New Minisplit AC Units

I finally convinced Bobby that we needed some sort of air-conditioning unit in the front living room. Actually, I think he has given up arguing with me at this point about it.  Ha!  Well, the day finally came almost 2 weeks ago now.  Hooray!!!

Poor Charlie has to do his PE on the side of the house, as Bobby had his call on the back patio:

A few hours later... the first AC unit is up!  It is not quite working yet as the guys still need to make all the connections:

In the meantime, school is still in session and everyone is gathered around the dining room table:

I eventually switched Graham to this other side of the table so I could keep an eye out on him actually paying attention to his teacher.  And that way, I can have my usual spot back at the dining table too:

Check out the remote for the new AC unit.  YIKES!  It's like we are trying to operate an airplane here.  Ha ha!

Graham's turn to do PE!  

Graham's room will be getting a mini-split unit too.  It was a bit tricky for the contractors to route the electrical work and plumbing to the condenser on the opposite wall, but I'm glad it worked out!

Here's the piping that had to go in the attic.  It has a long way to travel from one side of the house to the other!

Here's our new condenser - the unit is a bit bigger, in case we need to accommodate a third mini-split unit in Charlie's room:

It doesn't look like we need a unit in Charlie's room as of yet, as the one in the living room is somewhat able to cool his room too.  Although, we won't really know for sure until next summer because we are already on a downward cooling trend now!  But in the meantime, we are already enjoying the cool air from this new front unit!  Did you know that the air coming out is actually 10-15 degrees cooler than what is set on the thermostat (or remote control)? Ours was actually 20 degrees cooler... talk about efficient!

I was really hoping to route the drain from the living room unit into the rain barrel, but somehow it was just not doable.  So here is what the contractors ended up doing - digging a hole in the concrete and draining the water into the side of the house.  I wasn't very happy about this but I had our foundation guy/contractor come out and he said it's minimal so it will be ok.  I hope he is right!

Here is the pump that pumps the water out from the living room unit:

Our garage is looking even more busy with more ductwork going above/along the roof-line:

Here is the other drain from the unit in Graham's room - directed into the rain barrel.  Yay!  It's not much but I feel better about saving some water since our rain barrels are almost always empty now during the summer time:

New electrical work outside from the panel/box:

So many tools!

We had to shift Graham's bunk bed to the side so the guys could work in the area to put the AC up:

We decided to just take the top bunk down:

Graham seems to be happier now!  Especially with the new AC on too:

The AC contractors started working on Thursday and by Friday morning.... NOOOOooooo...!!! Mice droppings!!! BLAHHHH!!!

It was right by our toaster, and what's more frustrating is I actually had set a couple of mouse traps in the kitchen too!  And yet they preferred the toaster instead of peanut butter crackers??!

I had accidentally left some breadsticks out one night and by morning, I had noticed one of the breadsticks was off the plate and I also noticed some nibbling.  So I'm not exactly sure if the mouse (or mice) had come in before the AC work or during.  Either way, I found this huge hole that the contractor had left on the side of our garage.  The yellow color is actually the light coming in where all the hoses and pipes are coming through the wall:

All the bikes were out of the way, so I was able to access this area.  I figured I might as well seal it up with some foam:

I did email and call the boss from the AC company to send his guys back out to seal any other spots.  I wasn't sure if perhaps parts of the attic were unsealed. I hope the contractor wasn't being lazy or anything, but he said everything else was sealed.  Otherwise, the lines/pipes were really tight along the openings too.  I hope he realizes that a mouse only needs a hole the size of a pencil to go through!  Anyway, I did have him seal along the lines outside near the condenser.  That's what the yellow stuff is:

Knock on wood, so far so good!  We haven't seen any evidence of mice since Friday night. There was movement from our security camera this morning around 1am and I noticed it was a cat!  I hope it caught some mice!!!

Yesterday, I also noticed that our little gravel hole was filling up with lots of debris so I ended up using some leftover stucco wire mesh.  Looks like it is working to catch all the dead bougainvillea flowers.  Funny enough, I think these flowers are coming from 2 neighbors up the street from us!

Well, that's it for now!  I'm so glad the two mini-split units are finally in and hopefully, the mice issue is also under control.  The weather has cooled down quite a bit these past few days.  We might be using the AC units more so for heat instead of cooling very soon.  Ha ha!  

New fence

It's sort of a new fence.  We had our gardener take down our old fence a couple of weeks ago.  The old fence was leaning and just waiting for a gust of wind to blow it down.  Ha ha!

