that brown house

I’d better post something before I forget it all. Let’s see…

We finally have contracts for the electrical and bathroom work. None of it is actually started yet but if all goes well it should be done by the middle of April.

When Steph met with the bathroom guy, they discovered that the water leak was close to the electrical so they turned the water back off. Fortunately she also now knows where to turn it back on, so we can turn it on for a little while when we need water before it is really fixed.

We have decorative registers for the heating ducts in the living room and dining room. The dining room one doesn’t quite fit right, but hopefully Matt from Kazen Heating will be able to fix that tomorrow morning when he comes by to drop off the permit.

Another morning, a guy from the shade place came to measure the windows for shades.

Saturday morning we went paint shopping and got the paint for the kitchen, a bunch of primer, and a bunch of brushes and stuff. We also looked at fancy kitchen appliances and agonized over whether we could put in a vent hood now that would also be compatible with whatever we end up doing to the kitchen in the future.

Sunday we did some excavation behind the stove, pulling some more painted-over wallpaper off the wainscotting and digging through three layers of mangled linoleum.

And we did a trial run of the bathroom tile (laying sheets of it down on top of the existing linoleum), fortunately discovering now instead of later that the room fits a few more tiles in each direction than we had thought.

The garden has been getting kind of dry but seems to be surviving. I met the neighbor in the house behind, who told me that the back yard used to be full of stray tomato plants, so if they will grow there randomly, hopefully we can also keep them alive there on purpose.

I managed to snap one of the porch railings just by leaning on it. It should be easy to replace but was kind of alarming while it was happening. Another one of the steps has started feeling shaky too. Always one more thing that needs to be done…

we didn’t do much on the house during the week last week…instead we celebrated eric’s 35th birthday! fortunately, our celebrating was followed with another perfect weekend for working on the house - sunny & 65-70 degree days - yum! we didn’t finish any of the big projects, but we got so many odds and ends done that i’m very proud of us.

saturday was dominated by the most organized and productive shopping spree that i’ve ever been a part of. i’ve never spent so much money so efficiently and with such a sense of accomplishment. we placed an order with moran supply for the bathroom plumbing fixtures/valves, purchased 450 lbs. of ceramic and porcelain tile (which all conveniently fit in the trunk of the car) from the tile shop in berkeley, made our final choices for the 1920s schoolhouse-style light fixtures for the bathroom and kitchen and placed that order at berkeley lighting, ordered (on sale from home depot) an lg high-efficiency washer & dryer (that we don’t yet have hook-ups for…ahhh, optimism), bought a grab bar for the tub, some wall sconces that we’re going to return because they don’t actually work with the glass cala lily shades i already have, more compost & mulch, and an L-shaped shower curtain bar from ohmega salvage.

after shopping, we assembled a makeshift trellis for the snap pea vines to climb out of a few posts and some bird netting… and once again, saturday evening found us fussing with bird netting and trying to quickly get plants in the ground before the sun went down. despite the lost hour of sleep, i’m thrilled about changing the clocks forward. it’s so lovely to be able to leave work when it is still light out…

i finished planting the veggie patch and spray painted some door and cabinet hardware on sunday while eric did some touch-ups to the kitchen wall patching and vacuumed up the worst of the dust in the house. i think it may almost be time to go shopping for primer and paint! exciting!

we also scraped the partially peeling, partially discolored privacy film off the sidelights flanking the front door. it took three passes of spraying adhesive dissolving solution, waiting, then scraping with razor blades to get the crap off, but goodness does it look better! clear, clean glass! for the sake of evening privacy, however, i’ll probably make some sort of semi-sheer curtain for the door with rod pockets on the top and bottom. my list of sewing projects is getting pretty daunting…i’m not even sure if my laughable sewing skills are going to be up for the challenge.

tonight we are meeting with the electrician. we’ve been playing phone tag with the guy we want to work on the bathroom, but we now have a back up plan if his schedule doesn’t work out for us. so, small steps forward…

It has been a really busy weekend. We started out by getting a quote for bathroom fixtures from, by total coincidence, our across-the-street (from the apartment) neighbor.

I have been making the fixture search harder than it really needs to be because I really dislike the all-in-one shower controls that adjust temperature and pressure with the same lever. Apparently it is now illegal in most states to sell showers with separate hot and cold knobs because of the scalding risk, and most of the remaining fixtures that have separate temperature and pressure knobs use fancy thermostatic valves that keep the temperature exact but cost a bundle. A few makers (Delta, Moen, American Standard) do make valves with separate temperature and pressure controls but without the thermostat, but they are pretty rare and you have to go out of your way to find them.

