This is the latest incarnation of a book nook I build for the classroom of my older daughter’s teacher. She wanted a cozy nook for kids to read in, and this sort of faux building is what I went to school for. She updates it occasionally for certain units/lessons or seasonal themes. This was for Valentines day.
I saw this living room set when we were shopping for our own, I just don’t know what to say, except that, yes, it really was for sale…
I was almost ostracized from the neighborhood for not getting my lights up til last weekend. Well, that’s probably a slight exaggeration, but our neighborhood is probably the most decorated for the holidays I’ve ever lived in. Same basic setup I’ve done since we moved in, but I’ve added 2 more strings of lights each year to the bushes in the front left of the house. Kinda crazy there are now 9 strings at ground level and 4 along the gutter. Once I touch up the photos of my new lights in the back of the house, I’ll probably post them as well. Oh, and please be nice to the friendly folks bringing you all of your Amazon riches.
Really? I have to get stuck, while at work, behind the only train running today?
A new rolling base for the chop saw I got for 15-years of safe driving at work. One of the best tools ever, just right behind my DeWalt cordless drills.
Bentonite Clay, that is. At least that’s what I think is the proper name for the native type of soil we have in our area.
At the top of the above picture you can see where the drain pipe for my neighbors sump pump. You may be wondering why I’m working on my neighbors sump pump drain, and the answer is that through a quirk of building the houses in part of our development, the drain pipes for sump pumps are routed through the neighbors yard along the side of the house, down along the driveway and to the street. A while ago I notices water leaking in the middle of the rocks, but other than a little bit of ice on the side of the driveway in the winter, it was no big deal. Well, the break shifted a bit and got worse as did the volume of rain we got this summer, and the area was getting a bit swampy with more water on the driveway. Then I noticed that the downslope side of the broken pipe had worked its way almost to the surface above the rocks. I decided to finally fix it to alleviate the swampiness and the driveway ice. So I dug it out and pulled out the downslope part. I then dug out a bit more rocks and dirt to be able to seat the new pipe properly. Next, off to Home Depot.
Is that a 10-foot pipe in your trunk? Anyway, I can actually fit a 10-foot length of pipe or wood in my old Saturn. Also got a new utility saw, ABS glue, and a couple fittings.
Here is the newly installed pipe. I didn’t get a picture of the new joint and installation to this point as I had to do it in a rush due to a thunderstorm that blew in. I had to hastily glue the joint and place the pipe in the trough under the sidewalk without cutting it to length, so as to not get soaked. Fortunately I did a good enough job with the ABS glue joint that when the pump was pumping it did not leak, so I was good to rebury it. Except for the foot or so sticking out past the curb into the gutter. I was texting with my friend adventureinlunch.org because I couldn’t think of a good way to cut the end at this point and he suggested using a Fein-type multitool. I luckily had one I had not tried yet, but it worked great with a couple passes.
If I remember to, I’ll go outside and take a picture of how it looks finished. It looks as good as new with all the rocks replaced. I was actually really anal retentive and washed the clay soil off of all the rocks I had earlier removed and placed in a wheel barrow. I actually took it another step and washed them through a screen I had made for another digging/rocks project around my house. That was tedious as all get out, and only I would have know the difference, but it would have always bothered me if I didn’t. But it looks great, and now there will be no ice slick on that corner of the driveway this winter.
This is what I found to recover with last night. Not a bad late summer brew, definitely has the hoppiness of other Sierra Nevada beers, but it doesn’t knock you over with it. Now I have to decide what keg to get for my beer fridge, darn that 5-gallon size constraint of my fridge.
Well, I finally did it, I finished my second window well cover. It took a while, for a variety of reasons, but mostly life. Here are some pictures, I’ll probably come back and edit a bit more, but it’s easier to upload pictures from my computer.
This was a first attempt at basically making a dado cut with a handheld circular saw, to clear the rungs of the egress ladder.
This was my first thought of how to make the joints in the frame. Turned out ugly and not very strong.
This is the type of joint I decided on, a blind screw joint. Rock solid and super tight. First time I had tried this kind of joint, and it was perfect. Comletely unobtrusive.
Here is the screwed together frame in place on the window well for a test fit. Looking good.
Here are the slats as I am measuring and cutting them to size. Much faster this time around as I am lucky to have gotten a DeWalt chop saw as a 15 year safe driving award from work.
Here are all of the pieces done being stained. I stained all of the pieces first, before assembly this time. So much better. Also better was working on the brand new saw horses I built and made a comfortable working height for me, 36″ high.
First step of assembly, attaching what will be the back slat, the one that is against the house.
Here I am about half way through assembly. Using squeeze clamps and spacer blocks cut from the same lumber as the slats.
Here it is, the finished result. Not too bad, for about $80 in lumber, screws, and stain. The top one is the first cover I made last year as a proof of concept, I pulled it inside to refresh the stain on it, as long as I was staining the new one.
Here it is in place. The perspective is a bit off in this picture, it looks much more shallow than it is. This is the legal egress window for the 5th bedroom downstairs, so I had to redesign with that in mind. This cover can just be pushed forward, out of the way.
Here are both covers in place. You can see how close they are to the grass, hose, and play table for my daughters. We have two more window wells around the corner, but they aren’t really accessible, so it’s unlike I will spend the time to make another pair.
Here is me standing on it as a strength test. I wouldn’t jump up and down on it, but as you can see it can hold me. And keep kids, and bunnies like the one who jumped in while I was installing it.
Here’s an edited video of the hail storm, it’s the best I could do with a 7MB file size limit…
Wow, last night we had a crazy hail storm, basically out of nowhere. They were only predicting a 30% chance of thunderstorms, and we got literally golf ball sized hail. Ok, only a few were that big but most were cherry or marble sized. But man, never saw anything like it before.
Below was the first shot I took from my garage, only a minute or so after I got my car inside. Not that my car is anything special, but it could have been a big mess.
Next here is a waterfall of hail going off the back side of our roof and onto our deck. The hail was basically flowing like water. Yes, I know there was water mixed in, but it sure looked like it was hail flowing.
Looking the other way out to our back yard
Here’s the final total of the hail at the end out the downpour. Granted, a lot of this flowed off our roof, but it looks like we had a snow storm in July.
Here’s the aftermath view of our front yard
And one more, the view of our neighbors driveway and car. Don’t feel too bad about the Explorer, its place in the garage was taken up by the Corvette.
Looking around our house today, it looks like we came out fairly well. No leaking windows, no visible siding damage, and no roof damage I could see from the ground. Only thing I really had to do was rake up two bags of leaves that were knocked out of out two big trees in the front and back yards. Knock on wood…
Yeah, another mothers day snow storm. There’s talk of it being close to a record. I need to go shake off some of our newly leafed trees and bushes, its heavy, wet spring snow…