Recently a friend planning an Elfa closet system asked if I had any tips, since he knew I'd built three Elfa closets after our big hardware flooring project this summer. Do I ever! The Elfa system has worked out really well for us, but I do have a few tips about designing, purchasing, and building an Elfa system.
First, it's largely a waste of time to go through their online design process, as the guy on the other end will invariably make a dozen stupid mistakes (switching around numbers, misunderstanding your requests, etc.) that will take you a while to discover and correct. However, it's worthwhile to fill out the form a few times, just to make sure you have all the necessary measurements and are clear on which measurement is which, and also to make sure you have measured out how much hanging space of each length (shirt, pants, dress) that you need. You might even measure your longest shirts, pants, and dresses just to be sure that their norms make sense for you. V and I are both tall, so we disagreed with some of the defaults.
So, go to the store (we went to Container Store) and do the design in person--that's how they fill out your order, anyway, and you can lean over their shoulder and make tweaks. While they're doing it, keep an eye out for wasted space--we were able to add four inches here and there, squeeze in way more shelves closer together for shoes, and so on. For example, our master bedroom closet goes up a ridiculous 8', and we're both tall, so we had them move the double closet rods about a foot higher than they thought was reasonable, and then we put TWO rows of 12" shelves all the way across the bottom for three rows (one on the floor, two on the shelves) of shoes. Above the closet rods we have two and three rows of shelves for wicked-hard-to-reach storage of out of season clothes, fat pants and skinny pants, etc. They weren't willing to think of these things because they're inconvenient, but for us it was important to cram every list smidgin of storage into all three of our closets. We even have one hanging rod that is intentionally too long--it sticks out the side and runs to the wall, because the closest-fit Elfa framing was that many inches narrower than the space. It bought us hanging space for 15 more of Victoria's dresses. It might look weird to the Container Store people, but in our closet it makes perfect sense.
Second, choose between chrome or white. Ignore all the other choices (wood types, etc.) because they're just extra pieces that they charge you extra for that you slap on as the very last step, and it's a pretty bogus way to run up costs for no extra value whatsoever. Choose a basic color, build your whole system, and if you still care, go back and get the decorative bits.
Third, they'll sell you a whole bunch of little bits that you don't need, like closet-rod ends, shelf bracket covers, and so forth. Again, skip them and go back later if it turns out you care. Also note that for drawer stacks, they have lots of options, and they'll start by trying to sell you the most expensive kind, which you don't need. You also might not want top-covers
Fourth, before you leave the store, count every last doodad. We had to make three trips back to the store during our installation to get the pieces they'd forgotten to pack. They were nice about taking us at our word, but it was a royal pain that we did NOT need while building.
Fifth, if you have any trouble at all sinking the screws/bolts into your wall, run (don't walk) to your nearest Home Depot and buy (a) a screw gun (the best $80 I've ever spent) and (b) some boxes of drywall screws at 1/4" lengths from 1-1/4" to 2". Get the HD guys to show you how to use the depth-adjusting choke collar thingy--it's a little weird but very handy. Our contractor friend George assured me that the drywall screws are plenty strong for the situation, and believe me, they were way easier to get into the wall. I started with the default hardware where I could, then used 2" screws where I couldn't, and if those didn't work, I used progressively shorter screws until I could get one all the way in. Depending on what's going on behind your drywall, these are likely to work a lot better than the default hardware, and I ended up using a big old mix of fasteners in different places.
Sixth, make sure you have a long level--say 30" minimum. Mark where you think the hanging brackets should be, then use that long level to make sure that height is going to work all the way across the closet. Closets tend to be way crookeder than you expect. Don't get hung up on the height that the Elfa design recommends--it might make sense to hang your system as high as possible, as it did for us. Now, attach the first bracket by sinking the first screw through it, and use the level to hold the bracket in place and sink the next screw. This step requires a helper for the longer brackets, which are heavy. Now you're done with the level until you sink the rest of the screws and are ready for the next bracket. This way is much easier than trying to make and understand pencil marks with any precision.
The rest is pretty straightforward--as long as you're not missing any pieces!
Oh! And while you're at Home Depot, get a small tub of joint compound and an assortment of putty knives from 1-1/2" wide to about 6" or more inches wide (in the drywall department). When you demolish your old closet fittings and when you make mistakes on the Elfa installation, you'll get holes in the drywall. You'll quickly swipe a generous lump of joint compound with the smallest logical putty knife into the gouge, then use the largest putty knife to smooth it out. If you end up with any massive holes (like I did a few times because I was using the pry bar wrong), then crumple newspaper into the hole first, and then use the joint compound. Don't worry about bits of newspaper sticking out of the compound--they'll sand off easily when dry. If your closet walls are white, you might not even care about painting over the joint compound zones. --Erin
Showing posts with label remodeling. Show all posts
Showing posts with label remodeling. Show all posts
09 January 2008
25 July 2007
So you think you want hardwood?
We made that mistake, too, and here's the first installment of pictures and a heap of words to document the drama.
We've been wanting to get rid of the beaten-to-crap, never-was-very-good-in-the-first-place carpeting in our house for a long time, and this summer we finally decided to do it. We got quotes for putting in more white oak hardwood flooring (to match what Jon put in the music room, to match what was already there in the dining room) in the living room, staircase, and upstairs hallway. After that we planned to replace the carpeting in the three bedrooms. As much as we like hardwood, we both liked the idea of carpeting in the bedroom, mainly because putting bare feet down on kitty litter crumbs in the middle of the night is nobody's idea of a good time.
About a month later, we decided to go with the bid from Victoria's friend's company, and we scheduled the job. It was to start Wednesday, 11 July 2007, and finish up sometime around the next weekend, 21-22Jul. We were pretty much going to have to move out of the house once the finishing work began, since we wouldn't be able to walk on anything between our bedroom and the front door. The first step was to take delivery of the wood on Monday, 9 July.
On Sunday, 8 July, we were reading the New York Times and drinking (apparently way too much) coffee when we realized we were being idiots. We're replacing carpeting that's less than ten years old not just because we like hardwood better (who doesn't?), but because our carpeting looked like hell. Eight years of hairballs, boy cat expressions of antisocial sentiment through the urethra, puppy incontinence, dog barf, wine spills, food spills, and all manner of whatever comes into the house on the undersides of paws, shoes, and boots had pretty much trashed our carpeting--which, again, had never looked too great to begin with.
Also, a few months ago, we'd begun sliding down that slippery slope known as Oriental Rugs. Our friends Jon and Kyla (yes, Jon the artist behind my kitchen) threw a "rug party," where a friend of his from Turkey was showing literally hundreds of Turkish rugs of all styles, eras, sizes, and prices. They live in the Russian River now, in the tiny village of Monte Rio, and Victoria and I went up for the weekend. It was a chance to catch up with friends over great wine and food, and the next day on the way back, we'd pick up a mess of oysters in Tomales Bay and fresh cider in Graton. Our black lab, Candy, would have a chance to cavort with their labradoodle, Sam. I'd play a kiddie concert with the Marin Symphony on the way home. We'd have big fun. We'd do everything but buy rugs.
Right.
We forgot that part.
We drove home with four new (to us) Turkish rugs. One huge one had particularly caught both our eyes as being a good candidate for the living room--it was the usually hodgepodge of a million colors, especially reddish ones, that you expect, but its background was sort of pistachioesque somehow. We also liked a slightly smaller one that came off as purplish, and similar purplish medium one. Then we noticed a runner of unusual design that would be good for the hallway to our office after we do that remodeling job (which will be a subject for a future blogging, once we get around to doing it). While we were taking a closer look at these, trying to decide whether we'd buy any, Candy plopped herself resolutely down on the mediumish purplish one and refused to budge, clearly expressing her wish that we purchase it for her. (She was to have a tumor surgically removed the following week, and Dad speculated that she was picking out her own get well present.)
We left with all four.
So, back to our coffee that fine Sunday morning... We were having to completely move out of our house anyway, and did we really want to move out of each of the bedrooms AGAIN to have carpeting put in? Our hardwood and tiled floors all look fine. Our carpeted floors all look horrible. Why, exactly, did we think that the prosective new carpeting in the bedrooms was going to fare any better? Wouldn't those nice, cleanable Turkish rugs be a better idea? Wouldn't it be better to do the whole darned house while we were at it?
Well, of course it would be!
So we call our friend Jane to announce that we're moving in for at least two weeks ("Is Tuesday good for you?"), we do what we can that day to finish moving out of the living room, boxing up all our books and CDs and so on. Monday, Erin welcomes the first big load of wood, which the guys load into the music room. Victoria calls Allison at The Floor Show to ask if she can deal with our sudden scope creep. After work, Erin goes off to play chamber music for four hours (octets featuring a clarinetist who's visiting from Italy). V hears back from Allison: the answer is "probably... I'll look at it first thing tomorrow... and can we start tomorrow instead of Wednesday?"
Yipes! V goes off to get another heap of boxes, including five wardrobe boxes for the three huge closets we suddenly might need to empty out. We meet back at the house to panic. Who wouldn't? It's Monday night. I prepare the stereo/TV cart for moving, which is to say I unplug about a thousand cables and jam them all into a box, and then I get Victoria to help me move the BATV (which stands for Big Ass TV, of course) down to the office where it will be least vulnerable to clumsy movers and floor workers. Except that when we get to the top of the little living room staircase, V trips on the hardwood that's stacked in the music room, falls, lands on her wrist, and (we learn Wednesday) breaks it. We leave the TV there at the top of the stairs for the movers to deal with tomorrow.
Now we're panicked and half crippled. Great. We have to move everything we own by tomorrow, maybe, we've barely started, and I've broken my girlfriend?! Not good.
V takes half a pound of ibuprofen, straps on an icepack, and soldiers on. We jam clothes into the wardrobe boxes. The nice guy at U-Haul has kindly sent closet rod thingies that are about half as wide as the boxes, so I improvise and use the dowels from our closets instead. We set out the stuff we think we need to take with us to Jane's house, and then we collapse in bed.
Tuesday dawns early, with Allison arriving at 9 to look over the new turf. Tim arrives shortly after that and starts demoing the living room, and our mover guys Manuel and Juan arrive a few minutes later and just barely get our furniture out of the living room before Tim starts wailing on the carpet. V and I are simultaneously directing the movers ("Your mission is to fit everything we own into the dining room, kitchen, two bathrooms, and maybe a deck or two. Go!"), answering Allison's questions, jamming more of our bedroom stuff into boxes, and continuing to panic. Allison sees that we're both wrecks and advises waiting with the bedrooms. I propose that we move everything we can fit into the space available, prioritizing the master bedroom, and if we have to, we'll have the rest done after we move back in. Allison shrugs and agrees, asks us to let her know how far we get, and flees to safety. We put the cats in the safety of their carriers, and we usher Candy into the office so she won't help quite so much.
About four hours later, V and I have somehow boxed everything in the entire upstairs, and Manuel and Juan have somehow crammed it all into the bathroms, the tiny deck off the master bathroom, the larger deck in front of the master bedroom, the hallway leading to the office, and the dining room. Well, heck! We didn't even start using the kitchen! We could have done the office, too! (But that's to be another story for the future.) We call Allison and declare victory, run out for burritos, and then move to Jane's in Sausalito. Since V's wrist is throbbing, she can't drive, so we have to cram two adults, four critters, and everything we need into my car.
As soon as we've unpacked for our two (or will it be three now?) weeks at Jane's, I need to put on pit black, grab my horn, and turn right back around for the night's opera. I drive to Oakland, buy self-adhesive wrapping tape for V's wrist, grab something to eat, and meet my carpool to Walnut Creek. After the opera, I drop off my carpool, drive up to the house, and get my office stuff. I work from home, and for the next few weeks I'll be working from Jane's home, which means I need to take everything I need to her house. Fortunately, I travel so much that packing for a few weeks of work from a remote location isn't much harder than unplugging my laptop and throwing it into a briefcase that already has everything else I need. I also take a few minutes to wander through the freakishly empty house and take pictures of all our worldly goods crammed into bathrooms.
The rest of that week is surreal. V can't drive, so she can't get to work in Berkeley, and she's pretty much at my mercy. Wednesday morning I worked in the morning, and that afternoon, we drove to Berkeley so V could go to the ER to get her wrist checked out, and I went to buy groceries and check on things at the house. She learns that she's broken it, and she emerges from the hospital with her arm splinted and in a sling. We stop by a medical supply place to get a wrist-shaped ice pack and drive "home." Thursday I have an all-day business trip to San Jose, returning home at 9pm to a very frustrated V--my poor extravert has been home all day with nothing but furry critters for company. Friday, we make a trip to an orthopedist, where she's put in a cast; happily, though, now she can drive, so we go to the house to look around and get her car, and she drives "home." I plug my laptop in at my home office and work for the afternoon, amidst the chaos of sawing and banging, and that night I play another opera. Somewhere in all that, we also measured our closets and got to work figuring out how we'd refit them after we move back in: the stupid planks that currently support the shelving and rods will need to be removed to put the hardwood in, and we see no point in putting them back.
We recover over the weekend. Jane has fled to Seattle for a family baby shower. We spend Saturday touring closet stores, settle on an Elfa system from The Container Store, and spend a bunch of the day designing it, and then our friend Rhett comes over for a dog walk and dinner. Sunday I run off to yet another opera while V holds down the home front.
Week 2 is a little less surreal. Able to drive again, V returns to her usual work schedule. I play the last of the operas on Tuesday night. Jane is home and we start hanging out together and getting into the rhythm of our temporary large family. Tranquility is disturbed Wednesday: Gjetost has some kind of horrible mouth infection and needs to see the vet; fortunately, she responds well to a ton of meds (if not to the twice-daily ritual of slurping down more meds).
Weeekend 2, I have a flurry of Saturday errands in the East Bay, including hauling a car full of Elfa closet stuff up into my office; back in Sausalito, Candy takes V on several walks between loads of laundry; Jane is off in Berkeley doing dancerly stuff. Sunday we're the picture of domesticity: the three of us go off to a farmer's market and trap all kinds of great stuff for dinner and come back to work the Sunday NYT crossword. At some point I start getting antsy and make Jane unpack her living room; working together, we managed to complete that job in about an hour, and now it's time to make dinner.
Here we are on Wednesday of Week 3. I'm on day 3 of a nasty cold and feel like crap, but that pales next to our having just resolved a tricky problem: we can't move back in until Saturday. Or maybe Friday. Jane has only one guestroom, and she has a houseguest coming Thursday night, who may or may not be able to deal with cats. Jon and Kyla have invited us to the Monte Rio, but Jon's deathly allergic to our cats. Jane thinks about sending her guest to a hotel, but everything in the area costs a fortune, so we look at moving ourselves into a hotel back in Berkeley. Those cost a fortune, too, of course, and only the really icky ones will take our four critters. Fortunately, Allison decides we can move back Friday, Jane's guest says she loves cats, and we have a Goldbergian itinerary of a solution: Candy and Victoria and I pack up, clean up, and move out to Jon and Kyla's on Thursday afternoon; we stay there Thursday night; Friday morning, we come back for the cats and the rest of our stuff; finally, the whole menagerie drives home to meet the movers Friday afternoon.
