Archive for January, 2008
January 10, 2008 at 6:53 pm · Filed under Roadtrips
All is well. I am mumbling that to myself because my second day back on the road (since we became temporarily housebound) has been very funky.
Last night we pulled into an RV park in Tempe and visited with our friend Brent, who was staying there as well. Apache Blvd in Tempe is a hotspot for Middle Eastern restaurants and markets, and Brent took us to one of his favorites. We love Middle Eastern food (but then, we like almost everything edible). The portions were big enough that we each came home with leftovers. The leftovers reek of garlic and every time I open the refrigerator I am reminded of the meal, but that’s a good memory.
This morning I dropped E&E at the Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport to fly back to Vermont for a family visit. Emma is going to visit with her grandparents and uncles and friends, while I take the Airstream out for my first-ever solo trip. In over two years of traveling in this Airstream I have never taken it camping by myself, so it’s sort of exciting. I’ve been alone in it while they’ve been traveling, but I’ve never gone anywhere.
So after dropping them at the airport, I swung back to the campground, hitched, and pulled out on I-10 heading west to Quartzsite AZ, which is about 100 miles from Phoenix, near Blythe, CA.
Along the road, a truck pulled into the highway and began to spew gravel. A big piece left a nice round 1/2″ divot in my windshield (down low near the wiper blades). I backed off immediately and called the insurance company. By the time I found my next gas stop, I had an appointment to get the glass repaired at our house next week. OK, so that was annoying, but not fatal.
At the gas station, I found myself in one of those tight spots where pulling away from the pump is unexpectedly difficult. This happens at gas stations. I’ve said it many times to friends, the most dangerous place to be with a 30 foot trailer is a gas station. I thought I was going to make it, when I heard a thump, and knew I was screwed.
Or in this case, unscrewed. The left edge of the bumper caught something, and it ripped off the bumper. I found it hanging from the back of the trailer, pivoted to a 45 degree angle rearward, and attached only by two screws at the right side which were acting as hinges.
Well, there’s another first. In over two years of towing this trailer I’ve never clipped anything … but the evidence of the hanging bumper was pretty conspicuous for all to see.
The steel screws stayed, the bumper didn’t.
But once again it was repairable. The bumper itself was undamaged. If you look at it from the top closely you can see it was slightly bent but I’m talking about maybe 1/8″ of an inch, hardly noticeable. The four steel screws holding it on were undamaged. They ripped through the softer aluminum of the bumper, so that essentially the bumper just popped off without anything else being seriously hurt.
The same thing happened to the aluminum cover for the bumper compartment. It is held shut by a pair of spring-loaded clips which are attached to the bumper. They ripped through the aluminum of the cover.
Among my emergency kit I carry a hammer, a wood tapping block, screwdrivers, and some rags. With this, I was able to back out the two screws that formerly held the bumper, tap the bumper back into position, and tighten the screws enough to hold the bumper in place. The top one (pictured) isn’t doing much, but the bottom one is holding it just fine. This will stay long enough for me to get a better repair next week.
There’s also a little narrow scrape along the lower left corner of the Airstream. It looks worse than it is because there’s some plastic embedded on it. This will probably be hard to see once I clean it. It didn’t even dent — just scraped off a little of the clearcoat. And the cable TV/telephone jack cover is cracked. That’s easily replaced. So, I’ll need three parts and a bit of welding on the bumper. Not too bad. As scrapes go, I got off easy.
The final episode of the day occurred upon arrival at Quartzsite. I went to the BLM (Bureau of Land Mgmt) Long Term Visitor Area called La Posa. These LTVAs are basically just spots in the desert with minimal services, administered by the BLM. For $40 I can stay two weeks, but when I went to get my permit I found that I might not be allowed because of the decals on our trailer. Apparently the Federal regulations prohibit vehicles with “advertising” or commercial references on them. This rule even extends to work trucks being used to tow recreational vehicles.
