The arbor

So we bought this arbor from Lee Valley. Like, ages ago. And when I say ages ago, I mean AGES ago. Pretty sure the box was already sitting in our garage back when we tried fixing the stove. So, yeah, it's been around a long time. But hey - it's a nice arbor, we got it for a good price, and if it happens to sit around in the garage (or outside under the eaves, for that matter) for a ... year or two, well, we'll get around to it eventually, right?

After all, there's a brand new toilet in our storage space that we've had for almost THREE years, still in its box and everything. I shouldn't mention that, though, or the War Department will make me install it somewhere. Knowing that it's waiting in reserve is probably the only thing keeping the toilet from hell working at all.

Where was I? Right. The arbor.

Anyway, the reason we bought this arbor is because the old one that Frank left behind was completely rusted through in several places and only being held up by the wysteria growing up the side of it. There were actually two of the damn things, but one of them got ripped out during our aborted attempt at putting up the resin shed. Which, come to think of it, means that both of these arbors were involved in us buying something and then storing it in the garage for an extended period before actually erecting it. You know, I'm just not going to dwell on that right now. Or, probably, ever. This post is already depressing me and I haven't even started telling you about what a pain in the ass it was to actually install. Because you know that's coming next, right?

Cause if you don't, well, it's probably my fault for not updating the blog enough.

What the hell was this supposed to be about again? Jebus, but I'm bad at this.

Okay, so, the arbor. This thing:

Maybe, at some distant point in the Pleistocene or something, that might have been a good-looking arbor. Cast iron (mostly), nice detail, not too ornate.

Oh, who am I kidding? Crappy Tire special all the way.

Anyway, like I said, it was pretty thoroughly rotten - as this close-up will no doubt help illustrate: 

(That's a handy picture to include for other reasons, too, actually, as it shows precisely the main function of the arbor: to hold up the hummingbird feeder. The light on the side? Oh, that's to keep the feeder from freezing in the winter. Keep that in mind as you read this post: all of the effort described herein was solely for the benefit of the hummingbirds in the backyard. Hummingbirds. The biggest assholes in the avian kingdom.)

The good news about it being rotten is that taking it out was EASY. I just sort of yanked on it, and the half-inch of concrete it was sent into levered right up in one big chunk. Well, until it split neatly in half, of course, but that just made it easier to break up and fit into the wheelbarrow. Took longer to drive the scrap metal up to the recycling center than it did to take out the arbor, actually. Yep. Easy.

So... easy.

Sigh. Should have seen the rest of this project coming, I really should.

So, the new arbor was slightly different in design than the old one in that it was designed with legs about 18 inches too long for the arbor. This is because you're supposed to dig a hole for each post, and then set the posts in concrete. Of course, we kind of wanted a pad underneath (seeing as how the old one came up with the old arbor and it was a piece of shit anyway), so we figured we'd just dig out a big old hole at the base of the stairs there, set the legs into concrete, and then pour a nice slab across the top.

Problem One: bedrock. So, it seems like there's a reason for all the terraced levels and the steps in the backyard. It's because there's a bloody great rock underneath all the weeds. And this rock is right underneath the steps. And comes out from the steps underneath the lawn a little ways.

Which is a round-about and not very clear way of saying that there was no way to dig the hole deep enough without coming way out into the lawn. The front legs would have been fine, but the back legs would have been about four inches long, and propped on bedrock.

Well, I REALLY didn't want to start cutting the legs to different lengths, so we decided to just fill in the hole, pour a nice pad, and then cut the legs off the arbor and attach it to the pad.

Which we did. Well, the first bit, anyway. We filled in the hole, built a nice form from some spare scraps of two-by-four, got a few bags of concrete, mixed them up in the wheelbarrow, and poured a nice little pad at the base of the stairs. Then I measured up the legs all careful like, and cut them off with my trusty(-ish) hacksaw.

Then we realized that the concrete had to cure for at least 28 days before we started drilling into it with TapCons. Which meant propping the arbor up on the lawn for a month. (Couldn't put it back in the garage - how will we hang a hummingbird feeder from it in there?) So, that sucked. But, as it turned out, we needed those four weeks to figure out how the hell to attach four hollow metal legs to a flat concrete slab in a way that didn't leave the hardware exposed to the same weather that had already caused two metal arbors to rot.

I... can't even really describe the things we thought of using. L-brackets, fence hardware, hand-carved wooden blocks (I might have had a few beers when I thought that one up, I'm just saying) - hell, at once point I was convinced the best way to do it would be to start over. Or maybe just put it back in the box in the garage. It was happy there, I could tell. It didn't speak to me in that mocking whisper in the quiet moments just before the dawn...

