When we bought this place, there were two great big cedar trees in the back yard.
Unfortunately, one of them was right next to, and seriously overhanging the garage, which would have prevented putting a peaked roof on the garage.
The other one would have posed a problem for Laura’s office.
So, they both had to come out. We hate taking trees out. (Laura claims to having a genetic aversion to removing trees. It always makes her cry. Unless they’re alder trees.) We’ll plant some new trees somewhere else in the future.
Here is a little of the removal action:
And here are the after shots:
Laura adds:
It started out being a cool, foggy morning.
And by the end of the day the guys had a splendid blue sky. Dave reported that once the fog dissolved the guy up in the tree would periodically stop what he was doing to check out the view. Bald eagles celebrated the day, too.
We removed some of the kitchen cupboards recently. Specifically, the cabinet in the laundry room area of the kitchen, the cupboards above the cook top, and the cupboards above the counter to the right of the sink.
It really opened up the whole upstairs.
Here is what it looked like before:
And now:
I can now see our spectacular view while standing at the cook top. I love it.
Of course there will be a big vent hood over the new cook top before we’re done, but still…
A huge concern when we were looking at this house was its utter lack of Internet connectivity. There is no cable to the house and the telephone company can’t provide DSL because the wires to the house are (probably) 45 years old.
Yikes! No Internet is a deal killer for us. We can’t work without high-speed Internet and we stream the vast majority of what we watch and listen to. Now what? Let’s look into getting cable installed.
Comcast, the local cable monopoly, does have cable on the poles on the street. In fact, there is a pole right next to the driveway. Great. Let’s talk to Comcast and see what it will take to get cable installed up to the house. $38k+ 😱 You have got to be kidding me!
Well, after numerous conversations with a couple of Comcast reps, we got the Comcast charge down to under $5k providing we install the conduit from the street up to the house. Okay. Let’s see what that’s going to take. To make a long story short, a lot more than we wanted to spend but a lot less than Comcast wanted if they put the conduit in. Since we plan on staying in this house permanently, amortizing the cost out over the long term, as it were, it’s worth it.
So, off we go!
(Laura adds: We were initially going to hire a trenching outfit to trench the entire route, but things… happened. In the end, I’m glad they did, as if the original guy had done the trenching, we would have had to buy lengths of conduit at the store, and glue them together, then have the trencher return to fill in the trench. Time consuming. In the winter. In Washington. Wet. Cold. Sounds awful, right? We thought so, too. Especially Dave, who’s the one who would have done most all of the work. In the rain and cold. And it probably would have taken weeks to complete.)
The company we hired to install the conduit has some pretty awesome machines.
The first bores underground, is steerable (up, down, left, right), and pulls the conduit back through the hole when it is retracted.
Look at that. Two conduits right under the driveway with no ditch or damage to the driveway. 🙂
The other is called a plow. It has a spool of conduit and a huge plow blade-shaped head through which the conduit is fed. The head is lowered into the ground and vibrates very fast. The result is that a narrow, two-foot deep cut is made in the ground, the conduit is placed within it, the ground falls back over the conduit, and then it’s all tamped back down. Minimal mess. Minimal damage to the landscape. Very cool. (Laura adds: And amazingly fast. All that, a quarter mile, took only 2.5 days!)
The spool of conduitThe bladeThe conduit coming out of the bladeInstalling the conduit right next to the driveway
So we now have ¼-mile of 2-inch conduit running from the road up to next to the electric company’s transformer box and another 30 feet, or so, of 1-inch conduit running from there to the house.
Comcast has installed their cable in the conduit and installed “pedestals” along the way for their equipment and possible future customers on the adjoining lots.They are supposed to connect to the main cable on the pole today (Friday, 1/17/2020) and test it all next Monday.
Assuming all is good, we’ll then schedule installation to the house. 👍🏻
We’re doing an addition to the house for Laura’s office. It’s going to be off the southeast corner of the house with its door to the left of the bathroom that’s off the living room. Unfortunately, that bathroom has a shower right where the office door needs to go.
So out goes the shower. Don’t worry, there are three others. Besides, who needs a shower right off the living room, right?
So here is the bathroom as it was when we got the house:
As the shower was making its exit:
And all that’s left:
Still need to remove some of the flooring and cut and cap the drain pipe.
(And Laura notes that having a shower control and shower head in the middle of the door to her office will probably be slightly inconvenient, and so both of those should go as well. LOL)
As part of the remodel we’re moving the wall between the master bedroom and the master bath to make the master bath a little roomier. As it is, the door can’t be opened all the way because it hits the counter. We’re going to pull the wall back a bit and replace the swinging door with a pocket door (Laura would say Squee or some such at this point).
To do this we have to remove two of the existing closets and rebuild one of them in a slightly different location. This is how things started.
The closet to the left with the swinging door is the linen closet and will be moving to a larger space in the hall. The closet to right is Laura’s and the one that needs to be moved.
And this is how it looks now.
So, that’s two closets gone. What about the third? Ah, well. The future TV room has a closet (with a water heater in it that will be moving).
The library is on the other side of that closet and we need all the room we can get in the library. So we’re going to rebuild the TV room closet to be only 12 inches deep. That should be plenty for DVDs and the like.
