Hmmm....it hadn't rained in MONTHS...this shouldn't be wet. On closer examination, it was clear that water was burbling up out of the box that contained all of the partially-buried sprinkler valve.
Chad had previously rebuilt a couple of those valves, and we already knew the stuff that remained was on its last legs. Clearly the right thing to do was to stop putting off the chore of digging out all the old valves and replacing them with new ones and just do it. Thus the saga of fall house projects was begun.
Whoever put the old valves in buried them a little further down than perhaps they ought to. As a result, we had to pull out quite a number of the surrounding pavers and dig a huge hole to access the valves to get them out. Giant pain in the butt, giant mess.
Once maximal dirt was scattered about that corner of the yard, Chad was able to get the old valves out. He carefully drew up a plan for how to put the system back together better, and we set off to the hardware store to get parts.
Of course, the desired parts that are supposedly in stock are never all actually extant at the store, necessitating some rethinking of the plans while shopping -- i.e. "What can we find here on the shelf that will actually fit together and do the job without being ridiculously impractical?" Date night at Home Depot is so much fun.
As is usual for these things, after we got home and started on the rebuild, Chad found we needed one more part. Fortunately, Lowes is right next to the climbing gym, so it was easy for me to pick up the critical bit of flexible hose later in the week, and Chad got the valve box all put back together, as well as fixing another leak elsewhere in the system. And, as an added bonus, while checking all the electrical connections to the controller, he figured out how to connect the sprinkler zone in the front courtyard, which has never worked. We had been told that zone was broken and hopeless when we first moved in over a decade ago and have been alternately running it manually or not using it at all ever since, not knowing all it needed was for a solid electrical connection to be made. Kudos to Chad for figuring that out and fixing it!
One would think that one leak-related project was enough for the season. However, a couple of days later, I noticed that the kitchen sink faucet, which had been starting to feel like it was full of rocks when you rotated it, now had water slowly constantly seeping from the bottom of the fixture.
I have hated this sink ever since we moved in. It's ugly and stained, and worst of all, having the stupid divider right under the too-low faucet means you can't actually rinse out a large pot without getting water everywhere. Why on earth would anyone design a sink in which you can't get water to pour directly into the large basin?? The sprayer doesn't pull out far enough to be useful either.
In theory, we could have just replaced the faucet. However, after examining things from below, Chad pointed out that there was so much corrosion that the faucet was sort of welded on to the sink and that it would be awfully hard to get off. Maybe he just said that because he knew I hated the sink so much, but it was certainly a good excuse to get rid of the whole thing.
I had assumed that we might need to call someone to take care of the installation, but we determined that the hole in the counter was a standard size and Chad was confident that it wouldn't actually be that bad of a job. Time for another date night at the hardware store, this time to pet the sinks and faucets. I really need to look at this sort of thing physically, to get a visceral feel for whether something looks and feels solid and up to the task. Thunk the sinks to assess rigidity and sound insulation (important for large single-basin stainless sinks, which is what I wanted), make sure the faucet moves easily, feels solid and good in the hand, and that the sprayer pulls out smoothly and sufficiently far.
There were enough choices at the store to decide what we wanted, but what we wanted of course was not in stock. At this point I *could* have just ordered everything off of Amazon and had it the next day, but I wanted to get it locally -- especially in case there was a problem -- so I made an order online with Home Depot to pick up the following week, and spent the week watching the old faucet slowly seeping, all the while hoping it wouldn't progress to fountaining.
The week went by and everything arrived as expected. I picked up the parts, had fun trying to shove the large, heavily protected sink box into the truck (it almost didn't fit), and waited for Chad to get back from his work trip. On his first free day, he jumped right in.
It wasn't too hard to get the old sink out, shave out the corners of the hole in the counter slightly so the new, slightly-more-square sink would fit, and deal with the inevitable "it doesn't quite line up" plumbing connections underneath.
Thing were looking pretty good at this point. We might get it all done in one day! This is looking like a proper sink.
It's never that simple, though. Chad told me to turn the water on while he watched underneath, and -- AAAAAAIEEEEE! Water everywhere up top.
After drying everything off, Chad took the new faucet apart and examined it, only to find that one of the connections inside the stem was mis-manufactured. There was no easy way for us to correct it.
For the record, this was Not Our Fault. Chad had done everything right to complete the impressive feat of replacing the kitchen sink on the first shot. We just didn't count on getting a defective part.
Surprisingly, we were able to get Home Depot customer service on the phone on a Saturday evening. We could get a different (sort of ugly) faucet at the store the next day, or wait three days for another iteration of the one we actually wanted to be ordered. We opted to wait, and went out for pizza. I declared lack of kitchen sink to be reason enough not to cook. Pizza yields lots of leftovers that we could eat for days.
I counted those days. By Monday night, I hadn't seen any sort of email that anything had been shipped, which seemed sort of suspicious. Chad picked up on my worry and called Home Depot again, only to find that they hadn't actually sent out the replacement, for reasons that weren't making any sense given that the person on Saturday said that it was all taken care of. I will studiously avoid ranting about Home Depot's internal processes; suffice it to say we gave up on them and ordered the replacement on Amazon because it could show up the next day instead of requiring four more days with uncertainty of whether we were being good schedule information or not. I will say that Home Depot was at least good about accepting the return when I took the defective one back.
The Amazon box showed up the next day, Chad installed the faucet after work, and all is well. We finally have a real sink. Yay. We should have done this years ago.
What, pray tell, was the kid doing through all of this? Ordering a Nintendo Switch with money from the summer camp counselor job. Happy kid plays games.
Happy Kid also plans art projects requiring a large piece of wood, buys said wood, and sweet-talks Dad into helping cut it down to the desired size.
Happy Kid goes on bike rides, helping me discover a local dirt road climb that I've vaguely known about for a while, but hadn't previously managed to locate.
I did take a weekend to abandon Happy Kid and Chad, to go visit my parents. It was a good visit, and of course involved more projects, the biggest of which was helping my dad install a new garage door opener. It was a highly amusing process, a hint of which you can see below.
Back home, I finally got around to taking out the rest of the ever-dying loquat tree in our back yard. As you may remember I pruned this tree back heavily two years ago to give it one more chance. It failed that test, and continued to ail, so I dragged the chainsaw out and started hacking pieces off.
The wood on this tree is fairly dense, so I didn't want to drop it all at once lest I accidentally take out the shiny new fence the neighbors had put in. Plus the tree detritus all had to be cut into pieces small enough to go out with the yard waste anyway. The neighbors' fence conveniently has a nice top platform on which to stand.
The sound of the chainsaw brought Chad outside to investigate, and naturally he chose to get in on the fun :) He took out the largest part of the trunk once I got the top stuff shaved off. So -- one more project knocked off!
Speaking of knocking things off, we all collectively got sick of accidentally knocking the kitchen scissors off of the inadequate magnet hook on the fridge, so Chad designed and printed me a new one with sufficiently strong magnets on the back such that I can't possibly knock it off even when madly flinging the refrigerator door open. Sometimes the simplest things are the best! I declare victory on all fall projects.
