May 27, 2006
Kraft has Friday and Monday off for Memorial day, so we do also. This is stuff I was working on Friday.
Yep, it's time for another disaster.. :-) At some point, we want to build a masonry mailbox thing and are not going to do any better than this with brick and mortar. Also not likely to hire someone to do it... and so, here we go with this..
Old car mat helps the knees on the gravel. Try to level and get this first thing as right as possible and hopefully things won't go too far out of wack later on higher up.
This is our swamp. The original grading was not done good enough here to last past year 1. Somehow, last year, it was minimal or no swamp in the ditch. This year, it got wet and stayed pooled up pretty much all spring. I gotta do some damage here to fix it, so the plan will be to dig that trench in the bottom so the water drains. The, when it's a little less swampy to dig further, I'll make the trench into the perfect place to lay culvert. One day, I'll get the culvert in, lay it in the trench and hopefully the next day pretty well fill the ditch in with dirt. Have a flat yard and no more swamp issue.
Back to the mailbox thing. We got a number stone I need to work into the thing.
It goes about right here... ish...
The cords I have wouldn't reach to the house so I could run my saw and grinder, so I thought I'd do two things with one project. It's probably good to run the generator more than 5 minutes a year, so I pulled it out here and let it go for the couple hours I was working. At some point, I should figure out how to get the gas from the generator into a gas can, and into Kim's car and get new gas into the generator. That's a "by fall" kind of plan, so we shall see if I can pull it off. New gas and new sta-bil for the winter.
We got the number stone from the same people we got the blocks from. I was thrilled when he said... "The good thing is, these stones are specially designed to fit in where 2 blocks high with the Unilock dimensional stone". Wow, what a great idea... Until you get it to this point and see that the number block is a strong 1/8 inch taller than two Unilock stones. Close only counts in horse shoes and hand grenades, but not with dimensional stone and number blocks.
Since the block is 'roughly' 1 block wide and 2 blocks tall, when I cut the left stone to fit, the left over 2 inch wide piece happens to be the right size for the right side. Go up one more row and the same rule applies vice-versa.
I spent about an hour fitting the two stones above the number block. I had to grind them to accommodate for that added height that was discussed above.
The one thing I didn't have when I was working on this part... the mailbox... in fact, I hadn't ordered it yet, and you can't find the kind of mailbox for this project at home depot, lowes or farm & fleet. Here is the one I ordered... I'm not sure it was from this site.. It appears it's the same mailbox from a few sites so I found the one I thought would be cheapest for the same thing, but also still ship. The place I ordered from had a $5 off, plus cheaper shipping. I think it was around 107 with shipping. Surprisingly, there are not many types of these available. I see a lot of the masonry mailboxes around, but most are built on a round top mailbox.
And, on Saturday, we took a road trip. We went down to Utica where a tornado ripped that place apart a year or two ago.. most of it seemed rebuilt, one house was clearly still mangled up. Then we ran into this huge resort in the middle of nowhere. It's Grand Bear Lodge. We stopped at the counter to ask for pricing info, but the girl said we'd have to go check on the internet. Wow.. That's a marketing strategy. The indoor waterpark is not up to par with the other ones we know about in Wisconsin. It was interesting to see this out in the middle of nothing.
