As some of you may remember (yeah, right, who am I kidding) I used the Epoxy hotbox Arduino to read 1-wire temperature probes and make plots of the temperature. In LA, that’s pretty much the only interesting thing to plot, but given that the weather here is, ahem, a bit more variable, I’ve decided to …
Today, I hooked up the downspout to the drainage pipe: Now we’ll see what happens at the bottom when it rains. I still want to make the pipe end in a “dry well” gravel pit (maybe a good use for all the rocks I’ve dug up) and maybe make a drain hole in the lava …
We’ve hit the point of no return: perforated pipe is in the ground! It was finally time to add some actual drainage. With the transport sections laid down and covered, it was now time to start adding the perforated pipe. This posed a small dilemma: there’s this “pipe sock” of filter fabric that goes around …
Continue reading ‘Drainage improvements #6 – Point of no return’ »
The drainage project is getting to the point that I’m now putting stuff into the ground as opposed to taking it out. It’s like we’ve crested and started going downhill… After making sure that the trench has sufficient slope, I started burying the pipe, starting from the lower end. If you start at the bottom …
Continue reading ‘Drainage improvements #5 – Finally some filling’ »
The drainage work continues, but now I’m really seeing the end. After the demolition work in the last post, I continued to dig down along the side of the house. About where there’s some rock poking up through the lawn, I ran into the rock, too. Not entirely unexpected. Continuing to dig, the rock dropped …
The last post about our drainage work had me pumping the water out of the trench I’d dug after we getting 6″ or so over the last day. Since then, I’ve started working my way down the side of the house. I was hoping that this would be easier since that’s down the slope. However, …
Continue reading ‘Drainage improvements #3 – Kicking it up a notch’ »
In the last post, I wondered whether rerouting the downspout drainage away from the house would be enough to avoid more flooding… Well, I decided that it was better not to take any chances, so I started digging. I’d already dug a little hole to check for drainage pipes, so it was just a matter …
Continue reading ‘Drainage improvements #2 – a whole lotta’ digging’ »
As I noted in the basement unfinishing story, the basement has moisture problems. I was curious to find out if there was any sort of drainage around the perimeter of the house, so I started digging down along the foundation. This turned out to be rather difficult. While it looks like the house is surrounded …
Finally, we got to the final step in our basement floor recoating project: actually applying the top coat. We used EpoxyShield garage floor coating, a two-component epoxy that hopefully will be pretty durable. As usual when it comes to painting, the actual painting takes a small fraction of the time compared to the sanding, patching, …
After the grinding of the concrete in the basement, it was time to fill. I got some “EpoxyShield concrete patch”, which is basically a very thick epoxy, and started patching holes. First I just filled holes where stones or whatever had come out. (This is an endless task with diminishing returns… I wonder what the …