Urban Renewal

While our house has its own unique charm -- the small 1940s bungalow type charm -- it has always admittedly been a little ugly on the outside. We bought the house with the belief that we could improve it on both the inside and out, and thus far we have focused on the inside. But with the fall arriving in Monterey we have seized on the even-more-pleasant-than-usual weather, and really gone to work.

You might remember that our front yard looked like this when we bought it:

Not really very pretty, eh? Instead of grass, someone had decided to fill the whole thing with cheap and unattractive mulch. Uncomfortable for our dog, and not really great for curb appeal either.

Last weekend we got to work. We pulled up all of the mulch (not a small feat) filling about 9 garbage bags. We also finished pulling up the hideous white rock which we had started a few months ago, but we went at it full force this time. We used the rock to fill in a void area between the shed and garage in the back yard, which is was way easier than trying to dispose of 75 lbs of rock. Word for the wise: never use rock, especially white rock, for a decorative feature in your yard. Not only does it look tacky, but it makes it very difficult for anybody that ever wants to change it. So after the removal of everything, we did some turning of the dirt to hopefully oxygenate it a bit.
So this is how it sat for a week. We ordered sod online on Monday, a surprisingly easy process, and scheduled it to arrive on Friday. In the interim we had some of the worst rain Monterey has seen in a decade, which turned the yard into a mud pit. Luckily it dried out prior to starting work, but it did make the sod a bit heavy. Speaking of the sod, it arrived Friday morning, and they put it right down in our driveway, ready to go.
We have a fence that surrounds our front yard. It's kinda silly, but it seems every house here has one. In order to make life a lot easier, and since it really needs replacing anyway, I removed a section of fence along the driveway. Before you couldn't walk directly from the driveway into the front yard. But now, we could just walk with the rolls straight into the yard to unroll them.

And unroll them we did. Saturday was the day we had determined would be the most work, but it was a really rapid process. I started with a rototiller, which took all of 10 minutes in our rather small yard, and then we both attacked it with rakes. Half an hour into the work, and we had the first roll down. By three hours, we had a majority of the yard covered and we could start putting edging down. In keeping with the theme of doing sustainable and environmentally friendly upgrades wherever we can, we used a border that is made of a combination of recycled wood, and recycled plastic bottles. It wasn't the best stuff to work with, but it looks really nice in place, and with the sod it was simple. Put the border in the ground, lay the sod on top, and cut the sod with a sacrificed cheap old steak knife.

Finished off with some new redwood bark, and a couple new plants, and the yard went from a sea (or small lake) of brown, to a rich beautiful yard that is seemingly the envy of the neighbors.

Riley will hopefully enjoy it too. Although not until it gets a bit more established.

Looking at the house in a whole new light

Well, it has been a while since we've made any updates on our house's progress, which is largely because it's been a while since there was any progress. Labor Day weekend provided the opportunity to make some illuminating changes.

This was the light we had in our small entry.

The lights in the bedroom, office, and hall all looked like this one (which has, obviously, been disassembled).

So, we had four lights to replace. One would not have expected this sort of work to take a long weekend to tackle - but, this being a rather quirky house, it did.

Our house, like nearly all houses in the area, has no air conditioning. With the gorgeous weather this is not a big problem, but occasionally the house does get a little stuffy. So we decided we would put ceiling fans in the bedroom and office. We had one ceiling fan already that we got from a neighbor back in Virginia which has traveled through a couple of rental homes with us, now ready for permanent installation in the office. We bought a second fan, as well as a pair of lights for the hall and entry, at Home Depot. Brendon crawled up in the attic to make sure there was proper bracing to support the fans, and on Saturday afternoon the install began with the office.

I assisted by handing tools up and holding screws. And, of course, taking pictures. Bettie helped, too - as usual.

The fan went up easily enough, but suffered a significant wobble. So after taping pennies to blades, adjusting screws, Internet troubleshooting, and trying to get all the blades level... Brendon managed to significantly decrease the wobble. (The fan is NOT to be run on high until further adjustments can be made, lest it rend itself violently from the ceiling.)

