I'd had enough...

After banging my toes a third time this morning I had had enough of the stupid door in the master bedroom that opens the wrong way... Ideally it should open into the bathroom, but instead it opens into the room and into the walk in closet too... It also has a habit of automatically opening which is irritating..

I was giving it some thought this morning and realized that by switching the hinges to the other side of the door I could have it at least open the other way up against the door. Enter the zero clearance cutter that my mom gave me last time she was here. The only other way to do this is with a router and a template, both of which I don't have easy access to..

I decided to do this at the last minute, so Jenn challenged me with the usual flip comment that I had 45 minutes until supper....:)

Well, its ugly, and has a tendency to pop open, but it beats buying another 125$ door.... Now, I probably will do that one day, but for now at least we can use this one...:)

More on the pool

So during all the plumbing snafu I dropped Jenns camera, breaking the lcd screen on the back and basically making it useless (since there is no view finder). Anyways I went through the camera's memory card and found some photos of the pool while it was in progress...

The entire bottom of the pool had to be reworked,  as you can see from the picture below the previous owner had neglected the pool for so long that there was a tree growing out of it... The bottom of a pool is a special type of concrete that "breathes" so that any water that comes from below, can go back down when the water table goes down. If you didn't do this, when the water table rose the pool would basically float up out of the ground

The entire process took a couple of weeks, and we had to use extra thick foam on the walls to protect the liner from the slightly rusted side walls.

In the end though, it was totally worth it, we were able to move the pump from the back of the house to the back of the lot, and Gavyn lost 12 lbs in a week and a half of swimming...:)

my little helper

None of my kids have really shown an interest in helping with the renovations. Kyle has been grudgingly helping me whenever I need it, but when he has the option he would rather not assist... my only keener helper is this guy..

He is always interested in what I am doing, even if it is watching hulu... but when it has something to do with tools (so long as they are not too noisy) he's right there checking things out.

He does have a short attention span however....:) And needs constant encouragement or he loses interest and bails on my just like everyone else...:)

So yeah, plumbing...

Plumbing is not all that complicated when you know the steps... first you buy the parts you need. When you are patching a pipe thats a coupling like the ones shown below. Note that one of them has a little dimple? That is to allow it to stop halfway through on the pipe, the other one is what we want for this particular plumbing project so that we can cut the pipe exactly the same length as the old pipe.

Next you have to clean off the remainder of the gunk from the old pipe, and add what is called flux which helps both clean the pipe and acts as sort of a lubricant for the solder you will have to add next.

Now, you're ready for some fire. There are two types of torches that can be used for this purpose, one is a propane type one (blue bottle) and then theres the right one, which is some magical stuff that burns hotter and comes in a yellow bottle. Its more expensive, but worth it... I'm using the blue crap..

Now you are all set, ready to roll as it were. All we have to do is heat it up, add the solder and if everything works as it should we should have a patch...

Now those of you that know what you are doing, know that this doesn't look right... What I should have done is cut a smaller segment out, like say one smaller than the couplings you see in the photo. Problem I had was the zero clearance pipe cutter I was using kept threading the pipe instead of cutting it... As you would predict, I couldn't get a clean seal on the pipes because all of the flux basically melted all at the same time...

As with almost everything, doing it on the cheap, and as fast as you can is not the right way to do plumbing.... After i patched this one, leaks and all, I checked for more and found two other leaks... So after it took me 3 attempts to get a seal that would sort of hold water, I gave up and called a plumber...Took him 3 hours, but it was worth it as there are no more leaks now...

Hrm winter is coming

There can be no doubt that winter is coming. I had my colleagues over from Coach for a BBQ on Saturday and they all gamely froze to death outside. You see, we were supposed to have the BBQ when the project was finished, and we did... it was just finished 3 months behind schedule...

Anyways with the oncoming of winter I figured it was a good time to fix the leaking pipe in the heating system in the garage. Last time i posted we had identified the leak, but not yet fixed it... nows the weekend, carpe dium and all that crap.

The water is leaking from the bulkhead that I built, so down that comes

My fear of course is that I put a screw through the damn pipe when I was putting the bulkhead up. Luckily I am without blame on this one, but its still interesting... The leak is coming from somewhere up there....

Kyle climbed up into the attic and poked a hole in the ceiling to let the water that was pooling up there out, lo and behold, the water is coming from about 9 inches away from the bulkhead! Vindicated! I didn't cause it...

Apparently not having heat caused the issue... There is the burst pipe that I am going to have to fix later... note that the hole is about 5 inches across... there is an electrical wire running through there, and I have to solder a new pipe up there... this should be good times. How many times have I mentioned how much I abhor plumbing?

Hurricane Irene, glad you're gone..

We were truly blessed by Irene missing us. I see a lot of articles and pictures of people wading through their ground floors looking for prized possessions and can't help but be thankful that all we got is some water coming up out lawn

This photo was taken about two hours after it stopped raining, within another two hours the water was completely gone. Thanks again for amazing sewer system... the high water mark was another 8 ft up the driveway.

The irony of finishing the project and then having Irene flood the house was NOT lost on me... especially since most of the issues with the house were related to water, it would have been pretty fun in a sad and desperately pathetic kind of way.. Now, I can look back at it and laugh, since it didn't happen... This flood was over the 100 yr mark, so looks like while our street does flood, we're out of the way of the worst of it, glad to know.

Our pool, before, and after

So lots going on these days, after 6 weeks dumb and dumber finally finished the siding. have to admit it looks good, and it damn well better for taking all the time it did. Well it looked good until Huricane Irene came through and tore some of it off... Cold plate of Irony anyone?

Most of what I have been doing doesn't make for good blogging, that or I forget to take a before and after photo...:) This one is something that I had nothing to do with, other than to open my Wallet up real wide and let the pool guy reach in with both hands.... here is what the pool looked like before:

and heres what it looks like now:

You can also almost see that I power washed the fence... The fence now actually looks new instead of like a slime covered remnant from a post apocalyptic world...