that brown house

happy birthday to owen wesley holder!  welcome to the family, kid.

this weekend i finished my little spice shelf project that i started the previous weekend while eric was toiling away on the front steps…

and i celebrated by unpacking the standing mixer that inspired our kitchen wall color! the wall color is really quite nice in person, a bit less bright than it appears in flash photography. interestingly (perhaps only to me) the dark grout lines on the counter top are where the grout is missing. where grout exists, it should be white. i’ve managed to scrub much of the remaining grout to a decent approximation of white-ish…and i’m considering re-grouting the entire counter with super-white grout left over from the shower surround.

alas, having the mixer out and ready for action is a painful reminder that we have not made a decision concerning our oven conundrum. on the 21st we had a service call for someone from apple stoves to try and fix the oven in our 1930s era wedgewood stove’s oven, however, the heating mechanism predates thermocouples and is not something that is reproduced (that we know of). assuming that is correct, and i haven’t found any indications otherwise, we are looking at one of three options (1) replace the mechanism with a thermocouple with safety, (2) buy a different vintage stove with all working components, (3) buy a new/modern stove.

getting a bottom of the line new stove or a used stove that is relatively modern is the least expensive choice, but probably not much less than option (1). however, repairing our existing existing stove or buying “cheap” modern stove is a waste of money if we plan to replace it when we remodel the kitchen “in a couple years.” buying a different vintage stove is only worth the additional cost (over and above what it would cost to repair the one we have) if it has additional amenities (more oven capacity) and is in equal or better condition. to achieve that, we’re looking at spending 3x (or more) the not insignificant repair cost. making that kind of an investment in a different vintage stove will also drive the aesthetic of the entire future kitchen remodel…but so would buying a new non-temporary stove (such as the ge cafe series gas range that i’ve been drooling over).

until we decide what to do, we are going ovenless. fortunately, the wedgewood’s burners work great, it’s grilling season, and i’ve been amusing myself with creations such as not-really-chili in my hand-me-down crock pot. thanks for the crock pot, erica!

we’re continuing to slowly unpack, but eric took a break from unpacking on saturday to make some repairs to the front steps (that we feared were about to break any moment)…

steps, deconstructed:

steps reconstructed:

while not a permanent fix, the stairs feel much safer now and will hopefully hold until we are ready to reshingle (at which time we hope to have the front “porch” completely rebuilt…it was the biggest red flag on the pest report).  so, yea for eric!

meanwhile, i tried to clean up the driveway, backyard, and kitchen enough to host an impromptu bbq.  so despite the fact that there remains an old toilet in our driveway (it is behind the gate and not visible from the street…we have some standards, after all) we got to enjoy some lovely live fiddle music drifting over from a neighbor’s soirée while two of our awesome friends grilled veggies, homemade sausages and marinated tofu for us…yum!

neo’s curiosity won him a bath last weekend; not a him licking himself bath, but a tub of tepid water and a human making him very wet and unhappy bath. while we were out on a very disappointing shopping trip on saturday, neo decided to further explore the living room fireplace. we had previously scrubbed the visible portions of both fireplaces after both cats were sniffing around in them on move-in day and hoped that would be the extent of fireplace maintenance until we get around to trying to make one usable at some undefined time in the future. instead neo decided to double as a chimney sweep and get soot all over himself and the living room in the process. so eric and i arrived home to find my mother in a state of agitation and a filthy cat asleep on the sofa. we exiled neo to the outdoors with hopes that he would roll around and roll most of the soot off on the dead grass while i cleaned up the living room and eric went to the pet store to look for that spray that you can use on furniture etc. to keep pets from wanting to scratch or go near the sprayed item. i’m not sure how effective it’s going to be when sprayed on bricks, but eventually we’re going to want to remove the boxes and bags that are currently covering the fireplaces.

