bacheloring it this week, trenching

Aimee is gone on a business trip this week and Sam and I are left alone to our own devices. Our devices this week are shovels and wheelbarrows among train tracks, sand tables, trips to Costco, reading books and episodes of Team Umizoomi, Special Agent Oso, Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, Jake and the Neverland Pirates and Doc something -or-other (McStuffin maybe).

We spent the afternoon out back while I dug the loose dirt out of the sprinkler trench. Sam tried to help but was mostly just taking half little shovel fulls of dirt from the trench, the wheelbarrow, the small dirt pile left over from moving the dirt yesterday. He was really trying and it is the intentions that matter, I guess. I did end up getting him interested in finding big rocks from the ground or wheelbarrow or pile he was digging from and putting them in the red bucket; I will have to remove them anyways, so it was worth a try. I think he ended up with maybe a dozen or so, but it occupied him for a little while.

And when that failed to interest him very long, we went and got the sand table out and I had Sam shovel the fresh sand from the 5 gallon bucket to the table. 

So after working out in the yard, we read a couple books and since Sam wasn't resting well, I laid down with him. He finally cuddled his baby doll and kitty, with me using his teddy bear for a pillow and went to sleep. This picture is taken in the mirror beside his bed, which is why it looks a little weird.

It was almost 4pm when he finally settled down and fell asleep so I got up and took a shower while he rested. I guess he really needed the rest cuz when I got him up after my shower so he could wake up enough to go get dinner and go to Costco to get some provisions and ultimately a frozen yogurt/ice cream machine on total impulse. He was really sweaty and hot from sleeping under the covers in a 75 degree room and was just not waking up well, so I sat with him on the couch for about 10 minutes, talking with him. I then realized that the mail was probably here and carried him out to get the mail, then set him down on the LR couch while I got the RedBox movie we got for a free rental for Mother's Day and checked how long the rental went for. When I got back to get Sam's shoes on, I found him like this:

Then in the car, I think he dozed off again. We had even gone down the street a couple houses to say hi to Turbo, who is our neighbor's dog that Sam really likes. But as soon as we got on our way to get food, here is Sam in the back seat. He was so warm from napping that he wanted to wear the coat and gloves when we went out the door, but it was windy and a little cool, so I can understand.

He finally woke up fully by the time we had dinner and got to Costco. That was a quick trip and then on the way home we got a call from Aimee on her business trip. We ended up calling her back when we got home after a stop at FM for gas and movie return. Aimee got her Google+ account set up finally and we did a hangout and got to see her room and get some face time while she is away.

Sam wanted to take a picture to send to Mom of his extra special really big surprise he made for her this morning; evidently the torch light in the LR was too bright, but not too bright to wave.

I was kinda worried he may not sleep well tonight but evidently, even with all the napping, he was still tired enough that he didn't have any issues falling asleep.

Hating the rain

It has been raining since last weekend and I haven't been able to get outside to work on anything cuz everything is all muddy. It is really amazing how day the weather went from the 80s and sunny to rainy and 60s. There was only about a week of 70s and on and off clouds between the two.

I need to finish the sprinkler repairs but can't when it is wet. I actually got a lot of the sprinkler repairs done last week but finishing them up will probably have to wait until this weekend when it is suppose to be dry for a couple days. I have to get the filter installed before I can eventually cap all the sprinkler heads, pressure test all the lines I repaired (actually that is all of them), purge all the lines to get out any dirt left in the lines and then install the sprinklers and adjust them

I also got the downspout on the east side of the driveway connected up with the drain grate and the grate set in gravel ready to pour the cement around it and fill in the gap in the driveway. I may try to do the cement this weekend, if the weather is as nice as they say.

I just realized that I also need to get the gutters cleaned out since there is a lot of debris left over from roofing on the south side of the house and to get out the general buildup from tree needles and moss in the rest of the gutters. I really don't want all that stuff down my new drains.

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Labor Days, the rest of the week

So for the rest of the week after Labor Day I worked on:

• digging the rest of the trench to the downspout on the east of the garage including tunneling under the front sidewalk
• filling up the hole in the front with gravel to the drain ports
• installing the drain pipe from the east garage downspout to the drywell and filling in the trench
• capping off the sprinkler lines I hit so I could still water the tree in the front
• digging out the rest of the trench to the downspout on the west side in the back, including tunneling under the sidewalk
• breaking up the sidewalk over my tunnel in the back and removing the cement pieces (I was able to break them by putting a broken piece of cement under one corner after prying it up with the pick axe, then when I found I didn't have a sledge, I jumped on it and it broke)

It was pretty hot that week so I really only worked in the mornings when it was cool and picked Sam up early from the babysitter and had him nap at home. I got to spend a little more time with him once he got home, before his nap, got to put him down for a nap by reading a book to him and got to play and hang out with him when he got up from his nap, when he woke up before Aimee got home that is. On Thursday, he had fallen at the library with the babysitter and had a pretty big goose egg on his forhead, so he slept really good that afternoon. The pictures don't do it justice, especially when the babysitter, Sarah, said it was at least twice as big right after he did it, prompting them to go home and ice it.

