Moribund week

The build is creeping along at a snail's pace due to the serial nature of the renovation at this point. Each sub-contractor creates a bottleneck for the next sub. Unfortunately, due to the nature of each item there is minimal slack in the schedule. The only slack created is waiting for the bamboo to season.

The stairs were installed this week. Larry and Sally did a fantastic job with the grain selection and matching. Each tread is composed of nine separate pieces of Douglas Fir. It took five days and 60 clamps to glue the treads. It is unfinished at this stage, Matt the floor person will be applying the stain. Matt loves finishing and constructing staircases. It is reassuring to meet people that are passionate about staircases, I'll never have to worry about them collapsing.


Matt's assistant Donny dropped off the bamboo this morning to acclimate to the seaside humidity. I am glad we hired Matt and Donny. Donny weighs 150 lbs, the other flooring company wanted to use a 300 lb guy. This maybe workplace discrimination, but I do not want to empirically determine the mechanical failure threshold of Douglas Fir. In addition, I would likely be sued because my staircase discriminates against morbidly obese people.


Here is the 2x4 that supported the temporary staircase. I cannot believe that single post propped the entire load. Go figure, vectors are amazing!

In other news, the winter was tough on my San Diego friends (i.e., life not turning out like they expected or wanted). Hopefully, the spring weather will wash away their winter blues. Someone must of swapped my regular contacts for rose colored ones.

Up next is the counter top, cable rails and cabinets Mk 2.

Happy Birthday

Happy birthday to SFS. Wish I could watch J and Little Thingies give you a wedgie and a wet willy.

She smells like fish!

Check out Jeff's new fish tank:

It's a monstrous 50L tank with real plants and stuff. It's still a work in progress, but it's massive. Still waiting to put fish and shrimp in that thing.

Divorce #2

I received a terse e-mail from the architect -

W, this is not the first time you have said this, so lets not do it, just do the panels...without the back lights, S

In an earlier e-mail I voiced concerns about the lighting optics for the bookshelf design. I did not expect such a response. I imagine this is the end of our working relationship. My perception is that architects tend to be overly sensitive and that their designs are not open to discussion. Of course this is a gross over generalization but anyone want to debate this with me? I find the same sort of attitude in my line of work. People tend to be overly protective of their theories or models even in the face of conflicting data. On the other hand, I orphan all my papers and ideas. If someone wants to take shots at them, then by all means. Except know that I'll likely be refereeing your paper next time asshole.

Moving on, here are pictures of the installed cabinets. The cabinet construction was select vertical grain Doug Fir, Maple interior, full overlay slab, eased edge, no trim, Blume and Haefle hardware. I could lose myself for hours in the Haefle catalog. Imagine a telephone sized catalog of just hardware. The drawer inserts were all Haefle. Note the new storage space underneath the stairs. I intend to put our children in there when they act up. The best part of the storage space is the trap door to the crawlspace. I suppose our kids could imagine all sorts of unpleasant things coming up from underneath the trap door. These fears of course will be compounded since it will be pitch black during the time out.


This is the tread sample. In the end we went with an eased edge instead of the half round. Brazilian Cherry Wood will be applied on the leading edge of the tread, this is to minimize wear on the leading edge. I wanted a steel strip, the contractor and stair craftsman talked me out of the steel detail, they said it would be uncomfortable for bare and socked feet.

PS. To all my neighbors who doubted our design, renovations and my abilities to manage - You can go FUCK YOURSELVES.

Cabinets being installed.

The cabinet and assorted bits arrived yesterday. They installed part of the kitchen yesterday, today they are finishing the install. They will come back to install the hardware. We need to decide and order 21 pieces of door pull hardware. At $20/pull, that is not chump change.


Looking at the cabinets makes me so happy that Chad did not build our kitchen. Chad tried to bid the kitchen build. Chad is a fuck-nut amateur. The dovetail on each drawer is a thing of beauty - the joint is completely tight. The cabinet person was able to fix the misaligned doors with minimal interruption of the grain pattern.

Stairs are to be installed Monday/Tuesday. The flooring arrives next week and will "season" for a few days. Carmelo is hard at work finishing the painting. We met with the new carpenter yesterday. Jim's initial impression of him was, "bold," while I viewed him as eccentric and quirky. I imagine this may comes with the territory when the carpenter is a MFA graduate from the Carnegie-Mellon's industrial design program with a minor in sculpture.

Wood-work, doors and staircase handrail details are still being worked out. Other then that, things are moving along. I am getting tired of cooking and eating in the kitchen. I am sure the neighbors are tired of seeing me in my underwear eating breakfast.

Just for a Day

A quick update:


1) My loaner car is a 2008 SUV, I felt like a Southern Californian just for a day. Immediately, I had this overwhelming desire to vote Republican, shop at Wal-Mart, eat McDonald's, wear flip-flops and a trucker hat, drink Starbuck's coffee and be a fucking dirt-bag rat bastard.