left to his own volition, neo didn’t get himself clean enough to not leave black smudges on everything he touched, so first thing sunday morning i decided to give him a bath…a true test for my lovely clean white bathroom. fortunately, neo opted for the wide-eyed oh-woe-is-me-to-have-you-treat-me-this-way attitude instead of being hysterical during the bath, so i was able to contain most of the mess to the tub…if i hadn’t needed to keep both hands on the cat at all times (and the other inhabitants of the house were still asleep) i would have taken a picture…because i doubt anybody would believe how black the bathwater/tub-scum-ring was otherwise. yuck. but i cleaned the bathroom and it remains my oasis of pristine cleanliness and almost-completeness. it’s my happy place.

in other news:

we’ve mostly just been unpacking and puttering around trying to figure out what’s going to go where. progress feels slow to me, but i don’t think i’m going to feel like we’ve made real progress until we get the kitchen set up in a logical way. everything in the kitchen still feels like it is in temporary locations. the lower cabinets are odd sizes (and shallow) and have one fixed shelf that won’t accommodate anything remotely tall, while the bottom “shelf” is the floor. we went shopping for rolling bins to use in lieu of a bottom shelf, but mass-market storage bin sizes just don’t seem to work; in order to get something narrow enough to fit through the cabinet door, we tend to end up with bins that are too small to be useful for pots & pans. while out shopping for kitchen storage solutions, we were also looking at rugs. i had high hopes of getting two inexpensive jute-type area rugs at ikea: a large one to cover the bulk of the kitchen floor and a (matching) small one to cover the missing flooring by the door to the dining room. evidently, my memory is poor or they’ve discontinued some of their rug sizes, because the styles that had larger rugs that worked didn’t have smaller ones that worked and vice versa. anyway, very little progress was made in the kitchen.

we did get the kitchen sink drain fixed last week and have been using the range portion of the stove. cooking on gas burners again is wonderful. hopefully, we can find somebody to fix the oven. i had hoped to get reliance appliance in berkeley to come look at it, however, it slightly pre-dates the ones their service tech does (they date it to late 30s/early 40s) . they told us names of a couple places that are further away, but eric found a place in west oakland, apple stoves, that has done repairs on stoves that date back to 1911. they also do conversions to electric ignition, which is something we may look into come kitchen renovation time…it’s a bit pricey and requires them taking the stove to their shop…however, we now have an appointment with apple to look at our oven this weekend! woo!

The phone company turned our phone service on yesterday, but it didn’t work. It turned out that the cable coming from the network interface box had the red/green contacts connected to the blue/light blue wires, but the cables from the wall jacks to the junction box had the red/green contacts connected to the orange/white-orange wires.

It took me about an hour to figure this out, but at least it works now. Sometimes it’s a liability that all my phone wiring experience is with ancient rotary dial phones instead of something that uses modern conventions.

Last Wednesday, as you may recall, we finally got working electricity at the house. Alex volunteered to go over with me and Steph and help us try get things cleaned up enough that we could move in the next day, and that’s what we did that evening and into the night.

Much too early Thursday morning, the movers came to the apartment and loaded up their truck. It turns out that we have a lot of stuff. After several hours of loading, they hauled it all over and filled the house up with furniture and piles of boxes.

After the movers left, we reassembled some of the furniture, made an excursion to the hardware store, and brought the cats over. They seem to be adapting pretty well to the new surroundings and to be getting along reasonably well with the other neighborhood cats. They made it outside a little sooner than we had planned but didn’t have any trouble remembering where they should come back to.

We spent most of Friday and Sunday gathering up all the miscellaneous stuff that still got left behind at the apartment (and using the laundry machines there one last time), returning tools to the tool library, and starting to get things unpacked at the house.

Saturday morning the installer came to hook up the cable and internet service. That afternoon the washer/dryer delivery people came to install the machines, which look a lot bigger in the laundry room than they did in the store. They also shake the house a little distressingly while they are running. There was a momentary scare that we had the wrong kind of drain hookup for the washer, but it turned out to work OK with what we have.

