Friday, April 20, 2012

More Home Improvements

I had some serious plans for the early part of this week to accomplish a great deal on the shed.  These plans however were hampered by really wet weather here in SLC so far this week.  I was however, able to find some other ways to stay busy with my time and keeping up on the home maintenance and improvement front.

One of the nice effects of the shed project is that I had to dig almost a full yard of soil out of the footprint of the shed in order to keep the new floor joists and framing out of the dirt where it would rot.  Because of this we had a healthy surplus of soil just sitting around waiting for me to find a use for it.  The previous owners of the house were so nice as to instal an automatic sprinkler system, but weren't nice enough to make sure the soil was tamped back down on their lines nor were they nice enough to level the soil back out.  The problem we have been having because of this, is that water tends to pool up near our foundation during the wet months.  The dogs of course seemed to always find this mud hole and make it worse.  So naturally I was quick to find a use for all the extra soil we had laying around!


As you can see, the soil follows the contour of the depressed area of the yard against the house.  This is where I spread and tamped and raked some of the extra soil to fill in.  The yellow grainy stuff you see spread on the soil is all the grass seed I spread to reseed this area.  After this shot was taken I then raked it into the soil about 1/16-1/4 inch deep.  Suzanne and I are very hopeful that this will turn out well and not turn into a disaster.


This was probably the easiest of the projects from the last few days.  We have these air intake vents on the front of our house and they were quite rusty and I felt like they had become an eyesore on the house.  So I took them down and painted them while I painted some decorative door trim for our basement bathroom remodel.  They are actually white now and look much better mounted on the front of the house!


One of the more pesky but non-urgent problems Suzanne and I have had with the house was the mailbox post.  The previous post was maybe 1/128" thick steel pipe that was almost completely rusted through in most areas.  In fact it was rusted out in the middle and the previous owners of the home had put a PVC pipe around it to keep it upright.  Classy right?  Yeah that's how we've been reppin our mail the last couple years.  Well, due to the rain, I went to my Dads and hit him up for some work and materials and he threw this bad boy together right quick while I worked on some angle brackets for the shed.  This is 3/8" thick galvanized steel 3" pipe.  To top it off, or rather, to bottom it out, I threw in about 100 pounds of concrete to keep this nice and solid.  No more punk teenagers screwin around with our mailbox, twisting it around and whatnot!


 About a month ago, I popped in at the West Jordan utility complex and reserved a neighborhood dumpster for the shed project.  I knew I would have quite a bit of trash and had no way to dispose of it, so this was the best option.  It finally arrived on Wednesday and I was able to put all my trash in it before the rest of the 'hood threw their items in.  This is a 3 day reservation so Suzanne and I have had to endure having this 20 foot long 8 feet wide bright orange mini-dump with the word "Crip" tagged on the side, parked right in front of our house.  It's definitely been worth it though!

 
  The best part of the bad weather and the down time of not being able to work on the shed has been being able to hang with this cool kid.  Nothing beats time with Suzanne and our sweet little man.  This kid is a stud!  This was a night where it was just the Alexander men at home and this was the net effect. 

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