Archive for Home base
January 4, 2008 at 1:45 pm · Filed under Home base
I couldn’t blog yesterday because things have been insanely busy. You’ll understand why in a moment. There’s a lot to tell.
First off, Thursday morning two painters arrived at 7:30 a.m. to strip the “popcorn” ceilings off and starting painting the interior of the house. We were ready for that and had gotten two bedrooms cleared out, with floors sealed, so they could start there. The process involves covering all the walls and floor with plastic sheets, then spraying the ceilings with water and scraping the popcorn gunk off. It makes an enormous mess.
Then they wait for everything to dry, mask the trim, doors, and windows, and spray the new ceiling finish, then the paint. Then they hand-paint the rest and clean up. While they were doing this, Eleanor was still debating the final color (of Emma’s bathroom) with me and Jack the Painter Boss.
At 10 a.m., Bruno and Leila showed up. There’s a big backstory here that I don’t have time to go into, so here’s the short version: they are Airstreamers from France who are visiting the southwest for a month on vacation. For the rest, do a search on this blog of the word “bruno” (in the search box at right).
We all visited for a while, which was challenging and yet very interesting because of the language barrier. Bruno speaks fairly good English but he has to work to find the right words. Leila understands most of what we say but doesn’t speak much English. I understand some French but at the speed they talk I only got a few words, and Eleanor speaks her own particular dialect of American English that even I don’t understand often. (I call it “Watertown”.) So Bruno did most of the heavy lifting in the conversations.
I took them out to Saguaro National Park for a look at the desert plants and the great views, and told them about our native plants and animals: various cacti, mesquite, jackrabbits, desert rats, snakes, etc. It was a good break for me from the stress. This week I’ve been falling badly behind in work because of the house project, and I was facing a new website that didn’t work properly plus last-minute Spring 2008 magazine problems, plus rapidly-mounting expenses on the house, and a parade of contractors with questions. So a walk in the desert with friends was the right thing to do.
In the afternoon things really got hairy. The phone started ringing. I heard from the guy who measures for window shades, the guy who measures for kitchen cabinets, the scheduler for the gas plumbers, and several business callers. In between phone calls and writing down appointments and “to-do” items, the painters told me it was time for us to move everything in the living room (all of our belongings that had been moved down from Vermont) into the two finished bedrooms so they could destroy, um, I mean “scrape and paint” the rest of the house. Moving the stuff is a two hour job for two of us — which I know because Eleanor and I have moved it too many times already.
I was in one of the newly-painted bedrooms vacuuming up bits of plaster in preparation for this move, and the power suddenly went out. But no breaker had tripped. And the power outage was seemingly random. The light in the bathroom worked, but the fan didn’t. The outlets worked in one room, but not the light. In another room, one outlet reported “hot/ground reversed” but the others were dead.
So here we are at 4 p.m. with dozens of boxes to move, the power out in half the house for no apparent reason, and the knowledge that Bruno and Leila were going to meet us at 6 p.m. for dinner. It was time for triage. I called Handy Jerry to come over and look at the power problem. Then our neighbor Mike conveniently popped by to see how things were going — big mistake on his part — and we recruited him to help. He brought over a dolly and helped move boxes.
The electrical system in the house is a bit scary. The breakers are mostly mis-labeled, and there is definitely a loose white wire somewhere, which we have yet to find. We poked a hole in one wall and found a rats nest of wiring that probably met code back in 1971, but …
At 6:15 we sent Jerry home to think about it. By this time Bruno and Leila were sitting in the Airstream using our wi-fi, and the boxes were finally stacked in the middle bedroom. We went out for dinner at a Tucson tourist trap (and had a nice time with Bruno and Leila, who were very pleasant) and came back at 10 p.m. to get on our hands and knees and seal the dining room and living room floors. Emma fell asleep on a mattress on the kitchen floor while Eleanor and I were working. We finished around 11:15, cleaned up, secured the last of our belongings, and collapsed into bed.
And as I got into bed in the Airstream, Eleanor looked at me from the kitchen and said, “No blog tonight?”