Meanwhile back in Oakland, things are looking pretty good! V took some pictures of the floors after their first two coats of polyurethane on Monday night, and they're gorgeous. Even though we have no baseboards and its becoming increasingly clear that we're going to need to paint soon, the house is immeasurably improved by the hardwood. The floor guys were to have put the fourth and final coat of finish on Tuesday, and today and tomorrow they're installing the baseboards, which they had been pre-finishing down on the driveway starting last Friday.
Once our furniture is back in place and all the boxes are sitting in the rooms where they'll need to be unpacked, I'll need to start demoing our closets and installing the Elfa system, so that Victoria can move our clothes back in. I hope we can manage most of this on Friday, because on Saturday I need to pack for a flight Sunday to Salt Lake City. With any luck, my one-armed V will unpack and put away some of our boxes while I'm gone. I'll get home late Thursday night, and Friday we'll welcome a house guest! Fortunately Kathy has been through some remodeling herself, so we think she'll be patient with the boxes and general disorder she's likely to confront.
When we move back in Friday afternoon, the polyurethane will have been curing for only three days and will still be somewhat fragile. This means we need to put down a bunch of rugs to keep gritty shoes from damaging it, and for about seven more days, we have to be really careful. Candy will need to wear dog-boots when she's in the house, or else her claws would make little dents and scratches in the finish, so we've gotten her a spiffy quad of red dog boots at REI and have been having her practice in them on her walks. We think she looks fabulous in her sexy little red shoes, and so do all the neighbors. She's being a good sport about it--almost as good a sport as Jane has been, putting up with our sudden and prolonged invasion--but she has her doubts. Whenever we first put them on her, she doesn't seem to remember how to walk and instead prances uncertainly until she gets distracted by a retrieving dummy or tennis ball. This, of course, had to be captured on video!
All in all, we've had a pretty good experience, and we can't wait to see the results and take a mess of After pictures to post here, but it's been a whirlwind of an adventure, and we're not done yet.
We've been wanting to get rid of the beaten-to-crap, never-was-very-good-in-the-first-place carpeting in our house for a long time, and this summer we finally decided to do it. We got quotes for putting in more white oak hardwood flooring (to match what Jon put in the music room, to match what was already there in the dining room) in the living room, staircase, and upstairs hallway. After that we planned to replace the carpeting in the three bedrooms. As much as we like hardwood, we both liked the idea of carpeting in the bedroom, mainly because putting bare feet down on kitty litter crumbs in the middle of the night is nobody's idea of a good time.
About a month later, we decided to go with the bid from Victoria's friend's company, and we scheduled the job. It was to start Wednesday, 11 July 2007, and finish up sometime around the next weekend, 21-22Jul. We were pretty much going to have to move out of the house once the finishing work began, since we wouldn't be able to walk on anything between our bedroom and the front door. The first step was to take delivery of the wood on Monday, 9 July.
On Sunday, 8 July, we were reading the New York Times and drinking (apparently way too much) coffee when we realized we were being idiots. We're replacing carpeting that's less than ten years old not just because we like hardwood better (who doesn't?), but because our carpeting looked like hell. Eight years of hairballs, boy cat expressions of antisocial sentiment through the urethra, puppy incontinence, dog barf, wine spills, food spills, and all manner of whatever comes into the house on the undersides of paws, shoes, and boots had pretty much trashed our carpeting--which, again, had never looked too great to begin with.
Also, a few months ago, we'd begun sliding down that slippery slope known as Oriental Rugs. Our friends Jon and Kyla (yes, Jon the artist behind my kitchen) threw a "rug party," where a friend of his from Turkey was showing literally hundreds of Turkish rugs of all styles, eras, sizes, and prices. They live in the Russian River now, in the tiny village of Monte Rio, and Victoria and I went up for the weekend. It was a chance to catch up with friends over great wine and food, and the next day on the way back, we'd pick up a mess of oysters in Tomales Bay and fresh cider in Graton. Our black lab, Candy, would have a chance to cavort with their labradoodle, Sam. I'd play a kiddie concert with the Marin Symphony on the way home. We'd have big fun. We'd do everything but buy rugs.
Right.
We forgot that part.
We drove home with four new (to us) Turkish rugs. One huge one had particularly caught both our eyes as being a good candidate for the living room--it was the usually hodgepodge of a million colors, especially reddish ones, that you expect, but its background was sort of pistachioesque somehow. We also liked a slightly smaller one that came off as purplish, and similar purplish medium one. Then we noticed a runner of unusual design that would be good for the hallway to our office after we do that remodeling job (which will be a subject for a future blogging, once we get around to doing it). While we were taking a closer look at these, trying to decide whether we'd buy any, Candy plopped herself resolutely down on the mediumish purplish one and refused to budge, clearly expressing her wish that we purchase it for her. (She was to have a tumor surgically removed the following week, and Dad speculated that she was picking out her own get well present.)
We left with all four.
So, back to our coffee that fine Sunday morning... We were having to completely move out of our house anyway, and did we really want to move out of each of the bedrooms AGAIN to have carpeting put in? Our hardwood and tiled floors all look fine. Our carpeted floors all look horrible. Why, exactly, did we think that the prosective new carpeting in the bedrooms was going to fare any better? Wouldn't those nice, cleanable Turkish rugs be a better idea? Wouldn't it be better to do the whole darned house while we were at it?
Well, of course it would be!
So we call our friend Jane to announce that we're moving in for at least two weeks ("Is Tuesday good for you?"), we do what we can that day to finish moving out of the living room, boxing up all our books and CDs and so on. Monday, Erin welcomes the first big load of wood, which the guys load into the music room. Victoria calls Allison at The Floor Show to ask if she can deal with our sudden scope creep. After work, Erin goes off to play chamber music for four hours (octets featuring a clarinetist who's visiting from Italy). V hears back from Allison: the answer is "probably... I'll look at it first thing tomorrow... and can we start tomorrow instead of Wednesday?"
Yipes! V goes off to get another heap of boxes, including five wardrobe boxes for the three huge closets we suddenly might need to empty out. We meet back at the house to panic. Who wouldn't? It's Monday night. I prepare the stereo/TV cart for moving, which is to say I unplug about a thousand cables and jam them all into a box, and then I get Victoria to help me move the BATV (which stands for Big Ass TV, of course) down to the office where it will be least vulnerable to clumsy movers and floor workers. Except that when we get to the top of the little living room staircase, V trips on the hardwood that's stacked in the music room, falls, lands on her wrist, and (we learn Wednesday) breaks it. We leave the TV there at the top of the stairs for the movers to deal with tomorrow.
Now we're panicked and half crippled. Great. We have to move everything we own by tomorrow, maybe, we've barely started, and I've broken my girlfriend?! Not good.
V takes half a pound of ibuprofen, straps on an icepack, and soldiers on. We jam clothes into the wardrobe boxes. The nice guy at U-Haul has kindly sent closet rod thingies that are about half as wide as the boxes, so I improvise and use the dowels from our closets instead. We set out the stuff we think we need to take with us to Jane's house, and then we collapse in bed.
Tuesday dawns early, with Allison arriving at 9 to look over the new turf. Tim arrives shortly after that and starts demoing the living room, and our mover guys Manuel and Juan arrive a few minutes later and just barely get our furniture out of the living room before Tim starts wailing on the carpet. V and I are simultaneously directing the movers ("Your mission is to fit everything we own into the dining room, kitchen, two bathrooms, and maybe a deck or two. Go!"), answering Allison's questions, jamming more of our bedroom stuff into boxes, and continuing to panic. Allison sees that we're both wrecks and advises waiting with the bedrooms. I propose that we move everything we can fit into the space available, prioritizing the master bedroom, and if we have to, we'll have the rest done after we move back in. Allison shrugs and agrees, asks us to let her know how far we get, and flees to safety. We put the cats in the safety of their carriers, and we usher Candy into the office so she won't help quite so much.
About four hours later, V and I have somehow boxed everything in the entire upstairs, and Manuel and Juan have somehow crammed it all into the bathroms, the tiny deck off the master bathroom, the larger deck in front of the master bedroom, the hallway leading to the office, and the dining room. Well, heck! We didn't even start using the kitchen! We could have done the office, too! (But that's to be another story for the future.) We call Allison and declare victory, run out for burritos, and then move to Jane's in Sausalito. Since V's wrist is throbbing, she can't drive, so we have to cram two adults, four critters, and everything we need into my car. As soon as we've unpacked for our two (or will it be three now?) weeks at Jane's, I need to put on pit black, grab my horn, and turn right back around for the night's opera. I drive to Oakland, buy self-adhesive wrapping tape for V's wrist, grab something to eat, and meet my carpool to Walnut Creek. After the opera, I drop off my carpool, drive up to the house, and get my office stuff. I work from home, and for the next few weeks I'll be working from Jane's home, which means I need to take everything I need to her house. Fortunately, I travel so much that packing for a few weeks of work from a remote location isn't much harder than unplugging my laptop and throwing it into a briefcase that already has everything else I need. I also take a few minutes to wander through the freakishly empty house and take pictures of all our worldly goods crammed into bathrooms.
The rest of that week is surreal. V can't drive, so she can't get to work in Berkeley, and she's pretty much at my mercy. Wednesday morning I worked in the morning, and that afternoon, we drove to Berkeley so V could go to the ER to get her wrist checked out, and I went to buy groceries and check on things at the house. She learns that she's broken it, and she emerges from the hospital with her arm splinted and in a sling. We stop by a medical supply place to get a wrist-shaped ice pack and drive "home." Thursday I have an all-day business trip to San Jose, returning home at 9pm to a very frustrated V--my poor extravert has been home all day with nothing but furry critters for company. Friday, we make a trip to an orthopedist, where she's put in a cast; happily, though, now she can drive, so we go to the house to look around and get her car, and she drives "home." I plug my laptop in at my home office and work for the afternoon, amidst the chaos of sawing and banging, and that night I play another opera. Somewhere in all that, we also measured our closets and got to work figuring out how we'd refit them after we move back in: the stupid planks that currently support the shelving and rods will need to be removed to put the hardwood in, and we see no point in putting them back.
We recover over the weekend. Jane has fled to Seattle for a family baby shower. We spend Saturday touring closet stores, settle on an Elfa system from The Container Store, and spend a bunch of the day designing it, and then our friend Rhett comes over for a dog walk and dinner. Sunday I run off to yet another opera while V holds down the home front.
Week 2 is a little less surreal. Able to drive again, V returns to her usual work schedule. I play the last of the operas on Tuesday night. Jane is home and we start hanging out together and getting into the rhythm of our temporary large family. Tranquility is disturbed Wednesday: Gjetost has some kind of horrible mouth infection and needs to see the vet; fortunately, she responds well to a ton of meds (if not to the twice-daily ritual of slurping down more meds).
Weeekend 2, I have a flurry of Saturday errands in the East Bay, including hauling a car full of Elfa closet stuff up into my office; back in Sausalito, Candy takes V on several walks between loads of laundry; Jane is off in Berkeley doing dancerly stuff. Sunday we're the picture of domesticity: the three of us go off to a farmer's market and trap all kinds of great stuff for dinner and come back to work the Sunday NYT crossword. At some point I start getting antsy and make Jane unpack her living room; working together, we managed to complete that job in about an hour, and now it's time to make dinner.
Here we are on Wednesday of Week 3. I'm on day 3 of a nasty cold and feel like crap, but that pales next to our having just resolved a tricky problem: we can't move back in until Saturday. Or maybe Friday. Jane has only one guestroom, and she has a houseguest coming Thursday night, who may or may not be able to deal with cats. Jon and Kyla have invited us to the Monte Rio, but Jon's deathly allergic to our cats. Jane thinks about sending her guest to a hotel, but everything in the area costs a fortune, so we look at moving ourselves into a hotel back in Berkeley. Those cost a fortune, too, of course, and only the really icky ones will take our four critters. Fortunately, Allison decides we can move back Friday, Jane's guest says she loves cats, and we have a Goldbergian itinerary of a solution: Candy and Victoria and I pack up, clean up, and move out to Jon and Kyla's on Thursday afternoon; we stay there Thursday night; Friday morning, we come back for the cats and the rest of our stuff; finally, the whole menagerie drives home to meet the movers Friday afternoon.
Meanwhile back in Oakland, things are looking pretty good! V took some pictures of the floors after their first two coats of polyurethane on Monday night, and they're gorgeous. Even though we have no baseboards and its becoming increasingly clear that we're going to need to paint soon, the house is immeasurably improved by the hardwood. The floor guys were to have put the fourth and final coat of finish on Tuesday, and today and tomorrow they're installing the baseboards, which they had been pre-finishing down on the driveway starting last Friday.
Once our furniture is back in place and all the boxes are sitting in the rooms where they'll need to be unpacked, I'll need to start demoing our closets and installing the Elfa system, so that Victoria can move our clothes back in. I hope we can manage most of this on Friday, because on Saturday I need to pack for a flight Sunday to Salt Lake City. With any luck, my one-armed V will unpack and put away some of our boxes while I'm gone. I'll get home late Thursday night, and Friday we'll welcome a house guest! Fortunately Kathy has been through some remodeling herself, so we think she'll be patient with the boxes and general disorder she's likely to confront.
When we move back in Friday afternoon, the polyurethane will have been curing for only three days and will still be somewhat fragile. This means we need to put down a bunch of rugs to keep gritty shoes from damaging it, and for about seven more days, we have to be really careful. Candy will need to wear dog-boots when she's in the house, or else her claws would make little dents and scratches in the finish, so we've gotten her a spiffy quad of red dog boots at REI and have been having her practice in them on her walks. We think she looks fabulous in her sexy little red shoes, and so do all the neighbors. She's being a good sport about it--almost as good a sport as Jane has been, putting up with our sudden and prolonged invasion--but she has her doubts. Whenever we first put them on her, she doesn't seem to remember how to walk and instead prances uncertainly until she gets distracted by a retrieving dummy or tennis ball. This, of course, had to be captured on video!
All in all, we've had a pretty good experience, and we can't wait to see the results and take a mess of After pictures to post here, but it's been a whirlwind of an adventure, and we're not done yet.
20 January 2007
Indoor summer
We had our furnace installed and working by about 5pm last night, and when we left for my Oakland East Bay Symphony concert at 7:20, it was still cranking away on full blast. (This fancy-schmancy furnace has a big burner and a little one, and two fan speeds, so that it can do little fires with slow speeds to maintain a temperature, a big fire with big speed to bring a cold house up to temperature, and everything full blast to handle really cold houses.) When we got home, it was off, and we had a toasty, comfortable house--every last room was toasty and comfy! Mind you, this may not be exciting news for most of you, but this house has always had warm rooms and cold rooms, mostly the latter.
