summer solstice

Things are much better now! That last post really sounded whiny - and you know I heard the study on NPR that said the most unpleasant sound in the world, bar none, is a whine. Sorry.

Things are better. First of all I took 3 days off for Live Oak and listened to great music all day and night, watched birds and squirrels and bugs, heard the sounds of happy campers all round, and no construction noise!! Plus, I guess I missed the worst of the noise - generators and air guns for putting in the roofing nails on one side, and chipping out the stucco on the other side. Where the 2 parts of the house got joined, and where they had to demolish to build the new roof for the garage, all has to be stripped off, re-papered and re-chicken wired before the actual stucco gets applied. By hand, I am told. More than one coat. But some say they can't apply the stucco til the drywall is up and nailed on the inside of the walls - and inspected before the nails can be taped over. Others say do the stucco first, so it dries slowly (it is, after all, cement), and the drywall gets screwed in, anyway. There seems to be some confusion about the order of things, so, while the stucco job will probably take a week to do, it may or may not be for a while. The crew is busy stuffing in the insulation between the other stuff, so it is ready for the drywall, if, in fact, that happens first.

But other stuff happens at the same time. We have a roof now; it has skylights in place (haven't tested for leakage yet). The gas Franklin Stove for the bedroom was delivered and the connections are in place. It looks more like a house every day!

Now come the hordes of sub contractors - stucco installation, painters, tile installers. The stucco people are sub-contractors: they come in, do the job, and split. not connected to the outcome. Dave, the painter, and your next best friend (yes, there's a story to that and, no, I won't tell it), came by with a helper and painted the rooster tails, fascias and eaves under the new roofs. The trim will be forest green; we are still deciding the paint color for the outside walls. So far, we're leaning towards a yellowy-orange-ish shade.

With the construction crew work winding down, it seemed a good time to have a party for the guys who did all the dirty work up to now, including coming out in the (literal) middle of a Saturday night when it poured down rain (not once, but twice) to put (more) better covering over the holes in the roof(s), and mopping out the garage where it flooded. Hotdogs, hamburgers and beer. A few neighbors came too, and it turned into a great driveway barbeque.








Things are much better now. And, it's officially summer!!

slowly, step by step...

For a while we had no water; then we had no gas; and even for a while, no electricity either. The plumber was working on replacing all the plumbing lines and hooking up the new on-demand water heater; that meant cutting off the gas, too, as it is gas fired.

Then the electrician was busy hooking up all the connections from the new room to the circuit box - including the new circuit box, because there wasn't room in the old one for the new lines.

Meanwhile, the carpenter is busy doing the finishing for the front door and the roofer is busy laying the roof.

So, it doesn't look much different on the outside, but there's been a lot of activity on the inside.

On top of all that, it is a full moon. And, oh, the plumber, who had gone fishing last weekend, leaving Bill and Gary to fix the water leak, didn't catch any fish and was in a foul mood. Mel, the carpenter, apparently over-did it one night and was a bit out of it at work the next day. The heating guy hasn't even bothered to call to say why he hasn't showed up in 3 days. There has been a bit of tension on the job...

Here's Bill, peering through the sheeting at the front door. At least we can use it now; for days, we had to go out through the garage.

things take shape

Every day is a 3-ring circus now, the plumber, the furnace man, the electrician, and of course the carpenters, all scurrying around doing their things.










The furnace is now in the attic and the attic looks like the movie, "Brazil"! with all the shiny heater ducts twined and twisted around in every direction.

Getting the furnace into the attic was no small feat. They tried up the inside attic ladder, no luck; they tried up a ladder in the new room, no luck, so they finally had to cut a hole in the ceiling to get it in place and then replaced the ceiling piece.















The bedroom entrance now has a 45 degree dog leg into it, to accommodate the required "strong wall" where the new part joins the old. So, the closet has a dog leg in it, too, but it's still a really big closet!!




