I swung by Lowes today to see what kind of mortar (and mortar ingredients) they carry. Neither they nor Home Depot seem to carry white Portland cement, so unless I go through a supplier or lumber yard, it looks like my only choice is gray mortar. However, I’m not sure that’s such a bad thing.…

Today I officially got the pool project underway, after 6 weeks or so of procrastination. After a week of foul weather, I finally got a decent day, so I took off work and rented the concrete saw. It did the job quite nicely, and quickly enough that I only needed a 4-hour rental. It took…

Time to get started on the pool repair project.. better late than never I suppose. I’ve blocked off this coming Thursday to rent a concrete saw and cut back the expansion joint. Also, I’ve been thinking a lot more about what to use to mortar the coping stones in place. Terry Tamminen’s excellent book, The…

Well, May starts tomorrow, and with it comes… the pool project. This is sure to be the topic of many entries over the next couple months. Background: Late last summer I noticed a loose strip of waterline tile in the deep end of the pool. Further investigation revealed that all of the coping stones in…

Well, I wasn’t sure I’d ever see this day, but the basement plumbing project is finally finished. It went smoothly and pretty much according to plan. No more leaky fitting in the basement, and I now have a working frost free sillcock outside by the pool equipment. I started at 8:30am on Friday, and finished…

Friday’s the big day. Friday is the day I’ve set aside to finish the never-ending basement plumbing project(tm). My goal is to finish this before the baby comes, and before the yard/pool work starts. The trick is picking the day to do it. Ideally I need a day when I can have the house to…

I finally got back to working on my endless plumbing project today. A couple weeks back, I pressure tested the new branch I ran for the outside sillcock. To do this, I soldered a female adapter onto a 12″ length of pipe, screwed a quick-connect air coupling into it, and attached the other end to…

I’ve got this plumbing project in my basement, that I’ve been working at for what seems like about a year now. It started with my wife finding a leaky pipe. The leak was (is) at a copper tee, where a 3/4″ line branches out to 2 1/2″ lines. It was (is) leaking at a rate…

Subject says it all! I finished the wiring up today, installed the fan control, and replaced an outlet while I was at it. All my extra wiring turned out to be worth the effort — there’s absolutely no way I would have gotten the fan control in the wall box with all the extra wires…

I spent the afternoon in the attic today, and got the lion’s share of the wiring done for the fan project. Last week I fished the wire from the basement to the attic. It was pretty straightforward. Some medium-duty nylon rope was the ticket. I dropped it down into the stud cavity from the attic,…