Critters and Liars

Thought I would show you a quick pic I snapped of my buddy's horse barn going up.  It's looking really good, and I especially like the horse stall hardware...  He is hiring the barn done, but like myself, has an endless supply of other jobs to go with it all, and completely getting his property ready for horses and other critters, which will include a horse arena... Very cool...

In addition to the Boracare, which is a termite treatment, I also sprayed for various bugs.  If the chemical police find me out, they will accuse me of not using the product according to the label...  Uh, yes, that's because I am actually trying to kill some pretty mean critters....

Here is a scorpion that bounced down about 3 feet in front of me.  He was in the process of not being too happy about his new chemical environment.  I expedited his death...  He is about 3 inches long.  Super creepy, but scorpions have something like 8 eyeballs.... eh???

Next critter.  Never seen one before, but my buddy with the horse barn above told me there was a Black Widow living in his water meter box.  I found this one hanging out on our nice iron front door.  Tried to take a decent picture, but that didn't happen...  Oh, you'll never believe this...  Ready....  I took a flashlight to my meter box tonight to shut the water off for a few days (the lines have plenty of pressurized air in them, so no reason risking a deer or something stepping on the PVC lines that are above ground into the house... I digress).   So, back to the valve box, at night, which the other night in the dark I reached in there and was feeling around for the shutoff valve when I couldn't get a wrench on it...  Well, tonight, there was a great big BLACK WIDOW spider in there...  Damn....

And what the heck is this thing... Scared me half to death.  Some kind of bug I have never seen.  About 4 inches long, looked like a cross between a frog and a grasshopper.  He was a FREAK.... Can anybody tell me what this critter is???

So, story for the day... Nail in my right front pickup tire... Slow leak.  Take it to (name of major tire people to be not released) and by the way, can you rotate the fronts to the rear... Sure.  So, I come back an hour later to find they have sheared off a lug.  So, they ask who did the work previously and who would tighten up the lug that tight.... The Toyota factory, I reply, never had a wheel off yet.  So, can I see the lug.  Yes, it sheared off when we attempted to remove it...  I'm checking this thing out, trying to remember some metallurgy classes from long ago, a twisted shear fracture...  Going to be 100 dollars to take off my wheel and hub (disk brakes) and get some new parts...  I'm not happy. 

OK, short story long, I get this thing home and chuck it into the vice so I can attempt to remove the broken stud from the nut...  Big pipe wrench... guess what... it comes off with my fingers.  I am P_SS_D off huge.  They lied to me, because if it was loose, they were attempting to put the thing on, not remove it.  Further study of the twisted shear, and sure enough, sheared in the clockwise direction. 

After a nice little 5 minute one way phone conversation, the shop will be repairing my wheel with absolutely no charge...and they will be happy to do it...  GGGGGGGRRRRRRR....

OK, enough of my rant.  Finished (yes, actually finished something) the central vac low voltage wiring, got everything all covered up and ready...  Also got the solar lines into the garage last night and today, so that is ready to go.

Also sorted more wires in the attic tonight, and also flashed the front door where the now dead black widow used to hang out. 

Another thing about bugs...  Scorpions and Spiders do not clean themselves, so they are very hard to kill...who knew?  Other bugs clean themselves and in the process, ingest the poison very quickly and die promptly.  I saw some spiders still alive tonight, but only dead scorpions...  Even the wasps and mud dabbers were mostly dead.  Hornets dead too. 

Next week.... Spray foam insulation...  I'll have to do some video for that....

Have a great weekend...

Getting close to sheetrock...

Yes, it's the "Tour Eiffel" 

Snapped this with my iPhone the other day on the way out of the hotel.  You can't really believe how big this thing is until you have stood underneath it.  Built for the Worlds Fair way back when there was no CAD, nothing is straight on it... so putting it together had to be a challenge. 

Paris is one of the most beautiful cities in the world, hands down.  The French are growing on me too, with some of the latest things in the news, they are doing some good things over there... I won't get into details.

