For a year our contractor-son-in-law has been building a
house between “paying jobs” for Carol Ann and me. We have been “moving in” for
about a week now and it will probably be another couple of weeks before we
actually begin sleeping in the new house. There are so many little things to be
done and we don’t want to move until we tie up most of those loose ends. Located
next door to our daughter and son-in-law’s recently completed home, our new house
is located on a hilltop, one of the highest spots in the county at a little
over 400 feet above sea level. I know what you must be thinking about
son-in-law Sam building his in-laws a house next door to his. But it was his
idea and we hope he won’t regret it in a few years.
Carol Ann and I have been rattling around in a two-story
4,800 square foot house for about 15 years now. We probably use only about a
quarter of the house, keeping most of it closed off. The new house is 2,800
square feet but will give us much more useable room than we currently have in
the “big house.” The new house is also on one level with doors wide enough to accommodate
wheel chairs should there ever be a need. We even had the taller toilets
installed to make it easier to get up and down!
Sam and his crew came over with a trailer the other day and
got a load of furniture and yesterday we had movers come and load up the
remainder of the furniture we are taking with us. That still leaves a lot of
furniture and “stuff” in the old house. We will use it to “stage” the house to
help it sell faster (hopefully). Once the house is sold we will have a “we’re
not dead yet” estate sale.
The yard is not yet landscaped, but we have planted a little
close to 150 shrubs and trees around the house. I went a little wild at a
wholesale nursery, buying what I liked (as long as the nurseryman said they
were “drought resistant” and liked “full sun”). The bulk of the plants include
35 crepe myrtles (Red Rocket) and 28 jasmine (Carolina and Confederate). The
remainder include Texas sage, red yucca, dwarf fountain grass, spirea (two
varieties), rosemary, nandina, bottlebrush, forsythia, bee balm, Chinese
pistache trees, Japanese maples, red oak, and a few others whose names escape
me. I had to do something with them after they were delivered so I sketched out
a landscaping plan and hired some guys to do the planting for me. There is not
a blade of grass anywhere around the house and the soil is very, very sandy. It
looks like someone planted trees and shrubs on a beach, except there is no
water near the house.
I bought a soil testing kit at Lowe’s and tested the soil
from eight different locations around the house. I quit after testing the first
three samples. All three yielded the same results and I imagine the other five
would have also. The pH is neutral (7.0), Nitrogen is VERY LOW, Potassium is
VERY LOW, and Phosphorus is VERY LOW. Like I said, it’s sand. I have to water the
plants at least once a day and sometimes twice because the soil is “very well
drained,” as the landscaping articles like to say. The plants have quite a
thirst with the Texas sun beating down on them all day creating temperatures bordering
on the triple digits. It takes me about an hour to water all of them. I can’t
use sprinklers because without a lawn it would be a terrible waste of water and
Texas has been in a severe drought since the fall of 2010.
I’ve been reading up on drip irrigation, also called
micro-irrigation, and have installed a “test” system for one flower bed about
50 feet long. It’s working great and the lantanas went from looking very droopy
to standing up and blooming again. I’m working on a plan for the remainder of
the plants. Our front yard is relatively small, about 1,000 square feet and I
have just about decided to go with sod, zoyzia probably. It’s more expensive
but a lot less trouble than seed. It is also getting late in the season and I
need something growing on my front beach to keep it from washing away should we
ever have a rainy season again.
I am something of a gadget freak and spend a lot of time on
the computer and wanted to make sure we had a home network with fast Internet
access. That meant installing a wired network in addition to Wi-Fi. I had the electricians
pull Cat6 Ethernet cable (for Internet) and RG6 coaxial cable (for cable TV) to
each room while they were wiring the house. The cables all terminate in a hall
linen closet that I have commandeered for a “wiring closet.” I have a “structured
wiring enclosure” (the “box” on the wall) for a power module, ethernet switch,
cable TV splitter, a Power over Ethernet adapter, router, cable modem, and an
NAS (Network Attached Storage) external network hard drive.