2) House update - Carmelo has been showing up at 6 am every day much to my better half's chagrin. He typically sits quietly for an hour before starting the day's work. Today, Luis helped Carmelo paint. This Luis is different from Big and Little Luis, who applied the dry wall. Carmelo's car is broken so he gets dropped off every morning. Poor guy he has to deal with wifey's ire at the start of his work day. The walls are primed and ready to be painted. The floor has been prepared for the bamboo flooring. Cabinets to be installed tomorrow. I received the staircase tread sample, we are going over final edge details. Slowly getting there. I did manage to effectively let go the carpenter. I meet the new one tomorrow. I was told last week that there is typically one divorce during the build - the spouse, contractor or architect. For me, it was the carpenter.


3) We drove to the desert to look at the wild flowers. Note to self, I hate the fucking desert.

Snow Daze

A massive storm is expected to hit K-Hole this weekend with 30cm (11.8 inches for the imperial system users) of the white stuff. I prepared by securing a covered parking spot for my car and stocking up on milk. I'll have lots to do inside my apartment since I need to research and write my ALR essay.

In other news, I'm currently obsessed with kimchi and jPod, both the book and tv show. I was curious the other day and added kimchi to my canned vegetable soup. I've found my new comfort food. I'm going to go to the Asian market tomorrow to stock up on kimchi for the weekend. I also need to buy more scented candles since heated kimchi is a pungent mofo.

Snowing in the house.

Fig 1 - Tuesday night after work I was greeted with this sight - Christmas wonderland!

Fig 2. Wednesday evening I came home to this.

The last few days have been awful, the house was covered in a layer of fine white dust. Big and Little Luis sanded the mud for a tight and smooth museum finish. The walls look much better now, previously the walls and ceiling had a horrible texture application.

Fig 3. The rickety staircase is still up, the new one has not arrived yet.

The appliances arrived today, the build is moving quickly ahead. Even the kitchen cabinet fuck-up is being fixed (it was my fuck-up, I need to proof plans more carefully in the future). I must admit, our contractor is a great guy. His easy temperament, professionalism, good sense of design and ability to give me the bottom line has made this re-model relatively painless. He never goes into specifics unless I ask for them. All I need to know is if it can be done and the costs involved.

Fig 4. The kitchen has been put back together - the lid, electrical, plumbing, pony wall, ventilation.

In addition, Steven and his extended family are fantastic carpenters, plumbers, electrician, HVAC and drywallers. Another telling sign is the bathroom, they always clean up after themselves. Other contractors (i.e., Chad) make a mess in there (missing the toilet, pouring plastering mud down the toilet etc ...).

Fig 5. The appliances in the garage.

Kitchen Cabinets

I ventured to East County this morning to look at the cabinets. I had my doubts after seeing the sample last week, I was going to have a do-over and choose the skins myself. My concerns about the wood grain were allayed when I saw the mock-up. The wood grains were still too far apart, but seeing the doors together facilitated the grouping of the grains so that they appeared cohesive and thinner (those Gestaltist were onto something I suppose). Once the header and toe kicks are installed it will look clean and tight, sort of like my ass. My only concern is the finish. I want a more natural low sheen finish, I do not want a glossy finish. The last thing I want is for it to look like an Ikea showroom piece. or worse yet the typical North American kitchen (read: ugly as fuck and expensive to boot).

The corner unit is pretty cool. We chose to go with a unit that utilizes the hard to reach corner space. I hope the mechanism can withstand the wife's gorilla hands, she is tough on hardware.

As far as the house, nothing new to report. They are sanding and priming this week. The pictures are pretty boring so I'll spare you the photos of giant dust clouds and piles of white particulate.

The feeling one gets ... FUCK YEAH!

The feeling one gets when they finish a project at work is one of the best, especially when it is a Matlab application. Matlab is especially painful for me as I write line-by-line pseudo code, this makes debugging really, really shitty (ask LT, he loves rewriting other's line-by-line code). The program took three months to write and it finally works! FUCK YEAH! My laziness was the impetus for the present program. I abhor running three hour experiments, it is such a waste of a day when I could be outside instead. With the new program I can, hopefully, collect all the data I need in 20 minutes. I am crossing my fingers that this works, sometimes reality does not quite follow the scribblings in my lab note book.

What a great way to start off the weekend! FUCK YEAH!

Fast forward two weeks ...

The wife and I came back from vacation last Friday. Coming back home has been a downer - house is completely destroyed; missing the family; surrounded by bumpkins; sleep deprivation; jet lag; work; cabinet guy fucking up ...

It was a pleasant surprise yesterday evening to find a package in the mail. The package was from TC5 (no relation to TC3 of Quiksand and Rival Schools fame), who I hired as a research assistant at Duke. We have remained in contact since then, we typically quarrel about music, the Velvet Underground, Decemberists and Oasis. The package contained a piece of art she commissioned of us - the wife, Lex and me. The picture is quite appropriate and typical of the going-ons in our household (i.e., chasing and wresting Lex with noogies and headlocks). In the picture Jen appears to be a citizen of the planet Kamino while I look beefy, like Henry Rollings my neck is the same size as my head. This is a gift we will treasure. I have even picked a location in the house for this piece, right at the top of the staircase underneath the new Artemides eye ball light. Alas this will have to wait until the renovations are completed. Now onto house renovations ...

Since we left on our trip, Steven and his crew have been very busy. All the demolition, framing, plumbing and electrical is completed. Drywall is being completed this week. We are awaiting for the new staircase and cabinets to arrive. In the meantime, they have completely dissembled the old staircase. Nothing is supporting the staircase except for a 2x4 and gravity. It is amazing how vectors can work to your advantage every now and then. They usually work against me, especially during surfing and skateboarding. They removed the handrail and shifted it over to repair the drywall. The dog is nervous about this new staircase set-up. The pantry underneath the stairs has also been completed. We discovered a built in vacuum system in there that we had removed. I plan to use the pantry as a bedroom for the kids sort of like Harry Potter.

Here is a photo of the lower staircase.

The kitchen ceiling was torn out and pushed up 4 inches. The plumbing and electrical were redone completely. The previous contractors, Chad and his dad were careless. Just today Luis had to fix a pipe with nail shot through it. The surrounding dry wall was damaged from the moisture leakage. Chad, that dumb fuck, was not careful when he installed the crown molding in the ceiling. I am surprised the place did not burn down when Chad added eight 60 Volt lights to the 320 Volt transformer. Other things done but not pictured were pushing the dining room wall 4 inches, removing all the crown molding, re-applying dry wall and plaster, removing all molding and applying returns instead and destroying the Pony wall.

Day two - Gates of hell

In addition to the giant vagina in our house, Steven has managed to open the gates of hell. During the course of opening up the pantry, we discovered a previously unknown trap door that leads to the crawlspace. This might have explain the temperature difference between the kitchen and pantry. If you listen closely at night you can hear whispering emanating from the hole. Lex saw a pair of red eyes peering out from the crawlspace (at least that is what she told me).

They also tore down the drywall for the ceiling and the divider. Holy shit.

Close up of the previous renovation work. Looks like Chad ran out of dry wall and instead used a piece of flooring to cement the back splash too. Nice work Chad.

The kitchen looks like a bomb went off.

Another close up of the trap door and the crawlspace. The other hole is underneath the staircase. We plan to re-frame underneath the staircase for a series of drawers that follow the profile of the staircase.

Carnage.

End of Day 1 - A giant orifice in the house.

Figure 1

Figure 2

Figure 3

Figure 4

Figure 5

Figure 6

Figure 7

Figure 8

I came home to an empty kitchen and a giant vagina separating the living and dining room. Stephen and his merry crew erected a safe room using plastic sheeting. To get into the safe room, they installed a giant red zipper for an entry (Fig 1 & 8). Figure 2 is of the wifey stepping into the giant vagina - I suppose this could be read as something Freudian, but at this point I am at a loss for words. Figures 3-7 are what is left of the kitchen. If you look closely in figure 6, you can see a piece of flooring used to brace the drywall. I know for a fact that this was done by Chad, the contractor we used for the garage. Chad is quite a lazy resourceful fellow.

We met the original owner of the house who installed the green marble counter top. He went on and on how expensive the imported Italian marble was. During his monologue, my internal monologue was thinking that green marble reminds me of tombstones and other structures associated with the dead. When we told him our plans to renovate, he got upset and agitated. He took it as a personal insult that we were removing the counter top. I suppose he is right at some level - I think his aesthetics are questionable.

Here we go ...

The crew showed up this afternoon for day one of the renovations. We spent yesterday evening moving the kitchen and dining room to the living room. Phase one will consist of demolition of the kitchen, staircase and dining room. Here are pictures of the old kitchen. The cabinets are the original ones from 1974 with new faces. They are moldy and warped inside. The clearance between the counter and the cabinets is 14". They should be 18", hence the knocked over wine bottles when the cabinets are open. The light source used to be a fluorescent light box that was replaced with an ugly soffit. We are going to push the ceiling up to gain 4 inches . Also, check out the light fixture, it is made of some sort of plastic. The green counter top will also be leaving us. Check out the direction of the wood floor in the dining room. The previous owners were going for a different look I suppose. I am not sure what look it was though because it looks like turtle diarrhea to me.