Fight the Supression!

Raise your fist and yell, brother! We're being suppressed!

Oh, wait, no. This is actually a good thing. The fire-suppression system in the commercial kitchen was not up to modern standards. Nope. In fact, when I called the first expert to come out and look at it, he said he'd never seen one like this before. "Maybe my boss has seen one of these, but I dunno..."

Not words that inspire confidence.

Still, we weren't eager to buy a new fire system just for the fun of it, so we got a second opinion from the fire department, but they also shook their heads. That's a definite no, then.

Got three quotes from installers, picked the middle one, and got started. The old fire system had to come out first, which took a day and a half, and the new one went in, which took only half a day. The installer told me that he was frankly scared of removing the old system. Seems the big extinguisher bottle was on a hair trigger, and he was afraid that shaking it or tampering with the hardware would set it off, flooding the kitchen (and his face) with cold fire-extinguisher spray. He was happy to finally get it down off the wall, out of the house, and safely into his truck.

To me, the new system looks like a shinier version of the old system, but I'm not an expert. The law says that commercial food-preparation facilities must have a metal hood vent that extends a certain distance beyond the cooking surface(s). We had cleverly purchased our range to fit under the hood, thus complying with the regulations. But you also need a certain number of extinguisher nozzles pointed down onto the cooktop (so many per burner), and more nozzles pointed up into the vent hood, in case the fire goes up the chimney. The old fire-suppression system failed on both counts.

You trigger the system by pulling the big red handle mounted on the wall. The rules say the handle must be more than 6 feet away from the cooktop, but less than than 12 feet away. I think the idea is that you want it far enough away that it's not engulfed in the flames, but not so far away that it's hard to reach. The handle also must be a certain distance from the floor: high enough that kids don't play with it, but low enough that short people can pull it. It's a tricky game.

Pull the handle and -- whoosh! -- the system dumps an entire fire extinguisher bottle all over your cooktop and up the vent. There's no stopping it; it's an all-or-nothing deal, and it costs about $150 to refill and re-arm the system. I suspect that's where the installers make some of their money.

There's also a fusible link up inside the hood vent. If it gets hot enough to melt, it sets off the system without needing to pull the handle.

FYI, the nozzles are typically filled with Vaseline to prevent grease and dust from clogging them up. The red plastic caps then keep the Vaseline from dripping out (and into your food).

After installation, you do what's called "the balloon test." They tie party balloons over all the nozzles, put in a special dummy fire extinguisher bottle, and pull the handle. (They let me pull it.) Whoosh! If all the balloons fill up with compressed gas, you know the system is working. It's kind of festive.

Now we have to demonstrate it in front of the fire department to show them that the system works. So more balloons. Maybe I'll bring party hats.

The Great Wall of PG

You can see it from space!

As proof, I offer this high-altitude photo taken from upstairs. You can clearly see our new retaining wall in the distance, right between Oklahoma and Serbia.

The reddish oil tanker in the foreground gives you an idea of scale. The wall is an amazing four courses high, plus a buried course of foundation stones and the row of cap stones across the top.

After all was said and done, we wound up with eight leftover blocks. The rock store won't take them back, so we need to find something to do with them. We've got four big ones (75 lbs. each) three medium-sized ones (50 lbs. each), and one cap stone (55 lbs.). Anybody want to build a really small wall? Or need boat anchors?

The Smallest Room In the House

It's finally safe to go into the men's room.

After almost a year of on-again, off-again remodeling, the downstairs men's room (the one right off the commercial kitchen) is completely* finished. From the nasty, claustrophobic, little den that it was, it's now a bright, inviting... uh, men's room.

