Friday Finishes

Mission accomplished, but we are both dead... or at least wish we might be if that would put us out of our misery.

I had hopes this morning of scraping and washing the soffits on the north Florida room wall.  In actuality, I not only finished that soffit, but I also was able to scrape the east-facing wall behind the garage.  All of the scraping is finished!  Hooray!  So why didn't I wash the last soffit when I was finished removing the loose paint?  Because summer has arrived in Florida, and by the time that I finished with the scraping, the sun had moved to such a position that it was starting to bake the east wall. Having spent two summers working down here, we have learned that when the sun really starts to beat, we know it is time to quit for the day, or at least move to a more shady location.

Rick spackled the east wall of the guest room soffit and the east wall of the Florida room until he ran out of spackling.  A trip to Lowe's for more around the lunch hour was a nice break.

I was ready to quit for the day, but Rick had other (perhaps not-so-good) ideas.  After lunch, he started to dig the trench for re-routing the front downspout drainage underground.  He dug the trench to follow the slope of the yard toward the street with the trench ending 19 feet from the house.  The pictures show that we had to jog out at the downspout to avoid the footing/ slab on which Gladys is built, but the rest of the 4 inch piping is a straight shot away from the house.  We had to do this because in the future we want a sidewalk that will lead to the gate of the new fence. If we did not bury the downspout, we either would have to walk over the downspout extension on the sidewalk or in front of the gate.  This was our only alternative.

The pictures show the progress better than my words.

Rick studies the slope of the drainage pipe,
probably wondering, "Why in the world
did I start this project today?"

A slight jog in the pipe moves the pipe away
from Gladys' foundation.

Always use pictures to show locations of underground pipes.
This one shows that the drainage pipe is 26.5 - 29.5 inches
in from the driveway of our house.

The completed downspout beats having to jump
over downspout extensions.  We like the clean
look of the finished result, especially since this will
be in front of the new fence in the fall.

The green cap at the end of the pipe pops up
when the pipe fills with rain water and disburses
the rain toward the street. Once the grass grows back,
the whole system will seem to disappear.

After it was all glued together and buried, Rick ran the hose down the gutters to make sure that the pop-up valve would allow the water to clearly run toward the curb.  Wow!  A 19-foot long, 4-inch pipe takes a long time to fill with water.  We finally got it to open, so we know that the whole system works.

The bad thing about starting a task after the lunch hour is that the work continued until almost 4:00 p.m. which is the warmest part of the day.  We are both exhausted, but we are glad that the job is finished.

We had one other question answered today.  The concrete contractor that Rick called yesterday stopped by this afternoon and gave us a bid for pouring a slab for a future lanai.  He knew what he was talking about and had some good suggestions.  Because of the slope of the land in our backyard, we will need to pitch the whole slab to the north, and to be safe we will have to add a 2-inch drain in front of the laundry room door.  That way, we will never have to worry about that doorway flooding, and we will have an in-lanai drain if we want to wash down the floor.  The bid came in at $2400, so now we know how much we have to add to the budget if we want the slab poured in the fall.

The contractor also told us that he could not pour a cement slab on the north side of the house.  Our city has a law that concrete cannot be poured within five feet of the property line,  so we cannot have concrete in that area.  We just do not have the room for it.  Our solution?  For now, we will just put down a couple of large patio blocks to go under the garbage cans, and we will worry about what to do with that area after we have the slab and the fence in place.

One step at a time.  We accomplished what we wanted to finish today, and Rick even did much more than I had planned.  We both are very tired, and we both are very sore.  Tomorrow is Saturday.  Perhaps I can talk Rick into going to the Farmer's Market before we get back to the ladders and the overhead work. We did not finish all of the soffits by our original Friday deadline, but that is OK.  Tomorrow is another day.