House Made

For my mother, who only wants to see her grand-chickens. But first she must admire my handiwork.

In our fair city of Oakland, homeowners are allowed to own up to four hens (no roosters!) as long as the chickens’ enclosure is twenty feet from any residence. Here’s my fabulous Garden Coop. It’s about 6′ x 10′, and please note the salvaged tree guard as welcome mat.

This was my first foray into building any sort of structure, and it was nice to practice on something that could go slowly and didn’t have to be fit for humans. The design was really easy to follow, and Merideth ended up being jealous of the chickens as it went up. There may have been some attempted bargaining to make the structure her new office. I only made a few modifications to the design, the main one being that our door swings out instead of in. I was a little concerned about one sweet dog who has been known to push doors open with her dome head.

Here’s inside the coop with their sleeping perch. (The larger structure with the sand bottom is called a run, and the little house where the chickens sleep and lay eggs is the coop.)

Another shot inside the coop. This shows the egg door so that we can reach into the coop without going into the run to collect eggs.

Alright. I know why you’re really here. Here are the babies. From left to right, Violet, Doralee, and Judy. (Named for the women of “9 to 5.”) They’re about ten weeks now and their voices are just starting to change from peeps to clucks. They’ll start laying two to eight weeks from now. Happily, they don’t object TOO much to being held and loved a little as long as the holder is not the dog.

A close-up of chicken eyes (Violet and Judy). If they weren’t the dumbest animals ever, one would think they’re plotting something. Merideth jokes that the three of them together have half the smarts of the cat. And our cat’s not that bright. Sweet, though.

As all animals are in our home, the chickens are mutts. They’re a cross-breed called “Red Star” or “Red Sex-Link” because the females and males have distinctive coloring when hatched which makes it easier to separate and sell them with a certainty your little hen won’t grow into a rooster. Here’s a picture of Violet when they arrived three weeks ago. I can’t believe how much they’ve grown in just that short time.

But enough about them. Here’s one more shot of the run with the new berm that was created by digging out their run. It’s possible this whole project was a ruse so that I could have another bed to plant.

Here’s how we decide whether we’re going to do something ourselves or hire it out: will this project require procuring and/or moving more than 500lbs of material? I think we max out at 500lbs. Well, Beth maxes out at 500lbs (see the great mulch-haul). I crumble under far less. Cuz you know why? It’s heavy and it makes me mad to carry heavy things. There it is.

So we’ve been saving up to get the driveway repoured in lovely, spanking new concrete. Oh why bother? Because it used to look like this:

When the guys went to tear it out, in addition to finding that there was no rebar (not suprising in an old house) they also tore out several tree-trunk size roots including one that was easily 12 inches across and 7 feet long. (Sadly my camera picked that day to crap out for good so my photos of it turned out as a test-pattern of green pixels. Fie!) Demolition done, the guys doing the work laid down a lovely modern mesh of rebar and poured the crack free, un-paint-spilled-on, properly reinforced driveway. Now all the concrete on the front of our property is new and gorgeous.

As an added bonus, they poured a couple of piers in front of our retaining walls (again, old walls, no rebar, no modern drainage) for a little extra stability. When digging the holes, our foreman showed me the rebar he was going to use to support the piers: 4 inch rebar that was leftover from the new Bay Bridge! Yep, our house is reinforced with bridge materials. Rad. Of course I still need to paint.

 Beth here.

Almost three years ago (Three years, you guys!  It seems like yesterday.), I seeded our back yard with much expectation for a beautiful green lawn, and ended up with what looked like a vacant lot with a few grassy weeds covered with birds, who apparently love seed.  I learned many valuable lessons from the experiences of seeding a lawn and blogging about it:

1. People (namely male people) take lawns very, very seriously.  If you even hint that you want the tiniest bit of grass advice, you will get it in spades and vehemently.  
2.  People (namely crazy people) are very defensive of Lisa LaPorta.  And really, who can fault them?  She’s adorable and can do a lot of home remodel with a couple thousand bucks, even if I do question at length where she can find some of her products/services at insanely low prices.
3. If you seed a lawn that is on a slope, you will get a lot of beautiful grass…at the bottom of the slope.
4. If you ignore the problem for three years, the lawn does not magically fill in.
5. Seeding is not so much for me.

Enter the tax return.

Due to the many, many stairs to our backyard, we hired out this project to a neighborhood landscaper who tore up the backyard on one Saturday…

…and then made it gorgeous on the next Saturday.