Anyway, we wound up paying an extra $40 for a metal working shop up near Amy's work to make us some custom brackets out of scrap aluminum. Then, during a brief break in the incessant November rains, I got out there with a hammer drill and my LEAST FAVORITE FASTENERS IN THE WORLD, a box of TapCons, and I installed the brackets in the pad:

Which went about as well as could be expected for TapCons, and by that I mean I only broke one bit off in the hole, and only snapped the head off of one TapCon (which meant I had to drill a new hole in the bracket, which also meant I wound up installing the bracket at the wrong damn angle so the metal screw that attaches the bracket to the arbor is going into the metal on a different side than the other legs). I call that a roaring success.

Amazingly enough, the arbor went down over the brackets, and we now have a fully functioning hummingbird-feeder-hanging-device back up in the garden. 

The Injury Report 
 The project, of course, got its requisite amount of blood and swearing - I managed a nice little knuckle punch of the rock retaining wall when the drill bit snapped.



God damn it, I hate TapCons.

Wrapping up some loose ends

So it turns out that the only time projects DON'T take about three times as long as we plan is when we pay someone else to do them for us.

Yeah.

Why do we do this again?

Anyway, looking back over my last post (wow, it's been a while, eh?), we had just finished the patio. To be fair, the amount of work we put into the patio has figured heavily in my lack of wanting to post anything here. Or at least, that'll be my chosen excuse. Hell, I don't even feel like writing this right now, but here we are...

Way back when, before we had even STARTED the patio, we had our old friend Mike over to give us a quote on replacing the window in the kitchen with a patio door. (Mike's the guy who installed our floors downstairs, and rebuilt the sunroom.) See, to get out onto our nice new patio, we had to go out through the family room and through the sunroom. Which, admittedly isn't exactly FAR, but feels like light years when I've let the barbecue flare up again, and I'm burning the chicken.

Mike had assured us that fitting a new door was just a day's work for him (hah!), and so we went ahead and ordered a nice, pre-hung set of French doors. While we were waiting on those to be ready, we dug out and built the patio, and then sat around for another couple of weeks... it really took a long time for it to be ready, I gotta say.

Not Mike's fault at all, but the door place was... well, not the sharpest tools in the shed, if you know what I mean. Anyway, the door eventually arrived, and Mike came over at about 8:30 one fine Thursday morning to stick it in. Just in case I haven't ever shared a picture of that particular window, here's what it looked like the day before:

And these are the pictures the War Department sent me at 10:30 that morning:

Oh, and of course, she also texted that the door didn't fit, but she was LYING. VERY NOT FUNNY, DEAR.

By the time I got home, well, there was nothing really left to do but go and buy a lockset because we'd forgotten to tell Mike which one we wanted. At his recommendation, we got one with a lever handle because, even though it doesn't match the style of our existing door handles, it's a lot easier when you've got an armload of chicken for the barbecue in one hand, and a nice cold bottle of beer in the other. Not that, you know, I'm EVER likely to be using the door under those exact conditions every weekend or something.

Fortunately, I've done enough knobs in my time (TWSS) that I'm getting pretty good at it and I can install one without having to do it twice:

So the next part of this particular project was to replace the baseboard heater that was in front of the window. Of course, now there was a big freaking door there, so we'd have to come up with another solution. Fortunately for us, they make electric heaters that, amazingly enough, hang on the wall! So we bought one! This being us, it was not as easy as that. See, original electric wire that fed the baseboard heater came out at the bottom of the wall - near, oddly enough, the baseboard. Hence the name? I dunno. Anyway, we had to cut out a piece of drywall, and pull the wire up through the cavity and then across the wall to the panel on the back side of our new heater:

Fortunately, this being the kitchen, and not exactly a finished space, we decided to just put the drywall back, and mount the heater in front of it. We'll get around to mudding over that when we redo the kitchen in, oh, say, five years? Sure, let's go with that.

And with that, the patio - and the sunroom! - is officially finished. We bought a nice little patio table and some chairs (the umbrella has to go back to the store and be exchanged - cheap-ass p.o.s.), and I built a couple of planter boxes for herbs and flowers.

Sunroom:

Patio:

Oh, well, of course, we still need to do some backfilling and seeding around the retaining wall, and there are a couple of decorative bits to put in, and I really want to put a hosereel on the side there, and the barbecue is pretty ugly...

I'll say one thing for our patio, though: it makes the rest of the back of our house look like shit. Man, somebody really ought to do something about that stucco...

This is a title. It is not a placeholder. Really.