Here are some pictures from the week:

Front drywell filled to ports with gravel and trench extended to the sidewalk

Front drywell drain line in, under sidewalk

before I started extending the trench, but after removing some of the loose dirt from the machined trench.

trench under sidewalk

removed sidewalk

Trench under the sidewalk with sidewalk removed

Garden auto-watering

Finally got the drip watering system installed on the new raised garden beds. It took almost all of yesterday afternoon messing with it. Although, I did get distracted by pruning the tomatoes (they are in their pre-pruned state in the picture above) and getting them tied up and supported better; they had fallen over and were starting to grow up from laying down. They look a lot better now and are not so dense with dead leaves/branches on the inside.

pruned tomatoes

Since the sprinkler system is having problems, due to the irrigation well producing a rust or clay that is clogging the valves every time I turn it on, I decided to buy a faucet timer I saw at the wholesale store and bought an adapter so I could hook a hose to the drip system I had attached to the irrigation well system last year. It works pretty good, looks like everything is getting adequately watered this morning, but we will have to see how it is at the end of a long hot day; may need adjust the time up if it is not getting enough.

new timer

water lines

I also transplanted one of the pumpkins on Saturday from the raised bed since there were 3 on each of the two hills I planted in there. They are getting kinda big and invading the tomatoes. I may just have to find someone to take a couple of the smaller plants, but need to make sure I can successfully transplant one before I try that... I moved it into a large bark section of the yard just outside the garden area, where Aimee was going to plant some wildflowers but I guess gave up on the idea. I had to get more dirt for the transplant to make a small mound for it. I watered the heck out of it but the next day the leaves were all yellowing. It looks better today with several waterings yesterday and today.

pumpkin transplant

On the positive side, the one pumpkin plant is going gang busters and has like 15 little pumpkins forming all along it. On another note, the big one on the other mound I tried to get to hang over the side of the raised bed but I noticed yesterday that it twisted the vine and it was kinda splitting. I tried to support it better, but not too successfully, so we get to see how it does, hopefully it will adapt well.

Oh and the lillies are still doing really good, too.

front lilies

back lilies

We had dinner outside that night and ate almost nothing from the store; it either came from our garden or from the farmer's market.

Fourth of July

We had a fun fourth. We spent the day outside; Aimee washed the cars and I worked on trying to clean out the sprinkler lines that got some kind of debris in them. Sam had fun getting wet with the hose and trying to help me. It was a mildly hot day so the mist from Aimee spraying the cars actually felt kinda good.

We did some fireworks with Sam at 7 before he went to bed, then got him up at 10 and did some more. He was a little disoriented when we got him up for the later ones, but soon got pretty excited to see all the fireworks in the relative dark, in the street outside out house. We had bought a package of fireworks from Costco with a variety of sizes of fountains. We did a lot of the smaller ones before he went to bed and all the rest, which included the biggest fountains at night.



Here are the empties and the final pics from the night before we went inside:

It was a lot of fun and I am glad we got him up for the nighttime show. He really seemed to like it despite signing "loud" repeatedly for the "illegal" fireworks that the people at the end of the street were firing off. We will definitely be doing this in the future, especially since Sam went down to sleep afterword without much of a problem. We did have to help him calm down a little from the excitement but it didn't take long and was expected, so easily managed.

Here are some pics of the "good", yet illegal, fireworks that were being shot off down the street from us.

Sprinkler controller rewire

So, the deal with the sprinkler controller rewire was that I needed to move the controller and rewire the sprinklers so I would have enough wire to have the cable neatly routed along the ceiling or in the walls, or at the very least, so it didn't drape in front of the garage doors and restrict access.

When I first installed the sprinklers before the 4th of July, it was to get it ready so we could leave to go out of town, so I just barely got it wired to allow us to leave when we wanted. In the following months it became apparent that the controller was not in a very convenient place since I was adjusting the watering time weekly.

