Month: January 2024

Three more sacks

This seismic project is really going to take a long time! OK, so I got started digging out the opposite side. I’ve been looking forward to removing this step for a while.

After I’d chipped out the steps, I realized: There’s going to be a gaping hole at the bottom of the door. I put the concrete breaking on hold while I worked on extending the door by 14 inches!

I just glued a piece of wood on the top and the bottom. Not the most ideal method, but it was quick, and this door isn’t a beauty. I then used 10″ long screws to screw through this wood into the door frame. Really difficult to keep the screw going straight: Actually it came out the face on a couple of places. Ooops.

This is how things looked before I got into messing it up (so tidy!):

First I took off all the concrete and put it directly into a big yellow sack. Then I got started on the soil. Manual labor is hard.

Here it is, dug out (well, as much as I can do right now). On the right side, the foundation is much higher up than the ground level, so I had to leave the soil sloped back to that. I’ll be taking out all that foundation eventually.

On the left side, because they had poured concrete against the wood, there’s gaping hole all along the bottom of their house where the wood has rotten about 2 inches into the wall. It was all filled with soil. Not good!

I saved the small pieces of broken concrete to use as gravel while I’m working on this. Hopefully it will keep the amount of mud down.

So that’s what two sacks full of soil and one full of concrete look like. The weather forecast says 1 inch of rain on Wednesday: That’s the day they are picking the sacks up. I’d better cover them with a tarp!

When a lot happens, little gets written

Is that how it is? Well, last year, very little happened on the house, but a lot of other things did happen: Multiple trips. Marathons. But I’ll have to write about them another time. Just wanted to try to catch up on the house a bit here.

I decided to remove some more concrete, and plant a tree:

This soil has been below concrete, and compacted for so long that it can’t be healthy. I dug out quite deep, then threw in some compost: that’s some of the buggy apples from the ground (I guess it wasn’t quite rotten yet.) I layered compost and soil all the way to the top, then planted the tree.

And here is our new little Japanese maple. I hope it thrives here.

So the pile of concrete and dirt from my earlier post sat in our driveway for about 3 months. I had it covered in plastic to prevent a mud slick when it rained. My initial plan was to stockpile it so that I’d get a dumpster and fill it in one go. Well, I just got tired of having a huge pile in the driveway (it was in the way when I took out the garbage, it was difficult to get out of the car, etc.) And life was filling in a lot more of the weekends than I’d expected.

So I used a service called yellowsack. It’s quite a bit more expensive than a dumpster per ton, but if I’m just hauling out 9,000 lb at a time, that fits into three sacks, and they come pick them up with a truck that has a crane on it. No need to reserve street space.

OK, so there’s another project that’s been keeping me busy. I spent a few months reinforcing floor joists. Remember this phot? This one notch, even though it’s about 2″ deep, has probably halved the strength of this 10″ floor joist, because the edge fibers are the most important:

So one by one, I sistered on new joists to the old ones to try to strengthen them back up. I need the joists to be strong for when I’m shoring up the side of the house to replace the foundation.

Had to move some electrical wiring, and removed some rotten wood also.

It’s quite a pain trying to get a full length joist into that space. Actually, I made them a bit short, turned them on their side and pushed one side up high, while the other side I pushed up. Once it was in the space, I could flip it up and push it against the joist. Quite a workout. Don’t ever let an electrician notch a joist.

Oh, I just liked this photo: It’s the bag on my dust collector that’s connected to my table saw and thickness planer. I like how the different wood I was working put different colored stripes.

Roses

Years ago, on an impulse I bought a rose plant from the sale bin outside Lowes for about $3. I planted it against the post for our deck, and it’s loved the location. We get flowers almost all year round. Mole took a photo:

We also did a bit of gardening in the neglected corner of the garden that gets the greywater. It’s a bit of a tricky corner, because it’s the south side, so it gets shaded by the fence on two sides, although in the past tomatoes have grown well here. We decided to get some blueberry bushes. Didn’t realize until after we got them that greywater is not ideal for blueberries, because they are so acid loving. We’ll see how it goes.