Half Price Construction by the DR

Ending Blog : To Eat an Elephant : (Building Permit Completion)

noreply@blogger.com (Palm Tree) — Fri, 04 Aug 2017 00:25:00 +0000

In applying for the final inspection, I was informed that both my permits were expired. This is because I didn't have two pass inspections less than 6 months apart. I got this info from a building department clerk and I was told I had to restart the permit process all over again and submit all the paper work all over again. This would incur more fees.

I did not know the 6 month rule. The boat house permit expired in April 2017 because the last pass inspection was October 2016 and the garage / cedar porch additions permit expired on July 26 2017 because the last pass inspection was in January 27th 2017. I just missed the deadline on the latter permit by 1 day when I requested a final for both on July 27th 2017.

The boat house had actually been completed in October which is when I had the electrical inspection, but I waited to get the final because I still had the driveway to do and only wanted the surveyor to come out once which would save money.

And so that's how I ended up with two expired permits. I did follow the spirit of the building department rules but got caught up in a technicality......long story short, over the course of three business days and a weekend I talked to various people in the organization, being nice, not caring what the outcome was and pointing out all I wanted to do was get the inspection and not do anymore work. I eventually found the right person and she said I could get a final inspection for both permits without starting the whole permit process over again as long as it passed and there was no more work to do

The inspector came over on Tuesday and passed the boat house. But the other permit which was for the porch and garage got put into pending since he had some discussions to do with people in the building department about the swail and retaining wall. On Wednesday I found out that the final inspection had passed the gargae/proch permit.

Success! I have done it! Wohoo! After 2 years and 8 months of tough physical work, I have done it!

Time to post some before and after pictures:

The Garage before:

The garage after:

The porch before:

The porch after:

The boat house before:

The boat house after:

The planning for the permit work started started shortly after I bought my beautiful 1960s canal front home in November 2013 from my parents

Shortly after the purchase I purchased a software tool called home designer to help me visualize what some new landscaping would look like with the house. Based on the amount of time it caused to be sucked out my life the purchase was a big mistake! lol I quickly found out that the tool could be used to visualize what new additions would look like for the house as well.

Long story short after fiddling around the software, I decided that I would expand my single car garage into a two card garage, add a cedar covered porch and build a boat house. I posted a youtube video here of the home designer result. I estimated that all of this would only take three months.

The actual physical work for the permits started in December 2014 and it is now August 2017. Hopefully, from this experience I have learned to be more careful to what I commit to. Why did it take so long? Because I have a full time job and it I did most of the work on the permits myself. In fact during the house project I had to work over time for my day job to help finish off a weather radar product for a 737. Below is me for the last 2 years 8 months.

All in all I spent 2375 hours or 13 months of 40 hour weeks on the project. Another way to look at it is I spent about 17 hours a week for the last 2 years 8 months working in addition to my full time job.

So yes the house project was like another part time job. It was a sacrifice but I would probably have been bored anyway. Nevertheless, it had some enormous benefits. Firstly, It kept me fit and healthy. This project was like enrolling in a 2 year 8 month long crossfit course. Secondly, I gained knowledge and skills on building houses and construction. I certainly could get my contractors license now if I wanted. Thirdly, I saved a lot of money by doing the job myself and increased the value of my house. And finally, although there are many other benefits it gave me some spine and I took on bigger calculated risks.

The project was like eating an elephant. This is a saying that was popular in the past used to describe a task or goal that is big or ominous and seems insurmountable. To accomplish eating an elephant you have eat it one bite at a time......and eventually you get done.....poor elephant. This project certainly was that and I did need help from my dad to get started on the right foot. I probably would have caved and got contractors to do the work if it weren't for dad. But he did leave after three or four months, and when he did I was encouraged to do the task I had set out before me myself.

Why did I do the project by myself? Because it was a challenge to do and it is expensive to get contractors to work for you. Doing it myself was very advantageous because I made changes in my design along the way and got exactly what I wanted. For example, I went from cookie cutter porch to high end cedar porch. I went from hip roof on the boat house to gable roof. In general you don't always know what you want in the beginning and you have to discover that as the project progresses.

In some cases when working with a contractor it sometimes feels like they are just doing the job the way they want to do it and not really doing it the way you want it done. If you tell them what you want and its not the way they usually do it takes some convincing and explaining. Sometimes there is misunderstanding and didn't get quite what you wanted. At least if your like me. And if they do it the way you want it its going to cost you extra.

The kind of work I had to do was custom instead of cookie cutter and I would be hard pressed to find someone to build the things I did. Not only that the contractors are busy and want the big projects like building million dollar homes. As example the boat house builders were so busy that they wouldn't even quote me for a cookie cutter boat house. I know people who asked them to build a boat house and a year later they are still waiting.

There were times when I really had difficulty convincing myself to continue on. for example when I found myself digging a trench in waste deep muddy canal water when a fish kill was going on. I looked for all kinds of ways not to do the job.....I hired help and I turned to machines. None this worked out and I ended up biting the bullet and digging the trench myself. And now at work I tell my colleagues, " the only way your going to get this done is digging, digging and more digging and when you think your done .....get digging"

The fish kill was so bad that many people called the fire department to report a gas leak.

Other times I had to battle the heat when the feels like temperature was 110 F and I was dripping so much sweat that I made sweat puddles where ever I stayed for more than 10 minutes. And of course I had to be doing worst job for heat which is roofing during the hottest month of the year (August) literally burning my ass when I sat on the roof.

But even so I just plugged along one step at a time and kept visualizing what it would look like when it was done. The vision is what kept me going. It helped me ignore all the temptations to quit.

I take my hat off to those labors who do this type of hard work 8 hours a day. Its quite amazing that you can do this and you have my respect.

Of course a big show stopper for most people is that they don't know how to do the task. Believe me I was in the I don't know how to do this boat quite a bit on this project. This often results in the fear of the unknown emotion. This is enough for the average homeowner to call in the experts and have them do it. But remember if you have fear and overcome it your are courageous because you cant have courage without fear.

My remedy to the not knowing was learning how by reading library/amazon.com books, reading articles and watching videos on the internet and calling around and asking the professionals. And then just do it one step at a time and try not to think of all the challenges, time and problems.

And so here I am with my permits completed. It is time to point out why the blogs title is half priced construction by the doctor.

For the doctor part....I hold a Ph.D. in electrical engineering which makes me a.......doctor.

The half priced part is as follows:

I have estimated that a contractor would have charged me 127000 dollars for all the projects I did. But for the most part I did not let the contractors help me with my projects. My cost was 59000 dollars and I saved 68000 dollars and so the cost of the construction project was 46% of what a contractor would have charged. This is about half the price.

Although I did not know this at the beginning of the blog, I saw a trend half way through and made it a goal by naming the blog.

A break down of the contractor cost and my cost of the projects is given below:
Contractor My Cost Percent Cost
Garage $28350 $18000 63 %
Covered Porch $26000 $12800 49 %
Boat House $32000 $14700 45 %
Stucco / Exterior $12750 $1175 9 %
Retaining / Seawall Wall. $16800 $6800 40 %
Landscaping $3500 $2039 58 %
Driveway $7700 $4033 52 %
Total $127100. $59547 46 %

The garage is the highest percent cost because we had professionals do the the block work and stucco which was a big part of the job. The stuccoing the house with finish coat was the lowest percent cost because the cost is mostly from the contractors labor and the supplies are fairly cheap.

All in all I made about $28 per hour which is tax free I think.

And so with the closing of the permits its time to end the blog.

But before I do I will reflect back what are my most memorable moments? There are quite a few actually.

In terms of injuries I have had a few but they were all recoverable. I bruised my ribs 4 or 5 times which makes it painful to work....one time I got an x-ray and the doctor said it was broken. Apparently this happens to me fairly easily....I am susceptible to this injury more than most people.

One time I hurt my back to the point that when I was at my real job sitting in the chair at my desk one of managers saw me grimacing in pain and suggested that I go see a doctor immediately. But it got better and I'm fin now. Another time, I got stucco on my wrists and it ate away at my skin causing sores. Again it got better. But the most gruesome injury happened I shot my finger with the nail gun. I was rushing, it was raining and my hand got in the way......and so afterwards I watched a dozen videos on nail gun safety.

Luckily nail did not hit the bone and our finger is ok.

The injuries were not bad considering all the scaffold climbing / roof walking / ladder climbing I did and all the dangerous tools I used like the chain saw / planar / table saw. Not to mention using electric drills around the water to drill holes through pilings while on a floating dock and tripping the GFI breaker a good 50 times when the drill got wet.

Oh and lets not forget scaffolding near power lines....

But most of the time, I was very safe when I worked. I always wore eye protection. I wore a respirator, gloves, ear plugs and protective clothing when the job required it. I familiarized myself with safety videos on the tools that I used and learned about the horrific injuries that could happen. Furthermore I was slow and deliberate and when something was too dangerous I quit immediately and thought of safer ways to do it. And I made sure I was always fresh and did not work extended hours if possible.

I was for the most part not doing stuff like this every day.

The most scariest job is a toss up between using the chain saw on a tall ladder to cut off pilings and working on the boat house roof when there was no railing to hold on to. Each one had tall heights and shaky platforms involved. Like I said I was very safety conscious. In the case of the ladder I quickly replaced it with a sturdy broad base scaffold nailed on to the boat lift pilings, For the roof, I crawled on my hands an knees until I had some railing to hang on to. Then I walked it with confidence.

A memorable event involving the chain saw, was when I was cutting off the piling 15 feet above the ground and the end of the piling fell in the canal. So I scurried off the scaffolding and jumped in my kayak to retrieve it. But then when I tired to pick the piling up and place it in my kayak, the kayak rolled and I ended up in the canal. The neighbors saw all of this and my struggle to get out of the canal (the dock was high out of the water). They were set to come rescue me. But I muscled my way out and was fine.

The most nerve racking part was when the cement pump guy was filling up the forms for the retaining wall next to the sea wall. The seawall was part of the form and it let out a huge crack noise and broke letting cement flow out into the canal. I feared the whole seawall was going to fall in the canal and damage was going to be done to my neighbors seawall costing me thousands. We had to stop the poor in the middle and come back the next day to finish the job. It all came out good though and my neighbors walls were untouched.

I think the most fun job was using the terex/bobcat to demolish the driveway. I had never driven a track vehicle before and it was amazing how strong it was and how much time it saved. The whole driveway was demolished in 8 hours with 40 tons of concrete removed. Dad had fun too and he eventually bought his own bobcat. I am so jealous.

But also exciting was when we first started and tore out the front of the house by using a concrete saw and dads truck with a chain. I enjoyed working with dad and learned new things about him even though we had known each other since my beginning.

Building forms for the first time was very fun and they turned out to be works of art and overkill which is my trade mark. Dad would often say it was overbuilt when I did something. But since it was my house that was good thing in my book.

The garage form:

The patio form:

Part of the the retaining wall from:

Of course I have to mention the contraptions that were made due to the fact there was not enough man power to do the job by brute force. For example the piling hoist made out of a harbor freight engine hoist and wood for the lift arm was probably the coolest. This was my dads brilliant idea.

Although we were successful at placing most of the pilings the engine hoist ended up like this probably because I modified the wooden boom and made it shorter and the piling got stuck under the boat as it got pried up.

So I called in the professionals to put in four pilings......It was very informative and I learned some tricks of the trade. Especially valuable was the knowledge of how they held the boat still which we did not have a good way.

But how does one transport large lumber by one self? With a home made lumber dolly of course.

No one to help you place that beam on the roof, how about the using a crane using a cheap harbor freight electric winch for lifting the beam to the top of the pilings.

And the crane for placing the rafters on the porch was very helpful too.

Neatest tools include the jet pump for sinking pilings

Or what about the stucco sprayer air compressor setup? The compressor was probably the most useful tool of all that I had purchased.

Never thought I would own a cement mixer....it was useful for stuccoing and making the driveway curb...Love it.

