Drywall is now in finishing stages, and so we’ll be thinking about paint soon.
Lots of paint.
So, I’m thinking paint gun and a compressor, which I was gonna get anyway. We’ll see if the CFO will go for it. Possibly just rent the gun, since I doubt I’ll be using it often. The compressor I need to size for my workshop, plenty big for this job.
So then we retape everything that needs it, tape up the newly installed stuff, mask up and spray.
Sounds like 5 minutes of work when I put it that way. I bet we need two weekends just to prep.
Oh yeah, still need a concrete pour in the master bath, tile, etc etc.
This is an exciting week coming up: insulation and drywall.
Over the past month or two we’ve been running like dogs to keep ahead of our renovation todo list. We’re both “the Boss” and “grunt slave labor” on this project, working with our contractor and subs to keep the project somewhat resembling on schedule and minimize the inevitable budget overages.
Since the demo phase we’ve had no walls to speak of, which allows easy access to all the things we’re putting in said walls. Since that ends this week, we’ve been scrambling to get all the in wall stuff in and ready for insulation and even more so, drywall. After that adding things that go through walls becomes a lot less convenient.
That’s included 2000ft of CAT6 for phone and data, mostly because you always pull two cables to have a spare, and since it’s my profession generally speaking, I wasn’t going to do it halfway. (Well, I did use to run cable back in the day, now I’m higher in the networking food chain and let others have that fun).
Other cabling included:
~500Ft of RG6 Coax for cable TV (with a run for the future to the studio coiled under the house, have to trench for that…)
~1000Ft of speaker wire (two per room really eats up cable, especially to the back of the house)
-And the doorbell. We’re keeping the original button, replacing the chime, and I have a nefarious plan to have it notify me via twitter or something equally over-the-top-geeky, mostly just because I can. And after pulling all this cable I should have some fun.
Money saving hint: 12-2 landscape lighting low voltage wire is exactly the same as good speaker wire and a lot cheaper because it’s not labeled “speaker wire”. There’s a lot of marketing crap out there, but all that really counts is that it’s stranded copper and heavy gauge for longer runs (of which I had many). Audiophiles get what my mother calls “all Nth-degree about it”, and a market has popped up to take advantage of this. If they could figure out how to polish electrons and call them special “audio-transduction-electro-magnetic-wave-packets” and charge extra for them, they would. But I digress.
I think I drilled about 200 holes for pathways for all this plus all of the electrical. Walter our “German Master Electrician” was great to work with, and only had to drill a bit here and there, rather than spending hours of his valuable (expensive) time on it.
I probably removed ten pounds of wood just by drilling, but added back about 150 pounds of copper just in the cables (speaker cable is heavy!). After tidying up a few things (edit- done!) we’ll be hands off for a while during insulation and drywall.
It’s time for a break while we consider our next priorities, mostly the master bath details, that kinda has to be done before we move back in… Fortunately most of those details have been settled, there’s just some design work I have to finish (and Lois has to like) before we complete that phase.
It’s going to be great. I tell myself this often lately, sung to the tune of “I think I can…”
Went to Huntington Beach to see Lois’s sister Vera and her family, or really her husband’s family mostly. There was a high school graduation which served as a big reunion for the Kasprowicz side of the family. Lovely folks all around.
Long drives 450 miles or so each way, but worth it to see family. It was nice to hang out at the beach, less nice to have missed certain spots whilst doing sunscreen. I got off light compared to my niece however, who will be playing the part of the regretful lobster for a while. She loves the ocean, but accidentally used SPF 8 apparently. That’s useful in Minnesota, not so much in SoCal.
I am now officially uber-grumpy with sunburn (when exposing my fish-belly white legs to SoCal sun for hours, minor coverage mistakes have severe consequences), so I’ll be going to target and buying the CR best rated sun screen. “Up and Up sport continuous spray” is apparently the most effective, and it’s even cheap, so what’s not to like. Closing the sun-burned-down barn door, but we’ll have it for next time.
Aloe is my friend, but I’m still looking for solarcaine, which is my favorite sunburn suffering remover. Aloe and lidocaine, oh yeah baby! Apparently it’s mostly sold in Australia these days, but I’m sure I’ll find it somewhere.
Anyway, at least we weren’t doing dump runs or tearing down more of the house.
So I’m discovering that I’m beginning to reach limits. I’ve had one day off in four months basically. And there are many things I just can’t get to, which in itself is bumming me out a bit.
Well, we’ll just do what we can and get over the rest. I’d go to my happy place, but it’s being renovated.
