At Home In The Woods

[Obed]

Great suggestions Pete. We did have the end of the existing half wall beefed up because it was very flimsey originally. The end 2x4 goes through a hole cut in the subfloor and is tied to the floor trusses. However, that's all for nought since the half wall will be replaced by another one that will end in a different place.

Obed

 

[Obed]

Here are the bolts that will attach a ledger board to the house. The ledger board will be used to attach the back porch floor and deck to the house.

What is not apparrent in the picture is there will be another row of bolts below the existing bolts. The existing bolts are attached to the framing. The lower row will be attached to the concrete foundation wall. The holes have already been drilled in the concrete.

 

[Obed]

Trench for Electrical Conduit

This weekend I worked on the last portion of the electrical trench between the electrical pedestal and the house.

I layed out with some orange paint the line that will connect the two ends of the trench that I had dug a few weeks ago. Timing for doing this portion has been a little dicey because we can't get supplies to the house while the trench is opened across the driveway. Now seemed to be a good time to finish the trench.

 

[Obed]

Solving the phone delimna made gave me a little more confidence about digging around this phone cable.

You can see that my electrical trench needed to be dug right beside where the cable exits the ground. I dug a little around the phone cable by hand to get it about 3 inches away from where I would be digging the electrical trench.

 

[Obed]

I dug this section about 5 feet deep so that the gas line can cross the electric line here.

You can see the yellow gas line sitting above ground beside the transformer in the background. I'm digging the trench with a 9" bucket; the trench turns out to be about 12" wide or less. A 5 foot deep trench that is so narrow is tough to work in. It's too narrow to climb into. Fine tuning the trench by hand is tough. To remove small rocks that fell into the trench, I would lower the end of a hoe down and pick up the rock. Or I would use a set of post hole diggers to reach down and pull out rocks.

This rock was about 18" across. I hit it about between 3 and 4 feet down. It took a very long time to get it out of the 12" wide trench.

To finish the trench in the middle of the driveway where the two trenches joined, I had to change my tractor angle to the trench. I could no longer dig with the backhoe pointed directly behind the tractor but had to angle the backhoe to the side. When I've dug from this sideways angle before, it was always very slow because I would dig a couple feet of trench, then have to drive the tractor away from the trench and resituate the tractor to dig the next couple of feet. Remaneauvering the tractor every 2 feet would take as much time to do as the actual digging if the trench was shallow.

However, I learned a new and very useful trick. I was able to use the backhoe to lift up the rear wheels of the tractor and move the backend of the tractor about 3 to 6 inches sideways. Every so often I would pull the tractor forward a few inches when my remaneuvering resulted in the backend of the tractor being too close to the trench. That's all I had to do to shuffle the tractor sideways down the trench. This maneuver saved me a bunch of time. In this picture I was digging on the right side and then moving the tractor to the left along the trench as described above.

Here are the pictures of the finished trench.

 

[Obed]

My wife re-installed the drain tile underneath the electrical access holes. This is the drain tile that I attempted to install and was 15 minutes away from completion when a the rain storms that flooded Nashville reached us an messed up my work.

 

[Obed]

The valley between the garage roof and house roof funnels a lot of rain onto the area where the drain tile sits.

We took some steps to prevent the rain from ruining the drain tile work a second time.

 

[Obed]

Electrical Conduit

Electrical conduit got run this week between the transformer and the pedestal and between the pedestal and the house. The installers had a device that heated the PVC conduit so they could bend the conduit. The red plastic non-sticky tape will be placed in the trench a foot above the conduit. This tape is designed to warn future diggers that there is electrical wire in the ground below where they are digging.

 

[brin]

while that trench is open that crosses your driveway now is your chance to add one more piece of say 2 inch PVC so if in the future you want to run any wires to the other side of your driveway you will have a pipe in place.

 

[MarkV]

while that trench is open that crosses your driveway now is your chance to add one more piece of say 2 inch PVC so if in the future you want to run any wires to the other side of your driveway you will have a pipe in place.

That is very true. Never know when you might want lighting, driveway alarm, electric gate or such. It is cheap to do now and expensive later.

MarkV

 

[Tororider]

That is very true. Never know when you might want lighting, driveway alarm, electric gate or such. It is cheap to do now and expensive later.

MarkV

I third that, can even just put it twelve inches down so you don't have to go looking for it, but no better time to do it.

 

[mikefromnh]

I gotta say I have never seen it take 6+ months to get this far along on a house

You must be getting tired of digging holes to fill them back in.

 

[Obed]

I gotta say I have never seen it take 6+ months to get this far along on a house

You must be getting tired of digging holes to fill them back in.

Very true!

 

[Obed]

while that trench is open that crosses your driveway now is your chance to add one more piece of say 2 inch PVC so if in the future you want to run any wires to the other side of your driveway you will have a pipe in place.

We ran a 1 inch PVC for the phone line. I'm now wishing I had run a 2 inch conduit.

Obed

 

[Obed]

We spent long days Saturday and Sunday filling in the electrical trench. There were many large rocks in the backfill. If any of these rocks were directly dumped on top of the conduit, we would be at risk of having breaking the conduit during the backfilling and settling. Thus, we had to backfill much of the trench by hand so we could make sure that soft dirt without rocks covered the conduit first. So we covered the electrical conduit with a foot of soft dirt, then laid a 1 inch conduit for the phone line in the trench.

My trench had some humps and dips in it because of large rocks that I was unwilling to dig out. When the conduit was laid, there were some spots where the conduit was 2 or 3 inches above the trench bottom due to the uneven depths. The electric company inspector told us we needed to either tamp dirt under the conduit or put gravel under the conduit so the conduit would not pull apart due to the dips in the trench bottom.

 

[Obed]

We worked on covering up the area where the conduit enters the basement wall. If you remember, there is a drain tile below where the conduit enters the wall. I used some hydraulic cement to fill the gap between the conduit the holes through the basement wall. The wife installed the styrofoam and put some window flashing above the conduit to help prevent water from entering the basement. We covered the gravel with landscape fabric. When I started putting dirt over the fabric, it started raining so I had to stop. We covered the area with scrap house wrap and sheathing to protect the area until I can finish filling in the area.

 

[Obed]

My wife didn't like how the hall bath fan was installed.

See how the duct work snakes around. Each 90 degree turn is equivalent to adding 15 ft of length to the duct work in terms of inhibiting air flow and movement of moisture through the ducting. This short run has 4 90 degree turns. That reduces the efficiency of the fan equal to adding an additional 60feet of ductingf! So the wife re-installed the fan. I cut and installed the blocking and installed one of the duct hangers that my wife had a tough time reaching.

Here's the result of my wife's efforts.

 

[EddieWalker]

Nice job on straightening out the duct work, but why didn't you just replace it with flex line? It's insulated and you can bend it to fit anywhere, or go as wide and gradual as you have the space for in your turns.

Eddie

 

[brin]

That flex duct works great Eddie...that is what we used in a few places when we built our house. Makes you wonder how we ever did without it.

 

[mikefromnh]

Fan looks a lot better, amazing what 'solutions' people who don't care will come up with. Not only will the first way be inefficient but each 90 costs a few bucks too.

I like the hard line when possible, it stays cleaner over the years and will hold up to construction hazards better.