Posted on 2015-08-08 in FloraFauna
Saw a rabbit our by our hot tub… a day after we saw a Racer snake.
Hopefully those two will take turns in the yard so we have less death.
Posted on 2015-08-08 in Happenings
Dex and I installed an open sprinkler irrigation controller.
It is choice! The only slight mis-steps are A) We had 9 stations which meant we had to upgrade to 20 stations because the standard 8 wasn’t going to cut it and B) I didn’t get a right proper water proof enclosure so we had to hack the old one up to fit the new guts.
There were quite a few new talents to take care of here. One most important was testing for live 120V AC wires – with my kid watching. No one was shocked.
We managed to get it all done before Mariel got home and we surprised her with some automated, 10 seconds per zone, water works. It felt like fireworks 🙂
Posted on 2015-08-08 in Happenings, HomeMade
A few unexpected developments today. One was that Mariel didn’t really me /out/ of the bigger, heavier, more expensive shelf for the garage.
Another was that, while I did have the foresight to remove one middle chair from the bus, i removed the wrong one. This meant that Mariel had to ride in the trunk, 80’s style.
The last unconsiderable was how much work I’d have to do in order to make space in the cluttered garage to place the shelves in order to un clutter the garage.
It all worked out though, house improved.
Posted on 2015-08-04 in Happenings
We needed a good place for the cat box. There’s three cats these days so there’s a lot of input/output.
It’s got to be accessible for cleaning, but hopefully out of the way. We decided to sacrifice the pantry (or at least the bottom fifth). I had a wild idea of cutting a hole giving access to the crawl space under the stairs with a cleaning access door in the garage. BUT in a moment of uncharacteristic caution I thought that I might compromise the firewall aspect of the whole “garage thing”. Scraped that idea and put a cat door in the pantry.
I have a vent for getting some those fumes out, but I’m unsure of where (what) to do that.
Chase helped out and learned how to: 1) Take a door off it’s hinges 2) use a T-square and tape measure 3) use a drill 4) use a scroll saw
There was a lot going on and he was appropriately pissed off that he was forced to help dad – but by the end he was happy to have made some loud noise, destroyed a bit of the house on purpose and work on a project that he can take credit for each time he sees it every day.
Posted on 2015-08-03 in Happenings, HomeMade
There are times when your wife makes you a beverage at 10pm and asks you “Where will we put these while in the hot tub?”
That’s when you go (to the garage) and make an end table for the hot tube. You don’t have to worry about aesthetics because it’s dark out.
Posted on 2015-08-02 in Happenings, HomeMade
Zip ties are rarely a “good solution” but today I used them to make the big tall shelves less “death trappy”.
and it works out nice because if I have to move it out for any reason I can just snip 2/4ths of the ties and rebind them later.
Also, we re-mounted the “secret spot” that holds all our keys and odds and ends. It does not really fit on the new HUGE wall, but we needed to put it somewhere.
Posted on 2015-08-01 in HomeMade
Okay, I “fixed” the controller by finding out that a few zones just don’t work.
It could be something that needs to be programmed but the screen is busted… So I have a new controller coming but until then I won’t have to wrestle the spiders to manually start up citrus hill.
