Author: janeen

we didn’t make any major progress this weekend but got a lot of little things done.

i cleaned and repaired the blinds in the office and took down the valance and curtain rails. (20+ years of dust?) we’ll keep these blinds for now until i figure out what i want instead of them. hopefully soon i’ll get some new paint on those walls.

mathew temporarily fixed the sad, sagging deck in the backyard.

and pulled up the floorboards to get to the plumbing in the upstairs bathroom. he did some re-routing with the copper pipes in the garage. the previous plumber had some strange, inefficient methods. i know nothing about plumbing, but hot water shouldn’t travel twice the width of the house then go up and around the exterior of the house, should it?

is there anything this guy can’t fix? last week mathew also repaired the ancient stove in the downstairs kitchen. now we can cook downstairs! as good as the mexican food is around here, there are only so many tacos and burritos you can eat before you need some variety.

it’s columbus day and i guess some people have it off? mathew is away at work and i’ll soon be sitting in front of my computer, in my pink office with clean, functional blinds.

we had helpers today! in one of the downstairs rooms, my parents pulled up carpet.

(left) and linoleum tiles… under the underlayment (right) is old fir. mathew says this is called the sub-floor, not meant to be the final layer but often kept exposed in old houses and can be quite nice when finished. we may or may not add hardwood. we’re not sure what condition it’s in but the part that was uncovered was painted red.

and upstairs my cousin larry was helping scrape “chocolate” adhesive and wallpaper off the plaster walls. he was in town for the weekend and thought he’d put in a few hours of help.

the five of us had lunch at a local, very popular, hole-in-the-wall mexican restaurant. on the way back we looked at murals, another tourist attraction in the mission district. thank you so much larry, mom and dad for all your help today. i hope you’re not too sore tomorrow.

after our helpers left, we came back for more scraping and sanding. this new sander and wet/dry vac are amazing, the dust gets sucked directly into the vacuum cleaner. dustless sanding. mathew started to repair the plaster and kept wondering if we should have torn down all the plaster and put up dry wall. but what a mess that would have been, and more waste. and how many people actually have plaster walls these days? eventually the plan is to break into these walls and add built-in shelves and cabinets.

my hands and arms are so tired i almost didn’t post tonight. hope everyone had a nice weekend!