Todd Keebler's

Back in the Saddle + Living Room Feng Shui

2011-09-09T16:01:00.001-05:00

Google just released an iPhone app, so I think it's about time to hop back in the saddle and do some house bloggin'.

Since I installed my projector so the screen was at the end of the room, my living-room has barely been used. The couch was arranged with it's back to the dining-room/kitchen and as a result the only time ppl would feel comfortable sitting on it was when everyone was in that area. I wanted the projector that way so that it could be seen from throughout the house and so the speakers would cover the whole floor in sound... But ultimately, it just wasn't a great arrangement from a Feng Shui perspective.

Recently I had an epiphany: the screen didn't have to be parallel with one of the walls! Why not put it at an angle and then rotate the couch so it's back was facing the wall?

Doing this has really opened up the room and made it more inviting. In the last couple weeks alone, we've hung out in the livingroom more time than we have in the last couple years! It's great, an makes tons of room for the new XBox360 Kinect I got :P

Acoustic Reticles I

2011-05-24T23:49:00.004-05:00

In case you haven't read the blog before, I get the white foam from my work because it is used to ship some of our raw materials in. It's really high quality foam (polypropylene, not polystyrene), so rather than throw it away I've been keeping (read: hoarding) lots of it in my basement planning to do something like this for a long time now.

The white foam mainly diffusers (scatters) sound but the grey and red foam that I've added absorbs the sound, so acoustically it's a good compromise of features.... plus I think it looks pretty awesome.

The blocks are all held together using magnets and stick to small L brackets attached to the wall to give it a cool "floating" look. The magnet technique needs to be perfected a bit, but once complete will really ease installation and that's something I've been striving for to allow other people to put them in their house without complicated hanging instructions.

I plan on doing a 4x4 grid on my other wall, then trying to get some online press for them and spread the word.

BTW - The name "Acoustic Reticles" came from the silicon microphone wafers that the white foam is used to ship. A reticle is an electrical design/pattern which is repeated across a silicon wafer which in the case of my company are used to make tiny microphones.

"New" Bed and Wall Decorations

2011-05-24T12:09:00.002-05:00

I'm baaaaack!

I hope to get a number of house projects complete this summer so I figure it's time I get the ole blogspot up and running again. Today's update features one new and one new-to-the-blog items... Both of which are contained in this photo:

New-To-The-Blog is the wall decorations, which I scored from Construction Junction for $10. I sanded, fixed and re-painted them from their original red color, but the mounting hardware on the back made them relatively easy to hang.

New-new is the bed. My buddy Brandon and I built the box you can see there last night... and by that I mean I followed Brandon's lead and tried to keep up :P He works for Kramer's Kustom wood shop right down the street from me in the Southside and we whipped this together in a couple hours. This is just the start though. Next we'll add drawers, a front panel, a headboard and integrated side tables so the drawers can slide under them. All of this will be finished with a to-be-determined exterior like laminate, vaneer, metal... who knows. All I do know is it's gonna be awesome.

Recycling Milk

2008-10-20T20:26:00.004-05:00

I've been thinking about doing this for a long time, and finally got around to it..... definitely should've done it a while ago. I cut small notches in two sides of a milk crate, making two recycling bag holders.

Bag Notch

Crate with Two Bags

"Uncle Frank"

2008-08-25T06:29:00.004-05:00

I've been pondering the idea of putting an animal mount in my stairwell for a while, and after Jeremiah forwarded me a craigslist posting advertising 2 caribou and 8 deer head being sold, the idea came to fruition.

It looks even better than I thought it would. The pictures really don't even do it justice. The amount the head comes out of the wall and commands attention is incredible. Standing at the top of the stairs, your eyes are just about in line with his, and as you walk down the stairs and look up, you gain additional perspective on his antlers.

I like how it looks and (although it sounds kind of lame) the earthy feel it gives to my otherwise calculated interior so much that I think I want to get more. The woman I got it from has 8 or more deer heads still for sale and last night my friend Nick had a pretty amazing idea to place one at each end of my dining room table, coming out from the center of foam that I have mounted on them. The contrast of the highly geometric, entirely man-made foam with a large wild animal would be really impressive I think.

Here's what the wall looks like on both sides of my dining room table (just one side shown, but it's the same on both).

Transitions

2008-06-09T00:42:00.004-05:00

This is a fairly unexciting topic, but it took me a while to do this and I'd been putting off doing it for so long, I think it deserves its own post. I installed transition strips/thresholds this weekend between the cork floor and the sliding glass windows and the bathroom tile. It wasn't a big deal, but also took some finagling to get right. Pictured above is the transition by the front sliding glass window.

Not shown is the one I did for the other sliding glass window and the bathroom strip. For the other sliding glass one, I cut small holes in the strip on the two ends so I could run some speaker wire under it and have my movie area wired for sound. I'll take some pics of that when I document the main living room area and projector screen sometime soon.

Room Curtains!

2008-06-09T00:36:00.003-05:00

I spent many-a-mornings with my room bright as the day because all I had on the sliding glass doors to prevent the light from coming in was a thin white sheet. Last week though, my mom took the extra material from the curtain in the living room and made it into curtains for my bedroom! I think it looks pretty great, and it definitely works well to keep the sun out.

It even allows me to leave my plants and my cats' bed in the window box and lets them get sun while keeping it out of the room.

In this picture you can also see that I've made a little seating area by the window. My bed had been in the middle of the room, with a night stand to the right of it, but I moved that towards the door of the room and brought in two of the old-school/retro office chairs I have. Now you can sit there and read or watch TV or just lounge. I'm really liking the way the room feels with this area setup as opposed to before.

Ceiling Mounting the Projector

2008-06-09T00:27:00.004-05:00

This weekend I worked on ceiling mounting my projector with my mom. Since I got it, I've had the projector sitting on a little school desk between the couches. It was fine while sitting down and watching movies, but walking in front of it caused you to be blinded by the bright light, and the power and video cables going to/from it were just asking for an accident.

I got a projector mount when I purchased the projector as part of the package, but in order to get the cables to/from it I needed to either install various types of video jacks in the ceiling, have cable run through the walls to another jack, where I'd plug things like my DVD player, comptuer etc into so that I could see them on the screen. This would've been pretty expensive, so I went with the cheaper route of installing "raceway" from the projector, along the ceiling, to the wall, and then down. Raceway is just a plastic guide for the cables to go in so they're not conspicuous. It's fairly cheap and the sell it at Lowes and Home Depot.

I also had to cut out sections of my foam wall decorations/sound dampeners so that the raceway could run behind them, but that was pretty easy because of the fact that they're foam.

Once I finalize where my dvd player etc are going to be located, I'll run some more of the raceway horizontally along the wall to where it will end. I also plan on getting a black power cable as opposed to the orange one you can see.

$450...

2008-04-08T23:59:00.003-05:00

...is how much I'm going to get back on my taxes just from installing an energy efficient hot water heater ($300) and furnace ($150).

Definitely something to consider when considering upgrading appliances. Make sure to take advantage of this if you're able to.

It's about time...

2008-03-25T23:51:00.002-05:00

Since I moved into my new house I've walked across the house every morning to shower in the guest bathroom which is off the living room. Then I'll come back to my room to walk through my bathroom to go into my closet, then maybe I'll have forgotten to brush my teeth, so I'll walk across the house again to go back to the other bathroom.

Before I bore you with the details of why that happened, I'll cut to the chase and show you the video of the bathroom tour. The begining's dark, so give it a second or two:

(ok, now get ready, this is gonna be boring)

There were a few reasons for my "master bathroom" (my mom hates that term, so I don't use it much and now it sounds a bit funny/pretentious) not being ready. First it was because the contractors didn't measure right for the cultured marble order and had to jury rig it slightly, and as a result, needed an extra piece to cover a joint. Then once I finally got that piece ordered and picked it up, I found that it was made slightly incorrectly and had to be replaced. Then I got it back, had the contractors come back in to install it, but realized that the caulking they'd used on the rest of the cultured marble was the wrong type. I got the right stuff for them and they came back, got rid of the old stuff and put the new stuff on. So all good, right?

Wrong.

They did a terrible job applying the caulking. The transition between the black caulking and the white wall looked horrible... it was varying thicknesses, not a straight line, missing in places, etc. Anyway, I was sick of relying on them to get it right so I decided to do it myself.

Removing the caulking kinda sucked, and after trying to put the new caulking on "free hand" with my mom, we realized that you really need to mask it off to make it look good. Sooo, we did that... then when I went to touch up scratches we'd made in the paint removing the old caulking, I discovered that masking tape doesn't stick to silicone caulking! This made painting pretty difficult.

After a good bit of work with all this, I think tonight I'm all set to use "my" bathroom for the first time tomorrow morning. I even installed the shower head my parents got me for x-mas that has a spinning center, haha.

Closet, I have it.

2008-02-25T01:10:00.002-05:00

I finally installed the rod under my stairs for my coat rack. I have another idea I'd like to use for hooks hanging from the cieling, but that would be in addition to this. Wow, that picture's terrible.

Netflix should thank me...

2008-02-25T00:56:00.004-05:00

... cuz I won't be driving over their DVDs anymore :P

Basket with cork back board

(Sorry for the poor photo)

I have a mailslot on my garage door, but no mailbox on the other side, so the mail just falls to the ground. My mom got me this plastic basket-type thing for x-mas to use as a mail basket and I finally got around to installing it on my garage door with a few bolts. After doing so I realized that the basket didn't return to it's normal position after the garage door went up and back down, making the mail miss the basket. To get around this, I bolted a piece of extra cork to the back of the basket, acting as a stop for the mail, as well as making it so people can't look into the garage.

Looking up at the basket on garage door in it's open position:

Number Ni... Seven.

2008-02-25T00:45:00.003-05:00

I got this wood letter from Jo-Anna Fabrics, painted it with the same color paint as my siding and put three of the screw-bolts used to attach the siding in it (for show). It's too cold now, but when the weather's more temperate, I'm going to attach it to the concrete block with glue. For now I taped it to the front window though.

This. Is. Big. (Tetris.)

2008-02-25T00:16:00.004-05:00

As it is now, my living room/dining room has a very prominent "flutter echo" from the two large parallel walls. Although it's a neat phenomenon, it's also somewhat annoying because it makes the room sound loud. I've been planning to put acoustic paneling up on this area for a while now to deaden the room, but that's quite a large project so it isn't one that I thought I'd get to in the near future. However, we started getting some things for work shipped in these large, crazy looking styrofoam pieces and I immediately thought to use them instead of the fabric panels I'd been envisioning. They're not really ideal acoustically for what I want to do, but they should help, and they're free.

I was able to get 18 of them so far, they measure about 18" x 29", and there's a top piece and a bottom piece. Top and Bottom are similar, but both have two distinctly different sides on them; one which has square bumps coming out of them, and the other that has half-cube like holes. Word on "the street" is that we get these regularly so I should be able to get more.

My first plan was to hang them on the wall with nails, but then tonight while my friends Teddy and Jess were over, we came up with an even better plan: put nails (or pegs) all over the wall, allowing you to rearrange the pieces anyway you want, anywhere you want. We also discovered that in addition to hanging them, if arranged in the right way, they can be stacked on top of each other, essentially making a giant Tetris/Jenga game! It's hard for me to convey how cool I think this is going to be. Anybody that comes over can just rearrange the wall in a manner they like.

Also, with the track lighting mounted only a foot or two from the wall some really dramatic shadows are created. Stop motion photography to come ;)

"The System" Works (Like a Dysfunctional Family)

2008-02-12T18:41:00.001-05:00

Lots of updates to tell about the proposed place across the street today.

A few weeks ago the zoning hearing for the new building took place. Since I last wrote on here I re-examined what effect it would have on me and realized that looking out my window, I would barely be able to see the sky with this new building built as specified. I worked with my mom to create some scaled drawings of what it would look like next to my house and neighboring houses
and it really would be very out of place in the neighborhood, as well as blocking my light/view from the front. Additionally, my mom did some drawings showing that the land could easily be developed in a manner to fit 7 single family houses.

My mom and I went to the zoning hearing with two poster boards of drawings/pictures showing what I described above. The developer, his lawyer, a number of neighbors, and several Southside community groups (Southside Local Development Company, a Southside slopes group etc) showed up. After the zoning board had everybody state who they were and what their positions was (almost all the neighbors were opposed), the zoning board asked the developers' lawyer if they'd contact the neighbors or the neighborhood groups about the proposed development. When the lawyer said they hadn't, the board basically said, "Well, you should go and do that before you waste our time, because clearly there are some upset people here."

A week later the councilman arranged a community meeting. The meeting began with the developer going through a presentation he'd put together on who they were, who their company was, and what they hoped to do with the property. He focused heavily on it being a small family business (his wife, and two nephews were there, and his brother was involved, but couldn't make it) and that the intention was not to put in college rentals, but to put in nice condos for working professionals. The developer was clearly nervous, and I got the distinct impression from his manner during the presentation and through previous encounters with him on the street that he isn't a bad guy... just maybe didn't know the best way to go about these things. As they were talking there were clearly unhappy mumblings from the crowd here and there, with people talking under their breath or louder in disapproval at various things.

Next came the comment section in which the community members could have 2 minutes to speak. I went up first in an attempt to make a good example to the others of not being irate. I stated that although I was happy that somebody was developing the area and that they had some good ideas, the fact is that it's a really tall building that's out of place in the neighborhood and doesn't promote a neighborhood feeling at all. I explained that my mom had figured a way to put 7 single family houses in the same area and that this would be a much better way to develop the land. The comments from the other neighbors ranged extremely widely. The neighbors directly next to the property complained of irresponsible demolition practices, which they certainly had some justification in complaining about, while others practically yelled at them, and other still were pretty reasonable and logical about it all. It was really an interesting experience... the way people's approaches to the same thing can be so drastically different is fascinating.

Being that I didn't think the developers are terrible, money hungry people and having gone through a somewhat similar scenario with catty neighbors myself, I felt sorry for the developers a bit. Granted, I don't think their plan was the best it could be and they made some mistakes in not supervising their demolition crew properly... but so be it, nobody's perfect and they sure got an earful to think about. My mom, dad and I talked with them a bit after the hearing and they were clearly a bit shaken up by the whole thing.

I need to go to bed now, but the next chapter in this story is the Southside Planning Forum meeting just 5 days after the community meeting described above, and 2 days before the postponed zoning board hearing date.

The (Tax) Saga Continues

2008-01-20T12:20:00.000-05:00

Soooo, as I mentioned a few days ago one of the things I had to do in the near future was to get the number of rooms and other clearly incorrect information changed on my house's real estate listing with the county/city. My mom found an e-mail of a woman down at the city who was the contact for this and so I e-mailed her and told her the information that was wrong and asked a few questions to clarify things like "what is a basement", "what is a room", etc. She said that she had changed the definitely wrong things, but that somebody would need to come out to check the place out to clear up the shaky things and asked for my phone number.

About half an hour later I get a call from a guy named Charles Rogan, who tells me he's the supervisor for the assessment office and that he's been following the e-mail trail about my house, took a look at my file himself and found that there had been a clerical error when assessing my house and that rather than instead of being assessed at $178k which it currently is, it should've been assessed at about $85k! Hahaha, just a little bit of a difference. This brought it down into what I would consider a fairly reasonable range as far as paying taxes and a huge wave of relief washed over me. He said he would notify the 3 taxing bodies so that they would have the proper new records and all should be good.

An hour later I get another call from a number not in my phone and this time the guy explains that he's with Charles Rogan on speakerphone and that he's Charles' boss and they've been looking over the file together. He says that Charles was right that there was an error with the assessment, but that the new assessment comes in at $185k, not $85k. I ask how that can be considering the previous assessment was lower! He says that the computer program calculated it with the new information and that the assessment was actualyl $200k before, so this really is a drop. I say that I've seen it on the county website as $178, and he says he doesn't think so. I load the page up and sure enough it says $178. He explains this by saying it probably hadn't been updated yet. He starts asking me if I have a homestead and that saying would drop the assessment a bit. I'm pretty much freaking out at this point, my heart racing and I say I don't know what a homestead is! Then the other voice comes in from the speaker phone saying, "Todd, I really suggest you look into the homestead." I repeat again, frustrated that I don't know what that is! The voice repeats the last statement about looking into the homestead.... and it takes me about 10 seconds to wrap my head around it, but I realize that its my dads voice! He'd gotten one of his workers to call me up while my dad was there in the office the whole time, listening, haha. It's been a while since I've seen anybody pull off something that good that wasn't me, so I gotta give him credit ;)

Whoops, I Forgot: Kittens Need Updates Too

2008-01-18T08:45:00.000-05:00

I totally forgot that the last pictures I posted of K-Fed Jr were from before I even had him!

Here's Junior with his brother UB. UB is a bit of a special needs cat because his spine is twisted and he looks a bit deforme :P Hes still cute though and has a bit of a more sinister look than Jr.

UB on bottom left, Jr on top right

New Neighbors

2008-01-17T23:30:00.000-05:00

I got notice in the mail the other day that there would be a public hearing in front of the zoning board to discuss the request of the developers who are working on the jail space across the street to change the zoning of the building from whatever it was to multiple-family residential. The note said the plans for the new building were available at the zoning office downtown, so my mom and I went down there to check them out this past Tuesday.

The side facing Uxor:

The sides facing Sarah (left) and 13th (right):

Floorplan:

The good:
-The plans include the crappy college rental apartments across the street that were built up against the old jail. These were always rented out by dumb frat boys who would leave beer bottles in the street and barbecue while their dumb hoochies and loud friends would come by. In the 6 months I've lived here I think they've broken their windows 5-7 times. Needless to say they weren't exactly an asset to the neighborhood.

-Parking for the complex enters the "basement" on Sarah and then has an exit on 13th St. One of my concerns was that they would put the parking garage on Uxor because it's the least desirable in terms of view, so this was good to see. I really didn't want people driving up my street all the time and knocking off even more of my neighbors side-view mirrors.

-The design isn't bad. No aluminum siding, decent variation to the building as you go from bottom to top, and in general it's better than a lot of other new housing I've seen around the Southside recently. If I hated it I'd be pissed, but if I really liked it I might be even more pissed cause it would make my place look less unique/cool.

The bad:
-It's tall... and long. Although they list it as reducing the height from 53' to 40', only one portion of the building was actually 53' before, so the portion facing me is almost definitely going to be taller than the previous building. This blocks light and puts a big building right at the sidewalk, which may feel a bit ominous. My mom thinks the fact that there is a large building across the street from my house will make it dwarf mine and lower my property value... but considering I'm swapping a desolate, abandoned jail/police station and a crappy apartment for brand new condos, I think it'll still be a net increase.

.... and I think that's really the only negative thing about it. I may or may not go to the hearing and suggest that they put townhouses in instead. Single family residential is really waht the area is zoned for, so when the jail is gone, this is really what the land "should" be used for according to the zoning board. I'm not sure how much me going down there and suggesting that would really do though, or if it's worth making the developers come up with new architectural plans that I might like even less.

OK, enough posting for tonight... I'm spent.

I'm a Nice Guy (?)

2008-01-17T22:49:00.000-05:00

Guess they didn't see the "No Parking" sign.

I found out about a month ago that the proper procedure for dealing with somebody parked in front of your house is to call 911 (surprise!). This seems a bit strange, but the way it works is you call them and then you specify whether or not you want the car ticketed or towed. If you say towed, then they make an attempt at contacting the person whose car it is (not quite sure how...), and then if they don't get a hold of them it's time for the car to take a little ride.

So far I've used this new-found knowledge twice. The first time was around 3am as I was coming home in my car. I parked somewhere else in the alley and called 911. It went something like this:
*ring ring ring*
"We're sorry, no emergency operators are available right now, please hold.
*ring ring ring*
"We're sorry, no emergency operators are available right now, please hold.
(repeat for about 2 minutes)
"Hello, Pittsburgh 911..."

Good thing it wasn't actually an emergency. I couldn't help but wonder how many other people were calling in for non-emergencies and how many other people were watching the person that just robbed them (or worse) run away while they sat on hold.

I didn't need to get into my garage, so just told them to ticket the person. By the time I woke up the next morning the car was gone.

Two nights ago I was actually home when somebody parked in front of the garage (see above picture). I went outside and looked around to see if I could find whose it was... but no luck. So I waited about 25 minutes in case it was just somebody swinging by somebody's house real quick, and then I called the cops. This was a bit different considering I had work the next morning and my car was in the garage, but I was thinking of biking to work anyways and it seemed likely the person was just at a bar and going to come back later that night... so I told them to just give the car a ticket. When I woke up the next morning the car was still there and I was able to check out how much the ticket was: $92.50, a pretty good deterrent to having them park there again.

Over the past couple days I told a few people about this and more than a couple times the response I got was, "Wow, you're a nice guy... I would've towed them." I dunno, although it's hard for me to imagine how somebody could be inconsiderate enough to park in front of what's clearly an inhabited house, it just seems like such an unpleasant experience to have your car towed I'd really rather not have to do it unless needed. Additionally, if somebody's that much of an jerk-off it's also likely they're a jerk-off enough to smash my window or garage door while they stand on my sidewalk calling somebody to pick them up to drive them to their car.

I'm quite possibly kinda screwed.

2008-01-17T22:01:00.000-05:00

So, I got my notice of tax re-assessment in the mail today... and it's not so good.

It's assessed at about $180k, which means I would pay about $5k in taxes per year! I mean, I know the city needs money for various things, and I don't mind paying the 3% income tax for living in the city, but now to top it off we have the 10% drink tax and I have to drop $5k on taxes for my house? I guess what really ticks me off about the property tax is that it's the City of Pittsburgh that imposes it and the 3% income tax... So all the suburbanites don't have to pay any of it, yet would never be in this area if it weren't for the City of Pittsburgh, and they still reap all the benefits of being in the city. I suppose that's how/why cities like Baltimore get so run down and dilapidated. It's sad that so many people feel the need to save a few bucks at the expense of others. Granted, I'm annoyed that I have to pay so much and it's going to make things fairly hard on me financially, but a large portion of the reason I feel that way is because others, in my mind, are essentially cheating the system (that's not to say the city hasn't made it extremely easy to cheat the system... but still).

OK, enough about taxes and back to what I'm going to do about it. My first thought was, "Well, there's the tax abatement program that lets me slide on property taxes for 3 years because I built a new house and have improved the city. Great!" Then I went to get the forms in preparation for submitting my taxes... I'd assumed it would be like the tax credit for my instantaneous water heater that I submit when I file my taxes... nope! Turns out you're supposed to submit it 60 days from when the building permit was issued (well over a year ago). I'm going to try and see if I can get it anyways, but assuming they won't let me slide, that will add up to about $7,500 I've lost by making me think of that annoying phrase, "You know what they say about assumptions..."

They improperly listed the number of rooms and bedrooms I have, as well as the type of roof and the fact that I don't have a basement. These things may give me a little bit of fodder to base an appeal of my assessment on, but the bulk of it will need to be based on comparably houses in the neighborhood: something there aren't many of.

This whole process should definitely be a learning experience, though I'm sure a time consuming and possibly frustrating one as well.

Winter's Here... It's Official

2007-12-05T12:48:00.000-05:00

I just got back from Miami on Monday and woke up this morning to find out that winter is officially here:

So far the house has been holding up to the cold pretty well. The downstairs finished area is significantly colder than the upstairs (due to heat rising and all), but other than that there don't seem to be any cold spots in the house or drafts etc. This is a pretty huge difference from my last place where the windows seemed to make vague attempts at keeping the cold out.

One issue that has arisen though, is that my hot water temperature when in the shower has been fluctuating. I want to do some experiments to see whether or not it's just the shower that exhibits this, or all hot water lines. After I do that I'm going to call the people who I bought the instantaneous hot water heater from to see if they have any thoughts on the issue.

I'll be getting my kitten on Saturday, so there will definitely be more to come soon...

DSL

2007-10-26T12:58:00.000-05:00

After 3 months of sitting in the front half of my bedroom so that I can just barely leach WiFi off my neighbors at worse-than-dial-up speeds, I ordered DSL yesterday.

Looks like because my house used to be in their system I didn't have to pay a whole bunch of money to have them hook the telephone line from the street wires to my house... only $50.

It's going to be installed next Friday, so after that I'll be able to post house updates from my house much easier and I promise to update this more often :)

New Addition to the Household

2007-10-18T15:10:00.000-05:00

Well, I've been a total slacker about updates again. I gotta get on top of things.

Anyways, just a quickie to let everyone know about a very possible addition to the house: a kitten :)

Oh Hai!

I'm goin to check him out tomorrow and then would take him home in a few weeks.

Unless I come up with something better, he's gonna be named after the best father, husband and rapper of all times: Kevin Federline.

It's Showtime

2007-08-20T23:20:00.000-05:00

After talking about it lots, my mom and I finally are making good progress on the curtain. She got the necessary hardware from a medical supply place and we installed it and hung the un-altered curtain!

I'm pretty damn happy with the way it looks. The curtain is 22' x 16', and the wall is 19'3" x 10' so a significant portion of the curtain had to be cut off. The width was fine, but yesterday we cut the bottom portion off and plan to use this to make curtains for my bedroom which will use the same type of track that we used in the living room. I would ideally like to not alter it and let it lay on the floor, because it makes it look really cool, but considering that I don't want to ever dry clean this thing and it doesn't make opening and closing it very easy, it's far from a reasonable option. Sanchez really seems to like the curtain material (and fortunately not in a manner that involves lots of scratching) so while we were working on it, she'd stroll up and down the length of it like it was her own catwalk (pun intended):

In case it's not obvious, I got some furniture in the living room by now :P I don't think I posted about this before, but I brought over my old futon that used to be my bed that's setup like a chaise lounge, a small single seat chair that can be used as a bed if folded out and in combination with the ottoman, and then a full size couch that folds out into a queen sized bed (or close to it). I'm using my old dining room table for the time being, which is far from "nice"
or "cool", but it works.

After talking with my friend Nick about the layout of the place in general I changed the approach from what I'd originally planned. I'd planned to have a really large living room setup and have the dining room table sort of in the kitchen area, but once I filled it with furniture a bit it became obvious that I could have both the dining room and living room in the one large room and leave the kitchen more as a kitchen. I think I'm going to get a metal island w/ a wooden top (maybe butcher's block) for kitchen but at this point I can't decide if I want to have shelves under it, have it be open so I can slide stools under it, or maybe even both.

Unrelated, I've started stripping the paint off of the large cabinet of drawers that I got with the garage. It's pretty much a huge pain in the ass because there are something like 70 drawer openings, and each one has 4 corners that need to be scraped with a tiny knife etc etc. It's gonna look really cool when it's done though, and it will be a great place for me to store random stuff.

Changing topics again, I had my first "get together" this Saturday. It wasn't the official house warming party (which everybody keeps asking about, and will happen), but just a fairly lengthy bbq/hangout session. It went well, with the whole back patio full of people, one of my friends drunkenly peeing in the stones surrounding the paver stones at the end of the night, and even a little impromptu dancing. A few people stayed over, and the futons came in quite handy. Here's a bad pic from the top of the spiral stairs of the bbq in action:

I think Sanchez had a little too much to drink herself:

The Mysterious Noose

2007-08-20T23:04:00.000-05:00

I featured some pictures in the last post of the demolition occuring next door. Well, when I woke up two days later I looked over to see if any changes had occured that were picture worthy... I saw this:

Can't see anything special about that picture? Take a closer look:

Yeah, that's right... there was a noose hanging in the old jail. And when I came back at lunchtime, it was gone! My first thought was that one of the construction guys put it up that morning to pull a joke, but then I went back into the pictures I'd taken two days earlier and sure enough, lurking in the shadows is the noose still.

It's still possible it was a joke, but a tad creepy none the less.

Destruction...

2007-08-06T20:45:00.000-05:00

I posted an HDR picture (high-dynamic range image made from combining different exposures) a while ago, and have been dying to do some others. I've used a program called Photomatix Pro to do these.

Note to people familiar with image editing: A trial of the program is available which leaves watermarks on the image saying PHOTOMATIX PRO in 3 places. I realized today though that you can get around this by processing two sets of files separately: one set that's the original pictures, and one set with the original image re-arranged on the page. After you do this you just re-arrange the altered image to match the original and cut out the areas where the watermark was in the original image. Paste over the original image and it's as good as the registered program.

This is the view from my window of the demolition going on next door. I set up a bookcase in front of my window as a tripod and plan on taking more of these to track it over time. Yeah... I definitely shouldn't started this before they tore it down.

(I'd highly suggest clicking through to the full size version)

**Jump back in time 3 weeks ago**

As I think I mentioned, the old jail across the street is getting torn down. Apparently they decided it wouldn't be worth trying to save it.... which really is too bad considering how cool it was, but I can understand that financially it might just not've made sense... or at least they didn't care enough to make it work.

I really had wanted to take lots of pictures of the progress of it being torn down... but didn't do the best job. I did manage to get some before it was torn down and then I took some HDR pictures tonight (make sure to check out the end the post for this).

The side facing my house:

The side facing Carson:

The side facing 13th St:

A couple crops showing the facade's detailed brickwork:
Early evening lighting:

I'm a bad blogger.

2007-08-06T00:15:00.001-05:00

It's been quite a while since my last update on here, and I'm afraid that this isn't going to be a proper post either. I've been wanting to put together a blog for a while now, but haven't for various reasons. Some of these are legitimate ("I don't have internet at my house yet, and rely on just barely stealing neigbors wi-fi signals." or "I want to finish sanding and polyurethaning these transition strips") and some aren't ("I reallllly want to finish this Arrested Development 3rd season disc!" or "Man.... last night was a doozy.")

Either way, this post is more of a holdover than it is a real post. I want to take good pictures of a lot of stuff that's been going on and give proper explanations.

The Reader's Digest version though is that they've started demolition on the jail across the street, my mom and I are slowly making our way through the to-do list, I'm getting my furniture and other things into their places, and the contractors have finally started coming back to deal with the odds and ends that are left to complete that they're responsible for.

OK, more to come soon.... promise :)

Flattery

2007-07-10T18:44:00.000-05:00

They say imitation is the most sincere form of flattery....

... I just call it being a copycat :P

Granted, it's pretty different than mine, but this was just put up on the front of an old brick building in Larkins Way, along the way I bike to/from work. Same red color, and laidout (partially) vertically, like mine. I'd be pretty surprised if my place wasn't a direct influence on this.

Transformers Preview!!!!

2007-07-03T00:08:00.001-05:00

Here's a sneak peak at the new Transformers movie. Watch how the VW Golf turns into the 3 story tall robot:

Oh wait... wrong video. Apparently that wasn't more than meets the eyes, it was just my garage door opening and my car sitting there.

Sorrrrrrrrry

2007-07-02T23:32:00.001-05:00

Sorry it's been so long since I've posted an update. Lots of things have been happening, though compared to some of the major updates that have happened in the past, the newer stuff seems significantly less exciting. At this point, I'd really like a break from it all, but at the same time I enjoy it a lot and will miss it when i'm finally "settled".

One of the biggest projects was the painting of the spiral stairs. The ones I got came only primed (this saved a bit of money over galvanized or aluminum stairs). Any places where the stairs got scratched up during installation or just places that hadn't been covered by primer had begun to rust. This rust had to be sanded off, and then we primed those spots with some rustolium spray paint. You can see the red primer spray paint in this shot:

My mom and dad helped paint the stairs, which was great because every single railing rod had to be painted nad it was quite the task. Here they are, as requested by my dad to be in the blog:

We had to add what basically is sand to the paint that we used for the stairs themselves so that it added grip to the paint. Otherwise I would've needed to put some sticky strips on the stairs that invariably comes off.

One things that's really made it feel like I'm living "at home" is finally getting my washer and dryer hooked up. I got the washer for $25 off an old woman in the Hill that was moving, and the dryer from my old roommate when he moved to DC 3 years ago. Both work, but are nothing special. After struggling for a while to get the dryer vented to the duct work properly I went to plug the dryer in and found that the plug didn't fit. Turns out that the plug had been switched to be used for my old place's antiquated wiring. I went to Lowe's and got a new 4 wire plug, wired it in, and now it works fine. My washer and dryer, in all their glory:

The other day I put the knobs on the bathroom sink cabinets. I chose some clean, simple knobs that sort of feel art deco to me (in a good way... not in a pink and turquoise flamingo kind of way). I'm going to hold off on posting a picture, because all I have right now is a camera phone pic, and you really can't tell what's going on.

The last time I made a post I was talking about the theater curtain I wanted to get. Well, I went and got it... and it's pretty awesome. I haven't done much with it since I got it, because hanging it up is going to be a bit of an ordeal. I think I've figured out a way to do it using these right angle metal strips that I got from Lowes tonight, but it's still going to be a little while before it's up. My friend Casey's a sewing queen, so she's gonna help me alter the curtain to turn one 22' x 16' curtain into a curtain and a valence. The valence will hang down from the ceiling a bit out from the curtain to hide the track system I'm creating, and to also hide the projector screen that'll hang from the ceiling (or so the plan goes). The material the curtain's made out of is some serious stuff... 16 oz "Jezebel Red" velour. Unfortunately, from what I've read it has to be dry cleaned, which I'm sure would cost a fortune and will never happen considering the size of it. It seems fairly clean, so hopefully I won't have to worry about that for a while/ever. Here's a crappy camera phone pic of it spread out (it's HUGE):

OK, I'm feeling a bit under the weather, so it's time for sleep for me.

The Black Lodge Southside Chapter

2007-06-18T23:15:00.001-05:00

My livingroom/diningroom/kitchen from the spiral staircase landing:

Yes, indeed, the sun is nice... but it also is making my dark cork floor fade. I talked to a guy at Performance Lighting in Lawrenceville today and am going to be scoring a large red, velour, theater curtain to drape over the wall the sliding doors and spiral staircase door are on.

The other day I was telling somebody about my plans to do this and they said "Oh, you mean like the Black Lodge. (from Twin Peaks)." I almost entirely forgot about the Black Lodge because I must've been 12 when Twin Peaks was on, but after googling it, the similarity in floor color and the curtain are surprisingly similar to my idea:

Let's just hope Bob doesn't start appearing in my mirrors.

The Uxor Uxperience

2007-06-18T01:33:00.000-05:00

So I've been living here since last Thursday night. All and all it feels prettttty, pretty, pretty good (to quote Curb Your Enthusiasm). There's still lots of things still to do both on my part as well as loose ends the contractors need to tie up, but as of now it's at least livable. My mom and I made a good bit of progress on my closet this weekend, so that's underway. Still to come is painting the spiral stairs, painting the basement/garage interior, finishing the bedroom closet shelving/organization, and doing the pantry closet shelving. The closet's looking good so far, and I've taken before pictures/video to compare with what it looks like after.

So far I've been pretty happy with the floor poly job. There are a couple place which were missed though, so once other projects are completing I'll put another coat on a few spots. Once area of concern doesn't have to do with the poly, but with the actual installation. The floors were supposed to be leveled, but in some places, apparently they weren't leveled enough, making the flooring gives a bit under your foot. They're not bad visually, it's just that I worry that over time the movement will break the tongues/grooves and the tiles will separate. Only time will tell.

Here's a picture of the floor using a new technique I found out about called high dynamic range photography (HDR). To do it, you take multiple exposures at different shutter speeds. The images are then combined together to create a single composite picture taking the properly developed portions of each picture.

The best I could get this picture without this technique was either very underexposed or very overexposed. I'm going to try and use this same technique with the outside of the building. Taking pictures of the house against the bright sky can be tough.

Sanchez (my cat) was very freaked out when I first brought her over. She went and hid under the bed, in the nook in the bathroom, behind the toilet, etc. etc.

This continued for a few days and is now starting to subside. She's getting curious about the rest of the house. Whenever I go into the garage area I can hear her crying because she doesn't know where I am.

She also hung out in "her" window seat a couples times, apparently missing the birds in this instance:

One thing I'm definitely not happy with is that the air conditioner condenser unit on the roof makes a considerable amount of noise in my bedroom. This is something I was assured wouldn't be a problem, so I definitely expect this to be taken care of.

There's lots more....
Sometime soon.

Not Perfect, But Pretty Close :)

2007-06-13T09:37:00.000-05:00

Quick update: I went and checked out the floor this morning and although they're not "perfect" they're pretty darn close.

The finish on the new coat is the same as the old coat (which is still in the bedroom). There are a couple of missed sections by the top of the stairs and between the two rooms, but they're not too noticable. Other places here and there throughout the big floor have tiny spots of the very flat finish poking through, but I would be surprised if anyone other than me would catch them.

Also, we used 3/4 of a gallon, so there's still 1/4 left that I can use for touch-ups and the like.

It's About That Time

2007-06-12T23:43:00.000-05:00

Tonight my mom, dad and I put the final coat of polyurethane on the floors. I'm pretty sick of talking about it, so to be brief: I think we did a good job and I'm fairly confident it's going to look really good tomorrow morning when I go over to look at it. And if it doesn't... well so be it at this point. 5 coats of this liquid gold is enough.

The real good news though is that the house passed the inspection today, which means I'm approved for an occupancy permit, which means that I'm allowed to live there... and because the floors are done as well, it means I'm going to start sleeping there tomorrow.

One of the biggest things preventing the inspection from taking place before was that the sliding glass door and stairway railings were not installed. My camera phone pictures didn't turn out to bad either:

I'm pretty happy with their general look, though not they weren't built exactly right to fit with the ribs of the house and to center around the door perfectly. This isn't really a noticable thing, but something that'll annoy me none the less.

As I said before, it's wierd to come to grips with the fact that I'm going to be living in this practically imaginary place. The transition between planning for it, and living in it is really going to be interesting.

I'm taking this large change in my life to make a really hard attempt (i.e. actually do it) at becoming more organized and neat in general. I've "inhereted" a lot of junk from the last two places I've lived in and I have pack-rat tendencies as well, so it might be tough, but after putting so much effort into the house, I can't junk it up.

Sooooo, I write this from (what hopefully is) my last night in Mount Oliver.

Here's a "bonus" picture of the transition between the glossy and the satin finishes before putting on the last two coats. The picture doesn't show off the floor much and was a bit hard to capture in a phoograph, but I think this gets the point across:

An Open Letter to the God of Polyurethane

2007-06-12T08:26:00.000-05:00

Dead Poly-God,

My patience is wearing thin. I may be losing faith in You. After coming to terms with the generous donations required to obtain the Bona Traffic polyurethane and spending countless hours of penance on my knees buffing, cleaning and rolling I found that my lack of wisdom caused me to make the agregious error of pouring half the polyurethane out of the bottle and THEN shaking it, not the opposite. Half of the floor shone with Your presence like a shield reflecting all the rays of the sun, while the other half's matte finish calmly reminded me of Your calm and calculated wisdom.

To repent, I again buffed, cleaned and rolled the remaining half gallon, knowing full well that this half gallon could end up even more dull than the rest. I put my faith in You. I knew You'd let this poly dry true even.

But when the light of day was cast upon the floor, I did not kneel in thanks, but I rose my fist to the skys in anger as spots of glossy finish peaked and poked it's way through the extraordinarily flat finish.

After coming to terms with it, I've decided to ask the Oracle of Rossi Flooring to advise me in how to proceed and likely apply a last and final coat. Your advice no longer governs my actions. You're dead to me God of Polyurethane.

Todd

(In other words, I'm sick and @#$(&#ing tired of putting polyurethane on these floors. After attempting to fix a screw up that resulted in half the floor being glossy, I re-coated it which resulted in it being very flat in most sections, but with spots of glossy poking through all over. My plan is to spend another $100 and put one last and final coat on, unless the guys at Rossi floor suggest otherwise.)

Polly Wanna Urethane?

2007-06-06T23:40:00.001-05:00

Yesterday and today have been all about the polyurethaning of the cork floor. I need to wake up in just under 6 hours and put the third and final coat on, so I'll make this "brief":

-Got the poly for a little cheaper than expected (thanks Rossi flooring in Sharpsburg! *coughplugcough*).

-Cleaned the floor with brooms, then damp towels.

-Buffed the floor by hand with "mouse" sanders and buffing pads (this was largely done by my mom and Molly, you guys are awesome).

-While they did the buffing I installed cork tiles on the stairwell landing. This needed to be done very tightly, so was a pretty big pain in the arse.

-Cleaned the floor again.

-Applied poly (this was a lot easier than expected and was basically pouring the poly on the floor and then using a roller on a stick to spread it.

-Waited to dry.

-Discovered that I'd missed several spots.

-Decided that we needed 3 coats.

-Put second coat on.

There were a lot more little specks of dirt, lint and stuff in the polyurethane than I would've liked. Between the first and second coats I picked some of the bigger ones out. Hopefully that's good enough.

After seeing that I'd missed areas when doing the first coat, I decided that I wanted to put 3 coats on, so that at least each spot has 2 coats. Luckily the poly spread a lot more than it said it would, so 4 gallons should get me 3 coats plus 1/4 gallon left! It's spec'ed at 350-400 sq feet per gallon, but we were getting an entire coat of 800-900 sq feet done in 1.25 gallons! *shrug*

The railings and final inspector are supposed to be coming Friday. In make sure the third coat can be walked on when those things happen I decidcedto go in tomorrow morning at 7 to put the third and final coat on (my mom agreed to come help despite being busy with other stuff!).
ok, gnite.

What Have I Done?

2007-06-04T23:51:00.000-05:00

It's really starting to sink in that I'm actually going to be living in this place soon. Well, I don't know if I'd quite say it's sinking in, but it's starting to sink in that it's going to need to start sinking in soon, haha.

I've put so much effort and planning and time and sweat and thought into this project over the last two years, to see it finally come together is a strange feeling. Especially because it wasn't always going to be in this form.... I think back to the other places I've looked at and can't help but want to switch to the alternate dimension in which I chose to do those projects instead and see how they turned out.

Funny how I'm going to really miss making all these decisions and choices that I never would've thought I'd care about before the project began. I'd love to start looking for another place right now.... but unfortunately my income's brief stint in my bank account before going to house payments probably wouldn't allow it.

My roommate asked me the other day, "What if somebody just knocks on your door and offers you $300,000 for it?" The only way I'd consider it of course, was if I was given an indefinite amount of time to build a new place first... but even if that probably unrealistic hypothetical situation occured, would I really want to turn around and sell it before I've had the chance to "tweak" to my exact preferences and really settle into it for a bit? Probably not. But then again, if the price was high enough that I could then afford to do something even crazier with my next one.... maybe I would. Who knows.

Then after I've thought through all that stuff I get back to realizing how lucky I am to have been able to do this by having the parents that have spent all the time working on it with me and put faith in my decision (for the most part).... and to have all the friends I have that've offered their help.... and to work somewhere that's willing to be flexible with my work schedule enough to allow me to do this.... and to live in a city where you don't need to be a millionaire to own a house within the city limits...

And then I realize that there's no way I should be upset about not being able to immediately start building a second house.

Alright, time to enjoy some sleep on the fine couch here at my current place.

Biggest. Post. Evar. ??

2007-06-03T18:53:00.000-05:00

Well me last couple blog posts I was pretty upset. Having gotten over that initial panic, I realized that getting so upset about it really does no good. It's tough to tell yourself that at the time when it seems like the end of the world, but oh well.

Since that occured things have gotten kicked into high gear.

Saturday morning at 7am I rented a U-Haul (it was only available then!) and moved the stuff from my current place and my parents' garage into the garage/basement of The Hotbox (see previous posts for explanation of the naming... whether this name sticks or not, we will see). I couldn't move things upstairs yet because the cork still needs two coats of polyurethane applied. I'll be doing that this week. It took 1.5 trips with the U-Haul from my current place and just one trip from my parents'. There's still a good bit of small things to bring over, but over the next week I'm going to be bringing a lot of them down in my car. The move took surprisingly less time than I thought and was over a bit after noon.

Here's a snap of all my stuff piled in the garage:

And here's my cat, Sanchez wondering where all the stuff in my old room went:
(It's pretty hilarious she'll just go into the room and meow while looking around, clearly confused that everything's gone.)

Over the weekend workers were there much of the time, with Otto working till 10pm Friday night! (thanks Otto) There was a lot of joint compound, paint, and other general gunk on the colored concrete floor in the finished section on the first floor that had to be removed. Saturday night I went over and checked it out in order to give them approval to start the coating of it. This stuff was applied when the concrete was first poured (there are some blog posts related to this towards the begining of the blog), and seals the concrete, brings out the color which was mixed in with it, and allows it to be buffed, to create a polished look. I went over tonight to check it out and was really surprised at how much it changed the color! Over the course of the construction lots of dirt and dust have been ground into it, so that alone had lightened the color to almost a normal concrete gray, but the combination of cleaning that stuff off and coating it has really made a difference:

The other big thing I saw today was the installation of the bathroom countertop! The "Steel Gray" looks reallllly good with the black cabinets and black (with white speckles) tub surround. The continuity of the black works even better than I had planned. I think this is partially because of the little "seat"/storage area which we created at the end of the tub, under the countertop. It's not really a seat at all... it's more just a place to put things like soap, shampoo, etc, but it's similar to the seat that my parents' have at the end of their bathtub, so that's what we've been calling it. Unfortunately, this section is a bit of a tease because I didn't take a picture of it. The faucet isn't installed yet, and I wanted to wait to take the picture until it's all done.

(update: before posting this I went back the next day and it was done, so here's a pic)

As a consellation prize though, I took a picture of the half of the kitchen that's complete:

The oven sticks out a bit more than I'd like... but the countertop was already cut away more to try and move it back some, so I'm not sure what the problem is there. Aligning all the cabinet doors was a serious pain. At first I had no clue how to manipulate the hinges to make the doors move how I wanted. But when I finally got that down, it just got more frustrating. Having the two stacks of cabinets makes it so that once you adjust one door, you need to adjust three more to match it. Additionally, each door has three adjustments, and often times adjusting one means you have to re-adjust the other two.

The fridge is all hooked up and the water dispenser and ice maker are working! At first I thought there was a slight problem with the water dispenser squirting after the cup was removed, but it seems fine today. I also played around a bit with the controls on the front above the water dispenser: you can change the temperature by degree for the freezer or fridge, set an alarm/lock on it (so nobody can steal your beer??), and a setting with some crazy name like HyperIce.

In the garage area I wanted to have a crappy sink to wash out dirty/messy stuff, so I got a laundry tub w/ faucet and everything for like $60 at home depot/lowes:

I need to keep an eye on it in the winter, because it's in the unheated garage, but I doubt it will be an issue.

Here's a picture of the light in the guest bathroom on the second floor:

Toto toilets with the super G-force ultramax technology that I think I referred to before:
I'd been planning on working on the messed up section of the floor tonight with Otto, but when I called him early this evening to talk to him about it he said he dove into it and it turned out to be a lot easier than he expected. He was able to pull the tiles out, replace the messed up tiles and even only have to use one new tile in about 10 minutes! I was really happy this ended up not being as bad as it could've been. Had I not come over to check it out it would've kept coming in and sat there all night and caused who knows how much damage.

Alright, well this post is long enough and I think I want to post a separate one about general thoughts on moving, etc.

One Day's Worth of Work

2007-06-01T09:05:00.000-05:00

"One Day's Worth of Work"

(read previous post for explanation)

UXOR WAY – TO-DO LIST
As of June 1, 2007

GARAGE
- install garage door opener
- install laundry tub
- seal heads on side windows (3)
- seal around sliding door (inside and outside)
- level sliding door
- install sliding door’s screen
- remove construction debris
- sweep clean

REAR ELEVATION
- paint steel lintels (2)
- seal around window
- reset terra cotta coping on right CMU wall
- repair metal J below swinging door
- remove added wood below swinging door
- cover jambs with metal around swinging door
- clean windows and doors (4)
- remove extra mortar from concrete block joints
- install balcony railing

ENTRY/HALL
- Scrape, clean and buff concrete floors throughout (incl. powder room)
- seal concrete floors throughout (incl. powder room)
- install window sills (2)
- repair drywall under stairs
- install hardware and lock on entry door
- adjust furnace closet doors (left door hits right)
- set laundry valve box flush with wall
- repair corner bead to left of valve box
- install door stops (TK/AK)
- prime and paint repaired drywall (TK/AK)

POWDER ROOM
- install recessed toilet paper holder
- clean & seal concrete
- install towel bar (TK/AK)

STAIRS
- install railing and handrail
- repair drywall
- install luaun on landing
- install cork tiles on landing (TK/AK)
- cut baseboards for landing (TK/AK to install if cork is not installed yet)
- install transition at top stairs (TK/AK)
- polyurethane treads and risers (TK/AK)

BATH 1
- install hardware on pocket doors (2)
- install cultured marble joint pieces on tub
- install cultured marble countertop
- caulk transitions of cultured marble in all places
- install and connect faucet
- replace crystal diverter knob with chrome lever
- replace broken window slider catch
- move sills back to close gap
- install towel bars and toilet paper holder (TK/AK)
- install medicine cabinet (TK/AK)
- install closet shelving (TK/AK)
- install cabinet door pulls (TK/AK)

BEDROOM
- change direction on sliding door
- install balcony railing
- install quarter round
- buy pocket door hardware (TK/AK)
- install hardware on double pocket door

KITCHEN
- level partial wall, repair drywall and reinstall cap
- move range and refrigerator into place
- remove disposal
- exchange broken disposal (TK/AK)
- install new disposal
- install remaining cabinet doors (TK/AK)
- install quarter round (none behind range)

LIVING
- replace buckled cork tiles
- install hardware and lock on swinging door
- repair drywall around sliding door lock
- seal abandoned screw holes on sliding door jambs
- install pantry closet shelving (TK/AK)
- install quarter round

BATH 2
- replace broken tile
- hang door and install stops
- replace crystal diverter knob with chrome lever
- install toilet seat
- install hardware on door
- install vanity doors (TK/AK)
- install door stops (TK/AK)
-

No News is Good News?

2007-06-01T00:00:00.000-05:00

Well... if you'd asked me this morning I would've said the fact that I've had little to no news to report about my house/The Hotbox, I would've said that was a bad thing.

I returned to the site the Tuesday after Memorial Day weekend to find very little accomplished and was pretty disappointed. I let the contractor know that I planned on moving my stuff into the back of the garage this weekend because I needed to move out of my room at my current place. When I explained that we still needed to put two coats of polyurethane on the floor before I moved things upstairs, he said there was only one day's worth of work left to do, so this should be fine.

After seeing the amount of work left to be done, I knew there was no way for this to be done in one day. I let the contractor know that there was much more than this to do and figured now that he was in the loop things would get rolling.

Wednesday night though, I still found nothing done.

Today (Thursday) I sent a reminder e-mail, along with a note about the bathroom countertop which is ready to be picked up.

At the end of the day a big rain storm was coming through.... my first thought was, "Hmm... I hope things are OK over at my house." Followed by, "Nah, I'm sure it's fine." After work I decided to go over to see the progress that surely had been made by now as well as ease my silly fears.....

...... to find the back door to the spiral stairs wide open and a huge puddle on the cork floor! And guess why the back door was open? Hmmm, could it be because one of the things still left to do that hasn't been gotten to is to put the back door knob and lock on?

I'd assume my sarcastic tone is making it obvious that I'm pretty pissed about this, but in case it wasn't clear: I am.

The transition between the two tiles directly in front of the door had taken water in, expanded, and swelled. Amazingly it only happened on this one seam, but because the water was coming in at the edge of the cork, water had seeped underneith the 5 tiles in the area around the door and the door casing also was wet. What will happen to these when they dry out, or over time, I really don't know. They might be fine, but I'm not sure. The two tiles with the swollen tongue and groove definitely need to be replaced though.

Because they're tongue and groove, removing just one or two tiles isn't possible (unless you cut off the tongue and groove, which is not "the right thing to do"). To do it right, the baseboards and door casing will have to be removed and a significant number of tiles will have to be removed and some of them will need to be replaced.

OK, that's all the bitching I have in me for now, but to wrap up: I plan on moving my stuff into the basement on Saturday and then as soon as the work upstairs is complete I need to polyurethane the floors and then move my stuff up.

Today wasn't a good day. (no comment on my use of AK's, please)

We Be Plumbing

2007-05-22T00:06:00.000-05:00

Looks like some plumbing work got done today. First up is the basement/garage powder room sink. My mom found a cool, new bar sink at some kitchen supply type place in the strip for under $100, plus it looks cool. We salvaged one of the lights from the original garage and used it for the above the sink light. I was a little worried this whole thing we were going for wouldn't work, but I like it a lot and am glad we did it:

I ran the water and checked to see if the instantaneous water heater was working yet....

... but it wasn't even plugged in. Oh well, at least it looks impressive. The washer and dryer will go under the water heater and to the left from the perspective of this picture. I only have a dryer now... so if anybody reading this has a not-horrible washing machine they want to get rid of, I could use one.

Tonight I had my first meal in the backyard with my mom (she took the picture):

I even made a little video of the microwave's first use to heat up our Qdoba, but I think I'm going to spare the general public and leave that on my computer.

Tonight I finished adjusting the kitchen stainless wall cabinet doors. There's still a lot more that needs to be done (install and adjust glass cabinets above microwave, adjust drawers, install and adjust under sink doors), and there's no countertop yet, so I'm still withholding any pictures.

The bathroom cultured marble tub surround is installed now and it looks preeeeeeeetty awesome. I can't wait to see it with the steel gray countertop. The cabinets are installed as well, and although they look very nice, the laminate we got has a neat texture to it, that doesn't visually stand out. You can tell it's there if you look, and you definitely will be able to feel the difference though. That's probably for the best anyways, considering the busy-ness of the counter and surround. Pictures to come once installation comes nearer to completion.

