FINISHED IN 2020! Sharward's Partial Garage Conversion

Yo face gonna look like that if you disrespect my ride again! :P :lol: ;-) :twisted:

hehe, apropos face, this is the face of my car. if you like, you could say some words to it as a revenge :D :lol: 8) cheers roman

Yeah, yeah, yeah... But can it do this? :roll: ;-) :P --Keith :mrgreen:

ok, you win this round, but my car needs only 9 Liter per 100km or 3,8 gallons per 100 miles, and this with 248 bhp 8) and i could easily transport tons of drywall by myself because it's a station wagon :wink: your turn :D

Mine has no pistons. :twisted:

hehe, ok, but can it do this without pistons? :P btw, we're going slightly ot... :D ok, to come to an end, i like your mazda, i had the chance to drive one two years ago. A friend of mine is a car journalist and has always a good ride in test from skoda to porsche and even corvette :-) I love the low seat position of the rx8 and i also like the sound, even if it has no pistons. against, i don't like the fuel consumption... Have a nice weekend! Roman

OK, OK, "truce." :-) Yeah, the fuel economy is pretty poor... I get about 18 to 19 miles per gallon... About half what the most efficient compact cars get. It hasn't been trouble-free... Several recalls and a number of recurring problems. I was hoping for better reliability and quality, but I have no regrets. When the warranty runs out, I have to decide whether or not I'm going to keep it. I'm about halfway there. I'd probably not do it again though... --Keith :mrgreen:

Well, then the new Audi TT looks promising in this category, even it's a bit pricey... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdzYjhC0-S4 Cheers Roman

Hey...just read what happened last week. This sounds all too familiar...only I still have back pain. :( Hope the stiffness is loosening up. It's not fun. Any studio Prog...?

Hey Aaron, Yeah, what a joy... :roll: ...I dropped my car off at the body shop yesterday evening. I'm feeling fine though... Sorry you're not done hurting yet. :( --Keith .mrgreen:

hey man sorry to hear that your ride got crashed. those darned pretty ladies are nothign but trouble i tell ya. :evil:

Yeah -- tell me about it! ;-) The estimate from the body shop came in at over $6,500! :shock: It will probably be off the road for a month! I'm renting a Toyota Solara... Not bad, but it sure doesn't corner worth a darn. :evil: Back to the studio build... My insulated drain hose arrived yesterday. I also learned that my mini split is in transit now but it didn't leave the warehouse until more than a week had elapsed since I placed my order. :evil: So, it won't arrive at my house until sometime next week. :( I should probably order my ventilation system in the meantime, eh? :roll: --Keith :mrgreen:

Things are moving along very nicely... The mini-split air conditioner / heat pump arrived on Friday morning. I spent much of Friday at Home Depot picking up various things to support the mini-split and I was pumped up yesterday morning, starting work on it at 9:30. By noon I had removed 7 pavers at the back of the house, dug out a few inches of sand, backfilled with a few inches of 3/4" crushed granite left over from the slab base (I knew that would come in handy: ;-)), placed two concrete blocks on that base, filled around the blocks with more crushed granite, mixed a bag of mortar and filled the concrete block holes with it,set the unit onto the blocks, and then set J-bolts in the mortar. It came out perfect! :twisted: BY NOON! :-D After lunch with the wife at a favorite Tex-Mex joint and a long break, I went back out there to work on the connections. Here's where things got a little tricky. There are four lines: power to outdoor unit; power and control away from outdoor unit to indoor unit; and two coppper refrigerant lines: ¼" and 3/8", each insulated with foam. I decided to run each electrical line in ½" flexible plastic conduit with compression fittings. Transitioning from indoor NM-B (plastic sheathed indoor Romex) to outdoor conduit apparently requires a special cable clamp and the sheathing to be stripped off within the tubing. :x 12/3 (+ground) through 20+ feet of flex conduit is hard! :x Pushing 12/2 (+ground) through 20+ feet of flex conduit isn't much easier, either! :evil: And getting all four lines into the multiple segments of downspout tubing was a royal pain!!! :P Then to cover and protect all the lines, I used PVC rain gutter downspout tubes. But the outcome is awesome! :twisted: I need to go back out there to actually mount the downspout to the wall and under the eaves and then feed these lines into the attic through the vent. Once I've got that done I'll take some pictures and post them for you to admire. --Keith :mrgreen:

