Trash Patio · 2 September 2017
Apparently, I take things to the extreme. While I was making a patio for the trash and recycle to sit on, I dug a trench two feet deep for a possible conduit.
But perhaps I should start at the beginning.
I normally make a project in the summer when I am home from teaching high school students. I was planning on making a shed (hoping to still get there), but ended up making a small patio with left over pavers. (Where those pavers were left over from is another story.) At any rate, I got the idea of making a patio for the trash and recycle bins to live when talking to a friend about the shed. He suggested making a shed with no floor. Just have a floor of pavers.
The brilliance of the idea hit me like a ton of pavers. I would not need to make a ramp to the door, and there would be no rodents living in the floor trusses of the shed. (Speaking of rodents, why is it that bunnies are thought of as cute little animals, when in reality, they are just rodents with large teeth, big ears, strong legs, and a fluffy tail? Ah, but that is a rant for another day.)
Well to make a short story a little longer, I built the patio for the bins. The pavers I used were quite the assortment. Of sizes, shapes, and thicknesses. Which made it a bit tough to get the patio perfect. Impossible really. Which is fine. After all, it is just a place to put the trash, recycle, and yard waste bins. It does not need to be perfect. Or even totally flat. Which, I might have already mentioned, it is not.
The patio for the bins is a nice piece of work that it took me quite a while to do. I cleared the area, then put gravel to mostly level it out, then placed the pavers. It was like a jigsaw puzzle with no reference picture or interlocking pieces. Still it was a fun puzzle.
Of course, I had to get to the puzzle first.
Being homeowners, we always have our sights set on another project down the road. (Or is that just me?) Ours involves putting in power out to the back yard. Which means running wire. Which means running conduit to place the wire. Which means having to dig up the puzzle that I was going to put together. Which is something I did not want to do. So naturally, I put the conduit in first. Just in case we ever get to the other project.
I looked up how deep I ought to put the conduit and found that new construction wiring from the street to the house is two feet deep. So I decided to make my own conduit the same depth. Well, I knew I was going to have rocks to dig through, so I got a pickaxe and started singing, “High Ho, High Ho,” and it was off to work I went. I dug, dug, dug, dug, dug, dug, dug, dug. Dug the whole day through. And the next day as well. I dug under a drain pipe and finally got to a depth of two feet. I placed my twenty-foot long four-inch diameter PVC pipe with caps on both ends into the two-foot deep trench I dug, and buried it again. Apparently, that was overkill. Or maybe the fact that the trench was two feet deep at one end and deeper at the other end was overkill. Or maybe that it was a pipe I ran just in case was overkill. But it does not really matter that it is overkill. If we ever put power into the back yard, I am prepared. I will not need to dig the trench again underneath my trash patio because the conduit is there.
Of course, if we ever do use the just in case conduit, I will need to dig more trenches. And I will probably overdo them as well. But that is okay. Taking things to the extreme is what I do. After all, I made a patio for all the trash bins to sit on. (Even if I only have the floor of the shed built so far.)
© 2017 Michael T. Miyoshi
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