I removed one of the ethernet/coax wall plates to check the electricians’
work and couldn’t believe what I saw. I had assumed that someone running
Ethernet Cat6 cable for the home network would have known what kind of terminator
(connector) was required. I should have known better. The coax cable was fine,
however, the Cat6 cable was attached to a four-wire telephone jack, an RJ-11.
Cat6 cable has eight wires and requires an RJ-45 jack. To top this off, only
two of the eight wires were attached to the four-wire phone jack! I showed this
to Sam, who must have called the electricians immediately because they were at
the house the next morning to replace the jacks. I asked them to just leave
them with me and I would save them the trouble. I don’t think I can do any
worse than they did.
After finally getting the cabling sorted out I made an
appointment with my local cable provider to transfer my service to the new
address. The lady I spoke with told me to have all of the devices/equipment at
the new address for the installers. The appointment was for today (Friday),
sometime between 8 AM and 12 Noon. Last night before bed I disconnected 3 TVs,
a TiVo, 2 TiVo minis, a Blue Ray player, a Roku, and a Chromecast with all of
the assorted remotes, cables, and power adapters. Then I unplugged my Wi-Fi
router, the cable modem, MoCA network adapter, Ethernet switch, and external
hard drive. I also removed a box that was attached to the wall and connected to
the MoCA adapter by a power cord and an Ethernet cable. There were countless
cables and power adapters accompanying these items also. I put all of it in a
box and this morning I got up very early (7 AM is VERY early for me) so I would
have time to get the box and 2 of the TVs to the new house before 8 AM.
I
unloaded everything at the new house, sorted it all on the floor, and began my
wait. The pair of installer arrived about 9:15 AM. Not bad at all. I showed
them around and told them about the home network I was constructing. They looked
at it and informed they weren’t allowed to install any devices or cables that
weren’t from the cable company. I said, OK, use your own splitter, and I will
change it later. One of the guys then said that I would lose all of the
recorded programs on the TiVo machines during the transfer of service. That
would not go over well with Carol Ann. After the tour we went outside so I
could show them where the cable came into the house. The house is a couple of
hundred feet from the street so Sam had buried a conduit from the road to the
house. There was twine running through the conduit to make it easy for the
cable installers to pull the cable from the road to the house. The “Alpha”
installer told me right away that they couldn’t do that. They were installers; they
did not bury cable (apparently pulling it through a conduit was the same as
burying it). I volunteered to pull the cable through the conduit but they said
the conduit was not large enough. Because of the distance involved, they would
have to run RG11 cable, which has a greater diameter due to the extra
shielding. Another crew would be required to come out and bury the cable. He
could make an appointment to have the cable run and buried, after which I would
have to reschedule the installation. Seeing my disappointment, he suggested a
temporary fix. He could run the cable, but not bury it, from the road to the
house. It would lay atop the ground until the burial crew came and buried
it. Tomorrow being a college football Saturday I agreed and they headed down to
the street.
Within a few minutes they were back at the house telling me there
were only two “ports” at the street and both of them were in use. He would have
to call his supervisor for instructions. The supervisor was there in about 10
or 15 minutes (this is a fairly small town) and after looking over the
situation informed me that he would have to schedule a crew to come out and
install a port at the street for my house. After that was done, the burial crew
could be scheduled, and after the cable was buried, the installation could be
rescheduled. I’m reading weeks into this and not real happy but what could I do.
I called customer support and asked them to cancel the disconnect at my old
address. I loaded one TV, a TiVo, router, cable modem, MoCA adapter and assorted
cables, power supplies, and remotes back into the box and brought them back to
the old house. As of this writing I still haven’t figured out which cable goes
where, plus I seem to be one short, which requires a trip back out to the
house. My team kicks off at 2:30 CST tomorrow, Saturday. Hopefully, I will have
it figured out by then and will be able to watch the game.
