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...

Yrch!

The next goal I've been working towards is clearing out the old bedroom so I can move my office into it out of the dining room. That will allow me to take out the cabinets and take down the wall into the addition.

I knew that we had a mold problem in the old bedroom, but I figured I could deal with that later. However, as I discovered previously, the existing walls are completely uninsulated and lack a proper vapor barrier. Couple that with inadequate heating (there used to be just a floor furnace in the middle of the house, which meant the extremeties got pretty cold), the fact the bedroom is on the north side of the house and shaded partly on the west side, and a large dresser against the wall that kept air from circulating, and well, yrch! The mold problem was worse than I thought -- much worse. More than a quick coat of Kilz would take care of, and more than I wanted to continue breathing.

So this week I've stripped the drywall off, run some new wiring for a nice, properly grounded 20 amp circuit for my computer equipment, and insulated the outside walls. And because there's diagonal bracing inset between the studs, the insulation and attached vapor barrier are more cut up than I'd like so I added a separate vapor barrier, too. Today I'm hanging new drywall and can hopefully have everything taped and mudded by next week. It all goes much more quickly with a simple rectangular wall and not so many windows.

And She's Climbing a Stairway of Sisal...

Not much progress to report. Since moving into the new bedroom, I've been super busy with other stuff like Habitat for Humanity, Oakland Firefighters Random Acts, church media -- the stuff that usually keeps me only a little busy so I have time to work on the house.

I have managed to do some stuff like finally stain and finish the dresser that sat in our old bedroom for a couple years, hang the mirror, and most importantly (from the standpoint of the cats) build a ladder for access to the loft. Katarina and I had been using a stepladder for the time being, but the cats didn't much like the slippery metal under their feet. Rosie because she has no front claws and almost no front toes, and Star because she's "Wuss in Boots". Now we can all use a nice custom-made ladder, with sisal on the steps for gripping with kitty claws (for thems that's got 'em). Star still slides her paws down the side rail one step at a time, but Rosie has become quite comfortable with the ladder, the loft and a few other places we hadn't quite counted on.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

One of the most basic mantras in green living is "reduce, reuse, recycle". Reduce the amount of stuff you use and waste you produce . Reuse as much as you can. Recycle what you can't reuse.

I've been doing my best on this project to do those things, as well as use green building techniques and materials where possible. But it's all relative. If I were really green, I wouldn't be building this addition in the first place, since it's taking gobs of resources relative to a lot of things in the world. Better than most building projects in the U.S., but far from perfect.

Even the green materials are relative. Take the bamboo flooring. It's great, right? We love it, it's durable, it's beautiful, and bamboo grows to a useable size in 3 to 5 years. It even uses low-VOC adhesives to glue the stalks together into a useful width for flooring. What's not to like? Well, for one thing, most of it used for flooring, cabinets, etc. in the U.S. is grown in China. Great, that's where it's native, right? Well, it takes resources to ship it half way around the world. At best it came into the Port of Oakland. Then it was shipped to EcoTimber in Hayward. Then it was shipped most of the way to our house in Oakland. Then hauled up the hill. There, I removed it from the cardboard boxes, and removed the foam insulation between alternate boards (to keep it from scuffing itself in transit), and nailed it into place.

And I got a reminder on the reduce, reuse, recycle mantra recently. From our neighbor's cat, Fritz, of all, er, people. A while back Edis and I hauled a bunch of non-recyclable stuff to the transfer station in Berkeley, and yesterday I moved the rest of the drywall into the dining room, so there's not mounds of stuff in the carport like there used to be. But there's still some junk there: an old tarp; some scraps of wood that have been re-used several times; some trimmings from various bushes in the yard. Fritz decided to forgo the 'recycle' step on some of the lumber scraps in favor of 'reuse'. Cats are pretty darn good at making themselves comfortable, so who can blame him?

Movin' On In

We moved in to the bedroom Saturday, and spent a restful first night in the addition. There's no bathroom yet, and we have to go out on to the deck to get to the rest of the house, but it's a major milestone.

We woke up to a beautiful sunrise, first the earth shadow visible in the sky, then the first light hitting the fog down over the bay. With a tree-lined view, birds chirping, and no other sounds to be heard, it was like waking up in the mountains. Ah...