Darkavich's Daily Ramblings Ramblings of a Mad Sys-Admin

The last two weeks have been spent pretty much tearing out concrete. The company did a really piss-poor job. It was supposed to take them 2.5 days and it took almost ten, yes 10 days. Now, yes the concrete was thicker than they planned, but I don’t by that excuse. They should have brought out more crew to get it done on time.

After they were done, we dug trenches. These trenches will hold the water, electrical, gas and my network conduit. It will be nice to have all this under ground.

We also upgraded all the plumbing to bigger pipes. One of the problems with the old system is the pipes were too small, so the volume of water was not large enough to produce the bubbles for the spa.

We installed a new suction line so that the skimmer and suction are separate. The should help prevent the pump from ever running dry. In addition, we added a new check valve to the solar return. This helps eliminate a dangerous valve that was in the system that could be closed and build up pressure. We removed this and replaced it with a check valve.

All of the equipment was moved down about five feet. so that it is away from the doorways. This will allow us to put our trash containers outside the doors and give us more room for the walkway.

At the end of this week, they finally filled in all the trenches. Just in time too, as it started to rain today. This weekend will be spent pulling the cables through the data pipes and hooking up the network and cable-tv underground. If time permits, I will work on clearing out dirt to start leveling the hill. I plan to terrace it to two levels.

Ok, as most of you know I have been unhappy with the waterfall in my back yard since the day it was install. I finally decided to tear it out and start all over.

They started by taking down all the rocks and diverting the transition stream. When they took up the liner they found several holes. This is where all my water has been seeping out. I am glad after almost 4 years we got to the bottom (pun intended) of it.

With the stream diverted, we now have a good area where the foot bridge will cross and I can put a bridge there for my trains. I am amazingly pleased with how well it came out.

At the end of the 1st day, they completed the bottom half of the new waterfall. The new waterfall will be more of a terraced drop instead of a cascade. This will give it a nice look. I plan to have two bridges that run over the falls. I just have to figure out how much space I will have.

The fences are all done now and we have privacy again.

I also had them replace the fence on the other side of the property, so we can now park our jet ski over there! What you didn’t know we had a new jet ski? More on that later.

Our fences came down today. They were able to sink all the posts today.

Tomorrow will be a busy day. I have lots of contractors on site. Four of them to be exact. They will be finishing the fences, running my new gas line, pool work and redoing my waterfall for my pond (and hopefully finding the leak).

So we finally cleared the dirt away and found the root (pun intended) of why our concrete slabs were lifted around our pool.

We are trying to decide what to do with this. It is too critical a root to cut. If we cut the root, the tree may loose stability over time. We are thinking of putting a fake rock feature around the pool edge that covers the roots. More details as we figure them out.