(If you’re wondering, that pole in the middle is one half of the hammock-holding system.  It looks much better with hammock.)

We are now watering it like crazy to get it established (the variety itself is drought-resistant, but apparently not on day one), and the dog has been sequestered on the patio and kept occupied with a butcher bone, because she’s not allowed to spend her day playing Keep-That-Squirrel-Away-From-My-Yard-at-All-Costs and other similar games.

*I made up some Latin.

sign in front of our house

No, I’m?not talking about hatred for the street sweeping. Nuh-uh. I’m talking about hatred for the *#!%$!%$ FIFTY dollar ticket we got last week because, randomly, the truck decided not to start which, therefore, kept me from moving it out of the street sweeping zone. The truck. Truck discussion counts as house blog stuff right? It IS the truck that hauls all the stuff for the house projects. Right? Right. P.S. do you know how frustrating it is to know you’re going to get a $50 ticket and not be able to do anything about it? Pisses you right off.

I was pretty sure the battery had just given up any desire to hold a charge. It was pretty old and I did leave the lights on all day a couple of weeks ago. Turns out 1980 trucks don’t ding at you when you try to exit the car with lights a-blazin’. (Ok yeah, here comes the “start small” portion of our story.) So I thought, we’ve done a helluva lot of stuff to this house successfully. Changing a battery can’t possibly be harder than, say, installing a toilet, drilling post-holes with a gas powered auger, moving electrical outlets, or putting in an insinkerator. If we could do that, we could swap the old truck’s ticker. Turns out yes, that is a task that is well within the ole skill-set. And that small step has effectively determined what the post-house project will be: restoring the truck. Bring it.

Note: Because I’m now used to the random weird stuff you find when working on an old house, I was not suprised AT ALL to find similar weirdness in the old truck. Turns out the battery hold-down bracket which should keep the battery snugly in place was missing. The battery had been bouncing around the inside of the truck like a big electrified, acid-filled lego block. Nice.

pressure washed and ready for paint


planted wall

The front retaining walls have not been pretty for awhile. They do however hold back the hillside and since our house sits on top of that hill, I’m gonna go ahead and call that one little heroic set of walls. All that hard wall-work deserved a little pampering so I took the pressure washer (seriously, buy one) and gave it a little spa time, blowing off all the peeling paint and discovering in the process that the side retaining walls and the front ones had been poured at different times and by people with VASTLY different ideas of the definition of “quality work.”

We waffled on what color to paint the walls and ultimately decided on a basic brown, both to hide the inevitable city grime and to kind of downplay the wall altogether. We don’t want to look like a fortified battlement after all.

Once the paint went on, Beth planted the narrow beds between them and the sidewalks with Bay-native and drought-tolerant species. Oh they’re tiny now, but as they fill in they’ll further hide the wall and contribute to the lovely “wild native hillside” thing we have going on.

before



after-ish

I know you think I’ve been slacking. Really, though, I’ve just been blog slacking. Blacking. Sbloking. Sum’in like that.  Because really we’ve been…ok so you know the giant house list? (Ours is in Excel because, well, you just have to know Beth.) Anyway, so we’ve been making our way through it ticking off as many items as possible. This, my friends, does not make for interesting blogging. It makes for entries like “Today I painted the back door. Not suprisingly the black dog’s tail is now white.” or “Beth tightened the door knob in the bedroom. She is master of the…um…screwdriver.” Not exactly thrilling stuff.

But, I have also been working on carrying the saltillo tile we laid on the lower steps and landing up the second set of steps to the patio. It’s this close to finished! My game has been rain-delayed for a few days so now I’m just waiting for a stretch of sun so I can seal and then slip-guard the tile. Then I can officially retitle “Porch Phase I Complete” with an exciting new Roman numeral: II.

elastomerically coated roof

Well no. It’s not. Not even close. But it is blindingly white in manner of snow. Also in manner of horrible stretchy pants worn by the hooker down on High Street. I KID! not really.

The reflective elastomeric coating is all but complete. I have to wait a couple of weeks for a patched spot on the porch roof to cure before I can coat it but that is ALL that remains of the roof project. (rah, frackin, rah)

To make matters awesome, we immediately noticed a difference in the interior temperature with the new white roof. I would say the house stays 10 degrees cooler because of it. This rocks hard here in the land of no air conditioning. While you might say, “That’s great for the summer but won’t you be sad when winter rolls around and you want that sunny heat warming up the house?” Well the answer, Mr./Ms. Negative, is no. Because here in the Bay Area there is none of this “sun in winter” concept you may be thinking of. We have the rainy season–winter–and the not-rainy season–summer. So when chilly weather rolls around, it’s not like we’ll be missing out on any solary type benefits. So we’ll be as chilly as ever bundled up in our fleece blankets in front of the Christmas episodes of Heroes and The Office.

