Chicago Duplex Down Rehab

  After years of neglect, dogs, and a 10 foot trampoline, our weed farm in the back of the house will finally get some love.  The plan is to put in paver patio, new grass sod, and a surrounding garden with some small trees (Japanese maple and birch).   We already had a new fence put in on the north side of the yard, that will hopefully reduce the spread of weeds from neighbors to the north.

  I finally signed up for the Woodcraft class at Horner Park.  I'm planning on making two identical standing planters.   Most planters have a fabric lining that you put the dirt in.  Mine will have a space for a removable 30 in x 7 in plastic planter liner.   I'm going to use cedar boards from Menards.   I could have built this at home, but I want to make this with as few screws as possible, using woodworking joinery techniques.  

 many breweries in my neighborhood

 I had some time over winter break, family decided to tile basement floor in our utility room.  I used the Mapei floor tile mortar, only $5 a bag, seems to work well on concrete subfloor.  I would probably use something better (like Laticrete) for a wood and hardiboard subfloor.   

returning cement mixer to home depot, had to walk it from our house finishing the concrete 'platform', where the steps will start about to start mixing concrete, platform form in place ancient water level, tube has windshield fluid in it measuring for square with building, Pythagorean theorem! Roldolfo triumph, old concrete pier excavation old concrete pier in ground, where the new one goes, delayed project 4 hours dumping old concrete at Ravenswood transfer station Eric's fine deck drawing (1 of many) the stairs before demo stairs after complete demolition sidewalk and stairs during demo brick under porch, hasn't seen light of day in a LONG time

After watching a number of youtube videos, I discovered there's a commonly worn out cover under the windshield cowl.  The rubber piece covering this hole (called the fan access) was completely damaged and sunk into the hole.  Water was just pouring in from windshield, then under the hood, then into this hole right into the passenger side behind the glove box. access hole under windshield cowl replacement cover with silicone seal installed cover, hopefully no more leaks here A terrible side effect of having water pour into the access hole is damaged HVAC fan and its resistor.  The 'resistor' enables the fan to have different speeds.  So, it looked like in the end, the water started leaking in, damaging the resistor and the fan would only run on high setting (no resistor).  Then after time, more water would cause the DC motor to fail (rusted brushes, bearings, etc.).  The last symptom was a soaking wet passenger floor carpet. ...