Dog House Down
The structurally unsound old dog shelter comes down, a great opportunity to put Dino, the new tractor, to work.
Category: Projects
More Water Work and Coining a New Phrase
A new water softener replaces the ancient Kinetico, with a small flood along the way, and we coin a new phrase for the previous owners’ half-assed fixes.
Great News Everyone! They’ve Fixed the Slime Pipes!
Able finishes the septic job, a county inspector checks things over and the hole gets filled.
End of Day One: Septic tank in place, and we can flush the toilets!
End of day one: the new septic tank is in place, and we can flush the toilets.
More Pics of the Septic Work
The septic hole is now much, much bigger, and the house is vibrating.
Septic Day!
Septic day! The failed tank, never pumped in over ten years, finally gets pumped out and demolished.
Before and After Roof Comparison
Before and after shots of the great room and entry roofs. All the tar and paper were patches.
We have pretty electrons now
Voltz Electric upgrades our 175-amp service to 200 amps and replaces the fifty-year-old panel.
More Flooring Tales
Bringing the original teak parquet floors back to life myself instead of having them professionally cleaned and polished.
New Floors…almost
Replacing the filthy carpets in two rooms with bamboo flooring, starting with an unhelpful flooring store and ending at Lumber Liquidators.
Big green monster
New tank! Also, a sufficient crane.
Our house had an ouchy
The new flat roofs go on, and the great room reveals dry rot so extensive the wood was still wet in July. All repaired, and still under budget.
Well that didn’t go very well…
Epic fail: the contractor flipped their crane truck while trying to move the old well tank. Fortunately nobody was hurt.
The long week has begun
My first night at Purgatory, after hauling a truckload of boxes down in Barbie, ahead of the well tank replacement.
A week in review?
The view from the well, 200 feet above the house, why a rusting 10,000-gallon metal well tank is a problem and the Whale’s broken camshaft at LeMons.
Mister Gorbachev…
We have a wall problem: the old railroad-tie retaining wall is failing, and on the south side the deck and pool edging are heading down the hill.
Driveway of cracks
Pictures of the cracked, crumbly driveway before it gets repaired and resealed.
Bad Pipes
Replacing the gross old drain pipes under the kitchen and laundry, once the plumbers found someone small enough to fit under the house.
What a week…
Less than two weeks in: we have network connectivity, a plumbing quote for the drains and freshly cleaned carpets, with mixed results.
So much to do
Exploring the new house: a first dip in the pool, three contractors who didn’t show and a pile of garbage the previous owners left at the end of the driveway.
The list of crap we have to do…
The starter list of projects for the new house, from roofs, the well tank and septic to fences, a 300-foot retaining wall and the pool cover. And this is just the starter edition.