Category: On the Home Front

I’ve lived in Indian hills for over 20 years now and it seems each year seems to “feature” a different insect as the king for that year. In past years it has been millipedes, potato bugs, Stink Bugs, etc. It’s usually something harmless but still noticeable when you’re doing chores outside. A couple of months ago we found one or two of these guys in our house and lately we find one or two a day. Today I found a large number (hundreds) sunning themselves out back on my shed. Is it safe to say that I’m not the only one seeing Box Elderbugs as “King” this year?

The bobcat came in and regraded the backyard. That plus clearing out a bunch of the debris sets the stage for finessing the terraces.

It was too wet and sloppy today for me to want to trek up to the end of the yard for an overview shot but you’ll see in the next batch the difference.

The irrigation system piping is now buried except where final connections need to be made.

 

Looking closely you can see that the yard immediately behind the lenai is now level and there are two terraces taking shape beyond that to the left

 

 

 

The side yard is prepped. There will eventually be a fence and some nice space for the bird bath and a new bird feeder.

 

 

As viewed from the side of the above shed. It’s a bit hard to get a sense of the angles from this perspective.

Building out the Backyard 01

 

On the heels of last years epic renovations – Pool, Lenai, Driveway, Retaining Walls and Front Lawn and Irrigation system, we’ve embarked upon a less ambitious project  to address the area behind the Lenai which comprises the bulk of our back yard.

This time we’re working with Brian Plett of Blaydes Landscaping. He is local here to my subdivision. No web page I’m afraid so I can’t link you to him.

I took a few before pictures to get a sense of how things look as viewed from the house:

 

Work began in a relatively small way, the bobcat will be here tomorrow and that’s when the work can begin in earnest. Today was mostly some cleanup and roughing in the irrigation system.

 

 

Lights installed on far side of Lanai

Building out the Backyard 02

I’ve named it “HAL”.

Nest Learning Thermostat – 2nd Generation T200577

It can definitely beat out regular thermostats and I’m pretty sure it can outdo your programmable thermostat if you’re relatively active (in and out, temperature up and down a lot) or even if your schedule varies day by day.

Between the “airwave” technology that should maximize cooling dollars and its built in intelligence to figure out how long it takes to heat/cool your place, I’m expecting HAL will be able to cut our costs a little bit (I had my previous thermostat fully programmed) and maximize comfort by tracking our real use patterns and setting itself accordingly rather than the broad patterns that I set on the previous thermostat.

Oh, and did I mention, there’s an app for that? You can check out and control your house HVAC from your smartphone or anywhere with web access.

If you’re looking for an otherwise excellent thermostat, I’ve got an American Standard Gold XM Control 803 thermostat that  I’m willing to let go cheap…

It took a while to decide what we wanted to do with our lawn after the pool / patio project. The original lawn had heave issues, scarring from a water main replacement and was generally a mish-mash of unhappy fescue, crab crass, creeping Charlie and dead spots. Having a mini mountain of earth piled on it for a few weeks did nothing to improve the situation.

We got several estimates to:
1) Put in new grass
2) install an irrigation system (was an afterthought but became important when we realized how much it would protect our investment)
3) re-countour our front lawn tree/garden area
4) come up with something attractive for the strip on the right side of our driveway
5) re-invent our front walkway garden area
6) come up with transitions for our back patio and the lawn and our house and the lawn in pretty shaded area
7) address the stepping stones that we had installed but with which we were not really happy

Mardi Grass landscaping has been doing our lawn for a little over a year now and they came in with what seems like a reasonable quote when blended with all the facets I wanted covered.

Having them performing ongoing maintenance also gives me a comfort level that they will be available to stand by their work should anything go awry.

The first step was to scrape off the remnants of the old lawn, plus remove any new growth that had accumulated after the major construction of this summer ended.