Makes my little project seem pretty dinky... Never the less, it's happening.  I am really happy with the electricians, who came back and wired up the relay panels....  Took them hours, and it was HOT up there.  This is the non dimming high voltage relay panel.  The relays look like automotive relays, but they are rated at 30 amps each, so they are a little bigger.  For you non electricians out there.  Wires are actually pretty neat.  Black is the hot wire, white is neutral, and bare copper is the ground.  Hot is easy to understand, neutral wire is kind of like a plumbing drain, the electrons head out that way once they have lost their potential through the device, and the ground is really a backup to the neutral, but more importantly, the ground always ensures there is a better path to ground than you when you accidentally come into contact with hot wires.

Really nice job on the dimming panels... 

Finally, a shot of "The Bridge".  The transporter room is off to the right ;-)  Someday I'll take my better camera out there so you can get some better perspective shots...  I covered the panels all up with giant shrink wrap and house wrap so they don't get residual foam dust on them.  Next week is the insulator.  So this is probably the last time you will ever see those rafters. 

I have a couple of plumbing leaks.  Once I tended to today and fixed... an outdoor faucet which needed some tweaking.  Unfortunately, the plumbers screwed up two of the manifolds while replacing bad lines when they pressurized the system the other day, so I had to order new ones.  It's a long story, but you can't use a utility knife to remove the pex lines, if you scratch the propex fitting, it will leak, which they did.  The good news is that one of them is plastic (EP for the reverse osmosis water) and it is only like 15 dollars, and the brass one is the smallest manifold in the system, a 6 valve manifold, but still cost me close to 200 dollars with the appropriate installation parts.  I just can't trust that manifold behind the wall, though.  Not worth the risk...

Thought I would throw in a pic of some stucco we like.  This is a product from Dryvit that is basically a stucco with a faux washed finish on top.  We want the "old world" look, and this helps tremendously.  Look at the color difference between this picture and the next.  Same sample....  Different light.  We need to get it more into the yellow and brown tones and away from the pinkish tones in the second pic...

This is the stone we like.  It is called "Moss Rock" because it is quarried on top of the ground, and the stone has moss growing on it.   Mas Moss, as my wife says.  The selections are not completely official, and the stucco color still has some tweaking before we get it just right...  I am probably in trouble for leaking info about this, because I think my wife was holding off on this...  but I have been in trouble before...

This week I have some days off and trying to get everything tweaked as much as I can so they insulators can do their thing next week.  Tonight I actually pressurized the radiant floor with REAL WATER.  Some things probably excite me a lot more than you, eh...  I kind of freaked out when I couldn't get any water to go through the system, and had visions of hanging the whole project up, then remembered a not on the manifold box...  The manifolds were shipped with the flow control valves closed.  phew...  So, after opening those, and running a couple hundred gallons of water through the system to eliminate air, and then tightening several places up that were leaking, I finally left tonight at 11 PM with the system holding at 60.5 psi...  That number is for me, so when I got out there in the morning it better not be too much lower (the system will only operate at about 15 psi once it's online)  If there is a leak, I hope it's easy to find the problem. 

I was elated more than you can possibly imagine last night when I ran my last wire.  All the wires are finally in where they are supposed to be...with of course some exceptions.  I need to run a thermostat wire for the radiant floor computer's thermistor (under the garage eve).  Also need to put in place some HDMI cables, but I thought I would wait until the insulators and everyone else was done walking around on things up in the attic.  Just needs to be done before sheet rock...

Other projects this week...

Borocare spray for termites (basically a boric acid treatment for the wood).

Spray for bugs (way too many scorpions, spiders, etc.)

Tidy up wires in the attic.

Repair some framing here and there.

Start cutting the baseboard backers.

Run the lines from the solar collector on out to the garage.

OH, you may think I'm crazy, (of course those who really know me, that's not news), anyway, I'm going to use my airless sprayer for spraying for bugs.  Mix everything up in a 5 gallon bucket, and spray the crap out of everything.  Getting it all over the place.  I hate bugs.

OH, almost forgot.  Passed my structural and mechanical inspection the other day.  Inspector had some questions about a lot of the "different" things they don't see often, but the questions were more aimed out of curiosity and interest, so we had a nice chat. 

Off to the shower, eat dinner (at 1 AM), and then catch a snooze...

Have a great week...

Ok, since I am already in HOT WATER with wife, I will leak another picture out... Check out the cantera stone here.  The color is kind of a brownish grey, called Cafe II (this column may be something else??), and the columns inside won't have the square part you see on top of this capital.  Outside columns WILL have the square part of the capital and base, though...reason... TOE STUBBERS...