With that out of the way we went over to the house to patch some more plaster in the kitchen. We ended up using almost the entire roll of patching tape and the entire bucket of joint compound, which surprised me because it seemed like we had lots of it. I am new to this and my patches came out kind of lumpy, but it turns out that that’s OK, because when you go back the next day to sand down the edges, you end up sanding almost the whole thing off anyway, so it gets smoothed down to the point where it doesn’t really matter if you left some extra blobs when you put it on. The downside is that you end up taking so much off the wall that the floor gets all covered in plaster dust. I tried to sweep it up, but it still ended up getting tracked all over everywhere:

Anyway, I am getting ahead of the story because after patching, we went out to buy plants for the garden and yard. We have a couple of varieties of tomatoes, some bell peppers, some snap peas, and some flowers. (Steph will have to tell you what kind of flowers.) We marked off a section of the back yard and cleared the wild clovers out of it (and also a bunch of rocks and random hunks of wood that were buried there). Steph dug some holes for the plants while I put together some netting for the snap peas to grow on, but it got too dark before we could actually plant anything.

Sunday morning I started out by going over to Nathan’s to borrow his lawn mower, which, fortunately, is much more durable than the one we bought before and did not show the slightest sign of falling apart in the course of cutting our 20′x 12′ or so patch of grass. Steph’s mom supervised and pointed out all the spots I had missed.

I went inside to do some sanding as described above while Steph stayed out working on the front garden. After many hours of struggle she got rid of all the weeds and replaced them with plants that are actually there on purpose:

The other exciting news of the day was getting six more previously painted-shut windows to open. The only one that continues to resist is the one in the laundry room. Here in action are the kitchen windows, the right hand one of which put up a particularly vigorous struggle. You can also judge for yourself whether the plaster patching looks any good.

This morning we got up early to officially accept (and pay for) our shiny new furnace. It’s not actually turned on yet because we don’t have an electrical supply for it, but it should be ready when the electrical is.

We did get the air purifier option (attached to the right hand side in the photo), which hopefully will keep the air free of cat fluff and Steph’s lungs happy. The furnace installer also attached the missing vent to the water heater so we should be safe from the fumes from it now too.

In ancient news from Sunday, while I did some more sanding, Steph started patching the cracks in the plaster. It’s probably impossible to tell what’s going on from the picture, but the lack of visible cracks means it’s all fixed now, right?

Meanwhile, even longer ago and in the vaguely useful tips category: if you are ever trying to get painted-over screws out, I recommend the very small flathead screwdriver. You might think it is too tiny to get any leverage, but it makes up for it by being narrow and sharp enough that you can jab it all the way through the layers of paint so you are actually turning the screw, not just the paint.

The downside to this is that you end up destroying half the screws, and the ones that aren’t destroyed are still so covered in paint that they might as well be destroyed. A lot of the hardware really ought to have black screws, but it turns out to be really hard to buy black screws in most sizes—all you can find are brass and nickel. We’re going to try spray painting some normal screws black and see how that turns out.

cool.

soon to be warm and toasty! the heating contractor got started today. i stopped by after lunch and they had already removed the scary, asbestos-clad, 1940s-era floor unit:

before

after

and cut holes in the floor for registers:

it’s a hole! it’s the horrid kitchen flooring! through the hole you can see the bottom of the dining room chimney! i’ve also posted more (and larger) photos to flickr.

oh, that would be the (probably toxic) fumes of boiling cabinet latches, drawer pulls, and hinges…

however, we got multiple layers of paint off of a variety of objects, including some old white porcelain knobs that are probably original to the house. they had been painted brown and then painted with several layers of whites…why not just remove the brown instead of painting white knobs white? goodness. you can see one of the knobs in the lower right hand corner of this photo:

we exercised a little more caution when went back to the house to start sanding the kitchen walls. don’t you love my new accessories?

Today’s milestone was receiving our first mortgage bill, although it’s not actually due for more than a month.

