This was definitely a detail day. Jim worked in the apartment this morning - he has all the box rafters made and installed all the way up the valley rafter on the other side of the kitchen. He'll have to make a trip to get more ceiling baffles - he's all out.
But the big project of the day was the tubing for the water softener if we need one. Jim struck out trying to find the tubing he wanted; today he decided to just go ahead and use Pex. We have plenty of this - he used the bigger tubing that we used for the radiant heating in the floors. However, it was pretty much a nightmare trying to get it through the conduit. Jim worked for over and hour this morning to get it through and out this far. He said it was such hard work - he was soaked from sweating! So he waited until I got there after lunch. The plan was for me to pull on the outside while he pushed from the inside - good plan, right? It was still SO hard! I could get it to move a few inches - Jim wanted it out another 6' or so! We eventually switched places and that worked slightly better but it was still a lot of work!
The inside view...
The next step was to seal the opening to prevent water from coming in. Jim used more spray foam to fill up the conduit from the inside...
Once you open a can, you pretty much have to use it all because it gets hard in the tube. So he went back into the apartment and filled in more holes to use the rest of the can.
Jim wanted to let the foam harden up, so we switched gears and did some driveway repair work. The last heavy rain we had caused some gravel to wash over into the grass again. So we scraped that up.
Jim did a little flattening out of the driveway too. Getting more gravel is on the agenda soon.
Once the foam was hard, Jim switched to the outside. First step was to use caulk around the edges of the conduit...
Next, he used Zip tape and made a sort of casing around the conduit...
and then squirted more caulk in the casing.
More tape and caulk...
And a final taping of the whole thing and we're good to go!
Another casualty of the last rain was more of the sand washed down, exposing some rocks. Jim made sure there weren't any rocks over the water lines and put soft dirt back over the area.
He got a bucketful of gravel and started shoveling it in the corner...
and then hand shoveling it to make a good base of gravel around the water lines. This way, any water will just percolate down through the gravel and not cause any issues around the foundation (not that water not percolating in this soil is a problem!).
All the gravel in place...
We went up to the shed and found our roll of geo-fabric. Jim put a piece over all the gravel to prevent dirt from clogging up the rocks.
Then he shoveled some softer dirt on top...
Then onto backfilling!
I did rock duty below while Jim shoveled soft dirt close to the house.
More shoveling...
This is absolutely mind-boggling to me...this dirt pile is from when we dug the foundation 3 years ago! Amazing to think that we are now using it to backfill! Plus, after sitting untouched for all that time, the soil is as soft and workable as ever. That would never have happened in Ohio!
End-of-the-day pictures...Jim did more grading and contouring to try and divert water into the woods now.
The hole is getting filled in!
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