... and on the Seventh Day ...

... we happily worked our butts off.

On the third day, which was Thursday, Shelby and Bird finished the tiling and grouting in our bedroom and we moved back in that night ... after we scrubbed the tiles clean of excess grout film. That means vacuuming to pick up the big stuff and dust from scraping with a putty knife, then on hands and knees with a wet cloth and scrubbing the white film off the tile surfaces, then rinsing the cloth in a bucket of water that quickly turns milky white and has to be chucked. Then four or five mop jobs, letting the floor dry in between so we can see where there is still some grout film. We keep mopping until the water in the bucket no longer turns milky white. I dumped buckets and buckets, each four gallons, of white water in back. I think the old creosote bush is happy.

By Thursday, we had emptied Shari's studio into the living and dining rooms so it was ready for them to move on to the next room. As they worked on the studio, we emptied guest bedroom and my office. Saturday morning we scrubbed the grout film in the guest room and Shari's studio.

The weekend was rather mournful for me. I had to gut my office: boxing contents of drawers and shelves, then disassembling one desk, disassembling two credenzas, disassembling one IKEA Ivar shelving unit with drawer and glass cabinet components, and dragging them somewhere and somehow so I could remember how to put it all back together again. I have a lot of stuff in my office. In a sense, I was dismantling my identity and shoving it aside.

Shari was smarter when she took down her bookshelf: first she took a photo so she knew how it was organized.

I had seriously underestimated the volume of stuff. We had five packing boxes left over from our move two years ago. I thought I'd buy six more small boxes at Home Depot and that should do it. Hah! It took two more trips to Home Depot and another twenty-two boxes. Now that everything is moved back in, we have a nice stack of thirty-three empty, folded packing boxes in the garage.

Office floor tiles laid (L), then grouted and cleaned (R).

That Monday, Day Five, they tiled my office and finished the grouting on Tuesday. Tiling and grouting the four rooms had taken them six working days.

Day Seven, Wednesday, we cleaned the hazy film of grout in my office, scraping, vacuuming, scrubbing, and five times mopping. We did some more mopping of the guest bedroom, Shari's studio, and the hallways where grout dust had been tracked. Then we started moving furniture back to where they belonged. That seventh day was a long one, but we were eager to keep going because we knew could, and the rewards of returning to enhanced normalcy were significant. Over the next couple of days, we had our living room and dining room back.

I write "enhanced" normalcy because we no longer have petroleum carpets emitting formaldehyde and lord knows what other chemical fumes. How do we know? Our sinuses no longer clog up each night. The floors are so clean, so uniformly tiled, that in a pinch, the house could be used as a hospital ... you know, rooms can be disinfected and blood mopped up.

On the eighth day, we were rewarded. That morning, two carpenters showed up to install an "alumawood" trellis over the courtyard by our front door. It took them only three hours, which is a lot less time than what it took me to move out our courtyard furniture and potted plants.

The effect of the shade is marvelous. The summer heat here is bearable in the shade. If you are in direct sunshine, it's murder.

Day One

We were ready for it eight days earlier, clearing out furniture & stuff from our master bedroom (the "owner's suite") and stacking it in the —  for this purpose, the appropriately named —  "gathering room" (i.e., the living room). But Day One kept getting postponed.

The folds in the carpet, bumpy enough
to trip on, are circled in this photo.

We are having the carpets ripped out of four bedrooms and replaced with tiles. The guys showed up and started work yesterday, Day One.

We've been wanting to take out the carpets ever since we moved in here two years ago. Actually, the feel of the carpet on its thick padding was a bit luxurious, especially with bare feet in the winter. But its days were numbered. Not only do carpets store too much dirt and dust, and not only are cool tile floors more welcoming in the desert climate, but the developer and its carpet subcontractor had installed them very poorly. After only a few weeks, folds began to appear in the carpets in all four bedrooms.

Upon tearing up a corner of the carpet, I saw evidence to support a theory. The padding underneath was really thick. That's why the carpets felt so luxurious. Trouble is, the carpet tack strips nailed all around the edges of the floor are quite thin and the carpet layers cut the padding to abut close to the strips. By the time the carpet was laid down, the thick padding prevented it from being secured by the tack strips.

Tom is pleased with the tiles laid
on Day One.

Day One is a big step forward.

It's going to take a while, one room at a time, to get the tiling done and return to some semblance of normalcy. We are hopeful.

Meanwhile, I need to drive down to Home Depot to get some more small boxes. Sheesh, I thought we were done with those a year and a half ago when we moved form San Simeon to Blue Agave II in Dove Mountain. But I have to move a lot of books out of my office. 

Small Walls, Big Difference

Front yards covered with crushed rock.

The way developers of residential tracts work, they do some basic wholesale landscaping in the front yards so the streets and houses all look neat, nice and ready to move in. Each front yard gets a tree or two (mesquite, palo verde or shoestring acacia), some bushes (Mexican bird of paradise, cenizo, or trumpet flower), maybe a golden barrel cactus, and lots of hardy, flowery lantana plants, all planted on small mounds of topsoil because each site has been stripped of its native soil down to the hard caliche.

Each front yard is dotted with three or four large boulders, weighing probably one or two hundred pounds each. The boulders are jagged, easily fractured reddish rocks of a variety mined some place else because, like the ubiquitous crushed rock, they are very different from the local native rock, especially the pale granite Catalina rock that is common to the Tortolitas as well as the Santa Catalina Mountains.

An automatic irrigation system is installed so the plants do not wither, die, or look bad over the weeks or months it takes to sell the house. Plus, many buyers are not into gardening and without automatic sprinkling, some lots would end up with dead plantings. That ruins the ambience of the developer’s neighborhood.

One of the grand entrances to the “Saguaro Reserve” tracts being developed just north of our tract.

When the developers bulldoze native vegetation, roads and building sites for a new tract, they always begin with the entrance and a grand monument bearing the pretentiously magnificent name for the tract, often named after a native plant that was bulldozed to clear the lots; like, “Saguaro Reserve,” “Blue Agave” and “Blue Agave II.” The entrance is the first area that the developers landscape. It makes a nice, finished first impression while the tract itself looks like an open pit mine.

The grand entrances and the front yards of each finished tract house are uniformly covered with the same crushed rock. In addition to desert-color conformity and the need to discourage lawns, the crushed rock serves to cover and hide a considerable amount of construction waste: bits of roof tiles and perimeter wall concrete blocks, plastic sheeting, styrofoam, nails, caffeine drink cans, candy wrappers, cardboard, and layers of concrete left over from when they mixed it on the caliche.

Digging the trench for the larger wall requires a jackhammer
to break up the caliche and some place to pile the dirt.

In short, we live in a neighborhood where the front yards look alike and somewhat unnatural.

We inherited two mounds in our front yard that are a bit larger than what the developer dumped on other front yards. Looking out front at the mound outside my new office window, I would see the uniformly crushed rock everywhere, as well as three large, black plastic clean-out sanitary sewer drain caps. The front yard is also adorned with two storm drain outlets and a flat, rectangular metal cover with “Tuscon Water” written on it. To hide these embellishments, I covered the clean out caps and lined the house-facing sides of both mounds with native rock. Over the weeks we were moving in, I employed Agamemnon each day to bring a load of plants and rocks from our little acre on San Simeon. Now when I gaze out from my office window, I see my private view of native rock.

Shari’s very excellent stucco finish.

I tore out each lantana plant in the front yard (Shari is allergic to their pungent fragrance), and planted some small saguaros, barrel cacti, hedgehog cactus, pincushion cactus, a sotol (desert spoon), a Mexican fence post, and Mexican aloes to begin the process of making the front yard Tom-friendly.

Since March, out attention has been towards making the backyard livable. Now that the back is substantially completed, we have started work on redefining the two mounds where they face the street with low, cement block walls. Trenches have to be dug and it doesn’t take long before shovel meets caliche. Out comes my trusty electric jackhammer. Excavated dirt is neatly piled on double layered drop cloths until a level plane is carved out, pea gravel spread, and blocks placed.

Agamemnon’s load number four:
fifteen blocks, two 60 lb. bags of concrete mix,
and two tubes of Liquid Nails.