Then the lawn needed to be leveled and *some* topsoil applied. I have heard wildly varying versions of how much topsoil the Emerald Zoysia grass needs when it is installed on dirt such as mine. Mardi Grass’ take on it was somewhere in the middle. Some, but not a lot.

Above is the remains of our front entry garden area after the driveway and walkway work. Note the brownish bolder in the foreground. This was the only really big boulder that was dug up while excavating for the pool. This is to be moved into the other garden area on the front lawn. Also note “The Yucca Plant that will not die”. We have removed that plant twice. Each time it comes back.. a little closer to the walkway… presumably with malevolent intent. You can’t get anywhere near that thing without it piercing you regardless of clothing or other precautions. Maybe third time’s a charm?This strip along the side of the driveway has always been an issue for us. There is a lot of shade from the neighbor’s tree and it’s in an awkward spot to water manually. Note the truck with our grass on pallets on the street.

The front garden area is being recontoured with a border of  monkey grass (liriope) separating it from the lawn and visually separating it from the driveway.

Most of the workers are preparing the garden area while one person begins laying the grass.

Unfortunately I had to get to work so I was not able to capture the whole process. I saw the start of the use of the ditch witch as they laid the irrigation plumbing. Here they are relocating one of the sprinkler heads at the entry way garden to better cover the area near the garage. Notice that the boulder that was in the foreground in the picture above has been removed.

The grass has been laid. The little pink flags represent locations of sprinkler heads. The strip to the right of the driveway is still outstanding at this point

Here is the back yard. One of the new catch basins shows up clearly now in contrast to the grass.  Still outstanding back  here is the replacement flagstones by the door and gravel in the “splash area” next to the enclosure (rain dripping off of the lexan roof hits the dirt and splashes mud against the lower portion of the screen) and a kind of no mans land next to the house where we decided we don’t really want grass growing.

The total for all this? About $11,200. Of that about $2,600 was for the irrigation system.

I keep trying to capture how beautiful rain looks when it’s on the screening.  This is my best attempt to date. It looks like so many sparkling facets. Especially when the sun comes out after a shower…

2012 Home Renovations – Part 32 – Usable, final punch lists outstanding

Lights installed on far side of Lanai

So I had a pool installed this year. The pool opened on Memorial day and all was good.

Included in the pool was something I’ve been working toward for about 10 years, an Endless Pool system.

This particular system is called a “Fastlane” and it’s intended to be installed in a normal pool. i.e. the original endless pool was a self contained unit that has water return conduits and is focused on being essentially a “water treadmill”.

My system has brackets that fasten to the pool wall and the Fastlane is attached to those brackets with hydraulic hoses leading out to a pump that powers the unit from a safe distance away (keeping the electrics and the pool apart).

Note the Stainless Steel handle showing just above the water level.

Overall I’m really happy with the unit. I’m a reasonably aggressive swimmer and this unit is easily able to meet and exceed my capabilities.

I’m finding out now that Endless Pools is not really happy having their units in a salt water environment. The unit comes with a sacrificial anode (basically a hunk of zinc that you attach to the unit to attract electrons that would otherwise corrode the unit). Anybody who maintains a boat in a salt water environment will know what this is. When I tried to sign up for their “Sacrificial Anode Club” a few months ago I found that they’d already given up on that idea as they were encountering problems due to the vastly different rates at which the anodes are consumed for different pools. Temperature and pool chemistry varies a lot between pools and it was just too much of a hassle trying to work it out.

My first anode actually looked fine for about 3 months and then I began noticing some rust around some of the screws on the bottom cage (water input for the unit), on touching the anode it just crumbled immediately. Which meant it had been spent for probably at least a week or so. I immediately picked up a honking big anode from a motorboat supply house and ordered 3 more “official” units from Endless Pools to have on hand.

New here’s where my mystery comes in.

The stainless steel handle of the unit has pretty rapidly turned black. It’s some kind of corrosion but I have not been able to figure out what it is. If you touch it with your hand some will rub off on you and it’s a bit messy that way. So it’s not just a cosmetic thing, I don’t really want guests touching it and possibly messing up their swim suits.

In retrospect we are VERY lucky that we ordered the blue colored unit rather than the entirely stainless steel one, I shudder to think how awful it would look with the entire unit turning a coal black color like the handle.

I contacted Endless Pools and the first thing the rep offered to me was to change to a chlorine based pool system.

I told him to take that off the table since it was not really an option. He explained that they’ve been encountering issues with Salt water systems lately and he didn’t really know what to say. Apparently the adoption of salt water by individual consumers such as myself has caught them off guard.

Of course I had checked this before I ever determined my pool chemistry solution, their own website FAQ says use of a Fastlane with a salt system is A-OK so I was not expecting any issues:

Although as I search today I see this somewhat light warning out there, I would not have noticed this in my initial research in any case.

So I asked him to get my request for assistance in front of one of their techs and to please contact me by next Wednesday. If I don’t hear back I’ll be following up with them anyway.

I am posting this as a warning to other Fastlane owners that have or are considering a salt water system so that they can be informed. I will post any solution I find here as an update to this blog entry.

**Update** Even though I posted something as a reply below, I realize that it just gets lost in the comments. I found a solution and you can see this subsequent blog entry to check it out. Basically a simple and inexpensive cleaner plus being careful about what I introduce to the pool does the trick.

It took us a long time to find something we were going to be satisfied with for the far side of the pool enclosure. We wanted something that would accent the rock wall face without glaring back at the house where we would be sitting most of the time.

Some challenges included the fact that each light *had* to be at least 7.5 feet above the deck due to electric code restrictions and, since the enclosure posts were mounted on the far side of the retaining wall (about 10 inches from the near edge), the light needed to extend far enough over the deck so that it cast its light back on the wall rather than casting a shadow.

We ended up choosing a gooseneck design that was also “Dark Sky” certified. This would minimize stray light that would only reflect back on the screening which would take away from our desired effect.

We ended up choosing the World Imports 9004-89 Dark Sky Essen Collection Wall Light from Amazon. There are three sizes and we gambled on the largest one (with a 28 inch length) as being the most suitable for our purposes. We needed 3 of them. Two of which now sport 40 watt equivalent CF bulbs and the rightmost fixture sports a 60 watt equivalent to balance out the light.

Here we see them along the back of the enclosure right after I installed them.

They look exactly as we had hoped.

This slightly blurry picture shows the reach and how the larger shade does an excellent job of hiding the bare bulb

It was VERY difficult to get a shot that properly represents the lights at night. My camera and my software both want to make proper sense of the light and try to make every shot like it’s daylight. I did a bit of fussing with the images in post production and this was as close as I can get to how it really looks. The pool water *is* violet in this shot and looks great on its own. The new lights are there only for accent.

Here, with the lights off, the pool light is more obvious. Again the camera tried to make sense of things so both the sky in the background and the pool lights are showing MUCH brighter than reality.

One of the other things we need to deal with is how to gracefully handle the wet swim suits and towels that accumulate during the day. We wanted them to be handily available throughout the day and for re-use as needed.

Instead of having a hamper or leaving them hanging over chair backs on the deck we opted to pick up this “CORDAY ACCORDIAN DRYING RACK” from Ballard Designs and install it over the utility sink in our laundry room (which is just off the pool deck). That way really wet items can drip while the other items can take advantage of the ceiling fan breeze and air conditioning to quickly dry out of reach of Georgia’s humidity-filled days.

We just popped out the existing shelves to install this so we still have a bit of work to remove the remaining shelf supports and finish painting the already patched support holes.

That’s Phoebe (one of our cats) casually observing the scene on the dryer.

The rack can extend out as far as is needed and is much more attractive than a clothes line or one of those portable drying racks.

2012 Home Renovations – Part 33 – Landscaping

Building out the Backyard 01