House Made

I hadnt. And I actually laughed out loud. And a laugh is always worth sharing.

Thing 1:
I got home from work yesterday to find Beth on the phone with our 5-year-old niece, who had called to tell Aunt Beth alllllll about her very first day ever of school. It was all very thrilling and adorable.

Thing 2:
My sister-in-law and brother-in-law just got official word that they will be making the trip to China to pick up the newest member of the family in October. It’s all very thrilling and adorable.

Seems like lots of house restorers are in the middle of stripping some portion of their woodwork right now and we are no exception. I am thanking my lucky stars that our project is much smaller than what other folks have going on. Some P.O. replaced 2 interior doors in our little casa with everyone’s favorite: hollow core doors. Since those are crap we’re pulling them off their hinges and replacing them with wooden 1920s doors we got at the salvage yard. One of the 2 soon-to-be-installed doors has really badly chipped and peeling paint so I stripped it.

Compared to our other stripping projects, this one was really easy. I had a big flat surface to strip, outside, on saw horses. It still took 3 hours. Bleh. So hats off and a big batch of condolences to all of you working on large-scale stripping projects.

That’s right. Hail to Habib. It’s been stuck in my head since yesterday when Habib the electrician showed up at our house EARLIER than he said he would to start working on our little electrical upgrade. We now have a new panel with new breakers. He added a circuit and gave us a full 100 amps instead of the meagre 60 with which we’ve been living. He secured the wiring coming into the house from the city that was heretofore hanging on by a rusty nail as left by the stucco guys. And he installed a shiny new 8 foot copper ground wire. So that was the must-have stuff. While he was at the must-haves, he installed 3 new exterior outlets thus paving the way for Holiday Lighting Extravaganza 2006 as well as Lovely Landscape Lighting 2006.

I’m so happy that I’m almost completely over the frustration of not being able to get anything accomplished yesterday. Turns out I need power tools to do everything on my list. Habib installing new panel = no power. But as I said, I’m psyched it’s done. Beth has already ordered our new landscape lights and picked out the transformer we want to run the low-voltage scheme from H.D. She’s sketched out the lighting concept for both the front and back yards. It will be awesome.

All of this joy brought to you by Craigslist. CL, what did we ever do before there was you? Hail to Habib he’s the one we all say hail to…

first step

There should be a song called “Ballad of the Awesome” so that I can sing it accompanied by mad air guitar whenever something works out just like I hope it will.

Here’s a little preview of the first step with it’s leveling layer of cured epoxy. This genius product is Abatraon’s Aboweld 55-1. One of the many awesome things about this stuff, including the fact that it’s designed for restoration of masonry and consequently bonds to exisiting concrete with superstar fierceness, is that it’s so thick that it doesnt require forms. That’s right. You basically sculpt it with troweling tools. One of the sucky things about the stuff is mixing its 2 parts, one of which is this glutenous, unmanagable mass of stickiness that reminds me of uncured tar. If you decide to use this product, be careful not to burn out your drill when stirring the mix up.

The color difference between the Aboweld and the existing concrete doesn’t matter for us as we’ll tile over the whole shebang when the levelling is done. This is where progress will stop for now as we are going to visit some friends this weekend. More stairs next weekend when we see Steps 2 through 8!

Beth again.

Sometimes I feel a little betrayed when things I’ve worked on the house — things for which I have sweated and cried — stop working.

Such was the case of the spontaneous non-working status of the garbage disposal I installed only 18 short months ago.  I installed it.  I loved the garbage disposal and gave it a home.  Why would it stop?  Traitor.  Even fishing out all debris from its interior (it remains the scariest thing ever to stick my hand down there, and yet I can never be bothered to find the tongs — do not learn by my example, kids) did nothing.  The disposal just hummed and hummed, flickering the lights dramatically, but wouldn’t turn.

It was dead to me.

But before I arranged for a pauper’s burial, the Internet yielded this little article that solved the problem with a hex wrench and two minutes of my time.  I realize that the dads of the world already have this particular fix-it information pre-programmed into them, but it was a perplexing situation for me.

The garbage disposal lives!

We are friends again, but it’s going to be a little while before I can trust.

crooked steps

Ok, so you remember the wonky front steps, right? I asked for suggestions on how to fix it and all I got was the sound of crickets so HA! I’m making my own way people! Fingers crossed.

As a refresher, the steps are torqued because a tree, that has been removed, spent a good 5-10 years growing up under all things concrete and moving said concrete to suit its rooty needs.

Okay, so here’s the plan. Thing no. 1 to be aware of is that we DON’T want to have tear out giant concrete steps and repour them. The reasons for avoiding that chore are, I’m sure, obvious. So we’re going to try to add material to the downward slanting left side of the step to bring it level with the right side. Let me sketch:

Current state of affairs if you were to look straight on at the steps:

So we’re going to build up the left side of the step with epoxy/concrete to create a flat surface like this:

Once the steps have been built up to level(ish), we’ll tile over the whole shebang with Mexican and Talaverra tiles. I’m hoping it will work awesomely. Stay tuned.

Beth here.

I want to take this opportunity to encourage all homeowners to vent their frustrations to the Internet when they are unable to find a skilled tradesman.  Expletives and/or fake expletives ($#@!) are encouraged to really get the point across.

As soon as Merideth posted about our tradesman-hiring frustration, it started raining electricians who not only will work on old houses, but have things like non-expired licenses and want to discuss other things like permits.  It was like they were all above-board and not shady.

It’s all very strange but exciting.  I don’t want to jinx it further by telling you information like we got two very competitive offers or that we hired a real live person to do some work next week.

Is there an equivalent to “break a leg,” but for electrical work?

Why can’t we get a *#&@!\  electrician to come to the house?!!!!!!!

That is all.

front garden

You might think that a California-native drought tolerant garden would be fairly self-sustaining. You would be wrong in that assessment. Our front garden is fully freaking out right now. After 2 weeks of 100-degree temps that made them look haggard and sad(temps we NEVER see) our plants have decided to host a “Hooray We’re Alive” crazy growth spurt party.

So Beth spent all weekend thinning out dead stuff, pruning, watering, moving mulch, killing weeds, and generally making the yard look more, um, well…giving it a controlled wildness. That’s way better than the uncontrolled ravaged sadness it had been displaying for a few weeks there.

The yard is now just entering its red stage. (Check out the pink suprise lillies in the upper right of the yard!) It has its blue/purple stage in the spring. Then we move to red stage in late summer which then segues into, my favorite, red/yellow stage in the fall. I cant believe what a great job Beth has done with this.