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.
We bought 1532florida.com! That is now where we’ll be hosting the blog from. Please update your bookmarks accordingly. We’ve set up a redirect, so you might not even notice. 
Also, you can veiw our foster kittens at www.1532florida.com/kittens Awww, kittens!
This past weekend Adam went out to the playa for a weekend of camping and seeing many of our friends from Burningman. I wasn’t feeling too hot so I stayed in and painted the bathroom. Poor Adam returned from his camping trip covered in dust…with our main bathroom (the only one with a shower) out of commission!
This room presented some challenges when picking colors. We’ve got three separate sets of tile in the room. The floor is mainly white with black accents, the countertop is off white with black flecks, and the tub tile is a subtle blue/grey marbled pattern. Half of the accents in the room are gold (towel racks, light fixture, cabinet hardware) and the other are silver (shower door, etc.) After going back and forth we desided on a vivid turquoise and black. It isn’t something we would have picked without the tile being the way it is – we wanted to pull the patterns out and make them visable rather than looking like faded dirt. It turns out the blue is amazing! It is now my favorite color in the house!
Before:
After! Get ready for the blue!
We went away the last week of May and spent time with some of our awesome friends. When we came back we spent a week doing very little house related. I believe it was this concept called ‘relaxing.’ This week we’ve again hit our stride on the house.
I finished the door to the small bathroom. For awhile we had a two bathroom house…but only one bathroom door. I reinstalled all the random hanging rods, light switch covers, etc. Now the only thing it is missing is a new mirror and perhaps some new lighting.
The extra/guest room is coming along nicely. The green is even growing on me.
Adam’s been working on the electric in my office. This was supposed to be an easy job, but it – like everything else – has continued to take longer and cost more than expected. Turns out some lazy bums put the flooring ON TOP of the trim. So he’s got to cut out the trim rather than simply removing it. On the other hand, we now own an AWESOME dremmel.
On Friday I made my first run to the dump. I took a full truckload of construction trash and it looks like I took almost nothing. The dump people, however, were super nice. I find it odd that the Lords of Trash (ie: the dudes at the dump) are so amazingly nice.
Today we helped my old housemates – JE and Katie – move out of our old place. My stuff is still mostly there, although we did bring my favorite chaise over. Our friend Reid was able to bully it into its future home. Now I’ll have a nice sunny spot on the front porch to read and grow into the scary neighborhood old woman on.
Tonight Adam is out running Journey to the End of the Night with JE and I’m off with Katie to DorkBot to listen to lectures on electricity and awesome while drinking beer. Tomorrow is derby, pirate festival, and perhaps a bit more neverending work on the house.
For the past week I believed Adam was staying up late preparing for the move. I was a bit surprised at how behind he was when we showed up to get his stuff and also that he didn’t want my help. It never occurred to me he might be lying and really doing something else.
Like carving a proposal to me into the main support beam of our house.
The ring is lovely. Apparently he stole one of my rings out of my jewelry box to have it sized; it was my pinky ring! I can’t wait to get it resized! Happy me!