Proudest moment was probably lifting the boat out the water with the new lift system....The poor thing had alot of barnacles on it and I spent I couple of days scraping them off.

Or maybe it was building my first gable roof by following instructions from the internet and youtube....

The gable roof can be seen below where our very memorable visitor Hurricane Mathew dropped by..

Which took many shingles off my neighbors roofs but not a single one from the roof I did. His roof was quite old and may be excused but there is no excuse for the new boat house across the street...many shingles were missing off that.

Luckiest find was the pearl I found in an oyster during that period.

But it was lost due to the fact that the maid vacuumed it up or threw it away not knowing what it was.

And just being a scientist and finding out I could make a battery out of canal water

There were many other memorable moments and they are documented through the rest of the 52 blogs.

So now that work is done what are my plans? Of course there has to be celebratory party for having finished.

There is still lots more to do with the house of course. But I'm going to accept it as it is for awhile.

I hope my readers enjoyed the 380 pages of blogs that I produced over the last year and a half and I hope that it was valuable to those looking to do projects on there own. I have the heart of a teacher and if the readers were helped with their projects by reading my blog then I am happy. If they learned a few things or were motivated to take on projects on their own then the goal of my blog has been fulfilled.

Thus ends an amazing journey. Good luck on your next project!

Happy Building

The Dr.

How to install your own paver driveway: part 8 Finale

noreply@blogger.com (Palm Tree) — Sat, 22 Jul 2017 13:07:00 +0000

In the last blog , I discussed putting in the concrete edging for the paver driveway. In this blog I discuss wrapping up the last details of the paver driveway and my cost of the installation vs how much a contractor would charge.

To wrap up the installation, I decided I needed some bull nose coping at the entrance of the porch. The bull nose coping provides a rounded edge on the charcoal brick paver which mean less chance of tripping when stepping up on the porch. Unfortunately Lowes could not get me some so this means taking the hour and half long drive to Oldcastle in Orlando.

Im not sure when Im going to take this drive. But when I do I will also pick up some polymeric sand and sealer. The polymeric sand I wiil probably go with is NextGel jointing sand which can be found at this link This comes in at $24 per bag that covers about 60 to 120 square feet for narrow joints.

This sand is better for my application then the sand found at Lowes, because the sand at Lowe's requires a minimum of a 1/4" joint to fill. My joints are 1/8" and the NextGel sand says it can be use on joints as small as 1/16".

The process of applying sand is: clean off the surface with a leaf blower. Spread sand over the driveway with a broom. Use a vibratory compactor on low setting to move the sand down the joint and then spread more sand with a broom. Finally, clear off the surface with a leaf blower and wet the driveway.

And that is it. Since the directions say to wait 30 days before the sealer is applied I did not bother to get the sealer at this point in time. But this link has the stuff Im thinking about using.

Since I was not able to get the joint sand and sealer this weekend and because Im getting the final inspection done shortly....I feel that Im going to wait to apply the sand until the building department passes my work. If they make me tear up my driveway for some reason I do not want to have to contend with the joint sand. The survey is expected to happen on Tuesday.

Below are a few pictures without the joint sand.

So for this blog I'm jumping the gun a little and asking the question: how much did I save by doing the project myself. Based on my friends paver driveway installation, the cost for a contractor where they chose the lowest of three bids the job comes in at $10 a square foot. Since I have 750 square feet a contractor would have charged $7500.

It took me 99 hours to install my driveway minus the sealer and sand.

A break down of my expenses are as follows:

Dollars Materials
337.33 terex excavator rental
330 dumpster
160 geotextile
332 tamper
1656.2 pavers
370 1.5" crushed concrete
308 3 /8" crushed concrete
Total base depth 10"....which was overkill.
56.55 concrete
54 leaf blower
112 sand
219.25 Sealer
45 Bullnose coping

My total cost is $3980 resulting in $3520 savings. That's a whopping 46 % saved. Cue the cash register sound.

Happy Building.

The Dr.

How to install your own paver driveway: part 7 Tamping the pavers and installing the concrete edging.

noreply@blogger.com (Palm Tree) — Sun, 16 Jul 2017 12:11:00 +0000

In the last blog I i discussed laying the pavers. When I discussed this step I was not quite finished laying pavers. I still had the walkway to do. Well this time around I have the walkway finished except for the porch. That will be next weekend. The walkway minus the porch pavers is shown below.

I didn't do anything fancy with the walkway. I thought about putting a nice serpentine curve on the border like almost every paver walkway has here in Florida, but I came to the conclusion that straight lines were very nice. There would have been minimal benefit from doing a curvy walkway and based on the feels like 105 degree heat I was all for doing the walkway the quickest way.

I also did not make the walkway as wide as the porch due to the sewer clean out being next to the walkway at the corner of the porch. It could have been easily moved and a wider walkway could have been had but making the walkway so that it didn't cover the clean out was good enough and it lines up with the door just fine so I pursued the route that required less work.

As can be seen from the picture the roof over hangs the walkway. Often we have rain storms that are like monsoons here in Florida and this causes alot of water to run down the valley of the roof and hit the walkway. Having just laid the pavers down, I was worried about the water washing out the base out so I went ahead and installed a gutter on the roof over the walkway.

For the next step I rented a vibratory plate compactor from home depot and ran over the pavers. But before I did that I made sure the surface was free of stones by blowing it off with a leaf blower also rented form home depot. Once clean I put the compactor on the lowest setting that it would work and ran over the all the edges. Since the compactor knocked the edge bricks to the side I went around the edge dge and knocked them back in place. Then I ran over the rest of the driveway two times.

Once this was done I bought some ready mix concrete, mixed it and placed it along the edges so that the pavers would be locked to the boundaries. It took four bags to do about 80 feet of perimeter. To finish the concrete, I smoothed the concrete off with a concrete edging tool.

All that's left is to add the porch pavers, joint sand and sealer. But that's a job for next weekend.

That's all for now,

Happy Building.

The Dr.

How to install your own paver driveway: part 6 Laying the pavers

noreply@blogger.com (Palm Tree) — Sun, 09 Jul 2017 15:43:00 +0000

In the last blog I discussed preparing the driveway by making a curb, adding more fill for the pavers and screeding the fill so that it was flat. In this blog I discuss laying the pavers.

The laying of the pavers actually took place during the week of the fourth of July. I took three days vacations since at my company if you don't use it you loose it. Whats nice about this week is that I was given two holidays as well so that means not being at work for 9 days. I view this as quite the opportunity to make progress on my house.

Nevertheless, it was the fourth of July holiday and having fun that doesn't involve working on the house actually makes working on the house more tolerable and enjoyable and for me less likely to cause me to give up. For the week, I went to my first NASCAR race at Daytona. It was the coke zero 400. I went with friends and I was the designated driver since I have a big vehicle. When we got there we tailgated for a couple of hours and mostly spent time drinking beer, belching, eating boiled peanuts and just being rednecks. It was a good time.

The race was enjoyable which was surprising to me because I always said NASCAR is stupid. The cars go around a loop and then repeat 200 times. I get the point the first loop, no need to watch it 199 more times. How boring it must be to watch the whole race. Because of this attitude I never watched NASCAR or had an interest in it.

Nevertheless, I do have the rule that one should try everything at least once. And when I was invited I decided to go. It was actually very fun and there was always something different each loop. There was probably an accident every 10 minutes. And that is really kind of entertaining especially all the sparks that happen and the cars going airborne. On the other hand I feel bad supporting activities where people get hurt. But it seemed that these drivers always just go up and walked away unhurt.

I also like the sound of the car engines. If any of you worked on engines before, you would probably think how beautiful the sound of the high performance NASCAR engines are once you heard one. See the pic below where the pace car is shown starting the race off.

So back to laying pavers. There was actually still yet another layer of fill to put on the driveway. This fill is 1" of sand, but often the fines or the 3/8" crushed concrete is used. In fact sometimes they call the crushed concrete sand. I think that if crushed concrete is used for the final layer rather than sand there is a greater change of a paver cracking due to a stone under it. Since I could not find sand in the quantity I needed that was acceptable for pavers, I went with the crushed concrete.

To install this final layer, I once again turned to the 1" galvanized pipes. However, since this was the last layer it was the last chance to get the grading right. My biggest concern was where the pavers met with the curb and the garage slab. To ensure this was precise I shimmed the pipes to the correct level. For the garage I chose 2.5" below the top of the slab. The pavers are 2 and 3/16". I actually wanted the pavers to be a little lower at the garage entrance since this would help puddling in the garage to not be an issue. I also figured that the compacting step would make the pavers sink another 1/8". See the shimming and the results of the screeding process in the pics below.

As a side note I ran the compactor just before I put this final layer in and plan to run the compactor once the pavers are placed. It is important not to compact the final layer until the pavers are in place so that any unevenness that results in placing pavers can be taken out. Furthermore, once 10' of fines was placed I removed the pipes and filled them in and smoothed them with a trowel. I was very careful not to step on the graded fill this time and was successful at not doing that..

To help in making sure the pavers were straight and lined up I used a guide line from the garage entrance to the curb. I did the math for a triangle and used a tape measure to make sure the line was perpendicular to the house, Nevertheless, I moved the line after had some pavers placed because I never seemed to be able to follow it precisely. Because of this I would go to curb and check to see if the pavers looked straight to the eye. A few times I had to make some minor corrections.

To cut the pavers I bought the harbor freight 10" wet tile saw. This tool was a joy to use as it cut the pavers very well and easily. The tile saw can be found at this link. If you buy it remember to find the 20% off coupon online. Also the only blade I found that was proper for mounting with this tool was at harbor freight. Homedepot and Lowes had adapters on their blades and they just seemed to be not a good idea for this saw because of its mounting design. The blade can be found at this link.

The actual laying of the pavers was pretty easy. Since I had 9 pallets of pavers I pulled the pavers from all the pallets at the same time to minimize color variation. I used a wheel barrow to aid in the transport of the pavers. Since I was using the T pattern in my driveway, I had to use two rectangular pavers for every square paver. Luckily the 2 to 1 ratio is the way the pallets are shipped. It pays to do things the standard way sometimes.

When I placed the pavers, I made sure to touch the two sides with the already placed pavers and then drop the paver on the fines. This guaranteed that the fines were not holding the pavers apart. This i known as the click and drop method. I have seen in some videos workers put spacers between the pavers. This is a good idea if you want a larger gap. Some paver joint sand wants to have a 1/4" min gap. With My drop and click method the nubs on the pavers gave me an 1/8" gap.

The type of pavers I bought were Apian Stone pavers with the abocoa color. The border I decided to do with charcoal bricks.

The driveway basically goes straight and then make a 30 degree turn. To make the turn I used 11 charcoal pavers and cut them into wedges by knocking off about 3 degrees on each brick. This made a beautiful looking arc Shown below.

Because of the turn the guide string was no longer useful. However, the galvanized pipe I used for screeding is straight and I used it to get my border straight down to the curb.

Most oft he pavers that needed to be cut only required a straight cut. And the tile saw is excellent for this. But I was faced with three areas that had curves. There are a number of ways to tackle this. For example lay the pavers down and use a demo saw to cut the arc. I did not have a demo saw and it cost $50 to rent one. Rather than do that I tried the masonry blade in the angle grinder route. I quickly learned that it was possible to score the paver and then use a demo hammer to break the paver along the score. However, after experimenting with this for half hour I decided to do the curves the easy way. I chose the smallest paver I have and made one straight cut on them to make the curve. Using a series of the smaller straight cut pavers along the curved edge looks surprisingly well since my curves were shallow curves and there is sort of an optical illusion that makes the the cut look curved. This of course means that the pattern is ignored at the curve edge but to tell you the truth it looks good anyway.

For the entire week that I wasn't enjoying myself I laid pavers and the actual laying process took about 21 hours for about 700 square feet of driveway. That doesn't count the base prep. The progress I made with the driveway wet is shown below.