**Side Note**
The local water and electric company displays on their site the suggested percentage of water that a lawn will need based on a calibration of your watering system of 1 inch per week or water for lawns and .5 inch of water for shrubs. So for example the setting for this week is 1.1 so I set my seasonal adjustment to 110% and my timer automatically increases the times for all the zones by 10%. When it is not as hot or wetter, the value may be less than 1 meaning my setting would be less than 100%, giving my lawn less when it didn't need additional watering.
**End Side Note**

It would probably help if I had my system calibrated, but I am working on that a little bit at a time, as I have about 20% of the lawn measured for my current settings. I will eventually have a reading for several places around the lawn and can average them to see if I need to increase or decrease my default zone times.

Anywho... I digress as this is about the re-wiring. I decided to move the controller by the inside people door of the garage so it was easier to get to when changing the seasonal adjustment. I bought some additional 14awg electrical wiring for the irrigation pump relay switch connection so I could wire the pump separately from the irrigation wiring. This which allowed me to use the one length of cable for the front yard valves in the garage and the existing wire from the backyard valves was plenty long.

For the backyard wire, I ran it along the house to the back people door and up the side of the door into a hole into the attic space. I pushed as much as I could into the hole thinking it would be easy to get to from inside, but I ended up needing to crawl into the side attic space, where there was barely room for me to crawl in on my belly. It was quite cramped and upon getting back in there I found that my efforts to push as much cable as I could to make it easier had resulted in a ball of wire that I would have to fight to untangle... then my flashlight battery decided it was done and I was in almost pitch black with a little light coming in from various places from the garage.

I used my cell to call Aimee who was inside the house... and called, and called, and called for about 5 minutes when I started to get a little claustrophobic. I started pounding on the rafters and finally got Aimee to come out to see what was going on. Unfortunately, my being in a tight space for that long doesn't lead me to treat her with very much patience and I end up yelling at her to hurry up.

At this point, not only is my wits at their end being up there, but my back is giving me very specific signals that it needs to get out of the contorted position I am forced to be in. Aimee helps me get to the line with fresh battery and helps pull the cable through from the garage side of the attic so I can get to it when I crawl out. I finally get backed out of the attic space a little at a time and am covered in dust and sweat from being up there for about 30 minutes.

So the actual wiring part was quite easy comparedly, and got completed by the end of the night. I am glad to have it finished and as soon as I get the one side of the garage cleared out when I put up the next set of cabinets, I will be able to finish tacking up the wire for the front valves so it isn't just hanging along the wall.

The front sprinklers

I did the front sprinklers after I did the back yard ones in the last post. They were a little more tricky since I decided to replace the half inch PVC pipe that was fed off the irrigation pump with 3/4" pipe. This fed into the new manifold for the front sprinklers, which I had to modify to add a fourth branch for an new spigot by the front corner of the garage. I always had to fish a rather long hose from the back of the house to use the irrigation well water on stuff in the front yard; it was cumbersome and hard to manage. Not any more...

The project turned out to be more than I bargained for since it ended up needing a lot more than I expected. I had to buy an additional control valve for the spigot since the timer would only let me turn on the pump switch when it was turning a zone on, so I made the spigot a new zone. Now I can manually run one of the programs which only turns on that zone; run the pump for the time I need to use the spigot and then turn it off. This ends up working for both the front and back spigots since the one in the back is branched off the supply line for the back yard sprinklers.

Here are the pics:




The biggest setback I had while putting the front sprinkler controls in was that I snapped a connecting piece in the PVC pipe that went from the pump to the well while I was trying to reposition things for the new 3/4" pipe connected. I will post that story tomorrow.

The only thing that leaked when I turned it all on was the additional control valve I added for the spigots since I forgot to tighten it down when i was dry fitting all the pieces together. It started spraying everywhere and would have been much easier to tighten up if I would have added a coupler above it, like I did below it; something to add later. Otherwise it ended without a hitch and has been running for several weeks now without issue. I just need to add a rain sensor to shut it off when it rains like it has the past week.

One of those tasks

One of the tasks I had put on my list, just so I could mark it complete, was putting in automatic sprinkler valves for the existing sprinkler system. I had completed it before the July 4th holiday so we wouldn't have to worry about watering while we were gone for the weekend, but I wanted to be able to track that I had completed it then. Well, it actually isn't completed yet, since I still have to burry the control wire and finish routing the wiring in the garage so it isn't hanging in the middle of the garage door access.

Here are some before and after pictures:

Digging the (big) hole to expose the pipes.



Then, voila, the new access cover and piping is finished!!!



And the timer that still needs the wiring finished so it doesn't block the door:



I was even impressed the way I was able to set the timer up to turn our irrigation well pump on before it started the schedule for watering, and then turn it off when it was finished.

I will have to split the task for installing the control valves and doing the wiring of the timer so that I can mark the control valves completed and then have another one to mark completed when I finish routing the wiring! :)