I spent a bit of time creating a flyer to advertise them, and packed up a kit with stapler, tape, marker, etc., so that I could put them up in good places. Then I drove 45 minutes to the Computer History Museum, where the festival was taking place.

The second person who saw the flyer said, “OK, I’ll take them.” I hadn’t even posted it yet! After 10 minutes of transferring from my car to his truck, the BeBoxes had a new home, and better prospects for being refurbished and restored to their former, if not glory, at least functionality.

Rochelle hasn’t stopped smiling since I got back with an empty car. And I have to admit, with the CRAP efforts we’ve made in the last two months, it seems like we might recover the use of our third bedroom before the end of the year. That will make us both smile!

The problem is the wiring. Our house is a 100+ year old Victorian, and all of our phone wiring (except for the actual phone jacks) is on the outside of the house. And it’s old, and it’s been abused, and so on. So with all the rain we’ve been having, apparently water is getting into the wiring.

We’ve had PacBell out, more than once, and about the only thing they’re consistent about is that it’s our problem, not theirs. Even thought it’s on the outside of the house, it’s “inside” wiring because it’s past the junction box, and so our responsibility.

Anyway, it’s sunny and working now, and it looks like we might be done with the rain for a while. In the meantime, I’m calling wiring contractors, because I can’t take it when we don’t have internet access. I must be a junkie…or then again, maybe I need to have internet access to, like, work and earn a living…

It also took us forever to really finish bringing things back into the kitchen, and arranging them to our satisfaction. Two weeks ago we bought a new kitchen storage unit at IKEA, and that has made all the difference in being able to get things organized enough that we can work well in the new room.

The peninsula is cobbled together from three pieces of furniture: our old steel kitchen work table, the new IKEA kitchen storage unit, and a vintage seed cabinet that Rochelle found in an antique store about a year ago. It’s been moving around the house looking for a final resting place. The kitchen isn’t it — we’ll replace all of this in a year when we put in the real, permanent cabinets — but it’s working well in the new location.

The reason the new IKEA piece was so important to getting the kitchen settled was because we lost a huge amount of storage space when we rearranged the pantry by moving the door. We’ll get the pantry space back when we do the real cabinets, but for now, it’s holding less than half what fit in before. The Metro shelving that used to hold things we didn’t use often is now holding mostly things we use every day, i.e. all our pots and pans, cooking utensils, all our spices, etc.

The refrigerator in the back corner is still creating lots of dead space around it, because it’s so deep. Replacing it is the next major expense. And we’ll likely do it sooner rather than later, since all the manufacturers and stores have 12-month interest free loans and other incentives. We’re looking at getting a counter-depth unit, with the freezer on the bottom, and French doors for the refrigerator compartment. That will let us push it more fully into the corner, and better use the space around it.

These last two photos are stitched together from two shots each. It’s pretty easy to see the seams, unlike some of the earlier panoramas I did. I’ve got to get the hang of taking the shots from the same perspective, height, angle, etc. Might also try getting Preston to come by with his fancy camera and wide-angle lens; our little PowerShot isn’t really up to this kind of photography.

This one is the previous two stitched together:

And this one is of the kitchen entrance and our display shelf with all our champagne bottles:

Note: All of these photos can be clicked to view larger versions.

Worst of all, we forgot to take any photos during the event, especially of people in the kitchen. We’ll just have to try harder (or drink less) next time.

Keeping Up With The Jones Poverty Party

We started the year on a good note by getting rid of lots of crap, but alas, during a routinue appliance swap, we got sucked into a kitchen remodel. We’re only through Stage One (structural), and we’re broke.

So it’s time for a party! We’ll celebrate Rochelle’s birthday and our folly. Come by and make fun of us!

We’ll be serving cheap but good food like bread & dip, deviled eggs and…well…you haven’t lived ‘til you’ve had a fried baloney sandwich made on a Viking Range! We’ll have red wine & tequila (& mixers) from our existing but not insubstantial stash. We’ll also serve whatever beer is on sale that week.

