New House Blog: Episode XCI - Smile!

The next time you approach our New House you'd better be smiling, and on your best behaviour, because everything you do will be recorded by one or more HD, day and night, video cameras.  And this video evidence may be used against (or in rare cases, for) you in a court of law.  You've been warned!  In this Episode of the New House Blog we will also be reporting on two plumbing repairs.  The first plumbing repair involves, surprisingly, the 1/2 bath, which we just repaired in the previous Episode.  That particular bathroom does seem to require more attention than the other two bathrooms.  The second plumbing repair was for an outside remote hose spigot, and it may surprise you to learn who made this repair necessary.

Smile 1

You may recall from this Episode the teaser image of a new run of cat 6 under our New House.  Here is that image again, to refresh your memory.

We can now reveal that this cable run from our garage to the orange room was for the purpose of connecting our camera system with the rest of our house network.

But before we could run cable and mount a Cat 6 faceplate we needed to remove some superfluous piping.  The galvanized piping you see in this picture used to be connected to a water softener way back in pre-Bishopian times, but it had not been used for many years. It was rather easy to remove, too.

The large rectangularish hole is where the faceplate for new garage Cat 6 will terminate in the orange room.  The two smaller holes were test holes we drilled when looking for a suitable mounting point for said faceplate.

And what's inside the large hole? Not much, really.  Here you can see the hole we drilled to allow the Cat 6 to come up from under our New House.
















Pipes

It seems like our 1/2 bath gets a lot more attention, and needs more repair, than our other two bathrooms.  And most of this involves repairs to the high-tech pressure-assist toilet.  For a long time one of us (not Becky) wondered if we just had a lemon of a toilet.  After the drastic repair featured in the previous Episode we thought all of the issues were resolved; but no, after only a few weeks the toilet resumed its always-running behaviour.  We had replaced everything inside the tank, so what could the problem be?  Taking the lid off the tank revealed over an inch of water in the bottom of the tank, where there should be no water, and water seemed to be leaking out of the air pressure regulator at the top of the in-tank assembly.

A quick look at the online Flushmate troubleshooting guide revealed that leaking from the air pressure regulator usually indicates a lack of incoming water pressure. We knew the water pressure was adequate when we bought our New House, and we also knew that the toilet itself was in good working order, so a lack of pressure likely meant one thing - clogging of the incoming water pipe due to rust.

A quick look at the incoming pipe area revealed what you see on the left - a rusty leak where the pipe joined the shutoff valve. D'oh!  At least we were finally getting to the actual root of the problem. To troubleshoot and resolve this required turning off the house water, something we are loath to do.

But do it we did, and this is what was revealed after removing the shutoff valve - the galvanized inlet pipe was rusty, clogged, and the metal was breaking down and causing water to leak - all of which resulted in a reduction of incoming water pressure.

That's a lot of clogging going on there.

Another view of the same pipe. Note how the end of the pipe has deteriorated.  Also note that most of the dust on the garbage can lid is from the smoke of the Soberanes fire burning south of here.

It seemed like a good idea to look inside the wall to see the extent of the clogging and damaged pipe, but the existing opening was just too small for good viewing

So we did what anyone else would do - we opened up the wall a bit to see what was really going on (as you know, I have no fear of opening up holes in the walls). We were very happy to see that the corrosion and clogging were limited to the short inlet pipe, and we were even happier to see that the in-wall pipe is un-corroded copper.

Time to put it all back together.  The new inlet pipe is copper - no more of that galvanized for us!

Ok, so the replacement drywall piece isn't quite an exact fit. But it's not too far off.

Once it's patched up with tape and joint compound you can't even tell. And where did that seahorse go?

There's the seahorse.  We had to move him so we didn't accidentally sand him down or paint over him. :) And now we finally, really think we have this situation resolved. We can tell just by listening that there is more water pressure getting into the toilet than before, and so far the system has worked perfectly.  Hooray!!

Smile 2

After running the Cat 6 into the garage and terminating it in the appropriate faceplate it was time to mount the POE network switch.  POE stands for Power Over Ethernet, and it means that the network switch provides both power and data to whatever device is plugged into it - in this case our cameras.  From a practical point of view it means that we only had to run one Cat 6 cable to each camera, instead of having to run both a power cable and a Cat 6 cable.

But where do you mount a network switch in a garage that doesn't have any existing mount points?  Obviously, you make your own mount, as seen below.

This simple but effective mount was made from a single 2-by-4, split roughly in half, with each half nailed to an existing wall stud.

Our network switch mounted, plugged in, and connected to the house network.  We had used up all of our blue Cat 6, so we ordered a large spool of  black, outdoor-rated Cat 6.















PVC

And now we get to the second plumibing repair.  Below you see a picture of our the hose hookup by our food garden.

What you don't see in this photo is the dense foliage that I had to remove just so that I could see and photograph this hose hookup. It was the afore-mentioned intense density of weeds surrounding this hose hookup that caught my attention and prompted me to look deeper.

Deeper into the ground, that is.  I discovered an underground spring, springing from where the PVC elbow meets the horizontal PVC pipe.
Pre-Bishopians did the previous PVC joining, and it was not adequately joined - thus the leak.  The vertical PVC work, done by me in this Episode, was (and is) leak-free.

This repair was pretty straightforward. After turning off the water to this outlet I disconnected the elbow and vertical assembly and let the pipe drain.

Next I re-connected and cemented the elbow to the horizontal pipe and let the PVC cement cure.

Once the cement was cured I turned the water back on, tested to make sure the joint was sealed, then I filled in the hole and re-installed the bricks.

Here you see the hose re-connected and actual water flowing through this spigot.











Smile 3

The last two steps were mounting the cameras and running the Cat 6.  Now, I'm not going to divulge all of the details, but I will say that we have multiple overlapping fields of view, and the cameras are full HD, recording day and night.

This is some of the new, black, outdoor Cat 6.

Here you can see a typical camera. So far the system works quite well, and it has options for remote viewing and capturing.

We do not yet have facial recognition activated, but who can say what we might do in the future?

Smile for the
    bIsh

New House Blog: Episode LXXXX - The Houselift

You may remember our New House's facelift from this Episode.  Well, we decided to do something similar, but on a larger scale, so we had a hole houselift.

Houselift Part One

It started, as other things have, with the door-to-door salesman.  Door-to-door salesmen have been good to us in this neighborhood (remember the solar guy and our meat guy?), so we let him come in and talk to us about painting our New House (and our New House was in great need of new paint) - but not just any paint; he was specifically going to talk to us about a fancy high-tech type of house paint that is guaranteed for 40 (yes, forty) years instead of the typical 5 years you get with regular latex paint.  And he had a fancy demo device that demonstrated this high-tech paint's waterproof-yet-breathable nature (using our tap water).  The demo was convincing, and not having to repaint for 40 years sounded good to us, so we looked at the bountiful color palette and made plans to have our new House painted.  Two other contributing factors were that our existing paint was getting mildewed in a few places; and our New House was not painted one uniform color when we bought it - it was three or four distinct shades of off-white: it would be nice to have a house painted one continuous color.

Flushing Update

You may remember from this Episode that we had been having some troubles with our downstairs 1/2 bath toilet, and we thought we had the troubles resolved.  Well, we were mistaken - our troubles continued and built up to the point where the toilet ran and ran and the tank never filled up.  So we decided to take the drastic step of replacing the entire inner workings of the tank and flush mechanism.

For the benefit of those who don't recall, our 1/2 bath and our upstairs toilet have fancy compressed-air units in their tanks that perform the flushing action, so persuading one of them to stop running is a little more complicated than it is on your standard flushing mechanism.  Here's a picture of the unit in question.

As you can see, there is some water at the bottom of the tank, and the tank should be completely dry.  You can also see that the wall behind the toilet never got completely painted.

Replacing the in-tank assembly required removing the tank, and we took this opportunity to paint the wall.

The old unit on the right, and the new unit on the left.

This is the new unit installed, and as you can see, the tank is dry, as it should be - all of the water is supposed to stay inside the inner tank.

Look at that.  It's nice and level.  And so far the new assembly seems to be working as it should.









Houselft Part Two

In addition to paint color and type, we had to decide what to do with the wooden facade of our New House - do we leave it as-is and have the paint guys repair it, or do we cover it with stucco and pretend it never existed?  We chose to do the latter.  We also chose to keep the wood framing round the windows, front door, and garage door, instead of getting those newfangled moldings that you see on other houses that have been facelifted.

The first team of workers came to our New House and installed the chicken wire and tar paper, and that crew was great.  They didn't trample our succulents or break any of our little solar yard lights.

Look at that chicken wire.  And those not-trampled succulents.

This is a pile of old, damaged wood, and a rain spout or two.

It looks better already!












