Why Being A Landlord Is Awesome Part 2

and now back to our regularly scheduled goofiness....

I Love Having Tenants!!!

One of our tenants knocked on the back door the other day all a flustered.
'I'm sorry I broke your sprinkler.'
'Huh?'
'I broke your sprinkler. Here's a replacement.'
'Uh, okay....'

I went to take a look at our sprinkler...this is what I found...

I stood there for like five minutes...I still have no idea how the tenant managed to do this...
The sprinkler was on the grass in its 'sprinkle position'...The tenant must of ran it over with
her car???
Why the car was on the grass is beyond me....

Yay tenants!!!!!

next up: Kitchen, Kitchen, Kitchen

9/11 Never Forget

Never Forget
Forgive

But, Never Forget

I don't really feel that my usual witty prattle is required for this post.
I'm hoping the pictures will speak for themselves.
The fire was lit at exactly 8:36AM Eastern.
And I kept it burning as long as both towers lasted.

 

Is This Bad?

Went downstairs the other day and noticed this....

Is this a bad thing?

Holy Freaking Mackerel There's Smoke Pouring From My Plumbing!!!

It Filled the Entire Bottom Floor With Smoke.

This is a great shot, of where the abs drain pipe for the kitchen got cracked during demo.
Spooky Ceiling

This is normal right?? Nothing to be worried about? Happens all the time???









I'm kidding of course. They where doing smoke testing of the sewers and because I forgot to plug the holes the bottom floor filled with the smoke.

Though, after this I did race through the house to make sure I had no other plumbing leaks.
I didn't.

I did go outside to see the smoke pouring from my vents though....actually all the vents were pouring smoke except for one....which never smoked....its also on the far side of the house from any plumbing..so I'm thinking that its abandoned.

Wish I hadn't dropped my phone after the above pics...
All the smoke pouring from my neighbors vents looked very steampunk.

A Project No Sane Person Would Ever Undertake...

Follow along with this build journal.
Just about every single pro carpenter I talked about this project thinks its insane...they just can't understand how we're going to spend all this time and money on something and then burn it...

BackgroundThe Burning Man group that I am a part of lost one of our key members 2 months
ago to a tragic accident. His widow was supposed to be heading up this project but
she just can't deal (understandably I think). So now its been dumped in my lap (and a couple others laps)  and
its gotta be done by August 18th. Since we here at Chez Neumansky also lost a close Haunt-Nerd friend at about exactly the same time it made sense that we help complete this.

This piece will be part of a much larger installation called 'The Temple'.

From Memorial Pergola Project

InspirationThe widow has picked the design/theme of a Japanese Pagoda with Buddhist prayer
wheels.
We are going to basically copy this Pergola.

Our Pergola will be 10' square center to center of the corner posts. Instead of the
shutters along the one side picture both sides the same but instead of shutters we
have the prayer wheels.
Which look like this.

Construction Details
Here's an idea for the prayer wheels.

Sonotube, Plywood, Allthread, and washers.

We have no idea how to make the curved 'rafters'.
Here's our first guesses.

The plan is to build it at my place with through bolted connections and screws.
Then dissassemble it and reassemable it up in the desert.
And that's all I've got so far...
The entire structure will be painted in a paint the shade of birch plywood to match
the main temple.

Okay some pics of the first build day.
Supplies, we went with 12" sonotubes to make the prayer wheels.


We cut the tops/bottoms out of 3/4" ply with jig saws...








Then we routed the tops with a 3/8" rabbet bit. We made the size so that the inner circle would fit tightly inside the tube and let the outer edge 'run wild'.

 You can see several glued/screwed finished wheels behind the guy routing here.



And then the benefit of doing a project with a guy who is an ex pro chef, who has that
ridiculously sized BBQ I posted about before. I'm the one in the hat...

BBQ'd oysters (2 doz) lobster tails and sweet corn!
All on the 'cue at once.
All this stuff was crazy on sale I spent $40 on the food.
Next up, day 2

Okay now day two of building the pergola.
We decided to take y'all advice and build the curved rafters out of 1by4's.
We built a bending jig.


Then got to work gluing and screwing em together.
In this case I did not feel bad about using piffin screws.





 Its good that the yard keeps this wood outside as it was pretty wet and bent well and did not split once.

Close up of first rafter.


While the curved rafter build was going on another team was using a flush cutting
router bit to clean up the end caps on the prayer wheels.
Sorry no pics of this for some reason..but the women did all the routing for this part.

After the prayer wheels were all routed it was time to paint em.


At the end of the day all the rafters were done and the prayer wheels were painted.

