With things turning into fall, we are in a desperate need to finish a couple of projects to get ready for winter… One on the list was the little hole in our front yard by the light pole, this hole is a cement box that has our water turn off value for our sprinklers plus a hose faucet. Now when we first moved into our house and tried to turn on our sprinkler we found out very quickly that the previous owners had a freezer break in this box because it was not winterize, find more about that here. Last winter, we did a quick fix by putting insulation in the box and covered it with a piece of wood, after turning off the water of-course and draining the pipes. But this winter we wanted to making something that would last for years to come and something that would cover the box all the time, making things look a little nicer especially after repainting the light pole.
So we decided to make a cement lid for our cement box. Now we have never really used cement to create anything but after completing this project someone is in love with cementing and it is not me!! If you did not figure it out, this was Eric, and this was all his project, I just helped with a couple of things.
Before we started on the project I had to clean out the box by removing all the water that was sitting in it. To do this I used our shop-vac because you can vacuum up water with it.
After that Eric measured the area and create a box form out of wood. After the form was made we added cement to the form. I used an extra piece of wood to smooth the top of the cement.
After letting it dry for 24 hours, we used a cement drill bit and drilled holes to attach handles to the lid. After drilling the holes we used cement screws and attached the handles to the lid. After we tried the lid out for size and it fit perfectly!
Next we decided to line the sides and bottom (the part that sits on the lip of the box) with door weather-stripping to give the box a better seal.
And here is our finished product.
We now need to turn off the water and place insulation inside the box but the true test will be after winter to see if this really worked. Anyone else trying to finish some last-minute projects before winter?