Today, the painters showed up at 7 a.m., six of them. Eleanor was up first this time, so she let them into the house while I set up at the laptop to work out bugs in the new website. It is now mostly operational, which a few bugs that should be worked out by Monday. We have six online columnists right now and will have ten by end of next week. We have four great travel blogs feeding into the website on our “community” page, plus we’re testing a new Airstream photo site. There are a lot of other features that will be launched in a few weeks, too. Want to take a look at the beta site?
The house is filled with plastic and orange tape today. I can’t even get in there so I’m staying in the Airstream and trying to reduce my two week backlog of email. Handy Jerry came by but he couldn’t do any more than retrieve the tool bag he left last night. Dig-Safe dropped by and marked our power line in the backyard (it goes right under the grapefruit “lemon” tree) in preparation for the gas plumbers next week. Handy Randy visited too, to collaborate on plans for windows, bathroom tile fixes, etc while I was still in my pajamas this morning. Eleanor went out with Emma to place our final cabinet order (kitchen and baths) and research a few things. This is all we can do today. The house belongs to the painters and we are all just waiting on them to finish disasterizing the place.
January 2, 2008 at 11:29 pm · Filed under Home base
We are running a self-imposed race, trying to see how quickly we can complete a house renovation. Things are flying by so fast that I can hardly remember them all at the end of the day. Just today we scheduled the gas plumbing work (to start next Tuesday), had two meetings with “Handy Randy” about the punchlist and windows, bought a washer-dryer combination, selected shades for five windows, finalized our paint colors and phoned them into the painter, and shopped for a half dozen other things. That was on top of a regular working day in which quite a few little dramas unfolded.
Tomorrow will be even busier. The only way to get it all done and remain sane is to divide the work across the team, which is Eleanor and I. We’ve always had a clear delineation of responsibilities in our relationship, rather than both of us trying to do everything equally. That works for us, especially in situations like this where the task list is long and time is short. Eleanor was out in the car all day taking care of a dozen things, while I stayed back at the house and fielded phone calls and contractors.
Strangely enough, I feel very little stress, other than concern about staying close to budget. We just get up and do what we need to do each day, and we sleep well at night. I think the reason this process is going so well is that we have less fear than we have had in previous renovations. That’s the advantage of experience — fewer unknowns to keep you up at night.
The window estimates are in, and they will put us a solid $2,000 over budget all by themselves. We also realized a couple of days ago that the master bedroom would be virtually unusable without some sort of blinds on the windows (we have a massive 8 ft x 4 ft window looking out to the mountains — and the neighbors), so we added the cost of shades into the budget.
With overruns like that, we’ll have to cut a few corners in this phase. We’d like to replace all three of the cruddy old sliding glass doors but realistically we’ll have to keep them in place until later. We are re-using the 1971-era GE electric oven, which is identical to the one my mother had in the house I grew up in. It will work fine until we are ready to buy a newer one. We’re also going to use the Airstream’s microwave until we return to the house in the fall.
The budget is a very real thing for us. We have a spreadsheet that I built last May when we first bought the house, which itemizes every penny we are spending or planning to spend. Every little receipt gets entered into it. We’re not deluding ourselves about the cost of this work, which is good but also disheartening. Those little trips to Lowe’s and Home Depot for light fixtures, caulk, tools, bulbs, grout, and sealant? $875.75 so far. Appliances? $3,872 less rebates that will arrive later. Let’s not even talk about the cost of the kitchen cabinets, or the gas plumbing.
By the standards of home design magazines and TV makeover programs, our budget is ridiculously small. We’re renovating an entire house on less than what some people spend on their bathrooms. But to us every penny feels a little foolish since we have lived so incredibly cheaply on the road for two years. What we spent on a refrigerator and cooktop would easily put us in the national parks of the west for a month. At times like this I am not sure if perspective is a good thing. It is hard to rationalize the value of the house in the light of our past two years, so I keep reminding myself that someday we’ll be happy we bought a home base. I will, right?