Sorry if you’re one of the things I neglect, things will be better once the house is done. The steel beam is installed, so it’s getting closer.
The time capsule is now under reinforced concrete at the top of our new front steps. Embedded in the gravel fill, so as to not weaken the concrete, it is unlikely to be disturbed unless a 747 crashes directly on the house.
In the time capsule (stainless steel 3.5″x12″ cylender) we put pictures of ourselves, the house before and during the renovation, and also of us and my brother Greg sitting on motorcycles in front of the house. They might think us a little crazy given our pose, but what the hey, we’ll be long gone and difficult to embarrass anyway.
Also included are:
-a letter from us “hello from 2010″
-a spreadsheet of the renovation cost
-several of our new years letters from the past few years for historical context
-a silly gift coupon we did for my parents, again we’ll be dead anyway…
All of this we put in archival film covers, that I had anyway for another photo project. The pics I had done at a lab, so they’re probably good for 200 years or so. Particularly given that they’re in the dark with a dehumidifier packet and sealed with silicone and wax.
Things that didn’t make it in:
-Wire sculpture (couldn’t find my wire in time, since we moved to the cottage this has been a recurring theme)
-electronics of the 21st century (too likely to decompose in a nasty way)
-oxygen absorber(ordered it, didn’t show up, no time to get more, oh well)
-Jimmy Hoffa (redundant)
Having to run around and get things done for the time capsule. Have pictures printed, hope that they last the several centuries that we expect the capsule to be embedded in the stairs. The concrete pour is Friday, so we gotta get everything assembled and ready to go before then.
We’re putting in a letter, some pictures, and I’m trying to think of other cool non-perishable items to include as well. We’ll put in a newspaper section I suspect, if we can fit it in. The can isn’t that big, it’s stainless steel though, and is rated to last a really long time. I also got a dehumidifying packet and an oxygen absorber, so things should be in good shape for about 200 years at least.
I’m thinking I might put in a wire sculpture, that should last. Staples don’t apparently, nor rubberbands or such. So no plastic stuff either. I’m using archival film envelopes for the pictures and other documents, hopefully they will withstand the test of time, as severe as it may be.
Today we got the first of two concrete pours done, for the house foundation. The guys who have been working this job have been great, they really went to town on this job, getting it done faster than we thought possible.
Lois is baking them pies and brownies, which may have helped. It sure helps me.
I have video of the pour, but stupidly forgot my still camera. Oh well, the video is good enough. I’ll edit and post it next week.
This is getting pretty exciting, stuff is finally happening! Now we just have to bust our buns for 6 more months doing what we can and deciding on things as rapidly as possible. Kind of playing catchup on that, as we ran behind with the packing and moving stuff, and consequently the demo. We finally had to hire a few guys to accelerate that process.
Fun fun fun, we’re looking at concrete products for the bathroom floor. Hoping to do something elegant/tasteful, and yet unique and artful.
It’s also complicated by the radiant heating we’re putting in the bathroom, but as soon as we have the slab math worked out we’ll be okay.
Hopefully we’ll get a lot of demo done this weekend, but I suspect we’ll have to hire somebody again to finish it. We can do it, but we can’t hold things up or we just end up costing ourselves more. Lots of dependencies involved, more so that I originally thought.
But things are going well so far, very exciting indeed!
Such as simple phrase, it doesn’t really signify what Lois and I did last weekend. It’s been a week now, and I’m still feeling it.
We removed the chimney. From the Top of the old TV antenna to under the house in the ground, we took it completely apart and hefted the bricks out to the front of the house. (If you need any bricks, they’re cheap!). I suspect that we hauled about 5 tons of bricks out to the front. God bless Craigslist for finding us folks who bought them and more importantly took them.
Still have about 100 left, plus the broken ones.
Chimney Removed. Kind of like “Tiger Soup” Step one: obtain Tiger…
Okay, I will admit it, I was the termite. I was a six-one termite armed with a Milwaukee 15Amp corded Super Sawzall. Which, by the way, Rocks.
2×4′s were no match for me. Wainscoting put up laughable resistance. 4×4′s with sistered 2×4′s fell to my reciprocal wrath. Well, actually it was orbital wrath, as that is more aggressive and what you use for wood demo apparently.
I even made a cartoonish video of cutting a me-shaped hole through the wood wall. Unfortunately it was wainscotting again and kinda flew apart mid-way. But you still get the idea. Sawzall
Slideshow of my rather sudden progress to follow.
