Stripping the porch

Thanks to our water main upgrade, we’re now able to run the sprinklers out the back, as well as two water blasters without any noticeable drop in pressure. Why two water blasters? you might ask, well you see our house is very yellow. Very yellow indeed.

We’ve spent the last month stripping the paint from the bricks on the front porch. The house managed to make it through to about 2002 before some genius thought they’d “improve” things by adding a splash of color. I don’t know how long it took them to paint it, but it’s taken us about 60 hours and several hundred dollars to remove. We’re not quite done yet, but wanted to get some pictures up to show our progress.

The paint is latex, over red clay brick. It’s a bad combination as the paint is actually absorbed into the brick. I initially started using “Dads” brush on paint stripper. Unfortunately it’s a bit runny and evaporated straight off. I hit the internet and, after looking at several sites of people in the same position, found a product called “Peel away”. It goes on thick, like cookie dough, and is then covered with a layer of paper to stop it from drying out. It takes about 24-48 hours to do its thing (although we left some bits on a lot longer), but it does work.

The pictures below have us about 80% done. You can see some of the paper on the right hand pillar.







The thing that amazes me is how long it takes to strip off. Laying it up was pretty quick, but we’ve probably got about 50 hours between us in stripping it off. Every time I tell myself “just one more day”, I finish the day with “just one more day” worth of work.

We got the last of the paint off the brick today and moved onto the concrete slabs on top of the brick. We were able to use the remainder of the “Dads” stripper on this, as well as a couple of cans of Jasco.

Here’s AK painting the stripper on. Looks like I got her good side :)


One side nearly done.


Take care not to breath the fumes, if you use this stuff. Strange things happen.


We got the other side stripped, but ran out of light before we could finish the upper pillar supports. Looks like one more days work and we’ll be done.


Big, big thankyou’s to John R and Tim S for the use of their water blasters. We’re nearly done. Honest.

Water main. Part II

The eagle eyed amongst you may have noticed the code violation in the way we had brought the water main into the house. It turns out that you can’t use female threaded PVC pipe, or fittings, as they can crack. Apparently you’re also supposed to use primer with the PVC cement to help it bond better.

There. All better.



After replacing the PVC with a short length of 1 ¼ copper we passed the plumbing inspection. The city inspector was pretty good about explaining what we’d done wrong, and what we needed to do to fix it. Lets hope he keeps his sense of humor. He’s going to be around a lot.

Well color me gob smacked.....

We've been in the house for a bit under 3 months now, and we had our first real experience with the City yesterday. I have to admit, I was pretty impressed.

We’ve got one of the local contractors working on our sprinkler system. In the picture below, the two large areas of turf are serviced by two separate sprinkler zones, while the two patches between the road and the sidewalk – as well as the strip to the left of the driveway have to fend for themselves. To make matters worse, there were a couple of broken “pop ups” in the existing zones, so the lawn was starting to look a little sad.



Dave (aka Contractor guy) was able to fix the broken pop up heads pretty quickly and we then started to plan out the additional runs.

As part of this project, we decided to move the valves for the existing runs to the side of the house to tidy up the front garden (You can just see them to the right of the right hand piller), run a couple of new hose bibs, and shift the water main. The old water main had been replaced, in the not too distant past, with 1 inch PVC. All well and good, except that whoever had run it had been to lazy to bury it and it ran along the top of the garden for about 6 ft.



Hmmm. I see a trend emerging here. Touch one thing, end up working on something else, something else, something else etc and before you know it you’ve replaced everything.

So a new trench was dug, and the old water main and meter exposed.



It’s a little hard to make out in this picture, but this is small meter. It has an internal bore of 5/8th of an inch, a ¾ inch output with an adapter stepping it up to the 1 inch pipe. Well that just wouldn’t do. I had visions of running all the sprinklers, a shower, washing machine and flushing the toilet at the same time, and there not being enough water for the dish washer (which we don’t have – but plan to get one day) The pipes running into the meter were plenty big (2 inch), so we just needed a new meter.

And this is where the City comes in.

Dave heads up to the Dept of Public Utilities office at 8:00am yesterday morning. After explaining what we needed, and that we already had the trench dug and were in kind of a hurry, a guy turned up at my front door 30 minutes later. I kid you not, 30 minutes.

Of course his first question was “why do you want to swap out a perfectly good water meter. You can’t possibly need a 1 inch flow”. I tried to share my glorious vision of sprinklers, baths, showers and water for everyone. I’m not sure that he bought it, but he called it in and by 9:15 we had a new meter



Now that’s more like it. A trip to the Lowes to pick up some 1-1/4 PVC tubing and a few elbows and Dave has the water running again.

This is the new ball valve where the main joins the old ¾ inch galvanized pipe into the house. Isn’t it , heh, BIG?



The old galvanized piping is pretty nasty inside. Between however many years of corrosion and crap that’s built up inside it its choked right down and full of rust. Like I said, we’ll end up replacing the whole lot.

This is the tee off for the ¾ inch sprinkler run. This will go to a manifold that feeds the 4 sprinkler valves.