Ironically, tomorrow we will receive a visit from Bruno and Leila, who have come all the way from France to tour the American southwest. Bruno is one of the very few Airstream owners in France and an admitted lover of all things American. We’ve never met before — although we’ve tried — but we’ve corresponded for years via email. Bruno and Leila will be coming over in the midst of the painters taking down our ceilings, so it will be interesting to see their reaction. The house should be in a pretty awful state. Perhaps we’ll just give them a tour of the Airstream parked in the carport.
January 1, 2008 at 7:47 pm · Filed under Home base
About 11 years ago I wrote a long series of web pages about the building of our house in Vermont. (They are now long gone from the Internet.) The pages detailed the process of building a timber frame house from months before we turned the first spade of earth through the eventual move-in nearly two years later. What I wrote was, in effect, a blog, before blogs became known as such.
As I write this, I find that a lot of the thoughts I have had lately are identical to those of 11 years before, and to the vintage trailer restorations I have been involved with. There are certain commonalities to house renovations or building projects. One is the “punch list”, which is basically just a big roll-up of all those little things that need to get done before the project can be called done.
We’re approaching the “punch list” phase of this project, which is really great. It means things are proceeding rapidly. The list is not all that long either. When Brett and I were working on Project Vintage Thunder (a 1977 Argosy restoration) in 2004, the punch list ran to several pages. Our current punch list is just one page. Of course some of the items on the list can’t be accomplished until later in January or early February, when the cabinetry is in, but we can definitely see the end coming. We may well be done with the bulk of work by Valentine’s Day, a couple of weeks ahead of our initial estimates.
The bad news is that we’ve had to add some items to the list that we were planning to postpone. The windows in this house are awful, much worse than we had originally thought (and our opinion of them was not great to begin with!) They are el-cheapo 1970s-era aluminum framed single pane windows. They leak air like crazy. They jam instead of opening. They provide no soundproofing at all, and the glass is permanently etched & fogged near the bottom of several of the larger windows. I have been sitting in the dining room to work on the table during the last few days and it is freezing even with the heat on because there’s a huge window nearby. So we’re going to replace six windows and eliminate another with glass block.
Today Eleanor wanted to finalize her kitchen plan, so she marked the plan out on the floors and walls with blue tape. Seems like it will work. We’ll make just a few changes before the cabinet order goes in later this week.
In the next two weeks we’ll complete the really ugly parts of this renovation: stripping the old “popcorn” ceilings, adding some new natural gas lines, and repainting the interior. I say “ugly” because these projects will cause utter havoc inside the house, forcing me back into the Airstream to work for a week. I’ve gotten used to spreading out on the dining room table to do my work, leaving the dinette table available for home schooling.
Since most of the big tasks are scheduled already, I’ve been turning my attention to the next phase of small installation projects. That includes things like window treatments, dimmer switches, vent fans, faucets, and under-cabinet lighting. I’ll do a little of this myself, but we are lucky to have two really good handymen on call, Randy and Jerry, who will pitch in. Mostly our job will be to shop for all the bits & pieces they need, everything from faucets to outlet covers.
Gunny called me yesterday while I was driving back through New Mexico, and laughed at me for being in the middle of a house renovation. He knew better than to get into this process. A new Airstream comes with all the decisions made for you, and all you have to do is tweak to suit your taste. It’s a lot easier. But at least this time we are completing the process in a matter of weeks, rather than years. We’re headed in the right direction.
December 31, 2007 at 7:41 pm · Filed under Home base, Roadtrips
When I was preparing to leave Denver, Fred gave me directions home: left onto Monaco, right to I-25, left ramp, then right on I-10 and right to Tucson. That’s basically it if you want the fast route, I-25 for about six hundred miles, then I-10 for another 220 miles. Not much chance to see the back roads and “blue highways”, except for one spot where the best route is to cut the corner between I-25 and I-10 on NM-26.
That’s where I found the town of Hatch, which is known as the “chile capital of the world”. I had no idea it was here, but of course a stop was called for. See the chiles on the roof?
Via phone Eleanor put in her order for a bunch of chipotle chiles, which are smoky and fantastic (and are really jalapenos, not chiles). I picked up a quart-sized baggie of them, and I am sure to be rewarded for this minor effort with something really delicious.
Hatch has a chile festival in September that we’d like to attend. I’m not sure if we will be here in September, however. Our long-term planning only extends through August at this point.
