Someone say something

[Flo]

There don't seem to be a lot of new topics around do there? New ideas for self sufficiency, new angles, new challenges.

Whatever has happened to us all? Are we stuck in a rut? Or is each of us stuck in our own rut with no time to look over the sides?

[Green Aura]

Sorry, Flo, Bank Holidays mean DIY here - it's the only time I get my OH for long enough to do any jobs - this weekend we've put up a new wall (creating an extra room), put in a door and surround and been laying/varnishing floorboards.

One of his colleagues asked him what he'd be doing over the holiday period then laughed and said "Don't tell me the wife will have you working, won't she". How well he knows me.

[baldybloke]

I seem to have less time for forums these days due to other commitments. I have got myself involved with a local environmental group and that takes a lot of my free time these days. The rest of the time it's just work and trying to keep on top of the projects.

[Flo]

Sending sympathy to Mr Green Aura the poor picked on bloke. As for you baldybloke you should know better than to volunteer shouldn't you? I'm only around today because it's my declared day of bum on seat for relaxation before venturing back into the wild world of allotment work.

[baldybloke]

It seems we are all getting on doing things rather than sharing stuff on the forum. Other forums seem to have gone quiet too.

[Green Aura]

I think we do get quieter at weekends, holiday periods and particularly when the weather picks up sufficiently to get out in the garden. I've noticed it often, even when the board was at its most active.

[contadina]

You're not wrong GA I just spent the entire Easter weekend mowing, getting my keyhole garden ready for transplanting out seedlings, sowing my raised beds and tidying up the caper bush.

[mamos]

We all need to start putting more effort into keeping this forum alive. It would be a shame to see it disappear.

Paul

[Abi]

It'd be a terrible shame - I've only just joined!

[KathyLauren]

I think this forum lost its critical mass some time ago. I hope it's only because people would rather be out in their gardens than on the computer.

We are in the process of having a solar heating system installed. There are five panels on the roof. The crew is working on the plumbing right now. It will have two 60-gallon tanks in the basement, one for domestic hot water, and the other for the in-floor radiant heating. It won't be enough to store heat for a long time, but it should allow us to keep the house warm overnight without burning oil.

We are trying to rehabilitate the garden after moving to this house last summer. The large garden area is a mess. The asparagus, rhubarb, raspberries and blueberries are all starving. We might have to replace some of them, and of course get some compost happening. There's a bed near the front of the house that used to be a fish pond. The previous owners filled it with sand, of all things, to make a flower bed! Even weeds won't grow there. I'll have to remove some of the sand and dig in compost. We want to turn that into a salad garden.

We also have to rehabilitate the back yard. I wouldn't go so far as to call it lawn, but it was kind of lawn-like. We are not interested in maintaining a lawn as such, but we do need a level vegetated area as a pee pen for the dog. However, we had to have it dug up last month to fix a chronic drainage problem around the house. We got the drainage problem fixed (the sump pump in the basement now only runs half a dozen times a day, instead of once or twice a minute before!), but now the back yard is a big mud-hole. We will seed it with grass and clover, just to get it covered quickly. It'll be a month before we can do that, though.

Some of you might be putting in drainage for a building, so you might be interested in the story. The original owners reported that the basement had always been wet for the 18 years they lived here. Actual water on the floor. Apparently, the house had been built on an underground river. They had tried locating the outlet of the foundation perimeter drain, but had not managed to find it. The interim owners (who bought from the original owners and sold to us) did some expensive work in the basement to install a barrier and internal drainage system, which fixed the water-on-the-floor problem, but not the fact that there was an underground river going through the sump.

Since we get tropical storms and hurricanes hitting us occasionally, we were in fear that the power would go out during a torrential downpour. With the pump running 20 seconds out of every 30, there wouldn't have been time for me to run to the barn and fetch the generator before the sump overflowed. So we brought in an excavator and dug down to the foundation drain.

There, we found a perfectly good-looking drainage pipe sitting under a foot of water at the bottom of the hole. They brought in a sewer camera, cut into the pipe, and pushed the camera in. The camera emits a sonar signal, so in addition to inspecting the pipe on the video screen, a guy on the surface was following the camera with a wand. Eventually, the camera got to a blockage, which the guy on the surface located. We dug down and located the pipe, five feet down.

Get this: it just stopped! There was no outlet, no rock drainage bed, nothing. Just a pipe that stopped underground. Duh! No wonder it wouln't drain! They dug a trench, and extended the pipe to the side of a hill, where it comes to the surface and can drain freely.

While fixing the foundation drain might have fixed the problem by itself, I like a belt-and-suspenders approach. Since the excavator was there anyway, I had them lay in a separate pipe to take water from the downspouts away from the house. It had been draining into the same ground where the underground river was and making the problem worse.

It was a costly, but necessary repair. I can't believe those people lived with it like that for 18 years!

[Green Aura]

It's not just here then, cowboy builders are everywhere. Looks like you're getting it sorted though.

I did a double take at the belt and suspenders comment - we call them braces. Suspenders are a different thing entirely.

[KathyLauren]

I did a double take at the belt and suspenders comment - we call them braces. Suspenders are a different thing entirely.

Duh, should'a thought of that. I was a Brit myself for the first ten years of my life.

[Green Aura]

It did make me giggle.

[mamos]

Maybe we need to get a core group of us to try and put at least one new thread up a day and also try to then comment on others posts.

It is always easier to get involved if there are lots of new posts every time you visit the forum

Paul

[baldybloke]

It also seems like some of the heavy posters on the past have disappeared from the forum.