I edited the above post to include pictures from the last couple of days. I had hoped I'd be done with the exterior work on the mini split, but I ran out of steam at about 8 PM. Attaching that downspout to the wall and rafters under the eave was a lot more challenging than I had thought it would be, and stuffing the lines into the vent hole was also very time consuming. I had to go up into the attic to get the 3/8" refrigerant line out of the way to make room for the 1/4" line. Ugh. :evil: Climbing up into the attic is easy now with that awesome telescoping ladder, but today was the first time I headed south towards the back of the house up there. It's sooooooooo nerveracking -- every step carefully calculated so as to put all my weight (and there's a lot of it! ;-)) onto the trusses and none of it on the drywall. That's hard enough to do when you can actually see the trusses, but when there's blown-in cellulose insulation everywhere burying everything, it's not fun. There are pipes and ducts in the way, neither of which would appreciate being stepped on. :roll: It would have been so nice having a helper today. :roll: It looks like I'm going to have to make another couple of trips into the attic to pull those lines in... Pushing from the outside is not going to be sufficient. :x So far here's what the attic vent looks like. Even though I was hoping to be done with the exterior by now, I'm liking the way it's coming together. 8) --Keith :mrgreen:

Aloha Keith, Hey, congrats on the split install. It's looking good! Aloha 8)

Oooh - new toy! Looking great Keith - that's one fine looking install there!

Keith: very nice, good idea with the downspout, looks really clean i heard there was a lubricant you can get for pulling wires through conduit, that is safe for the wire casing might be worth putting some boards down across the trusses, if you are doing anything more than one quick trip ... makes life easier Dan

Thanks for the kind words and ideas, Dan. 8) Yeah, I'm digging the downspout idea myself. There are, I think, specially engineered tubes for the purpose, but I was pretty sure my el-cheapo plan would work, and it did. :D They'll look even better when I caulk the edges and paint them to match the stucco. :twisted: The problem with navigating the attic hazards is that there actually are several 2x4s already laid perpendicular to the trusses, which I did use... But the cellulose insulation is so plentiful that I have to kick out a hole/valley in the insulation with my shoe in order to see where it is... :? ...I left the "holes" so that I could use them on my future trips... But I'll need to backfill them after all is said and done so that I don't lose too much energy. It's akin to hopping on lilypads when the pond is covered in snow! :lol: Next time I'm up there I'll snap a few pics so y'all can see how deep the insulation is. Figure the house was built in year 2000 and it is a SMUD Advantage home, which by today's standards calls for R-30, which is about 9" to 10" of cellulose insulation blown in. I might like to someday run some parallel 2x6s on edge and then having some OSB platforms on which to walk and/or crawl. That would help a lot... At least in and around the most troublesome spots. Here are a few more shots I took this morning in the daylight. When I'm done with this, all four lines will be neatly tucked into the hole, and I think I'll put a new mesh below the rafters so that birds and other critters can't get around the pipes and nest in there. I'm looking forward to not seeing any yellow wire outside! :lol: --Keith :mrgreen:

........and Keith....you did say I could steal this idea and use it too........right?? :lol: :lol: :lol: Looks great!!! :wink: 35 days and counting till I get to start... :twisted: I cant wait!! :D AJ

Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery! 8)

... that installation sure does have a pro look to it.... nice work....

Thanks. :-) Actually, speaking of pros... i'd like to reiterate that once everything is installed and the wiring and refrigerant lines are in place, I will be hiring a pro to charge the system. Obviously that's way out of my realm! Hopefully I won't encounter any resistance from the pro(s) in the fact that I did all the installation... All I can tell them is, "Consider yourself lucky: I'm extremely particular -- so much so that you wouldn't have wanted to do the install!" :lol: --Keith :mrgreen:

Great news! I got up into the attic twice tonight to pull those lines in... All set! I even managed to coax Mrs. Sharward into guiding the last one from the outside so that it wouldn't bunch up or get tangled. She thwarted two or three attic trips for just 5 minutes of easy effort. :-) --Keith :mrgreen:

Awesome, sharward. Or as we say in Maine, Wicked cool, yesshuhbubb.... drums drums drums coming soon to a garage near you

Wicked!!! :twisted: I have a couple of coworkers who attended a week's worth of training in Boston... They came back and started saying "wicked" a lot as kind of a joke... And one guy did it so much that we now just call him "Wic." ;-) Hey, I meant to mention that the attic trips were a lot easier and less stressdful last night than the first time I headed over there. I think it's a combination of having already blazed a trail, having left behind the insulation "holes" so that I know where to put my feet. Also, I found a perpendicular 2x4 near the point of line entry on which I was able to kneel pretty comfortably while pulling them in. I have a couple more trips to make yet to pull the lines all the way to their northern end points, but the worst of it is over. At least, for now, until I start running my ventilation ducts... :roll: --Keith :mrgreen: