So yes. I haven’t been posting lately. I haven’t been keeping up with the construction project on my blog. It’s not that I’ve forgotten about the blog– it’s just that we’ve gotten really busy with work lately, and after a full week of working, and then a full weekend of house constructing, sometimes I don’t get ’round to the blogging thing. I’ve discovered that, when you’re self-employed, building a business, and building your own house, sometimes all you want to do is something that doesn’t require much (if anything) of you. Often, that means thanking my lucky stars for a red Netflix envelope instead of working on the blog. Sorry about that.

It has been several months now since we had our friend Curt help us with drywall. It is nice to have a few expert friends that we can call upon when it comes to skills that we don’t actually have in-family. Before hanging the drywall, Curt and Jim strapped the walls, to help cover a multitude of framing “sins”– the legacy of a poorly-built building that we are trying to turn into a well-built building. (Another way of looking at this particular building project of ours is that we’re trying to put lipstick on a pig…) You can see the strapping in the photo below (the horizontal boards that are running in front of the studs). Per our usual style, we manage d to sift through the pile of boards in the yard and find some old flooring boards from our ex-kitchen to use for this job. (Actually, Jim did the non-fun job of sifting through the board pile in the yard– so thanks for that!)

Jim and Curt hang the first sheet of drywall:

Partially hung drywall:

Luke mixing drywall mud:

Spraying drywall mud, while making some attempt to keep it off the ceiling with Luke’s handy masking tool:

After spraying on the texture, Curt did a great job of tooling it, so that we got a relatively smooth texture. Then I obsessively (and unnecessarily) sanded everything, as you may recall in this post about my adventures in drywall sanding. We then spent weeks debating about color choices, visiting the Sherwin Williams store, and investing in one of the most expensive liquids known to man: paint.

All our color selection agonizing only got worse once we actually started the painting process. This is mainly because I’m not very good at letting go of the fact that this crappy little practice house cannot fulfill all my desires for perfection. It cannot encompass every single idea, nor can it achieve exact color perfection. Our idea was to have one bold, orange colored wall, and the rest of the walls a white-ish color. We selected a cool white that we thought was–well– white. Besides being very expensive (for a liquid!), paint is also incredibly devilish. I guess this is why all the great painters (Monet, Picasso, Rothko, Mr. Pantone) devoted their so much time to the study of color.

The color we chose was actually quite blue once it went up on the wall. I might have been tempted to believe that the paint store actually mixed the wrong color, except for this illustration of how very different a swatch can look in different contexts:

So yes, the Sherwin Williams color, “Front Porch” is actually a very blue color, at least when painted on the inside walls of our little practice house. It’s not a bad color, just not the color we expected. Perhaps this is the universe’s way of trying to get me to lighten up.

Once the painting was done, we laid the flooring. Despite our initial reservations, we installed a floating Pergo floor. We wanted something that would be easy to clean, and, above all, cheap (this is a practice house, after all). I am no fan of Pergo– it is essentially a highly industrialized product that uses all the wonders of modern manufacturing to make plastic look like wood. This is not necessarily the most politically correct product to use in a family (Luke’s) that has spent years harvesting, transporting, cutting, finishing, and other-wise transforming (by hand) all manner of woods into useful objects & building materials. But. Sometimes, in the long game of life, pragmatism must win out over romanticism. Pergo isn’t very romantic, but it is practical and quick (and made in Germany, which makes Luke happy despite the carbon implications), and in this case, pretty inexpensive. Actually, obscenely inexpensive on a relative scale. We found this stuff at Home Despot for about 60 cents per square foot, because they were discontinuing it. And it actually seemed to be of higher quality than the newer stuff that is in the range of $3-6 per square foot. So we bought it, even though we had to go to about 3 stores to find enough of it to do the entire floor (sorry, carbon footprint). It turns out that we were too cheap to pay 25 cents per square foot for the silly foam underlayment that Home Despot tries to get you to put under your plastic floor. It’s the same thin sheet foam that is used as a packing material for shipping fragile things, and it is supposed to protect the floor from squeaking–or something. It is probably intended mostly to protect the consumer from walking out of Home Despot without maxing out a credit card or two. We did use old-fashioned tar paper under our plastic Pergo floor, to prevent it squeaking against the sub-floor.

Finally, a private message to the person who took all the cut-offs from their Pergo-laying project and packed them back into a box and returned the box to a Home Depot store in Albuquerque: you suck.

Your regularly scheduled post about the evolution of our “practice house” is being superceded tonight by a news flash: the critters are everywhere, and whenever you least expect it, the natural world is prone to pop into your day and remind you that humans are not the only critters out there, and we’re all just trying to figure out how to get by.

But before I get started on my story, I have a Rorschach test for you. What does the image below– a random assortment of ink spots– remind you of?

This week, I received an email (via my father) from my uncle, who lives in Stamford, Connecticut. It seems that he was going about his business, doing some work in his basement, when he got a phone call. The person at the other end of the phone line asked him if he lived on Rock Rimmon Road, and whether he’d seen a 200-pound chimpanzee running around. It turns out that my uncle has primates for neighbors, and that a chimpanzee that lived in the house next door, had a very bad day and brutally mauled a woman before being shot by the police. The incident turned into a bit of a major human-interest story, and hit all the major news outlets, including the BBC. The story got even more convoluted when the New York Post ran a cartoon depicting said chimpanzee, which many people interpreted to be a racist slur directed toward Obama. So, there you go: you’re innocently minding your own business, trying to get your overdue projects done (my uncle is an architect, therefore overdue projects are ever-present), and suddenly you’re interrupted by the animal kingdom taking over your neighborhood… and the international news… and the national political commentary.

This afternoon, I was laying the finish floor in our mini-home in the back yard with my father-in-law, while Luke worked on some wiring issues. He had stepped outside momentarily, and when he returned, he announced, “there’s something in our chimney.” He had apparently wandered into the “big house,” and heard some scratching noises emanating from the chimney of our wood stove. We assumed that it was probably a bird that had gotten trapped in the chimney– not such an uncommon occurrence. I went back to working, and Luke continued to wander around the property, involved in some project. After a while, he came back inside and said, “it’s a squirrel. I saw it inside the wood stove.” At which point, I became interested enough to forget about my Pergo-laying project, and go investigate. It turns out that, at some point, a squirrel was frolicking on the ridge of our roof– probably running along our power line, jumping into our spruce tree, and then taking a jaunt along the ridge. He evidently climbed a couple of feet higher than the ridge, onto the brick chimney, and from there another foot to the top of the stove pipe sticking out of the chimney. But the top of the stove pipe offers no play surface for squirrels– only a 25 foot drop straight down into a darkened squirrel hell. From there, it was a 90 degree turn and an 8 foot slide down into the wood stove’s upper flue chamber. From there, he could likely peer out the glass doors on the front of the wood stove, but the amusement park ride was pretty much over. He found that he could scramble his way back up the last 8 foot section of slanted pipe, but the 25 foot vertical drop was beyond the scrambling powers of even the most motivated squirrel (though he did manage to make his way several feet straight up, and hold on by his little squirrel-fingernail for a few minutes.)

Here is Luke, un-fastening the stove pipe, in order to deliver Mr. Sooty (as I like to call him) from his creosote chamber.

You can see that he’s armed with his DeWalt flashlight, and a stick, both of which he is preparing to point at our sooty intruder. At the moment that this picture was taken, the squirrel was trapped just inside the horizontal pipe that you can see sticking out of the top of the brick chimney. This is what a truly pissed off squirrel looks like:

It may be difficult to tell from the photo, but this is supposed to be a brown squirrel. But his trip through our chimney has rendered him rather blackened and he seemed to be doing a lot of wheezing. We tried to coax him into a bucket, but our attempts were unsuccessful, and he eventually ended up flying out of the chimney pipe and falling 8 feet to the floor below, creating a lovely Rorschach test pattern on our concrete floor. From there, it was pretty much the standard scene you might imagine when you’ve got a soot-covered, half-crazed animal running all over your cluttered job site, being chased by a girl with a 5-gallon bucket and an unnatural fear of rabies.

Eventually Mr. Sooty found his way to the opened door, and darted under the front porch, where he will hopefully recover some of his dignity and think twice before hopping onto any more chimneys.

This is a continuation of my previous post, in which I explain how we’ve spent all our “free” time this winter turning a metaphorical rusty old Ford into a Lexus. We seem to have accomplished this by (metaphorically), jacking up the key, and rebuilding everything around it.

Below, is a picture that sort of shows what the place looked like before we started working on it.  Except that the space wasn’t actually as light-filled as it appears in this picture. Here, natural light is streaming into the space because we’ve removed part of the wall on the other side of the room to add a new window.It is difficult to tell from this picture, but the floor consisted of the world’s lumpiest concrete, painted grey.  When the former owners poured the floor, they clearly had no idea how to even screed a concrete slab, so they just made a half-hearted attempt to smooth it in a few places, and then left it to harden into a horrible mess.  In the interest of expediency, we considered just leaving the concrete floor as it was, and living with its gross-ness. However, as is usually the case with our building projects, “expediency” was quickly thrown out the window in favor of trying to make the place nice.

At some point, I was sort of annoyed at myself for not being a more skilled/dedicated photographer and taking picture that accurately illustrated the lumpiness of this floor before we covered it up, so that I could share it with all 6 of my  blog readers. But then I realized that maybe you didn’t need to get the full picture. I mean, I wouldn’t take a picture of my vomit and post that on my blog, would I? Okay, so I did share some pictures of Fluffy with you, but I have to draw the line in the sand somewhere. So– no close-up pictures of the concrete horror: you’ll have to use your imagination.

We spent a long time discussing how best to cover up the lumpy concrete floor. We flirted with the idea of  pouring a new concrete topping over the slab, but eventually decided that the best way to deal with it would be to frame a new floor over the concrete one.We used up a bunch of reclaimed 2×4s that were clogging up our yard, found the highest lump on the floor (thanks to our trusty rotary laser), screwed ledgers to the existing studs, and installed framing in between.  Unfortunately, the highest lump was higher than we’d really anticipated, which meant that we raised the floor level more than planned– effectively lowering the window heights enough to make me discontented. But I was held back from renovating them AGAIN by various family members trying to speak with a voice of reason.  

As an aside, before we could frame the new floor, we had to remove all the junk from the building.  Generally, this meant cramming more stuff into the garage, but one immovable object was not so easy to deal with. A year or so ago, we acquired a workbench that I like to think of as “the revenge workbench.” You see, I have a sister who owns a piano and also has a propensity for moving every 6 months or so. Since I have married a man who has a genetic predisposition that enables him to move very heavy objects without complaint, her moving seems to have increased in frequency, and we have moved the piano many times. I figured that if we acquired a piece of furniture that is just as heavy as her piano, she would be under obligation to help move it at our convenience, and would therefore be intimidated into moving less often herself.  So we acquired a beautiful handmade workbench that is 8′9″ long and made up of cast iron legs and a 4.5 inch thick solid maple table top. However, when it came time to remove the workbench from the building in order to frame the new floor, all my plans for revenge back-fired, as she was not available to help move our incredibly heavy piece of furniture (having–ironically– recently moved away). So we took the legs off and Jim rigged up a shelf to hang the table top off the wall. Below is the workbench top, suspended above the floor. (It is also visible in the background of the previous image.)

