July 2023 in the Books

It finally warmed up here, maybe too much.  We had a number of days with the highs in the 90's and little rain.  At the end of the month we had a couple of pretty good thundershowers blow through and dropped about an inch of rain for the month.  We have been busy the last part of June and all of this month of July.  After achieving occupancy on the new house build in mid-May, we waited until mid-June and spent a couple of weeks moving over from the trailer and into the house.  By the end of this month, July, we are pretty settled in the house, although there are always things to do in terms of maintenance and new upgrades, so we continue to stay busy.  It was a bittersweet move after living and loving life in the trailer for 10 years straight.  We cleaned up the trailer as we moved out and now we are working on selling the trailer.  We have it posted on RVTrader.com at https://www.rvtrader.com/listing/2013-New+Horizons-MAJESTIC-5027086953  We still want to travel a little, but believe we can do so in a much smaller trailer, so that is our goal to downsize our camping equipment, now that we have a stick and brick home again.

We found all of our card decks when cleaning out the New Horizons trailer!

Jack and Sharon from South Dakota stopped by and were our first overnight guests in the new house.  We love these two wonderful souls and enjoyed the visit so much.  

Tom & Cathy from Arizona arrived for a summer stay the first week of July.  We met Tom & Cathy here in Idaho a few years ago and quickly became friends.  They have been full-time RV living for 20 years!  Makes our 10 year stretch look like a test run haha!  That's 100 lbs of Duke the Champion Black Lab!

 Steve, Cathy & Gari

Duke and Steve playing Frisbee catch.  Duke is a BEAST of a willing participant!

We mentioned a couple of months ago on our blog that we were having a terrible time with the kitchen countertops.   There were just a lot of mistakes and quality issues.  We ended up filing a claim with our VISA account.   Long story short, Lowe's lied in the VISA investigation, we were able to prove that by the emails we kept between us and Lowe's, and our VISA awarded us full reimbursement for the countertops.   Two days later the countertop installers (Lowe's  subcontractor) came and finally installed a proper countertop.  We aren't calling Lowe's after what they put us through.  We will see if they contact us.  This time Ben (L) and Noah (R) did a quality install.  Wish we would have had these two from the beginning.  Good job guys and thank you!

Back in business in the kitchen!  Gari is happy :-)

We have now turned our attention to the outside and started with installing a small irrigation system to grow a little grass around the porch so we can step off into some decent grass and not tall weeds and mud.  We decided to dig the trenches by hand after determining that the machine rental would be over $1,000.  This way we can put the entire system in for well under $1,000, maybe closer to $500.  It looks like Steve is happier to save $1,000 than Gari.

North side, green poly header pulled and starting to cover the trench.

East side, green poly header pipe installed and covered enough to hold it down in the trench.

South side, Green poly header installed, trench partially covered.  We did a beta test on this side.  We installed bedding gravel at the house foundation and outward for about 2 ft.  At the drip edge of the roof we laid a line of flatter rocks to prevent the roof eave dripping from digging another trench.  We will end up adding more washed gravel at the foundation and locking in the flat rocks.

 Working on the valve box placement.

Here's the sprinkler valve header that we built up.  The boiler valve at the top is access to blow out the lines at the end of the watering season.  We better do that with the cold temperatures here in the winter!

Sprinkler valve header installed in the valve box location.  The black mushroom thingy is a drain-waste valve.  It is a 1/4 turn ball valve that either turns the water on to the sprinkler system or turns the water off to the sprinklers and opens a weep hole at the bottom to allow the water in the line up to the sprinkler header to drain into a gravel french drain and empty out for the winter.

Steve prepares to place the valve box over the sprinkler header.

The valve box will sit something like this.  Now just need to back-fill around it.

Below is the setup for a sprinkler head.  The orange fitting is a saddle fitting that you just hand screw onto the green poly 1" header pipe.  The the smaller 1/2 black "Funny Pipe" just pushes right onto the orange saddle fitting.  Then you screw a 90⁰ elbow fitting into the bottom of the sprinkler heads.  The other end of the Funny Pipe also pushes right onto that sprinkler elbow fitting.  No clamps required.  The Funny Pipe is flexible so you can easily adjust the the location and height desired for the sprinkler head.  Easy-peasy... except for all the trenching and covering!

NE corner, sprinkler head not installed yet.

South side sprinkler heads installed.  Still need to haul in more bedding and topsoil and fine adjust the sprinkler heads.

East side same status as south side.

North side all set for topsoil.

And there's the mountain of topsoil to be spread around the house.  That will take us a few days.  Supposed to be a littler cooler this week, so that will be nice.

The last but not the least milestone was the blown in insulation for the attic.  We put R-21 kraft faced batts up in the ceiling this past winter.  BDI came out last week and added over an additional R-30, which was about 10 additional inches.  It looked like they averaged about 14-17" around the attic.  We suppose it will settle some.  We should have over R-50 in the ceiling now.  That should do it!  The arrival of the BDI truck was a bit of a surprise.  We were called that morning asking if that afternoon would work for us.  We said NO since the kitchen countertops were being installed that day.  The countertop guys finished up around 11:30 AM and we did get things cleaned up by about 1 PM.  That's when the BDI insulation truck rolled up.  We went ahead and let them install since the countertop guys were out of the garage by that time, so it all worked out.

Thomás climbs up into the attic through the only access that is in the 12 ft garage ceiling.  I went up a couple time to check the workmanship and progress and both were very good.  I believe they we finished in the attic in about 2 hours.  We were tired at the end of that day.

And we go out of this post with a pleasant summer sunset in the west....