Category: House

Container Gardening (2011)

Tuesday, 03 May 2011 18:23 Written by Matt 0 Comments

I tried some halfhearted gardening last year, and it did not go well. I think there were 2 problems. First, I didn’t make a dedicated space for planting, just kind of planted along the side of the house in some areas. Second, the soil around here is full of clay and I didn’t invest in any kind of fertilizer or planting soil.

Fast forward to this past weekend, we were up at White Oak Garden and I saw an Earth Box for sale and thought that might a better way to ease into the gardening thing. But they’re kind of expensive, which goes against my idea of “easing into gardening,” so I started looking for ways to build my own and voila! Of course, ours are pink!

The pantyhose-wrapped tupperware containers filled with dirt go in those 2 holes

Here's the whole thing, minus a lid

Still need to cut holes in the lid, but otherwise ready to roll!

I actually built two of these, one for Lily and another for Ava. We’ll go pick plants this weekend or next and get our green thumb on!

Picking Our Plants

Ava's Garden - Bell Peppers & Cucumbers

Lily's Plants - Tomatoes & Bell Peppers

Early June Update

Things are growing well!

DIY Drainage Pipe Repair

Thursday, 21 April 2011 20:25 Written by Matt 0 Comments

I’ve noticed what look liked a snake hole in our garden for a couple years, and thought it was odd but never really investigated it. My father-in-law looked at it last summer and pointed out that it was actually a broken pipe. I didn’t know this, but the downspout empties into a PVC pipe that runs out to the street. At some point, that underground pipe was busted and water running through it was causing the ground to wash away and cause the “snake hole!”

I took this week off work to get some work done around the house, and this seemed like an easy enough task.

Step 1 - Dig a big hole around the pipe

Step 2 - Cut out the busted part

Step 3 - Bring a good helper!

Step 4 - Extract cut-out pipe & clean edges

Step 5 - Insert new pip, make sure to use PVC cement!

You might be wondering why I used a Y connector. Part of our back yard gets a bit soggy, and it’s been hard to keep grass growing in that area so I have plans to trench that out and put in some corrugated drainage pipe. So the plan is to connect that up with this drainage pipe so that everything runs out to the street! That project (the trenching) was actually #1 on my list for this week, but it’s been raining just about every day in April and hasn’t let up this week so no digging unfortunately.

Home Networking

Sunday, 19 July 2009 20:58 Written by Matt 2 Comments

Did some minor remodeling this weekend, and was surprised it went as well as it did. I’m not what you would call a “handy man” so this was a bit of an adventure. The job itself was fairly minor, I bought some Cat6 from Your Cable Hookup (dumb name, really cheap prices & fast shipping) to run in one section of the basement. I wanted to get my XBox hooked up to the internet and prep for a media server or new TV, whatever.

I decided to go with pass-through keystone jacks, since I don’t have the tools to do the push-down stuff properly (and test it) and they cost more than everything else combined. The one downside to the pass-throughs is they add at least an inch of addtl depth to the faceplate so you have to sort of cram the faceplate in to get it flush with the wall. I also had to buy pre-booted cables; needed about 30 ft, but it was 25 or 35 so ended up with an extra 5ft of cable to stuff behind the wall.

I ran 3 cables, 2 would have been easier but I think I’ll happier in the long run with 3. To run the cables, I stripped off the baseboards, then run about a half-inch of drywall off at the floor. The 3rd cable presented a challenge in some spots, getting it tucked under but think I accomplished that. I’ll know more once we do the new baseboards in early August.

Closet jack

TV/XBox jack

Back to Western Civilization!

Wednesday, 17 September 2008 23:05 Written by Matt 0 Comments

Finally, electricity is back on as of this past afternoon! Talk about absurd, 3 days w/o electricity! Who had the bright idea to run electric lines on poles, instead of underground with the phone lines?

And because I just saw one, does anyone understand these Jerry Seinfeld/Bill Gate commercials? They make no sense and they’re not even funny?!

An F in home maintenance

Thursday, 17 July 2008 20:44 Written by Matt 2 Comments

Yesterday, our AC stopped being cold. The unit was running, and some air (not a lot) was blowing through the vents but it wasn’t cold. It was 85 in the house when I got home from work!

So I called a couple places this morning and found someone to come out over lunch, and it turns out the air filters were all clogged up. I had just cleaned the filters this Spring, but apparently I missed half of them. The HVAC guy pulled 4 out, I was only aware of 2 and even after looking for them tonight I still can’t find the other 2. I’ll have to look harder this Fall, when it’s time for another cleaning. In any event, I get an F today in home maintenance.

This incident did spur me to look at the filter in our humidifier, and it was disgusting. Big surprise, considering we’ve lived here over half a decade and I’ve never checked it before. So I went to HD and changed that out.

Maybe with clean filters, our energy bills will go down; that would be nice!