After we framed the new floor, we installed shims between the new framing and the lumpy concrete every 2 feet or so. This was a nightmare of tedium, quite frankly, and even drove me to distraction.  But it made the new floor very solid. (The shims can be seen on the right side of the picture below.)

After framing the floor, we insulated it using rigid foam left over from our large house project. Then we began installing a subfloor, which consisted of the tongue-and groove (T&G) boards that had previously served as roof sheathing on the kitchen we tore down, and subsequently served to choke our yard with construction clutter. Although it took longer to install T&G boards than it would have taken to install sheet goods, it worked well in this non-square building, and also helped to shrink the massive pile of boards in our yard.

Above, Luke installs subfloor.

The half-completed floor project. 

After the new subfloor floor was installed, we moved on to the walls, and the task of installing new doors… but I’ve run out of time, and will have to finish the tale of building our “practice house” at the next available opportunity. Thanks for reading!

We’re almost done with the “practice house,” as Luke has dubbed it. Basically, we’re building a miniature house in which we can pretend to be real homeowners, sans the Barbies.

At some point last summer, we realized that the big house project was not going to be finished within a reasonable amount of time. And we needed a place to live that wouldn’t involve squatting in our friend Kent’s house. In the back yard of our property is the world’s most crooked building. When we bought the place, it had broken windows and was filled with miscellaneous stuff that had previously belonged to a elderly lady with the same name as my grandmother. We named the building “the shed,” added our own pile of crap to the mix, and focused on renovating the actual house.

The shed really wasn’t worth considering as more than a place to keep the rain off a pile of junk. Until the sense of desperation set in. There comes a point in every woman’s life when she has to lower her standards and jump into action. This can happen at 4 a.m., when the paper is due in 4 hours, you and you realize that you can’t do research ANY MORE, but must start writing QUICKLY. You buy the Ford instead of the Lexus. Plenty of ill-conceived marriages have been entered into, due to this “desperation” phenomenon. Women end up settling for the chain-smoking, football addicted lout. Men end up settling for the nagging, shop-aholics. Neither party knows what to expect, but they figure, “what the hell?”

In our case, we settled for a twisted little building in the backyard. We believed that “things would work out.” We opened our hearts and our wallets to the crappy little shed, and we got to work. We were delusional. If we had known how long and twisted the road would be, we might not have started down it. We thought it would be a quick and simple job. The building already had basic wiring and plumbing. It had walls and a roof. All we’d need to do was replace the crappy masonite on the walls with some drywall, add a few fixtures and outlets, and start moving in, right?

Oh, the tangled web we weave. Here’s the real story:

First off, the windows were broken and very crappy. We had the old windows removed from the eviscerated kitchen, so we thought we’d throw those in. Simple. We began by removing half a wall…

We frame in the new windows. But they are very short windows, and we’ve planned to change the height of the floor, so determining the “correct” location of the windows turns out to be very difficult. We reframe and change the window height 3 times. Or was it four? I can’t remember. The insanity of this doesn’t escape me, but somehow I still feel like the windows aren’t located at the right height. (Below, Luke is raising the window sill. The day after he lowered it.)

To be continued. Soon.

There is drywall dust in my eyebrows. And in that funny fold that makes up my upper ear flap. There’s drywall dust under my cuticles and stuck in the dry wrinkles of my elbows. Let’s face it, I look like a powdered donut. I neglected to take any pictures because I forgot my camera… plus I dislike pictures of myself, even in more flattering circumstances that don’t involve my entire body being covered with white dust.

I spent the day sanding drywall. I had intended to just quickly knock off the worst of the ridges before we moved on to priming the walls of our little apartment. But things got a little out of control. Unfortunately, I have a nearly infinite ability to obsess over repetitive tasks. You can call this a love of meditative tasks, or you can call it latent Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. I prefer to think of it as a love of meditative tasks, because if my health insurance company knew about my tendencies, I’d be likely to lose my coverage. I also like to knit, and have discovered recently that taping & mudding drywall is a task fairly well suited to my obsessive / meditative personality, along with weeding gardens.

The unfortunate part of spending the day sanding drywall (besides the powdered donut thing) is that it may take weeks for me to recover all the range of motion in my right arm. I’ve recently discovered muscles that I didn’t even know I owned, because they are not-s0-politely requesting that I never sand drywall again.

I really should never have started down the path of heavily sanding the drywall. The drywall looked fine even before I spent 5 obsessive hours exercising my shoulder muscles. Our friend Curt did the drywall texture, and he did a really nice job– so the obsessive sanding was really overkill. But. But I have many many fears about drywall. I have too many years of architectural education, too many friends who are architects, and have had too many nightmares about suburban drywall splatter patterns. I associate poorly-finished drywall with cheap developer houses and dentists’ offices. And I would really prefer not to live in either one of those places.

Thinking about drywall may seem like the biggest waste of time in the world– akin to contemplating one’s navel — but because of our little drywall project, I find myself studying the wide world of drywall finishes everywhere I go. The bathroom in the taco place has a chintzy-looking splatter pattern (designed to cover all sins of poor construction and be finished in less than 30 seconds per square foot). The drywall in the insurance agent’s office has heavily textured mud with intentional trowel marks (designed to cover all sins of poor construction and accept a mottled paint pattern in order to look faux-ritzy). The drywall in my brother-in-law’s rented house has an extremely light splatter pattern (designed to provide a fairly smooth look without actually requiring much sanding, but in actuality providing a finish that doesn’t hide all the seams and other flaws of a quickie drywall job).

Our drywall? Pretty smooth, hopefully pretty clean & contemporary-looking. Hopefully it will be worth the effort, and hopefully it won’t result in any permanent nerve damage to my aching arm.

Tomorrow, we paint.

P.S. sorry for the lack of picture of the progress currently being made @ home is a process. I know that I’ve made promises.. and I’ve failed to deliver. This seems to be the way my life is going these days. But I promise this: the before and after comparison will be fabulous!

So, I’ve been a bad blogger recently. I really enjoy blogging, but I’m not always the best at multi-tasking, and doing the things I want to do despite all the busynesses of life. But I’m working on that.

We’re almost finished with the little apartment we’ve been fixing up in the back yard.  Which means that soon we’ll be able to stop commuting 1/2 hour each way to work on the house.  I promise to post some pictures this weekend.  For the moment, we’re off to work on drywall … we’re leaving as soon as I manage to drag Luke away from his little lathe project in which he is building a tool to fix the timing on his latest acquisition, a Volkswagen. See? We have a lot of catching up to do…. I’ll be back soon!

Winter is upon us.  You know it’s official and unavoidable when you realize that you haven’t felt your feet for 2 hours, or when your husband spends the entire day trying to get a few vehicles started with an alarming array of battery chargers, block heaters, trips to the auto parts store, and unabashed swearing.  You know you’re in trouble when the battery in your car freezes, when your bedroom reaches 45 degrees (not kidding), and you discover that your snow shovel has frozen itself to the tundra.

Winter is lovely for those who can sit in their houses and dream of Colorado mountains and skiing, while enjoying an afternoon in front of the fire with a pot of hot chocolate. But the romance is pretty much lost on us, because we live in a very cold house (our “rental”), and we’re sentenced to spend our weekends trying to make a livable place at the house in Monte Vista.  When a windy day guarantees that we’ll get to spend hours excavating our cars from underneath snow drifts, there is just nothing to recommend the endless season that comes between autumn’s siren song and the flirtations of spring.

Luke’s Mercedes and our Land Rover (some may remember it from our nuptials), buried for the duration.**

Our embarrassingly large collection of semi-antique vehicles, being dwarfed by a pile of snow.**

Our cold “rental” house– the house where we actually live (the one with the 45 degree bedroom), until we can get our little project livable.

**Those of you who know us personally, and follow our ever-evolving car collection, may notice that this particular iteration of the collection is actually a bit outdated. That’s because these pictures are from last year.  The featured snow drifts remind us of all the fun we get to look forward to in the coming months. It was 15 below zero last night.  It was 10 degrees below zero at high noon.  It’s nice to know we’ve only experienced the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

I recently wrote a post about Luke & I dealing with the depression resulting from our un-ending house-building project. Our depression, combined with the world’s longest case of the flu, is the reason that I haven’t posted anything to blog recently. Except for the weekends when we were coughing up green phlegm (and one mini-vacation weekend that we spent soaking in the Mt. Princeton hot springs), we’ve still managed to keep working on the neverending project. Because, well– we don’t have a lot of choice, quite frankly, if we ever want to have a place to live. We do enjoy working on the house (usually)– we just don’t enjoy the constant pressure to keep working, keep spending money we don’t have, and never have any time to relax. So here, for your voyeuristic pleasure, is a medley of pictures of our recent progress.

We worked on several fronts simultaneously, so these are not necessarily in chronological order.

This is Luke’s brother, Olin. He’s the one wearing a respirator. You can tell it is Olin because it says so on the sleeve of his Leadville 100-mile bike race sweatshirt. (“I rode the world’s most hellish 100-mile mountain bike race, and all I got was this lousy sweatshirt?”) He is holding a contraption that we invented in the depths of our garage, using the following everyday items:

1.) My pre-marital angle grinder. (By pre-marital, I mean that it was a tool I owned before meeting Luke, which therefore must be handled with strict adherence to the Mezoff rules of proper tool care.)

2.) A $2.99 diamond blade purchased on Ebay, (normally $20+ at Home Depot), which has already paid for itself many times over with various masonry-cutting projects. Ebay is a lifesaver, especially for cheapskates like us. And apparently, having a diamond blade lying around isn’t such a bad thing either.

3.) A piece of 3″ PVC pipe, being used as a handle extension for the angle grinder.

4.) A couple of pieces of lath, that once lived in the walls of our house, but which now are serving as a wedge to hold the PVC pipe onto the angle grinder. (The next stop for these pieces of wood will be a fiery demise in our wood stove.)

For the record, it was Olin’s idea to put the diamond blade on the angle grinder. This was a brilliant idea– however, since I come from the safety-nerd side of the family, I suggested that we might not want anyone to end up with the nickname of “Stumpy,” so I required the addition of the long PVC pipe handle so that nobody’s extremities had to come withing striking distance of a blade that cuts through concrete.

That’s Kim standing next to Olin. She’s playing the Vanna White role in this particular escapade, turning the device on & off by unplugging it from the extension cord. Here’s what this contraption can do for you:

He’s standing in the bottom of a hole and making a clean cut on the end of a clay sewer pipe, finally severing our little house from the nightmare of clogging & tree roots that must have driven the previous owners absolutely crazy. (So crazy that they lost their heads and forgot to mention it when we were buying the place.)