I didn't think it was possible to heat this house properly! All these years I've known I had a crappy old furnace, but I thought the real problem was all the glass, the high ceilings, the fireplace without glass doors, blah blah blah. Turns out this house heats up just fine when it has a decent furnace!
We didn't even hear the furnace kick on this morning, but when I woke up around 8am and it was programmed to be 60 still for overnight, it was reasonably comfortable to get up and pee. When I woke back up around 10:30, and it was supposed to be 68 according to our weekend program, I lay in bed scratching Gjetost's ears and thinking, "Gosh. It feels TOO warm in here. It's nice and comfy under the covers, but the air on my face is too warm!" Now it's in the 62˚ phase of the program, and it still feels toasty and comfy inside--too warm, even--but the furnace isn't even noticeable. I don't think it's even kicked on since we got up.
All these years I've had the thermostat set to 68˚ for active times, 62˚ during the day while we're away, and 60˚ overnight. Turns out I've never actually felt 68˚!
I grew up in a house that was 72˚ for most of winter (right, Mom? or 70˚?). We're astonished to find that we both agree 68˚ is too warm, and we've already reprogrammed the thermostat for 66˚ during our active hours. All these years I've thought I'd lost my winter fat and exchanged it for plain old fat fat, but I guess it really is winter fat.
Amazing. I'm thinking we will see our gas bills go down! I should have done this years ago.
Okay, all you people who, like me, have been too cheap to replace your POS cheap old 60% AFUE furnaces that came with your house: stop dithering! Replace it now. You won't regret it.
Ductwork gets redone on Tuesday. After that, we'll probably have to get out our summer clothes and put away all the fleece throw blankets. I've already put my long johns, ragg socks, and turtlenecks in the laundry basket.
I didn't think it was possible to heat this house properly! All these years I've known I had a crappy old furnace, but I thought the real problem was all the glass, the high ceilings, the fireplace without glass doors, blah blah blah. Turns out this house heats up just fine when it has a decent furnace!
We didn't even hear the furnace kick on this morning, but when I woke up around 8am and it was programmed to be 60 still for overnight, it was reasonably comfortable to get up and pee. When I woke back up around 10:30, and it was supposed to be 68 according to our weekend program, I lay in bed scratching Gjetost's ears and thinking, "Gosh. It feels TOO warm in here. It's nice and comfy under the covers, but the air on my face is too warm!" Now it's in the 62˚ phase of the program, and it still feels toasty and comfy inside--too warm, even--but the furnace isn't even noticeable. I don't think it's even kicked on since we got up.
All these years I've had the thermostat set to 68˚ for active times, 62˚ during the day while we're away, and 60˚ overnight. Turns out I've never actually felt 68˚!
I grew up in a house that was 72˚ for most of winter (right, Mom? or 70˚?). We're astonished to find that we both agree 68˚ is too warm, and we've already reprogrammed the thermostat for 66˚ during our active hours. All these years I've thought I'd lost my winter fat and exchanged it for plain old fat fat, but I guess it really is winter fat.
Amazing. I'm thinking we will see our gas bills go down! I should have done this years ago.
Okay, all you people who, like me, have been too cheap to replace your POS cheap old 60% AFUE furnaces that came with your house: stop dithering! Replace it now. You won't regret it.
Ductwork gets redone on Tuesday. After that, we'll probably have to get out our summer clothes and put away all the fleece throw blankets. I've already put my long johns, ragg socks, and turtlenecks in the laundry basket.
Indoor weather continues
For those who missed earlier episodes of "Fun with V and E: The Great Indoor Winter of 2007," our furnace started gasping its last breaths late last week, just in time for a week of record low temperatures. (You've probably heard that the California citrus and avocado industry is expecting a $1B loss, and the Governator declared a state of emergency in a bunch of counties.) As a result, most of this week it's been high 30s/low 40s outside and mid 40s inside. We've been shivering under even an astonishingly large heap of bedding by night, and by day I've rediscovered the value of long johns, fleece, flannel, and many layers, even in my office with the space heater on. V has been going around in her stocking cap. This morning I washed a bunch of pots and pans just for the pleasure of having my hands in hot water. (They did need washing.)
It turns out that it was probably a relatively easy fix costing a few hundred dollars to get the old POS working again, but on its best day that old thing still sucks, and I've known for a long time that I should probably replace it. It never gets below about 30 around here, yet my utility bill soars from $50-75/mo in the summer to $200-350 in the winter, which is pretty ridiculous. It's partly due to the maybe 60% efficiency of the old furnace, which appears to be at least 25 years old and too small for the house besides (75K btu, where 90-100K btu is a better idea). It's also partly due to the debacle of energy deregulation in California, in particular how PG&E's rates are capped on electricity (which is expensive to produce and inefficient to distribute) but not natural gas (which is abundant, if problematic for other reasons in recent years). If you figure that a lot of our electricity is produced by burning natural gas and then pumping electricity down the lines, and line loss is way more expensive than gas-pumping, it's really stupid not to go straight to the source and burn your own gas, but in California you pay more to do the smarter thing. Go figure. It's ridiculous, but I'm still going to do the right thing, and there are some signs that California has finally figured out that reregulating the energy industry is needed, so maybe someday my PG&E bills will reward my good behavior.
So, I had appointments with four different estimators plus two others who never made it (one called to cancel, one didn't), and a seventh from Sears blew me off twice--scheduled me, then called the morning of to cancel, both times. After my water heater experience from hell with Sears, I didn't find that too surprising.
Everybody had the same advice about the basic question, once I stipulated that I wanted a PG&E-rebate-qualified high-efficiency furnace; namely, we should get a variable-speed, two-stage, high-efficiency furnace of the same capacity. They extolled, variously, four brands, American Standard & Trane, which are the same company and basically the same furnace, Ruud, and Amana. All are rated well by Consumer Reports. They differed on whether additional things were needed. I ended up with bids ranging from $3334 for furnace only to $12070 for furnace, fancy filter, redoing all the ductwork under the house, splitting the house into two zones, and gold-plating a bottle of snake oil.
The first guy was the gold-plated snake oil guy, and the other three were basically sensible geeks. Snake Oil guy was clearly all about sales and pushing a dubious rebate scheme that looked like a big marketing scam to me. One of the geeks took great pains to freak me out about all kinds of code issues, and I ended up concluding that this was a sales-by-fear tactic intended to make me accept a price $2K higher for exactly the same furnace installation. All of them guaranteed to do whatever it takes to pass the inspection at no additional cost, and Code Freak guy was the only one who thought that my ductwork (which is clearly also some PsOS) was fine.
Third was Family Business guy, who actually seemed to know what he was talking about and who wasn't freaky or dogmatic about anything at all, including brand of furnace (Trane or Amana), and who presented all the options at competitive prices, explained the pros and cons, and said it was really up to me. I liked him and had decided it was his bid to lose when the fourth guy arrived. This guy basically said the same thing as everybody else and gave the 2nd lowest price but didn't bother breaking out much detail. At some point I asked him about his accent, and he answered cautiously that he's Iraqi. I replied that I have never voted for this president and never would, and he immediately relaxed, and there followed an interesting exchange about the war and how he's had to move his extended family to Syria. It was an interesting conversation. His heating proposal was reasonable, and he ended up second place in my thinking.
After a long, shivering talk Wednesday night, we decided on Family Business guy and the Amana, whose efficiency has a 96% AFUE rating, vs. 92.x% for all the others. That's a trivial difference except that it qualifies you for a $200 Federal tax credit, plus the Amana costs $700 less than the equivalent models from other brands (at least in the estimates I got) and has a better warranty. Since we have two people with allergies and asthma, three furry critters, and a bunch of friends/family with allergies, we also opted to add the $800 superduper HEPA filter (a Trane CleanEffects, which was $1695 from the snake oil guy).
And then we come to the tricky decisions: ductwork and zoning. First, ductwork:
California requires that you test all ducts and seal leaks any time you do a furnace replacement. In some zones including Oakland, buying a 92%+ furnace exempts you. However, it's still true that leaky, poorly insulated ducts are a bad thing, because they let heat out and pollutants (like mold, and my crawlspace's rat-shitty-dust) in.
Snake Oil guy said this is bad, bad, bad, we need to redo all the duct work; you wouldn't have to, you're exempt, but we really ought to, especially if we're zoning and messing around with all this stuff anyway.
Code Freak guy looked at all the dust and crud that appears in stripes on my old ductwork and said, "That's normal--leaks suck in air, so the insulation filters out the dust and you see dirty areas. It's not big deal, because the insulation filters the stuff. You see this all the time." But he said they could test and fix up leaks for another $600.
Family Business guy said they looked basically okay, but that if we redid them we'd probably get a performance gain about equal to that of the new furnace vs. old, and that doing so would also give us the opportunity to resize and rebalance things so that the house is more evenly heated (we've found that the living room and master bedroom are much colder than the small rooms, which is not surprising given that they're bigger, glassier, and fed by vents exactly the same size as all the other rooms).
Iraqi guy said they're basically okay "but they need some care. We'll check them over and do some re-sealing."
As for zoning, Snake Oil guy of course extolled its virtues and built it right into his price. Code Freak guy said not to bother, it wasn't worth it. Family Business guy said it's nice but not necessary, but then said that he himself has a crappy old furnace like mine in his house, and after he zoned the house, he's been able to put up with it for another 20 years. He didn't think there was a strong case for or against zoning in our house, but said we'd like it if we did it. Iraqi guy said not to bother, because it only really works when the house is divided into distinct areas like a two-flat; with my open-plan, all the heat's going to move everywhere on its own anyway, so it's kind of pointless.
We ended up deciding yes on the ductwork and no on the zoning. All this is costing us $6134, minus a $300 PG&E rebate, a $200 tax credit, and supposedly up to $1K/yr savings in energy use, but we'll see about that. If that savings actually comes through, we'll also get a PG&E discount for reducing our average monthly consumption by whatever percent it is they set as the goal--I think it's 12%, but don't quote me.
Fortunately, Family Business guy had a cancellation for today which meant we're getting our furnace before rather than after the weekend. His guy Jeff is banging away downstairs putting in the furnace now, which he said would take him pretty much all day, and a crew is coming on Tuesday to redo all the ducts. On Monday night I plan to crank the house up to 70-something so we'll make it through another furnace-less day on Tuesday.
Finally, now that the cows are safely outside in the neighbors' pasture, we're looking into a lock for the barn door: I priced out wood-burning stove inserts for our crappy sheet metal fireplace that looks nice but sucks heat out of the house, and we're giving strong consideration to spending just shy of $3K to install one that can heat up 1200-2000 sq ft, or possibly even one size larger. I also looked at gas fireplaces and wood pellet stoves, but it seems to me that with this spiffy new furnace, the heating power of greatest emergency use to us is a backup system works no matter how many utilities have gone out of service. So, gas is out. As for wood pellets, those stoves use motors and electricity. And if I don't have something that takes logs, what am I supposed to do with the huge oak tree that is now a stack of logs under my stairs? Or the big fallen branches on the hill behind my house that look like kindling waiting to happen?
Anyone got opinions on this puppy? http://www.lopistoves.com/product.asp?dept_id=5&sku=34
It turns out that it was probably a relatively easy fix costing a few hundred dollars to get the old POS working again, but on its best day that old thing still sucks, and I've known for a long time that I should probably replace it. It never gets below about 30 around here, yet my utility bill soars from $50-75/mo in the summer to $200-350 in the winter, which is pretty ridiculous. It's partly due to the maybe 60% efficiency of the old furnace, which appears to be at least 25 years old and too small for the house besides (75K btu, where 90-100K btu is a better idea). It's also partly due to the debacle of energy deregulation in California, in particular how PG&E's rates are capped on electricity (which is expensive to produce and inefficient to distribute) but not natural gas (which is abundant, if problematic for other reasons in recent years). If you figure that a lot of our electricity is produced by burning natural gas and then pumping electricity down the lines, and line loss is way more expensive than gas-pumping, it's really stupid not to go straight to the source and burn your own gas, but in California you pay more to do the smarter thing. Go figure. It's ridiculous, but I'm still going to do the right thing, and there are some signs that California has finally figured out that reregulating the energy industry is needed, so maybe someday my PG&E bills will reward my good behavior.
So, I had appointments with four different estimators plus two others who never made it (one called to cancel, one didn't), and a seventh from Sears blew me off twice--scheduled me, then called the morning of to cancel, both times. After my water heater experience from hell with Sears, I didn't find that too surprising.
Everybody had the same advice about the basic question, once I stipulated that I wanted a PG&E-rebate-qualified high-efficiency furnace; namely, we should get a variable-speed, two-stage, high-efficiency furnace of the same capacity. They extolled, variously, four brands, American Standard & Trane, which are the same company and basically the same furnace, Ruud, and Amana. All are rated well by Consumer Reports. They differed on whether additional things were needed. I ended up with bids ranging from $3334 for furnace only to $12070 for furnace, fancy filter, redoing all the ductwork under the house, splitting the house into two zones, and gold-plating a bottle of snake oil.
The first guy was the gold-plated snake oil guy, and the other three were basically sensible geeks. Snake Oil guy was clearly all about sales and pushing a dubious rebate scheme that looked like a big marketing scam to me. One of the geeks took great pains to freak me out about all kinds of code issues, and I ended up concluding that this was a sales-by-fear tactic intended to make me accept a price $2K higher for exactly the same furnace installation. All of them guaranteed to do whatever it takes to pass the inspection at no additional cost, and Code Freak guy was the only one who thought that my ductwork (which is clearly also some PsOS) was fine.
Third was Family Business guy, who actually seemed to know what he was talking about and who wasn't freaky or dogmatic about anything at all, including brand of furnace (Trane or Amana), and who presented all the options at competitive prices, explained the pros and cons, and said it was really up to me. I liked him and had decided it was his bid to lose when the fourth guy arrived. This guy basically said the same thing as everybody else and gave the 2nd lowest price but didn't bother breaking out much detail. At some point I asked him about his accent, and he answered cautiously that he's Iraqi. I replied that I have never voted for this president and never would, and he immediately relaxed, and there followed an interesting exchange about the war and how he's had to move his extended family to Syria. It was an interesting conversation. His heating proposal was reasonable, and he ended up second place in my thinking.
After a long, shivering talk Wednesday night, we decided on Family Business guy and the Amana, whose efficiency has a 96% AFUE rating, vs. 92.x% for all the others. That's a trivial difference except that it qualifies you for a $200 Federal tax credit, plus the Amana costs $700 less than the equivalent models from other brands (at least in the estimates I got) and has a better warranty. Since we have two people with allergies and asthma, three furry critters, and a bunch of friends/family with allergies, we also opted to add the $800 superduper HEPA filter (a Trane CleanEffects, which was $1695 from the snake oil guy).
