Go big or go home

so today was kinda the death of a dream, as i sadly gazed on what was once the largest excalibur bbs in the world, and my first foray into providing dialup access to said bbs, and dialup internet, webhosting, etc.

this would be the late ’90′s

these are the last known photos of shadows of sanctuary bbs…

the board is actually still up, and accessible from the internet, if anyone really wants to hunt for it.

i still do internet services (you name it) i just don’t host any of it here anymore.

the 12 racks of servers are gone, colocated elsewhere now, the banks of modems are quiet, didn’t bother to try and sell ‘em… the 18kva best ferrups has been offline for years, as i didn’t want to buy 20 new 8d batteries for it…

so today, with the price of network cable being as high as it is, i decided that maybe some recycling was in order.

maybe it’s time to pull the miles of networking cable out of my house…

unstring the huge bundles of cables that are aerial dropped throughout this place, uninstall the 10 line 24 extension comdial pbx, and make the place a bit more like a home and a bit less like the “heaven” set from johnny mnemonic…

i sat out back and looked at this for a few minutes, and my mind wandered back through all the people i had met through my board, all the things i had accomplished…

and how much nothing ever turns out the way you plan.

so remember those 27 runs of cat 5 that were strung down my back fence?

this is the business end of those drops.

yes, if you want it bad enough you too can get uswest (now qwest) to pull hundreds of phone lines into your house…

now this box is empty. i unstrung the wire from here to the network switching and modem rack in my office…

4725 feet of cable if anyone is keeping score…

the blue lines were data, the grey lines were modem lines…

so i reloomed the grey wire…

and sketched out a network diagram and me and aiden started pulling wire…
and pulling wire…
and pulling wire…

and i whipped up a set of brackets for my punchdown panels since i don’t really want to spend the money on rackmount rails for this small of a project…

a bit of stain and they look fine…

framed out a bunch more of the deck as well, in preparation for the ramp.

chris hooked up the hot tub, works as intended

i got a lot done today…
feel kinda sad about it though.
-stone

so i’ve been doing a much needed overhaul on my house…

spent 3 weeks under it with a bunch of 30 ton hydraulic jacks leveling it…

then spent a couple weeks doing drywall, mud, tape, texture and paint…

the kitchen is on hold for a moment, so i took some time to overhaul the deck…

first thing we did was strip it to the rails… once upon a time i had a carport, and the deck was built from the original rafter framework, so it might look a bit different than you’re used to seeing under a deck, but this is way stronger than standard deck construction… better be, and with that many 2×12′s and 2×8′s it made sense to use it…

so, stripped off the old decking, lowered the hot tub to ground level so we weren’t trying to support it’s weight, and i had an idea…

so i pulled the pump, heater, and everything else out of the tub, and laid myself a concrete footing…

the studs you’re looking at are actually 4″ bolts in the concrete to bolt the pump to.

my friend chris gave me a set of rubber motor mounts from a pressure washer or similar (he’s a small engine ninja) so i’m going to use them to isolate the motor…

so i set the pump on the pad, and looked at it for a while…

when i first bought this place i had to replace the sewer line, and i had put a cleanout in it, where the sewer line exits the house…

so when i was in the plumbing dept i realized that the parts i needed were 50 bucks… but they had a 3″ diameter pile with (2) 1 1/2″ pipes coming in the sides that would fit the bill nicely… for 5 bucks. … so i put a cleanout cap on top of it, cut off the old pipe and glued it inside of the old one…

now i have a 3″ cleanout instead of a 4″, but it’s no big thing… and i have (2) 1 1/2″ connections on the sides of it…

one of which i plumbed the hot tub drain to, so i don’t have to mess with the hose anymore…

then i extended the connections from the tub to the new pump and heater location…

the big valve on the right is the drain valve, and the high volume directional T fitting in the upper right is going to be a drain for a sluice shower (take a quick rinse off before and after using the tub) …

the weirdness with the upper line in the above picture is because i wanted to go under that deck beam, not through it… (if the deck sinks or settles or anything i don’t want to break it and have to deal with 500 gallons of hot water under my deck)

i used gentle curves wherever possible to make things flow easier, especially where it’s being pumped…

yes, the T fitting to the drain would make it work faster for draining the tub if i turned it around… but it flows better for standard operation (pump running and recirculating) when done this way…

everything to the right of the double beam in this picture is the old carport rafter frame, re tasked for this. it actually ends behind the hot tub at the top of this image, the new wood is where the old 2×6′s where removed to allow us to set the tub on the ground…

framing in an access hatch…

and here we start laying decking.

the stain is olympic “maximum waterproofing sealant” and the color is “canyon brown”…
we stained the bottom and sides of each board, and then i screwed them down with “phillips II plus high performance deck screws with evercoat coating” (these are awesome) while they were wet. a pain in the butt, but i was pressed for time, and it worked fine…

gives you an idea of how long this took. the deck is 22×18, and there’s 70 2×6′s in this pile…

you can see here that carol, aiden, and argyle are staining faster than i can align, force together, and screw down, the decking…

here the pump access is framed in. i have 5 pieces that fit in here to cover it…

here’s a shot along the side of the house from the back door looking t’ward the pump…

here’s a shot from about halfway between the back door and the pump, facing the ramp off the back…

starting to stain…

long way to go…

and half of it finished…

and the other half…

now i just need to trim out the tub (the deck isn’t actually going to touch it, but it’s going to come close) and then put the side walls back up and stain them, and it’s a wrap

the lines are from the light coming through the polycarbonate roofing over the deck…

i suspect heavy deck use this summer
-stone