If it gets enough light/sun that plants grow, put a peppermint plant out there.
Rodents hate the smell.
If nothing grows there. You could spray peppermint every month, or hook up some kind of rope/ladder for them to get out. If you go the "escape route" way tho, they're gonna live in there having babies and you won't be able to open the window or they get into the building.
Might be better to put a finer mesh over the chicken wire.
Hmm, I can't grow peppermint in the recess, but maybe around the dome would work?
Good point about the escape route possibly making things worse. There's plenty of evidence that previous owners have dealt with rodent issues, so I wouldn't want to reintroduce that possibility.
Probably even be enough to have one inside on the windowsill.
Rodents have an insane sense of smell, and they hate peppermint because the smell is so strong. So it would probably be enough to keep them from going in there.
Some corners look very sharp, but light and deco is more important. Right now it's a sterile look. You need lots of strong artificial light to compensate for the narrow window.
I keep thinking that I’ll install flow meter with my Rachio system so that I can catch leaks. Irrigation systems kind of like classic cars - they require constant maintenance, and shit often breaks. And since I water at night, I often miss major leaks until it’s too late.
As for valve covers, your best bet is just to Google stuff and do some image or shopping searches. Most are pretty ugly, but some fake rocks and fake logs exist.
I ended up burying mine. It’s a pain in the ass, but it’s the price I’m willing to pay to not hear my wife complain about a fiberglass box.
If you can cool the garage, insulating the ceiling will help. Even if you run a fan to pull in cool air at night and then try to hold it in, it'll help.
I have an attic that gets direct sun until the afternoon. It gets quite hot. I had easy access to the rafters so I used radiant barrier, and the difference is very big. As you're putting it up you can tell that it's blocking the heat standing in an a covered vs uncovered area. In subsequent days when it was all up it was obviously cooler. It's still hot but not unbearable.
Radiant barrier is more expensive and fiberglass probably would have worked just as well in this situation, but I didn't know enough about air flow in that space to tell whether fiberglass would impede anything,so I used radiant barrier and left a gap at the bottoms and tops. It is very easy to install. Fiberglass wouldn't be too hard either, but the barrier is daed simple and there's less volume to move around.
In general, my experience say it's going to help, and whether you do fiberglass or radiant barrier is up to you.
Put in a radiant barrier.
A radiant barrier is a layer of metallic foil that reflects up to 96% of radiant heat, assisting in the energy performance of a building.
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