A 30-minute long process began as a result of this, which culminated in the head Ranger talking to me via cell phone and actually loading this weblog to ascertain whether I was “commercial” or not. It was concluded that I was, even though I promised I wasn’t here to sell anything. The solution was to cover up the spots on the trailer where “tour.airstreamlife.com” appears, and also the decal that says “AIRSTREAM LIFE”. The rangers actually drove down to the hardware store and bought the necessary paper and tape to get this done, which was very nice. So now this is what my Airstream looks like:
I am “anonymous” now. You’ll never find me!
By the way, if you want to try the BLM LTVAs here at Quartzite (or other spots in the west), keep in mind it’s sort of the Wild West out here. You’ve got to come prepared. Some of the LTVAs have portable toilets, and all have dumpsters for trash. The dump station is down the street at La Posa South. Otherwise, it is just you and what you brought. In my case, that includes a ton of food, 39 gallons of fresh water, and all the comforts of home. I should be self-sufficient for a week easily, but if I need anything the town is not far.I’ll be here for at least a few days, exploring the seasonal RV phenomenon that occurs here every winter: thousands of RVs congregate and spend months here living cheap among the creosote bushes on Federal land. Half a mile away there is an enormous flea market area which is currently hosting the Tyson Wells Gem & Mineral Show. My plan is to explore the area and find a story for Airstream Life magazine. For the next week or so, you can come along.
January 9, 2008 at 10:54 am · Filed under Home base
Today we leave on an Airstream trip! Whew — just in time for our sanity. The house craziness has been a lot of work.
Yesterday the gas plumbers showed up to dig a new trench in our back yard. We need a new gas line because we want to have a gas stove, and the code doesn’t allow us to to connect another appliance using the existing (small) line. All the utility providers were called out to mark their lines, but Cox Cable didn’t show up. We didn’t know they had a line in our back yard, until of course the plumbers “found” it with their Ditch Witch. Cox got a call and sent someone out to repair it.
Interestingly, they don’t actually repair the line. They simply replace the entire thing, underground. At first they said they’d do it when we ordered cable service, which isn’t going to happen for a loooong time, if ever. But we didn’t want them coming back to dig up our newly landscaped yard next year, so after some negotiations Cox agreed to come back today and lay the replacement line in the same trench as the new gas line.
The gas plumbers also discovered that the sewer line that we are using for our full hookup in the carport isn’t buried very deep. In fact it was only about 12″ under the surface. So they clipped that with the Ditch Witch too … but spliced in a repair today. At least now we know where everything is.
My camera is back — just in time for our trip. The CCD is cleaned and the problem with the onboard flash is fixed. You can expect to see a lot of photos from this week’s trip, as I start to use it again. We will be on the road by 1:30 pm today, heading to the Phoenix area for a night and then west. Time to go hitch up the Airstream!
January 7, 2008 at 11:06 pm · Filed under Home base
People who meet us here often comment on the stark differences between Vermont and Arizona. Vermont is cold and damp, Arizona is hot and dry. Desert versus Green Mountains. It seems to amaze people that we’d relocate to some place so totally different.
I prefer to think of them as yin and yang. We need both to stay balanced. In Vermont we play on a lake full of water, and all summer I see the rain and clouds passing by. It seems that water is a constant presence, in endless supply. Moss grows near the Airstream and at times the dampness invades to the point that even the furniture seems to go limp. I think longingly of the vast dry sands and succulent saguaros posing in the sun. Then we come to the Sonoran Desert and it is so dry (“how dry is it?”) that I can drink two liters of water a day just sitting at my desk, and still feel thirsty.
But it is not always so. The typical winter day in Tucson features blue-gray clouds that cruise by in the breeze, and temperatures only in the 50s, like today. As I write this I can hear an unusual sound: water dripping off the eaves of the house. We’ve had rain, actual soaking rain, today. There are puddles in the back yard, and I hear a slishing sound as cars drive by. Those are things I associate with the northeast, not here.
And with this rare rain we have gotten a bit of humidity. It’s still a dry day by northeast standards, but there is enough moisture in the air that the mid-50s feel cooler than usual. This has led me to a discovery about our house: it’s chilly.