If you recall, we couldn't decide whether to save the wine-label "wallpaper" that was covering the entire room from top to bottom. In the end, we removed some of it and covered the rest. So the wine labels are still in there somewhere; they're just not on display anymore. We resurfaced all four walls (and the ceiling) with fresh new water-resistant drywall. The plumbing got pulled out and updated, both in the walls and under the floor; the electrical conduit got removed and the wires hidden appropriately; the oak floor got refinished; the ventilation fan got replaced; the ceiling light got swapped out; and all-new porcelain fixtures went in. In short, it's an all-new room in the same place as the old room.

Kathy went to work on the painting, adding almost as many colors as on the outside of the house. The bead board on the lower half is gloss black, the upper half of the walls is gray, and she hand-painted a series of horizontal black, red, and gray stripes around the top of the walls to visually lower the ceiling a bit. The room is actually higher than it is wide, so making it appear shorter is a good thing.

We found the tiniest sink we could fit into the corner, with an equally small faucet. The door still swings into the room and wants to hit the sink, so we mounted a permanent doorstop on the floor to prevent customers from inadvertently smashing the sink. I've still got to come up with some kind of lock for the door; the existing vintage lock mechanism might be confusing for people to operate.

We kicked around a lot of ideas for decorating the room. What colors do we want? What kind of decorations? Should we hang pictures, display old pieces of hardware, or leave the walls bare? In the end, Kathy found a group of vintage racing car photos that we framed and hung on each wall. They're big and oversized, and look great. I'm a fan. And the black/white photos, gray paint, red stripes, and black molding all look good against the stained hardwood floor. Our first public restroom is open for business!

*Well, almost. We need to add a small shelf to hold the hand soap and some paper towels. I give it another year.

Paging Mr. Hadrian...

As wall building goes, we're not professionals. But we do okay.

After stacking all the various sizes and shapes of blocks in neat piles, we set about actually laying the foundation. One entire course of stones will get buried, and these have to be absolutely flat and level, because anything we stack on top of them ain't moving. So we exercised our best high school geometry to draw out the lines and curves we wanted.

As I mentioned earlier, most of the digging is way underground. Not just because the bottom course of blocks gets buried, but because our ground level is already too high and we want to lower it by a good foot or two. That means digging deep trenches before even the first blocks can go in. I was waist-deep most of the time, and tossing soil onto piles that were over my head. Thankfully, it's been warm and sunny all this week, because otherwise we might have been comfortable.

Once we got down to about the level we wanted, it was a matter of carefully putting some of the soil back in to level it. Every block has to be level front-to-back and side-to-side, but it also has to be at the right height and the exact same height as all its neighbors. Basically, the first block you set determines he position of all the others.

We'd dig out a bit, lay a few foundation stones, tweak them until they're straight and level, and then take a break. Then more digging, more levelling, more stones. We got the bottom course done in about three days.

The hardest part was laying the two curves because, well, they're not straight. But the stones are. To do an "outside" (convex) curve, you cut away part of the back of each stone to make it a trapezoid. That way, the fronts all fit together snugly while the backs are smaller than the fronts. Cue the angle grinder and diamond-tipped saw. Doing "inside" (concave) curves is easy in comparison. You just angle the blocks with their faces touching.

Once you've got the foundation course laid, building up the actual wall is relatively easy and kind of fun. You can place the differently sized blocks any way you like, but there are also suggested patterns that give a random look without funny-looking repeats or ugly gaps.

As of today, we're maybe three-quarters of the way done. The entire foundation course is laid, and about half of the wall. We've actually run out of blocks; we'll need to order a few dozen more. I can't wait to haul them in from the street.

The Stones Come to Pacific Grove

Please allow me to introduce myself. I'm a man who delivers rocks.

Our nifty little retaining wall will be made up of cast "stone" blocks that interlock together like really big LEGO bricks. You can find these in all different types, colors, and sizes, and we eventually settled on the style we liked. They had to be special-ordered (who would keep these in stock?), but that only took about a week.

Kathy and I made bets on how much the blocks would cost. My guess was lower; hers was higher. We were both wrong. It actually cost less than half of my low estimate. Bonus!

