Raised garden beds

I am now light-years behind on any sort of posting schedule, or non-schedule, or really just posting, period.  As a result, several of the next few posts will be horribly outdated: projects I finished months ago - some even last year.  I'll start with some adaptive reuse that's been feeding me for part of this summer:

I won't go into the virtues of raised beds here (plenty of others have said it better than I can right now) - and I'm not even to the point of square foot gardening - but I knew a couple of raised beds were going to be an important feature of my efforts to turn the gravel pit behind my house into something better.  These are made entirely from found materials.  The stakes - which are roughly 2' in length each - are the same scrap posts I used for the compost bin last year; each has the same 45-degree miter at one end.  The walls used to be a porch up in Elyria.  The homeowner had redone his porch but hadn't thrown out the wood yet, then saw my post on Freecycle looking for tongue and groove planks.

Construction could have gone several ways, each with their own pros and cons.  One option would have been to measure off the stake locations and dig/drive them in first, then fit the walls to that skeleton. This would probably wind up with some imperfect corners since you're looking at keeping things square over a four foot run.  Another involves building the entire box in the workshop, moving it, holing out for the stakes, and then hoping you've leveled the ground well so it doesn't skew when set down.

I chose to lay out two stakes on a flat surface, attached the planking for a long wall, then sank that whole wall into the ground.  After both long walls were in I attached the short walls, screwing in the lowest plank, then fitting the next plank, screwing it in, etc.  It was easier for one person to handle, and a little forgiving of leveling issues.  The most important detail in this approach is being as exact as you can in spacing the two walls - otherwise the corners are likely to look ugly.

It's conceivable that you could build two 'L's of one short and one long wall each, then move those into position.  Again, that approach will have its own pros and cons.

Ultimately, no matter how you build your garden beds, it's still all about the dirt.  These beds are roughly 20" high so I wasn't planning to fill them entirely with top soil.  I have piles of clay fill from a neighbor's basement excavation and put in about 15" of that to fill the lower half.  A healthy topsoil mix (river soil and mushroom compost from the local nursery) filled the rest of the box to within an inch or so of the top.  Gravel or other drainage materials might have been helpful in the long run, but this mix seems to be working fine.

The paving stones were highlighted in the previous post.  We'll see how these beds and that mini patio tie together into the rest of the landscaping plan.

More updates as they are warranted.

Update (warranted):
Never posted these, but here's the first dish that came out of the garden (cukes were from the front garden beds):

And here are some stubby carrots, because I did not water the beds anywhere near as regularly as they required):

Delicious in butter, sadly not from the garden:

Can anyone identify these paving stones?

These were salvaged and quite likely discontinued, but I'd like to get more that match if possible - problem is I don't know what the type is called so I can't search for suppliers. If anyone knows, and has any recommendations on where to buy, it's much appreciated.

Pavers are roughly 1' square and an inch thick with - and this is the feature I can't match anywhere - half inch deep 'ledges' on alternating sides that allow you to lay them in an interlocking fashion without needing mortar. The sample in the picture has a broken corner, but otherwise should give (I hope) an idea of what I'm dealing with.

There's a clever post title involving the word 'doorknob' around here somewhere, I just know it...

This is quite an old post, but I finally remembered to take a picture of the finished project.  Old house, old doors, old door latch mechanisms - and plenty of neglect by tenants over the years.  Screws had stripped out so the knob and latch on my bedroom door was barely held in place anymore:

Attempts to fix it over the years look to mostly have involved larger and larger screws, which just gouged the wood more each time the door banged closed:

This was another fairly quick repair, thanks again to Abatron's wood epoxy (putty) which I can't recommend enough for these sorts of small replacement jobs. Side note: This is the second time I've linked to Abatron in this blog and both times I've linked to the Wood Epox directly; they also make a sister product called Liquid Wood which helps harden soft or rotted wood, and is recommended for use on the area where you'll apply Wood Epox.  Just so you don't feel I've led you astray, consider buying both products at the same time - I often use both, but sometimes, frankly, I'm lazy.

