Direct Mail Convert

Never in my life have I actually bought something from a random piece of direct mail. Well, last week the Reggio Registers catalog appeared in our mailbox just as I was about to start looking for some. All that they sell is registers and exactly the ones that we wanted! If only every purchase had been so easy in this process. I ordered of 5 of these cast iron grilles and think that they'll look great with those dark floors. It just cracks me up that somewhere in someone's database, I've been labeled as a good target for heating grilles. I'm so far gone now that I'm finding that amusing, aren't I?

Insulate This

We passed both our insulation inspection and our HVAC/heating inspection yesterday. This means we are green-lighted to start sheetrocking. Woo hoo! I thought this day would never come. The studio is about to become completely transformed, my sweets. Our general inspector also informed us yesterday that he'd been layed off. Too bad. We'll see what this means in terms of turn-around time for future inspections.

Progress

OK, so I swear I'm back on the blogging bandwagon. This last week we have made good progress. I have several things to report on.

1) We spent a good portion of Saturday looking for the right drill for Josh to enable him to do the low voltage wiring (cable, internet, phone) downstairs. Since he's doing it himself, that is the perfect opportunity for a new tool acquisition, wouldn't you say? So, after a bazillion phone calls, he finally located the biggest right angle drill you could possibly find. It's intended for drilling holes through wood so that you can feed the cables through. We found it at this awesome tool shop in San Bruno called K119 tools of San Francisco that looked more like a liquor shop from the outside than a tool shop. My favorite part was that it was across the street from the West Coast Taxidermy shop specializing in wildlife artistry. The drill looked like a jackhammer. After much deliberation, Josh decided that it was perhaps more than what he could really justify for the the job at hand. So, back to Home Depot we went to pick up the smaller drill.

2) We spent most of Sunday downstairs doing the drilling and wiring. Lucy and I were in our supervisory role as usual and at the ready to hand over various bits and pieces as needed. Needless to say, you will likely now be able to get online from the toilet and the kitchen sink. Talk about wired.

3) Tommy started the insulation on Monday. He still has a bit to finish today. As soon as he's done, we can schedule the insulation inspection.

4) Our HVac/heating inspection is scheduled for Tuesday.

5) Uncle Paul created the most amazing piece of stained glass to go over our front door. It arrived yesterday in perfect condition. I can't wait to install it. It's really going to snazz up the front of the house. I'll post pics of it soon.

Rock the House

This weekend Josh and Tommy started to sheet rock in the cans. Apparently, this is required for fireproofing in two-unit buildings(something that Josh asked our electrician about when he started and he assured us that we didn't need). It's a challenging project because you have to measure out these tiny pieces of sheet rock and wood blocks to hold them in place and then putty and tape them in perfectly.

We're going to have to rip out more of one of the walls and flooring upstairs than we had hoped in order to install the upstairs sub panel. The wall that we need to rip out is plaster covered in sheet rock, so it will make quite a mess. Nothing compared to the mess of the demolition to come, however!

Our two furnaces are finally finished. I still think that everything about it looks like an alien spaceship. The intake for it is just a gaping whole in one of our rooms. That will be finished off after we finish the upstairs. In the meantime, I have glorious heat all day long! The way that those furnace guys would schedule everything made me a little nutty. They would never work for more than one day in a row. And then they wouldn't come back for about 10 days. This happened about 4 different times. In the end, they did a decent job, albeit not the most expedient one.

Our Very Own Spaceship

Little did I know that seeing that alien toilet ship at the plumbing store yesterday would lead to our studio starting to resemble its own spaceship today. There are giant E.T.-style ducting tubes going in every direction in our studio. There are sheet metal tubes poking through flooring and up through the ceiling for venting in places where we will some day frame upstairs. There are holes in the floor right now that are silver and shiny that our little pussycat, Muffin is so intrigued by. To her, it would act like a little slip'n'slide and she would land hard on the concrete floor below, so I hope she doesn't try it. I hope that we've made all of these calculations correctly because it's quite possible that the vent pipe is actually going through where my tub needs to be. And we all know that we will not be building a bathroom upstairs without a tub. I remain optimistic.

In other news:

- Poor Josh had to move the water pipes again. We now have hot water in the bathroom sink, but no water anywhere else. That means no toilet and no kitchen sink. Vavooom!

- The tile guy came out today. I am very excited to watch him tile so that I can possibly do some of it next time myself.

- Electricity down in the studio/garage seems to have diminished since this morning.

- The furnace guys have disconnected what was working upstairs. It will be at least another week until they can come back and get it operational again and finish the job.

- Our cabinets arrived today! I am so pleased about that. We are attempting to minimize the workable space downstairs as much as possible. I timed this best I could, but what can you do? It appears that they are even in the correct color which I still love, thankfully. The sweet delivery guys thanked us about three times for ordering cabinets. They said that no one is ordering right now and that business has been really slow.

A Christmas Miracle and Rotten Eggs

Who in their right mind tries to go to Home Depot at 11:45pm on Christmas Eve? We did. And we were very frustrated by the empty parking lot. I mean, aren't there a lot of people other than ourselves that have urgent Depot needs at that hour? Why did we need to go to the Depot, you may be wondering....Well, our Christmas miracle yesterday was heat. Hoorah! The furnace guys were able to temporarily hook up the furnace to some of the existing vents to pipe in some delicious heat for us until the rest of the work can be done. The only trouble was that the house soon smelled like rotten eggs. This is because the intake for the furnace is temporarily pulling air from the downstairs. Hmm, that still doesn't explain the rotten eggs. Well, my friends, that is because phase 1 of the plumbing that's been done down there involves lines that are open which means that the sewer lines are open. Thus, the furnace is pulling refreshing sewer-laced air up into the upstairs.

So, we quickly turned it off and set off for the Depot late last night in hopes of buying some caps to cover up the open pipes. Alas, we were forced to cover the pipes with duct tape instead which seems to have done the job. Josh is featured above covering the pipes. Now we have clean air upstairs. My body is in a bit of shock with this alarming warmness that follows me everywhere I go in the house. It feels unnatural not to have my four layers of snow gear, hat and long underwear on. It's positively delightful.

Let There Be Heat!

The guys from Atlas Heating arrived on the dot at 8am. I am positively giddy. There are not 1, but 3 of them. Three is a wonderful number. I wasn't expecting to have actual heat for another month or so because of other work that we have to do, but miracle of miracles, they are going to hook up the only remaining vent on a temporary basis. We will have at least a little heat for the next month before we move downstairs. HOORAH!!

35 Degrees, No Heat and No Power

I have been able to endure most things with this remodel: very little electricity, no central heat, no real bathtub (this is the most challenging for me!), and a house that often feels like a wind tunnel. I can even deal with this in the 30's which it's been dipping down to lately. I know that for most parts of the country that that's no big deal, but for us N. Californians, that's below zero. What pushes me over the edge completely though is when we lose all our power. I came home tonight for the second night in a row to absolutely no power. It was out in the whole Mission (our neighborhood). Luckily, my magical UPS driver, Jose, had delivered my toasty new boots earlier under the stairs. That was my only saving grace. I ran upstairs with the box and by the light of my little green lantern, I opened the box and slipped into my new boots. I think they deserve a whole entry to themselves later. I love them.

The great news, however, is that after living without a furnace for 13 months now, we have a furnace guy scheduled to start installation on Monday and an electrician starting on Tuesday! Josh ripped out our gravity furnace last November because it was in the way. Most of the year we wouldn't use it anyways, but now that we've officially entered our second Winter without heat, it's been getting a little more challenging. I really can't believe that these big things are finally happening!!

This picture is of our little angels, Muffin and Lucy, during last year's Winter without heat. They were curled up as close as they could get to each other for warmth and as close to the space heater as they could muster.