turtle + mole – Page 10 – home in progress

the ALC ride begins!

mathew and i woke up at 3:45 this morning. we were at the cow palace by 4:30. there were yummy breakfast foods to greet us and lots of tired but happy faces. there was a nervous, excited energy in the air as 2000 cyclists were getting ready to start day 1 of their ride to LA.

mathew and his training ride buddy, david. david jokingly calls mathew his “straight boyfriend.” he thinks mathew is amazing and is so in awe that heteros like him will train and fundraise to help end AIDS.

waiting for the opening ceremony to start.

as part of the opening ceremony there was a warm-up and stretching session for all of the cyclists. here, mathew and his bike-buddy, steven (they have the same bike!) do a group stretch.

during the ceremony positive pedalers (riders who are HIV positive) walked down the middle of the auditorium carrying banners that all the riders had signed the day before. in between the banners was a bicycle with no rider, symbolizing all the people we have lost to AIDS and the motivation for this fundraising ride, to end HIV/AIDS for good.

it was a teary moment as everyone stood holding hands. soon after, a very exuberant woman came out to change the mood, talking about how excited everyone’s butts were to get on their bikes, and how this will be the last time their butts will be feeling this good for the rest of the week!

i said good bye to mathew and he disappeared into the crowd of cyclists anxious to get on the road.

the first of the riders! in the foreground is our buddy alex in a green roadie t-shirt, he’s volunteering with the ride for the week.

some cyclists are serious athletes, some are newbees and most just want to have fun. can you see the teddy bear on the bike (above right)?

there was a creepy camera drone flying and hovering above the cyclists as they rode out.

in my excitement when i finally glimpsed mathew, i was yelling his name and almost forgot to take a photo! this is the only photo i caught of him on his bike. but he’s got a big smile on his face! i think he could hear me yelling, and i’m sure it feels amazing to start the ride with hundreds of fans cheering you on.

a photo with a couple of my roadie friends, alex and alan. i’ll catch up with everyone again on saturday in los angeles for the closing ceremony.

mathew will spend the morning and early afternoon riding on highway 1 along the coast. the first night’s camp is set up in santa cruz. you can read a description of each day’s route here: http://www.aidslifecycle.org/life-on-the-event/route/
and there are route sheets you can download if you want to see all the stops mathew will be making.

all week mathew has been worrying about the weather because it was forecast to be cold and drizzly leaving santa cruz tomorrow. hopefully it clears up because it’s beautiful and sunny here in san francisco today.

and in case you’re not on facebook, here are training ride photos i’ve been posting up until now.

playing on a little kid’s bike.

a short ride in tahoe wearing the jersey he got for reaching his $5k fundraising goal.

the official training ride the following day turned into “snowpocolypse”! the temp dropped to 32 degrees and it snowed for the last 20 miles of the ride! mathew was one of the few who actually completed the ride and didn’t experience any hypothermia.

i doubt there will be snow during the coming week, but if any rider gets too tired and can’t finish the day’s ride, there are sag cars to pick them up and carry them to camp. that’s what makes this a ride, and not a race.

from one of his last bay area training rides. he’s known for his “bunny ears” those fuzzy things on his helmet straps. they look strange but actually cut down on wind noise, so when other riders are yelling and struggling to hear each other, mathew seems to be able to hear conversations just fine.

i’ll post more photo updates on facebook and on this blog. hope everyone has a good week!

Custom Moulding

I started out trying to just re-use the door that used to be in laundry room.

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It isn’t a beautiful door, just a hollow core door, but at least it wasn’t painted. The new door needs to be narrower and slightly taller than the old door; so I trimmed the width, and added a piece at the bottom. When I was testing its fit, it looked so dull and out of character for this house, that I decided to go and get an old door from Building Resources. No question why this is taking me so long!

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Above left you see the door I bought. It’s in pretty poor shape and has been painted and dinged up quite badly. It’s going to be a project to make this door nice.

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First I stripped all the paint with the heat gun. You can see there are some deep gashes from where the door must have rubbed against something. There are also screw holes and dents in lots of places. Still a lot more to do to make this door nice.

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Meanwhile, in the laundry room, I’ve almost finished putting up all the trim. To match the molding for the rest of the house, a local custom milling company used a sample of the old molding and duplicated it. In a time of poorly made, imported, machine made stuff (our couch for instance), Lowpenski Moulding are one of the treasures still operating from old San Francisco. They spell “Moulding” the English way — hence the title of the post.

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Still needs painting, but it came out really nice. Above right is one of the complicated fiddly details that I enjoy.