And then we come to the tricky decisions: ductwork and zoning. First, ductwork:
California requires that you test all ducts and seal leaks any time you do a furnace replacement. In some zones including Oakland, buying a 92%+ furnace exempts you. However, it's still true that leaky, poorly insulated ducts are a bad thing, because they let heat out and pollutants (like mold, and my crawlspace's rat-shitty-dust) in.
Snake Oil guy said this is bad, bad, bad, we need to redo all the duct work; you wouldn't have to, you're exempt, but we really ought to, especially if we're zoning and messing around with all this stuff anyway.
Code Freak guy looked at all the dust and crud that appears in stripes on my old ductwork and said, "That's normal--leaks suck in air, so the insulation filters out the dust and you see dirty areas. It's not big deal, because the insulation filters the stuff. You see this all the time." But he said they could test and fix up leaks for another $600.
Family Business guy said they looked basically okay, but that if we redid them we'd probably get a performance gain about equal to that of the new furnace vs. old, and that doing so would also give us the opportunity to resize and rebalance things so that the house is more evenly heated (we've found that the living room and master bedroom are much colder than the small rooms, which is not surprising given that they're bigger, glassier, and fed by vents exactly the same size as all the other rooms).
Iraqi guy said they're basically okay "but they need some care. We'll check them over and do some re-sealing."
As for zoning, Snake Oil guy of course extolled its virtues and built it right into his price. Code Freak guy said not to bother, it wasn't worth it. Family Business guy said it's nice but not necessary, but then said that he himself has a crappy old furnace like mine in his house, and after he zoned the house, he's been able to put up with it for another 20 years. He didn't think there was a strong case for or against zoning in our house, but said we'd like it if we did it. Iraqi guy said not to bother, because it only really works when the house is divided into distinct areas like a two-flat; with my open-plan, all the heat's going to move everywhere on its own anyway, so it's kind of pointless.
We ended up deciding yes on the ductwork and no on the zoning. All this is costing us $6134, minus a $300 PG&E rebate, a $200 tax credit, and supposedly up to $1K/yr savings in energy use, but we'll see about that. If that savings actually comes through, we'll also get a PG&E discount for reducing our average monthly consumption by whatever percent it is they set as the goal--I think it's 12%, but don't quote me.
Fortunately, Family Business guy had a cancellation for today which meant we're getting our furnace before rather than after the weekend. His guy Jeff is banging away downstairs putting in the furnace now, which he said would take him pretty much all day, and a crew is coming on Tuesday to redo all the ducts. On Monday night I plan to crank the house up to 70-something so we'll make it through another furnace-less day on Tuesday.
Finally, now that the cows are safely outside in the neighbors' pasture, we're looking into a lock for the barn door: I priced out wood-burning stove inserts for our crappy sheet metal fireplace that looks nice but sucks heat out of the house, and we're giving strong consideration to spending just shy of $3K to install one that can heat up 1200-2000 sq ft, or possibly even one size larger. I also looked at gas fireplaces and wood pellet stoves, but it seems to me that with this spiffy new furnace, the heating power of greatest emergency use to us is a backup system works no matter how many utilities have gone out of service. So, gas is out. As for wood pellets, those stoves use motors and electricity. And if I don't have something that takes logs, what am I supposed to do with the huge oak tree that is now a stack of logs under my stairs? Or the big fallen branches on the hill behind my house that look like kindling waiting to happen?
Anyone got opinions on this puppy? http://www.lopistoves.com/product.asp?dept_id=5&sku=34
16 January 2007
Indoor weather report
Last week our furnace began to bite the dust. By the time we got back from a weekend away, it had bitten the dust.
So it's 48 in our house today and 41 in our driveway. I'm frozen despite being dressed in winter fleece pants over long johns, ragg wool socks, winter boots, a turtleneck, and my GoreTex-lined Norwegian sweater.
Our furnace comes on and makes half-hearted attempts to do things for 5-10 minutes every so often, but clearly it's not helping much. I have two guys coming to give estimates today and two more tomorrow, and I hope some obvious conclusion about our options jumps out at us soon. I have a feeling "how soon can you do it?" will end up being a pivotal point when we compare their bids. I'm also hoping that the guy who's now 15 minutes late for the first estimate appointment will see something simple and obvious to fix and get us back in heat for the time being.
I also looked into fireplace inserts, and it sounds like what we need would start around $2500, all told. Probably money well spent, but not necessarily at the same time we're paying to install a new furnace and address god knows how many other problems in the process.
Even Candy seems to appreciate having a blanket over her--V tucked her in with a doubled blanket last night, and she stayed put under it until morning. I retucked her this morning at 8:30, and she hasn't budged since. The cats are snuggling under the comforter.
And here's proof that it's too darned cold in this house: we have flannel sheets, a flannel duvet, and the doubled down comforter on the bed, but even Victoria agreed that we needed the afghan on top, too. Last night I just about went to get my neoprene face mask for skiing, too, except that I would've gotten too cold getting out of bed to go look for it. I even slept through the night without getting up to pee despite having wanted to pee since about 2am. I've heard that it's a bad idea to get in the habit of peeing in the night, because it's a problem that will only get worse over time if you give in to it, so maybe this will be good bladder and sleep training for me.
So it's 48 in our house today and 41 in our driveway. I'm frozen despite being dressed in winter fleece pants over long johns, ragg wool socks, winter boots, a turtleneck, and my GoreTex-lined Norwegian sweater.
Our furnace comes on and makes half-hearted attempts to do things for 5-10 minutes every so often, but clearly it's not helping much. I have two guys coming to give estimates today and two more tomorrow, and I hope some obvious conclusion about our options jumps out at us soon. I have a feeling "how soon can you do it?" will end up being a pivotal point when we compare their bids. I'm also hoping that the guy who's now 15 minutes late for the first estimate appointment will see something simple and obvious to fix and get us back in heat for the time being.
I also looked into fireplace inserts, and it sounds like what we need would start around $2500, all told. Probably money well spent, but not necessarily at the same time we're paying to install a new furnace and address god knows how many other problems in the process.
Even Candy seems to appreciate having a blanket over her--V tucked her in with a doubled blanket last night, and she stayed put under it until morning. I retucked her this morning at 8:30, and she hasn't budged since. The cats are snuggling under the comforter.
And here's proof that it's too darned cold in this house: we have flannel sheets, a flannel duvet, and the doubled down comforter on the bed, but even Victoria agreed that we needed the afghan on top, too. Last night I just about went to get my neoprene face mask for skiing, too, except that I would've gotten too cold getting out of bed to go look for it. I even slept through the night without getting up to pee despite having wanted to pee since about 2am. I've heard that it's a bad idea to get in the habit of peeing in the night, because it's a problem that will only get worse over time if you give in to it, so maybe this will be good bladder and sleep training for me.
A break from smørgåsbord news
Our furnace is kaputt. We can either spend a few hundred on a quick fix or else several to many thousand on a replacement that's probably long overdue. Since it's 40 degrees indoors, both of them seem appealing. Fortunately it's supposed to warm up to 60 outside by Sunday, so we can probably tough it out while we wait for one or the other to happen.
But in the meantime, one of the companies who gave us an estimate has sort of an amusing name, which prompted Victoria (the Mandarin scholar) to comment that it sounded Chinese, and in a quick few exchanges we merged in all our favorites from the Chinese business name hit parade and came up with the ultimate name for a new business, especially if it caters to a Chinese clientele: Lucky Golden Rising Star Dragon Snake Happy Wind Joy Luck Fortune Fish Club. Luckily for anyone wants to start a new business, we're not entrepreneurial types, so we won't be needing a name and I'm not going to run out and trademark it. I'm too busy freezing to death here in my office. Help yourself!
For those who are eager to read the next (overdue) smørgåsbord installment, here's a tidbit: the word "smørgåsbord" effectively means "buffet of lots of yummy little things," but its literal translation is a triple compound that I guess the Chinese would also appreciate: butter-goose-table.
But in the meantime, one of the companies who gave us an estimate has sort of an amusing name, which prompted Victoria (the Mandarin scholar) to comment that it sounded Chinese, and in a quick few exchanges we merged in all our favorites from the Chinese business name hit parade and came up with the ultimate name for a new business, especially if it caters to a Chinese clientele: Lucky Golden Rising Star Dragon Snake Happy Wind Joy Luck Fortune Fish Club. Luckily for anyone wants to start a new business, we're not entrepreneurial types, so we won't be needing a name and I'm not going to run out and trademark it. I'm too busy freezing to death here in my office. Help yourself!
For those who are eager to read the next (overdue) smørgåsbord installment, here's a tidbit: the word "smørgåsbord" effectively means "buffet of lots of yummy little things," but its literal translation is a triple compound that I guess the Chinese would also appreciate: butter-goose-table.
22 July 2006
Whoops!
Sorry about that broken link to the Deck: Before and After, Jr. photo collection. It's fixed now.
It's bloody hot here--too hot to think clearly or accomplish anything. I need to cobble together some kind of swamp-cooler for the baking kitties.
It's bloody hot here--too hot to think clearly or accomplish anything. I need to cobble together some kind of swamp-cooler for the baking kitties.
17 July 2006
Scope-creep happens
After Jon and George and Russ and the guys finished my kitchen, way back in the fall of 2004, George tore out the rotten, ugly, hideous, cheap-ass deck-facsimile that had been his route for supply-hauling and so on for the five months he'd been slaving on my kitchen, and he built me a beautiful redwood and copper deck.
This would be the ultimate scope creep. We'd gone from redoing a kitchen, widening an opening, and redoing dining room, music studio, and entry floors, to doing all that plus tearing out, upgrading, and lighting a deck and major outdoor staircase.
The deck was awful. It was beyond awful; it was scary and hateful. When I bought the house, it was one of the declared "preexisting conditions." There was already a bounty on its everhating head: $6K. Yeah, right, $6K. I started talking to contractors and heard numbers more like $30K, and I decided I could ignore the rotting, hideous deck for a while. But five years had gone by, and Jon and George and Russ and the guys had been tromping up and down on my deck and cursing at my deck and cutting tiles on my deck and stacking old appliances on my deck and heaping debris on my deck for five months more, and it had become apparent that this deck was not only ugly and hideous but a potential liability.
George and I had shared morning coffee nearly every morning for five years, and afternoon beers and whatnot for many of those days, so by now we were family. Since the kitchen was finished and he was ready for a new project, George offered to redo my deck, showed me some sketches, and offered a reasonable estimate of materials, times, rates, and so on. We reached agreement over martinis one night (or rather, I was drinking a martini, and he was having a vodka-vermouth-olive concoction). I took care of the boring legal details, he took my deck books and sketches home to think about, and we were off.
George decided to view this holistically as a project not only of construction but of art, of mind and body, and of moral struggle, so he decided not to involve any cut-rate (not to mention illegal) day laborers. He decided to do all the work himself, including digging out the hillside as needed to have a single door-level deck and remove the steps and level change; including digging holes for piers and mixing and hauling concrete for piers; including constructing a whole new, higher, stronger retaining wall running a larger portion of the perimeter. We decided to take Before and After George pictures to go with the Before and After deck pictures, since he planned to improve his own physique along with my deck. The Before pictures are in the photo collection, but we forgot to take the Afters, unfortunately.
I helped with a bit of the shovelwork, but nothing significant, and the design process was collaborative, involving many sessions of us staring at what was done so far and discussing how next to proceed, but on the whole, this deck was a work of George Lawson art.
Did I mention that George is an artist?
Google him, and you will find a long (electronic) paper trail of his ongoing career as an artist. Eventually you'll land at his site and see his newest paintings, which were inspired by the enthusiastic reception that a painting of his received at my kitchen-warming (Smørgåsbord V: Norway and Sweden) in January 2005. I've hung two of his works, tangram dancers and turtles, in my music studio, and you'll see these in my Before:After, Jr: The Deck photo collection.
His new work is exciting. I want the Japanese firemen.
It was also a remarkable act of friendship. We grew closer, as his work grew depressing as the weather grew colder, and my software job grew depressing (because we were going through a rough spell at work). Many is the time we slurped nasty protein shakes for lunch together, dug holes together, and commiserated over our miserables states of employ. Our conversational arch over the four months (or so) that it took to redo the deck covered the nature and purpose of art, daily politics, the disastrous 2004 elections, food, life, love, and everything else that mattered then and still matters now.
We watched the series of presidential and vice-presidential debates together, always over the requisite food and drink. One dark night, George W. Bush the Despicable won reelection. As Ohio's electoral votes stood between us and doomsday, George even persuaded me to give him a haircut, and I can at least say for myself that his head looked better for the next six weeks or so than my nation did.
Back to art, my house has a George Lawson original on the west side. It's still waiting for its crowning glory, a promised redwood sculpture, perhaps of a napping cat, to be perched on the curiously unfinished-looking post at the bottom of the staircase. It's also waiting for a signature. When these are installed, we'll mix martinis and vodka concoctions and dedicate not just a beautiful work of construction and art but another wonderful branch of my family. I'll always have an extra chop on the grill for George.
This would be the ultimate scope creep. We'd gone from redoing a kitchen, widening an opening, and redoing dining room, music studio, and entry floors, to doing all that plus tearing out, upgrading, and lighting a deck and major outdoor staircase.
The deck was awful. It was beyond awful; it was scary and hateful. When I bought the house, it was one of the declared "preexisting conditions." There was already a bounty on its everhating head: $6K. Yeah, right, $6K. I started talking to contractors and heard numbers more like $30K, and I decided I could ignore the rotting, hideous deck for a while. But five years had gone by, and Jon and George and Russ and the guys had been tromping up and down on my deck and cursing at my deck and cutting tiles on my deck and stacking old appliances on my deck and heaping debris on my deck for five months more, and it had become apparent that this deck was not only ugly and hideous but a potential liability.
George and I had shared morning coffee nearly every morning for five years, and afternoon beers and whatnot for many of those days, so by now we were family. Since the kitchen was finished and he was ready for a new project, George offered to redo my deck, showed me some sketches, and offered a reasonable estimate of materials, times, rates, and so on. We reached agreement over martinis one night (or rather, I was drinking a martini, and he was having a vodka-vermouth-olive concoction). I took care of the boring legal details, he took my deck books and sketches home to think about, and we were off.
George decided to view this holistically as a project not only of construction but of art, of mind and body, and of moral struggle, so he decided not to involve any cut-rate (not to mention illegal) day laborers. He decided to do all the work himself, including digging out the hillside as needed to have a single door-level deck and remove the steps and level change; including digging holes for piers and mixing and hauling concrete for piers; including constructing a whole new, higher, stronger retaining wall running a larger portion of the perimeter. We decided to take Before and After George pictures to go with the Before and After deck pictures, since he planned to improve his own physique along with my deck. The Before pictures are in the photo collection, but we forgot to take the Afters, unfortunately.
I helped with a bit of the shovelwork, but nothing significant, and the design process was collaborative, involving many sessions of us staring at what was done so far and discussing how next to proceed, but on the whole, this deck was a work of George Lawson art.
Did I mention that George is an artist?
Google him, and you will find a long (electronic) paper trail of his ongoing career as an artist. Eventually you'll land at his site and see his newest paintings, which were inspired by the enthusiastic reception that a painting of his received at my kitchen-warming (Smørgåsbord V: Norway and Sweden) in January 2005. I've hung two of his works, tangram dancers and turtles, in my music studio, and you'll see these in my Before:After, Jr: The Deck photo collection.
His new work is exciting. I want the Japanese firemen.
It was also a remarkable act of friendship. We grew closer, as his work grew depressing as the weather grew colder, and my software job grew depressing (because we were going through a rough spell at work). Many is the time we slurped nasty protein shakes for lunch together, dug holes together, and commiserated over our miserables states of employ. Our conversational arch over the four months (or so) that it took to redo the deck covered the nature and purpose of art, daily politics, the disastrous 2004 elections, food, life, love, and everything else that mattered then and still matters now.
We watched the series of presidential and vice-presidential debates together, always over the requisite food and drink. One dark night, George W. Bush the Despicable won reelection. As Ohio's electoral votes stood between us and doomsday, George even persuaded me to give him a haircut, and I can at least say for myself that his head looked better for the next six weeks or so than my nation did.
Back to art, my house has a George Lawson original on the west side. It's still waiting for its crowning glory, a promised redwood sculpture, perhaps of a napping cat, to be perched on the curiously unfinished-looking post at the bottom of the staircase. It's also waiting for a signature. When these are installed, we'll mix martinis and vodka concoctions and dedicate not just a beautiful work of construction and art but another wonderful branch of my family. I'll always have an extra chop on the grill for George.
20 March 2006
Reading law at the courthouse
I spent the day at the courthouse reading the Nolo Press book on neighbor law today. Why?
The lot next to my house has "red-tagged" seven trees, meaning the owners have applied for a permit to remove them, most likely because they mean to build a house there. Naturally my neighbors and I have opinions about both intentions, and now we have to step through the city's hoops to express our views on same.
I was at the courthouse because I had been summoned for jury duty. I was supposed to call in last night after 5pm, a fact which I remembered at 9:35am today; had I done so, I would have known I was supposed to report to the courthouse at 8:30am. I then attempted to call the jury room, shower, and dress all at once, eventually succeeding at the tasks sequentially in the above order. When I reached the a live human at the jury room and explained that I'd overslept, she chuckled in a way that suggested sympathy and explained that I would need to call back after 11am to see if I was needed in the afternoon, and if not I'd be excused. Let's hear it for kind jury-room staff.
I called back at 11am and was indeed told to report by 1pm. I did so and waited around through various announcements issued in triplicate, a boring orientation video apparently intended to relieve a virulent strain of jury anxiety of which I was previously unaware, and hours of people's cell phones disturbing the public peace. Eventually at 3:35pm we were all dismissed. The court clerk who dismissed us told us to go buy lottery tickets, because this was our lucky day: our case had just been settled; had it not, the trial was expected to last six to eight weeks or more.
I asked her, "Was it expected to be an interesting six to eight weeks, at least?"
She look surprised by my question, then grinned and said, "Oh, yeah! It would have been interesting, all right!"
Anyone know which case was in the Hayward (California) Hall of Justice, Dept 519, on the afternoon of 20 March 2006?
The lot next to my house has "red-tagged" seven trees, meaning the owners have applied for a permit to remove them, most likely because they mean to build a house there. Naturally my neighbors and I have opinions about both intentions, and now we have to step through the city's hoops to express our views on same.
I was at the courthouse because I had been summoned for jury duty. I was supposed to call in last night after 5pm, a fact which I remembered at 9:35am today; had I done so, I would have known I was supposed to report to the courthouse at 8:30am. I then attempted to call the jury room, shower, and dress all at once, eventually succeeding at the tasks sequentially in the above order. When I reached the a live human at the jury room and explained that I'd overslept, she chuckled in a way that suggested sympathy and explained that I would need to call back after 11am to see if I was needed in the afternoon, and if not I'd be excused. Let's hear it for kind jury-room staff.
I called back at 11am and was indeed told to report by 1pm. I did so and waited around through various announcements issued in triplicate, a boring orientation video apparently intended to relieve a virulent strain of jury anxiety of which I was previously unaware, and hours of people's cell phones disturbing the public peace. Eventually at 3:35pm we were all dismissed. The court clerk who dismissed us told us to go buy lottery tickets, because this was our lucky day: our case had just been settled; had it not, the trial was expected to last six to eight weeks or more.
I asked her, "Was it expected to be an interesting six to eight weeks, at least?"
She look surprised by my question, then grinned and said, "Oh, yeah! It would have been interesting, all right!"
Anyone know which case was in the Hayward (California) Hall of Justice, Dept 519, on the afternoon of 20 March 2006?
28 September 2004
Final pictures
Somehow, moving back into the kitchen, music room, and dining room; enjoying home-cooked meals; and cleaning up the entire first floor post-construction has been even more time-consuming than camping in the construction zone was. But I finally found a free hour or so to put together a final set of Before and After pictures for the kitchen project, which is now complete! See the top link in the Photo Collections at the right.
28 August 2004
The remains of the project
This week, Jon's been hiking somewhere, and George put in a few half days doing some little stuff. He sealed the backsplash, put a second coat of sealer on the floor, installed oak trim around the hearth, and did some cleanup.
Jon'll be back on the job on Monday. I leave tomorrow for another week in North Carolina, and I hope that when I get back, the place will be, as Jon promises, unrecognizable.
The big things that remain are to install the hardwood flooring in the music room, sand and refinish the hardwood in the dining room, tile the entry way, and install baseboards in all of the above. Jon ought to be able to get a big jump on these while I'm gone.
There's also a jillion little things. Here's another of those "Honey-Do" lists, this time written by me and Jon, for Jon and George. George has already knocked some of his off.
George
Jon'll be back on the job on Monday. I leave tomorrow for another week in North Carolina, and I hope that when I get back, the place will be, as Jon promises, unrecognizable.
The big things that remain are to install the hardwood flooring in the music room, sand and refinish the hardwood in the dining room, tile the entry way, and install baseboards in all of the above. Jon ought to be able to get a big jump on these while I'm gone.
There's also a jillion little things. Here's another of those "Honey-Do" lists, this time written by me and Jon, for Jon and George. George has already knocked some of his off.
George
- install glass in cabinets
- seal backsplash
- outlet plates
- outlet plate for junction box at old subpanel
- run speaker cables from living room to music and dining rooms (which will involve running conduit outside the house under the part of the living room that's cantilevered over my carport, into the crawlspace, and up through the floors)
- finish outlets including switch in upstairs bedroom that's wired backwards (or screwed in upside-down, whichever)
- clean back deck
- rest of handles
- trim around hearth, under sill
- install knife racks (I had an 18" rack and a 12" rack, and we decided two 18" racks would look better, so I had to order a second rack--it has just arrived)
- dining, music room ceiling lights
- trim piece at threshold
- phone jack
- pot rack
- glass shelves-->bar
- finish ceiling @ hood
- paint
- seal floor 2d coat
- hardwood
- tile
- scribe
- dishwasher door squeak
- get a shelf for under lazy susan garbage?
A kitchen is born
Last week, Jon and George got my kitchen working at last. George finished up the undercabinet light valances, most of the other misc. bits of trim, outlets, and switches, and Jon hooked up my faucets, disposal, drains, dishwasher, and refrigerator. On Friday, the two last big things remained: the range and the hood. These were big in more ways than one.
First, the range presented a surprise. Oakland code requires that gas hookups be made in an adjacent cabinet, so that you can switch off the gas without pulling out the range. Wolf design requires that gas hookups be made behind the range. So Jon had to replumb the gas line--argh!
Next, the range is huge and heavy. It has legs in front but giant casters in the back, so that somewhat normal humans can move the thing, but it's 36" wide (just under a meter) and therefore had to enter the kitchen sideways. That meant that Jon and George had to roll it as close as possible on a dolly, then ease it onto cardboard sheets, then sort of slide it over the cardboard sheets until it was far enough in that they could finish the job on the rear casters. It's a good thing it didn't have to go very far.
The hood presented some challenges of its own. I'll spare you the details of how complicated it was to install the inner duct into the ceiling duct inside the chimney while attached to the fan-and-damper mechanism and while attached to the underside of the hood (the part you see when gazing up into it while cooking), because I'm only vaguely aware of all the little gotchas, but it involved lots of things that all had to be done first, so that what they ended up with was a large, clumsy, intricate contraption that one person had to raise up into the ceiling ductwork while the other tried to find access to the screws that would secure them.
I stayed in my office most of the time.
The hood is supposed to extend to 30-36" (just under a meter) from the cooking surface, and it was right at 30". The problem is that 30" off the stovetop (even given my higher-than-usual 37" counter and stove height) is about 6" below the top of my head. We all agreed that it was way too low--it looked monstrous, dominated the line of sight, and was perfectly positioned to do skull damage to anyone of Vangian height.
Jon and George suggested taking out the 12" chimney section and hang it directly from the ceiling, at 42".
I called Vent-A-Hood and explained my predicament to their rep. He said that, especially over a grill, it really did need to be in that 30-36" range for a 100% capture of all the smoke, vapor, and grease. He suggested that I could order a custom-fabricated shorter chimney extension, but he didn't know how much that would cost (presumably a lot more than the $280 standard 12"er) and did know it would be at least 6-8 weeks to get it. I asked how bad he really thought it would be to move it up to 42". He said that, off the record, he thought it would be fine, so I gave Jon and George the go-ahead to take out the chimney section.
An hour or so later, it was done. I wish I had pictures of George holding the whole thing from below, both arms overhead, looking a lot like Atlas, while Jon maneuvered around him to screw the thing into the ceiling, but I'm pretty sure they both would have killed me if I'd gotten out my camera at that moment. Instead I took a turn at holding one side of the hood so George could shake some circulation back into one arm. About the time I should have moved to the other side, Jon had finished up overhead, and George dropped his arms in relief.
At this point, Jon had to rush off--he was already late getting home to leave on a week's vacation hiking in the Sierras--and while George did some clean-up, I made my first meal in the kitchen. I was rushing off to an emergency opera gig--my friend Alicia had gotten flu, so I was sight-reading Gounod's Romeo and Juliet in Walnut Creek--so I didn't have time for much, but I did get out a skillet, some butter, and some eggs, and I made me and George the best darned plates of scrambled eggs I've had in a long time.
I spent most of last weekend moving into the kitchen. Only one size of drawer/door handles had arrived in time to be installed last week, so most of my doors and drawers have blue masking tape handles for now, but the kitchen was fully functional at last.
In a later post, I'll wax ecstatic about how nice it is to cook in this gorgeous kitchen. For now, I leave it to your imagination. Place yourself in these pictures:
Moved in!
First, the range presented a surprise. Oakland code requires that gas hookups be made in an adjacent cabinet, so that you can switch off the gas without pulling out the range. Wolf design requires that gas hookups be made behind the range. So Jon had to replumb the gas line--argh!
Next, the range is huge and heavy. It has legs in front but giant casters in the back, so that somewhat normal humans can move the thing, but it's 36" wide (just under a meter) and therefore had to enter the kitchen sideways. That meant that Jon and George had to roll it as close as possible on a dolly, then ease it onto cardboard sheets, then sort of slide it over the cardboard sheets until it was far enough in that they could finish the job on the rear casters. It's a good thing it didn't have to go very far.
The hood presented some challenges of its own. I'll spare you the details of how complicated it was to install the inner duct into the ceiling duct inside the chimney while attached to the fan-and-damper mechanism and while attached to the underside of the hood (the part you see when gazing up into it while cooking), because I'm only vaguely aware of all the little gotchas, but it involved lots of things that all had to be done first, so that what they ended up with was a large, clumsy, intricate contraption that one person had to raise up into the ceiling ductwork while the other tried to find access to the screws that would secure them.
I stayed in my office most of the time.
The hood is supposed to extend to 30-36" (just under a meter) from the cooking surface, and it was right at 30". The problem is that 30" off the stovetop (even given my higher-than-usual 37" counter and stove height) is about 6" below the top of my head. We all agreed that it was way too low--it looked monstrous, dominated the line of sight, and was perfectly positioned to do skull damage to anyone of Vangian height.
Jon and George suggested taking out the 12" chimney section and hang it directly from the ceiling, at 42".
I called Vent-A-Hood and explained my predicament to their rep. He said that, especially over a grill, it really did need to be in that 30-36" range for a 100% capture of all the smoke, vapor, and grease. He suggested that I could order a custom-fabricated shorter chimney extension, but he didn't know how much that would cost (presumably a lot more than the $280 standard 12"er) and did know it would be at least 6-8 weeks to get it. I asked how bad he really thought it would be to move it up to 42". He said that, off the record, he thought it would be fine, so I gave Jon and George the go-ahead to take out the chimney section.
An hour or so later, it was done. I wish I had pictures of George holding the whole thing from below, both arms overhead, looking a lot like Atlas, while Jon maneuvered around him to screw the thing into the ceiling, but I'm pretty sure they both would have killed me if I'd gotten out my camera at that moment. Instead I took a turn at holding one side of the hood so George could shake some circulation back into one arm. About the time I should have moved to the other side, Jon had finished up overhead, and George dropped his arms in relief.
At this point, Jon had to rush off--he was already late getting home to leave on a week's vacation hiking in the Sierras--and while George did some clean-up, I made my first meal in the kitchen. I was rushing off to an emergency opera gig--my friend Alicia had gotten flu, so I was sight-reading Gounod's Romeo and Juliet in Walnut Creek--so I didn't have time for much, but I did get out a skillet, some butter, and some eggs, and I made me and George the best darned plates of scrambled eggs I've had in a long time.
I spent most of last weekend moving into the kitchen. Only one size of drawer/door handles had arrived in time to be installed last week, so most of my doors and drawers have blue masking tape handles for now, but the kitchen was fully functional at last.
In a later post, I'll wax ecstatic about how nice it is to cook in this gorgeous kitchen. For now, I leave it to your imagination. Place yourself in these pictures:
Moved in!
17 August 2004
Let's cut to the chase
I love my contractor.
I almost can't believe Jon's fastidiousness. It has really come out in his tilework for the backsplash. Every time he comes to an outlet or switch, he makes incredibly fussy, perfect cuts around it, even though the edges of the tiling will be covered by plates. Each time the backsplash turns a corner, he does beautiful mitred cuts to match the tile edges up, and then he picks up the pattern on the new plane by repeating the fractional tiles at the edge of the previous plane. Look at pictures to see what I mean: whatever part of the diamond is on the left, he repeats on the right, so that each corner has perfect symmetry. He also lays the pattern out such that it's perfectly centered on whatever is logically the centerpoint of the wall. See the picture over the sink: there is a column of whole tiles perfectly centered in the frame created by the cabinetry, and the pattern goes out from that center.