I can rough in the wall and stucco, but it takes Shari to smooth the cement finish so evenly that a stucco professional would be envious. Neighbors passing by on their walks stop to praise the work — in large part because of Shari’s finish.

Agamemnon has served valiantly hauling some eighty concrete blocks (2700 lbs), 28 concrete caps (some 225 lbs.), 360 lbs. of concrete mix, 120 lbs. of pea gravel, and 160 lbs. of stucco mix — six or seven trips; all in all some 3500 lbs. or over 1600 kg. Only one or two 80 lb. bags of stucco mix and a tube of Liquid Nails left to haul.

I used to identify our house by clicking the remote garage door opener. The house with the garage door opening was ours. Now guests can identify our house by the small, architectural walls in the front yard. Nice.

After seven days of work.

Backyard Bliss

It is a much smaller canvas than the little acre we had at San Simeon, but it has its charm and it requires a lot less work.

The huge pergola and two trellises provide shade, as will the two mesquite as they grow and spread wide. The planter on the right has already grown a bumper crop of basil, and the recently planted seeds of Chinese broccoli (gail lan or kailan), arugula, and dill have sprouted. The rest of the yard is devoted to drought-tolerant cactus, agave, yucca and euphorbia — “drought” being a somewhat odd term to use in the Sonoran Desert as the climate is mostly drought. Maybe “desert-tolerant” would be more appropriate.

“B-island” L to R: octopus agave, saguaro, totem pole cactus & behind it a golden torch cactus, joshua tree yucca.

From the drone perspective, the yard isn’t quite as interesting as from ground level. In my imaginative mind’s eye, I think of the rocks as Yosemite-sized walls.

“B-island” L to R: Hedgehog cactus, totem pole cactus, saguaro, artichoke agave (foreground), octopus agave.

“A-island,” “B-island,”
and the corn-husker.

As I carefully place large, medium and small rocks then scatter pebbles and sand scraped from wash deposits, I feel as if my childhood love of model trains has found a new expression.

Here we are in November and we have some flowers blooming. I like to think that is evidence that the plants are happy. (The alternative explanation is that the plants are desperately trying to propagate before they croak.)

Most plants don’t like being dug up and moved. It’s certainly true of cacti. I know the torch cacti we brought over in pots from San Simeon had trouble adjusting as their pots got moved out of the way several times over some nine months. I finally planted them under the big trellis over the raised desert garden.

A couple of smaller torches are still struggling, poor things, but two of the tall specimens seem to be happy being freed from the confines of a pot and finally planted. Either that, or the trellis shade allowed them to survive the summer sun, and now that the sun is lower on the horizon, they are able to enjoy its less fierce sunshine and decided to bloom. That's the fourth flower on the one on the left.

We still have several places available for additional plantings in C- and D-islands, but the sense of urgency has diminished because I know enough that some of these plant get big. For some like saguaros and joshua trees, that will take decades; for others, a couple of years and they will be crowded.

Another reason to shift attention is that we are now tackling the two “pony” walls in the front yard. The smaller one is up and I am using my trusty electric jackhammer to dig into the caliche for the trench in which the larger one will rest its bottom row of concrete blocks. Stay tuned.

Construction Zone

The approved submittal sketch.

Well, it's been about ten weeks since they started digging up our backyard with the intention that it will look a little like the artist's conception image we submitted to the HOA police (the Architectural Review Committee of the Homeowner's Association) for approval.

So we've joined the Construction Zone.

There are scores and scores of new houses under construction to the north of us. By morning twilight, the warning bells of trucks in reverse gear can be heard together with the fire of nail guns and, occasionally, boomboxes playing Sonoran pop songs. Dove Mountain Blvd. becomes a regular stream of pick-up trucks and various construction company trucks, large and small, whether infrastructure businesses (licensed in Texas), concrete trucks, concrete pumps, cranes, plumbers, roofers, HVAC businesses, hardware delivery, landscape outfits, pest control firms — anything and everything you can imagine.

Then there are the swimming pools. Being a new development, every backyard comes with plain dirt, weeds, and construction debris. Many buyers decide to have a swimming pool constructed in their backyards, so there is a regular parade of worker bees and their trucks digging, laying rebar and concrete, etc., etc.

