Wheres It All Go

Wheres It All Go

When we were designing the house, John Kim at Res4 explained a rough engineering version of what effect water has as it moves downhill against a wall - I didnt really get it, but it sounded scary. And because our retaining wall opens on the uphill side of the house, it acts kind of like a giant catch basin for water coming down the hill underground. So it was really important to get the drainage right and send whatever water gets trapped by the wall through to the other side. The guys who poured the foundation took care of that with pretty extensive drainpipes around the footers that funnel the water through a pass-through in the wall (where it travels through an underground pipe to an outlet below the house down in the woods).

Because we also get a lot of water from the roof through the scupper above the retaining wall, the same process needs to happen - it all needs to get funneled through to the other side of the wall. So as they infilled the retaining wall they connected some black sewer pipe to the footer drains and ran it up the side of the wall to right below the scupper. I built the walkway with a box for a gravel catch basin:


When the stone for the driveway came a few weeks ago, I stole some of it and filled the bottom half of the box, cutting down the pipe:


Graded the stone toward the pipe and lined it with plastic and some chicken wire:


And filled it (almost) the rest of the way with stone:


Remains to be seen how it will handle a lot of falling water - how much splashing well get, how quickly it will drain through the gravel, etc. And Ill finish the open edges of the box with some leftover ipe.


Wheres It All Go

Wanna go halfsies

Wanna go halfsies

I dont think I could ever live in the desert, but Id love to have a west coast version of LostRiverModern and man do I wish it could be this:




With apologies to all the wonderful prefab designs out there, this very first version of the Marmol Radziner entry into the prefab world still blows me away. Dwell has detailed the home and the process here. And if anybody out there wants to help me scrape together $1.2mm...


Wanna go halfsies

Four weeks to go

Four weeks to go

Weve got volunteers to be "test guests" Memorial Day weekend, so Ive got one month to finish up...

I got a LOT of work done on Tuesday and Wednesday: plumbed the tub drain/overflow, hung the sheetrock/cement board in the bathroom, trimmed the bathroom window, tiled the shower until I ran out of mortar, hung and trimmed the basement doors. Forgot my camera, though, so the only evidence I have are these fuzzy phone pics:






I actually got most of the shower walls tiled - only about ten rows left to do, plus all the partial pieces to cut. Hanging tile is not rocket science - especially if youve hung your cement board well (with nice level seams), the only real tricks are laying it out so that you dont have to cut really tiny pieces of tile at the edges, and then getting the first row level. (I had an issue with the lip of the tub not meeting the cement board cleanly, so Ive got a couple of pieces of tile that arent perfectly vertical. Cest la vie. A whole post one of these days will be devoted to our DIY mantra of "its good enough.")


Four weeks to go

Easy Come Easy Go

Easy Come Easy Go

Im going to tell the short version of this story so as not to reveal all the details of what a dope I am. The one-sentence abstract is "back up your stuff." Ive been pretty lax about getting data from our laptop (a Powerbook) to our external hard drive, which I keep in the basement, and dont hook up very often, and blah, blah, blah. Computer crashes and lots of stuff from the last year is gone. Pictures and music, mostly. Including all 1100 or so pics of this project, which had been on my iphone until just days before the fateful moment. Cest la vie. Sarah doesnt want to even think about all the family pics that are gone. I feel terrible. So back up your stuff.

I will tell this part of the story in some detail: Apple sent me a brand new MacBookPro out of the kindness of their hearts, though I was one day past the expiration of the 3-yr extended apple car warranty. They probably could have just fixed the hardware problem on the old machine and been done with it (or worse, told me tough luck). So Ive got a brand new fancy pants computer (albeit with no pictures or music on it). Now its kind of their fault that all the datas gone from the old machine (they erased it in trying to fix some minor problems the machine was having), and its kinda their fault that the computer crashed (it was fine when I sent it off to have the mouse pad - which was acting up - replaced just before my warranty expired). But they tell you over and over again to back up your stuff before you send it to them, and I didnt.

Anyway, they sent me a new $2k computer when they didnt really have to and when I fully expected I was SOL.

And back your stuff up.


Easy Come Easy Go