Yesterday I came home from work to find that he'd almost finished the backsplash along the back (sink) wall. He had one tile with a curved corner cut-out to wrap around the higher bar-top, and the margin between the tile and the granite was maybe half again bigger than the usual grout margin. He said to me, "I might have cut that one corner a little wide. It's a little bit too far off the granite. I'll redo that if you want me to."
He was right about it being a smidgin too wide, but in the context--a backsplash tile that is under a cabinet and will probably be blocked from view by a telephone or something in real life--it didn't seem like a problem. I said, "I'll leave it up to you to decide, Jon; I'm okay with it either way."
He walked in, looked at it one more time, and said, "Aaagghh--it's too wide. I'm going to fix it!" With that, he ripped the offending tile off the wall and scraped off the thinset. The man is fussier than I am!
The last activity yesterday was for George to put the first layer of lacquer on the kitchen floor. I've chosen a lacquer called "Wet Look," which gives the richest, brightest, shiniest color, to maximize the color and texture of the slate. The floor looks amazing.
I came home today to find Jon's beautiful, completed backsplash, with all but the newest section grouted. The intricacy of it is already a thing of beauty, but I can't wait to see it fully grouted and lacquered. See it yourself in the:
Before
Preparing for chaos
Demolition and chaos
One month in
Still later
Two months in
Progress!
George has installed about half of the switches and outlets and the rest of the light valances are now in place. A few more scribe bits need to go in around the edges, and the glass (now resting in the living room) needs to be put in, and then the cabinets will be done, except for the handles, which should come in Thursday or Friday.
George is off tomorrow, but Russell is coming in, and Jon plans for them to get the big old hood installed, along with the range, refrigerator, faucets, and if time the dishwasher. His goal is to have the kitchen functional before he leaves for a week hiking in the Sierras. It's hard to believe that by this weekend I might actually be moving back into the kitchen. What a luxury to have a full, functioning kitchen again after all this time!
I wonder if I'll remember how to buy normal groceries?
Cutting to that promised chase, my point is this: I am fortunate indeed. Most people hate their contractors by this time. I was a little worried that I would, too--at the very least, I worried that I would be at wit's end handling delays and stupid little mixups. I worried more about how I would deal with Jon if he did something awful or seemed to be cheating me in some way. I did not want to have to yell at a friend or, even worse, start playing legal games (which is part of why I went to the trouble of having my lawyer friends next door vet the contract).
Jon himself warned me that by this point in the project I would be so sick of seeing him, his mess, and all the delays that I would want to strangle him, and he would probably want to strangle me. I'm a project manager. I know that he was right: odds were that we'd be good and sick of each other by now. But the truth is, his work is so good, meticulous, and tasteful, I just want to hug him most days. Several times we've sat down with a glass of wine at the end of the day and enjoyed a good talk about music, or life, or whatever. He's a total sweetheart, he's doing a beautiful job, and I'm a ridiculously lucky remodeling client and friend.
I almost can't believe Jon's fastidiousness. It has really come out in his tilework for the backsplash. Every time he comes to an outlet or switch, he makes incredibly fussy, perfect cuts around it, even though the edges of the tiling will be covered by plates. Each time the backsplash turns a corner, he does beautiful mitred cuts to match the tile edges up, and then he picks up the pattern on the new plane by repeating the fractional tiles at the edge of the previous plane. Look at pictures to see what I mean: whatever part of the diamond is on the left, he repeats on the right, so that each corner has perfect symmetry. He also lays the pattern out such that it's perfectly centered on whatever is logically the centerpoint of the wall. See the picture over the sink: there is a column of whole tiles perfectly centered in the frame created by the cabinetry, and the pattern goes out from that center.
Yesterday I came home from work to find that he'd almost finished the backsplash along the back (sink) wall. He had one tile with a curved corner cut-out to wrap around the higher bar-top, and the margin between the tile and the granite was maybe half again bigger than the usual grout margin. He said to me, "I might have cut that one corner a little wide. It's a little bit too far off the granite. I'll redo that if you want me to."
He was right about it being a smidgin too wide, but in the context--a backsplash tile that is under a cabinet and will probably be blocked from view by a telephone or something in real life--it didn't seem like a problem. I said, "I'll leave it up to you to decide, Jon; I'm okay with it either way."
He walked in, looked at it one more time, and said, "Aaagghh--it's too wide. I'm going to fix it!" With that, he ripped the offending tile off the wall and scraped off the thinset. The man is fussier than I am!
The last activity yesterday was for George to put the first layer of lacquer on the kitchen floor. I've chosen a lacquer called "Wet Look," which gives the richest, brightest, shiniest color, to maximize the color and texture of the slate. The floor looks amazing.
I came home today to find Jon's beautiful, completed backsplash, with all but the newest section grouted. The intricacy of it is already a thing of beauty, but I can't wait to see it fully grouted and lacquered. See it yourself in the:
Newest pictures!
Almost there!Old pictures
Two and a half monthsBefore
Preparing for chaos
Demolition and chaos
One month in
Still later
Two months in
Progress!
George has installed about half of the switches and outlets and the rest of the light valances are now in place. A few more scribe bits need to go in around the edges, and the glass (now resting in the living room) needs to be put in, and then the cabinets will be done, except for the handles, which should come in Thursday or Friday.
George is off tomorrow, but Russell is coming in, and Jon plans for them to get the big old hood installed, along with the range, refrigerator, faucets, and if time the dishwasher. His goal is to have the kitchen functional before he leaves for a week hiking in the Sierras. It's hard to believe that by this weekend I might actually be moving back into the kitchen. What a luxury to have a full, functioning kitchen again after all this time!
I wonder if I'll remember how to buy normal groceries?
Cutting to that promised chase, my point is this: I am fortunate indeed. Most people hate their contractors by this time. I was a little worried that I would, too--at the very least, I worried that I would be at wit's end handling delays and stupid little mixups. I worried more about how I would deal with Jon if he did something awful or seemed to be cheating me in some way. I did not want to have to yell at a friend or, even worse, start playing legal games (which is part of why I went to the trouble of having my lawyer friends next door vet the contract).
Jon himself warned me that by this point in the project I would be so sick of seeing him, his mess, and all the delays that I would want to strangle him, and he would probably want to strangle me. I'm a project manager. I know that he was right: odds were that we'd be good and sick of each other by now. But the truth is, his work is so good, meticulous, and tasteful, I just want to hug him most days. Several times we've sat down with a glass of wine at the end of the day and enjoyed a good talk about music, or life, or whatever. He's a total sweetheart, he's doing a beautiful job, and I'm a ridiculously lucky remodeling client and friend.
13 August 2004
Self-medicating
David, my violinist, has been incredibly patient about this whole ordeal. (Doesn't everybody have a violinist?) (Just kidding. He's my housemate who plays violin, and he's the cats' beloved uncle.) He has some of the same incentive I do--that we'll have an amazing kitchen (and dining room and music room) when it's all done--but as my tenant, he shouldn't really have to put up with this kind of crap. He pays rent for a livable living space, and that's not exactly what it's been around here lately. Before the work started, we agreed on a reduction in rent to acknowledge his higher costs for eating out, buying ready-to-eat groceries, and so on, but still, it's a pain, and he's been a saint about it.
Recently, though, David commented that it's been getting harder. He'd expected it to get easier as we start to see it looking more like a kitchen, but he's found that it just gets harder.
I, on the other hand, am finding that it's getting easier as the end draws nearer. I suppose it's partly because now I can see that it will end some day--see it, not just know it--and partly because it's exciting to see how beautifully it's all turning out.
I think I'm also getting more used to camping in the house, and I've drastically lowered my culinary expectations for the time being. My main gourmet effort these days is to make many, many pots of coffee for Jon, George, and me. I eat lots of salads (assembled in the loo-kitchenette) and cold leftover grilled meats, and on weekends for a special treat I scramble eggs on the campstove. I've gotten in a habit of hard-boiling a batch of eggs for the rest of the week's breakfasts, and lunches I just sort of scrounge from cheese, cold-cuts, and so on. If I do eat out or pick up take-out, I make sure to order too much food so that I'll have leftovers, and believe me, that's pretty exciting.
The real difference, though, might be alcohol.
I remember an episode of M*A*S*H whose conceit was that a MovieTone News reporter was filming a slice of life at the 4077th. He asked Hawkeye (or was it the Padre?) whether the MASHers drank too much. The response was something like, "You should be asking, do we drink enough?" His quip makes sense to me now.
As I wrote a while back, my colleague Katrina in Boston suggested that I should infuse vodka with some of those berries.
And when you're "cooking" in a half bathroom and salads with leftover grilled meat or reheated Thai are fine dining, you need a glass of wine, that's all there is to it. When I bought the plastic-jug vodka to make the Montclairberry stuff, a new brand of... wait for it... wine in a box caught my eye, and I thought, "Why not?" It seemed about right--camping wine for camping cooking in my construction zone. I'm eating weird things off paper plates, when I'm lucky. This is a time for alcohol on tap, not wine snobbery. I bought three boxes--a Black Box Chardonnay, a Black Box Merlot, and a Handy (white box) Shiraz. I put the Chardonnay in the fridge, and the other two I put upstairs on my bathroom counter. I know--wine ten feet from my bed doesn't sound like such a healthy thing, but this is temporarily The Apartment.
It's not bad stuff. Really, it's not.
So last week, after David and I had been commiserating about the situation, I pointed out to him that he wasn't drinking enough. With that, I drew him a glass of box wine, and we toasted the much-awaited day that we have a real kitchen again.
As for the rest of you, you really ought to plan a visit to come taste Frozen Montclairberry Cosmos soon, while the bottle lasts. Bring take-out for extra credit.
Recently, though, David commented that it's been getting harder. He'd expected it to get easier as we start to see it looking more like a kitchen, but he's found that it just gets harder.
I, on the other hand, am finding that it's getting easier as the end draws nearer. I suppose it's partly because now I can see that it will end some day--see it, not just know it--and partly because it's exciting to see how beautifully it's all turning out.
I think I'm also getting more used to camping in the house, and I've drastically lowered my culinary expectations for the time being. My main gourmet effort these days is to make many, many pots of coffee for Jon, George, and me. I eat lots of salads (assembled in the loo-kitchenette) and cold leftover grilled meats, and on weekends for a special treat I scramble eggs on the campstove. I've gotten in a habit of hard-boiling a batch of eggs for the rest of the week's breakfasts, and lunches I just sort of scrounge from cheese, cold-cuts, and so on. If I do eat out or pick up take-out, I make sure to order too much food so that I'll have leftovers, and believe me, that's pretty exciting.
The real difference, though, might be alcohol.
I remember an episode of M*A*S*H whose conceit was that a MovieTone News reporter was filming a slice of life at the 4077th. He asked Hawkeye (or was it the Padre?) whether the MASHers drank too much. The response was something like, "You should be asking, do we drink enough?" His quip makes sense to me now.
As I wrote a while back, my colleague Katrina in Boston suggested that I should infuse vodka with some of those berries.
(Raspberries? blackberries? Turns out there's a zillion indistinguishable [to me] species of the genus whateverus, and while mine look more like raspberries than many of the other choices, supposedly raspberries don't grow in this half of the country. I'm ready to throw in the towel. I'm calling them Montclairberries until somebody else figures it out. Calling all botanists!)After a few weeks, I had a rich, dark purplish stuff that I strained off into a different bottle and threw in the freezer. So now it's a hard purple slush, and every so often I urge a few inches of it into a glass and enjoy some kind of Montclairberry Cosmo Slurpee which tastes so good I then have to urge a few more inches of it into my glass...
And when you're "cooking" in a half bathroom and salads with leftover grilled meat or reheated Thai are fine dining, you need a glass of wine, that's all there is to it. When I bought the plastic-jug vodka to make the Montclairberry stuff, a new brand of... wait for it... wine in a box caught my eye, and I thought, "Why not?" It seemed about right--camping wine for camping cooking in my construction zone. I'm eating weird things off paper plates, when I'm lucky. This is a time for alcohol on tap, not wine snobbery. I bought three boxes--a Black Box Chardonnay, a Black Box Merlot, and a Handy (white box) Shiraz. I put the Chardonnay in the fridge, and the other two I put upstairs on my bathroom counter. I know--wine ten feet from my bed doesn't sound like such a healthy thing, but this is temporarily The Apartment.
It's not bad stuff. Really, it's not.
So last week, after David and I had been commiserating about the situation, I pointed out to him that he wasn't drinking enough. With that, I drew him a glass of box wine, and we toasted the much-awaited day that we have a real kitchen again.
As for the rest of you, you really ought to plan a visit to come taste Frozen Montclairberry Cosmos soon, while the bottle lasts. Bring take-out for extra credit.
Granite and ranges and tiles, oh my!
Jon was right when he said things would start seeming fast--they sure have. I've been a bad blogger again/still, so I have some catching up to do.
Wednesday two of the Granite Guys came back to finish up the granite work, cutting out the bar sink, drilling faucet, airgap, and soap dispenser holes, fitting the other slabs, fitting the window sill, and gluing all of them down. Jon, meanwhile, was scraping, sanding, and staining the side pieces of the wooden fireplace frame, since the granite would be placed right over the top of them, replacing the front wooden pieces but not completely covering the messed-up side pieces. (This is too hard to explain without a martini and a lot more effort, so just look closely at the before and after pictures if you really care.)
Speaking of pictures...
Preparing for chaos
Demolition and chaos
One month in
Still later
Two months in
Progress!
A few hours later, while Granite Guys were getting started on the fireplace, Delivery Guys rolled up in an eighteen-wheeler to deliver the range, hood, and microwave. Of course, I couldn't be happy with a range normal humans could lift; I had to get the massive 36" Wolf complete with grill, which weighs approximately a gazillion pounds (about a jillion kilos, for my European readership) and is awkward as hell. Somehow, through, three guys and a handtruck had rolled that sucker down the street and up my steep driveway and humped it up twenty-five steps and around four corners to my frontdoor. It wasn't as awkward a shape as the massive fridge Jon and Manuel had struggled with several months ago, and they'd removed every last removable part to get the weight down, but we were still impressed at how handily Delivery Guys handled it. A dozen trips later, they'd also carried up the massive hood, the little teeny microwave, and all the miscellaneous range parts they'd set aside.