At long last I am home again. I’m not sure what constitutes “home”, either Airstream or house. I think it’s really just Eleanor & Emma. In any case, our family is once again reunited. The little Fit is tucked into the carport next to the Airstream and it looks happy to be here too — or at least, it will once I get it to a car wash to remove the gray splatters (souvenirs of the Denver slush).
With all the traveling rush I had forgotten that today is New Year’s Eve. A lot of Airstream friends of ours are up at Picacho Peak State Park (about 40 miles from Tucson). We had planned to be there too, until my Thursday flight got canceled. Instead tonight we will make a fire and eat pizza on the rug of the living room (because there is no furniture), and perhaps watch a movie. It will be a quiet New Year’s Eve, but a memorable one. We are settling into our new house, Emma is seven years old, and never again will this moment happen. It’s good to be home.
December 29, 2007 at 10:00 pm · Filed under Home base
I’m starting to look at this phase as a sort of journey in itself. We really have to, in order to avoid being intimidated by the scope of the work to be done. As the proverb goes, “The journey of a thousand miles begins with just a single step.” Every day we take another step and we try not to think too much about the hundreds of miles ahead.
And we are making good progress. We nailed down a few of the appliances. We’ve bought a refrigerator, cooktop, vent hood, dishwasher and toilets. We’ve settled on the kitchen cabinetry design. I’ve sealed the tile in all of the house (two coats) except for the living room and dining room where all of our boxes are. We’ve turned the corner from demolishing to rebuilding, which is an important milestone.
Our good friend Rob Super has advised us to take breaks from this process once in a while and enjoy the “pleasures of civilization”. He’s right, of course, and in a few days we’ll slow down our frenzied pace. The initial sprint was just to get the ball rolling. Now that we’ve got the contractors lined up and the materials purchased for the first couple of weeks, we’ll be able to do some exploring of Tucson.
We’re also aware of the risk of burnout in a house renovation. It’s easy to go over budget, overwork yourself, get frustrated, and lose the joy. This is our third house renovation, so we’re working together very well. We’ve done this hike before.
Tomorrow I get another hike … from Denver to Tucson. It’s time to get that Honda Fit that we left up there. I’m flying up in the morning and will drive the car back over the next day or so. 900 miles. Can you say, “ROADTRIP”? Oh yeah. I’m all packed and ready: iPod, overnight bag, snacks, camera, roadmap. Once I’m done with this blog entry, the laptop goes in the bag too. Hey, we’ve been stationary a whole week now. It will be good to hit the road again, even if it is just a ferry job.
December 28, 2007 at 7:35 pm · Filed under Home base
When we were first walking through this house last March, we noticed only one living thing in the otherwise desolate back yard: a small lemon tree. The poor thing was so dry that its leaves were curled and it had borne just a pair of pathetic lemons. Since the house was vacant, we took pity on the tree and watered it.
Every time we came back to the house after that, we watered the tree, and it began to respond. So we asked Jerry the caretaker to keep it happy while we were gone all summer. Now, in December, the “lemon” tree is lush and green, twice the size it was last May, and bearing fruit — grapefruit. I was a little surprised to find out that it was really a grapefruit tree, but can’t complain. The fruit is delicious and juicy, and there’s something inspiring to me — a lifelong northerner — to have an actual citrus tree growing in my yard. I may plant an variety of orange too, when we get to landscaping next fall.
Last night I flipped on the TV to to catch Colin Ferguson doing the Late Late Show and there, crawling along the bottom of the screen was a SEVERE WEATHER WARNING. Eleanor and I both perked up, because we’re used to those things containing scary news like tornadoes, flash flood warnings, destructive thunderstorms, etc.
The crawl said, “HARD FREEZE POSSIBLE”.
Uh-huh. I suppose in southern Arizona that’s cause for fear and anxiety, but to us Vermonters a hard freeze is something that comes every October and continues until roughly May. We don’t even get interested until it dips below 10 degrees during the daytime, which happens every January. But in a place without hurricanes, tornadoes, levees to break, heavy snow, earthquakes, and only about 12 inches of rain a year, a hard freeze for a few hours may be the scariest phenomenon the TV weatherman has to work with during winter.
