Joe and Jamie's Blog

Happy Birthday to me!

Yup I’m 25 now, guess I’m no longer a child anymore, might need to grow up one of these days, lol.

I wanted a really simple birthday and I got one, finally everyone listened to me. Just had a nice dinner, opened a few gifts while having some cake, it was nice.

I got a new tool bag since I’m exploding the sides on the one I already have, too much stuff in there. I also got a nice pilsner beer glass and a trip to go meet and pet some penguins in NJ which is going to be really fun. Gotta love the penguins.

Are you ready to play fetch with your dinosaur? I am…….

After five or more years of not playing or having a video gaming console I broke down and bought an Xbox 360. Why? Well all of my friends play Halo almost every weekend and most weeknights so I got tired of waiting until the weekend to go to Andrew’s house to play.

It’s been great so far. I log on and play a bit after dinner and while Jamie is studying. I also purchased some other games to play with Jamie which was fun last night (finally received the second controller from UPS last night).

Now I just need to remember to take breaks from playing it so it doesn’t get boring and I don’t gain 50 pounds from sitting in the chair for 8 hours a night!

Since I’m a huge loser and actually track this stuff, you can check my stats for Halo here.

The week before we left for vacation I put together the elliptical I bought a few weeks back. I was really tired of paying for a gym membership that we barely used each month due to timing conflicts. I figured the money spent each month for the gym could be spent on the first piece of our home gym, which will get more use because we can use it when we feel like it.

I purchased the NordicTrack AudioStrider 990 elliptical after reading several promising reviews online and since NordicTrack’s owner ICON Fitness is the world’s leader in fitness equipment. You can read the full specs on the elliptical here. Jamie really likes this elliptical because it has adjustable ramp incline settings for more resistance.

My sister has gotten the most use out of it so far since she’s the only one that really had some free time. Between packing for vacation and work Jamie and I had been pretty swamped. Jamie spraining her ankle two days before vacation didn’t help either, but that story is for another post.

Friday night and over the weekend we completed this project. We started to piece together the PVC drain pipe Friday night and made our decision on where we were going to drill out the wall. We are using 1.5″ PVC for this project.

By the time I woke up Saturday my father had the hole drilled through the brick wall and was ready to go to the store to get more PVC. We placed the clamps on the legs of the heating oil tanks and mounted the PVC so that it wouldn’t move from the force of the pump. We continued out the wall and then patched around the piping.

Later on Saturday I went out but my father finished up the PVC. He ran the tube outside along the wall and placed the opening in the same trough as the gutter leader. I haven’t seen it in action yet, but if it keeps raining the way it has been I’m sure I’ll see it soon. Next I know my father wants to build a sturdier cover for the basin so we can walk on it without falling in, the standard one is pretty flimsy.

I was able to find all the parts we used on Grainger’s website. Here are the links to the parts we used if you are interested in their specs:
1/2 HP Automatic Submersible Sump Pump
22 gal Sump Basin
Sump Basin Cover
1.5″ Check Valve

Friday I was able to break through the second concrete slab and dig out the hole. It was tough breaking through concrete while alreay in a hole, there isn’t much room to swing a hammer. It was even tougher digging down the 22 inches we needed to get to due to all the rain making the hole mud. Mud is not fun to dig unless you are a kid with a Tonka truck messing up your good clothes.

It rained all weekend and we didn’t purchase the basin until today, so there was nothing we were able to do all weekend except watch the water level rise in the hole. Tonight my father purchased the basin, cover, and rocks to refill the hole. By the time I got home from work he had the basin fitted in the hole and was starting to fill it with the rocks. I helped fill in the hole and then we mixed some concrete patch to finish it off. We used Sakrete Fast Setting Cement Patcher for this job, sets in only 20 minutes. Smoothed it over and looks like we drilled a nice smooth hole in the ground.

Unfortunately the sump pump was previously used and the label is corroded so I don’t have a manufacturer or model number to look up and tell you about. I do know that we tested it and it can empty a 5 gallon pail of water in roughly 2-3 seconds. The sump pump does have a check valve to stop the water from flowing back into the hole when the pump turns off. It also has a float so it will automatically turn on and off. It isn’t a manual on/off model like a smaller one we also have.