From all you iPoders out there, Rochelle has a special birthday request — bring a playlist of not more than 10 songs from any time I have been alive (May 31, 1962 to present). They can be all from one year [extra points for great years: (birth)1962, (college)1980-84, (move to SF)1985, (move to 569)1992, (guess)1995, and (married Michael)1999], have a groovy theme, or just be 10 cool songs you love. We’ll take take turns jacking into the system, so it’s your chance to be a DJ.

And if you like dressing up, come as your favorite Jones (Davey, Shirley, Starr, Bridget?). Since I suspect there will be at least one Tom Jones, bring panties to throw.

PS – We highly, highly recommend coming via cab or public transit because parking is virtually impossible in the Lower Haight on weekend evenings. Seriously.

“Yeah. We spent into the grocery money.”

“Worse. We spent into the booze money.”

The day after Ken left, I spent hours and hours pole sanding the putty in the floor seams, and then painted the floor. We can’t actually decide what kind of flooring we want (plus we’re out of money), so we’re just painting the subfloor for now. You can sort of see the dark brown we’ve chosen in the photos below. The paint is polyurethane-reinforced, but the subfloor is soft plywood. We’ll see how well it all works out.

Because of the damn floor paint, which takes 24 hours before you can walk on it in socks, or apply another coat, and takes a week to cure fully, we haven’t been able to really move back into the kitchen. But, with the sink finally hooked up, we’ve been able to do dishes, and that has made us a bit happier — huge piles of dirty dishes have been oppressing both of us for some time.

It’s also nice to be able to flip a switch and get light in the room again. Actually, our old kitchen lighting was a single fixture, with two 60-watt bulbs. Our new lighting is a central fixture, three wall sconces, and a task lamp over the sink (which is the only light you can see fully in the photos above). All told, it’s 13 bulbs, and most of them are 60-watt. It’s as bright as the sun in the room (the yellow paint helps with that effect), and we’re pretty happy with that. Though the central fixture is kinda ugly; a poor decision on eBay, alas.

There’s still plenty to do to finish the room, and then lots and lots to do to move back into the kitchen properly. But we’re really, really close to being able to call it a kitchen again, instead of a project.

Which is good, because we have a party scheduled for the weekend after next. Yikes! Good thing Rochelle has three days off this weekend to work on the house…

Here are the stove and refrigerator in their permanent spots. The walls have been primed and patched, but not yet painted. And we’re having a weird problem with the refrigerator’s rollers, where it’s tilting backwards. We’ve already begun lusting after a new fridge, with an icemaker. Plus the white fridge is going to look so icky in the new kitchen…

Panning around the room a bit, the stove is nicely aligned with the new pantry door. You can see some painted over paint patches, where we were trying out different colors, and then had to start painting over them, so they wouldn’t bleed through later. And this shot gives a decent look at the new trim on the pantry, which is used on all three doorways and the two windows.

That weird blotch with the squiggle is actually a wad of bubble wrap, stuffed into the original vent hole in the chimney. We’ve not yet patched it, and it’ll probably be on our list for “when we get to it.” For now, the bubble wrap is keeping the chimney from sucking all the heat from the house. The squiggle is the electrical wiring for the stove hood, which is a down-the-road purchase.

Here’s the opposite corner of the room, where the sink has yet to be installed. The cold and hot input pipes are sticking out under the window on the right, with a stick balanced across them. And more paint patches. The first set were to see the colors next to the brick of the chimney. These were to see the colors in the light that comes in the windows. For now you’ll have to guess which color we picked. If you look closely, you can see that we’ve got the ceiling painted (just one coat at this point).

Here’s the before and after of the pantry doorway:

The difference is pretty subtle in the small photos, a little more apparent in the larger ones (click photos to view). Basically, the door now starts 16” from the wall, instead of 4”, and it’s much wider.

The difference isn’t subtle when you’re standing in the kitchen. We are incredibly pleased with how much it changes the room, by having the pantry be more a part of the room, rather than a hole hidden in the back of it. And if it looks this good before trim and paint (and all the rest of moving back into the kitchen), it’s going to be fabulous when we’re all done.

Like all decisions we’ve made, this one seems reasonable. And in the end, it’ll be the right thing. All we’ll really lose by moving the pantry door is some time (which is expensive) and some sheetrock (which is cheap).