Fair warning: I've been staring at a blank post window for a good ten minutes here. I don't know where this is going, how it's going to get there, or what it's going to do once it arrives, but I figure typing something is better than nothing. It may turn out to be a pure stream-of-consciousness post, or it may have a readily discernable narrative arc. (My money's not exactly on the latter, if you're looking to place a bet. Take the over on the nonsense, double up, and let it ride.) I'm really just typing, and hoping the end result is something like a blog post.

And no, in case you were wondering, this approach doesn't seem to produce worthwhile results at work. I'm hoping the acceptance criteria are significantly more lax in this medium.

If none of the above made any sense, then good. We're all on the same page. Shall we get on with it?

When last we saw our weary, dwindling heroes, we had finished refilling most of the patio hole with roughly 8 yards (or so) of gravel and sand. After, of course, we had taken out 10 yards (or so) of dirt, rocks, and miscellaneous crap.

Oh, hey, while we're at it (we're not, but stream of consciousness, remember), how about a hand for the War Department's green thumb? This particular corner of our garden has four rhododendrons in it that haven't bloomed since the day we moved in. This year, thanks to her tender ministrations and ceaseless garden-based puttering, all four of them have absolutely exploded:

Anyway, back to the patio. The next step was to ... do ... something. Man, I seriously don't remember the order in which we did stuff. I know we had the Tireless Duo return and help us (both days) and that the War Department did a bazillion little things around the house and yard while I putzed about with the stones, but I can't for the life of me remember how it all went down. All I can see are those damn pavers and the never-ending turning, tamping, testing, cutting, and smoothing. Maybe just some pictures then?

Here's more or less where I left off at the end of the day on Saturday:

I know it doesn't look like much, but... yeah, it wasn't. It was bloody hot, though, hence the umbrella. Anyway, here's after a couple more hours most of the day on Sunday:

It was slow. And hard. And monotonous.**

Part of the problem - a HUGE part - was the pattern we picked. Mostly because there wasn't one. It was supposed to be random, but at the same time, we had an equal number of each of the three sizes of stone. This meant that I needed to use roughly the same number of stones as I went, or I was going to run out of one size before the others, making it look weird. (This KIND of happened anyway, but it turned out okay.) Of course, this made it difficult for people to help, as I had to put three equal mini piles within reach, use them all up before getting more stones, and, of course, cutting down the ones around the edges to fit against the soldier course (made up of all square stones of a different color). Oh, and to cut the stones, I had to lug them around the house to the saw station in the driveway.

Hey, guess what? It turns out that we picked an advanced style and design of patio for our very first attempt! Go us!

The down side is that it took FOREVER. Boo us! More pictures of our poor, ruined lawn!

Just for fun, this was exactly (to the DAY) two years ago:

To cut a long sob story short, I finally got the last of the pavers in (with help from Mr. Tireless Duo, who did the marking and fitting, The Crazy Neighbour who carried, toted, and entertained, and the War Department, who carried and planned and kept us all going, and with me cutting in the driveway), and then we broadcast jointing sand over the whole thing and compacted it all down with the plate compactor.

Putting in the very last brick before sanding:

We finished up about 8:00 (yes, EIGHT) on Sunday evening. Here's the War Department enjoying the first of what I hope will be a great many beers on our freshly sanded patio.

And now... well, now I'm exhausted. Utterly bushed. Let me put it this way: if I had known laying those damn stones was going to be that hard, I wouldn't have done it the weekend before Bike To Work Week. I've got four straight days of cycling to go, and my legs are already threatening to secede from my bodily nation after the first day. It's going to take a full week of trade summits with my quads and hammies, and some serious sweet talking of my ankles to get them back on my side. Oh, and apparently, if that last sentence is any indication, I may or may not be delirious now as well. 
Great.
 
I'm going bed. To bed.
 
Sigh.







** That's for Cassandra.

Well, we tried

We tried to get the patio finished this past weekend, but it bested us. Well, actually, it was a combination of the patio and the bloody weather that beat us into submission, but the effect is the same: we needs must spend another week looking at a half-finished project before we can (hopefully) call it done. Let's hope the weather and our moods improve by Saturday, or it might well be another week on top of that...

To fully tell this story accurately, however, we'll have to back up a bit, and spend some verbiage recapping some of the finer details that I missed in my barely coherent Q&A ramblings from last week. I'd like to think I did my readers (like I have more than one, shyeah!) a favor by not posting last night or it would have been nothing more than mild cursing interspersed with onomatopoetic grunts.

So, not much different than a usual post, then.

Anyway, I had intended to put up a post mid-week with some of the finer details of our efforts last weekend, but there wasn't really time what with all the prepping we were doing, so you get the tech writer's standard solution to any problem that can't be solved by a table: the bulleted list!

