Hurrah without the "H"...

It is hard to believe that it's been three+ weeks since I was on here to post.

Lots has happened. Some hasn't happened.

I haven't figured out the conduit wiring to the barn, haven't gotten the north door header replaced, haven't gotten as far as I'd like vacuuming the barn loft.

However, I HAVE made progress on getting the well pump hooked up. I have gotten a lot of stuff out of my old garage into the barn loft so I have room to work at both locations now. And I have gotten the pool up and running. A yard of sand, a new liner, new water, new hoses and she's a going concern! The water is slowly warming up and should be in good shape later this week, even without a blanket on it.

It took us about three days work to get the old liner out, the sand all cleared of roots and problems, the new sand added for the berm around the bottom edge, the hoses hooked up and the water to fill it.

My friend Charles came over one day and helped me get the old liner out. We cut it along the bottom edge and took it out in sections. It had been filled with all sorts of debris, leaves, etc. So it weighed a ton. But we got it.

The sand was an issue. The online instructions for the liner specified a 3" by 3" berm. Directions in the box -with- the liner specified a 6" by 6" berm. Even that was barely enough in several places. My friend Todd and his family (wife & eight kids) came over one day and brought his trailer with a yard of sand on it, twice what we thought we'd need. They and the kids set to work with a will and moved about a ton of sand in five gallon buckets in a very short time. Those kids can WORK! As it turned out, we had one half of a five gallon bucket left over. We basically used the whole thing. (Deduction: always buy more than you think you'll need. Whatever you have in leftover is no loss when compared to the cost of making two trips for supplies. Feels extravagant, but it's really not when you consider time and cost of travel.)

The new liner was then removed from its box and laid out on the floor of the pool enclosure. We gradually got the lip into its slot around the rim. I went next door and my wonderful neighbor, Janet, let me hook up a long string of hoses to start filling the pool enough so the wind wouldn't blow it away before the pool water guy arrived. The sound of those kids laughing and giggling as they helped us spread out the lining and smooth out any wrinkles was worth a million bucks. They were treating the bottom as a big "slip and slide" as the water began to spread out across the surface. They'd grab one another by the arm and drag each other around, water spraying in all directions, shrieking as they went, oh, it was delightful to hear. I want this place to always echo with the laughter of children.

Getting the pump and hoses properly hooked up was one of the worst parts of the whole thing, but I managed. At one point I had leaks at every place there was a fitting that screwed into a housing. Whoever had last assembled the thing never put Teflon tape around the threads. I had to take the hoses off to get the fittings out. Of course, many of these can't be pulled off, they have to be cut off. And then they're too short, so they have to be replaced... at $7 a foot.... For a few pennies worth of Teflon tape. Argh.

And, of course, they don't make the part to replace just the outlet nozzle where the water returns to the pool, so I had to replace the whole assembly that goes through the wall of the pool. And, of course, the new part demands a larger hole than the old one. And, of course, the pool is filled to within about three inches of the hole at this point, so dropping any little metal shaving is potentially going to fall between the liner and the steel band that holds it up and be a leak, so I can't use the dremel tool... But I was very careful and managed to enlarge the hole with some aviation snips I've had laying around for almost 30 years. (Vindication for my pack ratish ways...) I blunted the sharp edges and applied a double layer of duct tape and installed the new fitting just as the truck pulled up for the last load of water. Whew!

Oh, and the motor, that had been sitting there for probably five or six years unused seemed to be seized up when I flicked the switch. But I grabbed the shaft with a vise grip and worked it a little and it freed up and seems to be working just fine. It's run around the clock since Thursday now with no perceptible flaws.

I wanted to take down some trees near the pool to keep the leaves out of the pool and allow more sunlight earlier in the day. In dropping the first one I almost missed the pool railing. Another two feet and I'd have cleared it... Fortunately when it hit it only bent out one vertical member and sheared off a couple rivets that hold up the "fence" around the catwalk that circles the pool. The vertical part I could straighten and will reinforce with some aluminum channel I found in a roadside trash pile. The panels that popped out from sheared rivets I can put back in place pretty easily. So all's well that ends well... One of my students came by last Friday with his chain saw (mine is in the shop) and we took down some more trees along the road. We barely scratched the surface though. There's a LOT of cutting ahead to clear all those trees out of there.

All of this was a lot of work and might seem pretty frivolous when the house has so much that needs doing. That's probably true. But the other night I got to take a dip and float around the pool under the stars in the moonlight, listening to the sound of the night critters. It all seemed worth it then. It's a small step of something DONE, amidst a sea of tasks that seem endless and overwhelming at times. The human need for definition and closure should not be underestimated, IMHO.

The kitchen cabinets are also well under way. There's been several glitches and hitches to figure out. Some of our cabinets are custom designed and we've had some challenges to figure out. But our "go to" guy, Jason, is a whiz with cabinetry and really doing outstanding work. He needed, however, the dimensions for the range exhaust hood.