What I’m struggling most with — aside from how to pay for it, of course — is where to move the Cat5 and speaker jacks, now that the cabinet in which the Sonos ZonePlayer audio unit was to be housed is no longer on that wall. Fortunately, with the extra expense of moving the door, it’ll be a while before I can buy it, so I’ve got some time to figure things out…

Yes, that’s no fewer than four valves, for “managing” the hot and cold water feeds to our kitchen sink. No dishwasher, no garbage disposal, no refrigerator ice water line. About the only thing that makes sense is the long vertical pipe which feeds the flats upstairs.

And we’d probably have left it that way, except we wanted to rotate the kitchen sink cabinets 90°, to put the sink directly in front of the kitchen window. Which our plumber sternly tried to convince us was a bad idea, mostly because it meant completely reworking all of the kitchen plumbing. Rochelle was not persuaded.

Et voila:

All that remains of the old, which you can see on the left, is the red-capped old drain line (which will get cut away tomorrow, so we can finish the drywall), and the cold line that (still) feeds the flats upstairs. Our own supply now comes from pipes which are in the basement, so that they can be entirely in the wall.

An especially observant person might notice that we had to cut away the lower part of our window to make room for the drain vent. It’s true, we’re losing our old window, and the new one will start about a foot above where the old one was. It’s scope creep of the worst kind, because we can’t afford to buy the box window we really want, so we’re paying to put in something we don’t really want, and which we hope to remove again one day.

The upside is that the old window never opened, but never fully closed, either. It was, as Ken (our primary contractor) pointed out, literally a vent, because of the large gap at the top where it was askew from the ’89 earthquake.

This is a bigger deal than you might imagine. Previously our kitchen had had zero insulation, but it stayed somewhat warm even at night, because the old stove had five not-terribly-efficient pilot lights. Indeed, we used to reheat leftovers by setting them on the griddle, without lighting it, and we warmed plates in the oven. The pilot lights were quite enough for those tasks!

But since the old stove was disconnected, the kitchen has been cold at night. And once the walls had all the lathe and plaster removed, it got even colder. We dreaded going in there as much for the chill as for the construction mess.

So we’re pretty excited about the R13. If we can just seal up the window sills more completely, and get the windows to close fully, we should be able to cope with our new stove having zero pilot lights.

Other progress made includes “getting the lid on” — the ceiling is sheetrocked. But probably the biggest deal, something I’m particularly proud of persevering to make happen, is the ventilation duct for our (forthcoming) hood for the stove:

The fisheye effect might make it tough to see, but it’s between the ceiling joists, and so it is entirely hidden now that the new ceiling is up. The alternative we were otherwise faced with was to go out along the side of the room, below the ceiling, and through or behind the cabinets that will eventually be wrapped around the refrigerator. It wasn’t going to look as nice, and it was going to cost us probably two cabinet shelves.

Next week: more sheetrock, then mudding, etc. But the big deal will be the plumbing. More on that in the next house post.

Two days later, it looked like this (not the same perspective, but you get the idea):

That was a week ago. We’ve made progress since then, but it’s still a gutted room. We’re hoping to start filling the house with sheetrock dust (it’ll sift down nicely on top of the plaster dust) before the week ends, but doubt if we’ll have four walls and a ceiling before mid-next-week…

Since that point, we’ve ripped out drywall, moved some pipes, and — most importantly — put our new (old/used) stove in place:

But, the real work starts on Monday. This weekend (indeed, tonight) we’re moving all of our stuff out of the kitchen. On Monday, the demolition crew will take everything out, except for some wonderful, 100 year-old wainscot (you can see it in the 2nd photo, covered in horrible paint and glue; it’s the lower part of the walls). We’ll be basically down to the studs.

On Wednesday, the electrician shows up, roughs in, and leaves. Then new plumbing, drywall, and we’ll have 80% of the project done.

With 80% left to do.

I am writing, of course, of our apparent decision to rip the kitchen out to the studs.

It started as a simple upgrade of our stove, as a gift from Rochelle’s mother. Then we got the bug for a “professional” style range. More money, but still a simple swap-out.