There is only a small (2 foot) crawl space between the old attic and the new, so we are getting another attic access door and ladder for the new space. ka-ching. And the fireplace for the bedroom, ka-ching. And the floor heating wires that will go under the tile in the bathroom in the shower and around the vanities, etc to keep the floor warm, ka-ching. And refinishing the (old bedroom) doors that will be the new front doors, ka-ching. The new on-demand water heater system has arrived and is installed, ka-ching. See the money clock go round and round!

The carpenters are putting up interior walls (closet, bathroom, shower stall) and drilling access holes in the studs as fast as they can, to keep up with the plumber and the electrician who are running water lines and wires all around and through everything.

We have had to make a lot of decisions kind of quickly: what kind of ceiling lights do we want, and where; where do we want the wiring for the TV, computer, telephones; where do we want light switches, floor outlets, etc. From nothing happening except outside framing and major plumbing connections, all of a sudden we are down to the nitty gritty. The stucco and dry wall guys came around to make their estimates. Bill says they might start as soon as next week!

And this morning, the carpenters put up plastic sheeting around the front door and started pulling everything down to make the new front entrance. The hall closet (where immense amounts of things have been stored (coats, boots, blankets, leaves for the dining room table, hats, and on and on)) are now all piled on our bed and around the living room in any available corner. As Gary mentioned earlier - we're going to end up huddled under a tarp in his study and using the honey hut outside (which now smells, even though it just got cleaned!).

When they all left for the weekend, they kept the sheeting up, because, while the doors are in place, they have no hardware. All that is between us and the outside are 2 layers of plastic sheeting - that breathe! "Natural breathing" we call it, an art installation.

The windows and new doors got delivered - more ka-ching! For the first time since they started on the room, we have opened the door from the hall into it - and - voila! - new bedroom!

The roofing materials were dropped off by a truck with a long belt that lifted the heavy slate shingles up onto the roof and will get laid down on Monday.






Our water apparently has to come through a garden hose from the street (at least til some inspection is had). We have to turn it off when not in active use, so the pressure from the street main doesn't blow out the hose! Even so, over the past weekend, the connection started leaking and looked as if it would break any time, so Bill came over and he and Gary worked on it. That meant lots of cussing, 2 trips tot he hardware store, welding torch action, etc. Naturally the plumber was unavailable - he's fishing! Once again, if something can go wrong, it will, and on the weekend!


Video's of the new front door, and the art installation (with commentary).

...and more rain!

Lono, the Hawaiian rain god, is having his way with us this year! Chances of rain in May were supposedly 4% (and it did rain - see prior posts); chance of rain in June is supposed to be nil - but there is a huge storm approaching us for the weekend - temperatures 20 degrees cooler than normal, precipitation estimated at 2 inches!!

The good news is that the nail inspection finally took place and the crew can legally put a cover on the roof - plywood, then tar paper, but still not the final shingles, because of the bad news (see below). So hopefully we will be waterproofed. But, since the final vents and outlets aren't done, at least for this weekend, everything will be closed over - no stove fan vent and the hot water heater vent is in the attic.

The bad news is that the plumber, the head carpenter and the electrician have been steadily tearing out more and more of the walls between our living space and the outside - finding mice-bitten wires, gerry-rigged gas lines, studs cut through so they have no stability, and other horrors I don't even want to know about. We hear them ripping and tearing and then exclaiming - "oh no!," and, "oh my god." Ignorance was bliss - the house could have caught fire any number of times from the faulty circuitry.








And then there's the issue of the front door. Turns out CA code requires a strong wall just at the spot we were planning to have the door installed, which would have put the door flush up along side the garage wall - i.e., no space to actually open the door! So, here's the new plan: move the furnace up into the attic, put the strong wall where the furnace was, re-frame the juncture between the old part of the house and the new part to accommodate that change, and then we can put the door where it ought to go. There's that money clock zinging around, faster and faster!

Meanwhile, we're looking for outside wall sconces - but, again, CA code requires a specific kind of bulb, which narrows the selection quite a bit. And there's still the tile to choose, and the inside light fixtures - ceiling lights? vanity lights? fans? And all the while, there is a constant pounding of nails on the roof, with occasional crashing sounds. And dust. Everywhere, in the crevices, under the doors, seemingly in the air!