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Post by RickW on Jul 9, 2018 16:50:09 GMT -5
One reason I live in a strata now. I had a few projects when we owned a house, and while not as big as that, were painful. Just getting a mound of gravel to deposit under the deck and down the sides was exhausting. Nothing like flinging shovels of rock for a few hours to remind you why you didn't go into manual labor for a living.
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Post by james on Jul 9, 2018 16:51:54 GMT -5
One of my various excursions into "gotta pay the rent" jobs was as a landscape gardener and wall builder. After lots of fairly well paid projects over the years, my back and knees refused to tolerate the demands on them any more. It is more of a young man/woman's game.
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Post by epaul on Jul 9, 2018 19:48:43 GMT -5
... It is more of a young man/woman's game. It is quite narrow and prejudicial of you to assume that all who engage in landscaping are either a man or a woman, some of us are neither... for that matter, not all of us self-identify as human. We may prefer to identify as another species that more accurately represents us. We may even be that species. There is no cosmic or earthly reason to blithely assign an arbitrary sex or species to those of us who tend and build, we are "Tenders" and "Builders", and we live among you, tending and building and stuff.
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Post by jdd2 on Jul 9, 2018 20:20:17 GMT -5
I'm a tangent.
(which is not very useful in landscaping)
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Post by james on Jul 9, 2018 21:41:21 GMT -5
... It is more of a young man/woman's game. It is quite narrow and prejudicial of you to assume that all who engage in landscaping are either a man or a woman, some of us are neither... for that matter, not all of us self-identify as human. We may prefer to identify as another species that more accurately represents us. We may even be that species. There is no cosmic or earthly reason to blithely assign an arbitrary sex or species to those of us who tend and build, we are "Tenders" and "Builders", and we live among you, tending and building and stuff. It was a consideration. I edited "young man's game" to "young man/woman's game" because a regular employer of mine was an Australian woman. She was the fastest wall builder I've ever worked with. I'm sorry I wasn't sufficiently inclusive.
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Post by fauxmaha on Jul 16, 2018 15:02:29 GMT -5
Got a bit of a wrinkle here. I was a dutiful citizen and called for an underground locate before we started. That revealed a bit of a problem, since the power service was running right under where we wanted to put the new wall. So I carefully hand dug and found the line. Good news was we could work around it. The only downside, such as it was, was that there would be a brief section that wasn't as deep as it should be, but only like a foot or so. So off we went. Got the lower two tiers finished. Then Thursday morning I wake up and power is out in half the house. Oops. A bit of diagnosing and breaker flipping and noodling and I figured out that what happened was one of the two "hot" leads on the 220V feed cut out. Any 110 circuit on that side of the feed was dead. Including the one that the coffee pot was plugged in to. Which really sucked. That was weird, since it had been over two weeks since I'd done anything remotely near the spot close to the cable I was worried about. And weirder still since the exact same thing happened a year and a half ago when I was doing the remodel project. Anyway, called the power company, an this time they decided to just run a new cable. So right now, I've got this big horse c*ck of a power cable laying across the back of my yard. All of that creates two problems. The first is I'm guessing I'm going to be getting a bill from the power company. They haven't said anything about that, but we'll see. I honestly don't think I could have caused this, but I expect convincing them of that might be difficult, although the fact that the same thing happened in the recent past would seem to bolster my case. The second is that I'm kind of dead in the water until they bury the new cable, since the only reasonable place to bury it is going to cross under the last section of wall that I am yet to build. I'm trying to coordinate with the power company, but they are about exactly as customer friendly as you'd expect. Ugh. Did manage to get a bit done over the weekend anyway. There is a little stub of a wall on the other side of the house that needed doing. Got that wrapped up, except for the caps. That turned into six hours of not fun. Not only did I have to excavate a surprising amount of dirt by hand, but all my materials were stage on the other side of the yard, so I had to hand grunt them over.
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Post by brucemacneill on Jul 16, 2018 16:25:21 GMT -5
Guess I should have warned you that the stuff you needed would be on the wrong side of the house. I learned that back in Pa. building my similar wall. I didn't f^& up the electrical though.
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Post by Village Idiot on Jul 16, 2018 21:31:25 GMT -5
The second is that I'm kind of dead in the water until they bury the new cable, since the only reasonable place to bury it is going to cross under the last section of wall that I am yet to build. I'm trying to coordinate with the power company, but they are about exactly as customer friendly as you'd expect. Ugh. It all looks great, but I get your labor and I get your current plight. It sounds like Paleo's predicament a few years ago when Urbana decided on "free" cable, and everyone had cables laying in their yard.
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Post by fauxmaha on Aug 8, 2018 11:54:41 GMT -5
Finally moving forward. The way the power line fiasco worked out is I had to hire a contractor to bore a new conduit from the meter back to the electrical boxes in the corner of the yard. Other than taking a $1,500 beating and a few weeks delay, that worked out. At some point the power company will come out and fish their cable through the new conduit, and they do seem determined to take their own sweet time on that one, but it's not holding me up anymore. So it's back to the grind. I'm on the last tier now. Probably need two more good evenings of work and I'll be ready to put on all the caps. Just have to run this section another 25' or so up to the driveway...
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Post by Marshall on Aug 8, 2018 14:12:43 GMT -5
they do seem determined to take their own sweet time on that one, Fire the power company ! It's not like they are the only ones that can give you power.
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Post by fauxmaha on Aug 14, 2018 10:23:09 GMT -5
Down to the short strokes. FINALLY! My tendinitis-prone right elbow is fighting me every inch of the way at this point. All three tiers of the wall are topped off, and I'm about halfway through with the capstones. Stupid power company still hasn't shown up to run their line through the new conduit, but heh. Joke's on them. They aren't slowing me down anymore. I'm amazed at how close the materials estimate turned out, particularly since I made a couple of on-the-fly design changes as it went. Started out with 16 pallets of block and two pallets of caps. As it stands, I've got less than one pallet of block left over. Don't know yet how the caps will turn out, but at a glance, it looks like I'll have a few extras as well. Seven tons of crushed limestone to put under the wall worked out perfect. Don't have any of that left. I brought in the backfill gravel a pickup load at a time. Ten loads at 3k pounds/load for a total of 15 tons of that. My long-suffering wheelbarrow has done yeoman's work on this. I bought that thing for a project 25 years ago. The tire looks like hell, but it still holds air. Kind of have the idea of giving it a full restoration, including hot-rod metal flake paint job, once this is over. It's earned it. Jessica's boyfriend Nick has been a huge help on this. His family owns a grading company, and he's been over with his Bobcat a couple of times doing the major dirt-moving. Without that, this would have been a nightmare. He also loaned me the tamper in the photo below (that thing will take you for a ride) and a man-eater of concrete saw. Amazing thing. It's a Stihl, and the tiny little 2 stroke engine is rated at over 4HP. Cuts through those caps like butter. Got the lights ordered. Going to be 28 of them. Once the caps are all cut to fit, I'll go around and install the lights, then glue down the caps on top of them. Then I have to find a concrete guy to pour the sidewalk/stairs. Then I have to re-build the stairs off the deck. Nice being able to finally see the finish line on this one.
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Post by fauxmaha on Sept 12, 2018 12:49:23 GMT -5
Well, the wall proper is done. Has been for a week or so, actually. All the caps are cut and fit and glued. I put some nifty lights in as well, and those turned out beautifully. When it was all said and done, I ended up raising the AC compressor by almost a foot. Got some good news this morning. We tore up the sprinkler system pretty indiscriminately as we were excavating. Got my sprinkler guy over and he said it wouldn't be that much to get everything put back to where it should be. Nice. But I've got a problem. Seems like with the crazy wet summer we've had, every concrete guy in town is behind schedule and booked solid. I haven't had a bit of luck getting one of them to show an interest in getting this done any time soon. Not much I can do about that except hope they get caught up in time. Marshall, got a question: My deck is due for a refresh, and part of the overall concept here is to pour a huge patio underneath it, extending out a fair amount into the yard. Fancy stuff with a fire pit and all that sort of thing. Additionally, the guy who built it (not me!) did a crap job on the stairs you see on the left. They are just resting on the ground, not on proper footings, and a decade of heaving has pretty much left them shot to hell. So the idea is to remove those stairs (there will be a different stairway coming down off the other side of the deck onto the new pavement), and also re-engineer the main deck support. What I'd like to do is get rid of those five posts, and replace them with three, so as to have fewer obstructions on the new patio. I assume that means I'll need two sections of steel I-beam. I also want to run the I-beam flush with the outside edge of the deck, so it's sitting directly under the upper posts holding up the roof, which will also allow me to get the new beam and posts installed before I knock out the old stuff. Anything about that seem unreasonable?
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Post by theevan on Sept 12, 2018 16:05:02 GMT -5
Seems reasonable to me. I love the lights
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Post by RickW on Sept 12, 2018 19:16:20 GMT -5
Looks great. What a ton of work. Hurts just looking at it.
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Post by jdd2 on Sept 13, 2018 4:49:04 GMT -5
The work involved is admirable, but what's surprising here is that there is that much elevation difference in any part of Nebraska.
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