Sunday Sunday Sunday

2007-05-21T00:35:00.000-05:00

It's Sunday night... that means it's late and I'm putting off getting to sleep in order to do some updating. Before I do that though, let me just say that my two favorite characters on my other Sunday night activity the Sopranos and Entourage are Paulie and Johnny Drama.

So I've been going over to the house a good bit to work on stuff, and one of the biggest, but also least exciting tasks has been sanding and varnishing/polyurethaning the baseboards. My mom had always suggested we clearcoat/polyurethane the baseboards and trim etc rather than paint it like is normally done. Seemed fine to me, so I didn't think anything of it... untill we started, and I found out that doing that involves sanding, then painting on the polyurethane, then sanding, then more poly, then more sanding, then installing, then more poly and more sanding. It's quite the task, and if you don't put the polyurethane on just right it leaves funny marks on the wood. I'm getting better at it, but it was a struggle at first. (btw, don't ask me why it's called clear coating, varnishing, and polyurethaning.... but all three mean the same thing).

This is some of the baseboards on sawhorses during the sanding/coating process:

While over there today, I also picked up a bunch of the cardboard on the floor (to protect it) and swept a bunch of the saw dust up. I've been waiting to post good pictures of the floor until there's not much stuff on it and it's cleaned... but it's probably going to be a little bit before that happens, so I just went ahead and took this picture while it was the closest it's been in a little while:

The pattern turned out real nice. My only concern with it is it getting damaged because it's so soft. There were some small mess-ups with it from installation alone, and although there aren't that many workers going in and out of the upstairs, it's still taking wear and tear from all that's going on :/ I'm trying to leave lots of cardboard around to protect it, but I almost worry that because the cardboard's there, the workers think they can be more cavalier than they should be. I've found a few dents and scratches that definitely weren't there before.

The good news on that tip is that I started messing around with doing some patching of the cork. I cut out a little section on a scrap piece, then got some other cork, cut it up into pieces, jammed it in the section of missing cork, and coated it with polyurethane. Then I gently sanded it down flat, coated with more poly, etc etc. It didn't work perfectly, but it worked pretty well! With some practice (and I think maybe using a little glue initially), I should be able to patch it if bad things happen to it.

Another thing I've been working on, but withholding documenting quite yet are the kitchen cabinets. I drilled the handle holes, attached the handles and hung the doors this past week (after much thought and discussion into exactly how to position the handles) and this weekend I spent some time adjusting them so all the doors are spaced properly in relation to each other. The Ikea doors have three things that you can adjust to do this, and although they clearly show how to adjust each axis, it took a good bit of futsing about to figure out a good technique. The real problem is that if you change one thing, then you have to change 2 others on the same door, then if that changes how the door hangs in relation to the doors around it, you have to change all those. I'm doing a double stack of 24" tall cabinets too, so this makes the "surrounding doors" issue even worse. I finally got the hang of it today though and got a good bit done. Hopefuly I can get that finished up soon so I can take a proper photo n'at.

Alright, before I crash, here's a little video I took walking down the spiral stairs and into the patio. My mom brought over a little plastic table she got for free and some plastic chairs she got for a dollar, or something ridiculously as little. (Update: it seems as though the plastic table wasn't there when this was filmed... but don't worry, it's there now)

The Hotbox

2007-05-18T13:52:00.001-05:00

I've been trying to come up with a name for a while now for my house, and with the help of Ash and Wikipedia, I think I found a keeper: The Hotbox!

My place looks a good bit like a railroad car, so I threw that into Wikipedia and then Ash found it.

Hotbox: An axle bearing that has become excessively hot due to friction.

It's great for my place because:
1 - Hotbox is a railroad car term
2 - My house quite boxy.
3 - My house is HOT (and this is why it's hot, hot; this is why it's hot).
4 - My house is red... like something hot.
5 - Just cause it's a cool term.
6 - etc

No-Party Time, Not Particularly Excellent

2007-05-15T15:21:00.000-05:00

So up until a couple weeks ago I've described the non-finished portion of the floor as "garage/work/storage/party" area.... but unfortunately I've come to realize that it's probably going to be more like just "garage/work/storage" area.

I talked with the head of the acoustics department at work about soundproofing it, and he basically said that if there's a garage door, the only thing I could do to keep sound from getting out would be to build a whole new wall inside the garage. This is pretty much out of the question because I want to leave room for at least two cars to park (I will have two for a small period of time, plus future owners may have two), and building a wall after that much space would leave very little room for partying anyways.

He often times is overly cautious about acoustics in general, so at first I passed his comments off as exageration.... until yesterday when I was in the back of the finished area (about 40 feet from the front) and I could hear two people standing in the street front of the garage door outside talking. Not only could I hear them, but I could hear them fairly well, and they weren't talking particularly loud. The garage door closes in a way that leaves gaps around the edges, and I would imagine is the way most garage doors function as well (this might even be a requirement to allow venting of fumes).

What this means is that the garage door will acoustically act like a screen door.

Considering that a few of my neighbors hate me, that sound will bleed out of the garage area all over, and that my upstairs would be destroyed if I had a party there............ I've pretty much come to the conclusion that parties at my house are almost definitely not going to happen. This really sucks. I like throwing parties at my house and was really looking forward to it. The plan from the start was to have the basement/garage be a party area.

I'm not saying that I won't try my hardest to find a way around this problem.... but I really don't think it's likely. My best thinking now would be large wrestling mats that I'd have to hang from the ceiling to the ground right in front of the garage door, and somehow make a seal between them and the walls. Don't ask me where I'd get these from, or where I'd store them... but ummmm.... yeah.

Anybody that read this want to offer up their house for me to throw parties at instead (couch (or bed) for me to crash on at the end of the party is required)?

Kitchens are a good thing

2007-05-11T01:10:00.000-05:00

I really should be going to bed now, but instead I'm going to finish with the major house updates.

While working on the flooring Wednesday the appliances were delivered. After a small scare of the fridge not fitting up the stairs (!!!), they got everything into the kitchen area. We laid cardboard all over the floors to prevent scratching and it seems to have done a good job.

Slide in range with convection feature:

Slick dual drawer washer:

Fridge with bottom freezer and french doors:

The cabinets were going in at the same time, so it worked out perfectly timing wise:

The microwave got installed today as well, but I don't have a picture of that. Unfortunately there will need to be an outlet in the cabinet directly above it, but thems the breaks, as they say.

To leave a little more of my personal touch on the house I wrote a note to future owners, and along with a dollar bill I sealed them with plastic and slid it under the cork tiles in the bedroom.

(yes that's a T2 allusion, and yes I realize how dorky/lame the entire message is :P)

Spiraling out of Control

2007-05-11T00:58:00.000-05:00

Things seem to have reached a new state of completeness now that the spiral stairs have been installed and the outside patio has been finished. Maybe it's because I'm so happy with how it turned out, or maybe it's because it's the first large section that's "done"... but it really overwhelmed me.

The spiral stairs came in Tuesday in three pieces:

Wednesday I took the day off work to get some stuff done at the garage, and that just happened to be when they installed the spiral stairs. It took a bunch of guys and seemed a bit tricky, but got done.

It still is going to need to be painted (we just got it primed to save some money). As of now I'm thinking to just paint it black... I think it looks pretty damn good as it is.

Where to begin...

2007-05-11T00:34:00.000-05:00

Since I last dropped some of this hot blog action so much has gone on. I might break this up into a couple posts for organizational reasons, but we'll see.

The biggest thing going on has been the flooring, which I last posted about. The more I worked with it, the more I understood it and the little things you need to do to avoid problems. The most important example of this is how exact the tongue and groove needs to be to fit together correctly. If the tongue smashes at all then it lifts the cork at the edge on one or both tiles. I didn't have a good grasp on how important this was until more than halfway through the process. Although I caught big mess-ups, there were some imperfections that I definitely would've liked to avoid.

Buuut, regardless of that it looks awesome :)

As of May 5th, here's where we were:

My parents were there assembling the kitchen cabinets too:

Towards the end of the day I slammed my finger with the hammer... it didn't hurt that bad after a few minutes, but the fact that a decent section of my finger was halfway disconnected from my finger, it made me a bit uneasy at first:

After cleaning, treating and wrapping it, it felt a lot better and looked better too (and the above picture doesn't show off how bad it was.

One more update to come tonight before I sleep.

And Then There Was Cork

2007-05-03T07:35:00.001-05:00

Last night we started laying the cork (shown above unboxed). After figuring out the dimensions with Otto, we decided there was room for 19.5 rows of cork, so we decided to put 1/4 row on each side so that the pattern I'd come up with would still work.

The first row was the real bitch. It took forever because the wall wasn't perfectly straight and each tile needed to be cut a different size. Just determining that the wall wasn't straight took close to an hour, haha.

Once we got into the groove (no pun intended) with the first row it wasn't so bad... that is until we got to the second row. Hitting the full 1'x3' tiles into the small 3" wide tiles was not so easy. You'd hit into one, and the next 3" wide one would pop off. Then you'd have to go to the end and pound those in, etc etc.

Anyways, Otto and his grandson, Josh, left after about 1.5 rows was done. I then sanded the floors and continued on. I got the feel for it and came up with some better techniques for the second row I was completing. I was feeling real good about my progress so when I got to the end I figured "hey, what the hell, I'll cut the piece for the next row with the circular saw." (I'd never used one before). I did that, it went well... nice cut, good size for the tiles. So I started laying the third row and this was a LOT easier. I got 2.5 tiles in and realized I should start checking when I'm going to need to put one of the dark pieces in.... wellllllllllll, this is when I discovered that although I'd planned on starting in the corner with a 1/2 tile, and we'd done that, what I HADN'T planned on doing with starting with a 1/4 wide row of tiles. Basically that 1/4 wide row was extra to my design, and should have been started with a full tile!

Man, I was so pissed. After all the work we did doing the first and second row, there's now way I'm going back and re-doing it. I decided to call it a night and focus on the pattern.

I came up with a variation on the other one that I'd designed, and it's pretty nice too. I'm going to take some time at lunch today to work with the pattern a little more, but I think I'm fairly decided on what I've come up with.

Here are a couple pictures of the first row and the start of the second row:

I'm a Cork Dork

2007-05-01T11:51:00.000-05:00

Alright!

The new Night cork arrived today. I went over at lunch to check it out, and as promised, it is the same height, width and length and has the same tongue and groove!

Otto (the site supervisor that's going to help me install it) is a beast. He's gotta be over 60, and after a full day of working is going to take a quick dinner break and then come back to begin laying it.

6pm tonight is go time!

w00t.

Check back late tonight for pix of the install process at Ash's request.

Keep Hope Alive

2007-05-01T00:26:00.000-05:00

After talking with the cork company a few times today I think it's all sorted out for me to recieve replacement Night cork that should fit with the Stone that I have. The woman at the cork company was very nice about it and said she'd personally check to make sure what they were going to send me fits with the Stone cork that I have. They also said I could keep the incorrect Night which I received. I'd like to build some boxes/shelves and scratch protectors for the floor out of some scraps, so this will be perfect.

They sent the cork out overnight to me today, so I should have it tomorrow.

I'm really happy they were nice about all this. It would've been a pain to have to deal with some people that didn't care.

I'll post an update tomorrow as to whether or not what shows up fits or not! The suspense is killing me.

Time to Wait and Other Updaits

2007-04-28T15:56:00.000-05:00

Well, after getting to the garage this morning and looking at the cork with Otto (the site supervisor who I'd hired to help me on the side), we decided that it makes the most sense to wait until I can talk to them on Monday. Otto said he could help after work if he had a quick break, so it wouldn't mean a full week's delay. He also pointed out that not only are the two types of cork incompatible because they have different tongue and grooves, but they also are different sizes! Strangely, the boxes with the Stone cork in it say "910mm x 300mm" printed on the side, but the sticker which the company I bought it off of has on it says "900mm x 298mm" (the same dimensions listed on the Night cork)! Anyways, we'll see what the cork people have to say about it.

A few things that I haven't blogged about yet:

I showed up Monday night to paint the first floor and discovered the steel beams this "lovely" shade of red:

They were supposed to be the same red as the siding, but there was some miscommunication and they were painted this bright red instead. It turned out they were planning on doing multiple coats, so it was fixed easily. The contractors got a new red mixed together, and it looks much, much better:

(the hook is still the other red)

Finishing of the patio area was begun as well. The back area had been cleared out, dug up, and gravel was poured. This was from when just the gravel was in, but now there are paver stones covering the majority of the area.

There seems to have been a bit of a mix-up between my mom and the contractors regarding the elevation of this. My mom had meant to indicate that the part now underground which was dug out and filled with gravel be sloped towards the house, but the contractors (and me too) interpreted what she said to mean that the ground level elevation of the gravel and paver stones be sloped towards the house. This may cause a problem with drainage and water run off in the future... but hopefully it doesn't because it looks really nice and I'd hate to have to lift large concrete slabs by myself and level out the gravel!

Lots of the lights have been installed and look really good. We're going to have to do some tweaking of the track lighting because some of the, just the kitchen ones just don't give off enough light.

I'm Pissed

2007-04-28T00:57:00.000-05:00

This cork floor's been nothing but hassle.

