Accomplishment

The field that runs alongside our gravel road is mainly used to intermittently house horses and, on weekends, people who come and ride them for the day.

Last week, someone came along and dumped a truckload of construction rubble at the end of it that the horses don't really use. We wondered if accepting construction debris might be another way for the owner to make money from the property, and then Bob noticed that the debris seemed to contain a fair number of bricks.

Our front, umm, area is tiled where the car goes, poured cement leading up to the door, and semi-cemented/semi-hard-packed-dirt in the remaining wedge-shaped space, backed by an untreated cinder block wall. Yeah, it's about as attractive as it sounds.

We'd like to fix it up a little, but there's no real danger of anything actually growing there, since the dirt is so packed and part of it is actually concrete anyway, and all our "it really belongs outside" stuff ends up leaning up against the wall.

I thought if we could loosen the soil just a bit along the bottom of the wall (and find another spot for all the junk), maybe we could get some sort of climbing vine to go up the wall at least. And when Bob saw the bricks, he suggested asking for some of them and stacking a couple of rows up to maybe hold in some additional dirt, in which perhaps something might one day grow.

I asked about the bricks yesterday, and the guy said he'd actually brought them to "load" the horses. Not sure if that means he's going to train them to carry loads, or build something up which they might walk when loaded into the trucks, or ... well, anything really.

But he also said we could take some, and when I got home from dropping Bob off this morning (he has to leave the country every 90 days to renew his tourist visa), the same guy waved me over and said he'd pulled some bricks aside, and that I should leave those and pick what I wanted from the rest.

So that's what I did, using a couple of the cat litter buckets and making ... well, I didn't count at the time, but about nine two-bucket trips based on the number of bricks. They're homemade adobe bricks, clearly from an old house that was demolished, and a decent number of them were relatively whole.

I found a little chunk of broken cinder block with which to knock bits of mortar off the bricks, and now we have a pretty little dry-stacked wall into which we may eventually place some dirt:




The whole thing probably took an hour and a half or two. Then when I was done the kitty got up from her nap, strolled over to the door and said, "Dayum. How long was I asleep?"


And then she said, "Okay. Nuffa dat."


The end.

More fun than coding a Blogger template

I'd only played with Google SketchUp once before (and I liked it then too).

This time, I'm getting paid for it.

Behold how I spent most of my time at work today:


It's a 4x8' solar hot water panel with an 80-gallon hot water heater, adapted for solar use.

I still need to connect the PV panel (the small one at the top) to the pump that it powers (small cylinder in the cold out line), and hook up the expansion tank (medium cylinder above the main tank), but I sure learned a lot about elbows and pipes and, above all, rotating things today.

Very fun.

Birth of a Driveway

Well, to tell the truth, it's not fully born. Not yet. But its water broke today.

May 10


May 11

May 13


Yesterday







Today








All I have to say about today's series is that that picture of the city guys looking at the fountain is about 15 minutes after they shut off the water half a mile uphill from us, once the pressure was finally mostly spent. The guy that punched the hole, and the guy next to him, and the pine tree behind him, were all totally drenched. They had the rock over it by the time I was called outside so I didn't get to see how high it went, but I saw the results, and it went high.

See that freshly-dug path down in the previous post?

I choose to believe that sod laid after dark and in the rain has a better chance of taking root than that which is laid under any other conditions.

Those who might be in a position to know otherwise (and he knows who he is) should probably refrain from comment at this time.

If anybody needs me, I'll be across the street having a beer and some mediocre food that I did not cook.

After & Before

First, an "After" picture of the front steps. They look especially good when wet. This is good, because that's how they're going to be for the next few months.

We'll need to repaint the grates; somehow they're not blending in as well as they did with the green-painted cement steps...


On to some Before pictures of the driveway project.

It took the dogs all of about 15 minutes to figure out what the freshly-delivered mountains of sand and rock were for. They like the sand better, and it's proving hard to keep that tarp in place.


Here are a couple of pictures showing why we want a driveway:



In addition to, or rather as part of, the whole driveway extravaganza, we're putting in a sidewalk up to the front steps.

Alex got tired of explaining why his vision of the sidewalk (to the right of the tree) was better than mine (to the left), so he finally said to go ahead and put it on the left. Now I just hope I was right...he's not even here to give his opinion of the layout before things get permanent.

We do nothing by halves

Here's what's going on out my window today:


We hope to have a driveway out of all of that by the end of, say, next week.

It's a good thing the driveway plans call for a new drainage-ditch-crossing mechanism, because this is what the sand and rock trucks did to The Grate Formerly Known As Flat: