Marc's Musings

Wow! The promised bad weather finally hit us. Our tornado watch was upgraded to a tornado warning last night some time before 9 pm. There were some spectacular rains and some damage affecting the major roadways near our house.

Fortunately the folks working on our site were farsighted enough to put tarps over everything that needed it and anchored them securely so we had no problems at all.

We began the process of removing about 3 feet off of the driveway to prepare for the needed trench for the footer that will brace our major retaining wall by the side of the house.

Here is a kind of crappy picture, taken through a screened and somewhat dusty window, of the jackhammer in action (far right)

and the driveway (with tarp covering) is a wee bit narrower

especially when contrasted with how it looked at the beginning of this project

All that dirt had to go somewhere, so here are a couple of pictures to try to give you a sense of the size of the pile of dirt in our front yard. I characterize it as being about the size of a school bus.

Traffic has been slowing just to stare at it both in its tarped and untarped forms. I wonder how many of them are regretting not voting for reinstatement of the neighborhood covenants figuring that we’re going to do something monstrous.

Never fear fair neighbors. Much of that dirt will go back to supporting the driveway and much of the rest will modestly adjust the slope of the front yard. The rest, if any is left, *will* be hauled away.

One minor annoyance, the folks who were supposed to mark the utilities missed the coaxial cable supplying my internet connection. It managed to survive the jackhammering, but met its match when the mini-bulldozer attempted to remove the concrete pieces.

Apparently the last contractor who had worked on this driveway 1) poured a brand new driveway OVER the existing driveway and 2) embedded the cable (within some pvc piping) WITHIN the newly poured concrete. The first is a cardinal sin and whoever did that job should be standing in an unemployment line someplace. The second I’m told is also a terrible idea for exactly the reason that you have no choice but to wreck it when you work on the driveway.

The crew was so paranoid after that that they very carefully dug out the area by hand to ensure that nothing else had been missed.

To their credit (I can’t believe I’m about to compliment Comcast), the cable company had a rep out the next morning who reconnected service and gave us a generous amount of cable so that we could shift it around as we need to for the remainder of the project. Mind you, they still are charging me $49 for the visit because we cut the cable. I suppose they are just hoping that it will be too much bother for us to argue the point with them.

The pool walls are now up!

The usual shots

Now showing the filtration unit attached from the back end

And my favorite perspective.  After seeing the hole in the back yard my mind was picturing the pool as being larger than it really was. Once the lanai is in place the pool will fit very nicely but, just like when you get that flat panel TV home from the store and in your room you always second guess yourself and think you maybe should have gone for the larger unit, I found myself thinking that we really should have gone for 50% more pool. Silly… but that’s just the way things are.

 

2012 Home Renovations – Part 07 – Tha major part of the Pool dig is done

2012 Home Renovations – Part 09 – Rebar for the pool and its retaining wall is up

In the morning we met with Rich (DC Enclosures) and discussed what we were going to do with the dirt being pulled out of the back yard. Much of it will go into leveling our driveway to make the top portion a bit handier for people who visit. Typically, anybody who parked in the “turnaround pad” found their car to be on a steep enough angle that opening the door and getting out proved to be somewhat of a challenge.

So we will be widening the driveway and making the bottom part of it somewhat steeper. This will allow us to bring the top part much closer to level. We also will not be nearly so aggressive in the slope that is built into the driveway (the side to side curve that will help redirect water where we want it to go – the reverse of a crown).

The pile of dirt in the front yard continues to grow and will grow even more tomorrow as about 3 feet of our driveway – at the side of the house – is broken off and then the underlying dirt is excavated in order to prepare a massive footing that will be required to properly secure the new retaining wall.