Short on daylight hours, we moved to the bedroom. Bettie helped some more.

Then the real trouble began. We had bought a remote control mechanism with a box that would mount, theoretically, where the light switch was and control both the light and fan speed. While Brendon was on the ladder trying to adjust the fan's bracket to compensate for a not-so-level ceiling, I removed the light switch and tried to connect the wiring. The problem, shockingly, was not with the wiring (which was extremely old and nasty), but came when I tried to get the control box to fit into the cutout in the wall. Apparently - and we had learned this in the kitchen remodel, but hadn't made the connection to this project - our 61 year old house has thin walls compared with today's standards. As hard as we tried, we could not get the remote flush into the wall.

So this had to be returned. Which, because of the fading daylight, meant putting everything on hold until the next day, and going the remainder of Saturday with capped wires and a bedroom lit by bedside lamp light only.

Things went somewhat more smoothly on Sunday, though some of the fan parts were a little fiddly and many screws were dropped from the ladder. Eventually the fan went up, and worked beautifully... for 24 hours. Today I walked in the bedroom with clean laundry to put away, hit the button on the NEW remote (a hand held one, with a plastic wall mount that is next to the light switch), and no light came on. More troubleshooting, but Brendon had the small wiring problem worked out in 15 minutes or so.

As for the hall and entry lights, they were much quicker and easier, though by no means perfectly straightforward. In the hall, the junction box was recessed quite a bit, so it required some tweaking before the bolt would extend all the way through the globe to the screw. And in the hall, the light appears to have been original to the house, its base was painted on, and the wiring looked like this.

But, at the end of the holiday weekend, here are the lights.

Office:

Bedroom:

Hall:

(The light in the entry is the same as the one in the hall, and it has been successfully installed. I guess I just didn't get a picture.)

I apologize for the amount of time it has taken for us to get our butts in gear and do another blog post outlining the completion of the kitchen. With our demanding school and work schedules, it can be difficult to find the desire to sit down and compose a couple hundred words. Cara gives me a hard time for being too verbose, but it’s hard to really get my sense of humor out in small snippets of text.

So, where were we when we last spoke? The cabinets were just about completed, and most of the big jobs were done. While it was not a really complex job, the cabinets did pose some issues. The ceiling is very straight in one direction, and very very wavy in another direction. With cabinets that go just about to the ceiling, and molding that does go to the ceiling some work was needed. Butch, our contractor, went to town with a sander, and hand shaped the top of the molding to fit the ceiling. The piece over the fridge has over half an inch differential in width from one side to the other, with the bottom line remaining level.

The little nitpicky stuff took more time than expected, and work was finished on Monday afternoon instead of the originally estimated Friday. So that threw a bit of a monkey wrench in our plans. The floors were scheduled to start Monday morning, and Alex from the Floor Store (creative name, eh?) had been out of the office, and apparently his voicemail didn’t work. I decided it would be prudent to call him on Monday morning to make sure that he had gotten my message. Apparently the guy to install the floor was already en route, so he quickly called him off, and he showed up ready to go on Tuesday. I had expected the floors to take several days, but it turns out that they are really easy, and being essentially a pair of boxes, the kitchen and laundry room were straight forward. He was even cool and fixed a couple areas where the boards were a bit squeaky.

As the floor guy got to work, the electrician also came back to finish up on a few things. He put switches and plugs in, and so we were back to having lights overhead. He also installed our pendants over the peninsula, and a new laundry room light. So for the first time since we’ve lived here, we have light in the laundry room. That is so much better than you can imagine.