Now it was just a matter of fitting all of these pieces back together correctly:

...with one small stop to the workroom.  The back of the warded lock block had broken years before, and someone had attempted a fix with duct tape:

This was a more crucial part of the repair than it might immediately seem.  Without a full, strong back 'wall' to this block, the whole internal mechanism could shift just far enough back and into the block that the latch wouldn't always spring free and catch in the door jam.  This, too was easy enough to deal with - some Goo-Gone to clean up the surfaces, a quick filing job to make sure the broken piece fit snugly back onto the block, and a bit of SuperGlue to hold it in place.  Yup, SuperGlue works just fine on these old metals:

Reassemble everything, and sink a few new screws into the rebuilt 'wood'.  Voila!  Working door knob:

Removing old knob and tube porcelain fixtures

This isn't a post about replacing old wiring with new three strand Romex.  (There will be posts on that, don't you worry your pretty little heads.)  No, this is a post about a seemingly small but very poorly documented task related to such replacements - removing the knob and tube porcelain fixtures themselves.  Note: The following pictures are of completely dead, orphaned wiring segments - they have not been attached to the electrical panel for decades.  Never muck with live wiring, especially live knob and tube.

 

In this image you'll see both knobs - the thicker cylinders jutting out from the beam - and tubes - the thin, hollow cylinders, one of which is strung horizontally for some reason, one of which is inserted into the beam next to the first knob.  Tubes are pretty easy to remove -the hole drilled for them years ago is snug but usually a bit bigger than they are.  All you should have to do is slide it out - at worst, a quick yank with pliers will do you.

The knobs seem somewhat more daunting.  They don't unscrew or come apart on their own.  Each should consist of two porcelain segments, one thicker than the other, and a heavy nail running through them into the beam:

The nail likely extends an inch or less into the beam:

Removing knobs, then, is a fairly straightforward matter of wedging a hammer between the beam and the porcelain, and levering the nail out using the entire fixture. This next picture doesn't show how far I actually inserted the hammer - quite close to the nail:

I was a little unsure at the start of this project for fear of shattering porcelain everywhere. It doesn't seem to be an issue - the porcelain will likely chip and flake, especially as you're first working the hammer in behind the knob...

... but it's stronger than you might think.  A gentle-but-firm approach had a half-dozen knobs out in less than ten minutes, and even an overzealous pull on one resulting in it flying from the beam and clattering to the floor didn't cause any of them to break. 

...and then I hotwired my house.

New high tech boilers?  Insulate all the walls of the house?  Sure, these things will help reduce energy usage.  But in an old house like mine, one with partial infrastructure upgrades, most a few decades old, there's a smart, simple place to start - the thermostat.

The old thermostat, likely installed in the 80s or earlier.

Old mercury-based thermostats are typically less accurate than modern digital systems - their temperature reading alone can be off by four or more degrees.  Plus a new programmable thermostat comes with all sorts of fancy ways to make your life easier with just a push of a button etc etc end rampant advertising here.

If you're upgrading to a new thermostat on an older heating system - and especially if your thermostat looks like the one in the picture above - you might run into some of the same issues I did.  The instructions on the Honeywell model RTH6300B I picked up (note - they'll probably fix it soon, but the Lowes' website shows a previous price of $100K on the thermostat, discounted all the way to $49. Quite the deal, I know...) were pretty straightforward, and I won't take you through all the step-by-steps.  I'll just annotate where things weren't as simple as advertised.

The main problem was figuring out the wire labels. The instructions assumed that your old thermostat had a label at each terminal - when you unhook the wire from the old setup, you just make a note of the letter and then attach as appropriate to the new thermostat. Suffice to say, no such labels existed on the old thermostat:

Thus some detective work was now in order. Those of you who know me know that the preceding sentence was met with some amount of glee. Anyhoo - first I did a quick check online for the old thermostat's manual (paperwork for many old systems, appliances, and tools can be found from the manufacturer, or at specialty websites). Unsurprisingly this didn't have the answer - it showed generic hookup plans for multiple types of heating systems.  Time to head to the basement...