"Simple," thinks I to myself. "I'll just go down to the appliance store and pick one out."

"Not so," said Capt. Murphy.

It's taken about three days of visits to hither, thither and yon to get this worked out. First I visited "Ye Olde Appliance Shoppe" and learned I had to find out the BTU rating for the cook top. Back to home, I scrambled through papers and located that. Then I had to find out how many CFM (cubic feet per minute) of ventilation that many BTU demands. About a day online trying to figure that out. (FYI, I found one site that had a formula of 1 CFM for every 100 BTU, sounded reasonable.) Now we need to find out how big the duct needs to be to carry 900 CFM and work from there. A little math, a little research, voila! (10" round)

The space I'd figured would carry an exhaust fan (3" x 10") is not large enough to carry this duct. Where can I take a 10" duct out of that location? It occurs to me that I could go straight up through my office upstairs and box in the duct, putting bookshelves along the wall to cover the depth of the duct work. Voila! Solution.

I bumble around looking at various models and types of hoods that are wide enough and have enough CFM rating to fit our needs. One site offers a model where the blower mounts outside and thus the hood doesn't have any motors in it. Quieter and better, in my estimation. My wife can cook and converse with our guests and no one will be going "eh?" from the noise of the vent hood. I look up the local dealer and it's the same appliance store where I started my search a few days ago. Different brand than they'd directed me to though.

The first hood the salesman showed me on my return trip has an opening of 8" not 10" at the top. Their suggestion was that I have 10" duct from the blower all the way to the hood, then reduce that to 8" at the hood. Which made as much sense to me as using a straw on a milkshake with big chunks of chocolate in it. Not much is going to fit through that 8" opening. It defeats the whole purpose of the big fan and big duct, as far as I could see.

I took the paperwork and walked outside and looked it over. At the bottom was a phone number for the Broan Corp., so I called it and a very nice operator put me through to a tech rep who suggested a different model vent hood that could accommodate the 10" duct all the way through from the fan to the hood. Whew! I was amazed that a) I immediately spoke with someone who spoke English b) knew what they were doing and c) offered a solid solution to my problem with little hesitation. Amazingly this new model was $240 cheaper than the one that I was shown first... I wonder how that happened..? Tomorrow morning I drop off the specs at the cabinet shop and they'll have all they need to crank out the cabinets. Now I just have to build the room they'll go into... ;)

"Well," you ask, "this is all very interesting, but why the title of this posting?"

During the Civil War... (my friends are rolling their eyes about now, every story has to involve the Civil War somehow :) this was a phrase they used to describe your stomach's reaction to the smell of rotting horse flesh. I've never had to bury a horse, let alone several hundred, but last week I did have to fish a groundhog out of my cistern.

A few months ago my buddy Todd and I pulled the old kitchen cabinets out and put them in the new shop. This exposed the hole that goes through the kitchen floor into a 5,000 gallon cistern that lies below it. It has water about 2.5 feet deep in it right now and I put a few boards over it, so we didn't step on the hole, but they were not enough. A groundhog found his way into the house, smelled water and pushed aside the boards to investigate. We've had VERY dry weather, so he was probably very thirsty. So he leaned waaaay down to get to the water, and went kerplunk. By the time I found him he'd been in there for a few days and the place reeked.

I decided to fish him out at night when the air was cooler. I set up some bright lights so I could see down in there, then mounted a fan to blow fresh air through the area, dropped two tablets of pool chlorine into the cistern to minimize the smell and sprayed a bunch of Lysol down the hole before I turned on the fan. I had prepared an old plastic 5 gallon bucket that was split down the side. I bored some holes in the bottom to let the water drain out, put a rock in it so it was heavy and wouldn't float, then fastened on a rope and lowered it into the cistern. The water was just deep enough that this might work. Using a shovel as a paddle I swished the water, trying to create a bit of a circular current, hoping he'd float into view. (I was hoping he was still floating and hadn't sunk in there, back out of sight beneath the floor.) I didn't relish the thought of climbing down in there to haul him out. This was bad enough. Finally he glided into view and I managed to get him nosed into the bucket and enough of him in that he wouldn't fall out. Holding my breath, up he came and onto a large plastic garbage bag, bucket and all. I gathered up the four corners and headed out the back door for the hill above the house. I walked briskly, holding my breath, gasping to the side away from my cargo at infrequent intervals. Finally I got far enough from the house to be safe, and pitched the whole thing into the bushes along the path. If the local scavengers don't carry him off I'll come back to bury him in a while. And that's why the title for today's posting...

Aren't old houses fun to remodel? :)

Plans for using the cistern for potable water are currently under review...

And it's not even August yet...

Cheerz!

Doug