One down/Two hundred ninety to go

The dreaded utility room sink is finally conquered. As I put on the finishing touches, problems kept cropping up. The last of these annoyances was that the trap for the sink did not line up with the pipes in the wall. Why should it? Also, the pipe from the sink is 1 1/4 inch, while the p-trap is 1 1/2 inch. When I went to Home Depot over the weekend, I asked a young man for help. I asked if he had some type of reducer so that I could make the pipes fit correctly. He was honest and tried very hard to find something that would work. Finally, he asked an older sales person. The older salesperson walked up to the wall and picked up a plastic washer. He told me that all I had to do was to switch washers when I was ready to connect the fixture and that it would make it water tight. After another trip to Home Depot, to buy extensions and after much contortions(have you tried to connect anything to a sink from the back and below in tight quarters?), I am finally done. One thing to check off my to do list and a few hundred left to go.
Today I worked on cleaning up the area near the Chinese quince. The trees are not much bigger, but they have nice movement and taper. It seems like I just did this a little while ago. I also worked on pruning back some junipers for the GSBF convention. The junipers were filling in but not as nicely as I had anticipated. When I went to Santa Rosa a few weeks ago I noticed that one of the vendors had some Japanese maples that were quite full. I asked him how he got them to look so nice and full and he told me that it was his soil mix. It was a mixture of fir bark, pumice and peat moss. Since I was going to go to Home Depot anyway, I picked up some fir bark. I think that I am going to experiment with soil for the trees that I take to conventions. I am going to try a mix of fir bark, perlite and scoria(small lava rock). I will let you know how my experiment is going. Well now that my break is over, time to tackle the screen door!

Categorised in: Uncategorized

This post was written by George