That shouldn’t be a surprise. Our house was built to be cool, defended again 110 degree July days by a reflective roof and thick masonry walls that absorb the cool at night. It has no insulation except a few inches of fiberglass in the ceiling. The windows are single-pane cheapos that the wind whistles through. The floor is concrete covered by slate. There are no windows on the west side, and only two small ones on the east side. Southern exposures are protected by overhangs. In short, everything about this house is designed to feel cool.
That’s all fine ten months out of the year. But when the temperature drops and the humidity rises, it feels like a drafty old stone castle, and running the furnace seems futile. It can heat the air, but it can never overcome the stored coolness in eight-inch-thick adobe block walls. I am fighting the urge to run out and buy lots of thick wool rugs for the floors, and to crank up the heat to 72. With the windows we have at present, and the general leakiness of the house (I’m talking about air infiltration, not rain), running the furnace more would heat the local neighborhood more than the house.
Window replacement on the house doesn’t pay here, because the heating season is too short. If we replace the windows it will be for comfort and convenience rather than energy savings. We probably won’t heat the house for more than a few days this winter, and we don’t expect to run the air conditioning at all since we’ll be traveling during the warmest months.
Up in Prescott AZ, where our Airstream buddy Rich C is living, they are getting occasional snow. Rich is up around 5,000 feet and things are quite different up there. People associate Arizona with sunshine and desert, but in reality half the state is above 4,000 feet and it is covered in green forests that are quite a bit cooler than the southern half of the state. Flagstaff, at 7,000 feet, has a climate more like Denver than Tucson. People are skiing up there right now.
This is why our Airstream travel routes are quite limited this time of year. We stay south of a line defined by the Mogollon Rim (muggy-on), which is why our travels are focused on places in southern New Mexico, southern Arizona, southern and coastal California, Mexico, and west Texas.
Speaking of which, our next Airstream trip is the day after tomorrow. We have to stop doing house stuff and get on the job of prepping the trailer for the trip, but it’s hard to stop the momentum. Handy Randy showed up to work on the bathroom tile that was failing, and a guy from the gas plumbers showed up to scope out the job. Another guy came by to measure for window shades, too. Tomorrow the gas plumbing begins in earnest, and I’m expecting another contractor to stop by to estimate some masonry work. Also, FedEx LTL (Less Than Truckload) says we may get 213 lbs of toilets tomorrow. Wheee. It will be a busy day.
January 6, 2008 at 7:27 pm · Filed under Home base
So much for playing outside the house today. I resisted the pull, but eventually the house sucked us in and we ended up spending most of the day puttering around inside. We have four rooms we can use, because no further significant work is being done in them: dining room (where I’ve set up my office), living room (where we are stacking miscellaneous boxes that we need access to), the middle bedroom (our primary storage area), and Emma’s room. So we are spreading out and beginning to open a few boxes.
Handy Jerry came by around noon and solved our electrical woes. Turns out the painters didn’t tie off the electrical connections properly when they took down the ceiling fans. That was half the problem; the other half was caused by Handy Randy when he moved a bathroom fan switch and didn’t make a tight connection. I should send a bill to both parties splitting the $90 it cost to figure out the problem and resolve it. We also re-installed all the ceiling lights, wall sconces, and duct faces.
One project I’ve had on my list is to somehow deal with the two large boxes of photo prints we’ve been toting around for a decade. Remember the days before digital? Well, I’ve got plenty of souvenirs from that era, which are slowly deteriorating and never viewed. They just take up space in a storage area somwhere.
We’ll never get around to putting them in albums, so I figured if we had them all scanned we’d have them available on our computers. Then we would have them to view and enjoy anytime, even as we were traveling in the Airstream. I was planning to use ScanCafe to do the work. You just send them all your negatives and they scan them and put them up online for you to view. Then you pick the ones you want, and they burn them onto DVD for $0.19 per image.
Today I found the boxes of photos and cracked them open for the first time since 2000 (when I bought my first digital camera). I quickly discovered that we have waaaaay too many photos. There are approximately 4,000 negatives between the two boxes. ScanCafe will scan them all, but I have to pay for at least half of them whether I want the images or not. That’s $380.
