More Renovation

Our last report on the renovation was May of last year. Although at that time about a year had gone by since the contractor had officially signed off, there were matters left for us to do. Carol worked on the windows, and I worked on repairing the damage to our yard. Despite being good with a shovel, I didn't feel quite up to repairing the lawn sprinkler system that the workers had damaged nor the driveway that had been sliced through at a couple of places. I asked the contractor to come back and give an estimate on putting that in order. He took at look at it about six months ago and brought by a sprinkler subcontractor, but I haven't heard anything from him since then. (No recession in that business, apparently.)

So, several weeks ago I got the shovel back out and resolved to put the sprinkler system back in working order. Since then, I have become well known in the plumbing department of the new Lowe's in Hialeah, have bought work lights that allow me to toil after the sun goes down, and learned, among other things, that there is something called "flexible pvc" and 22 degree elbows and other semi-exotic sprinkler system parts. The internet has been a great help in figuring out how to patch broken pipe and, of course, there's Jack Dewhurst to consult: Jack, who, between jobs during 2003, originally put in the system.

Finally, there is Carol, the brain trust. She would have been a great engineer or surgeon, because she can really figure things out. So out she comes when I run into a problem.

The sprinkler system for our vast estate has three zones, one for the back yard (South Zone), one for the west yard and the west parkway or "swale" as some people call it (West Zone) and one for the front yard and north parkway (North Zone). (No need for an East Zone because Octavio, our neighbor to the east, has a very serious sprinkler system that takes care of about a six feet strip on our side of our common lot line. Octavio has just finished building one of the new terminals at MIA. Before that he went around the country building new Home Depots. He is a serious DIY guy. He tries not to smile when he sees me with a shovel.)

The West Zone is now up and sprinkling. The North Zone is up and sprinkling except for a portion I have temporarily capped off while I wait for the delivery of some 1 1/4 flexible, white pvc to repair a break. The South Zone was the most damaged, and today I repaired one of the pipe breaks and located what I believe is the only other one in that zone. So I have the back broken on this project.

Let Octavio smile.