Also on Saturday we tried to return the leftover tile from the bathroom to the tile shop (but they weren’t willing to take it back), tried to get some advice about how to make the oven work (but the guy who knows about stoves wasn’t at the antique store), and bought a shower curtain, bath mat, contact paper, and other stuff like that.

Fortunately the water heater turned out to work. The part of the plumbing that has not worked out so well is the kitchen sink drain, which was draining slowly for a while and now is hardly draining at all.  We’ll have to get the plumbers back over to figure out what is going wrong there.

i’ve been wanting to say that for way too long now.

we got the power! we got the power!

i feel tipsy with relief. of course, just to heighten the drama, pg&e didn’t show until 3.30 this afternoon, so my morning of optimism had spiraled down almost to doom…but now elation has set in!

happy power day to us! happy power day to us!

okay, enough mirth. time to get back to work…then cleaning…then moving…then maybe i’ll even write a post with photos…

that’s right, the electrician is back! oh happy day! i’m so happy that i’m posting twice in one day. you’d almost think i didn’t have an impending work deadline.

alas, not all is perfect, since today is tuesday and we had been told that the electrical work would be done monday, inspected tuesday, and powered up wednesday…before the movers dump all our belongings amid the dust and grime on thursday.

well, turns out we need power BEFORE we can get the final electrical inspection. oh boy, is that going to be fun: power wednesday, moving and inspection thursday? hmmm.

we also need to schedule the water heater and heater inspections. i just haven’t had time to take off work and wait around for the inspector (they give you a two hour window, but not until the morning of the day they are coming)…maybe we should schedule all the inspections for thursday! just kidding…sort of.

mom and eric joined forces and bought me a really nice hammock for my birthday yesterday. it has blue & green stripes and an assortment of large wood & metal components that need to be assembled into a stand. it’s totally going to dominate the back “yard,” but i can’t wait to get it erected, so i can curl up on it with my sweetie, or a cat, or both cats AND my sweetie, or a book…yes, it looks like it will be large enough for all this.

yesterday’s other pleasant surprise was tacking a small task and having it be easy. i know, gasp. it’s all about having the right tools. after work i stopped by the tool library for a 5/16″ drill bit (my set only went up to 1/4″ and that wasn’t quite enough for one of the projects we had tried to tackle over the weekend) and a pair of bolt cutters. even though the bolt cutters were bigger than the back bathroom, i was able to clip off enough of the bolts (at a sharp angle) on the new toilet to get the little plastic caps on. this made me absurdly happy.

also, we put up a curtain to temporarily replace the water closet door and installed the towel bars and toilet paper holder in the main bathroom.  we’re so close to being done with the main bathroom that i get giddy whenever i go in there!

…but all this happiness is not enough to outweigh my dismay upon seeing that the electrician had not shown up at all yesterday. we really can’t wait on this…and hasn’t there been enough waiting already?  his team started on march 26th; that’s 71 days ago.  grrr.

All those plans that assumed the electrician would be done on Friday and we would spend the weekend getting everything all cleaned up and ready to have stuff moved in? Yeah, that didn’t quite happen.

What did happen was getting another coat of paint on the bathroom walls, fixing up some of the paint edges that were kind of shaky before, taking the bathroom door down and sanding, patching it, and repainting it, putting the ceiling light back up, and getting the lights and mirror put up on the bathroom wall.

In kitchen news, we put the stove and refrigerator against the walls where they belong and got the cabinets pretty much cleaned up, so it finally feels more like a kitchen than a storage room. We finally put the vent pipe back on the stove and dared to turn the gas on, and fortunately it turns out to actually work!

The oven situation is not so fortunate. The pilot light stays lit, but no amount of fiddling with the controls will make it actually turn on. We also wonder if maybe there is another pilot light that we haven’t found, since there is the mysterious “heater” knob at the left that turns on the gas to something that never seems to light, so we played it safe and turned the gas back off until we can fill in some of the gaps in our knowledge.

We also did some patching and repainting on the baseboards and the laundry room walls where the cutouts for new electrical outlets and switches had messed up the paint.