The floor took most of Tuesday, and just a few hours in the morning on Wednesday. I really wish I had gotten the floor guy’s name, because he was very entertaining. He was Salvadorian and could speak English well, but you couldn’t understand a word he was saying. Despite this, he entertained me with stories, more specifically ghost stories. He told me first of how his co-workers snapped a picture in the ballroom in Hermann Hall (the building formerly known as the Del Monte Hotel) at NPS, which they had just finished renovating the floor of, and managed to get a picture of a ghost. That building is supposed to be one of the most haunted structures in California, so I could buy it. The he started telling me all of the times he saw ghosts as a child in San Salvador, including seeing the devil in a tree. Very amusing, but it almost made me late for class. He finished on Wednesday before I got home from my morning classes, and it looked awesome.

Thursday was supposed to bring the countertops, but due to some delays in fabrication, it got pushed off until Friday. They came at lunch time, and went about the surprisingly quick process of installing the huge chunks of granite. The granite is an amazing piece of nature’s beauty. We were taken by it when we first saw the slab, and it really was the icing on the cake of the kitchen. It was a bit expensive, (but still one of the cheapest things in the kitchen), but it was worth every penny. There is no way you can look at it and think that it was picked up at Home Depot or something. Very beautiful grain, some complex organic patterns, and the colors really brought everything together. It’s really the one element that links the cabinets, the flooring in the kitchen and the hardwood in rest of the house, and all of the paint colors. And most surprisingly, it was the very last thing we picked out. Pictures really don’t do it justice.

The final piece of the puzzle was the appliances. These came the following Tuesday. We got GE Profile appliances. Matching set of stove, fridge (with ice maker), an over the range microwave that doubles as a convection oven, and the best part, a dishwasher. They are very nice, although we are still figuring them all out.

So with these, the kitchen is essentially complete. What’s left? We still have to get the under cabinet lighting installed, it was back ordered, and we only just received the fixtures. These will be hard wired and switch controlled (that’s the wires hanging down you can see in some of the pics). We will be installing a tile back splash, probably using those cool trendy glass tiles, and eventually will have the ceiling textured to match the rest of the house. We also still need to buy and install stainless switch and plug plates. We have bought some new stuff for the counter, including a new stainless Cuisinart 4 slot toaster, and a new utensil holder for alongside the stove.  

It is a dream to cook in. Probably the best kitchen I have worked in, and I’ve worked in a lot. There is a huge amount of room, one of the advantages of devoting about a 6^th of the house to kitchen. There is ample counter space, a function of effectively quadrupling the counter space, and enough room for each of us to have cutting boards and not interfere with each other, and not block sink or stove. We celebrated the completion by cooking a big meal of duck, fennel salad and roasted carrots (cooked in the microwave).

All in all, a well done kitchen, we have cooked a huge amount. And the best part is that we can now cook together, which we actually like to do. It was so difficult in the old kitchen. We will now be spoiled, and hate every kitchen we have in the future I suspect. Look at the difference. 

Kitchen progress: cat's-eye view

During the days when work is going on in the kitchen, our cat, Bettie, has been closed up in the bedroom so that people can go in and out without worrying about letting her out (as she is an indoor-only kitty). When the moment of liberation arrives at quitting time, Bettie rushes out to inspect the day's accomplishments. The few days represented below will probably be covered soon in greater detail, but for now, Bettie gives her own guided tour.

"Smells like progress."

"Lots of nooks and dark corners to check out."


"Quite a fine kitty cave."


"Have to make sure all the screws are tight!"


"Nice depth to this sink."


"Looks like everything's following the plan nicely."

"Looks level from here."

"On the floor, on the wall, with shelves - any cabinet is good to me."

"I give it the Feline Seal of Approval."

***If B were posting, he would probably give Bettie a lolcat vocabulary. Brendon underestimates her cognitive genius.***

Update on Days 2 and 3

Tuesday started with a flurry of chaos. There was the arrival of the plumbers and the electrician, along with the General contractor and his assistant. As things were getting very frenetic, the big truck with the cabinets arrived just to make it worse. There was really no good spot for the cabinets. Lots of very large and heavy boxes, and have I mentioned that this is a small house. The garage seemed like the best place, but it was packed full of our old kitchen cabinets and appliances. The next logical place was the yard, but Cara vetoed that, and she wasn’t even there. So the garage had to do. With some clever packing in, and the complete denial of our access to the fridge which still has stuff in it, everything fit in, although there was some stacking, and lots of cramming. As this was all going on, I said ‘I’m out!’ and headed to class.