• The excavator we had delivered was actually the larger of the two available. We had hoped for the smaller one, and the sudden appearance of this massive machine resulted in several things happening: first, the War Department became immediately convinced that I would drive the thing right through the side of the house. Actual quote: "It's not like a video game!" Second, we had to modify the hedge in the side yard to make room:

• It's not like we weren't planning on taking out that hedge entirely at some point, but at least the one plant we did have to take out came up pretty easily.
• I didn't realize until the next day that the shots I posted of the "final" hole didn't really capture the sheer grandeur of the pit we made ("That's a nayce hole!") so here's one from another angle that shows the depth a little better:

• This Week In Mayonnaise!

• That's some of the stuff we hauled out of the hole. Mostly a bunch of sprinkler pipe (yeah, that'll have to get fixed) and a big, dirty, old chunk of really-I-have-absolutely-no-freaking-clue.
• This is one of the worst bulleted lists I've ever written, let alone published. Man, it's a good thing I don't do this for a living, isn't it?

(Oh, and by the way? It was EXACTLY like a video game. You know, if a video game could drive through the side of your house.)

Anyway, this past weekend started bright and early, as I headed off to the rental place first thing Saturday morning to pick up a plate compactor and a wet saw. By the time I got back to the house, our sprinkler guy was there to fix the stuff we had broken, followed shortly by the delivery of four yards of 3/4" road base:

Man, I really hate road base.

Wait, already I'm getting ahead of myself. This weekend actually started on FRIDAY morning, when the patio stones showed up just as the War Department was heading off to work:

I see a few wheelbarrow trips to the back yard in our future. Good thing the path has already been carved permanently into the lawn, eh?

Fortunately, the weather on Saturday was fantastic. I have no idea how, but we managed to convince one of our helpers from the weekend before to come and move gravel with us. Which is pretty much what we did all day. It kinda doesn't seem like a lot, but it was really a full day of shoveling, toting, raking, compacting, shoveling, toting, raking, levelling, raking, raking, raking, and compacting. Did I mention the raking? Man, that was a lot of raking.

But by the end of the day, we had filled in our hole with four inches of compacted, level road base:

Sunday, the weather was... less good. Overall, it wasn't terrible: cooler - which was nice for my sunburned neck - with a few isolated sprinkles. We spent the day building a retaining wall, again with help from Mr. Not-Those-Clarks-The-Other-Clarkes:

And then came Monday...

Let's just say the War Department isn't wearing that hat on a long weekend Monday morning because it's fashionable. (I think it's cute, but then I'm weird.) Monday kinda chewed us up and spat us out.

It rained ALL day. It RAINED all day. It rained all DAY. Emphasize whatever you want - it sucked.

I spent a few hours cutting pavers to serve as a cap for the retaining wall. This consisted of either standing in the driveway (in the rain) at the wet saw station, getting sprayed with a thin slurry of concrete dust as I tried to trim off the sides of pavers at just the right angle, or carting pavers back and forth from the driveway to the back yard, test fitting and marking and trying to make the damn pavers fit the curve of the wall.

That, I'm sorry to say, was the EASY job.

See, the gravel we had so carefully laid down? Yeah, that had to get covered up with sand. Exactly two inches of sand, which could not be disturbed or walked on after it was put in. Oh, and of course, the sand had to be taken from the driveway around the side of the house in wheelbarrows. Oh, but of course, we also now had a retaining wall in the way that we couldn't yet backfill because the rain meant the blocks were wet, and some of them couldn't be glued together yet. Which meant that all that sand had to be carted from the driveway to the backyard in BUCKETS and lifted over the retaining wall. And then it had to be screed and leveled.

Man, I'll take a freezing cold spray of concrete slurry over sand in buckets any day.

Once again, we were assisted by our friends so tried-and-true. (Seriously, if it weren't for them, we'd still be working on the damn road base. They were absolute troopers.) Oh, and the Crazy Neighbour™ toted his fair share of sand and pavers around to the back of the house for us. Not to mention all the tools, wheelbarrows, and materials he loaned us.

Of course, then we ran out of sand. Which is when the whole damn weekend kind of ... fizzled out.

I mean, we tried to keep going. But I couldn't actually attach the caps to the retaining wall because - again - too wet to glue. So the War Department raced off to Home Despot and found some bags of playground sand that would work to fill in the last little bit, and I got started installing pavers into the base of sand. But the pavers looked like hell, and we couldn't quite reach the last few holes without wrecking the rest of the sand. On top of all this, the rain was intensifying, and everyone was kind of cold and miserable. So we called it a day, and packed up. Our helpers didn't even stay for a beer, it was that depressing. (We'll make it up to them - promise.)