My time on the house is now confined to weekends once again. The tasks that remain are, finish walkway paver laying, compacting the pavers, putting cement keepers along the perimeter, placing the joint sand and then putting the sealer on. All in all this should take three weeks.

See you in the next blog,

Happy Building,

The Dr.

How to install your own paver driveway: part 5 resuming the paver driveway

noreply@blogger.com (Palm Tree) — Sat, 01 Jul 2017 02:35:00 +0000

In my last blog about the paver driveway, I had ordered the pavers but Lowes told me they would take 6 to 10 weeks to get them. So in the mean time I stuccoed my whole house. They did arrive in about 8 weeks. However, I had about a month left of stuccoing to finish the stucco work. So the pavers just sat on the lawn being neglected.

Im happy to say that 3 months later, I am resuming the paver driveway. To get this point I mostly worked 6 to 8 hours on weekends to stucco my house. That's right I have been dialing it back on the work effort because I can see the end of the work is near and I am confident that I can finish. In fact once the paver driveway is done the permit work is done.

Instead of going at it full bore, I took the time to have a little fun and learn some dances. I first started out with a private instructor and learned the basics of salsa, rhumba and meremgue. The reason why I took lessons was because, girls would sometimes ask me to dance but I never really wanted to mainly because I didn't know how. When I got up the nerve to actually go out on the dance floor, I was stiff and awkward and danced like Frankenstein. Believe me when a girl sees this and says loosen up it doesn't help and makes me want to go hide behind my beer at the table. This is pretty much what every guy experiences and is why so few of them dance. I decided to change that.

I have taken about 12 lessons and now and feel pretty comfortable and enjoy going to group dance lessons where the norm is to dance with and meet 5 to 10 girls. Of course we are all just expecting to learn dance in these lessons.

Back to the driveway. Right now its been all about prepping the driveway for the pavers. It is very important to get the base material flat with a grade. No depressions or mounds is the goal To do this I used 1" diameter 10' long galvanized pipes to act as screed rails. The pipes are stiff and help smooth out the voids when material is placed between hem and screed-ed.

For this go around I underestimated the amount of fill and ran short. But it did reveal that I had an issue at the curb in the culdesca. It turns out that the curb was not level especially at the storm drain where it took a dip. When it rained it would usually puddle on the driveway at that location.

The only was yo fix it was to make my own curb that was level. This turned out to be a 6 hour task or one weekend. The curb I made is about 22' and is five inches wide and 8 inches deep and it is curved to match the culdesac. It was a pretty fun task and took 9 bags of concrete. So glad I bought that cement mixer it made the job much easier.

The first step was to build the forms. To do this I cut some strips of quarter inch plywood I had laying around with the table saw and made some 1.5" x 1.5" stakes out of scrap wood. It is so nice to have a scrap wood pile so that I did not have to spend money making these forms. I then hammered the stakes in the ground five inches from the existing culdesac curb and made them vertical with a level. Next, I tacked the quarter inch plywood on the stakes with a the nail gun and then shoveled some of the base up against the form so that it would be supported from the non fresh cement side. The other side of the form was the cement curb that was already in place. Its called a Miami curb. The challenge here was it was not level. I extended the curb taller by fastening wood to the curb with tap cons. However I did not worry about this side being level because the other side of the form was level and I could screed off that. Instead I just made the curb side of the form taller than it needed to be so it would hold the cement.

The forms are shown below:

Once the forms were place, I set up shop and made some concrete. But I realized there was kind of problem of getting the cement into the forms from the cement mixer since they were so narrow. After discussing this with my dad on the phone we came up with the idea of building a shoot. This shown in the next picture.

With this setup, I mixed 9 bags of cement and filled the form. As I was working my way down the curb. One end became ready to finish off. So I ran a edger down both sides and then took out the middle lines in the cement with a trowel. The whole cement poor took 3 hours. The cement I used was ready mix and it just doesn't set up to fast. The amount of water I used per 80 lb cement bag was 4 inches in a five gallon bucket. This made the cement mix and pour well.

Once the curb was finished, I kept it wet for a couple of days to strengthen it and then took off the forms. I then finished the fill off by getting another load of fines and then compacted the entire driveway. The end result is shown below.

The driveway is nice and flat now and compacted. The next step is to put another 1" layer on using the skreed poles. Put some guide lines down and then place the pavers.

See you in the next blog.

Happy Building,

The Dr.

I'm so blue: Finishing off the house exterior with paint.

noreply@blogger.com (Palm Tree) — Sat, 03 Jun 2017 22:30:00 +0000

In the previous blogs I detailed stuccoing the house. In this blog its time to discuss the painting of the exterior.

Lot of people ask me if I'm going to paint the stucco or assume it is a requirement and that I am going to paint it. But I did not paint the stucco. The reason why is that its unnecessary work especially if you like the color of the stucco. To back me up I will refer to the Portland cement website (they make stucco) which says the following about painting stucco:

"Stucco can be painted. Portland cement-based paints are very compatible with stucco because they are made of the same material. These paints should be scrubbed into the surface and fully cured. Alternatively, you could consider a colored stucco finish. These finish coats are often made with white cement and pigments, providing the widest range of colors. Premixed materials are color matched from batch to batch and are most consistent.

Additionally, the fact that you are placing a finish coat with a nominal thickness of 1/8 inch instead of a paint layer usually gives more assurance of complete coverage. It is possible to paint with other types of paint, though these are usually not as long lasting as cement-based paint. Acrylic paints are long lasting and durable but change the permeability of the stucco (make it non-breathable) which in some climates may have adverse effects on the long-term performance of the system."

So the color of my stucco comes from the white base finish coat I used (i didn't add any coloring) and I like it a lot. To complement it though I decided to paint the trim blue.

The sofit I painted white. To get the right color of white, I brought in a piece of stucco into Lowes and asked them to match the paint to the stucco with there paint computer. The technician immediately complained about the texture saying it casts shadows on the surface and that he may not be able to get the right color. But then after a few minutes he declared success.

Long story short is the white paint is not a precise match to the white stucco and is a little darker. No big deal.

For the drip edge, sofit and gable, I chose Manitou blue SW6501 Sherwin Williams weather shield paint which protects against mold, algae, peeling and cracking and this can be gotten at Lowes. It comes in around $40 a gallon.

The reason why I titled this article, I'm so blue is because I have found that the 100 degree weather makes me sweat and soak my shirt which seems to transfer the blue paint on my shirt to my stomach. Luckily the paint comes off with water otherwise I would be a real life smurf!

I wont go over the details of painting because most people know how to do it. I will have to say that I did invest in a paint stirrer drill attachment. And it was worth it because the blue paint really needed a lot of stirring to make it uniform in color. Also, a good rule to follow is to cover everything you don't want paint om.

The house with all the stuccoing and painting done is shown below:

Because of my decision not to paint the stucco, I saved about $1700 on paint supplies. I'm sure a paint contractor would insist that the stucco needed to be painted. Even the stucco guys who did the garage seemed to think painting was necessary. But it is not necessary and it was common not to paint colored stucco in the 70s.

I spent about $195 for five gallons of paint and about $135 in paint supplies. I used the drop clothes from the stucco work so that saved some money there. Total cost then is $330.

I only spent 17 hours painting a total area of 450 square feet.

According to homewyse.com the cost that a contractor would charge to do the job is about $600.
That means a whopping $270 was saved or 45 %.

Cue the cash register sound.

Due to the excessive heat now in Florida, I think Ill be slowing down. All I can say is at least I don't have to do any roofing in the summer this time.

I do have a few stucco nits yet to take care of but after that I will be focusing on is the last one to complete my permits. It is finishing the paver driveway.

Happy building,

The DR.

Using stucco to refinish the exterior of your house: part 12 Finale

noreply@blogger.com (Palm Tree) — Sun, 28 May 2017 17:53:00 +0000

In the last blog I stuccoed the back porch wall and mentioned how challenging it was to cover up the entire cedar porch. In this blog I am proud to report that I have finished the stuccoing work.

For the last wall that was stuccoed, I rented a scaffold from home depot for $128 for a week. This is because there is a wire attached to my house on this wall and I did not want to spend the time assembling and unassembling the scaffold I had bought to access the other side of the wire. I figured that would be too demanding in the middle of stuccoing the house. The dueling scaffolds are shown below after pressure washing.

The finished result is shown below,

Since all the stuccoing is done, it is time to tally up the cost and time spent.

The total number of hours I worked to stucco 2500 square feet of walls is 106. Since I have a full time job and only did the work on weekends the time spanned 4 months.

Hours task
32.5 pressure wash
8.5 stucco practice
22 stuccoing
32.5 covering windows / eaves
10.5 bonding agent

It is interesting to note the time it takes to prepare the house for stuccoing is almost three times as long as it takes to stucco the house.

The total cost of the stucco project was $1162 which is detailed below

Dollars Materials
386.63 stucco
15.22 plywood
86.18 tape
98.55 bonding agent
30.38 rollers
53.98 6 mil plastic
74.04 4 mil plastic
11.32 buckets
60 face shields
18.96 elasto patch
187.38 drop clothes
12 pin boots
128 scaffold

When I originally had the garage stuccoed, I also got an estimate to stucco the whole house. The bids came in around 11 thousand dollars. That means I saved a whooping $9800 or 89 %!

Cue the cash register sound!

Now its time to finish off the painting of the trim and then to move on to the paver driveway.

Happy Building,

The DR

Using stucco to refinish the exterior of your house: part 11 80% done

noreply@blogger.com (Palm Tree) — Sun, 21 May 2017 23:18:00 +0000

In the last blog I had mentioned that I threw my back out which was two weeks ago. I thought I would be stuccoing again in one week but I decided to give myself another week of rest by doing light work. That light work was painting the trim blue.

Well I was looking forward to using my Wagner paint/stain sprayer. But when preparing for it I figured out pretty quickly that it was the wrong way to go. The problem is that the sprayer requires extensive covering of the walls, sofit and roof with plastic and drop clothes. What makes matters worse is the stucco does not lend itself to tape sticking to it very well and then wind doesn't help either. Furthermore the trim is a small area and the sprayers are better for walls.

In this case the paint brush and roller was the way to go and I returned my sprayer and got my 100 bucks back. With the brush and roller the painting was a breeze. I'm really happy with the end result shown below:

The next weekend I turned to stuccoing the wall where the cedar porch is. The protecting of the porch with plastic took about 10 hours whereas the actual stuccoing took 2 hours. The challenge was that the surface was oily and tape did not stick well too it. Especially when tape is expected to hold large sheets of plastic to the surface and there is wind. However, I figured out a good way to hold the plastic on. The first step was to use 1 foot pipe clamps to clamp a large sheet of plastic to the rafters on the underside of the porch.

Once that was in place, I could use stucco poly tape to tape other pieces of plastic to the clamped plastic. This is because the poly tape sticks to plastic so good. This enabled me to cover the entire underside of the cedar porch with two sheets of plastic. And it got very windy and still held.

After wrapping the columns with plastic, all that remained was the ledger. For the ledger I decided to use the green masking tape (which is made for hard to stick on surfaces) on the ledger and then stick the plastic on top of that with stucco poly tape. This method worked well.

After the drop cloths were put on the patio floor, I smurfed the walls with bonding agent.

Then I stuccoed them with white finish coat using the hopper. The end result is shown here.

With the covering of the cedar porch wall with stucco, I have only one more two story wall left to do. In the next blog find out how much I saved by doing this work myself.

That's all for now,

Happy Building.

The Dr.

Using stucco to refinish the exterior of your house: part 10 another delay

noreply@blogger.com (Palm Tree) — Sun, 07 May 2017 23:54:00 +0000

In the last blog I had to take a tangent to refinish part of the cedar covered porch before stuccoing around it. This was very successful and now I have experience with the maintenance of the woodland oil finish.