On the other hand, we were way off on the weight, and this proved to be punishing. They'll deliver the rock to the curb, but not onto the property. That's your responsibility.

I have to hand it to the driver/forklift operator, though. That guy is an artist with heavy equipment. He parked his huge truck in the middle of our street, casually blocking all the traffic, then unloaded his forklift off the back and proceeded to whirl it around like he was a circus performer on a unicycle. The entire load of blocks was on the ground in under five minutes, including lining them up nice and neat on the sidewalk. He could probably rearrange eggs in a carton with that thing.

Once he was gone we really missed him, because now we had to get all those same blocks into the backyard by ourselves. And quickly, too, since they were blocking the driveway. And it's uphill...

The invoice told us we'd just taken delivery of 7284 pounds of blocks. That's 3.5 freakin' tons! The largest and heaviest blocks weigh 75 pounds apiece; even the smallest ones come in at 18 lbs. Kathy would load three or four of these into the wheelbarrow and push them up the ramp to the backyard. I'd take a pair of the big ones on a hand truck. Over and over, rinse, repeat. If we'd been smart, we would've hired a couple of guys from the Home Depot parking lot.

By the time we finished we'd dead-lifted a total of 7 tons because, of course, you have to lift each stone at least twice: once to get it off the pallet and onto the wheelbarrow, and again out of the wheelbarrow onto the ground. That doesn't even count the work involved in humping it all up the ramp to the backyard. We figured we'd earned ourselves a greasy burger from the joint down the street.

If you need us, we'll be in the Home Depot parking lot.

Digging Dinosaurs

Poor little... whatever type of dinosaur this is. He's put up with a lot, including losing his companion to alien abduction. Now he's up to his neck in displaced dirt. That's one of the few places we could pile it without getting in our own way. We left his head out, though. There's only so much indignity a plaster dinosaur can tolerate.

Trench Warfare II

New project: Let's build a stone retaining wall in the backyard! How hard can it be?

In terms of engineering, it's pretty straightforward. But the labor involved? That's another matter.

We decided that the best way to deal with our sloping backyard was to terrace it. The neighbor's soil is at least a foot higher than ours, putting pressure on the fence. And the whole yard slopes, making it hard to walk on or enjoy. So we decided to push some of the dirt back toward the fence, and pull some of it forward. The result, we hope, will be two more-or-less flat areas with a retaining wall between them.

We started by laying out the now-familiar pile of bricks where we wanted the wall to go. You can see them here. The idea is to run part of the new wall straight, then transition into a semicircular curved section on the left side. That way we get a bit more "high" area to stash the excess dirt.

Then we used some boards to mark out the straight portions and to hold back the dirt once we started digging. And there's going to be a lot of digging.

We figure the retaining wall only needs to be about 2 feet high, but that's just the part you can see. We also need to bury part of the wall, for strength, making the whole thing about 32 inches from top to bottom.

Best of all, most of that 32 inches is going to be underground. The whole idea is to lower our average ground level, so we're going to have to dig out... well, pretty much the entire backyard. Question: Where do you put a backyard's-worth of dirt when you're digging up the backyard? Where does it all go?

In big stinkin' piles, that's where. We had to get clever about piling the dirt someplace where we wouldn't have to immediately turn around and move it again. (This strategy was not 100% successful.) The short-term plan was to shovel dirt from the high parts and throw it into the low parts, knowing full well that we'd have to shovel it back in a few days. but where else can it go? We don't have that much room to work with.

It's a bit like one of those puzzles with 15 tiles that you move around, trying to get them all in order. Except the tiles are big mounds of dirt, and it's hot outside.

Eventually, we did manage to dig a straight(-ish) trench to start the wall. We took the opportunity to bury sprinkler pipe, too, although that was almost more trouble than it was worth. Laying the pipe and putting in risers means keeping certain areas clear (no dirt piles) and it creates trip hazards all over the yard. Just adds to the excitement.