Studio711.com – Ben Martens

The area on the northeast part of our lot towards the cul-de-sac has always been mushy and swampy. One day I was out there when the sump pump turned on and I saw it shooting out a LOT of water right down the hill into that area. After chatting with Tim, we decided to see if we could improve the situation.

We met at Home Depot one Saturday morning at 6am (he had to drop Chelsea off for a half-marathon) and were done with the project by 9:30! We trenched 30 feet out to the street, connected the top end to the sump pump and a downspout, and installed a popup drain right by the curb. When the pipe fills with water, the drain pops up and water flows out to the curb.

It was super helpful having Tim there. He taught me a couple great little tricks:

• If you don’t want to reseed the area, cut rectangles of grass on three sides and then fold it back.
• Lay down some plastic and throw the dirt on that. It makes for super easy cleanup.

I might need to dig up the popup drain at the end and redo that some day. It has a small hole at the bottom that let’s excess water drain out. But since we just set it right on the dirt, the wet dirt filters up through that hole and plugs it up so now I have a layer of dirt at the bottom of the pipe. I imagine that over time it will start to plug up the pipe. At that point I’ll dig up the end of the pipe, dig a small hole right underneath that point and fill it with some gravel. There’s no rush though. That can wait.

We’ve had pretty consistent rain since this project so the swamp has never had a chance to fully dry out. At that point we’ll know how much this drain helps. I suspect it will still be wet down there since this area used to be a pond and we’re at the bottom of a hill, but hopefully it helps. When we redo the whole yard in a year or two, I’m tempted to tie all my downspouts into drains like this and also run a big French drain along the west side of my lot to stop water from flowing down the hill.

When we bought this house, the inspector found a few outlets that didn’t work and quite a few that didn’t hold a plug very tightly. Since I had to replace quite a few, I decided to just replace them all. We chose to go with the Decora style outlets and switches. Those are the rectangular ones. I went for the tamper resistant outlets meaning that it’s difficult to shock yourself by sticking something in. Replacing the existing outlets and switches is a pretty simple process (once I picked up a device that helps me figure out which circuit I should shut off), but it’s time consuming.

Most of this is pretty boring, but it’s fun to look through the Leviton product catalog and see all of the interesting stuff that they offer. Here are some off the non-standard things that I’ve installed:

• Digital timer switch that calculates sunrise and sunset. Read more in a previous post.
• Bathroom fan timers. These come in 5-10-20-30 minute and 10-20-30-60 minute versions. I used the shorter ones for the bathrooms that just have toilets and the longer ones for the bathrooms with showers.
• Remote control dimmer switch. I have one of these in the theater room and one in the bedroom.
• Nightlight outlet. This light isn’t very bright but it’s just enough to light up a dark area at night. It has a light sensor so it turns off during the day.
• USB outlets. I put two of these in the bedroom for charging our phones and Kindles. There are a few different models around but these are UL approved.
• Surge protector outlet. I haven’t installed one of these yet but I’m tempted to. It saves you from having a bulky surge protector lying on the floor for one or two devices. I’m holding off because I’m thinking about installing a whole house surge protector instead.

The other day I was standing in a bar with my boss and we were going back and forth rattling off different fun things we had seen in the Leviton catalog. That’s when I knew that unequivocally, I was an adult. A geek, but an adult.

At our last homeowner’s association, a Woodinville police offer was a guest speaker. She talked about the types of calls that came from our area (there aren’t many), and the size of the Woodinville police force (only 1 or 2 officers on patrol at any given time.) At the end of the talk, she offered to come by our houses and talk about security. Most people seemed to ignore this line, but I got her card and a few days later, we set up a meeting.

When she got to the door, she said, “I’ve been in this house before.” “I hope it was for something good!” “Oh yes, the original owners were the neighborhood watch captains.” Phew!