Looking a few sample packs of prints, Eleanor and I realized we don’t really want more than about 10% of them. The pictures are pretty lame — lots of photos of building our last house, generic pictures of flowers, sunsets, etc. Very few are the type of photo we want to save for posterity: images of people and special moments. The one below is an example of a keeper. That’s me on the left (pre-beard), with my friend Steve B, preparing to go flying on August 14, 1993, just before Eleanor and I got married. I don’t remember where we were going that day, but I do have a lot of fond memories of that airplane. It was our “Airstream” back then, and we flew it all over the northeast.
Our neighbor Carol popped by for a visit late in the afternoon and was suitably impressed by our progress in the last two days. It just happened I was in the storage area and dug up a gift box full of goodies that Brett sent us for Christmas, so we took it over the dining room table, shoved my office equipment out of the way, and had an impromptu buffet with Carol. Crackers, smoked salmon, camembert cheese, cinnamon cashews, garlic toasts, stone ground mustard, green olives, and we added summer sausage, parmigiano reggiano cheese, and root beer. So that was dinner in the new house. A few Ghirardelli chocolates from the gift box made dessert, and then we made a fire of the excess packing paper and some scraps of a cut-down tree that I found in the backyard.
It is clear that we will never have a “move-in” day. Like our Airstream life, entering this house is going to be a process. We are moving in by degrees. Each day a little symbolic step or two forward occurs. Today, the first picture hung on a wall, and the first guest for dinner in the house. Tomorrow, who knows?
January 5, 2008 at 8:55 pm · Filed under Home base
Yesterday afternoon as the painters were leaving for the day, Eleanor and I stepped into the plastic-shrouded house and tip-toed past piles of ceiling (now in crumbles on the floor) to see what the first colors looked like.
It was horrifying. The hallway color we had chosen, with a name like “Sahara”, looked on the sample chip like a nice balance between adobe and terra-cotta. In reality, it was RAGING ORANGE CREAMSICLE color, almost fluorescent when the sun hit it. We stared in disbelief and then did the usual things we do when the color seems terribly out of whack (because this has happened to us before on other renovations):
- Think, “They must have put on the wrong color.”
- Pull out the paint chip and compare to the wall.
- Realize with a sinking sensation that the color is correct, and we are color-blind idiots who should probably stick to shades of off-white from now on.
- Mentally calculate the cost of a new 5-gallon bucket of paint.
- Call the painter and recount the disaster.
- After some free counseling from the painter, drive to the paint store and quickly find a new color that is boring but very safe.
So this morning the painters restored the hallways to a benign taupe. (Sounds like a medical condition: We have a benign taupe, which is better than a malignant orange.)
And then they painted Emma’s room.
Now, I knew Emma’s color was going to be unsuitable for most adults. She picked it. I tried hard to convince her not to go with a blue-green and managed to get the color lightened a shade, but it was still very blue. It appears to be precisely what it is: a kid’s room. Did I say “very blue”? Very very blue. The camera imploded when I tried to take a picture of it.
After that things went better. We love the kitchen color, called “Olive Oil” (sort of a light green), but of course this, our favorite color in the house, will be mostly covered up when the cabinets and appliances are installed. The living room and our bedroom are not bad either, in a mellow shade called “Almost Peach”, and the ceilings are a light cream color. It all works. Even Emma’s BLUE actually matches a lot of the slate floor.
Covering up the mistake
I am greatly relieved to have this phase over. The painters will return next month once we are done installing things, to do some touch-up, but that’s nothing. At this point we have no other major disasters scheduled inside the house, so we can start to unload things from the Airstream and open a few boxes from the storage room. Although the house won’t have a kitchen for another month (and no bathroom cabinetry), we’ve got a few rooms that are usable.
So we are going to take Sunday off from house stuff and try to go have some fun in the local area. A day to play will clear our heads for the next phase of planning, which is “details”. We’ll need to pick out drawer pulls and cabinet knobs, rugs, a couple basic pieces of furniture, faucets, one or two more light fixtures, closet systems, window shades, etc. Hmmm… sounds like a lot of work. We may hold all that for after we return from the next Airstream trip, which starts on Wednesday.
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.
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