I managed to get about 15-20 bottles cut and polished last weekend. I used blue duct tape on the polished edges to add another layer of insurance. Even after using the sand paper, those glass rims could cut flesh or wire. Also, some of the bottles had hairline fractures coming off the neck, and I wanted to make sure the bottles would be strong enough to stand up to foot traffic once in the ground.
This is a 12" X 3" auger. It is awesome. Unfortunately, our Texas coliche contributed to the burning out of this drill. Oh well. It was good drill and it had served me well, and it died a very noble death.
In the lime green bin on the right, you see my collection of cut bottles, with the edges all taped up in blue. In the darker green basket on the left, there are uncut bottles. Remember, in my original plan, only the bottles intended to hold LEDs needed to be cut. The rest could just be turned upside down and buried. And all around you can see weeds (green) and weeds-washed-with-boiled-water (brown). For my test, I was going dig a trench on each side of this part of the path (a foot away from the boxes, to allow for a row of pavers), put bottles in and backfill. I wanted to know if they could be walked on and all that jazz.
A better picture of my handiwork. Might not look like much, but that is most of a Saturday's daylight, sweating in the garage over folding card table and a citronella candle, trying not to hurt myself cutting glass. Humor me.
TrenchNumbaWon. OMG. Even with that auger, digging that trench was NO joke. Texas clay and coliche is awful stuff. And I had two 4' sections to dig, and that was just for the test runs. Forget that the path is about 25' feet long ( so that's a total of 50' feet of trench to dig, plus a bit more to run wiring). But I was stoked and I had a vision to bring to life!
I wanted to use varying sizes of bottles for the lights. Some clear, some blue, some brown, some green. All with white LEDs. In some places, I wanted to use a single wine bottle or liquor bottle. in others, I had intended to use a cluster of 3 beer bottles. Just wanted to keep it visually interesting.
Just a few more of the bottles. When I was still playing email tag with the landscape lighting specialist, I had promised him these pictures, but as my test continued, I realized the project was DOA.
Yep, more. Just want to be sure you know what I was going for. Since it's not going to happen. Sad face here.
These are all cut-and-taped bottles. You can see in the bottom left corner that I have started to backfill the trench. It looks promising, at least in my eyes...
Finished backfilling and then soaked the soil to make sure it was compacted. Began to notice yet another roadblock - the indentations in the bottoms of the bottles hold silt. Not good if these are supposed to be LIGHTS.
Close up. Keeping the dirt out of those bottles was going to be a B!^@# The difficulty of cutting the bottles hadn't posed itself as an obstacle. After all, I was only going to have to do so many, right? (You'll learn how that hypothesis fell apart shortly). Digging the trench was an issue, but there were other ways to get it done - rent something from somewhere that digs trenches (and the truck with which to haul it home and back), hire someone to do it, suck it up and do it myself. But at this point, seeing how the bottles weren't ideally shaped for the job, I was starting to see that I might have to give up on this one. Having already collected and sorted through over 700 bottles and found the ones I thought to be best suited and been proven wrong was hard to swallow. Not just because I was wrong, but because my sample size was pretty significant, and it told me that finding more bottles that were better wasn't very likely. I might have been able to buy some somewhere, but the point was to RECYCLE, not create a need for a new consumable. Frankly, this made me a little sad.
Starting the trench for the other side. Already exhausted from the first one, and the shadows here say that it was late in the day.
Gah! Forgot to take a picture of the problem that clinched it all for me. At the end of the day, I threw this scrap of plywood over the second trench so no one would break an ankle in it. It kind of fittingly reminds me of a coffin lid, as this trench proved to be the death of the project. The first trench I dug was about 12" deep. And that was about as deep as I could expect to get with just "man power". At that depth, the soil was like rock. However, for the bottles cut for lighting, that was sufficient. In fact, I had to add soil back in for the areas where I was using beer bottles, as they are so much shorter than wine and liquor bottles. But here's the straw that broke the camel's back - the non-light bottles, the ones that weren't to be cut, didn't fit. They were several inches too tall. Duh! So now on top of the trench issue and the silt issue and the electrical work and the logistics of going in at a later date and digging out the top 2-3 inches of soil for the rest of the path to lay pavers and limestone WITHOUT damaging this first stage of the project, I learned that I would have to cut about 700 bottles with the process described in the last post. That's 700. That's what I calculated would be needed to do a 50' line of bottles. Remember, the 15-20 in that bucket at the top of this post was a full day's work.
And with that, my bubble burst.
It just wasn't worth it anymore. Yes, each of the individual issues could be addressed. As stated before, I could hire a machine or a crew to dig the trenches. I could stay on top of that landscape lighting contractor I found and get him to commit to something other than sporadic emails, like a site visit or a bid. I could tough it out, digging x-feet of trench per weekend and cutting y# of bottles per weekend and read resource after resource about electrical work and LEDs, watch all the You-Tube tutorials I could find, and on and on. But I had to ask myself - to what end? How much did we need the lighting? What would be the return on my investment of money and/or time? In the time it would take me to do all of this, how many other projects, more realistic and attainable projects, would get put on the back burner, and for how long? If I threw money at it to make it happen, would it be a wise investment? Imagining it would cost nearly as much as the front fence, would it add as much value? The fence is a winner. It's full the brim of fencely qualities and does fencely stuff. But the lighting. Did I need the path lit at night? How often did we have anyone come up the path at 3 am and stumble in saying, "thanks for having me, I almost broke my neck coming up the yard". How long would the lighting last? The fence is guaranteed - the cedar is cedar, the steel is steel, and the labor is warranteed. There are few variables. But who can guarantee the tensile strength of the bottles I cut? That I wouldn't step on one the wrong way one day and have it shatter and cut my foot all to pieces? Who would guarantee that the blue tape would keep the wiring from being sliced, in time? And so on, and so on, until the decision was made...
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