Category Archives: Life

The day to day

The New Flowerbed days 1 & 2 progress

I don’t have any exercise numbers to add to the Biggest Loser contest for the weekend. I think I’m going to mark a good 180 minutes anyway. I was sweating buckets while moving dirt, tamping and then stacking the wall blocks.

image

I should have gotten good before pictures, I didn’t. Oops. I suppose I should mention that the goal wasn’t necessarily to build a retaining wall flowerbed box thingie, but rather I wanted to get the retaining wall blocks that were delivered to me some months ago off pallets, out of the driveway and into their proposed useful resting spot. I was less than 1/2 successful in this endeavor as I still have a pallet and change of bricks left.

image

You can see the intention is for the wall to go all the way around the Flowerbed. It’s not good practice to do landscaping above the sill plate. Also I need to maintain a path for the rain-gutter to get away from the house.

image

Lots of tamping. I didn’t start with gloves on… Plenty of blisters.

image

Well here is what I think the finished product will be.

image

I’m going to try and level the tops a bit, definitely in that corner where the cinder and wall blocks meet.

image

After getting the wall built I spent another hour or so sifting landscaping rock out of the dirt contained within. It seems the prior homeowners redid this Flowerbed a number of times. I found quite a number of layers of fabric and extra rock. I could sieve rock out of this ground forever it seems.

I don’t have a great way to haul fill dirt, nor do I have a great source yet. I’ll work on both of those problems during the upcoming week.

And lastly, I have a picture of the bricks being delivered. The forking truck was a surprise. When the guy pulled up I was like “WTF, I didn’t pay too have these delivered so I could unload them by hand.” The Eastern European delivery driver was a nice guy. Go Menards.

image

Hot Tub Repair

It’s easy to see that I have a fresh new website. My old one was neglected for a long time, then it went offline and needed to be replaced. Luckily I have the infrastructure here to do it right. Now all up to date with the most current WordPress (no thanks to EPEL) it’s time to backtrack and put the fun projects of recent history into words and photos.

When I bought the house in MN it was well understood that the hot tub was in need of repair. I was a bit frightened by that, but figured worst case I’d pay someone a few bucks to come haul it off if repairing it was beyond my capabilities. Come to find out repairing a hot tub isn’t so difficult.

Symptom: doesn’t hold water

I opened up the sides and kind of tracked where the leak was coming from. It was easy to find the wettest foam then just start digging that out until I reached the actual source of the leaky water. The below plenum was cracked right down the side, probably from freezing.imageI was confident seeing this. This appeared to be something I could handle, I was just now hoping that everything else worked well and there were no smaller/hidden leaks elsewhere that would be more difficult to repair, namely in the shell. I cut the piece out with my handy dandy cordless sawzall that I had already outfitted my garage with, it’s something I learned nobody should be without but left mine behind in AK for dad. Here is the broken piece, the crack can be clearly seen on the left hand side. A good eye can follow it all the way back across the section adjacent to where the tubes come out perpendicular to the plenum.imageAnd the remains inside the tub:imageI’m very glad that the plenum in question broke, you can see in the picture some other areas of tubing that are much more difficult to get to. Here I’ve started to reassemble, you can see the short coupling I had to create to deal with the loss of tube from cutting:imageMore of the same in the following picture, you can see that the pieces simply attach with PVC glue. Simple and effective:imageHere we are all reassembled and pumping water. Just had to get about 20 cans of great stuff and refill the void I left in the foam to insulate it. The hot tub now works great, holds its water and is a nice addition to the house. Next hot tub projects – replace weathered cover and repaint flaking plastic siding.

The parts were cheap and easy to walk in and out of at my local hot tub distribution place. They even suggested I go to Home Depot for the parts that could be sourced there cheaper than retail prices in-house.

Moral: don’t be afraid to take on hot tub repair even if you just have general handyman knowledge, it’s not rocket science. Continue reading Hot Tub Repair