Now we just wait for the cement patch to fully harden and figure out where and how we are going to run the drain pipe. We have a few ideas and started to think it over today. Not sure exactly when we will start on that part of the project.

After dinner tonight my father told me he had a job in the basement for me. My mother said he was drilling something down there so I figured it was a shelf or new workbench he bought on the way home or something. Well I was wrong. I came down and turned the corner and saw the post hole digger, figured that wasn’t used for a shelf. First some back story.

Last year was the first time ever that the water table actually came above the basement floor and into a few low spots in the basement. It was after a four day non-stop heavy rain storm that really flooded many areas. I remember the nice wake up call of my mother yelling to get out of the bed the basement was flooding. I rushed downstairs thinking there was a few inches of water to find medium sized puddles around the basement. I called my father to see if he had any suggestions since the wet-vac I had could only fight so much, I would have been there all day turning it on a off, you just can’t beat mother nature sometimes. He told me he had a sump pump sitting in a box somewhere. I scrambled to find the hose and get it all hooked up and threw it in a low spot that was large enough to cover the bottom half of the pump so it would work and not overheat. That allowed us to gain control of the water until it stopped raining later on that evening.

Ever since then, we have talked about digging the hole to install the sump pump and discussed where it should go. I guess since it has been raining on and off for the past week the idea popped back into his head. While I was still at work he drilled some holes and busted out the concrete to make an 18 inch hole. When I came down I helped by digging out the dirt, got about 7-9 inches down and we hit a snag. Apparently there is an entire slab under the first slab…go figure. Everything in this house was built very strangely by previous owners, I don’t think they knew what they were doing at all with all the uneven floors and crooked walls. So the project for tomorrow is to drill through slab number two and dig some more. Can’t friggin’ believe there’s another slab. My theory is hopefully there was no sewer piping when the house was built in the 1920’s so they laid down the pipes and just poured a new slab over the old one, otherwise I am really baffled.

For the type of system we’re putting in we need to go down 22 inches. This 18 x 22 inch hole will fit the basin that sump pump will go into. From there we just go straight out the wall to the left for the drain pipe, only about 3-4 feet away. It’s not a very large system at all because we really don’t get any flooding. Our main use of the system will be to keep the table lower below the basement floor to improve dampness. The basement is very damp and we need to run a dehumidifier constantly throughout the summer. The electricity cost from that thing for two months is more than the refrigerator for almost the whole year.

I’ll post more and maybe grab the manufacturer and model of the sump pump tomorrow when we continue the project. Right now I don’t even know where it is. If you want to read more on sump pumps and how they work, here is the Wikipedia article.

Hole for sump pump

On a side note but related, my friend Paul over at the Homeowner’s blog has an excellent dry basement system that he had installed last year. If you flood often you should read his posts and consider this system, he hasn’t had any flooding since! Read them in order and enjoy!

http://www.catskillhouse.us/blog/fixing-the-basement-drainage-problems
http://www.catskillhouse.us/blog/basement-contractors
http://www.catskillhouse.us/blog/the-basement-water-proofing-prep-work
http://www.catskillhouse.us/blog/how-to-water-proof-a-basement-from-the-inside-out-part-i
http://www.catskillhouse.us/blog/how-to-water-proof-a-basement-part-ii
http://www.catskillhouse.us/blog/basement-wet-or-basement-dry
http://www.catskillhouse.us/blog/putting-the-american-dry-basement-system-to-the-test
http://www.catskillhouse.us/blog/basement-not-flooding

Around this time last year we had a robin make a nest in the back of the house. It found a little nook on top of a bend in the gutter leader that is next to a floodlight. Well we started to notice twigs and sticks all over the deck again. We looked up and there she was, same robin using the same spot. I guess it works well for her, she had three chicks last year. I had to clean off the top of the air conditioner the other day that was in a nearby window. I was able to go high enough up to see some eggs in the nest, about 2-4 of them I would say, I couldn’t see inside the entire nest. Didn’t have the camera for that shot, only some Windex and paper towels. You can view the post from last year here. I will try and get some shots of the chicks once the hatch.

Keep those babies warm!