All work and no play makes Papa a boring Sheep. This weekend just passed I took a break from working on ye olde homestead and trekked out to the Waterfront in Suisun City with the BAMA folks for the Biggest Little MCA National Show. The BAMA crew returned to base with nineteen (19) gold awards in the saddle bags!
The Papa Sheep
This, that an'tother
Tuesday, May 24, 2022
Sunday, May 22, 2022
Front Porch Part 2
It has been another busy few months in the Sheep Family Compound. For a number of reasons our DIY activities have been in the background over the last few months, but finally one of our projects has reached the stage where it can be transcribed onto the modern equivalent of a stone tablet.
If 2020 and 2021 were side yard and raised beds summers, then 2022 is definitely a front yard summer, staring with the porch and the entrance to the house. This is how I left off the weekend before the Christmas holidays. I knew it would be a few months before I could work on this project again, so I spread some pea gravel on the area we walk through.
This is another week later, and we're all ready to pour the new edge of the upper step:
Sunday, February 27, 2022
Basement Expansion Part 20
The last post, which appear in this blog at the end of last month told the story of work done up until our Christmas Holidays. And very nice they were too, thanks for asking. It has become traditional in the Sheep Clan to either flog our guts out over Christmas/New Year on some all-engulfing DIY project, or to do absolutely nothing productive whatsoever have a nice relaxing break from such activities. The year just passed was most definitely in the latter category, but do not let that fool you; since the turn of 2022, we have been hard at it with the concrete mixer and the finishing trowels!
I didn't take as many photos during this part of the project as I might have done, but oh well. The first step was to install a plastic vapor barrier - this means that if the drainage system fails the water will not leach through the concrete and rust out the rebar.
With that done, the floor was divided up into a grid where the lines in the grid/seams in the concrete line up with those in the sections we poured previously. This pattern dictates that the first section of the floor will be an L-shape. I installed the rebar after I built the forms which makes it much easier to building the forms, but impossible to remove them without total destruction.
sump pump connected and working! |
The two photos below we taken this weekend. It's been four or five weeks since the last section of concrete was poured. It that time everything in the basement and workshop has been swept and vacuumed to the point where I have gotten rid of all but the most stubborn concrete dust. I still have the concrete mixer and all the related infrastructure on hand for the porch project, but once that is done, I will be moving them on and freeing up this space for the cabinet saw. Totally new floor space, not including the bit we could previously walk through is about 350 square feet. One day we might have a fifth bedroom and fourth full bathroom down here.....
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