We've joined the club and we are having our own parade of workers: laborers digging holes and trenches, laborers using concrete blocks to fashion raised planting beds and an outdoor barbecue island, plumbers adding outdoor faucets and a natural gas connection for the barbecue, a crew setting up our backyard pagoda, electricians adding outdoor plugs and wiring for the adjustable louvers.

The plan involves a tall pergola over a concrete pad that extends out from the back patio, concrete paths from the side gate to the pergola, a barbecue area (of course), one raised garden for Shari, one raised garden for Tom (with trellis), a trellis outside our bedroom window, and a layer of crushed rock over all the dirt to keep the dust down.

The biggest spectacle was the concrete pour complete with concrete truck and concrete pump. In the morning, a team of workers showed up to finish laying the forms, digging out the cavities to be filled with concrete, and laying a crisscross of rebar, all just in time before the scheduled 8 a.m. arrival of the concrete truck. Also on site was a concrete pump with long sections of hose. Then, to the sound of a boombox dialed to Sonoran pop songs, the crew went at it. By noon, the concrete was all shaped and smoothed.

The building department inspector comes tomorrow to check electrical, plumbing and gas connections. Then, hopefully, we can complete the backfill.

For now, it's all still a bit of a mess ... a promising mess, but a mess. It will probably be several weeks before all the hired work is done, then more time for Shari and me to do clean-up and finish. When the workers are done hauling and spreading ten tons of crushed rock, we might have our backyard ready for our use — but I am trying to be upbeat. Rome was not built in a day.

So if anyone has been wondering what we've been up to this year, now you know.

One Good Wall Deserves Another

There are lots of nice things about cement blocks. They make great retaining walls that greatly slow down inevitable erosion. They are easier to collect than boulders. They have flat surfaces that can adhere to one another and take stucco. They also can replace inclines lined with rocks and free up those rocks and the occasional boulder for use elsewhere in one's landscape design. And, perhaps the greatest incentive, little critters can't tunnel through them and, if tall enough, javelina are reluctant to jump over them.

So after a few years of loose rocks slipping, critters tunneling, and javelina munching on the roots of ornamentals by my main traversing walkway, I counter-attacked. I made several trips with Agamemnon to Lowes and Home Depot to bring back cement blocks, concrete mix, stucco mix, liquid nails, pea gravel, and clay bricks. I removed my precious native Catalina rocks, dug a trench, and did a rough layout of the wall.

The work is exhilarating and satisfying, although when the lizards are scampering around mid-morning, it's time to get out of the heat. After about a week of early morning work, four or five hours at a time, the block wall was stuccoed, painted, and topped with clay bricks.

I would sit in our outdoor living room and admire not only the pleasing order which I had imposed upon the landscape, but the new areas where I had created terraces with the rocks and the occasional boulder I had freed up.

I noticed something missing.  I had constructed individual lengths of concrete block retaining walls interspersed with natural Catalina rock in our gully (Coat Hanger Valley). I had retaining walls along the slopes defining paths and three sets of stairs leading down to the bottom of the gully, but where you first cross the driveway to get to those paths was untidy. It needed some inviting refinement to entice a person to saunter inside. It needed an entrance.

That required a curve, three test roughed-in layouts, welcome advice from my better half, and a lot of additional trench modifications and cement blocks. The curve was made using three columns of landscape retaining wall wedges between columns of concrete blocks, then filled and smoothed with concrete and stucco.

In my opinion, the result is satisfying. I am almost tempted to have something written out on the curve — you know, in metal letters like universities have their names on masonry curves at the corners of their campuses. Instead of "University of Arizona," I could have "Coat Hanger Valley."

Nah.

 

The Tower Gets Shade

 A video program chronicling the evolution of the old tower into the new.

Smoke in the House

Water heater burn-out.

It happened once before, an unusually acrid smell and smoke wafting out the door that leads to our small, centrally located utility room; the one that holds the heat exchange system, water heater, alarm system, door bell, vacuum cleaner, and IKEA shelves holding boxes and piles of shoes, boots, winter hats, sewing machine and notions, light bulbs, extension cords, spare cushions, fabric ….

Just outside the door to the utility room is the security system smoke alarm. It makes a phone call to a light bulb in Central Alarm headquarters and someone there calls the house (Are you okay? What is your security code?), or the person calls the fire department and they also call us, or all of them call us.

The alarm went off. We ran towards the noise and immediately noticed the smoke coming out from the utility room. We ventured inside fearful of flames. There was just acrid smoke coming from an electronic control box of the heat exchange system. The unit was fried.

A heat exchange system has two parts. A large unit inside and another large unit outside and plumbing in between that circulates a heat-cold retaining fluid. If it runs one way, it takes heat out of the house. If it runs the other way, it brings heat into the house. It was an old system that probably dated back to when the house was built, 1978.

We replaced the entire system. We even paid for the rental of a crane to hoist the outdoor unit over the concrete block wall that serves as its enclosure. The gate was too narrow.

In the nine some years since, we have enjoyed our new system. It is much quieter than the old. It's still pretty noisy, but that old system, each time it turned on, made an exploding noise like someone hit the metal ducts with a sledge hammer.

Friday a week ago: déjà vu. Acrid smoke smelling like burnt rubber poured out from the utility room. Disturbingly enough it did not trigger any smoke alarm. Fortunately, it was early morning when Shari and I are most active. Shari noticed it and grabbed me as I returned from walking Nazar the Wonder Dog. We were frantic. The water heater was smoking.

I rushed outside to the circuit breaker box, realized I needed reading glasses to decipher the electrician's handwritten labels, rushed back, couldn't identify the water heater circuit, and started guessing. I never did find it, but the smoke did stop. The stench lingered for days, but it stopped smoking.

I unscrewed the panels that cover the two heating elements, the one above with sensors and controls and the one below. It was the one above. It fried. The tank itself had failed. Probably the slight alkalinity of our Tucson water had eaten through the sheet metal and water had leaked into the surrounding insulating layer and filled it up all the way to the control box electronics which shorted and smoked and fizzled until it fried itself out. (And, thank God, tripped the circuit breaker. I just hadn't noticed.)

The good news was that July means summer in the Old Pueblo. This time of year, cold tap water isn't. It's quite tepid. So cold water showers are actually quite pleasant and refreshing.

The water heater replacement took place four days later. It took Jeff and Tracy six hours.

See, we have a solar panel on the roof that heats another circulating, heat absorbing fluid that is piped down into the utility room through a heat-exchange manifold that heats water circulating out from the water heater tank. When the sun is out, the water heater doesn't need to fire its electric heating elements. The solar system takes over.

A Borg. "Resistance is futile."

New water heater. "Vacation mode is futile."

What the solar-assist system means from an installation perspective is a lot of copper tubing. Our water heater doesn't look just like a water heater. It looks like a water heater that has been absorbed into the Borg collective. It has copper pipes all over the top — water out and back into the tank, gel from and back to the solar panel on the roof — the copper-clad heat exchange manifold itself, and the small pump and control panel that governs the solar gel circulation.

We kept the front door open so Jeff and Tracy could do their work and gather tools more easily. The indoor thermometer read ninety degrees.

They fabricated new copper piping to replace the old. The soldering produced enough smoke to trigger the smoke alarm. We got calls from both the fire department and Central Alarm. Well, at least we knew the alarm system worked.

After six hours of installation, Jeff showed us how the touch screen worked on the solar control box. To put it in vacation mode, tap up here, see the icon appear there, then tap down there three times (I kid you not) and the vacation mode icon appears here and you touch there to confirm. To turn off vacation mode, you do the same in reverse. His fingers seemingly raced over the panel like a teenager's two thumbs texting on a smart phone. After six hours of increasing owners' heat exhaustion, we didn't really need to know vacation mode.

We were more interested at looking at Tracy's and Jeff's smart phones. While Jeff was writing up the bill, Shari showed Tracy her paintings in the living room.  Turned out Tracy was an artist by training and avocation and a plumber only by necessity. He pulled out his smart phone. Turned out Jeff also painted. He pulled out his smart phone. Both showed us photos of their paintings. They were not only good, their styles were very original.