In a few more hours, Granite Guys finished up with the fireplace, and Jon sent them on their way. While they were clumping down the front stairs, though, I thought to double-check that the cover for the natural gas log starter valve doohickey (just look at the pictures, please) would fit in the hole they'd drilled in the hearth, and it didn't. I suppose it wouldn't be tragic just to leave that doohickey out of the picture, but Gjetost enjoys lifting it with her little paws and tossing it around. Jon called Granite Guy the Blonder back up. He said he'd already his largest hole-saw drill bit, but after about 15 minutes of going at it from slightly different crooked angles, he'd managed to widen it just enough to get the doohickey to fit. I'm sure Gjetost will appreciate it. The fireplace looks spectacular in granite--a tremendous improvement over the icky 1970s tile that seemed to cry out for avocado appliances and a harvest gold Princess telephone.
George didn't come in at all Wednesday; his car had crapped out despite the measures taken Tuesday. It turned out to be recall work, no charge. He hadn't gotten the recall notices, since he's moved too much. Having lived at five addresses in the last ten years (and eight home phone numbers in the last eleven), I know how that feels. There are still some orchestras sending W-2 forms to my previous address in San Francisco. I bought this project (I mean house) five years ago!
Meanwhile Wednesday, Jon finished up the kitchen floor tilework and a few other odds and ends.
Thursday I worked at the office, so I can't do blow-by-blow, but when I got home, I found a painted kitchen, a grouted floor, and some wicked impressive tile-cuts.
Oh, yes: grout. Remember my mentioning the countless details that I wouldn't have even thought of, much less gotten right? On Wednesday, Jon had brought in some grout color samples to look at, and he was recommending that we go with a dark, muddyish green. At first I was appalled. I figure the goal for grout is that it disappear in neutralness, providing just enough border to neutralize color changes from tile to tile but not to call any attention to its own color. Green grout, even the muddyish green of the sample, seemed way too colorful. I thought we should do a dark grey, like the one I'd used upstairs between the Indian Peacock slate tiles. But when we put the grout-color sample stick thingy between a couple of the Brazilian slate tiles, I could see what Jon meant: in this context, that muddy green is what disappeared. The grey I would have chosen was way too bright and colorful. I went with Jon's advice.
I was both pleased and chagrined to find upon my return home Thursday night that Jon was right. The muddy green looks great--it disappears and becomes the greyesque noncolor I wanted. Actual grey wouldn't have worked. It's really annoying, though, that Jon is right so often.
About those tilecuts: Slate tile is stone. You can only cut it with a diamond-blade in a wetsaw and a lot of patience. These suckers look like table-saws with big old cutting wheels. They're no jigsaw. So if you need weird-shaped cuts, you've got some figuring to do. I've done it, to get those funny little cutouts to go around toilets and faucets and so forth, and it ain't easy. So imagine my delight at getting to watch Jon figure out how to cut beautiful arcs to go around the curved base under the curved corner shelves. Basically you have to cut out the rough shape as well as you can, and then make little radial cuts to the edge as well as you can, break off the little chunklets, and then sort of rub the edge against the spinning blade to smooth it out as well as you can. Pain in the neck!
So Jon did several of those, and I was pretty much ready to bow down as it was. Then I come home last night and find a little stack of tiles that have rectangular cut-outs to go around the outlets, and I'm done for. I have no idea how he could fiddle around to get those right and not wanted to slash his wrists or at least mine. Look closely at those pictures of the backsplash, folks. There's some might impressive saw-work. Oh, and you can't see it, but where the tiles meet at the corners, he's mitred them, freehand, just holding the tiles at the right angle to the blade. He eye-balled bloody mitre-cuts! I can't do a decent mitre cut on a wooden baseboard with a mitre box! This man knows what he's doing.
Today, Jon did the backsplash behind the bar and along the pantry wall. Look closely at those pictures; he came up with a clever way to create a border where the backsplash stops (and figured out a priori where to stop the backsplash).
Meanwhile George installed under-cabinet lights, then put in little baseboards behind the refrigerator, dishwasher, and range. Next he started putting in the light valances (the trim bits that go under the cabinets to cover the under-cabinet lights). They're installed at a little gap from the doors for a cool floating effect.
Jon had an odd idea to install the upper trim bits (essentially these act like baseboards between the cabinets and ceiling) at a similar gap from the ceiling as from the tops of the doors for a subtle but nifty effect where all the upper cabinets seem to float near the ceiling instead of looking attached, instead of installing them flush against the ceiling, which is more normal. It's a funky little detail that I wouldn't have thought of or expected to like, and Kyla (his wife, who was over to do some computer stuff with me) didn't like it, but when we looked at it both ways, I decided to go for it. I got up on the step ladder and held the trim bits each way for Jon to look at from a distance, too, and he also preferred the gappy way. So, gaps it is. You'll have to wait a few days to see the pictures of that, because by now it was quitting time, and here I am at 8:30 finishing up on the blog and getting ready to take some reheated leftover takeout Thai up to the apartment.
Wednesday two of the Granite Guys came back to finish up the granite work, cutting out the bar sink, drilling faucet, airgap, and soap dispenser holes, fitting the other slabs, fitting the window sill, and gluing all of them down. Jon, meanwhile, was scraping, sanding, and staining the side pieces of the wooden fireplace frame, since the granite would be placed right over the top of them, replacing the front wooden pieces but not completely covering the messed-up side pieces. (This is too hard to explain without a martini and a lot more effort, so just look closely at the before and after pictures if you really care.)
Speaking of pictures...
New pictures!
Two and a half monthsOld pictures
BeforePreparing for chaos
Demolition and chaos
One month in
Still later
Two months in
Progress!
A few hours later, while Granite Guys were getting started on the fireplace, Delivery Guys rolled up in an eighteen-wheeler to deliver the range, hood, and microwave. Of course, I couldn't be happy with a range normal humans could lift; I had to get the massive 36" Wolf complete with grill, which weighs approximately a gazillion pounds (about a jillion kilos, for my European readership) and is awkward as hell. Somehow, through, three guys and a handtruck had rolled that sucker down the street and up my steep driveway and humped it up twenty-five steps and around four corners to my frontdoor. It wasn't as awkward a shape as the massive fridge Jon and Manuel had struggled with several months ago, and they'd removed every last removable part to get the weight down, but we were still impressed at how handily Delivery Guys handled it. A dozen trips later, they'd also carried up the massive hood, the little teeny microwave, and all the miscellaneous range parts they'd set aside.
In a few more hours, Granite Guys finished up with the fireplace, and Jon sent them on their way. While they were clumping down the front stairs, though, I thought to double-check that the cover for the natural gas log starter valve doohickey (just look at the pictures, please) would fit in the hole they'd drilled in the hearth, and it didn't. I suppose it wouldn't be tragic just to leave that doohickey out of the picture, but Gjetost enjoys lifting it with her little paws and tossing it around. Jon called Granite Guy the Blonder back up. He said he'd already his largest hole-saw drill bit, but after about 15 minutes of going at it from slightly different crooked angles, he'd managed to widen it just enough to get the doohickey to fit. I'm sure Gjetost will appreciate it. The fireplace looks spectacular in granite--a tremendous improvement over the icky 1970s tile that seemed to cry out for avocado appliances and a harvest gold Princess telephone.
George didn't come in at all Wednesday; his car had crapped out despite the measures taken Tuesday. It turned out to be recall work, no charge. He hadn't gotten the recall notices, since he's moved too much. Having lived at five addresses in the last ten years (and eight home phone numbers in the last eleven), I know how that feels. There are still some orchestras sending W-2 forms to my previous address in San Francisco. I bought this project (I mean house) five years ago!
Meanwhile Wednesday, Jon finished up the kitchen floor tilework and a few other odds and ends.
Thursday I worked at the office, so I can't do blow-by-blow, but when I got home, I found a painted kitchen, a grouted floor, and some wicked impressive tile-cuts.
Oh, yes: grout. Remember my mentioning the countless details that I wouldn't have even thought of, much less gotten right? On Wednesday, Jon had brought in some grout color samples to look at, and he was recommending that we go with a dark, muddyish green. At first I was appalled. I figure the goal for grout is that it disappear in neutralness, providing just enough border to neutralize color changes from tile to tile but not to call any attention to its own color. Green grout, even the muddyish green of the sample, seemed way too colorful. I thought we should do a dark grey, like the one I'd used upstairs between the Indian Peacock slate tiles. But when we put the grout-color sample stick thingy between a couple of the Brazilian slate tiles, I could see what Jon meant: in this context, that muddy green is what disappeared. The grey I would have chosen was way too bright and colorful. I went with Jon's advice.
I was both pleased and chagrined to find upon my return home Thursday night that Jon was right. The muddy green looks great--it disappears and becomes the greyesque noncolor I wanted. Actual grey wouldn't have worked. It's really annoying, though, that Jon is right so often.
About those tilecuts: Slate tile is stone. You can only cut it with a diamond-blade in a wetsaw and a lot of patience. These suckers look like table-saws with big old cutting wheels. They're no jigsaw. So if you need weird-shaped cuts, you've got some figuring to do. I've done it, to get those funny little cutouts to go around toilets and faucets and so forth, and it ain't easy. So imagine my delight at getting to watch Jon figure out how to cut beautiful arcs to go around the curved base under the curved corner shelves. Basically you have to cut out the rough shape as well as you can, and then make little radial cuts to the edge as well as you can, break off the little chunklets, and then sort of rub the edge against the spinning blade to smooth it out as well as you can. Pain in the neck!
So Jon did several of those, and I was pretty much ready to bow down as it was. Then I come home last night and find a little stack of tiles that have rectangular cut-outs to go around the outlets, and I'm done for. I have no idea how he could fiddle around to get those right and not wanted to slash his wrists or at least mine. Look closely at those pictures of the backsplash, folks. There's some might impressive saw-work. Oh, and you can't see it, but where the tiles meet at the corners, he's mitred them, freehand, just holding the tiles at the right angle to the blade. He eye-balled bloody mitre-cuts! I can't do a decent mitre cut on a wooden baseboard with a mitre box! This man knows what he's doing.
Today, Jon did the backsplash behind the bar and along the pantry wall. Look closely at those pictures; he came up with a clever way to create a border where the backsplash stops (and figured out a priori where to stop the backsplash).
Meanwhile George installed under-cabinet lights, then put in little baseboards behind the refrigerator, dishwasher, and range. Next he started putting in the light valances (the trim bits that go under the cabinets to cover the under-cabinet lights). They're installed at a little gap from the doors for a cool floating effect.
Jon had an odd idea to install the upper trim bits (essentially these act like baseboards between the cabinets and ceiling) at a similar gap from the ceiling as from the tops of the doors for a subtle but nifty effect where all the upper cabinets seem to float near the ceiling instead of looking attached, instead of installing them flush against the ceiling, which is more normal. It's a funky little detail that I wouldn't have thought of or expected to like, and Kyla (his wife, who was over to do some computer stuff with me) didn't like it, but when we looked at it both ways, I decided to go for it. I got up on the step ladder and held the trim bits each way for Jon to look at from a distance, too, and he also preferred the gappy way. So, gaps it is. You'll have to wait a few days to see the pictures of that, because by now it was quitting time, and here I am at 8:30 finishing up on the blog and getting ready to take some reheated leftover takeout Thai up to the apartment.
10 August 2004
Negative delay
Project managers usually keep track of pessimistic things like delay, critical paths, and occasionally in an optimistic (usually fleeting) moment might contemplate "slack," which is how much freedom a given task has to start early or late without affecting the overall outcome of the project. Something so rare that its name is stupid actually happened to the kitchen project today: negative delay. Negative delay is when something fails so badly to be late that it happens early.
(Which reminds me of a witty violist's comment that our particularly bad conductor was so confused he was liable to start telling us we were rushing too slow and dragging too fast. [Yes, there are some witty violists. At least two, maybe three. Don't believe everything you read on the internet.])
Yes, that's right, something started early.
Granite Guys were supposed to come tomorrow (Wednesday), as were Range Delivery Guys, which as it was already had Jon and George hustling yesterday (Monday) to prep the way, but they had a cancellation, so they were coming this morning at 9:30. George and I learned this at 9, when we returned from dropping George's ailing car at the garage down the hill. George and Jon then whipped into a flurry of activity to clear the decks for Granite Guys. I tried to help, but after hauling some cardboard down to the recycling bin, it became clear to me that the best way to help was to get out of the way and go back in my office to work.
Granite Guys didn't actually show up until noon. Were they lost? Doing some emergency quick installation somewhere? Taking a long morning coffee break? Who knows. We don't ask these things.
Anyway, once Granite Guys set to work hauling obscenely heavy slabs of granite (so heavy that the bar-top, which is not glued down yet, feels glued down) up the stairs and fitting them into place, George took up a position at the diamond wetsaw outside, cutting 16 inch slate tiles into quarters and diagonally-cut half quarters (for the backsplash), Jon ran off to buy the under-cabinet flourescent lights, and I ordered pizza and got back to work at my day job as a project manager. At 1:30, George, Jon, Tara (George's Airedale), and I took our pizza break. By 4pm, Granite Guys (three Romanian boys who barely looked old enough to drive the truck, much less do a multi-thousand-dollar granite installation) had put all the kitchen slabs in place, done the cutout for the kitchen sink, and glued those two slabs down. The bar, sill, and other slabs are just sitting in position. Tomorrow they're coming back around 9am ("Or later. Depends," said Blonde Granite Guy) to do the bar sink cutout, fit the sill slab cutout, glue everything down, and then affix the fireplace slabs. It turns out there's enough to do the hearth and face (yay!).
(Which reminds me of a witty violist's comment that our particularly bad conductor was so confused he was liable to start telling us we were rushing too slow and dragging too fast. [Yes, there are some witty violists. At least two, maybe three. Don't believe everything you read on the internet.])
Yes, that's right, something started early.
Granite Guys were supposed to come tomorrow (Wednesday), as were Range Delivery Guys, which as it was already had Jon and George hustling yesterday (Monday) to prep the way, but they had a cancellation, so they were coming this morning at 9:30. George and I learned this at 9, when we returned from dropping George's ailing car at the garage down the hill. George and Jon then whipped into a flurry of activity to clear the decks for Granite Guys. I tried to help, but after hauling some cardboard down to the recycling bin, it became clear to me that the best way to help was to get out of the way and go back in my office to work.
Granite Guys didn't actually show up until noon. Were they lost? Doing some emergency quick installation somewhere? Taking a long morning coffee break? Who knows. We don't ask these things.
Anyway, once Granite Guys set to work hauling obscenely heavy slabs of granite (so heavy that the bar-top, which is not glued down yet, feels glued down) up the stairs and fitting them into place, George took up a position at the diamond wetsaw outside, cutting 16 inch slate tiles into quarters and diagonally-cut half quarters (for the backsplash), Jon ran off to buy the under-cabinet flourescent lights, and I ordered pizza and got back to work at my day job as a project manager. At 1:30, George, Jon, Tara (George's Airedale), and I took our pizza break. By 4pm, Granite Guys (three Romanian boys who barely looked old enough to drive the truck, much less do a multi-thousand-dollar granite installation) had put all the kitchen slabs in place, done the cutout for the kitchen sink, and glued those two slabs down. The bar, sill, and other slabs are just sitting in position. Tomorrow they're coming back around 9am ("Or later. Depends," said Blonde Granite Guy) to do the bar sink cutout, fit the sill slab cutout, glue everything down, and then affix the fireplace slabs. It turns out there's enough to do the hearth and face (yay!).
