A Slow June

June was a slow month. I was severely injured when I was in the basement nailing foam insulation to the basement ceiling and my wooden stepladder collapsed under me. I fell backwards, bouncing off the wall, and landed on the cement floor with my hands behind me, instinctively trying to break the fall. My left wrist and lower arm were literally shattered. The surgeon used bone cement to glue the fragments back together, as well as inserting a long plate holding the bigger pieces together with a dozen screws. There are also three pins which hopefully will be removed soon. The cast presses on them and it hurts when I move my arm too much. I'll permanently lose some mobility in the wrist, but hopefully will get back most of the use of my fingers. I still feel very lucky. It could have been so much worse.
Some pictures: my brother Cliff removed the driveway running through the back yard, and this picture was taken after I had started filling in the hole. I was just starting to get the hang of the Bobcat before the accident.
Here's the asphalt waiting to be picked up to be recycled. You can see the work Cliff did backfilling around the front window wells.

Here are the solar heat storage and heat transfer tanks.

Finally the sheet rock has been started! This is standing in the living room, looking towards the rear. The kitchen is on the right, the master bedroom windows on the right.

This is a view from the kitchen to the living room on the right. The office/guest bedroom is on the left, behind the dining room.

The front before backfilling. See the second picture above and current view to see the backfill.

The north window wells being installed.

The north window wells installed. I did the backfill myself with the bobcat.

The pots contain all the plants I ordered, mostly fruit plants. We are WAY behind on the landscaping.

More plants. Many I planted from seed. and they are still sitting there, waiting to be planted. The garden behind the pots is my neighbors'.

This is the wooden stepladder. If you have one, get rid of it. They are not safe! When I tell people how I was injured, everyone has their own horror story about stepladders, many worse than mine.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Although this is the same date as my last published blog, I wrote that one on May 15th, while I was in New Orleans on business. I was waiting for more to happen, but it never did, and time got away from me.

So today is June 5th, and I guess I should talk about the ugly. I've done a lot of light construction work in the past, and lots of work on ladders. I've never been seriously injured that I can remember. But that changed when I had a wooden stepladder collapse under me last Saturday at the house. Alagandro and I were nailing solid foam insulation on the underside of the first floor, to keep the heat from the radiant in-floor tubing radianting upwards. We both were on 5' ladders, standing between the rafters. I was on the fourth rung or so, and when I took a step down, the ladder collapsed. It shattered, and there wasn't time to do anything but fall. I fell backwards from about five feet up, landing on both wrists and my rear end. My left wrist was shattered; the surgeon said the bones looked like corn flakes. My right wrist was badly sprained, but not broken. My back hurt pretty badly, but turned out not to be broken, either. Overall, I think I got off pretty easily. I hit my head pretty hard on the wall. I could have broken my neck or back, or both arms. The wrist is pretty bad, but things could be a lot worse.



One good thing is that all the pain medications have helped my back pain. I'm hoping I'll be able to go back to work next week.



Progress on the house has been moving along. The basement floor has been polished, the sheetrock will be hung this week and next, and we have a contract for the stucco.



My brother, Cliff, and his wife Rosa, are going to help me with landscaping this weekend, and I can finally get some plants in. My injury will cause things to slow down, but not stop.

May Progress from May 15th

The problem with the roof and solar panels hasn’t been fixed yet, so I’m still unhappy with that. I’ve been assured this is going to be fixed, so stay tuned.

I’ve been away for the past two weeks on business, but was home for last weekend. My brother Cliff and his wife Rosa came over to the house for a few hours to help me with some landscaping. I have Cliff’s bobcat there temporarily. He moved some pallets and equipment around which were in the way, and finished filling in the place where the driveway had been. When my lot was adjoined to the Quinces’ lot next door, the owner put in a large horseshoe driveway which went around the perimeter of the property. I took out the part of the driveway which cut through my backyard, and will use what’s left of the driveway along the north side of the property. Part of the driveway was taken out when we dug the hole for the basement, and the asphalt driveway as a whole is not in that good of shape. It was old anyway, and all the heavy equipment on it didn’t help. But it is still a useable driveway, and eventually I’ll replace the asphalt with permeable pavers.