 

Tracing the wires from the living room wall to the boiler, I found a splice - important to note because it told me I was now looking for where the red and white wires connected to the boiler controls, instead of the red and yellow wires from the living room wall.  This is truly an important but subtle distinction when you see where all this was leading:

With the power already off, it was a simple(ish) matter of unscrewing the terminals where the red and white wires (from the bundle on the top left) ran.  Some of the terminal labels were easy to see:

Most, including the two I cared about, were not:

 

 

After some poking and moving, I found what I needed.  Except it wasn't at all what I needed.  The boiler control might have had letters on it that matched expected letters for wiring up environmental controls and thermostats in this day and age, but they turned out to mean nothing. I dutifully attached wires G and Y to their appropriate terminals, plugged the thermostat faceplate back in, programmed it, and sat back on my couch... the thermostat then failed to talk to the boiler, even though everything else was working fine.

Quick sidebar explaining the title of this post: Honeywell technical support was closed by the time I tried to call them so I was sitting in a slowly cooling house.  Pieces of the old thermostat had come loose when I was removing it, and I wasn't sure if I could successfully put it back together.  Soon after I'd posted online griping about the problem I got a call from a high school friend who had dealt with a similar issue on an old heating system.  To test to make sure that everything was still working beyond the thermostat, he had me hold the two wires together (the voltage is stepped down from 120 thanks to a transformer on or near the boiler) to complete the circuit and see if the boiler came on. It did, and we were back to musing about possible fixes.  Meanwhile, though, I looped the two wires together so they would stay connected - and keep my heat on.  My friend on the phone is a firefighter and he assured me this was perfectly safe - at the same time, you follow in my footsteps at your own risk; hotwiring houses is not on a list of great solutions. It's barely on a list of temporary ones.

 

In any case, when I did get Honeywell on the phone it was a quick conversation.  The wire labels I had were useless - Y was for compressors, I think - but the phone rep had the correct info in front of him.  If you're dealing with a boiler control that looks like the one in these pictures, you may want to call the thermostat manufacturer at the outset and see what terminals should be used for an old 2-wire basic I/O system.  Might save some time, might not.

Everything else proceeded pretty much as the instructions said.  One reminder - if you're dealing with old plaster walls like these, even if you're only making minor changes, it's best to wear a mask or, better yet, a respirator.  Drilling the two screw holes to mount the unit will kick up a little dust, not to mention you don't know what will be knocked loose when you remove the old mounting plate, jerk the wires around, etc, etc, etc.

 

All plugged in an programmed!

Two minor quibbles with this model - First, the instructions call for using a 7/32" drill bit to make the holes on a plaster wall for the wall anchors; this is too large - the anchors slide right in with very little tension.  I'll have to redrill smaller holes and reset the mounting plate tomorrow.  Second, the mounting plate doesn't have fins or bumps from the back to make it more flush with the wall.  As a result, you get a very slight rocking when you press the control buttons - not a big deal by any stretch, but I wish they'd thought about this given that they included wall anchors as part of the installation and could easily have balanced that slight depth with equivalent bumps on the bracket.

 

Oooo. It even has backlight...

As always, there are really no small jobs on an old house.

So much for that schedule...

The blog-updating one, not the house-working-on one. Apparently I didn't make a single post while on vacation (surprise, surprise), so I'll have to catch up ... some other time. Meanwhile, let's get the typing started again with, if nothing else, a not-very-elucidating list of things I did around the house today.

- husked the last of the walnuts
- raked the last of the leaves from the front and side yards
- plugged the couple of carpenter bee holes from last summer with that savior of old houses, Abatron
- created more tool hooks in the back room

More stuff later, as always.

Flora

Wow. Has it really been two months since I posted anything? The mini vacation I'm taking will give me a chance to catch you all up I'm sure. Meanwhile, here's a little bit of what grows on three tenths of an acre (untended for a few years):


That's a vast amount of buckthorn pulled out of the area around the old shed foundation. There's some more on the west edge of the property, but I'm not going to deal with that until I decide what I'm planting over there.

And here's most of the leaves that fell in the yard. I know! This blog is just so scintillating sometimes: