Studio711.com – Ben Martens

We’ve never had a screen on the window in the master bathroom. At first it wasn’t a big issue since we never open that window, but when I have to seal the grout, it’s nice to be able to open the window. And with a big tree right outside, I always have visions of a squirrel or a bird making its way inside.

So I headed to Home Depot and bought the stuff to make a screen. Then I returned it and bought it again. Did you know that there are two different thicknesses for the screen frame? I didn’t, but now I do. As I was building the frame, it dawned on me that this is an easy home repair that some homeowners might not know how to do.

You can find plenty of YouTube videos to show you how it works, but here are the basic pieces. There is a metal frame that consists of four pieces cut squarely and held together with plastic corners. The plastic pieces slide tightly into the tubes and make a pretty strong joint. Some springs also slide onto the frame on one side. Then there is a groove that goes along the outside of the frame. Screen material is unrolled over the frame and then a thin piece of rubber gets jammed down into that groove and it stretches the screen material tight. Save yourself some grief and just buy the littler roller tool to help push the rubber into the groove. Finally you cut off the excess screen material and voila!

I redid every one of the screens in our house back in 2012 since the previous ones had all been torn up by cats. Now that I’ve built this one for the bathroom, I’m hopefully done for a while. It’s a handy skill to have in your bag of tricks though because it’s pretty easy for the screens to get damaged. Repairing them yourself is way cheaper than paying someone else to do it.

I feel like I missed last summer even though I spent more time outside than I have in a long time. Nearly every evening for two months was spent outside with Tim working for 4-5 hours in the evenings on the front and back yards.

So what’s on tap for this summer? What monster house project will I tackle? NOTHING. We’re specifically saying no big projects this summer. We want to leave our time free to enjoy the weekends and get outside as a family.

But home improvement is kind of a hobby I guess, so there will be some smaller projects. For example, I’ve got an endless list of woodworking project ideas, and there will be a day coming soon when Tim and I will put plants all around the house. I bought a basketball pole that needs to be installed and Tyla wants a desk in her craft room. So I’ll still have projects to do but nothing will be so important that I have to put it before normal fun summer activities.

We’ve been getting lucky the past couple months with temps well-above normal. I’m sure we’ll be in for more cool, rainy weather, but these past couple weeks have given me a strong case of spring fever. The grass is growing, the cherry and magnolia trees are blooming. Bring on the summer of nothing!

Now that we have an irrigation system, I have one more chore on the fall list: winterization. All the water needs to be blown out of the lines because I sure don’t want to dig them up again! You can pay a company $50-70 to come with a huge generator and blow out all your lines in a matter of minutes. Or you can be a cheapskate like me and do it yourself. I’ll caveat this by saying there a lot of different ways to accomplish this. What you see below is how I chose to do it.

The first piece of the puzzle is an air compressor. The bigger the tank, the better you’ll be. I have an 8 gallon one which is pretty small but worked ok for my yard.

The next challenge was hooking the air compressor up to the irrigation system. When we put it in, Tim installed a quick coupler valve. I went to McClendon’s and built the contraption in the photo below. It’s the quick coupler connector, a ball valve, a reducer and then the quick connect for the air compressor. Shove that into the valve, hook up the air compressor and you’re ready to go.

I used a combination of manually opening the valves and using the control clock. The clock kept me drier but the valve box let me be closer to the action to see when I was done. The basic idea is that you pump air into the lines, open up one zone, and let it blow until all the water is gone. The ball valve on the coupler keeps you from getting water pushed back into the air compressor after the first few blows.

Some zones only took a tank or two while others took three or four. This is a two beer job so get comfortable. You don’t want to rush it and leave water in the lines.

You can never have too many outlets in your shop. I finally got fed up with running extension cords all over the place so while Dad was visiting, we got our electrician on. Three new outlets were added inside: one near the bottom of my shelves to power the air compressor and the battery tender for the motorcycle, one by the irrigation clock, one up in the rafters by the IR light and the security camera. We also added two more outside that are on the same timer circuit as my outdoor lights: one is near the ground and one is up under the eaves. Why do that? For Christmas lights of course! I’ll have easy places to plug them in and then I’ll be able to control them with our fancy timer switch from inside the house. Thanks for the help Dad!