Also, the 3 year old across the street told me I missed a spot. He was right. I’ve fixed it.

roof in progress



sorta side of roof

Do you think I’ll ever write a post in which I discuss some project that came together quickly, easily and was just a dance party of fun to execute? Or will I always be talking about the latest thing that is, how you say, sucking my life away? Today, kids, we’re going to talk about roofing and what I’d hoped would be a fairly short-lived, if sucky, project.

The gist: The roof is fine but could use a few little touch-ups here and there. Primarily, I wanted to get a new reflective elastomeric coating on the roof to help protect it and to encourage the sun to stop making my living room into what felt like a giant bread machine with sofa. So great. Did my research. Bought my stuff. Headed to roof. But it’s not just about the final coat. Oh no. There was…prep work. And AND, there were multi-step applications. Yes. And now I’ve been sweeping, spraying, rollering, brushing, brooming, and swabing for many, many hours. And I’m not done.

In the end, it’ll be one of those things no one ever sees but I will know that the shiny, sugary white reflective coating is there. And also, dude, the view of the bay from our roof is spectacular. Work aside, it’s been fairly lovely up there. Hey you have to look on the elastomerically-bright-white side.

trowel for stuccoing

Ohhh details. Yeah. I completely forgot about those. I got all caught up in the joy of being finished with the project; the heaven of not squatting on a bucket-bottom; the thrill of being able to stand upright and not lean over all monkey-fashion. Sweet, sweet hand lotion. There should be an ode or a sonnet or a country song to you. But anyway.

Here’s what I did. At first, I thought I’d put up a scratch coat and then a finish coat. Then I realized that the a finish coat would have plenty to bond to since the aggregate was thoroughly expposed on the wall’s face. (Metal lathe, which is under all the house’s stucco, was never a consideration for the likes of mere garden walls.) So after I pressure-washed off all the grime, slime, and loose paint, I painted on a concrete bonding agent for a little extra holding power. I mixed up small batches of La Habra base 200 (grey) from Home Depot and troweled on the mix. It took me about 3 batches to find a consistency I liked but then I had the proportions set and things went fairly quickly. Definitely spring for a big flat mixing tray. It’s so much easier to get the stucco out of that than a bucket. I sacrificed a wooden spoon from the kitchen for mixing because it was easier than using my pointing trowel and it was totally worth doing. The pointing trowel was great for stuccoing the tops of the walls though. It was like frosting a cake.

I worked in about 4′ square sections. When I completed 2 sections, I went back and used a rubber float on the first section, which had set up enough to withstand some finessing, to smooth out the trowel marks and bring up the sanded finish. Once that was done, I misted the whole thing lightly with water to keep it from curing too fast and continued to mist once a day for 3 days to get a proper cure.

We could have tinted the stucco mix and avoided painting, but I don’t think we would have gotten the color right in every small batch. The wall would have looked like a Greg Brady patchwork vest.  Then every day when I’d see the wall I’d have to say “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia!” Much to Beth’s chagrin.

newly stuccoed wall


old tatty wall

In my other photos, the angle, light, shadows and dog all conspired to downplay the true hideousness of the weathered concrete walls.  This weekend, though, I got before and after pics of the last section. Now you’ll see some stuff.

Overcast days never turned me on, but something about the clouds and this mixed. Finally, you can kind of see the craptastic shape of the concrete vs. the stuccoed finish. And let’s be clear: This little 3′ wide wall, all crumbly and cracked, was in approximately 12 x cube root of pi x a million times better than the 75′ big wall. This little guy has yet to be painted and since it’s raining today, that’ll have to wait until Thursday or Friday. When the paint is finished, Back Yard Stucco 2007 (woo-hoo) will be fully crossed off Beth’s list.

Note that the original title of this project did not include the words “Back yard.” We’ve amended that because we’ve decided to implement Front Yard Stucco 2007 (woo-hoo). We’re so pleased with the change the stucco has made that we’re going to carry it around to the front concrete retaining walls. I have to say the process has been extremely satisfying and I’ve gotten pretty good at it for a lay-person with zero real training. Check it out – I’m even on the calendar to give a lesson to our neighbors.