This time I made good progress but threw my back out so I had to delay the actual stuccoing of the wall with the cedar covered porch attached to it. The injury happened when I bent over and twisted my back and then pushed on something. There were no big forces involved here just a awkward orientation. In any case I have hurt my back worse before on the construction of the additions and unlike last time no one at work will suggest that I go to see a doctor after observing the pain I was in. I expect to be stuccoing next weekend.

What I did accomplish was the finishing of the pressure washing of the side of the house that has the cedar porch on it. Additionally, the covering up most of the things that needed to be covered (windows, doors, eves, roof shingles and the cedar). The covering up is very challenging here because the cedar porch is oily and tape has a hard time sticking to it. But I am the point now, after 7 hours in very windy conditions, where I see a way to accomplish the necessary covering that needs to be done.

To accomplish the covering of the underside of the porch, I used some pipe clamps to fasten the plastic to the beams of the porch. I hope the clamps don't leave indentations on the rafters but not to worried about since if it does it will add a little character. Better that then having a clamp fall on my head because its loose.

Before I thought of the clamp idea I made some braces to hold sagging plastic up. But I probably could have just used the clamps to get the job done. Below are some pictures of what I did below and above the porch.

In the picture of the cedar porch covering the ledger is not covered. My plan is to cover that at the last minute and use the green painters tape that is advertised for hard to stick to surfaces at this link. Not sure that this will work and I haven't actually seen the tape yet and tried it. Alternatively I could use the red poly stucco tape which does stick to the oily surface but eventually falls off so its all about timing. I experimented with residue free duct tape but that seemed to be worse than the poly tape.

That's all for now.

Happy Building,

The Dr.

Refinishing Wood coated with Olympic Elite Woodland Oil: Yet another tangent,

noreply@blogger.com (Palm Tree) — Sun, 30 Apr 2017 20:11:00 +0000

In the last blog, I was able to continue stuccoing the house. However, with 60% of the house stuccoed I was now ready to tackle the stuccoing in the cedar porch area. But as I looked at the cedar porch it was obvious that it needed some touch up. In the sun exposed areas the finish was showing light weathered look due to UV exposure and even a little graying. It certainly did not have its original luster (see the former blog on the cedar porch at this link). But in the sun covered shadowy areas it was still ok. It actually was almost two years ago when I constructed the porch and put Olympic Elite Woodland oil on it.

Since applying the oil to the cedar usually gets oil on everything, including the walls and the cement pad, I decided not to subject the new wall stucco to touch the cedar up in the areas that needed it before I had applied the stucco (This would be a double tangent for me as it puts off the stucco job which also puts off the paver driveway job). Of course even when the new stucco is on the wall eventually I will have to re-coat the entire cedar porch with oil.

To determine if the Olympic elite woodland oil is ready to be reapplied , the manufacturer recommend throwing water on it. Since it beaded up and didn't absorb the water, I could not refinish it according to the manufacturer. So I decided to use the Olympic deck wash and brightener on the weathered areas. If you look at the MSDS you will find that wash has Ethanedioic and Phosphoric acid. in it. To apply the wash I used a sprayer . The directions say to to wet the wood and apply the wash and wait 20 minutes and scrub with a nylon brush and then wash it off. However, to my surprise the wood soaked the wash up within five minutes. This made me realize the cedar porch was ready to take the woodland oil and my preliminary water test had been misleading

I used the wash on the ledger, the main beam, posts and outer rafters. It did not seem to really be that great at cleaning the wood, but combined with the pressure washer the wood did get clean. Since the directions mentioned staining the wood after using the wash, I changed my course of action and proceeded to refinishing the washed wood with the oil.

First I covered up the walls and cement pad with plastic and then applied the oil to the cedar. It went on very nice and looks great. I decided the areas that are in the shadows and less weathered will be refinished next year.

Below is a picture of some of the weathered wood although this is not the worst area.

The refinished wood looks like this.

That's all for now,

Happy Building.

The Dr.

Using stucco to refinish the exterior of your house: part 9 back in business

noreply@blogger.com (Palm Tree) — Sun, 23 Apr 2017 23:23:00 +0000

In the last blog I mentioned I was out of business because the stucco sprayer broke. Well the parts arrived and I'm back in business. I stuccoed another wall making me 60% done with the stuccoing. The results are shown in the pics below.

This time I completely disassembled the sprayer and cleaned off the stucco.

I have also started thinking about paint and have decided to paint the facia, drip edge, wood gable ends and doors blue. I will never paint the stucco. I bought some Sherwin Willianms weather shield paint which protects against cracking, mildew and algae. It also can be applied to metal and wood.

Even though I have less than 400 square feet to paint, I also bought a Wagner airless paint gun for the job. I figured it would make the job easy especially where the drip edge overlaps the facia. I was set to do the paint job this weekend but it looked like it was going to rain so I pressure washed the back of the house instead.

In the back is the cedar covered porch. When I was pressure washing, I though that right before I stuccoed would be a good time to re-coat the cedar with oil since I don't want it to get on the new stucco. FRo the most part it does not need it but there are a few areas (mostly the sun exposed areas) that do. This means next weekend I will try out the Wagner paint gun with the oil. It has a paint and stain setting. Not what I originally envisioned using it for but I think its going to work out really nice.

That's all for now.

Happy Building,

The Dr

Using stucco to refinish the exterior of your house: part 8 stucco sprayer broke

noreply@blogger.com (Palm Tree) — Sat, 15 Apr 2017 19:16:00 +0000

In the last blog I detailed an experiment that I was trying with the stucco sprayer. In this blog I have no progress to really report. Unfortunately, the stucco sprayer broke. The reason it broke is that I was futzing around with it trying to get it to work. There was to much dried residual stucco in the inner workings. So after playing around with it the spray valve broke. If I had known that I was supposed to disassemble it to clean it out this would not have happened. Stucco is harsh material and I can see its hard problem to have a machine with fine parts have to work with it. Anyway, I called the manufacturer and they are sending me two new valves free of charge.

In the mean time I cleaned out the stucco sprayer. This is actually the first time I completely disassembled it. I found harden stucco everywhere. To get the stucco off I first tried distilled vinegar. That seemed to work some what but it seemed to run out of cleaning ability so I switched to barnacle buster. Barnacle buster has phosphoric acid in it. This got most of the stucco off and some paint too. I don't think it had an effect on the rubber o-rings, There is another concrete dissolver known as mean klean which is gycolic acid based that is often used for chemical face peels, I would have tried it but it is expensive and has to be ordered online in this area. Here is a before and after picture:

Moral of the story is to clean the stucco out with water when it is wet.

Here is a pic that shows the state the house was left in before the sprayer broke.

There is good news though. The pavers have arrived and they look great.

See what happens in the next blog.

That's all for now,

Happy building,

The Dr.

Using stucco to refinish the exterior of your house: part 7 half the house is stuccoed

noreply@blogger.com (Palm Tree) — Mon, 10 Apr 2017 17:27:00 +0000

In the last blog I stuccoed the front of the house with white base finish coat. I am very pleased with the results. The texture of the stucco and color of white base is very nice and all my neighbors have come by and complemented me on the appearance of the house and said it was a good job. It does help however that my house was a disaster area not to long ago which provides contrast.

This time around I have stuccoed half the house and it is very easy.

For this blog I would like to talk about a few new practices I'm doing. First, my sprayer got so clogged, I had to take it apart. The stucco was clogging the jets and I cleaned it with compressed air, water and a wire brush. I also inserted a nail through the jet. When doing this I realized it might be a good idea to take it apart and clean it after very use. When I put it back together I put antiseize on everything that had threads.

Additionally I might have found out what causes the sprayer to get stuck on. The jury is still out though until I finish the entire house. The lever has a plunger that gets stucco in it. Eventually all the grit interferes with the on off action and it gets stuck on. To try to help with that I am experimenting with a protective boot on the plunger. The perfect boot for this can be found on the brake pins of some cars. Luckily they sell the boots separately at autozone and are called pin boots or brake hardware. I actually had to use a pair of scissors to make them the right size but the end result is shown below:

So far the stuck on failure has not happened but I have only put two bags of stucco through it.

The other thing I'm doing differently is I invested in some protective wear and covers. Since the over spray was larger than I expected when I prayed near the roof, my roof got stuccoed a bit. If it bothers me Ill replace the shingles in the area that got hit. Not a big deal. But it is stronger with stucco on it....maybe I should stucco my whole roof. :)

For this time around I found some drop clothes at Lowes and covered things up with them. Additionally I got a painters suit, more face shields, ear plugs and a respirator. When I have all this on I look like an alien with a stucco sprayer for a weapon.

You can see a freshly stuccoed wall behind me.

I intend to stucco one more wall on the house and then switch back to the paver installation for the driveway since the pavers will be arriving next week. This is great since I always like to quit a job when it is half done. :) Not really. It will nag me incessantly until I finish it.

Anyway cant be more happy with the way its going for the exterior. I'm thinking about getting into stuccoing for a profession. Not really interested in doing houses though. My focus would be expensive cars. Anybody need their car stuccoed? Ill do it for free. :)

That is all for now until the next blog,

Happy Building,

The Dr.

Using stucco to refinish the exterior of your house: part 6 applying the stucco

noreply@blogger.com (Palm Tree) — Sat, 08 Apr 2017 17:31:00 +0000

In the last blog I discussed colors that are available for stucco. I chose not to color the stucco but use the white base finish stucco as the finish color. Going by the color chart I determined that the stucco that the professional had done on the garage was white.

Turns out that was wrong. I guess the color chart can be misleading. On the garage the color is an off white and I'm not sure if this is because the white finish coat is so thin that the grey coat under it is showing through (or maybe the sponging for the sponge finish mixed the two coats together) or its actually colored.

In any I case I stuccoed the entire front of the house, about 750 square feet, during the weekend with white finish coat. The color is extremely white and I like it. I even like the texture better than the sponge float texture the professionals had done on the garage. Quite amazing since I had no stucco experience when I started and I had no help at all applying the stucco.

What made this possible is the texture sprayer that I used. It essentially reduces stuccoing to an easy spraying process. I was considering sponge floating the texture spray on the house but glad I didn't because it would have taken so long and the result was not as good as the texture sprayer result,

Before I started I did a little more wall prep. The main column on the porch had a large crack in it. I decided to mend it using elastopatch This material should be used if your going to paint over it or in my case stucco over it. This is because it is different color then stucco and even it isn't, when the stucco gets wet it will show.

First, I ran an angle grinder down the crack. Unfortunately I could not find my masonry blade but the metal cutting blade did the job with some coaxing. The I filled the crack with elastopatch. Then I knifed away the excess. And finally I dabbed it with a sponge float and wet rag to get back the original texture.

I only did one fill with the elastopatch and I recommend two, since it contracts and leaves a concave channel in the crack.

Other preparation included covering the garage door, the front door and porch up with plastic. For the roof I found some old tar paper and put that down. Plastic is too slippery for the roof. The tar paper worked well.

After that I rolled some blue bonding agent on the house. The bonding agent requires 2 hours to be ready for stuccoing. It is nice that it is blue since I could tell where I missed a spot very easily. Unfortunately it is only good for 24 hours and since my stuccoing spanned two days I had to apply some more the second day to be sure that it would work. The end result is a blue smurf house shown below.

I have watched YouTube videos by kirk the stucco expert and he recommends diluting the bonding agent for the finish coat otherwise it will spider check which means it will crack a lot. Since he uses a different bonding agent, I have no experience with the bonding agent I bought and the bonding agent says do not dilute I put it on full strength. So I will see if I get spider checking as reported by kirk.

Leading up to the stuccoing process, I perfected the texture spraying process by practicing on plywood. First, I figured out the amount of water needed to get the stucco to run through the funnel provided by the texture sprayer manufacturer. It is precisely 6" of water in a Lowe's 5 gallon bucket per one 80lb bag of white finish coat stucco. I marked the bucket and made a level spot on the ground so I would get a consistent amount of water.