Alas, we cannot say that the next crew was as kind to our succulents or solar yard lights.  They did great stucco work, but in the proccess they blindly and callously walked on top of and through our succulent garden with no regard for our succulent friends (we mentioned this damage in the previous Episode).  And they broke at least one of our little solar yard lights.  They were the most careless of the crews that worked on our houselift. The company did compensate us somewhat, but we were quite annoyed.  As I said, they did good stucco work, as you can see below.

This is the first layer of stucco.  The workers were kind enough to leave the back door uncovered so that we could go in and out of the house.

This is more of the first layer of stucco.

This is the final layer of stucco.  Even unpainted it looks like a brand new house, except for the cable dangling in front of the window.

That's some nice texturing.

New stucco, meet old stucco.  And here are some more dangling cables that the stucco guys dislodged.

















Harvest Time

Some of our fruit trees have yielded bountiful harvests this year.  Our pear and nectarine trees, in particular, were extremely fruitful.

This photo shows only a part of the bountiful harvest.  We have harvested more pears this year than in the previous three years combined, and there are still a lot of pears ripening on our tree.  We think that the pear tree is doing much better this year because of our ongoing vigilance in keeping it free of fire blight.


Houselift Part Three

And now what you have all been waiting for, or what you impatient ones have skipped ahead for, the reveal of our houselift results.  See for yourself.

Voila!  Our houselift is complete.  As you can see, the painters did a marvelous job of masking off our house number, and the mailbox is now much closer to being level.

This is how our New House looked when we first bought it.

Continuing around to the garage area.  The colors we chose are Blue Glow for the main color and Burgundy Dash for the trim.

There was some left-over primer and paint in both colors, so let us know if you need something painted and you want the paint to last for forty (yes, 40) years.

The maker of the paint claims that this paint actually reflects the sun's heat, resulting in cooler wall temperatures.

We finish up with these two pictures of the back of the house.  How many different shades of off-white do you see in this first picture?

Finally, our New House has walls of one color all the way around!












Happy painting.
    bIsh

New House Blog: Episode LXXXVIIII - Gardens Galore!!

Once again it is time for the somewhat annual spring planting and gardening Episode at the New House Blog, and as usual every one of our defined gardens has been updated and/or added to.  As part of this garden updating we encountered a tricky root, and found some long lost garden sentinels. Additionally, we dug up a pre-Bishopian artifact, dealt with a water leak, and acquired a couple of new tools.  As a bonus, there may be some subtle (or non-subtle) hints and clues regarding another not-quite-complete project that we will be discussing in an upcoming Episode.  See if you can figure out what the project was. :)

Garden 1: Food Garden

We'll get things started with our food garden.  Every spring we clear out the weeds and remnants of the previous spring's food garden and we prepare the ground for fresh planting.

This is the freshly-prepped ground for our 2016 food garden.  The green plant you see is our strawberry plant that has been going strong since 2012.  One change you may notice is that the catnip is gone.  We have moved the catnip from the garden to a spot near our blueberry bushes, so as to provide easier access to the catnip.

This year our strawberry plant got some new friends in the form of some hula berry plants.  Yes, hula berry.  We had never heard of them before, either.  While approaching a local Home Depot to purchase some garden soil we saw signs for hula berries, so we picked up a four-pack (they were only available in four-packs). Each four-pack consists of three hula berry plants and one red strawberry plant that is a pollinator for the other three.

Here you can see the new plants surrounding the established plant. Hula berries are supposed to be white, and the taste is supposed to be similar to pineapple.  One week after planting they seem to be thriving.

Other plantings so far include: various lettuces - including deer tongue and rosette tatsoi, persian cucumbers, crenshaw melons, honeydew melons, and blue Hopi Azul corn.  Still to be planted, as of this writing, are potatoes, more lettuces, and onions.

Garden 1b: Discoveries

While prepping the garden for planting we made some unexpected discoveries. First up was the discovery of a substantial tree root of some kind.  We were surprised that we had not encountered this root before, and it was in the way so it had to go.

We've battled roots before, but they were closer to the surface and not quite this entrenched.  How could we get this root out of the ground, or at least remove the section that was interfering with our garden? There was no room to swing an ax or pickax, and it would have been a prodigious endeavor dig a hole large enough to permit ax/pickax swinging.  Likewise, there was no room for a traditional tree saw.  What to do?

I had in my mind the idea that maybe there existed an attachment for my DeWalt cordless drill that would make it a circular saw - a kind of circular saw bit.  Alas, such a thing does not seem to exist.  Time for a new tool!  After a thorough search of a local Home Depot (not the same one where we saw the hula berries), and after questioning a HD staff member, I discovered the tool that would make short work of the offending root.