This is our frost-free yard hydrant before we buried its lower half. Ignore the fact that it looks very crooked in this photo. We fixed that. It may be hard to tell in this photo, but that hole is about 5 feet deep. It is hard to describe in words how nice it is to have a hose connection in the yard. When you’ve got a house that is basically a shell, and nothing works, the smallest things can make one very happy. Like running water.

Here is the new hydrant, with the the sewer line in the process of being bedded. The impetus for this whole project was that we needed to have an electrical line from the alley to the house– which happened to be the same path as the sewer line. We’re lucky for the overlap, because we would have been in DEEP trouble if we hadn’t replaced the sewer line. (as you can see in the latter part of this previous post.)

Here’s some other miscellaneous stuff in the little sideline trench. The lines with the black insulation around them are heat dump lines for a future hot tub (or other heat dump medium). We plan to have 8 solar hot water collectors on the roof, and in the summer, we’ll have to do something with all that excess heat, because it won’t be needed for space heating. Also in this trench: conduit for control work at the heat dump, and the electrical line, which is running through the old sewer line, and maybe a few extra conduits that Luke threw in there when I wasn’t looking. (Because you wouldn’t want to be stuck needing to run a wire somewhere and have NO conduit through which to run it. Heaven forbid we should fail to run an empty conduit to every conceivable point on the property. Somehow I feel that this penchant for running conduit is going to someday turn into an excuse to buy more electronic devices.)

The red tape says “caution buried electrical line” and is intended to float above the electric line, so that if anyone is every foolish enough to dig up this yard again, they’ll have fair warning before being shocked.

Luke drills a hole into the basement to welcome the new sewer line into our house. The new sewer entrance into the basement will work much better in terms of laying out all the various bits of plumbing. We used 4″ sewer pipe, instead of 3″ — because we aren’t very good at doing anything half-assed, and because we already had some of the 4″ sewer pipe in our stockpile of construction clutter. But we got a lot of flack for that from various visitors because 3″ is considered adequate.

Luke tries to get the concrete plug out of the drill bit, which was graciously lent to us by our friend Marcos.

Finishing the trenching project also involved removing yet more old foundations. We ripped up the remaining concrete, and loaded it up into a trailer and took it away to an earthmoving place that will grind it up into gravel. I have no idea whether the energy needed to grind the stuff up negates the recycling effort, but we were grateful that we didn’t just have to take it to the dump.

I can’t even tell you how excited we were to see this crap leaving our yard, after tripping over the piles of debris for months on end. “Ecstatic” doesn’t even begin to describe it.

Good riddance to bad rubbish. This is the very last vestige of our nasty moldy plastic greenhouse– the lumpy foundations of which will never again populate our yard. The end result of all this dirt-moving and labor is this:

I know that this looks like the most boring picture in the world, but for us it is a beautiful sight to see a flat, relatively empty yard. We’re continuously marveling at how big our yard actually is because up until now, it has always been clogged with crap. When we bought the place, the yard was full of decrepit shed-like structures containing all manner of junk and decomposing plastic. Through the course of the project, these structures were replaced with piles of dirt and demolition debris. Eventually those piles were replaced with a 6′ deep trench running the length of the yard, and all the associated piles of dirt & rubble. Now FINALLY (just in time for snow) our yard is actually starting to feel empty. It makes us feel ready for winter, and for the frozen ground that will soon make digging impossible.

We also recently poured the second half of our concrete floor. As with second children, we didn’t take as many pictures during Round Two. And, as with baby pictures, I realize that it can get a little repetitive to everyone except the proud parents. But here you go (feel free to scroll quickly– I’ll never know the difference):

Everyone working to get the concrete laid down, and screeded.

Here’s a shot of the concrete conveyor delivering its goods through the front door.

Concrete tools. The floor turned out pretty well. We don’t know yet how we’re going to finish it, or if we’ll color it with an acid wash. Speedy aesthetic decisions aren’t exactly our forte.

We also got the last remnants of sheathing installed on the new kitchen (thanks to Jim), and we got plastic on the windows (also thanks to Jim and Ruth). This particular job helped make the kitchen much more tolerable now that it is getting cold. It also involved evicting a certain family of birds that believed our tall kitchen made a nice aviary. We’re glad to have the kitchen feel closed in. Next stop: real windows!

We bought a used stainless steel solar storage tank, and 7 hot water collectors. We weren’t really planning to buy this stuff right away, but the opportunity for this used equipment came along, so we bought it. (Something to fill up our now-empty yard until we have time to install them.) Getting this tank into our basement is guaranteed to be a difficult and annoying job.

Last but not least, Luke had a birthday. The unfortunate reality of our lives is that birthdays, when they fall on weekends, must be celebrated inside a cold, unfinished shell of a house, after a day of construction work. Here’s hoping that on Luke’s 33rd, we’ll be able to have a party inside a livable, warm house.

There you have it folks: the things we’ve managed to accomplish (with the help of friends & family) during the last couple of months while sick and depressed and still trying to keep our business projects from totally disintegrating. Sometimes it makes me overwhelmed just to think about it. But perhaps if we could get our mojo back, we could really start knocking down the projects!

P.S. I almost forgot to share this picture:

A visitor to our job site told us about a nearby quarry, where the foundation stones from our house probably originated. One Sunday afternoon when we were too discouraged to do another thing on the house, we took a drive to check it out. The spot is perhaps 10-15 miles away from the house in Monte Vista. By quarry standards, this is probably quite small, but still pretty impressive. Note the small trees in the bottom. It seems pretty likely that the stones that make up our “foundation” are from this quarry, though they were not very well dressed, so maybe they were the leftover rejects from the quarry. Seems to be a likely scenario for this house.

Happy Thanksgiving! May you be warm & well-fed in your homes with intact windows and insulation and other such luxuries. As for us, we’ll be visiting our siblings (who have all those luxuries), and our grandparents, who are in the process of moving into an assisted living-type home. We’re grateful that they’ve found a good place to live, even though the change has been painful, and it will be much harder for us to visit them since they’ll be on the other side of the country. “Home” is always a process.

Dear Readers:

I’ve been remiss in my blogging duties and therefore have most likely squandered all of your goodwill & readership loyalty. I know that there are a small number of human beings out there (some of whom aren’t even related to me) who have enjoyed this blog and have checked it regularly. But recently I’ve failed to keep my end of the bargain, and have not posted anything new. For this, I can only apologize (and suggest that you might want to sign up for email delivery of my blog posts so that you don’t have to check the website to find out whether I’ve written anything recently.)

And now (drumroll please), my complete lack of blogging is brought to you by:

The Blues.

If you’ve ever built or renovated a house, you may understand many of the ingredients that make up the renovator’s blues, and make the project (and life in general) feel rather overwhelming. In our case, we’ve got our own special family recipe for cooking up a big helping of The Blues:

Begin with an unusually substandard piece of real estate. Make sure house has no actual virtues to recommend it (like functional plumbing or wiring).

Next, remove all substandard or ugly portions of the real estate, using a very sharp knife. Do not be afraid to cut away as many layers as necessary, even if it means reducing the house to a shell.

Then, take the unreasonably large gut renovation, and season with an unrealistically small amount of cash. Boil the project for a year or two over medium heat in a small, economically depressed town, and flavor with a hereditary dislike of debt that necessarily keeps working capital to an impossibly low figure. (Do not lower expectations of future home to reflect financial reality.)

At the same time, mix together the following ingredients in a separate bowl:

1) A genetic disposition (brought in from both sides of the marital family tree) that tends toward never ever hiring help, except in the most extreme circumstances (like open heart surgery).

2) A brand of perfectionism that results in a laborious decision making process, and an overwhelming desire to have the project built to our aesthetic & craftsmanship specifications.

3) A long suppressed desire to live in a house that reflects our aesthetic rather than that of various family members, landlords, roommates, and second-hand sausage vans.***

Allow the above three ingredients to marinate together for, say 30 + years (or to taste), so that their flavors are inextricably melded. Then pour the marinade over the project, making sure to soak thoroughly.

Next, add the requirement that the project be as energy efficient & green as humanly possible. Add plans for a solar electric system & a solar heating system into the pot. Thoroughly soak them in the marinade listed above. Do not, under any circumstances, reduce the scope of the project. If possible, expand the scope of the project to include a future solar-heated hot tub, handmade cabinetry, and structural renovations to the garage.

Carefully document the entire project, and require self to write about it in self-effacing blog. Garnish with a healthy dose of sarcasm.

Next, prepare the following side dishes:

Start with matching cases of the flu resulting in the production of copious amounts of both green phlegm and misery. Add this to a couple of marginal business ventures, and a general sense of discouragement about the direction of our lives (particularly our careers). Mix in a dash of the following: 4 -5 rapidly ailing grandparents, winter coming on like a freight train, and an international economic crisis that makes our already-shaky household income look extra scary. Add water & stir over medium to high heat.

Separately, combine a ticking biological clock with self-employment and citizenship in a country with few healthcare choices (none of them good for people like us), and add a handful of doubts about whether we really want to live in the town where we’re building this house.

Recipe serves two. (Can be stretched to encompass the lives of various hapless relatives.)

_____

The result? A bit of a melt down (sort of like an economy we all know), a big pot of
The Blues, and, well…. a few weeks in which I didn’t do much blogging.

You’ll have to forgive me.

(*** Regarding sausage vans: that’s another story. If you’re interested in reading it, you’ll have to stay tuned. I’ll get around to writing it as soon as I’m done with this funk.)

The “big dig” is moving along. Last weekend we got all the digging finished, and the fresh water line that goes out to a hydrant in the yard has been laid. In all, we had about 100 lineal feet of trench to dig between the house and the alley, some in the most difficult places possible. The spot between the shed & the fence was about 5 feet wide, and much of the digging involved a true feat of choreography for the bobcat operator. There was nowhere to put the dirt, we were trying to avoid killing all our precious vegetation (the only decent legacy left to us by the previous owners), and the dirt was so sandy and loose that we had to keep shoring the trench in many places to keep it from subsiding. We dug the trench 5+ feet deep for the fresh water line to the hydrant (hopefully that will be deep enough to keep it from freezing because we couldn’t have gotten it any deeper!). Now we’re filling the trench back up to an appropriate level for the sewer line. We have little choice about the level of the sewer line because it has to match the existing tie-in to the city sewer. Many of the sewer lines in Monte Vista froze last winter, because many portions of the sewer aren’t very deep, and we had an extremely cold winter. Probably they didn’t have very good digging equipment when they installed it originally, and this isn’t exactly the sort of place with lots of extra dollars lying to around to upgrade infrastructure. Our sewer didn’t freeze last winter mainly because it didn’t work, due to extreme clogging by tree roots. Anyway, we’re installing a 4″ line, even though a 3″ line is allowable, and hopefully the larger pipe will help with the freezing issue. It will probably take us much of this upcoming weekend to get the sewer line properly located & bedded. We’re going to have precious little “fall” in the line, since we’ve got 100 feet to get from the house to the alley. A 4″ line can tolerate a smaller slope, so that’s another reason to pony up for the larger (and more expensive) pipe.