Our neighbor said that it was okay for us to make the new fence (with the old fence) perpendicular to the old one, so that's what we decided to do:

We weren't too sure about the shorter two planks that were closest to the gate.  And definitely not happy about the pile of leftover fence!

The following week, the gardener fixed up those shorter planks with no extra charge. Woohoo!!!  We did ask him if he wanted Graham's old bike, so I think he was happy with that trade (despite the punctured back tire).  Ahhh... fence is looking much better with those longer planks of wood:

I did have the gardener get a new wooden pillar.  The old one was pretty eaten up with pests:

Charlie did help me hold this one while I drilled some screws from the other side.  Those planks needed just a big more support:

Last week I decided to also sandpaper and stain.  I'm happy that the extension cord was sufficient!

When I got done with sanding, somehow I managed to get all these scrapes on my arm??!  

Hmm.... can't really see the scrapes too well in the photo, but I swear they are there!  And of course, I couldn't find the antiseptic cream.  Oh well, maybe it's just from rocks that were flying while I was sanding close to the bottom of the planks.

On to staining!  What a big difference in color:

All done on one side! It's Mosquito O'clock so the other side will have to wait until tomorrow:

And.... the next day, halfway done:

I had just enough stain to finish up.  This was the same can of stain I had used on the pergola in the backyard:

Here are Graham and Charlie digging through the garage while I was busy staining.  Ha ha!  Those are traditional woven hats from one of the tribes back in my home-state of Sabah.  I've had them since college because we used to celebrate Malaysia/International Day at Arizona State University:

Looks like the pile of old fencing is still there!  Bobby said to have the gardener dispose of it but that will of course cost a few more bucks.  So I decided to take care of it on my own.  Plus, there are still some good planks that can be recycled or upcycled.  Just think of how many birdhouses we can build with these :-D

But first, we have to pull all the old rusty nails off:

And there were a lot of them!

I finally had Graham help me out.  I'm glad no one poke anyone's eye out with those nails.  Always a bonus when no one gets hurt :-)

See, it wasn't so bad.  Most of it is a keep pile:

This plank is definitely a throw-away:

There were some nails with no nail heads as I did remember seeing the gardener cutting through the nails with an electric saw.  And those can't be recycled in the green bin, so... here comes my electric saw too :-)

Oh wait, my handsaw couldn't handle the thickness of this piece of wood, so I still needed to get my "manual" handsaw out.  Nothing like working those biceps!

 

Success! Look at all that space we have gained!  Although, technically the property line is still along the bottom/rock wall where the fence originally was:

We had recently picked up some more Palos Verdes rocks for free from a neighbor last week and I really wasn't sure what I was going to do with them.  But looks like this might be the right spot!  Now that the fence is gone, hopefully the erosion won't be too bad when it rains (whenever that might be!):

I really want to get rid of those pile of roof tiles too (to the right in the photo above).  I'm guessing the previous owner has it there to prevent the soil from coming down - which I think functions quite well, but it just does not look good.  The boys and I did go back to the same neighbor again earlier this week to pick up some more rocks but they only had some smaller ones and a couple of big ones. So hopefully with a bunch of other from our rock collection in the garden, we can come up with something!

And speaking of coming up with something... more animal bones??!

I did find some sort of carcass in this area once, when we first moved in.  And I remembered it scared the crap out of me when I actually figured out what it was!  So maybe I shouldn't be so surprised by this one bone. Actually there were two.  Maybe the previous owner just loved eating chicken wings and tossed the bones in this part of the yard. Who knows?!

Anyway, let's talk about rocks instead :-) There's some other rocks that were already here before.  Looking good!

Charlie swings by to tell me something interesting from his encyclopedia.  He is such a character!

Never a dull moment with these boys!!!

Mealybugs

I had my first introduction to mealybugs last week.  Ewww...!!! It's white and they stick on the plants and basically suck the nutrients out of them.  I think I still need to read up more on them.  Supposedly soapy water is able to kill them so hopefully it will!  Somehow they started appearing on the tall plants along the side of the house:

You can see all those white patchy "stuff" on the branches.  Just reading up on mealybugs and there are 275 different species??! Sheesh! As if one type isn't enough damage! 

Supposedly ladybugs are suppose to help.  Hmm... might have to get some more of them!  Neem oil is suppose to help too, and I just bought a bottle of that today.  So maybe I need to spray it some more.   But in the meantime, I'm just going to cut off those icky branches off:

Again, it didn't take long to fill up on of those green bins!  And as I was trimming, some of the mealybugs would fall to the ground.  Those tiny little legs on these weird-looking bugs really eek me out!

I never intended on learning about bugs and pests in general but having a home with lots of different foliage has definitely kept me up-to-date.  Ha!