She walked around inside and outside and gave me some tips. Overall she said we were doing really well. Obviously I’m not going into detail about what she suggested we improve, but here are some general things she talked about that she sees:

• Don’t put big bushes in front of your windows. This gives burglers a place to hide while they peek in. Keep them trimmed down below the bottom of the windows and the bottom of the bush should be 1-2 feet off the ground.
• Make sure all your windows are locked or have dowels in the track to avoid them being forced open.
• Where can someone hide outside your front door? You want to be safe if you step outside at night.
• Which entries are the least visible from the street and your neighbor’s houses? Those are the most enticing.
• What electronics can you see if you look in from the windows?
• What kinds of friends do your kids have? Kids talk and if you have cool stuff in your house and an easy way to break in, word is going to get around.

I’ve made it a point to get to know as many of my neighbors as possible so hopefully they’ll notice if anything odd is going on. While there’s not any special history of burglaries in this area, there’s no reason not to take some simple precautions. A lot of this is common sense, but the trick is to make your house harder to break into than your neighbors’.

At some point we are planning to put in a proper irrigation system, but I think the backyard remodel is a couple years out. Since I’ve been spending so much time learning about caring for a yard, I don’t want to let it die off during the summer months when we don’t get any rain. But I also don’t want to have to move sprinklers around the yard by hand and have hoses laying in the grass. By pulling up an aerial view of my property from King County, I realized that with three sprinklers, I could cover most of the front and side yard.

I picked up three Melnor spike sprinklers, a 100 foot 8 ply 3/4” hose, and some female and male hose repair ends. (On a side note, I’ve been so impressed with that brand of hose that I have picked up two more of them.) I took the brand new 100 foot hose and cut it into three sections to run from the spigot too the sprinkler and then on to each other sprinkler. The hose repair kit gave me new ends for the hose and that all works very well without leaks. Tim had given me a hose timer so once I get into regular watering mode, that will come in handy.

This setup fulfills my requirements of not having to move sprinklers around and I can leave it set up semi-permanently. The downside is that since each sprinkler is covering a different span, the yard isn’t watered evenly. Also, when we had a plumber add a pressure regulator valve to help with the water hammer in the house, he turned down our water pressure to 40psi. Now that I’ve installed arrestors on every termination point in the house, I was able to crank that up to 50psi. 40 wasn’t enough to power all three sprinklers but 50 is just enough.

I also added some Y valves to the middle sprinkler which allows me to selectively shut off sprinklers down the line. This will come in handy when I need to water that big first section a little longer, and it was also helpful for tweaking the water flow to each sprinkler.

It takes me about 75 minutes to put down 1/2” of water in the big section on the east of the house. (An easy way to measure it is to set a used tuna can out in the yard while you run the sprinklers.) Once we get into summer I’ll set it so that it puts down 1/2” twice a week. For now we’re getting a few tenths a week spread out over many days. I’ll supplement the rain with a deep watering every once in a while.

Hopefully this work will leave us with the nicest yard on the block!

When I moved out on my own, my parents got me a 9V cordless Makita drill. It served me well through a ton of projects, but after 10 years, the batteries are worn out. It was either buy some new batteries or upgrade. After looking at the prices, I went with the latter and decided to keep the old drill around for smaller projects around the house.

I’ve loved using Tim’s 18V DeWalt drills. He works them much harder than I will and they’ve held up well, so that, combined with some online reviews, convinced me to stick with that brand.

DeWalt recently made a huge switch and broke backwards compatibility with their batteries. With over 60 million batteries on the market, that was a pretty big decision. I decided to buy into their new battery technology. It’s denoted on the market right now as 20v. Technically it’s actually still 18v but people were getting confused so it’s a marketing gimmick. The new batteries are lithium-ion and have a much different form factor that allows for smaller handles.

I ended up with the DCK280C2 combo kit which includes a compact drill, impact driver, two batteries, charger and a hard side case. Tim’s XRP batteries will last longer than mine, but I have the option of getting some “MAX Li-Ion 3.0Ah” batteries if I want. I’m very happy with the 1.5Ah batteries that were included though. On the recent deck project, I put in 250 screws with the impact driver before the first battery gave out. Each screw was going through 5/4” cedar into pressure treated support joists. Not bad! Each drill has built in lights that stay on 20 seconds after you’ve let off the trigger and that comes in pretty handy in dark spots. The lights on the impact driver work a little better because they have three lights around the chuck instead of a single light under the chuck.

