Winter's Here... It's Official

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

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

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

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

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...

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.

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

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!!!!

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

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.