This amount of water makes the stucco run though the funnel like the picture below:

With this consistency the spraying of the texture came out very nice.

Even though the stucco was very runny, it still clogged the gun quite often. Sometimes the sprayer would stop spraying. Other times the sprayer would get stuck on. To correct this I would detach the air pressure hose and get a garden hose and spray water in the stucco nozzle while holding the sprayer upside down. Then I would spray water through the pressure hose nipple and pump the trigger. When I did this water would pulse out the stucco nozzle. Doing this kept me going and enabled me to finish the job.

The end result is shown below:

Now that the front of the house is stuccoed, I am glad that the pavers are taking so long to arrive. This down time enabled me to stucco the front of the house. And form what I have seen the stucco gets everywhere, I had some sample pavers lying several feet away from the spray area and they got ruined.

By the way when using the stucco sprayer make sure to use, a face shield, respirator, hat, ear plugs and cover your arms and legs.

I plan to wait until next weekend to rip off the plastic and reinstall the lights. I might even paint the plywood under the garage eves.

Well that's all for now. See some tips I came up with in the next blog.

Happy Building

The Dr.

Using stucco to refinish the exterior of your house: part 5 choosing the color

noreply@blogger.com (Palm Tree) — Wed, 22 Mar 2017 01:13:00 +0000

In the last blog I discussed some stucco textures I was experimenting with.

In addition to texture, stucco color is a consideration. The stucco liquid color has a base number of 1319 and the colors that can be had are at this link. Unfortunately, they cannot be found in my area and the only way to get them is by going through the pro desk at Lowe's. And to top it off it only comes by the case. Seeing as I could not get a single bottle of a color to try out and because it takes awhile for the color to reach its final color when it is in the stucco, I contacted quickcrete and they sent me stucco samples of what all the colors look like. This is shown below:

Based on the color chart, the colors seem to be light colors. I think there are other ways to color stucco though. When comparing the color chart to my garage stucco it turns out it really is white without coloring. Since I like the result I'm going to go with just white finish coat for the color. If I end up not liking it I can always respray the house with color additives.

Other than that, since my compressor tank did not come in until after the weekend and because I spent an entire Sunday fixing my sister's air conditioner (which by the way was quite a pleasurable experience for me since I like to trouble shoot) I did not get any more practice in.

The compressor tank I bought can be found at this link and is shown below.

The ideas is to hook the stucco sprayer directly up to the two tanks before the regulator so that there is large air flow (CFM). The direct connection is what is recommended in the directions for the sprayer. The double tank is my idea to have less cycling of the compressor. Although the down side is longer to fill up the tanks. The PSI for the sprayer should be from 100 to 120 PSI. My compressor turns off and on at 130 PSI and 100 PSI and I think this will be ok for the sprayer.

I did manage to spend some time putting plastic on the eaves to prevent the stucco sprayer from coating them. I found that this product works good for covering eaves when I cut it down the center line for the entire 50' length. The tape used is poly stucco tape.

I have a bit more covering of the eaves and doors and maybe a crack repair and then maybe some more stucco practice to make sure I can get a good consistent stucco texture. But then it should be go time for the whole front of the house.

That's all for now, See the results of stuccoing the house in the next blog.

Happy Building!

The Dr.

Using stucco to refinish the exterior of your house: part 4 choosing the texture

noreply@blogger.com (Palm Tree) — Sun, 12 Mar 2017 21:13:00 +0000

In the previous blog I discussed how I gained some practice with applying stucco without applying stucco to the house. This idea came from the stucco book. In this blog I will focus on stucco textures that I'm considering. An article that shows examples of stucco textures is at this link Of course experimenting with textures means another weekend of practice before I actually apply stucco to the house.

Before a texture can be done, the stucco has to be put on the wall. I mentioned last time that I was not going to use a hopper because the air compressor requirements were too steep. But a lot of work is necessary to get the stucco on the wall and I was really wishing I could use the hopper because it would be much faster. For example see this video. It was also expensive at $260. But that is small compared to the $12000 stucco job I am doing. When I was reading the stucco book, I found out the hopper is also referred to as a mortar sprayer. When I put that search term in amazon.com I found another interesting hopper I had not seen before. It was cheaper at $195 and it had the ability to be used with smaller compressors by plugging some of the holes. This prompted me to purchase the one at this link. There is also more info on mortar sprayers at this link.

The first time I used the mortar sprayer, I was able to completely cover the piece of plywood unlike the last time I used the trowel to get the stucco on the plywood. But I did use up one entire bag for one piece of plywood. The mortar sprayer put a heavy dash texture on the plywood and this is shown below.

The first thing I tried was to use a darby to smooth it out. The darby did not get the whole surface flat because there were depressions in some areas. So if I wanted the surface flat I would have to come in with more stucco to fill the depressions and then smooth it out with the darby. Once I smoothed the surface out I resprayed the stucco covered plywood with the mortar sprayer with a quick dash coat and then after about 15 to 20 minutes I knocked it down with the trowel. The result looked very pleasing to me.

I know I was hesitating at the expense of the mortar sprayer above, but the idea of saving time with a sprayer and getting a professional look overruled the hesitation, so I went all out and bought a $355 stucco texture sprayer available at this link. This stucco sprayer has too adjustments to control the texture of the stucco and can go from a smooth finish to a heavy dash. The smooth finish result is shown below:

The finish in the picture can be improved I think. Its a little bit dashy and that's probably because the stucco mix I used could have been runnier. The sprayer comes with a funnel to measure flow of the mix and there is supposed to be a steady flow through the funnel but I didn't quite achieve that because I was experimenting. Another improvement would be my air compressor cycles too much. I have on order another air tank so that my compressor will have two 20 gallon air tanks. Also the instructions mention tapping directly form the air tanks instead of the pressure regulator which I was not doing. Correcting these problems may provide a better spraying experience.

When using the sprayer, I found out the surface that the finish goes on needs to be smooth to some extent as the texture coat will show irregularities in the surface. I also found out that the surface needs to be somewhat resistant to the material thrown at it with the sprayer, in other words wet/soft stucco may not make a good surface to spray the texture coat on because it may splash and make dents in the surface. Finally, its absolutely necessary to where a air mask such as the one at this link.

The good news is there is good potential with this sprayer. I like it better than the knock down dash I had done earlier. Furthermore, the sprayer coated the whole sheet of plywood and only used half a bag of stucco. Using the sprayer will mean about a $500 savings in stucco materials compared to the other mortar sprayer method and my inexperienced trowel method and will pay for itself.

Since I bought the other mortar sprayer from Amazon, I was able to return it and get my money back.

Well that's all for now, Next blog.

Happy Building

The Dr.

Using stucco to refinish the exterior of your house: part 3 stucco practice

noreply@blogger.com (Palm Tree) — Sun, 12 Mar 2017 01:12:00 +0000

In the previous blog I detailed the preparation of the house exterior for stucco. I did not prepare the entire house exterior since I really wanted to get the front of the house done first so that the paver's that I will be installing wont get ruined. They haven't arrived yet.

In this blog I describe my experiences with practicing applying stucco.

I only spent 1.5 hours this weak practicing. That's because the grant seafood festival was in full swing this weekend and I really needed some fried oysters.

And don't forget the lobster roll, mmmm so good.

Anyway since I am learning how to stucco, I have watched a number of videos on stuccoing. A few videos I ran across that were interesting are video video and this video. Here is a bonding agent video. I also read about stucco colors at this link and this is an interesting how to link. I also got two books off of amazon.com (link and link) which are good and have a few details that are not on the internet but probably not necessary to have bought them.

My house has 2500 sq ft of wall and since one bag of white finish stucco covers 76 square feet or 33 bags is needed I decided to buy a cement mixer to make the mixing process easier. The one I bought can be found at northern tool at this link. It is common to read that a mortar mixer should be used to mix stucco. But the $250 cement mixer is a lot cheaper and I have found it works good.

Assembling the cement mixer was time consuming. Getting the customer to do that job must save the manufacturer a lot of money. To top it off, there were bolts missing, the seal was broken in the box and the directions were full of errors causing me to make errors in assembly steps. But the mixer works well mixing stucco....very happy with it. Here is a pic with the stucco being mixed in it.

So to practice stucco I bought a bunch of stucco tools. I bought a smooth darby, serrated darby, a hawk, a hard rubber float, two red sponge floats, a soft yellow sponge float and a dash brush. I also bought the cheapest sheet of orientated strand board (osb) to stucco. After mixing the stucco I applied it to the wood board with my steal trowel and then ran over it with the smooth edge darby. So glad I bought the darby, it was pretty easy to get the surface flat with it. Although I see kirk apply finish coat without a darby so maybe I need some more practice.

My first attempt at stuccoing a wall is shown below:

I didn't quite cover the whole sheet of wood with one 80 pound bag. I must have put it on thick and at this rate it would require 80 to 100 bags to stucco the house. Hopefully, I can spread it thinner because it is $14 a bag.

Also it dried very white and I am now thinking about getting some off white colors to make the white more appealing.

Next I tried all the floats I had. I liked the wet sponge float effect the best. It seemed to leave streak marks so went over it with a dry red sponge float. The combination looks good an the effect of the float seams to lighten the stucco up and fill in all the small holes making it look as if it were painted. Here is a video about using a sponge float.

Next weekend the dash brush will arrive. And I will give the knock down dash texture a try. Also I hope to experiment with different colors of white.

I also read about some texture machine methods that looked interesting. One is the hopper used in conjunction with an air compressor (the air compressor requirements seem to make this not feasible for me) at this link, The other is a Gracco texture machine available for rent at home depot at this link. I don't think I'll use any of these but I always have the option to go over the whole house with these if I choose once I'm done. I think it is important to have a smooth flat surface with these machines and there advantage is that they are fast.

That's all for now, See what texture I chose in the next blog.

Happy Building,

The Dr.

Using stucco to refinish the exterior of your house: part 2 preparing the exterior

noreply@blogger.com (Palm Tree) — Sat, 25 Feb 2017 17:25:00 +0000

In the previous blog I described the stucco job that was done on the garage for the house and mentioned the reason I am going to stucco the whole house. To stucco the house with a finish coat over paint it is necessary to prepare the surface well so that the stucco lasts a long time and doesn't fall off.

To prepare the house it is necessary to get rid of the loose paint / dirt / mold / etc. and etch the surface. To do this I bought a Dewalt pressure washer at Home Depot. It is 3400 psi. and it is phenomenal! The Honda engine usually starts on the first pull. A good video from a very experienced stucco installer can be found at this link.

When using it I have found that my house has three coats of paint. Considering that it is built in 1962 and it is 55 years old that seems a little sparse. The last paint job was done by me and I did a shitty job. I never prepared the surface and the white paint has been peeling ever since. The pressure washer takes off that paint layer off easily. The second white layer of paint is stuck on pretty good but in some places it came off and exposed the original tan paint layer. Whatever they did for the third tan layer is amazing because it has only come off to expose the concrete in rare instances.

Here is a picture of the east side after pressure washing only once where the top paint layer has been completely removed.

The pressure washer takes off all the moth / worm cocoons too. They are pretty stubborn and sometimes the nozzle of the pressure washer has to be pointed directly at it up close in order for it to come off. Below is a picture of the worm / moth cocoons which make the house look hairy.

Since I have a two story house, I decided to buy a scaffold. I bought the scaffold at Northern Tool. The two story version was not in the store but was on sale for $100 off so if I wanted it I had to order it online and wait 4 weeks to get it. Not good! However they had all the pieces in the store sold separately so I bought them all to make the complete two story scaffold. The salesman asked his boss if I could get the $100 discount and the manager said yes. This made me a happy camper. The scaffold is shown below.

Since I really wanted to get the stucco done where the paver driveway would be installed so there would be no chance of ruining the pavers, I pressure washed the front twice and most of the sides of the house but left the back for later. This way I could speed up the stucco process where it is needed most.

