D and Adam’s House – The Acropolis

Today they did the main pour for the foundation work we’re having done, here’s a few photos of it in progress:

As part of the foundation and seismic upgrade they’re going to be putting up shear walls, which basically just means they screw plywood onto the studs in the basement. Which also means that the next few days are the last chance I’ll have to install insulation down there, so I started on that last night.

We’re in the middle of getting substantial foundation work done, at some point maybe I’ll go through the photos and describe whats going on, for now I’m just posting photos.   I believe they are in chronological order.

It’s been over a year since I’ve updated this blog, which isn’t to say that we haven’t done a ton of house projects, just that apparently I’m not great at blogging.  So I’m going to write up a little project I worked on this weekend, and maybe later I’ll write up some of the bigger things we’ve done.

When we were painting the front door to our garage I discovered that the frame for our street number used to have a tiny little light in it to illuminate the number at night but it had long since rusted to the socket.  This weekend I set out to replace that light.

I’ve been relearning how to play with electronics for the last few weeks and so I set out to build an automatic LED light that would fit in the existing hole.  Here’s what I eventually put together:

I wired in both white and blue LEDs with a switch to select between them (I included blue since both the doorbell and porch light are blue).  The lights are controlled by a photo-resistor so that they will come on automatically after dark.  After soldering everything together I put it all in an Altoids tin I had lying around.

Its currently just sitting in its eventual resting space, I still need to screw it in and properly hide the power cord, but it’s working:

D has apparently had a massive hand-made chandelier since she was a teenager, and now after many trips to the electrical supply store (mostly just because I could never seem to get the correct combination of parts) it has replaced the ugly one that was at the base of our main stairwell.

When we bought there were rumors that the main street near us would be undergoing major renovations.   A new report came out from the city this month that shows construction is going to begin this summer.;  It’ll be awesome for Caesar Chavez to be filled with trees and a median filled with plants.

We’ll be starting our own personal greening a bit sooner.  This Sunday we are waking up way too early and planing a tree with the Friends of the Urban Forest (FuF) in front of our house. We are getting a flowering leaf plum; my parents have one in their backyard that I used to climb up and read in.  

Our backyard is soon to have trees as well.  We’ve already picked up our burgundy plum from the nursery and our persian mulberry came in while we were in Tuscon visiting my brother and his family.  As soon as we get an non-rainy day we’ll be putting them in the ground.

And then there is future possibilities that I’m super excited about – FuF has a program that greens sidewalks. I talked to one of their arborists yesterday and she thinks we can get permitted not only for a patch of green on the street side of the sidewalk but also for a little “front yard” directly touching our house.  I am thrilled.  Even subsidized it won’t be cheap (the permitting fees themselves are hundreds of dollars) but it will be worth it.

A couple of months ago the San Francisco water department sent an inspector over to tell us all about how we could reduce our water usage and in the process they tested our water pressure, which turned out to be 100 psi.  The maximum recommended pressure is 75psi and apparently higher pressures not only increase the cost of a leak but degrades equipment (such as aerators and efficient shower heads) hooked up to it, so we needed to have a pressure regulator installed on our main water line.  In addition to the need to do that, one of the first things we discovered about our plumbing is that there is a hose faucet by our garage door which is actually attached to the line below the main shutoff valve for our house.  Naturally this faucet leaked whenever it was turned on, but to replace it the water to the whole house would need to be turned off.

Combining these two problems was convenient and led to replacing this whole section of amateur plumbing with my own amateur plumbing:

This is the section I soldered together to add some new shutoff valves and a pressure regulator:

Here’s the above bit attached to the water main:

Here’s the bit of pipe for the hose faucet:

And finally that bit attached to the wall by the garage door:

Our living room is now fully functional.  To get to this point we had to do tons of stuff:

* Clean and paint the walls and ceiling.

* Install two new electric circuits, one to replace the ancient ungrounded outlets and one fancy isolated-ground one for the entertainment center.

* Run a conduit through the empty space above the fireplace to allow all the wires from the TV to the electronics cabinet to be run without being seen.

* String speaker wire from the electronics cabinet, through the basement, and then up the far wall to attach the surround sound speakers.

We still need to get some new furniture, but the hard work in here is done.

Given all the work we have to do on the house I needed a work bench, both for random work and to attach bench tools to.  I started with a design from Black & Decker’s Home Woodworking book and then made it bigger and modified it for my needs with a recessed nook for the mitre saw, a pegboard back, and (since I’ve been immersed in electrical work recently) a number of electrical outlets and lights with a 10ft plug so that it didn’t need to be hard wired.  Now that I have everything attach it already feels too small, but its not like I have somewhere to put a workbench that’s more than 8ft long.

A couple weeks ago I finally finished installing new wiring and outlets in Ds office.  This turned out a huge amount of unplanned work, as I had to cut the trim off the walls and bend a lot of EMT with a device whose instructions expected someone with more mass.  I also installed new wiring for the kitchen, living room, basement, and laundry room, though those aren’t done yet.