Wasps

A while ago, I was taking care of something in the garage, and I noticed a wasp nest that I had never seen before. Now normally I would just spay it myself, but because of other things I decided to call some pesticide people to spray it for me. The guy came over and I showed him that nest as well as other places where the wasps like to build their nests. He sprayed all around the garage and all around the house. A week later I went outside and found this nest on one of the basement windows.


It's the same kind of nest that made me call the pest people in the first place, only much bigger. I'm guessing that this one is about six inches in diameter. This means war. I had the guy come out and spray again, and I also bought a wasp trap and hung it up in the back yard. Within a day the trap had already caught some buggers.

No no one has been stun yet. (Except maybe the pesticide dude, the second time he came it was in the middle of the afternoon. And that is the worst time to spray, it's when the wasps are most active.) Still, I want these gone. If anyone has any hints, I'd be happy to take them. As far as I can tell searching on the internet, this nest is for a bald faced hornet. However, even though the trap I caught is supposed to be for hornets, I don't think that's what I've caught. As far as I can tell, these are yellow jackets. Maybe there's some bug experts out there that can shed some light on the subject.

Yard plans

A few weeks ago, Ecologista was given the the assignment in her class to be a consultant, and a report to consult a client on the topic of her choise. So we decided to become water wise landscaping consultants, and the client was our own yard; we formed a Xeriscaping plan for our yard. The idea with Xeriscaping is to reduce water used by making watering zones. Some zones have the regular high water usage plants, and other zones are of of low water usage plants. This plan is ambitious and will take a few years to complete, but it will be great when it's done.

Here's our current yard:


Here's the future plans:

Eventful Weekend

We've had quite the eventful weekend. The in-laws came up Friday and helped us get a lot done. My wife and her sister did a lot of washing the walls. My mother-in-law then patched the walls. My father-in-law primed the walls (and everyone else did primer too). He also helped me put up the sheetrock in the bathroom yesterday, and today the wall got patched together. However the biggest thing that happened was that I was finally able to insulate the crawl-space.

It's been one long weekend, it's a good thing that I have Sunday to rest.

More House Pictures

This is what the bathroom has looked like for quite some time now. Hopefully soon here I'll be able to that sheetrock up.

A little soldering work

This is one of the light fixtures we got cheaply. You gotta love the discount bins. You can also see the easy texturing we are doing on the ceilings. So much better than mud.

lights

I'm excited. The other day we went to a lighting store to get new light fixtures. The store turned out to be quite expensive, but then we found the clearance table. We wound up buying enough lights to replace all of the lights on the main floor, and everything cost only $5 or $6 each. As we were checking out the clerk noted that we did very well (she got to see what the original prices were.) I don't know how much we saved, but I know it was a lot. N0w we just need to finish the ceiling and get the lights up. Then I'll start posting some pictures of that.

Plumbing and soldering

When we bought this house I wasn't planning on doing any plumbing, but my father-in-law talked me into replacing the old galvanized pipes upstairs as long as we're doing all the other remodeling. So for about a week the water to the house has been off while we tore out all the plumbing to put in new copper pipes. Yesterday we turned the water back on, and amazingly enough it worked. Of course I went through great pains to screw the connectors into the galvanized pipes that still remain in the basement. Also since I have done a lot of soldering with electronics stuff it was easy for me to figure out how to solder the copper pipes together.

As far as I can tell soldering pipes is very similar to soldering in electronics. The two main things to remember are: flux is your friend and use lots of heat. Here's how I did it.

To start off with I just soldered a connector to a pipe. That way I could easily inspect both where I was putting the solder as well as inside the connector at the opposite end of the solder joint. To start off with the copper needs to be cleaned. You can buy a special brush to clean out the inside of the copper, but instead I just used the green scrubbing pad on a regular sponge for washing dishes. Rub where the copper connects to make it shiny. Then you put on the flux. I got the best connections when I put the flux on the outside of the pipe as well as the inside of the connector. Remember that the flux helps the solder flow and that's why you need a lot. When I did use a lot of flux then I could see the solder not only went all the way around the outside of the connection, but the flux helped it wick into the joint. Now I know that those are very strong joints. The pipes themselves will break before those joints leak. The other thing to remember is to use lots of heat. If you don't use enough heat then the solder won't flow, it just balls up. The same is true with electronics, but there you need to take some care to not heat it up too much or you'll damage the circuitry. With the pipes you don't really need to worry about this. So use lots of heat. (Just don't burn down the house:)

Working on the house

Difficulties getting time with high speed internet continue (or any internet for that matter.) At least I can post this now. This is what I wanted to post last week.

When we bought the house, it was in a major mess. Dirty, full of junk, and with lots of fixer upper work to do. In a couple of places the carpet was so worn that you could see the floor underneath it. Amazingly enough though that was one of the nice things about it. What you'd see is a spot of hardwood floor. Last weekend and this weekend we worked on pulling up the carpet. Here is basically our first view of the hardwood floor without carpet covering it up.

(as you can imagine, it's a dusty in there.)