I chose the pictured Dremel Multi-Max MM45 oscillating tool, and as you can see it made quick work of the root.  I had no idea such a tool existed, but now that I've seen it in action I can think of a lot of other potential uses. Yes, both of the pictured blades were used.

This is the new view into the hole. So far none of the local trees has shown any signs of trauma or loss of vitality.







Discoveries 2

The next discovery items are the result of a family visit about two years ago.  Said family left some garden guardians, seen in this Episode, and at some point they were missing and presumed lost, but we have uncovered them again and restored them to their rightful place of guardianship.

They have lost some of their original color, but otherwise appear to be in good shape.











Discoveries 3

This third discovery takes us into BYA (Back Yard Archaeology) territory, for it seems to be another pre-Bishopian artifact.

As you can see, it appears to be some sort of rusted metal washer, about 1" in diameter.

This is the reverse side.  We don't know why the pre-Bishopians buried this washer, and we still have not been able to determine why they used so much rusted metal.

New Team Member

Welcome to our newest team member.  Meet Hatch.  Hatch is...well, Hatch seems to be a useful combination of hatchet, sickle, machete, edger, and saw.  We have found plenty of use for Hatch, mainly involving weeding.












Garden 2; Cactus Garden

At least one of us is under the impression that our cactus garden is open to continuous expansion and enlargement, and to that end we have added a second new cactus this year (the other new cactus, the eve's needle crest can be seen in this Episode).

This is our new San Pedro Cactus (Trichocereus pachanoi f. mostruosa). According to one web site, this is a very rare variety of San Pedro cactus.

And this is the overview of our cactus garden as it is now.  We're happy to report that everything survived the wet winter, and we're seeing a lot of new growth already.






Garden 3: Pottery Garden

We have refreshed and replanted our pottery garden, as usual.

This picture is from last April, but it looks pretty much the same, so I didn't feel the need to take a new picture.  For herbs this year we have basil, parsley and thyme.  For peppers we have yellow, green and red bells, along with super chili peppers and Big Jim peppers.

Water Leak

We recently discovered a water leak among the piping at the top of our water heater, and we thought it best to stop said leak.  Fortunately, it was a small drip and not a gushing fountain.

Here you can see where the water was dripping. These pipes, the shutoff valve, and the expansion tank were installed brand-new when the water heater was installed.  As such they were still under warranty, so we called up our friends at Benjamin Franklin Plumbing and asked them to come and take care of this.  They repaired the leak and flushed our water heater during the same visit.

This is the offending assembly.  Our theory is that it was not adequately tightened when it was originally installed, which allowed the leak to develop over time.

Looking into the offending assembly you can see some nice build-up.  This is part of why we use a water purifier for our drinking water.









Garden 4: Succulent Garden

We had a couple of supposedly-professional  work crews out at our New House doing a large, complicated project, and one of said crews carelessly trampled several of our succulents and some of our asparagus ferns.  Our succulents are hardy plants, but we lost several and had to replace them.  We decided not to just do straight replacement - we chose new and different succulents for added variety and beauty.  The asparagus ferns were straight replacements, however.

Replacing a trampled coppertone stonecrop is this beautiful Sedum Comixtum (top left) and a Crassula Pagoda plant (lower right).  The comixtum should be a spreading plant that will provide ground covering.  The pagoda should grow tall and straight.

In this photo you can see two damaged succulents and two new.  At bottom center is a damaged perle von nurnberg, which is slowly recovering and growing again.  Just above you you can see the damaged black prince, which is also recovering and growing.  At the left of the photo you can see a stalk from one of our damaged kokino aeoniums.

This closeup shows one of our new Crassula Marginata Variegatas.  We planted three of these beautiful little guys, and we hope they provide plentiful ground cover.

Looking between the stalks of a Madagascar pencil cactus shows another carssula marginata variegata (middle), a Rainbow Elephant Bush (portulacara afria variegata)(bottom), and a Green Jelly Bean (sedum pachyphytum)(top right).

Here is a better view of the green jelly bean.

My favourite of the new succulents is the beautiful Pen Wiper (kalanchoe marmorata), also known as Audrey 3 (center bottom).  The other new succulent in this picture is the Lavender Steps (senecio crassissimus).  Audrey 3 replaces a stopmed-on kokino aeonium, and the lavender steps are more of an addition than a direct replacement.






Have you figured out what the other big project was?
   bIsh