We went out shopping for bathroom sink faucets this morning. I am making the process much more difficult than it needs to be by rejecting anything that is trying to look old but ruins the attempt by using an anachronistic font. The worst offender in this regard was one that spelled out “circa 1897″ twice on every piece, but in Palatino. We also went to Baldwin Brass to look at drawer pulls and door locks, and discovered that it would be easy to spend $800 on the front door if we weren’t careful.

We went window shade shopping and are faced with the dilemma that the mom-and-pop Alcatraz Shade Shop is charging 50% more for the same products as Home Depot Expo. Where do you draw the line?

At the bookstore across the street from the shade shop, I found a copy of Rehab Right, the Oakland Planning Department’s 1978 guide to restoring old houses, which looks like it should be interesting reading.

Back at the house, we unscrewed a bunch of painted-over door and cabinet hardware and are trying to get the paint off by boiling it in a pot of baking soda, as Steph read on somebody else’s houseblog, and it looks like it might be working.

It is really cold there today without heat. Heat will be nice. We will have heat soon.

more estimates! more waiting! more contractors!

electrical work:

we’ve gotten more electrical quotes back and we’re really stewing about what approach we want to take to doing the electrical work. before we started talking to electricians, eric was very gung-ho to have all the knob and tube removed and the whole house rewired (in addition to getting the new service, which we’re definitely doing). some of the professionals we’ve talked to have adamantly agreed that is the right thing to do, some have proposed a hybrid system where we leave what’s in the walls, add a junction box and then run new, and one has said to leave all the existing, but put it on circuits, and just add some grounded outlets, the 220, etc. where we want additional receptacles. i think we should go with option one (all new, also more expensive) or three (keep all the old as-is and add to it, less expensive now, possibly more in the long run).

further complicating the decision is that one of the electricians is related to a friend of ours. i liked him during the walk through because he asked good questions and was the only electrical contractor we talked to who seemed to have thought out our needs more than we had (probably from having been debriefed before arriving), however his estimate is over 20% higher than any of the others. it’s also hard to compare the estimates because they are all written with different levels of detail. one has the equivalent of a full out schedule of values while another is a very generalized summary of the scope of work… plus, the scope of work varies depending on if the approach is for an all-new, a hybrid, or a vintage plus system.

heat:

we knew what we wanted. we had people give us estimates for comparable systems (different brands). we hired kazen heating & air. they came back to the house yesterday so i could talk to them about register locations and they are going to start work on monday.

bathroom:

we were unhappy with the first estimate and haven’t gotten the second one back yet. the soonest opening for the person we had the best recommendations for isn’t for three or four months, so he’s off the list. i do have an appointment to walk someone through on thursday and there is one additional person i’ve been playing phone tag with. i wish i knew how to hurry this up, since i think the bathroom project is going to take the longest to complete…we did order a new toilet and lav…and we’re going to look at faucets and whatnot tomorrow. yea, fun stuff!

Saturday morning I already broke the lawn mower. It is a push mower (a gasoline or electric one would be ridiculous for the tiny amount of grass that we have), and the strength of its handles was no match for the strength of the grass. We returned it and will have to get a sturdier one.

Then we went out shopping for plumbing with Nathan and bought a toilet. Buyer’s remorse has already set in and hopefully we can swap it for a different model before they even have it ready for us to pick up. We also shopped for light fixtures but didn’t buy any because no matter how many things we remember to measure, the one thing that we really need measurements for will be the thing we forgot to measure.

Also somewhere in there we got another quote for heating and electrical work. There is a huge range in what electrical people think ought to be done, ranging from keeping almost all of the existing wiring to replacing almost everything.

We spent most of Sunday scraping the painted-over wallpaper off the walls of the kitchen. It started going much better once we discovered that the scrapers came with the blades turned around the wrong way for safety so we had been using the blunt side. Later in the day Alex came over for the tour and to help scrape.

And we finally have a signed contract for the heat. They will be coming by later in the week to finalize the plans for where the ducts will go.

This morning we got up early and went over to the house to put together the wheelbarrow and patio furniture while we waited for a bathroom renovation guy to arrive. After I left for work, Steph talked to another electrical guy. PG&E called back about the new panel location so we should actually be able to start electrical work pretty soon.

I think this puts us at the end of all the appointments we have made with contractors to come and give us estimates. The first bathroom bid we got back is scarily more expensive than what we had been planning for, but maybe the ones still to arrive will be better.

In the evenings I have been poking around in the Oakland Tribune online archives to see what I can find out about the history of the house and its residents. I’ll post something about that once I have a little more.