The structural changes started when we decided to take out the façade that hid the brick chimney in the kitchen. It seemed simple enough, taking out some sheetrock (we could do that ourselves), and then either cleaning and sealing the chimney, or painting over it. Add a little trim around the edges to cover the effects of ripping out the sheetrock, and we’d be done. Definitely more work than upgrading the stove, and we’d need expert assistance to clean the masonry, but still very much a limited project, with us doing the majority of the work.

Of course, it couldn’t be that simple. Taking out the façade revealed gas and water lines which need to be moved. And our floor is actually a platform over the original floor, added to level the kitchen back to true. It only went to the façade, not the chimney, so there’s a couple of square feet of floor that needs to be built up.

Added to that, Rochelle has always hated the cheap wallboard that runs around the bottom half of the kitchen wall. So we took that off the wall on the stove side of the room. Revealing wainscot that will need to be stripped of glue and paint, and then repainted, and new trim added above and below. And of course, with the walls in flux, it makes sense to redo the electrical on that side of the room, to get more than one outlet for the whole side. Especially since we’ve decided to move the refrigerator to that side of the room.

At this point, the contractor helping us with the heavy stuff said that we really ought to take the whole wall out, and if we take out the ceiling too, we can install a ventilation shaft for the hood we’re planning for the range, add wiring for more ceiling lighting, and level the ceiling to match the floor. And if we’re taking out the ceiling and half the walls, well…

At every step, the decision to proceed seemed reasonable. But inch by inch, we’ve gone from an appliance upgrade to a brand new kitchen. We think we’ve got a way to do the whole thing in two or three stages, which makes it possible for us to afford it, but then again, I really did think we were not doing a remodel in the first place.

The only thing keeping me from utter despair is the knowledge that we will cherish the new kitchen, in much the same way we cherish our remodeled bathroom. That was something we scope-crept into also, when the engagement bathtub Rochelle wanted was too big for the room, but it’s been the single best investment we’ve made together, in terms of the happiness it brings us. I’m sure the kitchen remodel will turn out the same way.

If we survive it.

New Year’s Eve Daytime Open House and Freecycle Party

First, we’ve missed you all so much. We’ve been so busy with work, school and travel, that we’re ashamed to admit that we didn’t have a single party in the Year 2004. Well, there’s still time so we can’t have that!

We know you all have active social lives and no doubt already have plans to paint the town, go to a fab party — or barricade yourselves in your own home. So here’s what we propose: come by during the afternoon or early evening for a relaxed visit, and have appetizers and tea or wine at our house before your main event for the evening.

And we have a planned a fun, interactive activity — a Freecycle Exchange!

Some of you may be familiar with Rochelle’s crap-o-holic tendencies and ongoing battle with shit-nacks, and who has visited us and not been dumbfounded at Michael’s BeBoxes…all 14 of them. Well, our NY resolution is to get rid of half of our possessions! (Or at least half the crap…and all the BeBoxes.) Yeehaw! Our due date is Rochelle’s birthday in May.

We have a four-pronged plan of attack: the last stage is taking stuff to Goodwill, the third stage is posting stuff on Freecycle.org (a site where people give stuff to strangers), the second stage is selling a few things on eBay (a site where people sell stuff to strangers), and…drum roll please…our opening salvo in the war on unnecessary possessions is…giving them to you!

From 1-7pm on December 31st (and until we truck it to Goodwill), our dining room will be full of clothes, shoes, purses, hats, books, a feather mattress, videotapes, curtains, household and kitchen items, and who knows what else, free for the taking. Even the cats are getting into the spirit and have offered up some of their toys and a scratcher.

And, to make this all the more exciting, we’ll even let you in on the offer: if you have perfectly nice possessions that you’d like someone else to be able to enjoy, bring them by. Whatever is left on Saturday will be taken to Goodwill or posted on Freecycle.org. (Note: if you bring something, please take something. ;-)

Now it’s certainly likely the party will go on after 7pm and you are welcome to come by anytime and stay as long as you like, but I want to assure you this is not an ambush, we don’t want you to put on your beer goggles and wake up next to something that you would have never brought home had you been sober. That would never cross our minds. Honest.

RSVP is preferred so we’ll know how much vittles to prepare.

PS: I know that giving stuff away is a sign someone’s considering suicide, but really, we not that depressed about the election results — we just have a lot of stuff.