So we've got a half-finished patio and we'll have to rent the compactor and wet saw for another weekend.

Great.

(I had to wait until this evening to take pictures anyway; it was still raining...)

See how this post just kind of fizzles out? Yeah. That was our Monday.

Testing the limits of a good cliche

I'm not sure what people expect when they come to this blog, but I can't imagine anyone's expectations are very high. (Unless, of course, they reached this blog through a combination of search terms like "how do I best go about hurting myself while accomplishing simple, everyday tasks?" THOSE people are happier than clams. Why are clams so happy? Well, that's probably a question for a different part of the Internet. We just do renos and mayonnaise here.)

For our regular customers, good news: this week, I thought I'd aim for a new low! We're going to test that aged saw about how pictures are worth a thousand words. If it's true, this will be wordiest damn post you ever read...

To best present our wealth of visual imagery, I give you:

Every single conversation I will have at work tomorrow morning!

Let 'er rip!

Unsuspecting Coworker:
Hey Don! How was your weekend?

Half-asleep Don:
Uh, well... we, uh.... kinda. Well, this:

UnCow:
What the hell is that?! And what is it doing in your driveway?!

Don:
It's called a rock box, apparently. It can hold up to ten yards of soil or, as the name would suggest, rocks. Of course, like everything we do, it wasn't quite smooth sailing:

UnCow:
That would be an inconveniently positioned sprinkler head, yes, but what the hell did you need something that damn big for?

Don:
To fill up with rocks. From here:

UnCow:
Oh, right, your patio! Man, that looks like a lot of digging. I sure hope you had some help!

Don:
Yeah.

UnCow:
...

You're nuts.

Don:
Yeah.

UnCow:
I meant help, like, other people.

Don:
Oh, absolutely. We had another couple come over with their picks and shovels and crappy-ass wheelbarrow. Couldn't have done it without them, actually. But we bought extra beer and snacks, and filled them full of pork before we sent them home:

UnCow:
Oh, man... Amy's Famous Pulled Pork. I bet that was good, eh?

Don:
Oh, yeah.

UnCow:
So did you drive that Bobcat yourself, or did you hire somebody?

Don:

UnCow:
Uh... wow. I guess they let just about anybody drive those, eh?

Don:
Yeah.

UnCow:
So how much of that rock box thing did you fill, anyway?

Don:
Well, even with the Bobcat, it was pretty slow going, actually. When we stopped for a quick lunch, we had really only done half of the earth removal, and hadn't even started on the tricky bits:

Of course, the skip was filling up pretty quickly:

In the afternoon, though, I was starting to get the hang of the controls on the machine, and by the end of the day, we'd filled the skip almost to the brim:

But you could really see the shape of the patio coming in:

UnCow:
That looks like a pretty good weekend's work to me.

Don:
Yeah, but then on Sunday, the War Department noticed there was some room left in the skip, and figured we should round off the corner a little better to make room for the retaining wall we'll have to build. And then we went and got a yard of road base:

At that point, the skip was REALLY full, and the gravel place had closed for the afternoon, so we had to call it a day.

UnCow:
Huh. And here I thought you were just going to go to the Times Colonist Book Sale this weekend!

Don:
Oh, I did that, too.

UnCow:
You really are a nut job, you know that?

Don:
Sigh. Yeah. I know.

UnCow:
So, uh, I almost hate to ask, but...

Don:
Go ahead.

UnCow:
Really? Sweet! So, uh, Don? Any, uh, updates to everyone's favorite feature,

The Injury Report?

Don:
Yeah: apparently, I'm not so hot with ramps. I was wheeling a wheelbarrow up into the skip, and the ramp jumped up and bit me:

I pretty much stayed in the Bobcat after that. Well, I tried to.

UnCow:
I'll bet! So, uh, any of that pulled pork left?

Don:
No. Go away now.

 

 

 

I'm missing SO many details, but everyone wanted to see pictures (DAD), and I'm unbelievably tired. So I'll sign off here, but a HUGE, mega-big thanks to Not-Those-Clarks-The-Other-Clarkes, who worked their butts off on our patio for nothing more than a few beers and some pulled pork. Sure, the pork was pretty damn good, but still - we owe those guys, big time. Oh, and everyone involved wanted me to say a special thanks to my ol' buddy, Theo, who had the bright idea to rent the excavator in the first place. Saved us a lot of time and effort, seriously.

And oh. My. God. Was it ever FUN to drive! I WANT ONE!!!