 For a bunch of total amateurs things came out pretty well.
We used utility grade 1by4's and they are kinda rough.
The plan is to smooth out the sides with belt sanders.
No great sales so the food was pretty boring this time.
More sweet corn and sausages and a tri-tip...and no pics.
Next up, build day 3...which is tomorrow.

Okay its done, loaded up in the truck and will be headed off to the playa in a couple of days.

Here's some shots of how it turned out.


Yes, we actually stained the framing lumber! With three different stains!




We carved symbols into a couple of the rafters to signify the folks who had passed.










One of our many screw ups...we didn't make the tops of the posts long enough for the curved rafter to sit on top of it like we planned...so we quickly gang cut a bigger notch and it seems to be working fine.



 The structure is really stable in the direction of the walls.
Not so much in the other direction. This pics don't show the corner braces we built to
strengthen it in the weak direction. Hopefully they will be strong enough.
We are using earth anchors to anchor the structure to the ground. We will be putting 1/2" through bolts through the earth anchors.

Next UP
Pics of the Pergola installed and pics of it burning!!!!




RIP
Donovan, Rik

Another Code Enforcement Permit Signed Off!!!

Woo-Freaking Hoo!!!!
The inspector just recently came to inspect the giant mess of a deck redo project.

I missed two things...I forgot a couple of Simpson brackets called out for in the plans and I
didn't get the nail pattern correct for the doubled up beams.

Took an hour to fix that and now its good to go!!!!!

I'll say it again...
Woo-Freaking Hoo!!!!

The one year hard deadline is fast approaching in mid October so this is none too soon.

The final code enforcement issue is the kitchen...I'll be posting about that later...

Sorry no pics for some reason...guess I'm getting lazy in my old age.

Halloween in July!?!?!?!!?

Another back injury post...

I guess its time for my annual rant about stores selling Halloween merchandise waaaaaaaay before
the actual holiday.

Halloween in July!?!?!?!!?! C'mon Retailers, WTF?

Below is a pick of a 'Harvest Display' I snapped at my local Safeway in July!!!

From my Haunt Nerd connections I already know that the Halloween Merch has come and gone at Costco!

Christmas in Sept!?!?!?!!?
By Sept 1st Costco had already gotten rid of their Halloween stuff and the store was filled with Christmas crap!!! In September!!

C'mon retailers! don't you understand that if the only holiday you want to celebrate is Christmas that you're shortchanging yourself on the other holidays?

Retailers, don't you understand that except for a certain tiny part of the population that people don't want to see Christmas crap for months and months?

A holiday is special partly because of the anticipation..it comes, its wonderful and then it goes!
Stretching out the Christmas season to 5-6 months doesn't make it more special but less.

There Ought To Be A Law!!!
Okay, lets get a citizens petition together to force retailers to stop this practice.
Who's with me! Beullar.....? Beullar....?

What To Do With Our Sidewalk Strip?

Okay, so I'm waaaaaay behind on updating the blog...wow so much has happened...where to start...
Since I've managed to screw up my back again I'll not be doing any manual labor for a couple of days soo....

Help Us Do Something Useful With Our Sidewalk Strip.

The picture below it the only one I could find that shows the ugly, ugly sidewalk strip in front
our house.

The PO apparently just dumped the leftover concrete there when he did the foundation.
It was ugly, cracked and weed choked.

I decided that since I needed to do a dump run I would create as much crap as possible to fill the borrowed truck.
Of course with no pics, but I broke up all the concrete and removed it along with a bunch of dirt.

The sidewalk area now looks like this.

The red arrows are where the concrete used to be.
Wow, now we have a lot more room out front for plants and what not.

One immediate issue we have is how to get the drip watering to the other parts of the new planting beds. I need to tunnel under the sidewalk to run lines I guess?
Anybody have any ideas on how best to do this?

Oak tree!!!
In a nice bit of synchronicity my neighbor has a good sized oak tree that he doesn't want anymore.
Well, he still wants it but its growing too close to his foundation and needs to remove it before it
starts to cause damage.

Picture of Neighbors Oak tree from our Bathroom

That's a 6' high fence and the tree is probably 3' above that.
What we would really, really, love to do is move this tree to our sidewalk strip nearest the driveway.
The tree has kinda a cool crook in it that we could line up with the strip.

We have no idea how to go about doing this in a way that will maximize the chances of the tree surviving...

Does anybody have any ideas on how to best go about transplanting this tree?
Our only idea so far is to wait until November so it won't get trampled on Halloween.

Any help would be much appreciated.