Next I thought about repairing the large cracks in the stucco but not all of them. Stucco cracks and so I decided not to fuss too much. For reference I found this video and this video on crack repair. Also this is interesting link on the effects of repairing a maintenance free stucco finish crack.

My approach is to use elastopatch found at this link. They also make a textured variety found at this link but I did not use that. Since I am stuccoing over the patched crack I dont have to worry about the different coloring due to rain. Is this the right way to go? I don't know maybe Kirk knows.

Here is picture of a crack that I spent some time etching with the pressure washer on the side of the house.

I'm not sure I'm going to repair any cracks before I start stuccoing the front of the house. There are really no large cracks that I'll be stuccoing over right away. Whenever, I get around to repairing a crack I will blog about it.

Finally, I worked on covering the windows with black 6 mil plastic. To hold the plastic on I use poly tape. This tape is not supposed to leave a residue unless you leave it on for a whole month. Also I made sure to use a brand new blade in my knife. The video for how to do this is here

That's all for now. Next blog

Happy building,

The Dr.

Using stucco to refinish the exterior of your house: part 1 thoughts about colored stucco

noreply@blogger.com (Palm Tree) — Tue, 21 Feb 2017 02:15:00 +0000

In my previous blog I had mentioned that I had purchased paver's for my driveway but unfortunately it will take 6 to 10 weeks to get them. So that means lots of down time. To fill the down time I have decided to do the next necessary thing for my house. To refinish the exterior.

The exterior which is sponge finished painted stucco has a lot of blemishes. It has paint that is pealing. It has depressions where the old shutters used to be. It has humps where the cracks were repaired. It has cracks some of which are in the classic stair step pattern One crack I discovered goes vertically from the ground all the way to the top of the two story house. Finally there are little moth cocoons all over the house and it almost looks like the house has hair.

Anyway, I looked into different ways of texturing my house. One time a long time ago a salesman came to my house and gave me an estimate for what might have been tex cote. Not sure what it was, I don't remember. But the advantage of the system he was offering was that it never had to be painted, was maintenance free and it didn't crack. It might have to be cleaned by pressure washing it once in awhile. I think sears can do a similar installation.

Anyway, his quote was $25000 to do the whole house which is about 2500 sq ft.. When he left I shook his hand and watched him drive off in his $80000 Tesla. I guess I'm in the wrong business! Anyway, when you get an estimate and the guy comes driving up in a expensive car and talks about his yacht or vacations to Tahiti its a red flag. That means your probably going to pay top dollar and be funding his life of luxury.

I haven't really found anything for texturing my house besides stucco. There just doesn't seem to be a lot of options and I'm tired of searching the internet. So stucco it is.

When I got my garage stuccoed by professionals I got a number of estimates. There was a lot of push back from the contractors because I wanted to do what my dad suggested....get colored (white) stucco on my house. They just want it to be brown stucco and then I would have to paint it. But dad said that they used to put on color stucco and not paint the houses. Yet I kept hearing from the contractors that this is not what is done today. So I ended up finding someone who would do the colored stucco and he hesitantly he did it. He asked if I was sure that I wanted to do it and he kept indicating that I would have to put on a sealer on it anyway to keep the water out especially in the areas where stucco was going on wood so I might as well just paint it. And brown stucco is cheaper he pointed out.

I don't know if any of this push back is legitimate or if it is a ploy to get painters in on the job. Maybe it is legitimate. But I didn't listen and after about a year with having done nothing to my colored stucco job, I am going to proceed on with the idea for the whole house and I'm going to do it myself. I will not paint it.

Since I have not blogged about the stucco job the professionals did on the garage I will touch briefly on what they did.

I started out with cinder block. The first step was to put tar paper over the wood areas to serve as a moisture barrier. The wood parts include the gable end, the porch roof, the header and column. To do this quickly I used a hammer stapler found at this link to attach the tar paper. This is what the stucco guy wanted me to do to get the house ready for the stucco.

After this was done the Stucco guy went at it and put wire lath on with a nail gun.

The next step the stucco guy put on a scratch coat which is a base coat.

Then another base coat is added.

And then the white stucco finish coat was put on. Interestingly enough, when the white stucco went on over the brown stucco the brown stucco showed through. You can see this in the pic below.

But it whitened up over time as the stucco guy said it would. It still has a slight brown tint or off white color though which is nice.

I like the result of the finish on the garage and intend to extend it myself to the rest of the house. The cost of the job was $2620 for just the garage portion and porch. An estimate fot the rest of the house was in the $10000 range.

Anyway, a good reference for stucco questions is the Portland cement association website. The FAQs are at this link They talk about painting stucco under the Aesthetics section, and have written the following:

"Stucco can be painted. Portland cement-based paints are very compatible with stucco because they are made of the same material. These paints should be scrubbed into the surface and fully cured. Alternatively, you could consider a colored stucco finish. These finish coats are often made with white cement and pigments, providing the widest range of colors. Premixed materials are color matched from batch to batch and are most consistent.

Additionally, the fact that you are placing a finish coat with a nominal thickness of 1/8 inch instead of a paint layer usually gives more assurance of complete coverage. It is possible to paint with other types of paint, though these are usually not as long lasting as cement-based paint. Acrylic paints are long lasting and durable but change the permeability of the stucco (make it non-breathable) which in some climates may have adverse effects on the long-term performance of the system."

The adverse effects mentioned above might have to do with what is mentioned in this link. It says that the paint is not breathable and water on the ground will seep up into the stucco wall where it will be trapped behind the paint and cause mold.

Having just uncovered the above info when writing this blog I am glad I did not do anything to my freshly stuccoed garage.

In the next blog I will discuss the preparation of the house exterior for stucco.

Happy Building.

The Dr.

How to install your own paver driveway: part 4 ordering the pavers

noreply@blogger.com (Palm Tree) — Fri, 10 Feb 2017 18:57:00 +0000

In the last blog I discussed paver selection. As was mentioned there are a lot of factors to consider when selecting pavers like roof color, house color, paver color, paver size, paver pattern and surrounding landscaping color. all these factors can bog down the decision making process or if they are not considered the end result may be sub par. One thing in my favor is that I am the only one making the decision and therefore it is less complicated.

So initially I was set on a white / tan paver, but after considering what color my house would be I realized there would be too much similar light colors and I needed some contrasting colors. I have decided that my house color will be a shade of white with teal paint on the doors, window frames and maybe the gable ends. Its kind of what the house color scheme has been for a long time but it will be slightly different coloring.

For pavers, I decided on the Abacoa color pattern which is a red, charcoal, tan mix. To settle on this color I made a second trip to Coastal an old castle company in Orlando (link). and looked at their in ground paver display. This time instead of looking for light white tan pavers I looked for darker pavers and found the pavers pictured below

In the picture brick pavers are used but I'm purchasing a larger paver known as Appian Stone. I tried going even larger by purchasing Appian Grande link but it was not available and I think it has become a legacy paver. In the very bottom of the picture is different colored Appian stone. The Appian stone is a two paver system with pavers of dimensions 6" x 6" and 6" x 9". The reason I wanted the Grande is because I thought that I might want to roll a jack on the driveway and this would offer less resistance. Also tiles in housing have trended to bigger sizes and I wonder if the same trend will happen with pavers but maybe not. Anyway Appian Stone it is. Here is link where someone used Abocoa Appian Stone for a pool deck.

Additionally, I like the charcoal colored paver border in the picture and I am going to attempt that as well.

I calculated that I need 804 Sq Ft of pavers and about 135 feet of border. It is recommended that when ordering, an extra 10% to 15% is added on to account for the pavers that are cut. That comes out to be 9 pallets of Appian Stone and 1 Pallet of the black brick where a pallet is 103 square feet. I'm not to worried about running out since the small pad for the garbage cans can be adjusted in size depending on what I have left over.

To get the best price, I called a local installer that sells the pavers and Old castle in Orlando. The local installer had paver left overs for sale but was not a dealer of pavers so no dice. Old Castle of Orlando would sell everything to me for $2696.

However, I had another trick up my sleeve. I learned this when shopping for cedar for my cedar covered porch project discussed in this link. I called Lowe's. Now Lowe's does not have these pavers in their store or online but they do have a different offering of Belgard pavers. To get stuff from Lowe's that is not their standard offering you have to call their pro desk.

My first call to the pro desk resulted in no one answering. My second resulted in the statement "we don't have Belgard as a supplier." But after about an hour I thought to myself, wait a minute they have Belgard pavers in the store. I got out my red bullshit flag and threw it on the ground. In my third call, I challenged their statement and then educated the staff about the pavers in their store. They then wanted to transfer me to the lawn and garden store to talk with them. I said no I'm not talking with them they wont be able to help me and then I told them my story on how I got some really nice cedar through the pro desk and I would like them to find out if it is possible to get the paver's from the Lowes as well.

Turns out they could get them, from old castle for a slight higher cost per square foot but a much lower delivery cost. But when I asked for the QSP discount the price cam out to be $2345. Adding on the 1% for the cash rewards credit card I used resulted in $375 savings or more than one pallet for free. Nice!

Unfortunately, I have to wait 6 to 10 weeks for Belgard to make the pavers. This might have something to do with the non standard color causing them not to be in stock.

Since I now have down time other house projects are now in focus. I will discuss what mammoth project I have just started in my next blog. For the continuation of the paver driveway blog see this link

Happy Building,

The Dr.

How to install your own paver driveway: part 3 paver selection

noreply@blogger.com (Palm Tree) — Mon, 30 Jan 2017 00:12:00 +0000

For the last blog I discussed the sub-base. For this blog I will discuss paver selection. For this discussion this link is very informative.

In my area there is Landscape Depot, they sell flagstone pavers (link) and they have an in ground display. The flagstone paver website is very nice and there are a lot of pictures to look at and get ideas. Unfortunately, the paver I picked was not in Landscape Depot's in ground display and when I wanted some samples to put next to my house they told me the minimum order was a 1.5 ton pallet which is about $300 for 110 square feet of pavers. Ordering $2000 of pavers (8 pallets) based on catalog / internet pictures is risky because they will for sure look different when they arrive at your house. So no dice once again with Landscape Depot.

Anyway when I had talked with the dump truck driver he had mentioned a company named Coastal an old castle company in Orlando (link). They are a dealer for Belgard pavers. I looked into them and found out that they too have an in ground display. I made the hour drive and their display was better than Landscape Depot's dispaly because they had numbers on the pavers that could be looked up on a guide to tell people what the pavers were. Also the pavers and the colors I was interested in were on display. They had about 60 paver installations on display some of which are shown below.

I was also able to get a few samples of the colors I was interested in (but not the size) free of charge. So I ended up with two aragon, two harvest blend and two chestnut pavers. They had quite a big yard with alot of pavers in stock as can be seen in the pics below.

I took these pavers home and realized there was an issue. First the colors I picked would be slightly different for each paver block. This is on purpose and adds variation to the pavers in the driveway and it makes the driveway look nicer. But my small sample was not big enough to see this variation and how it would look. I took pictures of the displays I had seen so I looked at those and then encountered my second problem. I was using a $20 phone with a terrible camera. The colors were in no way what I saw with my eyes. A display that looked magnificent with my eyes looked like an ordinary sidewalk in the pictures. That was the last straw with the phone I had and I bought a better phone that has a better camera that very day. I was not particularly impressed with the paver colors I had selected and was wishing I had picked up an amaretto color as well.

I decided to investigate Lowes and they actually had pavers that were not on their website. They had Belgard Trinity Pavers (amaretto), Country Manor pavers (sand /tan) and Providence pavers (harvest blend). The trinity pavers had three different sizes and a beveled edge. The other pavers had a textured surface that mimics slate. I bought 6 samples of all three varieties and tried them up against the house.

Shown below is the country manor pavers.

Then the Trinity (on the left) looks like a non tumbled paver and Providence pavers (on the right) are shown below

The price for these pavers from Lowe's is expensive. For the Trinity pavers they come in at $3.42 a square foot. Where as the the Coastal pricing is about $2.25 per square foot and $228 for delivery so when all said and done about $2.50 a square foot. However, a call to the Lowes pro desk may change the price on the trinity when I tell them I need 8 pallets.