So I snorted in derision (try it sometime; the trick is snorting loud enough that other people can hear and yet not blowing anything rude out of your nose) and was about to flip the channel to see what Conan O’Brien was up to. But then a horrible thought occurred to me: What about my new friend the grapefruit tree?
Images of Florida citrus farmers spraying their crops with water to protect them flashed through my head. Would our lovely grapefruit all be destroyed by freezing? Did I need to dash out of the Airstream in my pajamas like a deranged version of “The Night Before Christmas” to collect all the fruit?
Reason won out. It was already in the 30s, and I was not anxious to go pick grapefruit by headlamp. They’d have to fend for themselves. I like my grapefruit but it’s also a fact that the Fry’s supermarket down the street has more if ours freezes. Besides, Colin was pretty funny last night.
Today I moved the office into the house so I could crank up the new Bose SoundDock while working, and spread out on the dining room table. I sent Emma out to collect all the grapefruit, and now sitting on the floor next to me is a grocery bag holding a dozen yellow softballs. During the day I can grab one, peel it, and munch on sweet grapefruit while working. I also turned the furnace up to 68 degrees. With that, I think we’re prepared for the long hard winter ahead — all four hours of it.
11 days to the next Airstream trip …
December 27, 2007 at 11:00 pm · Filed under Home base
I was supposed to fly to Denver early this morning but United canceled my flight. So I found myself with a free day on the schedule. I should have stayed put and gotten some work done on the Spring magazine, which is currently in layout, but instead we went out shopping for appliances. What a nightmare.
I don’t even want to talk about the joys of shopping for the house. Suffice to say that we visited a plumbing supply store, two big box stores, Sears, a window supply store, a “scratch and dent” appliance store, and a few miscellaneous places. We looked at fixtures, sinks, refrigerators, dishwashers, cooktops, hoods, washers, dryers, laminates, vanities, and replacement windows. What did we buy? Nothing. We ended up at 7 p.m. with a notepad full of scribbled model numbers, prices, rebates, delivery fees, colors, and confusion — but not a single sales receipt to show we’d actually accomplished something.
But hey, at least I bought two toilets online. Can’t wait for that big box to arrive. “Oh look! Quick! Everyone come round! It’s the toilets!” Then we’ll gleefully install them and stand, holding hands in a semi-circle, to watch the First Flush. Such are the joys of a renovation.
Sorry if I’m too sarcastic. I would prefer to wave a magic wand and have the house done. How can it be that we can see 27 different dishwashers and still not find the “right” one? Who is responsible for the dysfunctional design of gas cooktops that causes the ones with good flame control to be the hardest to clean? Why was the highlight of our day the burritos at Nico’s?
The low point was when I reluctantly turned over my beloved Nikon to the repair shop for cleaning and repair. It was almost emasculating. I am like a gunslinger with no six-shooter now. The world’s most interesting photo may pop up in front of me tomorrow, the equivalent of having the bad guys right in my sights, and I’ll be powerless to take a shot. The Nikon won’t be back until late next week, due to the holiday, so for a while the blog will be somewhat devoid of photos. I’ll borrow Eleanor’s camera for a few days to help bridge the gap, but it won’t be the same.
There’s one bright spot in the day. My father sent me a Bose SoundDock for the iPod, so now we have tunes in the house. If you’ve ever worked on a house, you know how essential it is to have a little music to work by. It makes everything go faster. Tomorrow, once I get a few things done for the magazine, I’ll be back on the floors again, so the SoundDock will get a good workout. It’s also portable enough to travel with the Airstream, which is a major reason why I wanted something like this rather than a typical large stereo.
Notice a common thread to my ramblings lately? It’s all about things now. That’s what the house is doing to me. I want to talk about experiences but instead my experiences seem to be related to the acquisition, disposition, or maintenance of things. This is why the burritos were the more memorable thing we did today — they were the only positive learning experience we had. I learned that Nico’s makes a truly awesome al pastor burrito for $4. It’s a little thing but if that’s all the day yielded, I’ll take it.
12 days to our next Airstream trip …
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