Note: the explanations for the photos are below each picture.

We had to remove this poor cherry tree in order to dig our trench. We cut off the dead stump, and replanted the living part of the tree in another corner of the yard, along with some other small cherry trees that were in the path of destruction. It remains to be seen whether they survive. The soil is so loose that we couldn’t keep any dirt around the roots when we dug these things up. Hopefully by having them out of the ground only a few minutes, and keeping everything really wet, the poor buggers will have a chance.

The cherry tree in a wheelbarrow, ready for re-planting in another part of the yard.

Here, Luke is trying to break the foundation of the old greenhouse by putting a bottle jack under the foundation in the center. Basically, the foundation consisted of a big, sloppy hunk of concrete. Since the builders of the moldy fiberglass greenhouse (now resting peacefully in the landfill) didn’t use any rebar in their concrete, we were able to break it into large chunks fairly easily, thanks to someone’s brilliant idea to utilize our collection of bottle jacks.

The foundation being dragged away by the bobcat. All the gravel you see was apparently part of an ill-conceived thermal mass project beneath the moldy greenhouse. Maybe it worked, maybe it didn’t. Since it wasn’t insulated from the cold ground, it probably wasn’t all that effective. The moldy fiberglass greenhouse is a real lesson in why one should endeavor to build things correctly, and using high-quality materials. The greenhouse had been the latest addition to the property but was completely un-salvageable (as much as we would have liked to own a greenhouse.) The fiberglass had never been a nice material, and after years of exposure to UV, it was falling apart and delivering its special toxins into our soil. The whole thing was so poorly built that its inevitable destiny was an early demise. (For a little more on the greenhouse, click here.)

In the process of digging the trench and removing the greenhouse foundations, our yard has become an obstacle course of rubble, dirt, tree roots, and a really big trench. The squirrels seemed quite pleased that their world has suddenly become even more 3-dimensional. And we’re just damn thankful that we have the bobcat to use, because we never could have maneuvered into all those tight spots without a skid-steer style machine.

Luke drills a hole in the basement wall for the freshwater line that will run out to the yard hydrant. Notice the old sewer line coming into the basement in the upper left hand side of the photo. We’re gonna replace that.

Luke in a trench, wearing his Thai Coca-Cola shirt. I think he’s trying not to look too overwhelmed in this photo.

Luke and Olin driving the bobcat over some difficult terrain. The holes left by the recently-removed foundations made the driving a little dodgy, so Luke drove the machine, while Olin pulled them over the worst of the holes using the backhoe bucket.

I heard Luke let out a little yelp as he saw these things fall out of the backhoe bucket. Fortunately, our kitty crypt didn’t turn any more sinister— as there was no body associated with these dentures. However, since these things look like they must have been incredibly uncomfortable, it does suggest to me that the former occupants of this house may have chosen to avoid crunchy & solid foods. This was probably a good thing, considering that their sewer line looked like this:

Yes, folks, that is the old clay pipe with an un-moveable root mass sticking out of it. Every single joint in the pipe was filled with a root mass. I pulled as hard as I could on this one, and it wouldn’t budge. Even if you could have been roto-rootered out the 100 foot line, the pipe never would have stayed clear for very long. But drilling out the roots would have been impossible because there were no clean-outs. So really, we’ve been paying a sewer bill to Monte Vista for the last year, but they’ve probably never gotten a drop of our waste in their system. The sad thing is that all those nice little root-lets probably did a good job of cleaning up the waste in an environmentally friendly way. Now it will all get dumped into the sewer, where it will likely be treated with lots of nasty chemicals.

Our trench, snaking its way through the yard.

Our trench with the poor, unfinished kitchen addition in the background. Yes, we need to get back on that project, and finish closing it in. Get the windows in, the roofing on, and the siding installed. (I need to decide what the siding will be first.) Sigh. The list of projects is endless and ever-growing.

For those of you who may be interested, our concrete floor is still only half done. We’re waiting for Dick’s broken ribs to heal, and for his schedule to clear up. And we’re hoping that maybe he knows someone we can hire to help him out with the finishing when we do pour the second half of the floor. Since the weather here is known to get bloody cold, bloody early, we may also be babysitting the floor once it does get poured, to ensure that it doesn’t freeze before it cures.

Meanwhile we’re moving on with our house-renovating lives. This means we run around like crazy all week trying to get our work obligations taken care of, and then spend all weekend trying to make progress on the house while also trying to take care of the socializing that we want to do (or in some cases are obligated to do.) This, while simultaneously trying to prepare for the onslaught of the coming week. Last weekend we spent Saturday trying to visit with Luke’s brother, Olin, + his girlfriend, Kim, while also digging a big hole in the yard. (I’ll discuss the hole in a minute.)

Architects sometimes talk about the phenomenon known as “scope creep.” This term refers to the gradual upsizing of the scope of a project– often in a progression that seems so natural that you hardly realize it is happening. Scope creep occurs when a faucet starts dripping, and a homeowner decides that, instead of replacing a fifty cent washer, she should buy a nice new faucet, justifying the purchase because the old faucet is looking cruddy. Then the nice new faucet makes the sink look pretty lack-luster, and before you know it, an entire $50,000 kitchen remodel has been embarked upon. Architects and contractors are hired, the economy gets stimulated in ways that make George Bush very proud to be president, and the whole thing quickly gets out of control. Frankly, I think scope creep is what makes the world go around.

Our little renovation project is really the classic example of scope creep going out of control. The progression of our scope creep is exponential, not linear. The “big dig” that we are currently embarking upon is but one example. It started when we needed to move our electric meter in order to do our kitchen re-framing (a project that itself started out as a “remodel” and turned into a total demo-and-rebuild project.) After a meeting with the utility company’s representative, we decided that the best and cheapest way to relocate the meter would be to put it out on the alley, and bring it back to the house underground. And voilà! The “big dig” was born. Because if we’re going to dig a 15″ deep trench in the yard we might as well dig another foot deeper and replace the undoubtedly substandard sewer line. And since we’re digging a new sewer line, we might as well go a little deeper and put a hydrant in the yard to water the garden that we’ll never have because we’re doomed to spend the rest of our lives rebuilding this damn house. And while we’re throwing everything (except the kitchen sink) into the trench, we might as well add in a loop of heat lines in case we need a heat dump for our solar heating system. Oh, and why not add a gas line in case we ever want to have a heater in our someday shop-space? See how much we’ve stimulated the economy by digging a little hole in the yard? (Pipe ain’t cheap, folks.)

Anyway, we brought the Bobcat down from Kent’s house and started digging last Saturday. Like many boys-in-men’s-clothing, Luke’s brother (Olin) loves nothing more than to play around with heavy machinery, so we got a lot of digging done. We removed + transplanted a bunch of cherry trees that were in the path of destruction. We ripped out much of the foundation of the old greenhouse we had demolished a year ago, and found the existing sewer line. By breaking it with the backhoe bucket. As it turns out, scope creep is not necessarily the enemy of human-kind, because sometimes it causes you to do things that really need to be done. In this case, the sewer line was clay pipe with joints every 24″ or so. Every joint must have leaked, because each joint had a lovely little plug of roots that completely filled the diameter of the pipe.

Frankly, it’s a miracle that the toilets worked at all. Living in that old dump must have involved a very careful balancing act in order to keep oneself from perishing. No heat + no insulation must have meant the occupants had to live within a 3-foot radius of the wood stove during our 9 months of winter. Clogged sewer meant no more than 2 flushes per day, and pity the person who got food poisoning from the gallon-sized tubs of mayonnaise they seem to have kept around. All the plumbing leaked because they neglected to get the solder into the pipe joints, but instead they seem to have sprayed the solder around in the general vicinity of the joints. So using any water at all must have involved a bucket brigade out to the yard. (Which perhaps explains how the sewer worked–most of the wastewater was diverted into buckets before it ever reached the sewer line!) Oh, and have I mentioned the rotting floor joists and the dead cats moldering below the floor?

Somebody– please remind me what possessed us to buy this nightmare? Ah yes, it was cheap.. and provided everything we thought we wanted in a house… the opportunity to work ourselves into a state of exhaustion while depleting our pocketbooks, the chance to correct all the building-sins of others, the opportunity to blog sarcastically about all our woes. Plus, the roof line didn’t make me want to gag.

Well, with winter quickly approaching, and a year of work under our belts, it turns out that what we actually want most out of a house is simply to have a roof over our heads. So far, what we’ve got is a big hole in the yard, an overwhelming amount of work, and a place that we can’t live in.

(My apologies for the lack of pictures…. deadlines loom, and I’ll have to post them later!)

The concrete truck backed up to our house last Thursday.

This post is brought to you by a couple of broken ribs. Unfortunately. I’ve been trying to find time to write about our concrete pour last Thursday. But things have been really crazy, and I haven’t had a chance. This morning, we were supposed to be pouring the second half of the floor, but our concrete guy called last night at 9:00 p.m., just as we were finishing up all the preparations for the next pour, and said that he’d broken some ribs, and wouldn’t be able to pour. A bit of a disappointment, but probably not as disappointing as being stuck with broken ribs. So, because of the broken ribs, I have a little bit of time this morning to write a blog entry. That seems to be the only silver lining involved.

We don’t hire people to do very much for us. That’s just the way we are. Luke fixes our cars. (I pretend that I’d like to learn something about fixing cars, but after handing him a few wrenches, I get bored and wander back inside.) We made our own wedding rings, we’re building our own house, doing our own plumbing & electrical, along with nearly every other aspect of the building project. When the hard drive on the computer died, we used the internet to get instructions on how to do surgery on a laptop. We don’t make much money at this point, but we get by because we’re willing & able to do a lot of stuff for ourselves. And we’re willing to fix things & keep our old things running. (Thus, our 14 year-old car and our 25 year old truck. We’d love to replace them, but we can’t afford to pay cash, so we don’t.)

But I firmly believe that the secret to good craftsmanship & doing things WELL is knowing your own limits. And, for better or worse, I think that if something isn’t worth doing well, then it’s probably not worth doing. I pay someone to cut my hair because, really– I don’t have a clue. We have an accountant do our taxes because it is cheaper than the marriage counseling that would otherwise be necessary. And medical care really isn’t a do-it-yourself activity. We hired Curt to help us frame our kitchen, because it was a complicated framing job–plus we wanted it done well AND done during this decade. So, when it came time to pour a concrete floor in the old portion of the house, we looked around for an expert. We’ve poured a lot of concrete ourselves, but we’ve never made beautifully finished concrete. And we wanted BEAUTIFULLY finished concrete. The smoother the better.

