Skip to main content

Post Primer....

We were going to rent a laser level but discovered that Home Depot sold one that cost less than the one-day rental.... This thing is very helpful in making sure that the posts are all set at the same depth....



This weekend is Jeff's birthday, our friend Mike Fuhr came up from Irvine to help us celebrate and to get a lesson in the careful art of precision post hole installation......We had a lot of fun and are VERY grateful for Mike's help....

Here Mike and Jeff are using the laser level to check the depth of one of the holes before we placed the post...



Here is the laser and the tripod that it sits on....



Once the hole was about an inch deeper than the target depth, we put gravel into the bottom of the hole....


After the gravel is poured in, we put the post in the hole and then re-checked the depth with the laser level and then used a level to make sure it was going in vertically (on both sides). We put in the two end poles first (and used a little geometry to figure out the exact location so that the line of posts would be square to the house and the lot.) and then rang a string between them so that the entire line of posts was lined up.

After the posts were aligned properly, the fast part was filling in around each one with bags of concrete post hole mix. These posts were set 30 inches in the ground.


Here is the first wall of the future utility enclosure that will store our garbage cans and yard furniture in the winter. The four tall posts in the middle will be repeated on the other side of the yard and we will string steel cables between them and string cafe lighting over our patio.

Do you know what I mean? light strings like these...

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Fridge is in

The kitchen cabinet bases are all installed, the only appliance we have placed is the fridge. The others will go in over the next week or so....you can see the Eucalyptus veneer on our cabinets....yes, they are from IKEA.....it has been a lot of work for Jeff to put them together, but they were significantly less expensive than the other choices we looked at.

3rd Floor bathroom progress

One of the cool things about the house is that when taking a shower in the 3rd floor bathroom, ones head will be in the skylight dome....Do they issue tickets for flashing a helicopter? You can also see that the HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) guys started last week. They started to pull duct work up to the air exchanger and fan on the 3rd floor.... All 4 of the toilets in the house are wall mounted Geberit low flow toilets with dual flush mode. You can see the `carrier' for the toilet in the middle of this pic. The tank for the toilet is hidden in the wall cavity. We bought almost all of our plumbing fixtures online. The sinks and toilets were purchased from Ira Wood & Sons in Kentucky. They have an excellent website for comparing products: http://store.yahoo.com/irawoodinc/tewamotosy.html

Practicing Safe Roofing...

About 10 years ago Jeff was up on our roof cleaning the wood shakes and gutters....He slipped and then fell off and broke his hip....When Jeff told me that he was going to save a little money and install the rigid foam insulation on the portion of the roof over the living room, I felt suddenly nervous....Luckily our friend David teaches rock climbing and just happened to have his climbing belt handy. Yosemite is now beckoning......Hopefully we won't have to install insulation on Half Dome.. http://www.nps.gov/yose/wilderness/climbing.htm