The Wall Saga: Putting it Together
A few posts back I mentioned that once Agent Smith’s father–our excavator operator and general project manager–flew back home, there was an unforeseen hiccup with…
Category: Projects
The Wall Saga: Drainage
One seemingly small but necessary step to completing the wall rebuild was creating proper drainage. We doubt this was done when the old wall was…
The Wall Saga: Block Unloading
We ended up purchasing 96 concrete blocks, only some of which are shown in these images. Since the 18-wheelers could only bring a dozen or so at…
The Wall Saga: Left Turn to Albuquerque
This is why I was extremely happy when I got both Apple and Google Maps to update their data for our property. As mentioned a…
The Wall Saga: Footer In Place
Once the concrete was poured, we needed to allow it to cure. We continued to unload shipments of block and I took a moment to walk…
The Wall Saga: Concrete Pumping Video
Carrying on from the last post, here is the video, with lots of annotations/subtitles to show and explain what was done.
The Wall Saga: Pumping Day
Once the forms were in place, it was time to pump in the concrete. Not an easy task; because of the hills and road conditions,…
The Wall Saga: Form Work
With block deliveries trickling in–after the unloading fiasco in last week’s post, we ended up getting just one truck a day, if that, as most…
The Wall Saga: Unexpected Moment
Here’s a video of some of the unloading mentioned in the last Wall Saga post. It gives an idea of how messy things got that…
The Wall Saga: 18-Wheelers and Inclines
To rebuild the wall we ended up purchasing large 6’x6’x2′ blocks from Granite Rock. They, along with United Rentals and All American Rentals, lessened some…
The Wall Saga: Deliveries!
In addition to an excavator (actually four excavators–the first one we rented from United was brand new but died and had to be sent back to the…
The Wall Saga: Trench Warfare
While the warfare was really only against the pocket gophers that are endemic up here, we did manage to win quite a few battles. Before you…
Aerial Excavation Video
Agent Smith shot this video toward the end of the wall project. It shows the magnitude of work involved in prepping to lay in the…
The Wall Saga: The Trench
Once our driver started working, a couple of days later we had an open trench. At this time the flagpole was pulled and moved to…
The Wall Saga: Cutting Progress
As part of the wall project we had to do some preliminary cutting work. In addition to the palm trees mentioned in an earlier post,…
The Wall Saga: Archeology
The first pic is the view of the concrete and deck demolition from my office through the north wing and great room. At this point…
The Wall Saga: Flagpole Displacement
As part of the wall project, we also removed the flagpole the Doc put in some fifty years ago. When he was up here for…
The Wall Saga: 900 Railroad Ties
To reiterate, when the Doc built this place, he got a deal on 8′ railroad ties–a buck a tie, and he purchased 900 of them.…
The Wall Saga: Concrete Removal Video
Here’s a short video showing Agent Smith Sr. helming the excavator as we worked to remove a half-dozen pavers from the pool deck.
The Wall Saga: Concrete Demolition
After removing trees and the ratty old deck along the pool, it was time to remove some of the concrete slabs that extended out towards…
Again with the kitchen sink
A few months after we moved in, I posted about our kitchen sink. We have limited space to its right, so we purchased a small dishrack…
What Lies Beneath
A great portion of our house sits on top of a concrete slab, but–and here’s the interesting part–3/4 of the house sits above this foundation via…
The Wall Saga: Deck Demolition
As part of the wall project, we took the opportunity to remove the horrible wooden deck and wall that ran along the south edge of…
The Wall Saga: Excavation and Trees
When we bought the property, we knew we were going to have to replace a very long, very old retaining wall that was built with…
All fenced in!
Last summer we posted about the abysmal state of our fences, and how the previous owners had bartered with a nearby horse guy to allow…
Ketchup cleans up!
As noted a few months back, we found a stash of random brass knickknackery in the stables. With some soap and water I managed to…
Paving Snags
It’s been a busy week at Purgatory, as a driveway repaving project has also become a let’s-replace-the-main-water-line-to-the-house project. This is currently day 2 without water,…
The End of Dry Rot
As mentioned a while back, we worked with contractors to address the huge amount of dry rot on the exterior features of our house. First,…
The Kitchen Table
Way back in 2000, my grandmother moved out of the house she had lived in for close to fifty years, and as part of the…
South Wall Videos Now Up
As we have mentioned/hinted in recent posts, we are well into the great wall of Purgatory project. As Agent Smith noted last year, we were starting…
Dry Rot Galore, Part 2
To keep our house from literally rotting away, I originally intended to have the awesome contractor who took care of the utility closet door work and…
Fun with Dry Rot, Step One: Identify the Problem
We knew when we bought the house that we had dry rot issues to address. Even through the fresh (but badly done) paint job the…