Day -84 -- Sprinkler, Sprinkler, Handyman, Star

Another Saturday closer to every day being a weekend. This weekend though, I’m on-call, and monitoring jobs. So far, not too bad.

Earlier this week, my lawn team was here doing some planting and other such for me. While he was here, the boss-owner noticed some areas of the grass in the front a little shy on growth, and a touch brown. He wondered it the sprinklers were hitting the area well enough. So I pulled out the iPhone, opened the app, and started up that zone. It was so-so. The one head was struggling to get popped up through the grass, and in the next zone, two heads were super low, and one pointing off by about 45 degrees.

His team doesn’t do that stuff, so I put it on my schedule for today. The first ones went easy. I cleared some grass, stuck a shovel under the sprinkler pushing it to the service more, add a little soil underneath and move on. I even replaced one unit that had a 2 foot extension, that used to rise above some bushes, to reach out in the yard. The bushes are gone, so a regular 6 inch popup worked great.

But then a little trouble on zone two. The one pointing the wrong direction was easy to twist. Just get a little wet while aiming it the right direction. The first low one though, not so good. It was up against the sidewalk, so I couldn’t just lift it with a shovel. I dug around it (over a foot and a half diameter hole) and used a trowel to clean the area. I was wondering why it was so wet in that hole. Then I saw the crack in the elbow. Drats. When I reached down to see if I could twist the sprinkler unit out from the hose, it came apart in my hand.

Now I need to dig more of a trench, trim the old tube, splice in another piece, and add an elbow, then tune where it sprayed. NOPE. The tube in the ground was a totally different size inner diameter than anything I had in my huge rubbermade bin of irrigation junk. I must have over a hundred various connectors/elbow/risers/etc. in that bin, but nothing fit.

Off to HOME DEPOT. UGH. On a Saturday morning. That place is packed with lookie lous (sp?). Just taking up space and standing there talking. It took almost an hour to find pieces that would fit — yes, I brought the old parts so I could compare. And, I only found 1 lonely tube to tube connector that fit the tube already in the ground. I would have liked to have bought a handful for the future. They did have a couple of the elbows, and some short pieces of that tube too. Not many of any. I grabbed them all. Sorry anybody else looking for one. (Um, my entire purchase was still under $10.00)

Back home, and by some miracle, they fit. That sprinkler unit only took 2 1/2 hours to fix. The last one, also against the sidewalk, fortunately wasn’t leaking underground. Just 15 minutes to dig around it, lift it, and replant the sod. — A few others with just pulling the grass around them so the can pop out, and I finished for the day.

Home handyman stuff is a pain in the sprinkler head!!

Oh, and to top things off, I decided to take a quick dip in pool. Forgetting that the guys just did a bleach cleaning of the patio and screen enclosure, around it. So refreshing to now smell like a bottle of Clorox..

And somebody must have turned up the thermostat on the pool heater. It was 90 degrees in there. After, I went around to the heater and dialed it down to 82. Maybe this is why my electrical usage seems up this month.

Time to sit back and relax for a bit.

Enjoy life…