It's Hot!

No great surprise to those of you in California, but it's hot here. The car said it was 77 at 8:15AM, and 100 at 4:00PM. It was broiling out at the Habitat for Humanity work site, but we got a lot done.

Tomorrow K & I will be going to a local food festival, the Eat Real Festival. Local food and beers, from the people who created them. You can read more about it on my Our Oakland blog. It should be great! And hopefully a little cooler than today.

Meanwhile I'm slowly mudding and taping the dining room and entry. This is me working in the clerestory in the entry way. I love the round windows (a house down the street of a similar vintage has one), but they have been more work. But most of the extra work for the taping and mudding has come from all the corners and edges that define the dining room and entry. Those also swallow a lot of mud during the taping phase, so I've gone through quite a bit for a relatively small surface area. But it's getting done.

International Fame!

Rosie and our cat ladder are now officially internationally famous! They've been posted on the Cat-Ladder blog, which shows homemade and commercial cat ladders from around the world. The blog itself originates from Sweden.

Our Electric Bike

Not much to report on the house. I connected the last outlet and the light switch in the dining room (it was behind the boxes for the kitchen cabinets) and put the last piece of sheet rock in. This week I hope to finish taping and mudding it.

our e-bike

One thing I've been doing lately is biking. A while back we bought an electric-assist bike. It's been great, and has us riding more than we did with regular bikes, in large part because of the big hills around here. I think some of you who are more in to green stuff might be interested. I wrote more about it on my Oakland blog: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

To Say Nothing of the Kitchen Sink

Nothing too exciting to write about. Yesterday I finished hooking up the vent for the range hood. This afternoon I spent cleaning up the dining room so I can move forward with that. It's been full of cardboard, boxes, pieces of styrofoam, etc. from the kitchen work. Everything (including the kitchen sink) had packaging. Some a little, some a lot, but it all added up to a substantial amount of cardboard. K had cut a bunch of it up before to go in the recycling bin, but there was still a fair amount left. Some of it I'd used to protect the plywood underlayment while installing the cabinets, and some had been re-used for various tasks before that, but most of it was just waiting to be recycled. I even have a potential lead on recycling most of the styrofoam. Each of the cabinets had styrofoam on the corners, and numerous other things had pieces here and there, so it added up to a fair amount. The catch is that they're waiting on some new equipment, and so can't accept donations right now. But better than into a landfill.