Maybe impact drivers are old news, but I’ve only started using them in the last year or so. If you’ve never tried one, give it a shot next time you’re at Home Depot and you see the little demo setup. They are incredible. You’ll twist your mind trying to figure out how you can drive a screw all the way through a stud without exerting any pressure on the drill. It’s like a knife through butter!

They say when you buy a house, the three most important things are location, location and location. I have about a five minute drive to Home Depot so I’d say our location is pretty great! The people there are starting to recognize me, and well they should. Here’s a breakdown of my transactions at Home Depot since we moved got the house at the beginning of October.

• 72 total transactions consisting of 62 purchases and 10 returns. That’s one purchase every 3.5 days.
• I end up returning 7.5% (by dollar value) of the things I purchase
• There are only five weeks that I didn’t go to Home Depot. One of them was the cruise.
• The most purchases I’ve ever had in one week is six, and that has happened three times.
• The most purchases I’ve made in one day is three.
• Sunday is the most popular day for me to make a purchase, followed in order by Monday, Saturday, and Thursday.
• Home Depot stock has gone up 50% since we purchased our home and has risen to a 10 year high.

It’s so nice to have contractors that you can trust. For any heating question, I call up Chelsea’s Dad who owns PMG Mechanical (206) 624-5040. When we bought the house, I asked him to come over and inspect our equipment. He recommended replacing the water heater immediately and said the furnace would last us through the winter but not much more. These recommendations lined up directly with what we heard from our inspector.

We already added a new tankless water heater and this summer it was time to replace the furnace. Beyond the question of what kind of furnace we should install, we also wrestled with the question of whether or not we should add air conditioning to the house. That might sound crazy to friends and family east of here, but very few homes around here have AC. it’s a luxury because you really only need it maybe a week out of the year. Temps rarely get above 85 degrees so fans and open windows are almost always enough. But on the flip side, we’re hoping to be in this house for a long time, so if we’re going to do AC, now is the time when we can get maximum enjoyment out if it.

We ended up with a Carrier Infinity 80% efficient two stage furnace and a Carrier Infinity suitecase air conditioner. Brent recommended that we go with the 80% furnace over one of the high efficiency models because they just haven’t nailed the reliability of those models yet. The two stage furnace will give us a big boost because it only runs at partial power most of the time, but for the rare occasion when it gets really cold, the furnace kicks in full power. The fan is also incredibly efficient and costs almost nothing to run. The air conditioner is an extra small and quiet model that is normally installed in commercial locations where size and noise are a factor. In our case, it we only had about 5 feet to our property line and I wanted to still get yard waste bins and the lawn mower through. After it was installed, we still have 3 feet of clearance to the fence. It’s definitely a splurge but I’m betting we’ll think it was worth it as time goes on. Plus, we’ll be the party house when it’s hot outside! The final bit that we added to the bill was an electronic air cleaner. It increases air flow through the system, creates an allergy free environment, and is very easy to clean.

Thanks to Brent for getting this all installed for us! Normally when I do a job I call around to a bunch of different places and haggle for the best deal. It’s such a blessing to make one call and have it done!

For the first time in my life, I own dirt! Yard care is a chore for some people, but after years of living in apartments and the condo, I’m excited to have a chance at taking care of a yard. We’ll see long long that feeling lasts!

Since Tim is literally a pro at this, I started peppering him with questions. I was afraid I’d drive him nuts so I fired up Amazon and ordered the top rated book about yards: Scotts Lawns: Your Guide to a Beautiful Yard. It was a winner! I was afraid it would end up being a catalog for Scotts products but they only mentioned Scotts a couple times.

The book was incredibly detailed and I suspect that there are some courses that use it as a textbook. But even though it contained a lot of technical information and science, it was still accessible to a newbie like me. I now feel prepared to mow at the right time (never mow more than 1/3 of your grass height), mow to the correct height (about 2-2.5” for my types of grass), water properly (once or twice a week totaling 1” per week) fertilize with the right nutrients at the proper times, dethatch and aerate when needed, and fight weeds, moss and pests. Along the way I picked up a ton of interesting facts. Did you know I read the book cover to cover and will be going back to it regularly as a reference. Come check out my yard after a year or so and see if it worked!