenais of Village Landscape Development stopped by mid-morning to discuss two separate projects:  1) stairs to get from the pull-thru driveway to the front porch, and;  2) redoing the retaining walls on either side of the basement walkout.

When we bought the house last year it had a makeshift pull-thru driveway and no stairs or pathway to the front porch, which is the main entrance to the house.  The previous owners used the Florida room, which is just an enclosed patio slab between the house and the garage, as an entry/breezeway.  It was empty and they left it unlocked, entering the house through a door to the kitchen that locked.  We use the Florida room as a library, so we do not leave it open.  We also had the pull-thru driveway substantially improved last spring so we can park our bus with the entrance door opposite the front door of the house.  Carrying things back and forth between the house and the bus on a steep grassy slope is an accident waiting to happen.  There is a four foot drop in 18 feet from the front porch to the driveway and we need a proper set of stairs.

Although we have a walkout basement, the house is not set into the side of a hill.  If you walk around the house it appears to sit on top of a mound.  It appears that dirt was piled around the basement walls, except by the walkout, and graded away from house, more or less.  In the back it slopes in towards the walkout.  There are remnants of an old railroad tie retaining wall and it appears that sometime later someone tried to stabilize the two slopes with plastic held in place with small boulders, pieces of cinder block, used bricks, and whatever else was handy to throw in there.  That apparently wasn’t working very well so they built two retaining walls, each about seven courses high (~3 ft), with blocks meant for decorative edging of plant beds.  It’s also clear that they did not make any provision for water drainage behind the walls and yet two downspouts from the roof gutter system discharged into these areas before I used corrugated plastic pipe to carry the water away from the house.  The pipes are still there, sitting on the surface right where I put them last spring. The earth behind the walls has obviously moved over time and the walls are buckling in places.  Mud pushes through and around them.  It’s not pretty on several levels.

Our sump pump runs quite a bit in the spring and we need to get rainwater away from the foundation as much as possible.  Drainage and stabilization of the slopes are my primary concern but I always care about aesthetics.  Steve and I discussed an approach using small boulders to make low retaining walls backed with fabric and drain pipes to capture and drain the water far out into the yard.  The slopes would be re-graded to provide runoff away from the house, covered with landscape fabric, and then covered with small boulders and “egg rock.”  The drain lines would all be buried and run to an exit point far out in the yard.

I spent much of the rest of the day working on our website and blog with the help of our cats, who were a bit needier than usual following their visit to the veterinarian yesterday.  Sometime during the day a package arrived from Amazon.  On Wednesday we ordered an Amped|Wireless SR20000G (wireless router/repeater/access point) to replace the one Mike (W8XH) gave us just before we left for Florida.  The SR20000G worked very well for us in our bus and is now a permanent part of our on-board communications technology arsenal.  We ordered it through Amazon Prime and had it in two days; no extra charge for shipping.

Linda picked up some groceries on her way home from the bakery and we had a simple dinner consisting of a very tasty spinach salad and an Amy’s Roasted Vegetable Pizza.  After dinner she worked on food for tomorrow’s visit with our daughter and son-in-law.  She made her fabulous vegan Sloppy Joe’s and carrot cake cookies while I worked with my new notebook computer.  Updates were available and I had to “update and restart” the machine six times before there were no more updates to install.  There were 24+5+20+4+8+10 = 71 updates in all.  Allen, the computer sales associate at Best Buy, had alerted me to the fact that once I activated the machine there would be quite a few updates, so this was not unexpected.