So, we asked Dick to do it. He’s an old friend of Luke’s family, and he’s been in the concrete business for a long time. He’s done a lot of finished floors. He’s quitting the business, but he agreed to come & help us, provided that we acted as the crew. We had been planning to “hire someone properly.” When I say ” hire someone properly” I mean that we pay them with real money to come in and do what they do best, while we sit back with a nice beer while other people sweat about all the details. But Dick doesn’t have a crew anymore, and I guess we were lured by the idea of getting a professional cheaply, because we wouldn’t have to pay for the crew. We’ve never YET sat back & been pampered, so why start now? So there we were last Thursday, schlepping heavy wheelbarrows of concrete around the house, following Dick’s orders, and being happy that this long-awaited job was finally getting done.

Dick elected to pour the floor in two parts, to make sure that it wasn’t too big a job for a novice crew and only one guy who knows what he’s doing when it comes to the finishing. We will someday have a structural wall running down the middle of the house, so we’ll be able to hide the cold joint. This was definitely the right decision, because there’s no way that he could have finished the whole floor as beautifully as he did if he’d had to do the whole thing in one day. And, like I said, our main objective here was to have it SMOOTH and BEAUTIFUL. I guess this makes me a modernist, but I want my concrete to look like concrete. (Only smoother and more beautiful than your average concrete.) I don’t want to cut it up into little squares and try to make it look like tile. If I wanted tile, I’d install tile. If I wanted stone, I’d install stone. I want my materials to be honest about who (or what) they are.

Concrete is a funny substance… and a funny business to be in. On the one hand, it involves back-breaking labor, and lots of really dry alligator skin. And on the other hand, it takes real skill combined with lots of experience to do a good job with the highly-finished stuff. Concrete has become a really trendy substance, largely because of its versatility & longevity, and there are lots of boutique businesses out there, selling value-added concrete work. But watching Dick out there on his skates atop some really green concrete, troweling it smooth for the third time, I could really see why he’s chosen to get out of the concrete business. It’s damn hard work, and probably is often thankless work. Easy to screw up, and really, really hard to fix once it has cured. He did a nearly-flawless job, which is about the best we could have hoped for. Now we just have to hope that he’ll heal up from his fall, and we’ll be able to convince him to do a fabulous job on the second half.

Sorry I don’t have any good pictures of the floor. Dick had us block all the windows with plywood, so that we wouldn’t get any hot spots that would cause uneven curing. Since we’re pouring the floor long after the house was built, we’ve got nearly-ideal conditions for controlling the curing process. But it means that the curing is happening in a hushed and darkened room. Visitors who want to see our floor, can be ushered in as if to a hospital room, where the patient is recovering from a high fever.

Oh, and by the way, it’s concrete. Not cement. Sorry if I get a little huffy about that– it’s an architect thing. They train you to get all sensitive calling concrete “‘cement.” (They do this by ridiculing you, so that you’ll learn that you sound uneducated if you use the wrong term. I think I’m glad I’m done with architecture school.) Cement is an ingredient in concrete. The more technical term is “Portland cement,” and concrete generally consist of cement, an aggregate such as gravel plus sand, and water. Nowadays, they are adding fly ash to concrete as well. Fly ash is a waste product from coal-fired power plants that would otherwise end up in the landfill. But clever people in labs have figured out that if you add it to concrete, you can reduce the amount of cement needed. Since cement is a very energy-intensive product with a very high-carbon footprint, the use of fly ash lowers the negative environmental impact of the concrete. Fly ash also increases the strength of the concrete, and creates a concrete that shrinks less, creating a more durable concrete product. High volumes of fly ash cause the concrete to reach its engineered strength more slowly, so that has to be taken into consideration when structural concrete is being used in conjunction with tight construction schedules. (Did I get that right, Carl?) After my comment that our local Redi-mix plant would probably laugh at me if I asked about fly ash, it turns out that they add it to all their concrete, unless you ask for yours sans-fly ash. So there you have it– maybe the world isn’t doomed after all, if they’re adding fly ash standard in provincial Center, Colorado.

In case you’re wondering, I am willing to call it a “cement mixer,” because the job of that little machine is to mix cement into the other ingredients in order to make concrete. But cement is cement, and concrete is cement plus some other stuff. Calling concrete “cement” is like saying “flour” when you’re really referring to bread.

The concrete conveyor being poked through the window. With an inch to spare.

Luke ready for the pour to begin.

Long view of the floor we're about to pour.

Dick on skates, finishing the floor.

Saw cutting our new concrete floor.

I changed the “theme” of the blog today. Hope you don’t mind. I did it because my father is an ophthalmologist who always used to harp on me to stop reading in the dark– and I thought that the text of the previous theme was excruciatingly hard to read. This free blog software has all sorts of “themes” from which to choose, many of them far too cheesy to be taken seriously, unless you’re a teenage girl blogging about makeup. My architectural training tells me that I shouldn’t use “stock” designs of anything, and that type should be small, elegant, and verging on cryptic, so that only the other folks who are in-the-know (e.g. other architects) will get it. Still, I struggle with my professional identity, particularly because we live in the boonies, so I try not to ignore my professional training entirely.

Frankly, I wish I didn’t have to deal with pesky things like graphics & photos. I’m not inherently a photographer or a typographer, but I appreciate good graphics, and I wish they would just magically make themselves beautiful. If the day comes when more than five-people-plus-my-mom read this thing, then I’ll hire someone to make my “look” graphically beautiful and not off-the-shelf. I have very little discretionary time (I’m building a house & business, remember?), so for the moment I’ll have to stick with off-the-shelf.

Since I have limited time & energy, I have to learn to develop boundaries– including boundaries around my inherently perfectionistic nature that tells me I should be staying up all night, making my blog very well designed. Instead, I’ll focus on the writing. The thing that makes this blog fun for me is getting the opportunity to write a few things, and it seems that all my life I’ve been looking for opportunities that will force me to do more writing. To the horror of my friends, I chose to do a written thesis (rather than a “design thesis”) when I was in grad school merely because I knew it afford me lots of hours to spend writing. I know that makes me a bad designer– it brands me uncommitted to the cause, and not one of the elite. Whatever.

I hope the new off-the-shelf graphics make it a little easier to actually read the blog. Trust me, nobody is stopping by Home is a Process for the pictures of dead cats. Anyway, I hope that you six readers enjoy the blog. I’m having fun writing it.

Warning: Graphic kitty-content below. If your children are prone to nightmares, do not bring them over to our house. Or let them read this post.

My husband has left me. Fortunately, it is only a temporary condition, as he’s spending the week in Paonia at a solar training class. This means that I’ve got nobody to pamper me, humor me, entertain me. I had figured that the silver lining in this lonely week would be that I’d get to spend lots of uninterrupted time blogging. Ha! It’s a lovely fantasy. The reality is that instead of blogging, I’ve been trying to keep things from falling apart around here. Bidding, billing, fixing a flat tire (actually paying a guy named Anthony-who-should-be-named-Jim to fix a flat), dealing with shipping debacles, trying to keep a frustratingly diverse set of customers happy. Also trying to deal with my procrastination tendencies.

Things have been moving along with the house. I swear I am going to provide some updates on all that. But first: cats. Those of you who have actually read this epistle from the beginning may remember my earlier reference to our little kitty crypt under the floor. When we were ripping out the rotten flooring in the living room, we found our friend, Fluffy, who had been mummified along with several of her offspring underneath the living room floor. Meet Fluffy:

We’ve kept her as our macabre mascot. (The perfect Halloween prop!) She’s sort of a symbol of what this house was when we bought it. The house used to be the sort of place where things went to die. Home is supposed to be a place of comfort, inspiration, and security. This house was none of those things when we bought it. Hopefully our unending sweat equity will exorcise those demons.

Ironically, Fluffy is pretty well intact. She evidently crawled under the porch and got underneath the house itself by crawling into a crack between the field stones that make up the decidedly un-modern foundation. From there I can only imagine a bunch of meowing and whimpering that must have driven the occupants of the living room above a bit crazy. This probably happened about 50 years ago. For that last 50 (or so) years, her mummy has been hanging out under our house, waiting for some naive renovator to come along and release her from her tomb. The ironic thing is that we found Fluffly’s crypt under there because the floor above her rotted away, causing us to remove it. The crawl space (if it can be called that, since it was about 6 inches tall at its most glorious point) was un-vented–and a mixture of dry rot, powderpost beetles, and miscellaneous decay caused the whole floor to lose its structural integrity (to put it kindly). Fluffy, who was resting only inches from all that decay, was pretty much unscathed (except for the painful-death-from-starvation part). You can still see her whiskers, her ribs beneath her now-dessicated skin, and yes, even the entrails that seem to be coming out of her mouth.

I should note that one day recently, Luke was out on the front porch, and a little kid, maybe 9 years old, rode by on his bicycle. He saw Luke, and was probably surprised to see a real person associated with this house that had been empty for so long. The kid said, “Hey mister– is that house haunted?” Luke politely informed him that the house is not haunted, and they both went about their business. A quick peek at Fluffy might have convinced the kid otherwise. Maybe we should have left the gruesome nightmare intact, and charged the curious neighborhood kids admission.

In more recent cat news, a few weeks ago we thought we had adopted a real live cat. We’d been having a few problems in our basement with mice–or more likely, the evilest of all rodentia: packrats. So we were kind of happy when we noticed that there was a kittenish creature hanging around the property. She was very friendly, and seemed skinny enough to be interested in some rodent-ala-carte. Before I knew it, Luke was feeding her the remains of our hot dog lunch, “just to keep her around.” We kept feeding her hot dogs, and she kept coming around. She picked up the name “Frankie”– because of the hot dogs. It’s probably a bad sign when you name a creature. It means that you’re getting attached. I started wondering how much it was going to cost to get her spayed & vaccinated. But then she disappeared, and I was oddly disappointed. We were gone from the house for about a week, so maybe she went to look for some other human hot-dog-dispenser. I found a dead bird in the house, and I left it for her in the usual hot-dog spot. The irony of leaving a dead-bird-offering for a cat did not escape me. The bird disappeared, but we haven’t seen Frankie again.

I tried to test her, to see if she was still coming around. So I created a trap to catch meddlers, as Cebah would say. (Cebah is Luke’s aging-but-still-feisty grandmother, who has peppered the family folklore with such descriptive phrases. I think that “a trap to catch meddlers” is her greatest contribution to the lexicon.)

My trap to catch meddlers involved circle of sand in the hot-dog spot, with a food offering in the middle. I figured that if Frankie came to get the food, she’d have to leave her paw-print signature. Indeed, the food was eaten, and paw prints were left, but the circumstantial evidence was inconclusive.