As I left, everybody was working in the few square feet of the kitchen and laundry room. Although by my return 2 hours later, the plumbers were taking turns slithering underneath the house, and the electrician was climbing alternately through the attic and under the house.

The plumber’s task for the day was the installation of a tankless water heater in the place where the old one was. I had initially been under the impression that it was a direct replacement. Pull the old one out, re-route the piping already there, and put the new one on. Unfortunately I was wrong. Instead they had to run completely new and larger gas lines, and install a completely new chimney. Our old one was a shared exhaust system for the furnace, water heater and vent hoot for the stove, and to top it off, it is an asbestos tube. They were not very keen on working with the asbestos, so they just routed a new one up through the attic and roof. Since they were already under the house, the also relocated the gas line for the stove to come up and out of the new wall where the door was, and also moved the gas line for the water heater so as to be against the wall. That did quite a number to free up floor space under the new water heater, and so now we have to determine what we can store in that position. We are thinking recycle bin.

So it was all rather chaotic, but on that one day, we had a new water heater fully functional, many new outlets, although they were wired and didn’t have their plugs or switches in them. Additionally, this day saw the demise of the chandelier. The hideous, god forsaken chandelier. Gone. But there was something that smelled funny about the whole ordeal….

That evening we surveyed the work, and noticed a strange smell. It almost smelled like gas, but lacked the utter nastiness of the straight natural gas smell. I thought it may just be the water heater getting broken in, and the chemicals that are used in the production process burning off in its first bit of usage. The following morning the smell had not dissipated and when Butch arrived, he decided he would check the fittings he could see for gas leaks. A little trick if you are ever confronted with this situation. It is something we do in the military, and it is done by engineers to check for leaks on different systems. Take some soapy water in a spray bottle, or even some cleaning spray, and spray it on the joints or any place where you think there may be a leak. If there is, it will bubble up and show you exactly where it is leaking. We spent about 15 minutes going over every fitting we could see, but there weren’t any leaks.

At this point I headed off for school, only to get a call in the middle of a class saying that they discovered that the furnace’s pilot light had gone out when they cut the gas the day before, and it doesn’t have an automatic relight mechanism. And apparently it was kicking the plumber’s ass trying to relight it. He spent about 2 hours fighting with it, and only got it lit after I got home.

While all of this was going on, the house had its first inspection. Since we are trying to do everything on the up and up, we had a permit taken out, which requires inspections by the city. This makes it all legal, but also provides an avenue for more expenses and more time wasted fixing piddly stuff that the inspector decides needs to be fixed. Luckily he was happy and there wasn’t a whole lot that needed to be done. The lighting, which is a point of contention in California, ended up being perfectly satisfactory. The only real big thing to do wasn’t kitchen related at all. It was a pressure relief valve on the side of the house that needed a check valve and a secondary relief valve installed. So I got my shovel out, and got to digging. 3 feet later I reached the pipe, and that was fixed later.

By the end of day 3, the cabinets were about to start going in. The first shims had been put on the floor, and two cabinets were in place. Or they would have been, had I not asked them to be moved for painting. When Cara got home from work we went to work on the kitchen, running a bead of latex caulk over all of the gaps in the new walls put up, or the old wall panels put back up, and then Cara ran the roller over them with a fresh layer of our terra cotta paint. Everything’s coming together very well. 

Kitchen Install: Day 1 Wrap-up

(Starting off with a gratuitious Bettie shot)

Update from Day one: Not a lot of big things going on for the first day of the kitchen install. The day started with our contractor Butch working by himself, while his assistant Ken was out buying supplies. We walked around and went over some of the ground rules, and made sure we were all thinking the same thing, so we could strategize the whole process. Then the work began.