One thing I noticed when fiddling with the pavers is the pattern has a big influence on how the pavers look. Concentrating on the trinity pavers here are a few patterns to look at that may not be fully complete patterns due to the limited number of samples. Below is a T pattern or half an I pattern.

Next we have a running board pattern.

This pattern reminds me of the Ashler pattern

Out of all these pavers I have sampled there are a few things that I like. I like the beveled edge on the Trinity pavers and I also like the larger size. The beveled edges provide and accent and when I look at paver driveways with pavers that have flush edges it is not as pleasing to the eye, The biggest paver in the trinity series is 9.8" by "14.7". To me the larger size looks better and I dislike driveways with too much detail. Also, although I have the garage to work on my car in, the larger pavers will offer less resistance to rolling my jack around and the beveled edge will be less prone to chipping.

Anyway, after fiddling around with paver colors I realized that maybe I should select a house color scheme. I would hate to put pavers in and find out that later on the house paint color I want does not match the pavers I installed. To help with this I went driving around some of the neighborhoods and found the houses with grey/silver roofs with paver driveways. Here are a few pics of some very nice color schemes.

The picture shows a greenish/blueish house with tan/white/charcoal pavers

Then we have the light yellow house with tan/white/charcol pavers

Then there is the grey house with the more grayish pavers

And the white house with grayish pavers

Then there is the brownish/green green house

The greenish/blueish house is a little dark but I think that is my favorite especially since the paver driveway looks exceptionally nice.

Anyway, another way of going about it is to use a picture of the house and then import it into the Belgard paver driveway visualizer at this link They allow you to put in various pavers, paver colors and patterns. Since I hadn't picked the color of the house yet I decided to take my picture and experiment with different colors in the Valspar painting tool at this link.

In the tool I can select different colors from a large color palette for the house exterior. However, my picture has a lot of shadows so that it is difficult to use the tool to paint the exterior nicely. It was splotchy.

I decided to abandon the Valspar tool and use the software I bought a long time ago known as chief architect home designer (which can be purchased at this link). Before I started the two permits I developed a 3D model of my vision for the house in this program. To get an idea of what can be done in home designer see this 3D animation I made of the house at this link.

Home designer allows me to change the colors of the house in the model and take screen shots which I then import into the Belgard paver driveway tool. Here are some results starting with a picture of the house and a simulated paver driveway and then continuing on with the screenshot pictures from home designer imported into the paver driveway drawing tool.

At this point I am getting a better understanding of what looks good but don't know the actual color of the house and pavers I will choose.

Some basic concepts that I understand and am working with are that sometimes there cane be too much of one color. If the roof, house color and driveway is all the same color then it will not look good. I am considering the fact that the lawn will be green and that a green house of the same color would probably be too much green.

Another point is that to break up color schemes it is good idea to mix light colors with darker colors. Like pavers that are sand/tan color would work better with a darker colored house and harvest blend colors (darker) work better with light colored houses.

Another point is that only certain colors work with grey roofs. I think a grey roof is actually kind of a tough color to work with. But that's what I have and there are some good options nevertheless. But on the other hand if you look at my garage from the road the grey roof is pretty well hidden.

Anyway, the amount of things to consider for paver selection is turning out to be quite enormous. This only means that it will take me longer to come up with what I want to to do. I am definitely forming some opinions though and am in no rush. I am of the opinion that it is better to do the job right rather than rush it and be unhappy with the result. To see what paver I decided on check out my next blog.

Until next time,

Happy Building,

The Dr.

How to install your own paver driveway: part 2 sub-base installation.

noreply@blogger.com (Palm Tree) — Sun, 22 Jan 2017 22:30:00 +0000

In the previous blog I discussed the excavation of the driveway to prepare for the paver installation. This blog is about placing the sub-base.

For the sub-base I chose road base or 1.5" crushed concrete. Code requires 4 inches of crushed concrete (3/8" ?) or similar material for the sub-base and paver base combined. But when I talked to the inspector he wanted 6". But the book driveways, paths and patios by Tony McCormack implied that 6" of sub-base and an additional 1 to 2 inches of paver base materiel / bedding on top. Anyway since I excavated 10" I put in 6" of sub-base leaving 4" for the paver base / bedding and the pavers (pavers are 2 and 3/8" thick).

The crushed concrete costs about $16 a ton which is about 1.3 yards and I ordered 17 yards. I ended up paying $370 for the entire load. I saved money because I shopped around. Landscape depot offers crushed concrete for $60 a yard plus the delivery charge of $50 dollars which would have been $1070. Got to watch your prices! Even so I like Landscape Depot because there are some neat varieties of stone and rock there and I might one day buy something there.

On a Friday I received delivery of the sub-base shown below.

The driver of the dump truck was kind to me. Because there was a 10" ledge he could not dump the sub-base into the middle of the driveway in fact a majority of it would have ended up in the street except he had a trick. First he dumped some of the load at the driveway edge and then he backed is truck up on it and dumped the rest. This in effect distributed the crushed concrete on about half the driveway. Quite the time saver! Below is picture of the sub-base from the other side where you can see the dump truck tire marks.

After he dumped the crushed concrete, I socialized with him because he had brought me some fill before for the concrete pads I had installed (see this blog). He said I had done a lot of work on the house. Anyway, after some chit chat I picked his brain on paver installation. He actually knew quite alot. He recommend to spread the sub-base with a concrete kumalong or concrete placer and a wide landscape rake. These are shown below.

By the way when you buy tools remember that Kobalt (Lowe's brand) or Husky (Home depot's brand) have lifetime warranties. I have gotten several tape measures and even a wheel barrow for free when the ones I originally bought broke. Lowe's has the 5% discount every time you use their credit card so Lowe's usually wins out with me.

The next step was distributing the 20 toms of material. In doing this I had to be accurate with my distribution because if I under filled a spot I would have to roll the wheel barrow over the crushed concrete which is soft and that is difficult. So right up front I figured a way to get a proper amount of material on the geotextile covered driveway surface. What I did is use a depth guide. I made this out of a concrete block and two weights on top which is about 6" high. This is shown in the picture below.

This method worked out really well and the only reason it did so good was because I was very accurate with the excavation. Sometimes starting off a project right and with quality work can save you a lot of time an effort later on.

Once all the crushed concrete was distributed I did the final grading. Instead of putting stakes and string lines in and measure down from the string lines like I did for the excavation, I used a laser level which I placed on the garage floor and angled down towards the curb at the entrance so that the laser beam matched the grade of the driveway. I did this technique on the left, right and middle of the driveway. I used the tape measure and measured down from the laser beam and made the adjustments to the fill. The depth guides had got it pretty close.

All the adjustments that involved the laser level were made with the concrete placer. With this device I was able to get the driveway to the correct height to within plus or minus a quarter of an inch. After that I went over the entire driveway with the Landscape rake and the final result is shown below.

The distributing of the sub-base material took 8 hours. It was a tough eight hours. Luckily the weather was cool. My collar bone ended up hurting and my neck and back ached. However, it was a great work out and it made me feel a little more in shape.

The next step is to tamp the sub-base. It is recommended to tamp the sub-base for every three or four inches of sub-base thickness but I decided to tamp it after the entire 6 inches was placed. I hope that is ok. I intend to rent the vibratory compactor from home depot again. I hope to do that next weekend and also get the inspection. In the next blog I will discuss paver selection.

That's all for now,

Happy Building,

The Dr.

How to install your own paver driveway: part 1 excavation.

noreply@blogger.com (Palm Tree) — Sat, 14 Jan 2017 01:35:00 +0000

Having worked now on my permits for the past 2 years and 1 month, I am nearing completion. The last project to do is the paver driveway installation. To get to this point I have finished the boat house which is discussed at this blog, the cedar covered porch which is discussed in this blog and the expansion of a single car garage into a two car garage which is discussed in this blog.

For the paver driveway project, I found the YouTube.com videos lacking so I ordered many used books from Amazon.com for a couple bucks each. The best book I found (and the most expensive) is Driveways, paths and patios: a complete guide to design management and construction by Tony McCormack and it is available at this link. Also a good web video reference is at this link which is a series of 12 videos on how to install Belgard pavers. This link is interesting but I think there are some inaccuracies in the reference.

For the first step I planned the driveway by drawing it in Visio. This is shown below:

Once it was drawn, the next step was to lay out the perimeter for excavation. I did this by using stakes and string lines.

Excavating the driveway mainly means getting rid of the organic materials and digging deep enough so that the sub-base, base and pavers can be installed to the right height. For my application 10" excavation was what I decided to do. This is so that 6" of subbase, 1.5" of base and 60 mm (about 2-3/8") of pavers could be placed on top of the sub-grade. For code I only need about 4" of sub-base/base, but I talked to the inspector and he wanted 6" sub-base/base. But then I read the book and it suggests 8" sub-base/base and that is what I went with. To ensure my depth was not too deep and not to shallow I used string lines from the garage to the curb at the street and measured in several areas to verify the depth as I was excavating.

For the excavation I had a choice, use muscle or machine. If I used a machine like a skid steer which I could rent from Home Depot (see link) for $450 a day I could have the job done easily in one day.

However, I chose muscle because I viewed this as an opportunity to get in some very good exercise without the expense of a gym membership and at the same time not having to pay for the excavating equipment. A pro would probably have gone for the machine, but I am desk jockey and it turns out sitting at a desk for 9 hours a day is one of the most unhealthy things to do. According to Dr. James Levine, director of the Mayo Clinic-Arizona State University Obesity Solutions Initiative, “Sitting is more dangerous than smoking, kills more people than HIV, and is more treacherous than parachuting. We are sitting ourselves to death.” There is more about the side effects of sitting at this link.

So I needed some exercise. I also had gained some weight because my job gave us free unhealthy lunches and all the snacks we wanted in hopes we would work overtime and get the project done by the dead line. So weighing in at 180 lbs on Christmas eve which is right at the point where a person my height is over weight I was not happy. I decided to go on a diet at the same time that I was getting exercise from the excavation to turbocharge the effects on my health that this project would have.

The best diet I know of is the South Beach diet. The diet has several books with recipes to follow when your on the diet. They can be obtained used from Amazon.com at this link for a couple of bucks each. This diet is a low carbohydrate diet with attention to the eating heart healthy by keeping the saturated fat content of the meals low. Since my cholesterol is high, I kicked it up a notch and ate only vegetarian south beach meals. I have found that I can lower my cholesterol by 50 points through diet.

The excavation took 21 hours which I spread out over 8 days which happened to be my christmas break. Ya, that's how I spend my vacations because of the permits. In addition to the 21 hours to break up the monotony I also did some landscaping, planting my home grown palm tree seedlings (see blog) and sprinkler repair (see this blog for how to work with sprinklers). The end result of the driveway excavation is shown below. In the picture some of the strings that were used for depth guides can be seen.

After having excavated the driveway, my muscles are strong as steel once again, its very easy to run a 5K and I've shed 7 pounds of weight. Large weight loss like this is typical for the south beach diet for the first two weeks where phase 1 of 3 is followed.

For the next step I rented a vibratory compactor from Home Depot and ran it over the sub-grade.

After the compaction I laid the geotextile down. The geotextile (see link) is a woven fabric (in my case 12.5' wide) which helps maintain separation of the sub-base and the sub-grade so that the integrity of the whole structure is maintained. It helps improve the load bearing capacity of the driveway system and is porous to water. It is optional but recommended by the two references I have provided for this blog. Below is a picture of the installed geotextile weighed down so the wind will not take it away.

Well that's my update for now. For the the next couple of weeks, I hope to accomplish adding the sub-base and then get the inspection. See the sub-base installation in the next blog.

Until next time, Next blog.

Happy Building.

The Dr.