So, for the moment, we’re pet-less. Which is okay, I guess. We’re trying to relish our relative pre-child freedom-from-vomit-on-the-floor, while we still have it. Plus, we never intended to get a cat (and never, never an indoor cat.) When I graduated from Cal, we intended to get a dog. While I was writing my Master’s thesis, Luke kept trying to spur me to completion by promising that I’d get a puppy when I was done. The day I (finally) turned in my thesis to the university, I received this:

One puppy voucher, redeemable at a husband near you.

A puppy voucher, signed by none other than Lucas Christy, puppy administrator. Notice how it’s only redeemable for one (1) puppy. (I guess if I want to get two puppies, I’ll have to write another thesis?)

Some people graduate & are rewarded with exciting things like high-paying jobs, a 401K, a new car (payment) or a trip to Hawaii. I got a puppy voucher and a sucker. Yes, a sucker. In all its generosity, the University of California gives you a sucker when you turn in your graduate thesis. The sucker has a wrapper that says, “I Mastered It.” I guess the idea is that you’re supposed to walk away from the office of graduate-thesis-collection with a huge weight lifted off your shoulders, and a sugar high to make your forget any grudges you may happen to carry against your former-slave-master. The Office of Alumni Relations is conveniently located across the hall, so perhaps you’re supposed to skip right across the hall and write out a big fat check before the sugar high subsides. Prior to turning in my thesis, I had heard about the suckers, and I promised Luke that I would share my sugar with him, since he earned it as much as I did (maybe more). I figured that since I had earned two masters degrees, I ought to get two suckers. They only gave me one. I politely pointed out that I’d actually paid for two degrees– and I ought to get two suckers, since they’d raised tuition like 200% since I started (despite a contractual obligation otherwise, which is now a class-action lawsuit, making a public education nearly as costly as a private education– thereby limiting access by the people who need it most). I pleaded my case, but the UC is an immovable force. I went home with my sole sucker, and tried not to feel like a sucker. Anyway, the reality is that Luke doesn’t like to eat candy. He much prefers his sugar fermented into beer.

In the end, I got neither a puppy nor a matching set of suckers. Instead I got a one-way ticket to the San Luis Valley, and a rotten old house. (I’m trying not to be bitter!) But it is our house, and nobody can take it away from us. (Dear readers, please be polite and don’t mention that it’s unlikely that anyone would want to take this place away from us.) So, we’re trying to laugh at ourselves and make the best of it, cherishing those kitty-crypt moments and being glad that we “get to” spend our weekends (re) building our house.

Last Monday, we were in Denver, picking up a pallet of batteries. While we were there, we checked out our usual house-building haunt, Boulder’s ReSource store. This place is great– it’s a big yard full of recycled building materials that have been removed from existing buildings, or were un-needed for some reason. We were hoping to pick up a couple of doors for our shed, but nothing really seemed “right,” despite the fact that they have a huge inventory of doors. It was actually lucky that we didn’t buy anything big because it would have been a huge hassle to somehow slide a ton (literally) of batteries underneath the doors. We got some copper fittings, which we paid too much for because we disobeyed the cardinal rule(s) of shopping at second-hand stores. Though perhaps never-before codified, the rules are as follows:

1) Find a good employee to give you pricing on the item(s) you want. You can “test” an employee by asking for a price on an item that you’re not really all that interested in. Eavesdropping on other pricing transactions is also a good way to evaluate an employee’s attitude toward pricing.

Some employees are interested in “making a sale”, and will price items with the understanding that you are buying rain-soaked items, which you’ve had to pick out of barrels of other used & un-wanted items. These employees, (known as “under-pricers”) will glance at the item, and estimate a price that is somewhere around 10-40% of the item’s retail value- (i.e. the price you would pay for the brand new item in the store, with a warranty & the right to return it.) Other employees, however, do not have such a good sense of the “value” of their water-logged merchandise (can you tell that it is monsoon season in Colorado?). These employees (known as “over-pricers”), will carefully pick through the box of items you’ve selected, and add up the estimated retail value of all the items, multiply by about 80%, and then round up to the nearest $5. If you make the mistake of getting pricing from one of these “overpricers”, be prepared to enact rule #2:

2) Always be willing to admit that your treasured item is actually a piece of crap and “walk away” from it if the price is too high. Trust me on this one—you’re never going to lie awake at night, wishing you had purchased that rusty padlock (with missing keys). On your deathbed, will you think of the $45 frost-free faucet that you plucked from anonymity at the bottom of a bucket of rusty nails? Even the best deal can be walked away from, if you are faced with an intractable “overpricer” who wants you to pay $25 for the privilege of taking home an item that is missing a few parts & had to be rescued from a moldy cardboard box hidden beneath a pile of broken boards. (In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that we have violated cardinal rule #2 many times—and our garage is a testament to this fact!)

Once you have determined that a particular employee is indeed an “underpricer” you can go about your business, and gather together all the treasures that you want to bring home. Get a box, and create layers of items (archaeology style)– make sure to put the most valuable items at the bottom. Then attach yourself with glue to your favorite under-pricer. But remember, don’t be annoying, and don’t whine, because the price can be directly proportional to how annoying you are perceived to be. However, when it comes to determining a final price on things, pretend that you are in India, screw up your courage, and bargain on the price.

(At this point, Luke would like to remind all six of you who read this blog, that once you have herded a “critical mass” of miscellaneous items into a box, any additional items that you chuck in the box are basically “free”. The $10-40 price that you’re likely to pay for a cardboard box of random items isn’t going to change just because you add another shiny widget. If you run into an employee who notices a bit of copper in your box, and suddenly wants to add $5 to the price, please return to cardinal rule #2, –or if you can pull it off– cardinal rule #1.)

After leaving Boulder’s Resource store, we decided to check out a used plumbing store in Denver called “Do-it-URself plumbing”. Our old standby, Rayback, has unfortunately gone out of business, so we were hoping to scope out a new source for used plumbing stuff. Plus we need another toilet. Due to our laziness (and the fact that our house was regularly 2° below zero last winter– inside), we have cracked a number of the disease-ridden toilets that came with the house. We are not (necessarily) shopping for THE toilet– you know, the toilet that shows up in the glossy magazines– just a decent toilet that is reasonably efficient and doesn’t feature pink ceramic or fuzzy accessories. We need a stop-gap toilet. Kind of like the geek you dated in high school while waiting for THE ONE to come along. A nice enough guy, but not necessarily someone that you want to be stuck with for the rest of your life.

Anyway, we got to Do-it-URself plumbing. They have thousands of used toilets, strewn about a large yard, protected with a chain-link fence, and a sign that says “beware of dogs.” We didn’t see any dogs, but apparently toilet-theft is something of a concern here. Or maybe they are just worried that people will illegitimately “donate” some unwanted toilets to their stash.

Now let me say, that we are just about the most tolerant purchasers of second hand items (or worn out crap) that you are likely to meet in normal society. Since Luke places much of his self-worth on his ability to fix anything & everything, we are pretty tolerant of broken or missing parts, and other hazards of eschewing Home Depot for the second-hand yards. If something is very high-quality (and therefore worthy of being fixed), we’re inclined to drag it home and let it lie around for a few decades before fixing it. But Do-it-URself Plumbing was too much, even for us. We’re supposed to sift through acres of mis-matched toilets whose bowls have been estranged from their tanks? And then we’re supposed to chase down an absent employee to tell us that we’ll have to pay 85% of the retail price for the privilege of taking home one of these non-functioning items that looks like it has recently been ripped from a public restroom in Delhi?

I just don’t understand the business models of some second-hand stores. Last time I checked, our society is awash in unwanted crap. Second-hand stores get most of their merchandise DONATED, and most are unable to handle the volume of donations that end up on their doorsteps. Why not make every effort to make a sale? Sell the stuff cheap, and move the merchandise through so that there is room for “new” used crap. What attracts us to certain second-hand stores is the knowledge to every time we go there, they will have new stuff, and it will be easy get a reasonable price on it. If we keep coming back, we keep spending money. And all that stuff is diverted from the landfill… right into our garage. (Are you listening, Urban Ore in Berkeley? I didn’t think so.)

As we were leaving Do-it-URself (having not spent a dime), I noticed something. We were the only fools wandering through the acres of used toilets. At Boulder’s Resource store, there are always dozens of people, wandering around with tape measures & starry eyes, hoping for the perfect doorknob. At Do-it-URself? A ghost town. Tumbleweeds were practically rolling past our legs. This leads me to cardinal rule #3 of second-hand shopping:

3) The best second-hand stores are the busiest second-hand stores. Beware if you’re the only person in a particular store. Unless the economy has suddenly improved dramatically and President Bush has just neglected to notify you, there should be lots of people coming & going– some people treasure hunting, and some donating back the previous purchases that their spouses didn’t approve of. People shop in second-hand stores because they can get a bargain. Not because they find it thrilling to re-unite a toilet bowl with its matching tank. The joy of re-uniting bowl & tank is only worthwhile if it comes with the parallel thrill of getting to install your new family of products for a VERY rewarding price. People who aren’t thrill-seekers go to Home Depot, which conveniently locates its toilet-bowl-merchandise near to its matching toilet-tank-merchandise.

And now, before ending this overly-long missive, I must confess the real reason that we shop at used building material stores: QUALITY. The reality of our lives is that we’re a couple of cheap bastards who are just skimming above the federal poverty line. But we also hate much of the cheap China-made crap that is out there for all of us to consume in large quantities. (And then quickly dispose of so that we can all go out and buy more cheap crap with our economic stimulus checks.) We have reached a point in the advancement of our civilization where it is easy to buy a plastic faucet with a chrome-like veneer that is guaranteed to leak within 30 days, but it is very difficult to buy a brass faucet that will still be functioning beautifully in 30 years (unless you want to take out a second mortgage on your house). But second-hand stores often fill that gap. There are a lot of idiots out there who watch too much home improvement television and replace their old brass faucet with one of those chromed plastic faucets that are ubiquitous at Home Depot. Most of the brass faucets end up in the landfill, but a few find their way into the second-hand stores. Where we’re happy to pay a fraction of the price for something that is of much higher quality than the Home Depot stuff. Plus, I’m married to the only man I’ve ever met who has a much-prized valve collection. Recycled building supply stores provide the perfect venue to feed his addiction.

I got a little tiny baby note about my blog on the houseblogs.net site. The link is here, though I’m not sure that it will send much traffic my way, especially since it is buried amongst a lot of other stuff. However, the Houseblogs post says that my little blog is about our “green” renovation. So I thought maybe I should use this opportunity to explain exactly how our little disaster of a house is “green.” I know that I haven’t (yet) done the greatest job of giving background on exactly what it is that we’re planning to do this place (beyond our attempts to make it less depressing & more habitable.) So consider this my first attempt to rectify that situation.

Why is our gut renovation project green?