Our driveway is really taking a beating. When you combine the fact that it was already showing some signs of shifting with the removal of the support the old, rotting retaining wall provided and the pounding of the heavy equipment moving back and forth over it it is small wonder that it’s now sinking and cracking so much

I looked over at our neighbor’s house to check out their retaining wall which was rebuilt about 3 or 4 years ago and can see that it is already leaning noticeably. I don’t want to mess about with a half-assed job like that. We’re going with a properly engineered solution so that my investment in the new driveway and the security of both me and my other neighbor below this wall will be assured.

The pool dig is largely done. You can see the actual shape of the pool as the deeper hole inside of the larger hole. The extra room of the larger hole is for the rebar, support and drainage that needs to be installed around the pool.

The black panels are the walls of the pool from DesJoyaux. The big “grooves” or “pockets” that you see on the bottom of the smaller pile will be filled with concrete when all is said and done.

The blocks you see at the bottom of the pool hole represent the bottom of the finished pool. The guys spent a LOT of time working with leveling devices to carefully place these. These will assure that the rest of the pool is set up correctly.

This unit in the center of the picture is the filter unit for the pool (upside down). One of the appeals of the DesJoyaux system is that there is very little plumbing involved, no bottom drain, no skimmers beyond the one on the filter unit itself. So there is less to worry about breaking due to freezing or heaving. The filter is positioned to promote a clockwise flow of water. Because you’re not moving water around through an array of pipes, you don’t need as powerful a motor. The unit I’m going to have will consume between .3 kWatts and 1.6 kWatts depending on whether I’m using the high or low setting (that’s about .4 to 2 horsepower).

2012 Home Renovations – Part 06 – The Pool dig has begun

2012 Home Renovations – Part 08 – The pool walls are up, half of the driveway is gone

Today had the majority of our new drainage infrastructure put in place. The yard was re-graded to properly divert water both away from the house and away from the pool area. The way our yard sloped before, the water would naturally flow across the intended pool area toward the neighbor’s back yard (and so on down the street). Now we’re redirecting all that toward the front yard instead. Three collection/catch basins were also installed where most of the downspout and runoff water will be collected. These may be overkill, but we’re engineering on the conservative side so that we will not have to go back later to address a problem that could have been avoided. We have relatively low profile curbs so the original plan to have the water piped down to the street and then out through a hole in the curb is in question at the moment. I’m looking at this as a possible solution.

You can see both downspouts are now redirected into the new drainage system and the grate for one of the catch basins in the center of the image.

Here is another of the catch basin grates, plus a couple more downspouts redirected and at the top of the picture you can see trenching for the pipes that will carry the water to the curb.

These are the pipes ready to go when we’ve sorted out how to introduce the drainage water to the street in an attractive fashion

But the big news is that the actual pool dig has begun. You can finally get a sense of our plans becoming reality as we see the pool carved out of the ground.

Note the sloppy clay from last night’s rainfall

This picture gives a sense of the formerly forested part of our back yard. I’m hopeful that we can do something back here that can recapture some of that untamed aspect.

This blue pipe is a rough-in for the downspout that will eventually come from the “supergutter” that will serve both drainage and support functions in the finished lanai

We’re doing a fair amount of planning right now to ensure that we make the most of our other planned enhancements. Namely to change the slope profile of the front yard and the driveway and to widen the driveway. We may be lucky enough to consume nearly ALL of the dug soil/clay in these other parts. Meanwhile the pile of dirt in the front yard continues to grow.

Of course all of this is not without cost. Rich (of DC Enclosures) is working with us to try to find cost effective options for issues as they arise. We have not had any real surprises so far.

2012 Home Renovations – Part 05 – Digging the trench for the retaining wall footer

2012 Home Renovations – Part 07 – The major part of the Pool dig is done

 

The rain forecast for the next few days doesn’t look very promising, some variation on “Thunderstorms” is being promised through until Sunday. It rained last night so things are pretty sloppy outside now.

The most substantial change is the trench for the footer for the retaining wall

There was a fair amount of work done in terms of preparing the site for the drainage that we are going to need. Including removing the wooden planters that had been up against the house.

And silt fences all around

Note the growing pile of dirt in the front yard – we have plans for this. Originally we were going to have somewhere between 20-50 dump truck loads to take away. So far we have had only 3 to remove the non-reusable stuff that’s been pulled out.

We now have ZERO grass in the back yard. With the rain all that red Georgia clay has become pretty slick and tenaciously stuck to anything that has come near to it!

2012 Home Renovations – Part 04 – Initial scratch and demolition

2012 Home Renovations – Part 06 – The Pool dig has begun

Critical to any project is knowing where you started.

I’ve chosen 9 vantage points from which to check out progress.

Beginning by looking out of the back of the house, you can see the view from our current patio sliding door.

  

Then, stepping out onto the driveway we can see the view through the current lanai, then to our shed and then down the driveway.

    

Then stepping off our property to get a look at the bulk of our existing retaining wall

After that, the view FROM the shed

And then a survey of the back yard from the far corner

    

Then, from the front of the house you can see the existing retaining wall, the driveway and the side of the house where we’ll be doing some drainage work

    

Finally, looking from the front patio down our walkway across the turnaround pad and from the garage respectively.

  

 

2012 Home Renovations – Part 01 The Project – Pool, Lanai, Driveway, Retaining walls

2012 Home Renovations – Part 03 Clearing the Trees

 

A few months ago, while visiting relatives in Florida, Michelle went out to take in the neighborhood. She came back from this not just a little excited and told me that they’d found a house that was in foreclosure and that I should come and take a look-see.

The house was nicely appointed (what we could see from the outside) with an *enormous* lanai complete with a covered area with ceiling fans, a pool, an outdoor shower and plenty of room to spread out on the paving-stone deck.

We weighed the pros and cons of purchasing this as a second home and, helped by the realization that foreclosures are primarily the purview of speculators and homeless people, we distilled our desire for the place principally to it’s great outdoor area.

So, rather than saddle ourselves with the massive initial debt and ongoing obligations that go with owning such a property, especially considering that we really would only be able to enjoy it a few times a year, we have elected to take what we felt was best in that place and build it into our current home.

The project seemed pretty simple at first, how hard can it be to put in a pool with a screened enclosure?

They call our subdivision “Indian Hills” for a reason. Our house is set reasonably far back on just under a half acre of land with the front yard sloping down toward the street. The back yard is level behind the house for all of *maybe* 3-5 yards before it starts to slope upward. What this means is that we need to make our own level ground. For some reason you don’t install pools on an angle 🙂

Because our yard slopes, not only toward the house but also from West to East, there are drainage issues to consider. Add to this that we have a deteriorating railroad-tie retaining wall supporting our driveway – both of which are original with the 1970’s era house – and we end up with the following project:

• Clear area for pool and lanai out back (about 25′ out from the house and about 42′ wide) including removing a bunch of trees
• Pour retaining wall along one side and the back of the enclosure area to a height of about 4′
• Level out as much of the remaining  back yard as possible to minimize the size of the needed retaining wall, otherwise this would need to be almost 7′ high
• Install 28′ by 12′ by 4.5′ deep pool with an Endless Pools Fastlane
• Build a drainage system to handle the backyard runoff that will be impacted by the retaining wall plus take all of our downspouts and route them appropriately away from the house
• Remove and replace the existing driveway and retaining wall

The pool will be furnished by DesJoyaux pools and DC Enclosures will be building the Lanai and overseeing the construction related to the other aspects of the project.

We expect the project to span from February 11 until some time in May.

While we were trying to visualize the project, we were provided with some preliminary plans that serve to give an idea of the overall scope and impression of the project. We’ve since redesigned the pool to be more purely rectangular.

This first drawing shows the overall schematic

Here we see the pool as it is supposed to look coming out of our laundry room

This perspective is looking back *at* the laundry room door corner from the far side of the pool

And this one is an overview from a point slightly above our shed on the hillside

 

2012 Home Renovations – Part 02 The Before pictures