Walls were cut out in pieces. They remained intact for the most part so he could re-install them in place so there would be less of a difference in the texture of the walls. Several interesting discoveries came out of this process. First, the type of plywood used to make the walls is no longer made. Sure it’s just ¼” ply, but its on the thin side of ¼ where most of today’s are on the fat side of ¼. I would have expected that ¼ inch ply would be ¼ inch thick, but I guess if 2x4s are neither of those dimensions that it reasons to stand that plywood would also be different.

It took some interpolation to determine the second fact. It is a bit strange to have plywood for walls when it is definitely more common to have either Plaster and Lath or drywall, but initially this was just put down for cheap building back in the ‘40s. But as the plywood walls were cut away, Butch noticed that the sheets of ply were glued to the studs in the wall, and the only nails that were in place were those used to hold the sheets up while the glue dried. This led to the hypothesis that the house was a modular house, built in 2 halves and stuck together on site in 1948. This actually makes a surprising lot of sense. If you consider than the house is nearly perfectly rectangular, the only exception being the front entrance being a bit recessed off the side of the house (if you can imagine it, that made sense in my mind, but I go through the door every day [look at the picture top right and I think you can see what I’m talking about]). Also, having spent some time in the attic, there it most certainly a central spine of the house, where 2 longitudinal joists come together directly below the peak of the roof, where it would make sense that the two sides came together.

By the time I came home for lunch, the door to be filled was removed, and the framing had begun. By the end of the day it was completely closed off on the hallway side. The kitchen side of it will be covered by cabinetry and back splash, and on the hallway side we will build a built-in bookcase. While I can see a door there being convenient, having the extra counter space, and the extra storage a book case provides will make the whole situation a bit better. And we lived without the door for several months and never noticed. So plusses all around.

The other thing that was started was the patching of the hole in the center of the kitchen where the original light had been, which was just covered by a little metal cover plate. There was a junction box up there, with shielded wire running to it. Unfortunately, as Ken discovered, the wires were still hot, and the wires had worn through at the edge of the conduit. He ended up shorting the circuit, tripping the breaker, and sending half of the house dark. A little bit of fishing, removing some shielding, and lots of electrical tape, it was then set for the electrician to work on it. On the subject of half of the house going dark, it was a further supporting fact for the modular construction. It would make sense for each half of the house to be pre wired on a circuit, and the two to be tied together in the panel during construction. It was then prepared for the plywood patch that will go in there and give us one solid ceiling.

So that’s where it stood at the end of day one. I am writing this toward the end of day two, and that update will follow soon. It’s a bit exciting, frustrating, and definitely a bit interesting, especially for someone like me who is a bit of an engineer, and a bit of a handyman. 

Kitchen Demo

This is what the kitchen looked like on Friday:

Outdated appliances that were cheap to begin with, stained vinyl floor, particle board cabinets (and not a lot of them), a hideous chandelier in an awkward spot, and really, really bright red paint.  

It all had to go.

Brendon and my dad knocked out this monumental task, with only minimal help from my mom and I (read, handing them stuff when they needed it and holding the door open for them to carry things outside), in under 4 hours.  Impressive doesn't begin to cover it.

There they are, all finished up, proud and exhausted.  The base cabinets gave a bit of a fight, but nothing these big strong fellas couldn't handle.

The gutted kitchen was in remarkably good shape.  Sure there were a few holes in the wall, but they will all be hidden behind new cabinets; and there was a teeny bit of mold behind the sink, but it cleaned right up with some Clorox spray.  The wooden subfloor is sturdy and even, and there's no signs of real damage.  It was really interesting seeing all the layers of paint as previous owners became less thorough about moving things before painting.  One corner looked almost like modern art.

The color on the far right is the one the finished kitchen will be, a marvelous terracotta.

The general contractor, plumber, and electrician will start work first thing Monday morning.  Meanwhile, the room is empty and startling every time we pass through.  And the cat is rather mystified by the whole thing.