I was planning on doing this:

Buuuut,
I was told they should, but the tongue and groove on the two types of correct cork don't fit together.
-this means I can't do a pattern like I'd wanted, and I don't have enough cork to do the entire floor in one color type either
-I won't get to use the night cork, which I liked the most
-my plan is to put the one cork down that I have the most of in the living room/kitchen and hope that they have more of this type left so that I can finish my room with it

Despite the fact that I feel like they should, I don't really see any chance of the company that sold me this paying $550 to ship it back to them, then give me the newer, almost identical new cork (which costs more) and paying $550 to ship that back. I don't see any other way that this could be "made right". I don't want to cut the tongue and groove off, because then the edges of the cork would not be solid all the way through to the ground and could break or dent when weight's applied to it.

Houselog Shout-Outs

2007-04-26T01:03:00.000-05:00

After being informed by a friend tonight that he was a loyal reader of my blog, I realized I need to send out a few shout outs to the people that read and comment on this houselog:

Tony - You closet houselog reader, you.

Ash - In it to win it.

Tara - "I feel like I talk to you all the time because of your blog."

Maranda - Oh so stealth with the M-Dahtness.

Oka - The cork's going in soon... I can't wait!

Frankie - This is the cause for me not visiting this spring :P

Oh yeah, and if you're a steady reader and I forgot to mention you, make sure to leave a comment yelling at me!

Score one for my property value

2007-04-25T16:52:00.000-05:00

Yesterday as I was taking care of a couple things at the garage, I saw a couple guys coming out of the abandoned police station/fire station across the street. One guy was in a suit, the other in casual business clothes. I asked them what they were doing and got to talking.... to find out they just entered into a sales agreement on it!

Unfortunately, they plan on tearing it down most likely (which is too bad, cause it's a really cool building), but anything being done with it other than crappy low budget college housing will increase the property of my house significantly. It will probably mean 6-12 months of my sleep being disturbed here and there, but I think I can deal with it.

They said they plan on either putting town houses or condos in... hopefully they do townhouses, because that would mean not quite as many people in and out of my tiny alley. Either way though, I'm quite happy about that, and feel significantly more secure in my investment now.

When you need it hyphy, I take it to the Bay (Siding)

2007-04-20T08:53:00.000-05:00

Just a quick update here, cause I wanted to post a picture of the wood siding on the small bay. It looks sweeeeeeeeet. I'm very happy with both the color and the proportions of it. Can't wait to see the bigger bay on the left.

A Paintful Weekend

2007-04-16T00:09:00.000-05:00

(forgive the bad title pun... I couldn't resist)

This weekend sure was tough, but fun in the end. Friday night I stayed home so I could wake up at 9am and begin painting the main living areas. I met my mom down to the garage around 9:30 where we started taping off/covering the doors, tubs, etc. It took a little while to get things going, but once we did, we made some good progress. Matt, Nisan, and Brandon were some of the first helpers. Later Ash, Joe, Brian, Geoff, and probably somebody else that I can't recall just right now came and helped put the primer on. The primer was fairly sloppy... and as a result, by the end of the day I was covered in white paint.

Here's a little video of the paint being poured:

And here's Nisan rolling the first paint:

After a lot of people left, I was getting ready to pack things up around 6:30/7 when I got a second wind. Geoff and Ike Jones came to help more, so I just kept goin.

Around 9 it was time to call it quits. I warshed ahht the rollers n'at and headed home for a shower and to chill for a second. Geoff then came and got me and we went to Flux, and then to the Beehive for after hours. I walked home (a mile up the hill), slept for 6 hours, then woke up for more painting today! Weeeeeee!

Today was extremely productive though. The real paint goes on a lot thicker and is a lot stickier, hence it doesn't splatter all over the place like the primer. We allllmost got 2 coats done today, thanks to a lot of hard work from Zack, Brandon, Nick, Molly, Andy, Ger, Emily, my Mom and Dad, and about 15 minutes from Dave.

The biggest thing is for us to get the upstairs painted so that the tile in the bathroom can go in, and then the cork flooring this upcoming weekend. As far as painting the rest of the place... it's going to take a while! The inside downstairs area isn't so bad, but the drywall on the garage
walls and cieling is going to be a serious undertaking... not entirely sure how that's gonna work :P

Ok, time for bed now.

This Flooring Decision's Driving Me Insane!

2007-04-13T09:28:00.000-05:00

Man.... I think this decision on the flooring is even more difficult than the siding decision... a close second, if not.

There's only 126 sf of one of the two corks I wanted to get that were on special discount, and of course it's the one that I like more. The discount cork doesn't fit with the non-discount cork because they have slightly new tongue and groove patterns, so I either have to go all new or all old, creating about a $900 price difference. I tried for hours and hours to come up with a pattern using just 126 sf of the one type of discount cork, but it really just isn't enough to make it look good...

and I need to make a decision TODAY.

To top this all off, it looks like the discount which I thought I was going to be able to get is not going to happen for reasons I'd rather not get into.

Blaaaaaaaaah.

Siding in the rear

2007-04-08T23:00:00.000-05:00

I couldn't get a photo of the back as I'd have liked to, so I took a video
instead. I think it gives a better impression of what it looks like.

There will be a set of spiral stairs going to the single door on the left, and the sliding glass doors on the right will have a fence/railing in front of the bottom half of it flush with the wall. At a later point I could put a balcony on it, but I can't really afford that and am not sure I want one anyways.

Here ya go:

Quick Walkthrough

2007-04-04T00:12:00.000-05:00

Yeah, this video kinda sucks, and I even had to put it on photobucket instead of youtube, cause youtube's down, but I didn't take any pictures today and wanted to post something, so here ya go:

I found out today that the upstairs and most likely the downstairs will be ready for painting this weekend. Let the begging for help resume!

Costs and "Thoughsts"

2007-04-03T00:28:00.000-05:00

(yeah, I just post Thoughsts cause it rhymed)

I'm getting to a couple key junctures in the project now:
-the point now when I'm going to have to start doing some of the work finish work myself
and
-the point when I have to make some decisions I've been putting off for a while.

Sometime next week it's going to be painting time. Previously I was thinking, "Painting's really not gonna be so tough." Then I was in the garage on the first floor a few weeks ago and looked up at the 12 foot cielings, with bulkheads and other things jutting out of it around the metal beams and decided it might not exactly be a "cakewalk":

Luckily a lot of people have been awesome enough to offer to help me, so I think the painting should end up being alright. Enough people have said they'd help that people don't have to spend the whole day helping me or anything to get it done. A few hours from each person will be great though.

After the painting gets done then comes the flooring. I'm not sure if I've mentioned it before on here, but my plan is to install a floating cork floor with the help of my mom and somebody else. This somebody else I hope to either have be a friend who has installed hardwood floors before, or maybe the overseer at the site, Otto. I'm going to use two types of cork: a darker cork in the livingroom and bedroom areas, and a lighter cork in the kitchen. The cork comes in 1'x3' tiles that snap together sort of like those crappy fake food pergo floors do. The tiles have a cork layer on the top that's somewhere between a 1/4" and a 1/8", then the loocking material which lets you snap the tiles together, and then another 1/4"-1/8" layer of cork underneith. They're supposed to provide very good insulation and warmth to the feet, which will be great to have considering that the garage underneith isn't heated for the most part.

Here is one of the layouts I'm considering:

I need to make the decision on exactly how many square feet of the cork to get very soon because it needs to be ordered.

Hopefully the following problem is done with, but I was having some issue before with water seeping into the windows along the side of the first floor. We saw as the drywall was being put in that this was leaking rain water, and I saw once again when the drywall was in that it was still leaking. For a while the contractors couldn't figure out what it was, but as it turns out, we think it was a combination of:
-pieces of the house wrap (basically a raincoat for the house) overlapping in a way such that water could fall between them and get channelled into the wall
and
-the siding and flashing not being installed yet.

Here's a pic of the damaged drywall I took just in case the issue cropped up again:

There are tons of lights I need to buy still... and I have to try and figure out how to do that in a way that's financially reasonable.

But for now, it's tme for sleep.

Spatula City!

2007-04-02T00:28:00.000-05:00

The last few weekends my mom and I have gone out looking at kitchen appliances. This has not been a very productive process, nor a particular uplifting one. I say that because this is yet another area where you can spend $200 on an appliance and get something you'd see in a college apartment, or you can spend $5,000 and get something you'd see in a fancy house magazine. I hadn't budgeted/planned for the very bottom of the line models, but really can't afford all that much higher either.

After spending a lot of time at, and getting quotes from two different appliance stores and doing lots of online research I'd narrowed it down to either getting all GE appliances or getting a GE fridge and everything else from Frigidaire (many of the manufacturers have mail-in rebates if you purchase multiple things from them). The Frigidaire option was going to be around $2600 and the GE option was going to be around $3500. Neither of them were exactly what I wanted and neither had any options that were all that great. The GE models looked a little nicer than the Figidaire, but the difference was fairly small. I really wasn't particularly excited about either package and had kind of become indifferent on the whole issue so was leaning towards just going with the Frigidaire to save money.......

Then this morning my mom, Molly, and I went to the "Sears Scratch and Dent" warehouse. As the name implies, this is where you can buy appliances and other things from Sears that customers returned because of cosmetic defects or that showed up at Sears with
cosmetic defects or sometimes even that are just discontinued. I was a bit skeptical about getting something from this place, but when I walked in the room and saw the number of appliances they had, I began to think differently... and sure enough, after spending only an hour there I walked out of there with all my appliances purchased and excited about the kitchen again!

Here's the run-down of what I chose:

Dishwasher - Fisher & Paykel Dish Drawer 603
It's hard for me to get excited about a dishwasher, but this one proved me wrong. It's basically two separate dishwashers on top of each other. Each drawer slides out and has stainless steel interior, is very quiet and the two drawers can be run independently to save energy/water and so you can put heavily soiled dishes in one and lightly soiled dishes in the other. Awesome.

(I'm getting it in black though)

Range - Kenmore Elite 36723
This was probably the best deal I got, snagging it up for 50% of what it normally sells for. It has convection, warming drawer, continuous grills, glass top, and a long burner on the left. It's what's called a slide-in range, which means it lays slightly over top of the counter top and there is no backsplash control panel area (the controls and display are on the front instead). Because of those two things it gives it a much more built-in, clean look. The reason it was in the scratch and dent warehouse was so minor too: the finish was chipped in a couple places on the vent cover, which is in the middle-back of the top surface, under the middle grill. I'm sure a replacement could be acquired for pretty cheap, but honestly it's so minor I don't know if I'll even try.
Fridge - Kenmore Elite 77249
This was exactly what I was looking for in a fridge: black non-textured finish, water dispenser, ice maker, bottom freeze drawer, and french fridge doors. This was another great deal, getting 40% off the retail price. This has the most damage of any of the things I got, with a dent on each side about 4 inches above the water dispenser, and a small one on the lower right edge of the freezer drawer. Molly astutely pointed out that magnets would cover the two top dents very easily, and the bottom one, really isn't very noticable.

Microwave - Kenmore Elite 80829
There's not so much that I was looking for in a microwave, but this has even more than that. It can cook with convection heating, microwave, or both and has an easy to clean stainless steel interior (I still don't understand how they do that... what happened to not being able to put metal in the microwave??). The convection option allows you to cook as if it was a stove and from what I read in this article, it works pretty well!

(I got it in black instead of the stainless though)

I need to get to bed, but a quick update on the rest of the place is that things are coming along nicely, with the drywall all in place and the siding going up very quickly. Looks like the big portions that I'm going to be doing (the painting and flooring) are going to begin next week, and completion is looking to be around the end of the month/early May (just in time for my b-day).

Been a long time...

2007-03-20T00:02:00.000-05:00

... since I left you (left you) without a dope blog to read to (read to, read to, uh read to).

So yeah, things have been rolling along. Lots of progress being made, though there have been plenty of snags and decisions to mull over and take up tons of time.

Today my mom and I went out to Bridgeville to talk to the people at Mathew's Marble about getting the countertop/sink/bathtub surround made out of cultured marble. Cultured marble is sortof like man-made/synthetic marble. In the past it's come in mainly/only corny colors like this (or worse):
But, nowadays it comes in a much wider variety of colors and is a reasonable alternative to really expensive stuff like corriane (sp?), granite, or real marble, but better quality and more durable than laminates like Formica.

In the end, in the main bathroom I think I'm getting "steel grey" speckled countertop/rectangular sink and then the walls around the shower are going to be black with white speckles. It seems like everybody but me thinks putting black all around the shower's a bad idea.... but I think it'll look sleek. The cabinets in the bathroom are going to be black laminate with a cool "microdot" texture.

This is the steel grey:
And this is the black:
I stopped by tonight and they were still working on the drywall at 9pm! Most of the drywall's up, which strangely makes the place look a lot bigger. Things were looking good and progressing, but there were also some things that my mom and I discovered that needed to be addressed like:
-a light socket that seemed to have been drywalled in
-a pulley mounted on the steel beam that's against the back concrete block wall that hadn't been removed... whoever laid the block actually broke a whole in the block so the block could go around the pulley, haha. I can't even imagine why they would've done that.
and the thing that really concern me,
-water dripping through the tops of the side windows. The drywall guys were about to drywall around it when we noticed it and pointed it out to them. If they laid the drywall with water dripping on it, the drywall would get ruined and the insulation behind it would stay damp and possibly mildew/whatever. So now the contractor's going to need to determine why water was coming in (the siding isn't up yet, so it's not entirely unexpected that water's getting in), pull the insulation board off the wall, put a heater on it to dry it off, put the insulation back, then put the drywall back.

All this stuff just takes soooo much time to think about and sort out. Lunch alone took over 2 hours, which I needed to make up at work by staying till 7:15, and I got into work at like 8:15. I need to go in early tomorrow so that I can leave early as well, so looks like I won't be getting much sleep tonight. But, before I go, here are some pictures of the progress as of March 6 (I need to take new pictures... maybe I'll do that after I get lunch nearby on Wednesday):

Insulation on the first floor:

Second floor insulation:
Second floor skylights:
This is a picture of a huge set of drawers that was in the garage when I bought it. I'm not sure if I mentioned this before on here, but if you count the holes, you can see there are 72 drawer spaces. There were a few drawers missing, but at least 60 of them were still there. My mom stripped one and determined that it was good wood (Oak maybe?) , so I made sure we got them when I bought the place and they're now waiting to be refinished in my mom's basement. I'd initially wanted to refinish the whole thing so I could have it ready for when I moved in.... but that really doesn't look like it's going to happen . No big deal though, I'll have a big basement to work on it in.

Bout time for an update

2007-03-02T20:13:00.000-05:00

Alright, well things have been going somewhat slowly for the past couple weeks basically because it was time to put the roof on but weather was preventing it. Without the roof put on, insulation, electric, etc could not be installed without the chance of them getting ruined... or somebody getting electricuted :P Luckily this week the weather broke for long enough to do that and in the next few weeks things will really start to roll.

The head contractor/owner of Team constuction (the contracting company) had been on vacation for the past two weeks as well, but he returned this week and I think that will give the whole thing some momentum.

Insulation should be going in this Monday, so all the wiring and other things that are in the walls like duct work need to be complete this week.

The back concrete wall has been constructed. It doesn't look quite as nice as I would've liked really... but we'll see how it looks once the siding's up and all that. I can always paint it or put a mural on it or something:

The skylights have been put in and look really nice. The sides of them on the short sides are angled to the ceiling to bring more light in. There are two in the kitchen, two in the livingroom and then one in the second bathroom (it couldn't have any windows, so a skylight was kind of necessary).

I've also got some new pictures of the windows and sliding glass doors. The mil-finish aluminum is really nice and I'm glad I spent the extra money on it.

Oh yeah... and last week I got my kitchen and second bathroom cabinets and plumbing shit from Ikea. The kitchen cabinets doors are stainless steel and the bathroom stuff is aluminum and frosted glass. Gonna be really nice :)

And for the end of this, here's a video of me sticking my head out the top of one of the skylights and scanning around the roof. Unfortunately the skylights can't be opened for going on the roof once it's done or anything... but oh well, a roof deck is definitely in the future plans category.

To tank or not to tank... that is the question.

2007-02-27T09:15:00.000-05:00

I found out a few weeks ago that the closet my mom drew in the plans for the furnace and hot water heater was not large enough for the hot water heater. She designed the closet with the standard sizes for both things, but for some reason the furnace took up too much room... I guess it was the cold air return? I don't know.

Anyways, by the time we realized it, it was too late to do anything about it so we then had to decide what to do about it. We'd considered from the begining getting a tankless / instantaneous hot water heater, but they're more money to buy, and as it turns out, also more expensive to vent in our situation. The instantaneous hot water heaters are A LOT smaller than a normal hot water heater. They can be hung on the wall and are fairly small... maybe the size of 3 shoe boxes side to side, but thinner.

It came down to spending extra money and getting the instantaneous hot water heater or putting a standard one in what was supposed to be my coat closet under the stairs. I just decided now that taking into account the money they save (you only heat the water you need as opposed to a normal tank of hot water which just sits there hot) and the space I would lose in an already space-tight house, that the tankless was worth the expenditure.

I'm planning on getting the Noritz N023, which can heat 6.3 gallons per minutes, etc etc. This means I can use two major appliances at a time (shower/dish washer/washing machine) and have hot water forever. I could take a 2 hour shower.

Hell, I could even take a shower with cower for an hour with some soap that smelled like sour flowers.... now that's some power!

Name My House

2007-02-16T10:34:00.000-05:00

Sooo, I need a name for my house.

Anyone got any suggestions?

Siding is here!

2007-02-16T01:07:00.000-05:00

The siding arrived today and I'm very happy with the color choice. Hopefully all the people that weren't fond of the red will agree.

It's funny how hard it is to represent a color. The inside and outside pictures look really different, but I think you can at least get an idea of the color and you definitely can get a better idea of the rib pattern I chose (Max-Rib).

The aluminum windows came a couple weeks ago, but I hadn't gotten a chance to take a picture of them yet. It's tough to get a good picture of the finish with a flash, but if you click the picture to enlarge it, that should help.

Framing N'at

2007-02-11T23:43:00.000-05:00

I've been talking about the siding choices and other stuff for a while now and haven't really included much of the progress that's going on inside.

The most obvious difference from the outside is that the window box has been framed. It doesn't seem to be placed correctly unfrotunately. It was supposed to be 1' from the right side, but looks like it's more like 9". I think it looks fine though so am not too concerned.

The HVAC work was begun last week and as of Friday the furance was installed and the duct work was begun. I got a two-stage 95% efficiency furnace. Two-stage means that it runs at a low speed all the time, but when it needs to, it turns on at full blast.

The furnace:

Some duct work:

The stairs have been put in too (no more climbing up a ladder to get to the second floor). The steel beam is currently going right across the landing, but that will be cut in the not so distant future.

All the walls on the second floor have been framed out and the bathtubs were put in their places, though the pipes for them haven't been installed yet.

View from the bedroom. Two pocket doors will section this off from the rest:

The kitchen area's been framed in:

I chose a single piece fiberglass tub for the bathroom off the living room because it's cheaper than a real tub with tiled walls. I thought this one was pretty decent looking:

Future bedroom, bathroom and closet:

View from the back to the front:

This is a pic of the first floor entryway before the stairs were put in:

Change of Thinking

2007-02-06T01:25:00.000-05:00

Well...

The Roman Blue in real life looked too pastel... the charcoal seems like just adding too many medium tones to it... so after my mom and I looked at some samples next to the wood and block....

Blam! Autumn Red.

It's deifnitely bold... but I think it'll be pretty sweet. Whatdayinzthinkn'at?

Walls make things look so much bigger

2007-01-30T08:21:00.000-05:00

Wow... I went by the garage last night to refill the heater again (turns out this needs to be done for ten days from when the concrete was poured) and saw that the walls between the finished area on the first floor and the garage section were put up. It's amazing how much bigger everything seems after walls are up! I still can't entirely wrap my head around why divisions in a space make it seem larger, but they definitely do.

I was most impressed with the cieling height. Now that the area's a bit more narrow the fact that the cielings in the garage are going to be like 12 feet or something like that is really clear. The garage is going to seem massive!

That's all for now. I have meetings at the garage for lunch today for the HVAC and tomorrow for the bi-weekly construction meetings, so I'm sure I'll be posting new pix soon.

Siding Choices...

2007-01-28T21:36:00.000-05:00

Up till the last couple of weeks, I'd always envisioned the second floor to be covered in mill finish, plain, silver looking steel corrugated siding. Recently though, I've noticed a number of other places in the area starting to use this and it's made me reconsider. Although I like the industrial look a lot, I also don't necessarily want my house grouped in with the other new construction in the area. I started looking at alternatives this week, and found that alternate colors and patterns are not as much more as I'd thought.

I also was informed around this time that the exact material which I'd specified before would weather and eventually rust despite the fact that it's supposed to be coated not to. The whole rusting thing is awesome, but I don't want to worry about dripping rust on my neighbors properties and on mine or having to replace it if it rusts too much.

Soooo, after some research I think I'm going to be using McElroy Metals. As of right now I'm trying to decide between these two colors:

(Please note, the blue color's a bit hard to reproduce, on the computer; even the scan of the color chart that I made is off a bit)

I like the blue cause it's bold, but not overly so... though the charcoal has a cool ominuous feel to it, which I like as well. To try and get a feel for what color to use as well as what rib-pattern to use for the corrugated siding I did some photoshopping of this picture:

I think I've decided to go with a corrugation pattern that repeats every 12" as opposed to a smaller corrugation that repeats every 3". I think the larger pattern gives it more of a "large commercial building" feel as opposed to an industrial feel. My mom was concerned that only having a small number (20) of ribbed patterns going down the front would be wierd because of the way the lines would intersect with the window and door openings. I photoshopped both the small and large patterns over the front elevation plan and found that I'm happy with just a few ribs.

Well, if you're still reading at this point, then hopefully you have an opinion on which of the various things I've laid out look best. Any thoughts? Leave em in the comments if you do.

Concrete Pouring and Kerosene Fun

2007-01-28T21:13:00.000-05:00

The colored concrete got poured this past Wednesday after a little bit of drama. At first there was a problem because of the temperature requried by the concrete color, but in the end we've been using a kerosene "bullet" heater to keep the area above freezing temperature. It's now Sunday and I've been going down every night and during the day if the construction guys aren't there to refill the heater every 8-10 hours or so. Kerosene. Is. Smelly.

Although the concrete's hard, the full cure takes a while and you can see it clearly by the fact that the color of the concrete is still changing somewhat. Here's a picture of the concrete the night after it was poured:

I'm extremely jealous of this place which is on Sidney and 16th I think. They're using corrugated steel halfway on it's way to rusting, large painted metal panels, huge windows and are using only portions of the existing building, using the rest to define outside areas, similar to what I'm doing... tho much more impressive.

Whoops, Sorry Jen

2007-01-23T01:06:00.000-05:00

Jen just made me realize I haven't yet talked about the robot room w/ pea green carpet.

Here's a sneak preview:

Bigger Pictures = Better Pictures?

2007-01-22T22:48:00.000-05:00

Anybody have an opinion on which is better:

-the small picture with a link to a hi-res version of it

or

-the medium sized pictures with no link

?

Leave em in the comments if you do.

Thnx.

Mgmt.

It Gets a Face

2007-01-22T20:33:00.000-05:00

January 19, 2007

Well, I've just about done it: gotten this blog up to date.

Last week the front of the house really started to get some form and the first peek at how it's going to look:

After some delays, the first floor plumbing was started. When the plumber came he found that the trap in the garage floor drain was draining slowly. The inspector who checked out the pipes before I got the place had the same problem. We decided to have him replace it for $500. I didn't really want to do that because I don't foresee myself using this drain much, but considering the drain is about to be permanently encased in concrete.... it's probably a good idea.

Here's the view from the front of the second floor looking towards the back:

And looking from the middle of the second floor towards the front. The right window will be part of the bathroom and sectioned off by a wall and door.

Remember the neighbors who delayed the start of construction by about 9.5 months costing me bunches of rent money and lawyer fees? Well, check out their "great view" that my house is blocking:

Ummm.... yeah, somehow I think they're gonna live.

Second Floor Walls

2007-01-22T20:02:00.000-05:00

January 11, 2007

About a week later I stopped by the garage to see that the second floor side walls had been built and raised. It was a nice day, so of course I had to snap a pic:

Constructing the New Floor

2007-01-21T20:02:00.000-05:00

January 6, 2007

When I visited to take more pictures in the new year I was happy to find that the cieling of the first floor/floor of the second floor was up and the frame wall of the second floor was built and waiting to be stood up.

This is the front (obviously).

This shows the cantilevered bathroom section which will bump out from the front.

Trusses for the cantilevered section go lengthwise in relation to the house, not across the width like the other beams.

The constructed roof looking from the back to the front.

Rooftop view from the back of the building towards the front.

This is a little video I took while on the second floor that shows some of the neighboring backyards etc.

There's a huge, old, run-down police station across the street that I talk about a bit in this video.

Concrete Preparation

2007-01-21T18:55:00.000-05:00

I took these pics a couple weeks later when I stopped by the site with some of my co-workers. All the demolition was complete, all the concrete which needed broken up and removed was gone, the walls for the concrete pour had been constructed, and the framing was being started on top of the side walls.

The concrete that's being poured on the first floor is going to be colored and polished. A dye is added to the concrete when it's being mixed, then afterwards a sealer is added to it and when it's all dry and ready, it's polished smooth. In the end it almost looks like marble. The color I chose is "rawhide".

Contractor Selection and Demolition

2007-01-21T17:53:00.000-05:00

December 16, 2006

After getting a three bids on the project, I decided to go with Team Construction. Their bid came in a little bit more than the lowest bid, and a whole lot less than the highest bid. Through her architecture work, my mom's worked with a number of contractors, so she was able to choose only quality people to even give us prices. The owner/head of Team Construction is a guy named.... Guy. He's helped out since the begining of this process a lot, giving advice and approximations of the amount of effort that would go into each one, etc etc. Although this wasn't the only reason we chose to go with Team Construction, it was certainly a factor.

Demolition of the interior and roof of the garage happened within days of signing up with Team. Here are some pictures and video of the initial stages of demolition.

Pics of the original garage

2007-01-21T17:20:00.000-05:00

Unfortunately I lost a lot of the pictures of the original garage when I got my computers stolen last summer, but here are some of the ones I do have:

The outside

Yes, that's right... there was an El Camino in there!

Here you can see the roof slats which I'll be re-using for the siding on the front of the house. You can also see the large cabinet that must have over 40 drawers that my mom and I are going to refinish. Apparently the cabinet's real wood and should look great when done.

Pictures of the area

2007-01-21T16:23:00.000-05:00

Here's an overhead view of the area with a couple local points of intereste pointed out:

And here's a close-up of the imemdiate area:

Floor Plan Fun

2007-01-17T00:41:00.000-05:00

(Note: click images to see them full size)

Floor Plan: 1st Floor:
If you start at the lower far right of this drawing you can see the front door and above that is the garage door. Through the front door you'll be in the entryway where a coat rack will be and the stairs leading to the second floor. Walk past the stairway and there will be a storage closet, then the furnace/HVAC room, then a washer and dryer, then a powder room. This whole area will be "finished" (drywall, heating etc). The rest of the first floor will be "unfinished" and will be a large garage. I should be able to leave room for my car plus a guest's car as well as have a large area for exercise equipment, games, more storage, who knows. At the end of the garage will be a set of sliding glass patio doors leading out into the patio. I was unsure during the planning phase, but once the roof was torn off I determined that the walls around the patio make it entirely private, yet open to the sky. For the time being I'll probably put a picnic table and grill out there, but in the future putting up a couple hammocks or even a hot tub are well within reason.

Floor Plan: 2nd Floor

Going from the first to the second floor, you go up the stairs, they make a right turn, and then you land on the second floor with the bedroom to your right and the rest of the house to your left. My bedroom is a decent size, though not huge. In it there is a window on the left that is in a box which bumps out of the front of the house. This is Sanchez's box so she can look out the window and I plan on getting her a nize fuzzy something or other to sleep on. To the right of that window are two large sliding glass doors which act as a psuedo balcony. There will be a railing in front of them, but it will be attached flat against the house so you can't actually walk out anywhere. The "master bathroom" is off this room. More details of this to come later, but it'll be pretty sweet and it will have a big walk-in-closet right off of it.

If you turn left after you land on the second floor, the kitchen will be to the left with the usual kitchen stuff. I'm hoping to get stainless steel cabinets mixed with wood cabinets from ikea for this, but the exact plan is yet to be determined, and I may end up going a different route. As of right now, the floor in the kitchen will be cork that my mom and I will lay ourselves, but this might get changed to VCT (vinyl composite tiles... sort of like a nice version of linoleum in tile form). Behind the kitchen is another full bathroom and walking past the kitchen will be the livingroom/diningroom/everything else. This will be done in hardwood and against the back wall there is another set of sliding glass patio doors on the left and then on the right is a regular door which will open to the spiral staircase going to the enclosed patio.

Floor Plan Time

2007-01-16T22:07:00.000-05:00

(Note: Click all pictures to see a larger version)

Front Elevation:

The part that says "wood siding" will be done using old slats from the cieling of the original garage. The windows and doors will all be mill finish aluminum, meaning they will be unpainted with that smooth/rough metal like brushed aluminum sort-of. The wood sections around the windows on the second floor bump out from the rest of the building a foot and a half or so. After some debate I chose to use corrugated steel as the main siding for the house. I had/have some reservations about using this because it's being used in many other modern houses these days, so I hated to do something unoriginal, but in the end I decided that it really is the right thing to use to achieve the industrial look that I'm going for.

Back Elevation:

Not shown is that the first floor in the back will be concrete block, like the rest of the first floor, and the second floor will be in the same corrugated steel siding as described above. All doors and windows will be mill finish here as well. If it's not obvious, the pole and horizontal lines on the left hand side indicate a spiral staircase going from the back patio to the second floor.

Side Elevation:

Because the garage takes up nearly the entire property, I made an outside area by removing the roof over the last 16 feet and building a wall in what was previously inside the garage. This side elevation shows that the second floor doesn't take up the entire length of the building, but stops at this outside patio.

The Real Planning Begins

2007-01-15T22:10:00.000-05:00

One thing I realized I haven't discussed up to this point is my mom's exact role in the project.
She works for Tai + Lee Architects and although not technically an architect she does most things a "real" architect does. Without her help and knowledge, none of this would have been possible (at least not with spending tens of thousands of dollars), and the end result would've been far less personal.

Although my mom and I had a pretty good idea of how the floor plan and general layout of the garage was going to be, now that we had the final legal approval it was start ironing out the details of the floor plans. Some of the big items in this area were:

Window selection and layout
Exterior siding type
Flooring
Skylight positioning

Next I'm going to post the final specs which we submitted with the architectural drawings to contractors to get bids.

The Legal Battle

2007-01-09T00:25:00.000-05:00

I will do my best to keep this portion of the story brief, but no promises.

*September 2005*
After working out a price with the sellers of the property, my mom and I went to the zoning board and scheduled a time a month from then to come in and present my case to the Zoning Board. Prior to this hearing, a notice must be placed on the property to inform neighbors that the owner of the property is requesting a variance from the zoning code. This allows neighbors to attend the hearing and object to changes that they may think will negatively impact them.

*October 2005*
3 women from the neighborhood showed up at the hearing to object to my proposed plans. The unfortunate thing about this was that going into the hearing they knew nothing about my plans, nor did they pay attention at the hearing when my mom was going over the plans we'd come up with. My intention was to create a place for myself to live while at the same time rehabilitate an under-used piece of property. Instead, I was vilified to be an absentee landlord trying to make a quick buck by creating rental property on the Southside bandwagon. Considering some of the other crappy housing in the area, I can understand why they might have had reservations initially. However, after seeing that I was working on the project with my mother and listening to my reasons and visions for doing it, they still blindly objected, leaving my extremely frustrated.

The Zoning Board agreed and sympathized with me and after a couple of weeks I got notice that my request for a variance had been approved. At this point I began the various inspections which are customary before closing a real estate deal like radon, pest, building, etc. Everything seemed to be in order so in early December I set the date to make the actual purchase of 7 Uxor Way....

*December 2005*
Two days before this day came, I received notice in the mail that one of the neighbors who attended the hearing and her husband (a lawyer (!!)) were appealing the Zoning Board's decision. Should they win this case, I would no longer be allowed to build the 2nd floor addition. I immediately called off the closing and requested an extension of the sales agreement. After hours and hours of phone calls to city offices I determined that this process could take months and that indeed, if I started construction and the neighbors won their case, I would have to tear down the new construction.

My mom and I went back to the drawing board, trying to figure out a way to do the project as a one-story structure. In the end we did come up with a plan, but it was limited in many ways. Time was progressing and I needed to figure out whether I should go forward and risk purchasing the garage or let the neighbors win. After being advised by persons familiar with similar cases that the neighbors had little chance of overturning the Zoning Board's decision, I decided to go for it. Worst case scenario being that I would not be allowed to build anything and would have to re-sell it without altering it.

*August 2006*
9.5 months and a couple thousand dollars later the "few month" legal process was complete and the judge declined the neighbors' appeal, clearly stating that not only were their reasons for appeal not valid, but that there was precedence in previous state supreme court cases which stated that I didn't even need to get a variance to build vertically on an existing wall structure anyways! *sigh* oh well... it was an interesting process none-the-less. I could go into obscene amounts of detail about how I chose to go about defending myself in the court process and the reasons why their case was most likely just BS scare tactics, but at this point, it's time to get to the reason this blog was created: to keep a running log of the project itself and so people can track what's been going on. Although I'm still not "up to date", I promise that the next entry will have some real info on the garage (including pictures, w00t!) and what's being done to it. Till then... my bed awaits.

The Search Continues, and Uxor Way is found

2007-01-08T00:58:00.000-05:00

After the detective agency, my mom and I looked through realty websites ourselves at first, but then began talking with Maureen States, a real estate agent for Neighborhood Realty in Regent Square right by my apartment and my parents' house.

To start with we looked at some regular houses in the Regent Square, Edgewood and Southside areas in case I changed my mind and wanted to do something more traditional. After looking a bit I still wasn't struck by anything. One day Maureen called very excited and told me she'd found the perfect thing for me. When I went to see her to take a look at the documents she'd printed out it turned out it was a large 20' x 72' garage that my mom and I had seen online before in the Southside but had dismissed it without looking at it closely.

We went and looked at it in person and my initial reaction was "it's really cool, but it's not big enough". My mom and Maureen though though it was plenty big and that I was crazy. At the time I envisioned having a work-out room, a studio room, a bed room, a TV room, an outside area, a roof deck etc etc. After we'd looked at it my mom and I drew it up a little and began to feel a bit better about it, though still a bit unsure. A little while later we went and revisited it and an architect friend of my mom's who live in the Southside nearby named Andrew Lang stopped by to check it out with us. He instantly could see its potential and had a very different plan than what we'd imagined: don't live in the garage portion... live above it. It was such a simple and obvious solution to a number of the problems we were stuggling with. Adding a second floor made significantly more room, allowed for light to be let in, left room for several parking spots and just gave much more flexibility and total worth to the end result.

The only two major downsides we saw to the property at this point was the fact that it's located in an alley and the difficulty of building the second floor. The alley it's in is one way, very narrow and allows parking on one side. It's narrow to the point that you definitely want to turn your mirror in when you park on it to avoid it being smacked off. It's a bit difficult to manuever down at first, but over time it's not a problem, and the other advantage of this is that it cuts down on traffic. If I go to sell it in the future, I imagine this aspect will scare some people away.... hopefully not everyone though :P

The other issue of building the second floor was difficult because of a zoning code which states that you are not supposed to build on the property line and walls of structure must be 5 feet set-back from the property line. The purpose of this is to avoid fires spreading from one building to the next. This law is fairly new, and so most buildings in the Southside, and many other areas do not adhere to it. Another code which is broken in many instances in the city is that you cannot add windows to walls already built on the property line, because again, it facilitates the spread of fire from one building to the next.

In her work my mom's dealt with situations like this where a code restrict a project and she knew that to get around this, we would need to get a variance from the City of Pittsburgh Zoning Board. Once I made the call that I did want to go forward with purchasing the building we spoke with Maureen and got her to write in our ofher to the seller of the garage that our purchase of the property would be contingent on me getting the approval to build the second floor. After agreeing on a price, the legal process began....... more on this to come soon.

Turner Detective Agency

2006-12-21T11:24:00.000-05:00

Alright, I'm home sick today, so I figure I might as well do something productive and post a few blogs on here. There's a lot that needs to be posted before I get this "up to date".

So after deciding the VFW hall was not worth the investment due to the area I started looking at a funky little place not too far away: an old detective agency on Penn Ave. in Doughboy Square, the corner or Lawrencville, the Strip District, Bloomfield and Polish Hill. The Lawrencville area has recently shown a lot of promise in making a resurgence. Lots of new stores and bars have opened up; there are lots of those ever popular hipsters moving into the area; and there's a massive hospital being built up Penne Ave that has really made the area start to change. Because of this, I thought that investing money into the detective agency would be fairly low risk and I could deal with the area being a bit rough for a while.

I went inside the place a couple of times and it would've had to been totally gutted and restored and I would've wanted to add a third floor onto it etc etc.

To make a long story short, on the morning before I was going to buy the property (after much debate with my parents) I went to hang out outside before I went to work to see what it was like there. I then realized that there was a "stop here on red" sign directly in front of the building going up a hill, and a bus stop one door down. This meant noisy cars and busses come to a stop then accelerate up hill and people congregate outside what would have been my front door. After this I got to thinking and decided yet again: this wasn't the place for me. From the financial side of things, it would definitely be a risk, and although I'm confident that the area's worth investing in, it could be 10 years or more before my investment would be profitable.

I've had a constant debate with myself (and my parents) over the course of this house project in general as to whether or not I'm really just building this house for myself, or am I building it to resell. There's a fine line to walk in this regard because although I AM doing it for myself, should something drastic occur and I need to move, I would need to be able to sell or rent it. Another aspect is that I very much like the idea of continuing to buy and renovate places.... and if I do that, I need to be able to sell/rent them out.

So anyways, back to the detective agency: I checked out the street scene the day before I was going to buy it and decided that I shouldn't do it. A couple days later I drove by it around 2AM and there were cop cars everywhere and police tape surrounding the front of it and the place next door. At that point I knew I'd made the right decision.

VFW Hall Pictures

2006-12-16T22:25:00.000-05:00

Here are a couple of the pictures of the VFW hall. The front shot shows pretty well how cool this building is. The second shows how the roof's caved in and the overgrown backyard :P

Another small problem with this property was the fact that the neighbors had built their deck into the backyard... a possibly tricky situation to deal with.

Introduction and the start of my search

2006-12-16T14:59:00.000-05:00

Welcome to "Todd Keebler's: This New House".

A year ago I purchased a 20' x 72' garage at 7 Uxor Way in the Southside with the intention of turning it into a place to live. The previous owners used it as a garage for storing and fixing race cars, zoned as a residential auxiliary building; before that, it was used to make furniture. It's located in a narrow alley between 13th and 14th St approximately half a block behind Dee's Cafe.

The story starts long before the purchase though. At the end of 2004 I began my search for a unique, non-house building to turn into a place to live. A nickelodeon turned VFW hall in Polish Hill by Gooski's was the first building I considered. The structure itself was in good condition, made from cool looking ceramic blocks. However, the roof and floor of the building had caved in years ago into the basement... along with a car previously parked inside. The project was daunting, but the more difficult part was the leins placed on the building years ago. After the property was foreclosed and the city took ownership, the debts on the building were sold off to a third party called Capital Assets for a fraction of their worth. Capital Assets was asking for the full $16,000 dollars, despite having recieved them for most likely a 10th of that. Clearly, I had no interest in paying these fees so began to draft a letter to Capital Assets offering them a small portion of the money. Before sending this letter I visited a number of properties for sale in the neighborhood.... after seeing the low prices and poor conditions of these houses I became skeptical that putting a large sum of money into the VFW hall was a good investment. I looked into other recent house sales in the area and found that despite the improvements made to some of the properties, their sale price was still minimal. Although I think Polish Hill has a lot of potential in terms of existing buildings, proximity to downtown, the Strip District, Oakland and Bloomfield, view of the city and general charm.... at the same time, I just couldn't take the financial risk involved in the area.

Next I'll update the blog with pictures of the VFW hall and the next building I looked at: the Turner Detective Agency.