Teleidoscope

Fri, Jul 24, 2009

Projects

Posted at 10:30 pm MDT to Garden

Wednesday evening Jason from the New Creation Hardscapes company came by to pick up the final check for the retaining wall work and discuss future projects. He's going to provide some estimates some time next week, but it looks like things will be more expensive than I had hoped. I am so used to this place that I long ago stopped noticing how badly it is graded.

Jason stopped by this morning to pick up some of the materials that were left over from the retaining wall project. I suggested window wells as a partial solution to some of the grading problems on the east side of the house, and he agreed that they would be useful. The problem is that the bottoms of the basement windows are too low to allow the dirt ro slope away frm the house properly. Windows wells will allow the grade to be higher than the bottoms of the window frames.

Also on Wednesday evening, a salesman from Lasting Impressions come by. Their company redid all of my windows on the main level in 1996, working around various problems of the original perversely designed windows, and I have been very pleased with both the work and the windows. The current project is to rebuild the bedroom deck and replace the sliding patio door that goes from the bedroom to the deck and the French door that opens from the basement to the area that is now made usable by the new retaining walls.

Ross looked at the existing deck and said, "You realize this design is totally illegal, don't you?"

I hadn't, exactly, but I wasn't surprised. The windows that were replaced in 1996 cannot possibly have been to code... Two of the bedrooms had single windows that were 4 feet wide by 8 feet tall, extending from floor to ceiling without being shatterproof. And because of the way they latched (or didn't) I am sure they were designed to be mounted horizontally instead of vertically. (The people who were renting the house before I bought it had little kids. Looking back, it's amazing no one was ever injured.) The original living room windows were just (badly) homemade double-pane units that had lst there seals. And they only opened at the top, so there was litle crossventilation in the room, which tends to turn into an oven on sunny days.

I have a standard rant about the house: I was told that it was built in 1974 "with his own hands" by a CU professor, and I am convinced he was a professor of something like English or American History, not anything like engineering or architecture. Every contractor I've ever had work on the house ends up saying "Why did they build it that way?" at some point.

The Lasting Impressions Guys are going to 'repair' the deck, which may turn out to require totally rebuilding it -- there's no way to tell until they start taking it apart. What I end up with should be a lot more functional and at least within shouting distance of code.

Thursday and today I took deliveries of stuff for the yard: a rainbarrel from Home Depot Online and a garden kit and tomato trellis kit from Squarefootgardening.com. The packages are still on the front porch (the box for the 60 gallon rain barrel is huge). I'll unpack them tomorrow and start preparing the places to install them. This will involve a trip to the local Home Depot or Lowes': I'm going to need a staple gun.

I also need the ingredients for the planting mix that goes into the square foot garden. Which happens to be the same mixture that Nanette uses for starting seedlings, so she was able to point me at sources for the ingredients.

Sunday afternoon, I have a strong college student (Shawn's son) coming over for a few hours to help with some yard work. So I'll be able to do some cleanup projects that need more strength than I have (the dead waterbed mattress will finally get put into the dumpster. Yay) , or more than two hands.

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