The Dream of Owning a Tree Farm

noreply@blogger.com (Palm Tree) — Mon, 26 Dec 2016 23:52:00 +0000

About three years ago I was inspired to start a tree farm.   Why would I want to do this? It seemed like a good way to make some money.   It would allow me to have an income other than my full time job. I have always felt the need to have some form of income other than my job because it will eventually go away. Whether its through a lay off or retirement, eventually I will not be working as an engineer.

Its a good idea to have some sort of income when retired. Passive income is the holy grail.   You know the income that just keeps flowing in with out any effort. With this kind of income there are no worries about out living your savings and there is the extra benefit of having something left to give to your loved ones.

When studying the tree farm idea, the financials seemed interesting.   Here was an investment that appreciated with time. Every foot that the tree grew meant it was worth more. What makes a tree have value? The reason is because people desire mature trees to make their yards look beautiful but do not want to wait the amount of time it takes them to grow.

Its a good idea to grow trees that grow well in your area. Since I'm in Florida, palm trees grow well and this is what I started with.   There are so many palm trees in my area that it is fairly easy to take a walk and find a tree to collect seeds from. Here are a few pictures of the palm trees that I collected seeds from to start growing. From left to right (Alexander, Queen, Bismark, Date)

I thought about selling the seeds I found on eBay but I realized there may be some legal issues. Sending seeds across state lines may be problematic due to the agricultural department regulations. I know that they don't like citrus to cross state lines due to diseases like canker.   Also in the state of Florida they want you to become a seed dealer and get a license. Anyway, because the red tape I was discouraged and didn't not pursue this.

I pursued the tree farm idea instead and started looking for larger parcels of land that were inexpensive.   Large parcels nearby were few and far between and cost millions. However 10 acres could be found in my price range about an hour away. But the distance made me wonder how often I would have to take this drive. Really if you have a farm you want to live on the farm to tend to it.

Nevertheless I was still excited about the tree farm idea and decided to start growing the palms on my property. I purchased some used black plastic pots and filled them with cow manure and top soil and planted the seeds. Some websites suggest that you take the fruit off the seed but this takes a long time so I just planted the seeds as mother nature provided them to me. I planted about 15 seeds per pot. It wasn't long before I had 150 palm trees growing. I must have had 10 different varieties. For a video on how to grow palm trees see this one.

I was excited about how much these trees could sell for. For example consider 10 year old date palm which sells for $650 at this link. That one tree earned $65 per year. Imagine having 1500 trees on a farm, the farm would grow in value by 100,000 dollars per year. In ten years it would be worth 1 million dollars.   Wow! Only 10 years to become a millionaire! The tree farm of course is a lot of work. Not only is there tending to the trees but then there is also finding a buyer. There are risks too. What if a hurricane comes or a disease strikes and they all die. I'm no expert on what it takes to operate a tree farm but maybe some day I'll talk to one.

Anyway back to my seedlings, I felt the need to water them even though palm tress seem to do fine with the rain water that god provides. I realized I may not be available to water them every day so to solve this I added some sprinklers tied to my automatic timer. I no longer had to perform the watering task. I also came up with a method to keep the weeds from growing around the plants by putting the pots on top of landscape fabric. See my setup below:

Early on I found I needed to separate the seedlings into their own pots and after a year I found that I needed to replenish the dirt in the pots. I encountered many night crawlers that had taken up residence in the pots. Maybe I should have opened up a bait store.

I did have trouble with squirrels. They dug up the seeds and ate them. I tried capturing them in a trap I purchased from Lowes. It was fun trapping these critters and even though I have eaten squirrel before I decided to relocate it to another area. But then another squirrel took up residence in the yard and I was back to where I started. Below you can see the troublesome critter in his jail cell.

The task of tending to the seedlings and starting a tree farm, got sidelined by my next new interest, remodeling my house. I have been remodeling the house now for about 2 years and have finished, converting a single car garage into a two car garage, building a cedar covered porch and a boat house with a lift. All that is left to finish the permits is to put in a paver driveway which I am working on now.

Because of the construction the automatic sprinklers for the palms were off due to the damage to the sprinkler system when tearing up the drive way. And so its been two years that those seedling have gone without water except rain water. Out of the 150 seedlings I had, I ended up with about 40 left. Some died because they were completely covered over with banana tree leaves and had no light. The 40 seedlings are doing well and have grown despite the very little dirt left in the pot. See picture below of the Alexander palms.

Due to my getting sidelined on the dream of owning a tree farm, I thought that I would never use the seedling palm trees I grew because I had nowhere to plant them. However, my attention has turned to landscaping my yard and I have realized that there are many places for these trees in my very own yard. What this amounts to is about $650 worth of palm trees to choose from for the yard. They were not exactly free since I paid money for the pots, manure, fabric, sprinklers and topsoil but that was probably about $150. This means that I have enjoyed a savings of 77% just for the plants and additional savings by taking care of the landscaping myself..

Cue the cash register sound.

Happy Building

The Dr.

Deciding when your old HVAC unit should be canned.

noreply@blogger.com (Palm Tree) — Fri, 23 Dec 2016 03:14:00 +0000

When hurricane Mathew passed through, my HVAC was fried from surges in electricity as I outlined in a previous blog. I should have shut off the main breaker to protect my electronics but I didn't. The fix was simple, it just needed a new switch on the access door which shuts the air handler off when the door is open.

However, this unit was a 12 year old Rheem and the natural gas heater didn't work. It was really rusty and usually every year it had to be hit with a hammer on the rusty burners to get it to work. But last year hammering didn't work and I busted a sensor fiddling around with it. But that's ok this is Florida and the heater is only needed once or twice a year anyway and I made it all last winter with out a heater.

But there was another problem, the Freon leaked. It seemed to get worse with the Hurricane. I called the insurance company out but then I realized that $5000 deductible would have to be paid by me and they were in no way going to pay because they thought the damage was less then the deductible.

The type of Freon used in the unit was the old Freon known as R-22. R-22 has been mostly phased out in new equipment in the United States and has been replaced by other refrigerants with lower ozone depletion potential. For more info on R-22 see this Wikipedia link. Currently R-22 is about 500 dollars for 30 lb on eBay. To use that stuff you need a license to handle Freon, which I don't have so I rely on the AC guy to come and add some every two years at a cost of $300 for 3 lbs. At $100 per pound if you have 4 ton system that uses R-22 you may have to pay $1200 to put 12 pounds back in. Since the Freon leaked the AC would get more an more inefficient and the energy bill would sky rocket.

The new Freon which is R-410A costs about $140 for 30 lbs on ebay. Usually when the whole amount of the R-22 Freon needs to be put back in the system, the AC guys tries to sell you a new $15000 top of the line 20 seer variable compressor HVAC unit.

My HVAC was fixable. At least it didn't look like the picture below which is the result of a copper thieves: See link.

Before I decided on getting a new system I wanted to know if the indoor coil or the outdoor coil was leaking. If it was the indoor coil then I could save some money and not replace the outdoor unit. To get a leak test you can pay $75 for an AC guy to come out. However for less than $75 dollars you can buy one of these and do a leak test your self.

I bought one and took the cover off my outdoor unit and pretty quickly found the leak.....keep in mind that there all kind of shock hazards in the outdoor unit and a pretty hefty cap that can shock you even when the breaker is off. Do it your selfer beware! The leak was in the main outdoor unit coil. It is possible to repair the coil but an AC guy usually wants to replace it for 1 to 3 thousand dollars. That's when they try to sell you a brand new AC unit and introduce you to a new ball and chain to strap on your ankle called a $15000 loan. There really is no choice is there? What live without AC in Florida? That's crazy talk!

Now it is possible to legally put in your own AC unit without a license because they come filled with Freon. Check out this site for example where you can get some really good prices on a Rheem. To do so you have to braze the Freon pipes when their empty and then pull a vacuum and test them for leaks. Once the system has proven to be leak free the valve is opened on the compressor which allows the Freon to get into the rest of the system. This should be enough Freon to run on but if there is not enough Freon you can get the AC guy to put in the right amount. Don't forget you have to get the Freon out of the old unit in an environmentally friendly way with a collection system. Without a license you can call a AC guy to collect it for you. Other skills include navigating the permit process, electrical skills and duct work skills.

Does it sound hard and like a lot of insurmountable work? Not really. My dad actually put in the AC unit that was being replaced in my house and he is not an AC installation professional. It worked great for many years.

Anyway, I wanted to have AC for my boat house completion party and felt I would not be able to complete it on time. So I called the pro in.. And he installed it in about three days of part time work. It is interesting to note that he had such trouble getting the old unit out it caused the AC guy to say, "your dad over engineered it and it would probably survive a cat 5 hurricane" and it also caused him to rupture the Freon lines causing it to all leak out into the atmosphere. Since it was an accident it wasn't illegal said the AC guy.

Anyway, the drain on my AC unit was directed into an old washer drain. The problem with this is that sewer gas could go into the HVAC drain and into the air handler and into house. There was no trap on the drain. Then you got stinky sewer gas smell in your house. I never really noticed a smell. It was not to code so it had to be fixed.

I knew the perfect way to get the drain from inside the garage to the yard which would fix the drain issue. The AC guy was not up to the task and a plumber would have to be called. Instead I took on the task myself. In a previous blog I had fished some electrical conduit into the garage which held the boat house wiring. My plan was to fish the drain along the same route as the conduit which was under about 10' of patio slab. Once again I used the walkway tunnel kit from Lowe's and it worked like a charm.

Below is picture of the drain on the inside of the Garage. In the picture on the right the drain is not yet connected to air handle. On the left the drain is visible coming out of the air handler and is completed

Notice the big hole I had to tear in the Garage floor with my harbor freight jack hammer. It is about 2 feet deep so that the pipe that was jetted under the slab could pass under the house footer. The hole was actually still there from the boat house project....so glad I hadn't filled it up with cement yet.

There was one problem though. Typically a drain from the AC sits above the ground. In my case it would be a tripping hazard since it would come out right in a high traffic area. I decided to make a below ground drain. To do this I used the drain grate from home depot at this link and some 6" pvc I found at Lowes. The 6 inch PVC is not to common in this area as Home Depot didn't have it and Lowes only stocked 2' sections. But 2' is all I needed.

The 3/4" pvc drain resides in a cavity created by the drain gate and the 6" PVC pipe and comes up vertically and then makes two 90 degree turns so that the water drops directly down to the ground in side the 6" PVC pipe.

Remember once the water comes out of the air handler it relies on gravity to find its way to the outside drain. So the air handler drain outlet has to be higher than the outside drain. If for some reason the drain gets clogged then water will back up into the air handler. Luckily the AC guy but a shut off switch on the drain for the AC similar to this one so that a backup will not cause any problems.

The outside drain is shown below,

In the end the AC guy did a very good job installing the unit and I'm very happy with the installation.
Funny thing is there was such a nice breeze for the party that I left the doors open and turned the AC off. I didn't really need it.

I did save money by doing the leak test myself and not calling a plumber for the drain. But the great savings to be had by installing the AC myself was not had as I let the AC guy do the job.

I did save money by getting more than one estimate. I had estimates from $14000 to $6000. Some the high estimates were for AC units with all the bells and whistles but I went with a lower end model. For the lower end models there was about $3000 variation in installation price. I went with a Trane 16 seer model which was 2 seer better then my old unit. Trane units have good reputation of being one of the best HVAC units and I got it for the lowest quoted price. I have already noticed lower electrical bills.

Some other savings that can be had, is Florida gives a $500 rebate for installing a natural gas appliance (since my heater uses natural gas) and since the unit is an energy star rated a tax credit can be obtained when filing the federal income taxes.

Also worth mentioning, there is a product used on HVACs that is often used on boats to prevent electrolysis damage. Its a zinc anode and on the HVAC system it is known as corrosion grenade. Since I'm near the beach I decided to get the AC guy to put one on. It can be found at this link.

That's all I got for now.

Happy Building

The Dr.