1) Re-use. First and foremost, this house is hurtling us toward planetary destruction at a slower pace than the average house because we’re re-using a 100 year old house that would otherwise have had a date with a bulldozer. Instead, we’re going to give it another 100 years or so. (If we can make that structure last another hundred years, then we’ve done our job with the place– after that, I take no responsibility– I expect at that point it will be some other sucker’s problem anyway.) So we’re turning an unlivable, unheatable nightmare into a house. Maybe someday it will even be our home. And we’re doing it without tearing up any virgin farmland (or forest land, as is more common in this area.) We’re not spurring the construction of new roads, adding new EMT or fire services, not spurring the need for new schools, not adding to the sense of abandonment in a neighborhood that really could use some re-investment. The latent city planner in me says that this is a really good thing, and perhaps the biggest contribution to our “green” bragging rights.

Much of the house wasn’t particularly salvageable– miles of faux-wood paneling (think: 1970s), knob & tube wiring that our insurance company required us to remove IMMEDIATELY, and more rotten wood than I care to remember. But we didn’t mindlessly haul it all to the dump. We’ve taken a lot of stuff to the dump, because it is just unavoidable. (What else am I supposed to do with a trailer load of plaster dust?) But all the wood that is not re-usable has been burned in our wood stove to keep us warm while working on the house last winter. It’s a good thing that we did tons of demolition during the winter, so we were able to use the “burn as you go” method of demolition. (Perhaps we would have been wiser to use the “gasoline + match” method of demolition in the first place, but unfortunately insurance companies and police departments really tend to frown on that sort of thing.) If we hadn’t utilized the “burn as you go” method, we’d have the most un-holy piles of wood in our yard, waiting for winter. Let me rephrase that. We’ve got the most un-holy of wood piles in our yard anyway– but it would be a lot worse if we hadn’t been able to burn a lot of it while we were demolishing our house in 30° (below zero) weather. Instead of hauling it all to the dump, we found that faux-wood paneling has many uses in a renovation project: we’ve used it as a “drop cloth” for painting, as a “base” to shovel dirt on to, as a temporary dividers in rooms, as a cover for mouse-entrances to our basement. Trust me, the stuff is useful. Even Luke finally agrees with me.

And, when it comes to getting rid of crap instead of sending it to the dump, you wouldn’t believe the power of a “free” sign taped to an item placed on the curb. (The only problem is keeping my husband from indulging in the practice of picking up such items. Ahem. When exactly are you going to learn to ride a unicycle?)

We’ve also carefully removed & de-nailed miles of good oak hardwood flooring from the house, which will be re-used in the upstairs. It is great stuff, and worth a nice chunk of change if we had to buy in new. Of course, it probably wouldn’t be economically viable (for us) to pry it up & re-use it if we had to pay someone for the labor, but since we’re doing it ourselves, it makes economic sense for us. I guess that is true of this whole silly project.

2) Reasonable size. The house is about 1700 square feet. We didn’t add any square footage to it with this renovation project. It isn’t tiny, but it isn’t huge either. It might be tight some day if we ever get around to raising a few teenagers in there (that stage would most likely come after we raise a few babies), but I doubt it will turn these future teenagers into mass-murderers or anything. The shed & garage out back will help make the whole place very livable.

3) Energy-efficiency. We’re doing a tremendous amount of work to make this a super-efficient house. When we bought the house, it was the model of inefficiency. Silly gas heaters that left frightening black marks on the walls, no insulation worth mentioning, single-pane windows that feature millions of small gaps to welcome in the wintry breezes, etc. We’re going to put in new energy-star windows, foam insulation in walls furred out to 6 inches, an efficient heating system (more on that below), and do all that other good stuff that everybody should be doing anyway (and should have been doing 30 years ago).

4) Solar. Solar. Solar. Last, but not least, there WILL be solar. We live in the land of 300+ days per year of sunshine. The sun is our friend, and massive holes in the ground from coal extraction are not.

Passive. The old portion of the house currently has one measly little window on the South side (plus 3 glass blocks that were installed in place of a large south-facing window.) Once we actually bite the bullet and order our new windows, we’re going to cut in 4 nice big windows downstairs on the south side of the house. (In addition to the generous southerly windows in the kitchen addition.) This will make all the difference for the light & winter heating in this house. Trust me, it will be huge, both with the psychological impact of having more natural light, and with the solar gain to help with heating in the winter. Fortunately, there is some really nice foliage on the south side of the house that will help shade the windows in the summer. (And, overheating is almost never a problem in the San Luis Valley– except in the most poorly-designed structures.)

Solar Thermal. That overly-tall roof on our kitchen is specially designed to hold a bunch of solar thermal collectors— which will make hot water for us, and pump it through the radiant floor that we’re going to install throughout the house. The concrete floor will act as a thermal storage, though we’ll also need some kind of water storage in the basement. And we’ll use a Rinnai tankless water heater for gas-fired back-up heat. Lots of other details that we’ve thought about but haven’t implemented yet, so you’ll have to wait to hear about them. Unless you come and visit (I’d suggest you come in the winter so that you can tell your children all about your hair freezing inside Luke & Laura’s house.)

Solar Electric – photovoltaics. Our utility company is Xcel. This is a good thing for us, because, thanks to their Solar Rewards program, we’re going to be able to afford a large grid-tied solar system to offset all our electricity usage. To hear Luke talk about it, we may be installing this system before we get some of the more basic parts of the house finished (like a bathroom). He keeps telling me that you can’t pass up free money, and if it sounds too good to be true, you ought to jump on it before it stops being true. So we’ll keep you posted.

Of course, we can do all this expensive solar stuff because we can do all this expensive solar stuff ourselves. This is good. But it makes me tired to think about sometimes.

5) Other stuff. We use local hardware stores for the most part (plus a lot of EBay). We’ve got no Home Despot or Lowes, so we’re forced to be good. But that’s fine.

We’ll do some other stuff too, but due to Colorado’s draconian water laws, I won’t mention things like rainwater collection. But I will provide you with a link to this lovely article about draconian water laws.

That’s all the green stuff I can think of at the moment. Like everything with this project, it will be a lot of work to implement all these grand schemes. Sometimes I find myself wishing for that childhood fairy godmother who will come along and “poof!” –make things magically happen. (Now that I’m an adult, I fear that if I had a fairy godmother, I’d wish for plumbing or an IRA– instead of something more romantic like a pony.) Anyway, I’m trying to work on enjoying the journey instead of the destination. Thus the name of the blog.

We’ve been away from our little housing nightmare recently. These are my excuses. We live in Colorado, where there are only two seasons: 9 months of winter and 3 months of guests. We’re trying to cram as much fun into our 3 non-winter months as possible, so that we can survive the sheer depression known as unending winter.

Speaking of guests, our friend Kent was here. (He’s not really a guest– especially since he owns the house we currently live in– but we’ll use that term for the sake of convenience.) While he was here, we elected to dig a new trench in the yard to replace the incoming fresh water line to his house. The line froze last winter, which resulted in some un-wanted campfires in the yard. (We dug a hole in the yard, found the frozen water line, poured in burning BBQ charcoal and kept a little blast furnace going in the hole for a couple of days, with the help of a hair dryer & a pipe with a perforated end. When the blast furnace technique failed to unfreeze the line, we were forced to cut it and feed a steam line into the pipe to get it unfrozen. By replacing the waterline in a deeper trench, we’re trying to avoid that winter “adventure” in the future.) Luke’s Dad has a Bobcat with a backhoe, but it lives on a hill at the end of a long bumpy road. So we rented a trailer to get the Bobcat down to the house–the only problem was that the rental place didn’t have the trailer we wanted, so we had to take whatever they gave us. They assured us we could carry the 3-ton Bobcat on their trailer. Well, apparently, our Bobcat is extraordinarily wide, as Bobcats go. After driving the trailer nearly an hour to pick up the Bobcat, the trailer ended up being about one inch too narrow for the Bobcat to drive onto it. (One damn inch!) There was no (safe) way to get the thing on the trailer, so in comedy of errors too numerous to describe here, we managed to get the Bobcat down to the house through a combination of driving it on the road, borrowing a friend’s trailer (that had no ramps and first had to be drastically remodeled in order to get the Bobcat onto it), and shuffling trailers between trucks that inevitably didn’t have the right hitch arrangement. After half a day of groaning, swearing, and juggling large objects, we managed to get the Bobcat to Kent’s house. From there it was easy as pie. It was only a matter of digging a 6 foot deep trench, tunneling under a sidewalk, finding a buried pipe, removing a buried electrical line, and doing a lot of hand-digging. A fun afternoon all the way around. (My husband tells me that I’m overly-sarcastic– which is my tendency– but it was kinda fun. Especially in retrospect. Unfortunately “retrospect” didn’t start until about 10:30 p.m. that night!)

Digging for a new water line. Notice the old water line at the right side of the trench. It is probably a miracle that it didn't get broken during the whole process.

Two weekends ago, we got in our sole camping trip for the summer. I’m looking forward to the day when we have a habitable house so that we can spend our weekends doing weekend things (like camping), instead of guiltily sneaking off for one quick trip, trying to pretend we don’t hear our house screaming, “Don’t leave me! I only have dirt for a floor!” We went up to the Collegiate peaks area, and had a lovely time climbing some 13-ers. (We’ve got a whole damn house to build, why kill ourselves on vacation by climbing 14-ers?) The trip was lovely, except for all the frenetic attempt to escape the hoards of people in the St. Elmo area. I am not fond of being run-over by ATVs that drive around willy-nilly, tearing up the roads and turning gasoline into noise. Anyway, when we managed to escape that modern nightmare (after many repititions of “what is this world coming to?”), we had a lovely time. Even though we didn’t have $40,000 of recreational equipment. (How will the economy survive when we haven’t done our part to support the recreational equipment industry?)

That's me hiking. Instead of schlepping dirt around. What a nice change.

Last weekend we spent a tiring 3 days helping out the lovely organization that is the Crestone Music Festival. We heard lots of great music (like Eileen Ivers, who was amazing) and Luke was happy because he got to repair a few deadbeat golf carts (soundly proving his worth in society). We were supposed to be hosting the campground, so we had to spend some unpleasant time trying to get deadbeat hippies to pay their camping fees (clarification: I love hippies, just not the ones that rudely refuse to pay for a camping pass that supports arts programs in the local schools of some of the poorest counties in the nation). Oh, and then there was the joy of trying to keep the inebriated folks from teaching their entire vocabulary of swear words to all the sleeping children at 3:00 a.m. Fun.

Oh yeah, and since it’s summer we have to try to do enough work to earn enough money to make it through the 9 months of freakishly miserable winter. Nobody wants a solar system (or architectural services) in the winter. So we have to try to make up for it in the summer, when the phone rings about 10 times more often, and we make ourselves crazy trying to keep our clients happy. Fortunately we specialize in lovely clients who all seem to do a pretty good job of understanding that we only have two sets of hands.

