For the record...

I realize we haven't updated the blog in a LONG time but the camera has been broken. We have lots of good things to show you and once Mark figures out how to work the new SLR digital camera I bought him for his Birthday we will overwhelm our readers (all 2 of us) with copious photos documenting our progress.

Before we have our big reveal I thought I would post the old G-Maps pictures of our house (at least 1.5 years old). Actually, we are currently trying to paint the exterior (the weather is not cooperating) so the outside currently looks a lot worse then it does in these photos.

Bathroom Pictures "Before":

For those of you who never had the privilege of seeing the bathroom in it's metallic purple state(or as our friend Martin called it 'the color of an unsatisfied woman') here are some BEFORE pictures:

more on the porch floor: walking on water

we officially have a floor in the porch. more correctly, we have some floor. a little bit of floor, which is to say not all of the floor. today we have about 38" of porch floor installed. but not painted. or stained, or whatever. the wood is beautiful, but largely as per the cost of materials and finishing, construction tolerances, and things of that nature, i think we're going to paint it, not finish it. it breaks my heart a little bit, since the wood is beautiful, but it is supposed to be a porch. i suppose we will make our final decision after we lay down the flooring we have already bought, which we could get away with staining if we decide to go that direction. 38 inches of floor. i think i mentioned in an earlier entry that the porch is about 36' or 37' long. also, only about 10' is leveled and ready for flooring, so we've still got a ways to go.

our neighbor let us borrow his floor nailer. it is a cool mechanical contraption; one lines it up with a joist and wails on the plunger with a big sledge hammer to drive little "cleat" nails at a perfect 45 degree angle right over the tongue, through the board, into the joist. of course, since most of the joists are pressure treated, we have to use galvanized or stainless hardware. oh yeah, and they don't make galvanized flooring nails for this thing, so i bought a $99 box of stainless steel nails (1000 count); a normal box is about $23. the truth is, after all that i've found that i prefer to hammer drive regular 2.5" galvanized finishing nails. i guess i'm a little old-school that way. on a more pragmatic level, with all the metal and giant holes from failed implantation of metal, sometimes it is beneficial to feel how the nails set and maybe drive one or two additional nails at an angle into the sides of the joists.

the truth is that building your own floor is very satisfying. i can only speak for myself, but when i step out the door and my floor catches me without creaking or groaning, it is a spiritual experience. for me, walking about on the floor that i built myself is like walking on water.

it makes a person think of famous carpenters - or at least step-sons of carpenters, said to have walked on water. was he actually walking on water, or did he just build himself a really nice floor one day, and in telling his friends and disciples was terribly misunderstood? growing up in a household with a professional carpenter, one is bound to learn a thing or two. in particular, if one had been away from the trade for a while and then built himself a nice floor, i think he'd be beaming over it. it is quite a thing to walk on a floor that one has built with his own hands.

oh yeah, construction...

so yeah, construction. we declared an end to major combat operations on the porch a month ago, but we've been working and tearing things up since then. in the last couple of weeks, we've put in 4 windows. day before yesterday we put in two doors and a bunch of giant beams. i started building the floor.

as expected, nothing about the floor has gone as expected. so we're right on target, right? this will require pictures to properly convey the complexity of the problem. let's toss out some numbers just for fun. the porch is about 37' long by 9' wide. the floor slopes down slightly away from the house about 1.5" in three directions. the floor must be:
1) level
2) strong enough that we don't fall through it
3) fairly even
4) not too high off the ground; we've already installed doors.

so the way we do the floor is to bolt 2x(something) lumber to the concrete, level it, put flooring on top. the primary, strong attachment points are called drop-in anchors; secondary shim-and-pin points are attached by tapcon concrete screws. stringers run every 15" or so (<=16"), and shim points need to be about the same. each point must be leveled to its 4 neighboring points. so in physics land, we call this a problem with MANY degrees of freedom.

Reconstruction

a few weeks ago, we declared, quietly to ourselves and i suppose anybody who asked (not that anybody did), the end of major combat operations on our porch. since then, we've been blissfully, leisurely spending most of our free time still working on the porch. of course there was a break in porch operations.

about two weeks ago, i went to Palm Springs for the annual SCEC meeting (about earthquakes, seismology, and all that good stuff). there, i learned several important things. 1) seismicity along faults appears to obey Gutenberg-Richter statistics. there was some disagreement amongst the participants as to the appropriateness of that conclusion from the study presented, but for the most part, i buy it. 2) some kinds of slider-block models have an interesting, tunable chaotic threshold. 3) there really ARE wood floors in our bathroom.

the first revelation i learned in a morning talk; the second was an excellent poster by a very smart UCSB student, and the third i learned on the phone. rebecca usually takes on a project when i go away for a few days. things get painted; furniture gets rearranged. it is always wonderful to come home.

so i get a phone call. "good news!"

"we'll have to make some exploratory cuts and see what we've got there."

"ummmm... i'm pretty sure there are wood floors. that is pretty much definite at this point."

the really good news is that it was surprisingly easy to tear down the bathroom to its bare bones. a diamond blade on a circular saw, set to the appropriate depth, makes very short work of tile grout (or just tile, but the grout cuts more easily and leaves the tiles intact). i mean, it makes a lot of dust. wear goggles, breathing mask, and all that good stuff. get a fan and blow out as much dust through the window as you can. the really key part is to have an assistant with the shop-vac on the trailing edge of the saw blade. with those bits in play, a person can tear up two or three hundred square feet of tile in a few hours.

of course all the toilets at home depot are crap, recognizing the pun, so we ordered a toilet. it will be here maybe tuesday. for a few more days, then, we have but a gulag style hole in the floor and the spider-toilet in the garage (see ZoD articles).

the truth is that it is worth it. the floor is wonderful; troy once again did a great job. i'm off to AGU in december, so i'm sure we'll be seeing him around christmas time.

pictures coming...

A Long Time Coming...

So it's been a while. We've been a little overwhelmed. Okay, a lot overwhelmed. But we are winning the war. See for yourself...

All of these pictures are a few weeks old now. We'll take some more pictures before the new windows and doors go in.

Thanks to Dick, Nancy, Scott & Ben for all of your help! Especially Ben- I never would have thought child labor could be so productive! :)

Happy house...neglected blog

July 16, 2009

Not much time for blogging lately. But we have made so much progress! I'm feeling much more optimistic, you know, now that there aren't any gaping holes!

Laundry room with holes...

The laundry room with a door, a window and a structurally sound external wall.

The new 6' french doors are finally in place.

The dummy wall that divided the porch has been taken down (the porch is huge!)

The old set of french doors no longer live on the patio (sorry no picture of the finished product). Admittedly I bit off more than I could chew with this project. Flaws aside, they still look better than they did before. I've downgraded the status of this project from 'total disaster' to small catastrophe. Remodel and learn.

Randy did an amazing job on our new gate! We've also started to do a bit of xeroscaping in the front yard. My goal is to have replaced 3/4 of our lawn by the time Woodland installs water meters.

Perhaps most shocking (to me anyway) is that I've successfully sewn two sets of curtains. And yes, the one set is hanging by masking tape in the picture above, but that was only temporary- it's properly installed now. Considering the fact that I'm a fairly right brained geeky scientist I'm rather proud of how they turned out.