Well here it is New Year’s Eve again. Once again, I took a nice, (2 week) long holiday break from work. And once again, I started out hoping to get tons done around the house, but it didn’t happen. Well OK, I got some stuff done, just not as much as I wanted to. It’s…

OK, so here’s the current plan for the basement floor drains. I haven’t quite finished poking and prodding the drains in the office and the back basement, but assuming the configuration is the same as what I predicted in my previous post, I want to scope them out with a video drain inspection system like…

I’m slowly learning more about our basement floor drains. I bought a small pump (a Little Giant PP-1) that sucks and discharges through a garden hose, and it does a wonderful job of pumping the drains out. A short length of hose easily fits down the drain, and I run the discharge into the office…

I’ve decided to try to figure out our basement floor drains. My goal is to ascertain: How the drains themselves are configured; Where the plumbing goes; Why they seem to hold water indefinitely; and Why they back up into the basement during heavy rainstorms. My goal is to either fix the existing drain system (I’m…

Wednesday, I took the day off work and moved the bulk of the circuits off our old FPE “Federal Noark” panel, to the new Square D QO panel. There are three circuits remaining to be done, all of which are connected via conduit, so I’ll need to reroute these before I can rip the FPE…

Today I officially began my project to replace two Federal Pacific circuit breaker panels in my house. I’m starting with a subpanel in the boiler room, and after that’s done I’ll move on to the house’s main panel. Ironically, the first step to doing this was to replace a perfectly good Square-D QO subpanel in…

At long last, I got the planetary alignment needed to caulk the pool deck joints, so I did it this morning. First lesson learned: I need to wear disposable gloves when doing this. Because as bad as I thought silicone caulk stuck to my hands, polyurethane caulk is 10 times worse. I wouldn’t be surprised…

Over the past weekend, I came to the conclusion that I’ve bitten off more than I can chew with my swimming pool repair project this year. The moment of enlightenment came on Saturday, when I spent most of the day working on the pool. It occurred to me that to effectively re-bed my loose coping…

Work on the pool coping project continues slowly but surely. I didn’t intend for this to be an all-summer project, but that’s how it’s turning out. The hot weather has really slowed it down, which is not all bad, as it’s keeping me from overextending myself. I’ve done most of my recent work in the…

Continuing in my grand tradition, I’m writing about yet another house project that I’d like to do… the problem, as always, is finding the time for it.. We have two circuit breaker panels which really should be replaced. They are FPE panels with known safety issues. One panel is our main house panel, and the…