I’m told that Innovative Power Systems (IPS) is busy installing the solar apparatus in the basement mechanical room. The schedule for now is that Concrete Treatment, Inc. is polishing the basement cement floor. This will give it a finished look and make it much easier to keep clean. I’ll put area rugs on top in some places, I’m sure. But I won’t have the problem of stepping out of bed onto a cold cement floor, because the floor will always be warm in the winter, due to the radiant in-floor heating.

Once the basement floor is done (hopefully Monday or Tuesday), we will begin hanging the sheetrock. I originally was going to use magnesium oxide (MgO) board, which will not mold. There were a couple things that made me forgo the MgO board in favor of paperless sheetrock. The cost was the big item: MgO board costs about 4 times as much as conventional sheetrock. Although the U.S. has plenty of gypsum mines (that’s what sheetrock is made of), it has no magnesium oxide mines; they are all in Asia, mostly China. It’s not very “green” to use materials shipped halfway around the world. Instead, I’m using DensArmor, a paperless sheetrock. It’s the glue and cardboard that make conventional sheet rock undesirable, because the paper burns, grows mold, and it and the glue are food for bugs. DensArmor has a fiberglass mesh to hold it together instead of cardboard. It’s more expensive than conventional sheetrock, but I’d rather not have the VOCs from the glue, and the potential for mold.

Last weekend I finished filling in the north side of the house, where new window wells had been put in. One of the things that were left out of the building plans were the window wells. RockSolid Concrete put three cement window wells on the south side, but since they weren’t properly set on footings, they sank when the ground thawed (they were poured in the winter) and have pulled away from the house. Two of them aren’t too bad, but the third one has pulled away from the house quite a bit. RockSolid Concrete won’t fix them, and I won’t pay for them, so I guess I’m stuck with trying to fix the problem. The metal window wells on the north side, next to the driveway, look really good. Jeffrey Swainhart ordered them and installed them. They are close enough to the house to leave enough driveway there to use for my car. I built the house as far to the north as I could, to take advantage of the sun on the south side.

I’m still hoping to be able to get the house finished by the end of the summer. There are some big projects which still need to be done. I will be applying the clay plaster to the walls, and need to take a couple weeks vacation time to do that. The radiant in floor heating has yet to be installed on the first floor, mostly because the sheetrock hasn’t been hung yet. Once the sheetrock and floor are completed, we can start doing things like hanging doors, installing kitchen and bathroom cabinets, and doing the finishing work around the house. Although the house is wired and has plumbing installed, all the fixtures will need to be put in, and that can’t be done until the sheetrock and first floor are done. Nothing on the outside of the house is finished except the roof. The outside has to have stucco put on and I’m not sure how I’m going to finish the gables yet.

I’m hoping to accomplish a lot of landscaping this weekend. My sister Cathy, the landscape architect, is in town, staying with our mom while I’m away. I’ll have a full day with her to lay out the landscaping plan. I already bought quite a few plants, perennials, because the nursery’s stop selling things by the end of May. So I wanted to get my asparagus, fruit trees, raspberry canes, etc. before they disappeared, not to be seen until next spring. I have containers all over my mom’s yard and porch, full of plants. I’m hoping to get some of my plastic lumber soon and start laying out some raised beds. I still have a big pile of dirt in the back, but I think I can start putting some things in on the south side and work around the pile. Another thing to do that I have forgotten: I need to put a retaining wall along the south side, since I had to lower the elevation there. It’s about a two and a half foot drop from my neighbor’s yard. I lowered the elevation because the basement windows, which were supposed to be at ground level, are two feet below the ground.

More updating later…