We knew there were issues with the septic system when we bought the house, the big thing being that the line from the tank to the drain field had to be replaced. Knowing that, we allocated money in our budget for that operation based on a local expert’s estimate.
Unfortunately, none of us thought about the line from the house to the tank and about a third of it also had to be replaced adding a bit more cost we hadn’t planned on. Drat! All in all, though, the vendors who did the work did a great job of keeping the costs down in addition to doing great work.
From the House to the Tank
The problematic pipe from the house to the tank was of a type called Orangeburg (Wikipedia). Orangeburg was made of layers of wood pulp and pitch pressed together. So, essentially, a tube made of rolled up tar paper. Yeah. That’s a great idea. Well, actually not so much.
Over time the pipe is slowly crushed by the earth around it to the point where little or nothing can pass through any more. Ours had gotten to that point.
Oddly enough, the other two thirds of the pipe from the house is iron and in fine shape. You really have to wonder why they didn’t use iron all the way to the tank.
So they had to tear up our beautiful driveway and dig a trench to replace the Orangeburg. Bummer.
BeforeCutting the asphaltAfter
From the Tank to the Drain Field
The line from the tank to the drain field was made of corrugated plastic pipe which had also slowly been crushed over the years.
The plan was to replace this with high-density polyethylene pipe using a pipe-bursting machine (Wikipedia). Basically, you feed a very thick cable (7/8″?), through the old pipe and then pull the new pipe through, shattering the old pipe in the process. This is really great since you only have to dig a couple of holes for the entry and exit instead of trenching. Or so goes the theory.
In this case we ran into a problem. It turns out that pipe bursting doesn’t work so well with corrugated pipe. Instead of bursting, it just condenses like an accordion. You can see it in a video further along in the post.
In the end they had to dig a trench for part of that replacement too. Not a big deal, though, since it’s just out in the field.
The pipe-bursting process is pretty interesting.
This is the head that attaches to the new pipe and the cable. That’s 4-inch pipe on the left.
The head that bursts the old pipe
The 20-foot sections of pipe are literally welded together. The two ends are clamped into a gadget that keeps them perfectly aligned. A special tool is then used to even up the ends so that they mate exactly. Finally, a heating iron is clamped between them until the ends begin to melt and finally, the iron is removed and the ends are clamped together until the joint cools. Voila! a single piece of pipe.
Welding the sections of pipeWelded sections
Here you can see the front of the new pipe being pulled through an intermediate hole that was required because of the length of the run. You can also see some of the compressed corrugated pipe.
So, seven weeks from closing to having a septic system we can actually use.
I had no idea how satisfying it could be to flush a toilet 😉
I took advantage of the nice weather last Thursday to take down the 12-foot satellite dish on the upper garage roof.
How it began the day
There was no realistic way to just remove it, especially by myself, so I disassembled it and took it down piece by piece.
Its construction was pretty straightforward. Nineteen supports bolted to a central hub bolted in turn to the support tripod. The 19 supports result in 18 metal mesh panels that create the semi-hemispherical shape of the dish.
Each panel was mounted to the supports with about a gazillion small, self-drilling, self-tapping screws. Most of them were rusty and not particularly willing to disengage. I used an impact driver to remove them and in the process destroyed a total of three sockets.
Removing the panelsAbout half way
After a certain point I started removing the supports as well. These were mounted to the central hub with 9/16-inch bolts, most of which were pretty rusty. You can also see some of the mesh panels in the foreground.
Almost all of them
The last two supports were a bit more difficult to remove. In addition to the two large bolts mounting them to the central hub, they were “captured” by some of the support hardware. That meant that I had to remove some very large, very rusty bolts.
The last two supports
I left the tripod because it is mounted to the garage roof and removing it would result in leaks into the garage. It can wait until we’re ready to pitch that roof.
Just the tripod left
Here is some of the hardware that held the thing together.
Started removing some of the paneling up stairs.
This stuff is actually rather hard to remove. First off, it’s pretty high-quality. The panels overlap at the seams instead of simply butting up against each other. That means that you have to take them off in the right order (i.e., you have to remove the top panel first).
In addition to that, they used 2″ nails with heads instead of panel nails in most places. That makes it really hard to get them to pop. Most of them are pulling through.
I also removed most of the remaining board and batten in my office.
The last few days I’ve been doing more demolition.
I removed the ceiling trim and paneling from part of the soffit in the kitchen so that we can see how far up the new cabinets can go.
Those big purlins (beams), on the ceiling are apparently just for show. They stop at the walls and are attached with nothing more than home-made joist hangers.
Having removed some of the ceiling trim I went ahead and finished removing the rest of it upstairs and down. The results aren’t much to look at but here’s the pile of trim.
The narrow boards at the left are the trim (the wider ones to the right are the board and batten that I removed from my office a while ago).
I also removed the shelves and shelf supports from the pantry.
And here’s an odd thing.
Yep. That’s a bare copper wire going across the corner of the pantry. On the opposite side of the wall to the right is a light switch. On the opposite side of the wall to the left is where the intercom master unit was. That wire is how they grounded the intercom system. Nice install guys. Not! 😕
I also finished removing all of the faux shutters, removed all five (yes, five), small satellite dishes, removed the (really ugly), medicine cabinet from the master bath, and finished removing all of the folding door hardware.