08 August 2004
Petty little yucky picky picky picky problems
My friend Deirdre once described a list of "petty little yucky picky picky picky problems" she'd gotten back from French localizers, and the phrase promptly entered my repertoire.
Last week we dealt with several of them, most notably with phone lines.
There was a phone line in my kitchen's ceiling, and it had an amateurish-looking splice job about in the middle of the ceiling: a black electrical-tape job that was yet another of myriad bush-league details Jon et al. have uncovered since starting the job. Black-tape splice jobs are not looked upon with favor by phone guys. George had to add another splice when rewiring the phone jack over the bar, and this he did with Scotch caps, which it turns out are also not looked upon with favor by phone guys.
Enter phone static on Sunday.
Why Sunday? When nothing new was happening? Who knows. But on Sunday I started hearing all kinds of static on my phone line. It got bad enough that it completely disrupted a meeting I was having while working from home on Monday, so I put in a problem ticket with Comcast. Thursday afternoon, Comcast Guy (Brian) came out to look at the problem. Long, long, long, expensive (three hours of labor!) short, there was some kind of problem in the hunk of wiring in the kitchen. Who knows which splice is to blame, or maybe a rat got industrious somewhere between the kitchen and my office, but the solution Jon came up with was to chop that hunk out of the loop, send a new feed to my office (which in turn feeds the upstairs jacks), and try again on the kitchen jack, rewiring it down through the floor (and that peninsula wall) to the feed that Comcast Guy left.
Last two times Comcast came out to service either my phone or ISP service, they either forgot to billl me or service was included. Brian was pretty sure I was going to get billed for that one.
Argh.
Last week we dealt with several of them, most notably with phone lines.
There was a phone line in my kitchen's ceiling, and it had an amateurish-looking splice job about in the middle of the ceiling: a black electrical-tape job that was yet another of myriad bush-league details Jon et al. have uncovered since starting the job. Black-tape splice jobs are not looked upon with favor by phone guys. George had to add another splice when rewiring the phone jack over the bar, and this he did with Scotch caps, which it turns out are also not looked upon with favor by phone guys.
Enter phone static on Sunday.
Why Sunday? When nothing new was happening? Who knows. But on Sunday I started hearing all kinds of static on my phone line. It got bad enough that it completely disrupted a meeting I was having while working from home on Monday, so I put in a problem ticket with Comcast. Thursday afternoon, Comcast Guy (Brian) came out to look at the problem. Long, long, long, expensive (three hours of labor!) short, there was some kind of problem in the hunk of wiring in the kitchen. Who knows which splice is to blame, or maybe a rat got industrious somewhere between the kitchen and my office, but the solution Jon came up with was to chop that hunk out of the loop, send a new feed to my office (which in turn feeds the upstairs jacks), and try again on the kitchen jack, rewiring it down through the floor (and that peninsula wall) to the feed that Comcast Guy left.
Last two times Comcast came out to service either my phone or ISP service, they either forgot to billl me or service was included. Brian was pretty sure I was going to get billed for that one.
Argh.
“It'll all start feeling faster now”
Jon said that it would all start feeling faster now, and he's right.
The cabinets are now all installed, so Granite Guy came on Friday to measure for the granite. As feared, the job oozed over two slabs into three, so in a twist of the usual "As long as we're at it" syndrome, Jon asked if there was anything else I wanted to do with the extra rock. So we also had Granite Guy measure to put granite on the wide new-dining-room window sill where I've been stacking my mug collection, and to replace the hearth and facing of the fireplace's ugly tile with granite. If there's not enough for the whole fireplace, we'll do just the hearth and then redo the facing in slate. Either way it'll be a big improvement on the baby-shit tan blotchy tile that's there now.
Jon says granite-fabrication will take about a week. He's planning to start in on the tile work, and he's bought a huge pile of slate tile, now resting in my driveway. George has the underlayment work all done, including the front closet and the mouth of the hallway. The hardwood will come next.
You can see all the gorgeous cabinetry in the latest new pictures:
Progress!
Old pictures:
Before
Preparing for chaos
Demolition and chaos
One month in
Still later
Two months in
George has the puck lights installed. Under-cabinet lights are next.
The glass I'd originally picked out for the upper cabinet door-fronts didn't come tall enough, so I went back to the Stained Glass Garden in Berkeley to pick out glass all over again. This time they had a pattern I liked even better: Rivuletta, with a subtle vertical reeding. Jon ordered the pieces we need and it came out, of course, several hundred more than the allowance in our contract. Yet another change order--ouch. Damned good taste of mine!
It turned out that we just couldn't get the Golden Butterfly granite (at least without an indefinitely long wait for a slow boat to bring it from Brazil), so we're back to uba tuba.
The cabinets are now all installed, so Granite Guy came on Friday to measure for the granite. As feared, the job oozed over two slabs into three, so in a twist of the usual "As long as we're at it" syndrome, Jon asked if there was anything else I wanted to do with the extra rock. So we also had Granite Guy measure to put granite on the wide new-dining-room window sill where I've been stacking my mug collection, and to replace the hearth and facing of the fireplace's ugly tile with granite. If there's not enough for the whole fireplace, we'll do just the hearth and then redo the facing in slate. Either way it'll be a big improvement on the baby-shit tan blotchy tile that's there now.
Jon says granite-fabrication will take about a week. He's planning to start in on the tile work, and he's bought a huge pile of slate tile, now resting in my driveway. George has the underlayment work all done, including the front closet and the mouth of the hallway. The hardwood will come next.
You can see all the gorgeous cabinetry in the latest new pictures:
Progress!
Old pictures:
Before
Preparing for chaos
Demolition and chaos
One month in
Still later
Two months in
George has the puck lights installed. Under-cabinet lights are next.
The glass I'd originally picked out for the upper cabinet door-fronts didn't come tall enough, so I went back to the Stained Glass Garden in Berkeley to pick out glass all over again. This time they had a pattern I liked even better: Rivuletta, with a subtle vertical reeding. Jon ordered the pieces we need and it came out, of course, several hundred more than the allowance in our contract. Yet another change order--ouch. Damned good taste of mine!
It turned out that we just couldn't get the Golden Butterfly granite (at least without an indefinitely long wait for a slow boat to bring it from Brazil), so we're back to uba tuba.
What a difference a kilo makes
Last August I had to have a massive red oak tree behind my house taken out because it was
I remember when I was six, Grampa and Gramma Vang (don't quibble with me about my spelling, the were my grandparents) came to take care of Kevin and me (or torment us, as it felt at the time) while Mom was in the hospital having her gallbladder out. One fine day when I supposed to be napping, I watched Grampa split what seemed like most of the cord of firewood we had out back. It was wintertime and cold enough out that Gramma wouldn't let us go outdoors without our "overshoes" (as she called them, in only one instance of the language barrier we encountered that week--I'd always thought of them as boots), but before long, Grampa was down to his longjohns and dripping with sweat. It was pretty impressive how he usually needed only two or three strokes of the axe to split a log. If I recall accurately, and who knows if I do, these were probably some kind of pine logs about 16 inches long and four to six inches in diameter. Somehow I remember his longjohns being red, too, but that might be a flight of memory's fancy.
Another fine day when I was supposed to be napping, I sneaked out to watch Gramma make lefse, and a vague memory of her kneading the dough turned into a burst of lefse-recipe-interpreting insight three decades later, but that's another story. Ask me at Smørgåsbord V (ack! Sweden!).
Anyway, I figured I was my Grampa's daughter and could split wood if he could, so when Tree Guy and his crew finished up, I googled "wood splitting" and learned that
Almost a year later, I've resumed my splitting efforts and learned that most of the advice I googled up was wrong. Red oak is easier to split when drier. It's got a swirly grain that knots fibers together against all axe-logic, but drying and the action of rot and termites do help. Today I broke my first sledge-hammer (a six-pounder) (I have to admit, I'm feeling a little macho about breaking a sledge-hammer) and went to buy an eight-pound replacement, along with an eight-pound maul, and I've also found that eight pounds is a much better-weighted tool for me.
Women's clothes and bikes don't fit me, either, so why did I think women's axes would?
While I certainly don't want anyone to think it's child's play to throw these eight-pound implements around (the stiff muscles I have everywhere are witness that it's not), that extra two pounds (almost one kilo) make a huge difference. Where before it took four or five strokes, in which I threw the sledge with all my might, to get a splitting wedge visibly further into a log, now a single stroke with the heavier sledge does the job--and I now understand why that googled article recommended a technique where you initially lift with dominant hand gripping at the end of the handle and other hand gripping near the business end, raise the tool overhead, slipping the other hand down toward the dominant hand, and then hurl with all your body's might, eyes focused on the target (either the spot you want the axe or maul to hit or at the splitting wedge in progress). With the six-pound tools, I found it wasn't worth the trouble (damn the backache) to do that whole hand-sliding thing, but then I needed to throw all of myself into each hurl. With the eight-pound tools, the hand-sliding thing helps a lot to stave off exhaustion, and the extra two pounds makes throwing myself into the hurlage more optional.
What a difference a kilo makes! Today I split a log that had frustrated me so much I'd set it aside into three hunks, and I got through several more intimidating hunks before I'd finished my litre of water and hour of iTunes.
I've still got nothing on Grampa, but I like to think all the same that he might be grinning a little curmudgeonly grin from the grave now at the sight of me dripping sweat and throwing myself for all I'm worth at stubborn hunks of red oak, even if I'm not wearing red longjohns while I do it.
- starting to lean over the house,
- showing signs of some kind of illness or root problem, and
- likely to keel over and die.
I remember when I was six, Grampa and Gramma Vang (don't quibble with me about my spelling, the were my grandparents) came to take care of Kevin and me (or torment us, as it felt at the time) while Mom was in the hospital having her gallbladder out. One fine day when I supposed to be napping, I watched Grampa split what seemed like most of the cord of firewood we had out back. It was wintertime and cold enough out that Gramma wouldn't let us go outdoors without our "overshoes" (as she called them, in only one instance of the language barrier we encountered that week--I'd always thought of them as boots), but before long, Grampa was down to his longjohns and dripping with sweat. It was pretty impressive how he usually needed only two or three strokes of the axe to split a log. If I recall accurately, and who knows if I do, these were probably some kind of pine logs about 16 inches long and four to six inches in diameter. Somehow I remember his longjohns being red, too, but that might be a flight of memory's fancy.
Another fine day when I was supposed to be napping, I sneaked out to watch Gramma make lefse, and a vague memory of her kneading the dough turned into a burst of lefse-recipe-interpreting insight three decades later, but that's another story. Ask me at Smørgåsbord V (ack! Sweden!).
Anyway, I figured I was my Grampa's daughter and could split wood if he could, so when Tree Guy and his crew finished up, I googled "wood splitting" and learned that
- red oak is easiest split when green, unlike most species, and
- women are best off with a three-pound axe, a six-pound maul, a wedge or two, and a six-pound sledge-hammer.
Almost a year later, I've resumed my splitting efforts and learned that most of the advice I googled up was wrong. Red oak is easier to split when drier. It's got a swirly grain that knots fibers together against all axe-logic, but drying and the action of rot and termites do help. Today I broke my first sledge-hammer (a six-pounder) (I have to admit, I'm feeling a little macho about breaking a sledge-hammer) and went to buy an eight-pound replacement, along with an eight-pound maul, and I've also found that eight pounds is a much better-weighted tool for me.
Women's clothes and bikes don't fit me, either, so why did I think women's axes would?
While I certainly don't want anyone to think it's child's play to throw these eight-pound implements around (the stiff muscles I have everywhere are witness that it's not), that extra two pounds (almost one kilo) make a huge difference. Where before it took four or five strokes, in which I threw the sledge with all my might, to get a splitting wedge visibly further into a log, now a single stroke with the heavier sledge does the job--and I now understand why that googled article recommended a technique where you initially lift with dominant hand gripping at the end of the handle and other hand gripping near the business end, raise the tool overhead, slipping the other hand down toward the dominant hand, and then hurl with all your body's might, eyes focused on the target (either the spot you want the axe or maul to hit or at the splitting wedge in progress). With the six-pound tools, I found it wasn't worth the trouble (damn the backache) to do that whole hand-sliding thing, but then I needed to throw all of myself into each hurl. With the eight-pound tools, the hand-sliding thing helps a lot to stave off exhaustion, and the extra two pounds makes throwing myself into the hurlage more optional.
What a difference a kilo makes! Today I split a log that had frustrated me so much I'd set it aside into three hunks, and I got through several more intimidating hunks before I'd finished my litre of water and hour of iTunes.
I've still got nothing on Grampa, but I like to think all the same that he might be grinning a little curmudgeonly grin from the grave now at the sight of me dripping sweat and throwing myself for all I'm worth at stubborn hunks of red oak, even if I'm not wearing red longjohns while I do it.
04 August 2004
Things that are better
Norton seems to be out of the woods. He kept me on pins and needles all weekend, acting normal and seeming to be comfortable, but not pooping from Thursday afternoon until Sunday morning. Then he didn't poop again until yesterday. Fortunately his poop Sunday looked normal, and pooping didn't seem to strain him, which was an excellent sign. I talked to the vet late Monday afternoon, and she said if he hadn't passed it or shown distress by now, he must have digested it. So, let's hear it for Norton's digestive system, and for the good digestive thoughts of my readership! Norton and I thank you!
The cabinets are nearly all installed now, and it's starting to look like it'll be a nice kitchen. When the sheetrock was put in, suddenly the space seemed too small for everything that was going to go in, but Jon said the cabinets would make it look roomier again. How this could be defies reason, but he was right. Now that most of them are in, the kitchen actually feels spacious, and the vast expense of alder is gorgeous.
George has finished installing the underlayment in the closet and at the mouth of the hallway.
The old dining room is no longer a chaotic crowd of cabinets, and it too feels more spacious. (The new dining room is full of saws and so on, so it feels far from spacious.)
The cabinets are nearly all installed now, and it's starting to look like it'll be a nice kitchen. When the sheetrock was put in, suddenly the space seemed too small for everything that was going to go in, but Jon said the cabinets would make it look roomier again. How this could be defies reason, but he was right. Now that most of them are in, the kitchen actually feels spacious, and the vast expense of alder is gorgeous.
George has finished installing the underlayment in the closet and at the mouth of the hallway.
The old dining room is no longer a chaotic crowd of cabinets, and it too feels more spacious. (The new dining room is full of saws and so on, so it feels far from spacious.)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
