Back to Work

Yesterday I finally got back to work on the house. I removed the rest of the paneling in the dining room, working carefully so I can reuse the paneling as needed in other parts of the house. It revealed a few more interesting things in the construction of the house.

The complete and utter lack of insulation no longer surprises me, but I found some other reasons why the dining room was always cold before. One was the nice cold well next to the chimney. I'd seen the space before from up in the attic, but I hadn't realized there was just a layer of paneling between it and the living space. The attic is open to the outdoors via roof vents, so that meant a whopping 1/4" of paneling for insulation. What's that, R 0.25 or less? There's a similar little space open to the attic in one of the other corners. Couple those with the general lack of insulation, the mirror butted against the outside wall, the leaky French doors, and it's no wonder the room was cold.

And here, boys and girls, we have a lesson in why you put a header above doors and windows, and why if you use two 2-by pieces, you put them vertically, not stacked. It's harder to see in the photo, but there's a nice downward bow to the 2x4s and the trim below it, about 1/2" or more. This lesson goes double if it's a load-bearing wall (which this is, as the ceiling joists rest on that wall, and indirectly, the roof does as well). Given the span and it being load-bearing, this header really ought to be 4x6 (and will be when I'm done).

The construction of this house is puzzling. Some things like the diagonal bracing show great care and craftsmanship. And other things leave you scratching your head. Of course, I'm sure someone in 50 or 100 years working on the house will wonder some of those same things about my work. Of course, I'm building to current building codes or better, so it will all be solidly built and well-insulated, so probably not so many.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle Redux

Part of why moving my office out of the dining room took so long was that there was so much stuff. I took some time to sort through it, and shredded a lot of old documents for recycling and threw away some useless crud. But the best way I've found to get rid of stuff I don't use is Freecycle. It's kind of like a local eBay, but free. You post what you've got, and other people claim it. Or you ask for stuff you need, and people may have it. It's a great way to keep stuff out of the landfill while simultaneously preventing more stuff from being made to replace it. There are now happy new owners of computer speakers, unused printer cartridges from Camron-Stanford House for a printer they no longer have, and some other bits and pieces are awaiting pickup. And I now have a futon for visitors to sit on, and which can serve as a guest bed.

Not surprisingly, I first read about Freecycle over on Treehugger, which is a great site for keeping up with what's new in the world of green and greenish things.

This Blood's For You

The last couple of weeks have been interesting. Not so much the "fun, new and interesting", but more the Chinese curse interesting, "May you live in interesting times." Not surprisingly, work on the house has been sporadic.

An old friend died of cancer of the esophagus. It's hard to believe Dave is gone. He was always enthusiastic about whatever he was doing, whether it was cheering for Cal sports, cursing various ESPN commentators, or randomly calling an operator in Atlanta a few years back when the Braves were in the World Series. (She of course was rooting for the Braves, but thought one of the opposing players had a cute butt. Which of course sent Dave into gales of laughter.) "Joie de vive" only begins to describe him. A golden retriever kind of personality, a Golden Bear, and a heart of gold. Or at least gold plated :-)

Another friend's father died of lung cancer. Amazing it didn't kill him sooner, since he smoked for over 70 years. I never met him, but I feel like I know him a little since I've been helping my friend prepare a video tribute to him. Chinese immigrant. Decorated WWII veteran. Restaurant owner. Loved to cook. Great sense of humor. Loving husband and father.

Our neighbor John died on Monday at the ripe old age of 95. A couple years ago he bought a hybrid Honda Civic because he'd seen our Toyota Prius and I told him how much we loved it and what great mileage it got. Even though age had slowed him down, he always had a smile and up until a couple of months ago walked his little dog.

Recently I received a beautiful gift, a copy of Galen Rowell: A Retrospective by the Sierra Club. I took a number of photo workshops with him, learned a lot, and was inspired by his work. I was planning on a trip to Antarctica on which he was one of the featured leaders, but the ship sank on an earlier cruise in the Pacific*. I took the picture on the left in Yosemite, one of Galen's favorite spots. He and his wife Barbara died several years ago on their way home from one of their many trips. I love the book, but it was a fresh reminder of their passing.
(* In the immortal words of Dave Barry, "I'm not making this up." It hit an uncharted reef, and the captain ran it aground to keep it from sinking completely. The insurance company called it a total loss, and the planned trip was delayed.)

But of course, people die all the time. Civil wars, hunger, disease, murder or just bad luck. It can all make you feel pretty small and helpless sometimes, even (or maybe especially) if you believe in God. So what's a person to do? Appreciate people like it's their last day on earth, because it might be. Give blood -- there's a continual need for it. Because the next life it saves just might be yours.

Break On Through To the Other Side

Last week I made a momentous change. I finished moving my stuff out of the dining room (which is pretty momentous in itself, or at least mountainous) and took down the wall between the existing dining room and its counterpart in the addition. It took a while because I'm going to reuse the cabinets in the basement for storage, and I salvaged the precious 1x12 redwood siding for the bits around the new windows.

But it's done, and now we don't have to go on to the deck to get between the bedroom and the rest of the house. The cats had been using their "secret passage" through the back of the bottom drawer, but they seem to approve of this change, probably because I haven't had the furnace company hook up my new vent for the bedroom, so this allows some heat in the bedroom (besides the solar gain).

I've also started taking the groovy grooved paneling off the walls in the dining room in preparation for putting in windows where the French doors are now. It comes off pretty easily, which is nice, because I'll need some for patching the hallway door that will be moved from the kitchen to the dining room. And it's encouraging for some distant day when I'll install new double-pane windows in the living room and insulate the walls there. Note the festive diagonal bracing between the studs in the "after" picture on the right. I don't know how much strength it adds (certainly not as much as plywood sheathing), but it certainly makes insulating more of a pain.

This week I've been doing some quick exterior painting, because the gutter people are due to come sometime soon. Normally I would wait until everything was done, the whole house repainted, the whole shebang. But we've found in previous wet winters that it's good to have drainage, and to encourage the runoff water to go on its way down the hillside, instead of through the basement. So I painted the fascia where the gutter will be, and painted a bit of the wall where the downspouts will be. Everything will get painted later, but it's a lot easier to paint those now.

Camron-Stanford House

The last couple of weeks have been busy. Given that I'm moving my office from the dining room to our old bedroom, it's no surprise I've spent time drilling holes, pulling wires, and painting and the like. What is surprising is that the work wasn't in our house, but in this little number:

It's Camron-Stanford House, a Victorian house on Lake Merritt. I've been volunteering there for a couple of years doing tech support. Via slow upgrades and a lot of work, the computer system is now in pretty good shape. (The database is still a mess, but that's a whole 'nother can of worms.)

The last weak link has been the Internet connection. It's a historical house, so drilling holes to pull cables or having *gasp* exposed cables are no-nos. So we've been using a wireless setup to connect to one of the law offices upstairs (office rents and renting the house for weddings and other events are how they pay for the upkeep of the house) where the DSL modem is. But given the vintage of the house, it has hecka thick walls (in the basement at least, 8" interior and 12" exterior), fat cast-iron plumbing and radiators, and uses plaster and lath instead of drywall as is done in more modern houses. Those things added up to pretty bad wireless connectivity, so we'd added an external antenna, repeaters, etc. I only occasionally had problems with it, and re-trying always fixed the problem. But the woman who used it to handle e-mail inquiries about renting the house for an event had frequent problems, which meant frequent phone calls to me, which meant frequent increases in my blood pressure. Not to mention an election-time like aversion to answering the phone.

But on my last I-can't-connect-please-come-down-here visit, the lawyer in the office upstairs and I figured out a way I might be able to run a network cable with no exposed cables, and (mostly) using existing holes by following other cables for things like the telephone lines and security system. A quick trip to CompUSA (yrch!) for some cable and home for some tools, and I spent most of the day fishing a Cat5 cable from office to office. I did have to enlarge one hole a little, and I had to cut off a connector to get the cable fished through. So today I re-terminated the cable, tacked it up discretely below a faux beam in the office (and painted it brown to match), and there's now a connection to the DSL modem that is as close to 100% as any can be. Which means fewer calls, and lower blood pressure.

Woohoo! Of course, we've now figured out a possible way to connect one of the problematic 2nd floor offices by fishing a cable through an old fireplace, so my adventures in really old houses is not over... And then there's the graphic design work I do for them, too...