After a long night of last-minute plumbing on Tuesday night, Luke managed to get our under-slab plumbing inspection yesterday morning. We passed! Now we’re free to throw dirt in the trenches and move on with installing the insulation & tying the radiant heat lines (more on this soon.) Passing the plumbing inspection is a huge step forward. It feels like we might actually have a floor before the snowballs start raining down upon us.

So. Those are my excuses for not getting more done on the house. May I please have my get-out-of-guilt-free card now?

Colorado summer-y wonderfulness.

More Colorado summer-y wonderfulness. Photo was taken before we had to start fleeing the lightning.

I’m not a big fan of the term “DIY.” I’m not entirely sure why—somehow it evokes visions of crocheted doilies and poorly-applied paint. Glue guns, duct tape, and leaky plumbing. It’s not that I don’t think people should do things for themselves, and make efforts to create their own environment(s) in an age when everything we touch is imported, mass-produced, and designed to be acquired, used, and discarded with a minimum of effort. I’m just not sure that our acts of creativity should be labeled with an acronym that is being promoted by all manner of corporate entities that want us to tune into their television show or buy the paint-by-numbers kit.

“Do-it-yourself” is certainly a concept that has managed to permeate the culture. When we were in the fishing village of Shek-O in Hong Kong, we were flying our kite – camera contraption (known as a Kite Aerial Photography rig), and some woman came up to us and asked, “Is that a DIY project?” She was presumably an educated Chinese woman, who simply wanted to know if we’d made the contraption ourselves. So why was I irritated by the question? I guess because the term “DIY” suggested (to me) that we’d bought a kit and glued some parts together while following along with a 4-minute video from YouTube. The reality was that we’d built the thing from scratch, machined parts out of stock aluminum, fabricated a camera cradle, and worked out all the bugs through our own tiny R&D process. (Except for lack of appropriate wind. We never managed to work out that particular bug.) So I hereby officially apologize to the woman in Hong Kong if I was a bit short with her because she used the term “DIY.” I didn’t mind her question—only her choice of acronyms.

If I can put aside the popular promotion of DIY-as-a-strategy-to-consume-more-stuff, then I can easily recognize that many people find it deeply satisfying to create things for themselves. My Mom and sister are both compulsive knitters (and have been since long before knitting saw its recent renaissance.) I’ve been considering staging some sort of intervention for them, because they practically start shaking if they’re left alone for more than five minutes without some knitting to keep their hands busy. It’s not that they need all those hats. It’s just that the act of making them is somehow very satisfying.

The developed world has become so ridiculously “professionalized” and “specialized” that people have come to believe that they can’t or shouldn’t do things for themselves. I recently got a catalog that suggested you ought to hire their “experts” to come over to your house and measure for curtains! Do we really live in a society where people aren’t empowered to operate a tape measure? By creating the “profession” of curtain-measuring is Smith & Noble going to free the world from the hazards of poorly-fitted curtains? (Do these professional curtain-measurers have professional liability insurance, in case they happen to mis-manage their tape measures?)

Enough of my rant. Perhaps because of our respective up-bringings, Luke & I have always lived on the edge—daring to measure for our own damn curtains (and then make them ourselves). When it comes to doing things ourselves, we tend to go a bit overboard. When we got married, we cast our own rings in gold & silver, we made our own wedding invitations, and we rebuilt our 1970 Series II Land Rover so that we’d have something truly funky to drive away from the wedding (leaking oil all the way). We’re not very good at knowing our own limits, however, and we’re prone to stressing ourselves out the very point of exhaustion. When I decided that I’d make my own wedding dress, my wise mother put her foot down and said “no.” We went to the store and within three hours, I had a wedding dress. Thank goodness. We were desperately trying to finish our wedding rings the day before driving to NM for the wedding—I can’t imagine throwing a half-completed wedding dress into the mix. (Especially since we had to allow extra time to drive the Land Rover several hundred miles at 50 mph– the fastest it can go without leaving a shower of parts on the roadway.)

And now we’ve moved on from mere wedding rings to completely rebuilding a wreck of a house. We’re still not very good at knowing our own limits, because we bought this place, and in spite of the fact that we really needed a place to live, we proceeded to tear the place down to the studs. Then, when the house was nothing but bare studs, we jacked the center wall up, installed a few beams, and ripped out more studs. (This, I believe, is our perfectionistic tendencies coming back to bite us, because we still really need a place to live.)

So, the reason I started this rant about the term “DIY” is that True Value is holding a contest in which contestants are asked to blog about their favorite DIY projects. (Winners are chosen at random, and receive a $300 gift certificate to spend at True Value stores.) I thought I’d enter, because, while I’m happy to disparage the term “DIY”, I have no unkind words for the local hardware store, and I’m not above having an extra $300 to spend there. We got to our local True Value Hardware store nearly every weekend (V&V Hardware in Monte Vista, Colorado). They’re open 7 days a week, and are friendly and helpful. There is no Home Despot or Lowes within several hundred miles of where we live, and we happily support the little local guys, who almost always have the PVC fitting we need, and are only a couple of blocks away from our project. And they remain in a small, struggling, historic downtown.

What is my favorite sub-project in our larger house-building project? I’d have to say it’s the underslab plumbing that Luke is installing at this very moment. It’s not glamorous. I am sorry to be unable to contribute photos of a pristine-and-fully-finished kitchen like many of the other contestants. (Believe me– I’d do anything to have a finished kitchen at this point!) The underslab plumbing is my favorite project because after months of depressing demolition, the beginnings of a plumbing system is a potent symbol of things to come. It marks the beginning of re-building, and the end of un-building. It is a series of traps and vents and purple primer that all point to our unending hope that someday our house will become our home. And I’m grateful that Luke knowns a “Street 90″ from a “Long sweep 90,” and that we know who to ask when we don’t have the answers (thanks, Marcos). In the endless project that is our house, a few lengths of PVC and a roll of 3/4 soft copper is all we’ve got to brag about.

I salute those of you housebloggers who have self-made & shiny kitchens. Can you see that I’m green with envy? Me– I’ve got some trenches and few drain lines: DIY without the aid of kits or glue-guns.

This post was written for Houseblogs.net as part of a sweepstakes sponsored by True Value. For more information about the contest, click here. True Value’s website is www.StartRightStartHere.com .

Luke compacting dirt prior to digging it all up into little trenches for underslab utilities.

It has to look worse before it can look better, right? (That’s what my mother used to tell me while I was agonizing over cleaning my room.)

We spent the day (Saturday) working on the house. Progress seems slow– sometimes painfully slow, and we did some mental calculations over dinner to determine whether or not we’ll be able to live in the house by winter (or at least part of the house.) The answer is: we’re going to try damn hard to be in there by winter, but we’ve still got a long road ahead of us, and I have a feeling that we’re going to be acquiring a lot of blisters as we limp down that road.

But this blurb from Fine Homebuilding this month does help us feel a bit better about the whole miserable mess. The letter to the editor is titled, “The Economics of Home Buying” :

“Kevin Ireton [in his earlier essay, "Is green building too expensive?"] states that over the life of a 30-year mortgage, a $350,000 home actually costs $796,000– a lot of money. But the real cost is vastly more if you account for the pretax dollars you must earn, then pay taxes on, before paying the mortgage with what is left.

If you consider taxes and other costs that reduce your income– for argument’s sake, say 40%– then you have a different equation for determining the earnings needed to afford a $350,000 home. The $796,000 30-year mortgage payback cost becomes a whopping $1,327,000, plus or minus. Add to this the cost of transportation, clothing, and so forth required for the job over 30 years, and you easily push needing to earn more than $1,500,000 to pay for a $350,000 house.

The equation of having to earn about $4 to $4.50 for every dollar spent to buy a house certainly is an incentive to build your own house, where your labor becomes sweat equity. If you can get the cost of the $350,000 house down to less than $150,000, including land and utility hookups (and I’ve seen this done many a time at even lower figures), you give yourself the gift of not having to earn hundreds of thousands of dollars for the same housing results. Not bad pay for a year or two of work. If you were making a modest $35,000 a year, this savings would mean not having to put in an extra 15 to 20 years of work, with the resulting societal and carbon cost of getting to and from the job.” — Richard O. Byrne (from Fine Homebuilding, #197)

So. Does this make my tired back feel less sore? Absolutely. We’re stretching every dime we’ve got to try to pay for this place, and we’re spending every bit of “disposable time” trying to make progress. (I use the term “disposable time” because we’ve got no “disposable income.”)

I’m not sure how much I buy Byrne’s argument that one reduces their carbon footprint by building their own house. Most people don’t necessarily start living a less consumptive lifestyle just because their house is paid off. A person’s carbon footprint is much more dependent upon their philosophical choices than on their retirement date.

But I do buy the argument that building your own house has huge financial rewards– though from down here in the muddy trenches (have you seen the muddy trenches in my future living room?), it can be pretty hard to feel them. Most people don’t have the skill, inclination, or time to take on such a task. There are a lot of times when I envy those people. I imagine them sipping lattes in urban Starbucks, and texting their other clean-cut, non-house-building friends on their brand new iphones. Or whatever type of phone is hip now. (I wouldn’t know what kind of phone is imbued with all the latest forms of hip-ness, perhaps because I live several hundred miles from the nearest Starbucks.) I imagine all these hip, non-house-building people enjoying their weekends, not worrying about how to pay the lumberyard bill, or poring over buildingscience.com articles while trying to decide whether they should have a vented or a non-vented roof. I like to imagine that these non-house-building-people have less stressful lives, more friends, and hipper telephones. But maybe– just maybe– it will all seem worthwhile in the end.

The Saturday morning realities of trying to run a small business while (re) building a house. (Never one to be satisfied with anything, Luke notes that his wheelbarrow isn’t very full in this picture.)

]]> http://homeisaprocess.wordpress.com/2008/07/21/the-economics-of-the-beastly-thing/feed/ 5 laura http://homeisaprocess.wordpress.com/2008/07/09/ive-spent-far-too-much-time-on-annoying-technical-details/ http://homeisaprocess.wordpress.com/2008/07/09/ive-spent-far-too-much-time-on-annoying-technical-details/#comments Tue, 08 Jul 2008 20:28:25 +0000 laura http://homeisaprocess.wordpress.com/?p=35 ]]>

Before you scroll down and read my missive about our weekend of manual labor, you should note that I’ve finally gotten around to adding a “subscribe by email” button over on the edge of the blog. This means that you can be personally notified when I’ve gotten around to publicly whining about the trials & tribulations of building a house.

I’ve also added an RSS feed button. For those of you (family members?) who might not be familiar with concept of syndicated feeds, there is a nice, easy intro here, and a more in-depth article here. If this all seems too technical, and overly complicated, I’d suggest that you just use the email subscription link listed above. (Though I have to admit that I’ve recently become a big user of Google Reader for the convenience and for tracking those occasional bloggers such as myself. It doesn’t work so well with the big commercial websites that add new content every 2.5 seconds.)

However you choose to do it, thanks for reading.