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For the last few years, our couch has had a squeaky, loose arm. Sitting across from it, I noticed that the arm looked like it was starting to come off, and the couch was sagging. With Arwen’s help, I took off the fabric on the bottom of the couch to find the problem: The frame is made of particle board, and was broken.

I don’t know for sure if we broke it, or if it arrived broken from Macy’s, but here’s a clue: There were two layers of fabric stapled over one another onto the bottom of the couch. The inner layer was torn (we bought the couch new.)

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I glued, screwed and clamped new wood inside the couch, and bolted it together again. It should hold now. You can see Bella exploring inside the couch on the left. She needed an “emergency” shower when she came out – covered in strange powdery particles of filling/foam/etc that we didn’t want her to eat.

Above right, Arwen is enjoying a blanket that mole is knitting.

Here’s a picture of Bella trying on another one of my shirts:

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happy birthday bro

Happy Birthday Misha from turtle + mole…

Janeen Mathew 10yr anniversary

We wish you many cookies…

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Or maybe one really big cookie…

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arwen and bella send you purrrrrs…

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Cuteness Awards Continued

Janeen just caught some photos of Bella working on her cutest cat award: Bella decided to get into my ‘Obama’ hoodie:
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She liked it so much that she went to sleep inside.

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I finished up installing the wainscot. Now I need to get the moldings for around the doors and windows.
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I always enjoy looking back at old photos of this project. The photos above on the right are of the same wall. The lower photo is from February 2012.

Laundry Room Wainscot

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Arwen has been working on her modeling again… trying to get a nomination for “Cutest Cat.”

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Never outdone, Bella’s doing her best…

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You know, humans aren’t the only ones obsessed with computers.

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We got a real tree again this year. My family came over for a Christmas celebration, and we managed to get the tree up a good couple of hours before everyone showed up. Arwen decided that this present was for her. I think she knew that Janeen would like the purple paper.

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Here’s Janeen, Eva and Leo comparing stripy socks.

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Christmas dinner around our little table: Seats eight.

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We even took a conventional family picture. That’s Mia on Skype on Dad’s phone.

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I did two batches of beer last month: an English Brown Ale, and a Chocolate Stout. I plan to give most away as thank you gifts for sponsors of my AIDS/LifeCycle ride. Let me know if you want some!

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Arwen and Bella are very “helpful” when it comes to making the bed. They love to play “thumbtack” when you move the sheet.

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OK, so this blog was supposed to be about working on the house. Well, not been doing a lot, but I did tear out the old tile flooring in the laundry room (no photos), and put in cement board ready for new tile. Looks cleaner already.

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Continuing with my goal of reusing old wood, I have a pile of short scraps of old wood that is still left over. To make baseboards (nice, thick, big baseboards), I cut the pieces of wood into identical sized strips, planed and glued them together. Here’s one of the boards, using lots of clamps.

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Before and after going through the planer. I routed the triple bead into one line of the wood strips before glueing together. On the right, I’ve filled the nail holes, and the board is smooth after going through the thickness planer a few times.

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Here’s the baseboard going in, and the start of the wainscot. I’m finally using the recycled wood I made and talked about back a couple of months ago. I still need to make boards for the window sill. I’ll probably buy molding for around the windows, though.

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Happy and Peaceful New Year, from turtle, mole, arwen and bella.

the BIG “life” post

there’s a lot of “life” that happens when we’re not working on the house. i’ve been meaning to post these photos for months…

back in may i helped mark (our friend and downstairs tenant) redesign his cafe website. this involved a photo shoot where we got to eat and/or take home everything that was shot. definitely one of my better projects!

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(left) some of the beautiful, delicious food. (right) it was a late night and mathew was probably a little bored.

to see the finished photos and website. click -> epicenter cafe.

fun fact: i also helped choose the color palette for the cafe when it opened in 2008.

an animated collection of mathew’s “selfies.” these were taken when misha was visiting in may. i could have made the image larger but i didn’t want to scare you.

i’m no food photographer but sometimes i take photos of stuff i make. (left) poached eggs on english muffins. (right) vegan ginger cookies!

ice cream is a regular, if not daily occurrence in mathew’s life. look how happy he is making an ice cream sandwich with luna and larry’s coconut bliss and my vegan chocolate chip cookies.

in june i went to seattle to visit my “other family.” i also visited the new chihuly garden glass exhibit.

a dramatic show. beneath the space needle.

while in seattle i caught up with my old friend erik. we had a very touristy day which included the pike place market, china town, souvenir shopping, ice cream cones and a ride on the new ferris wheel at the pier.

here i am with two of my “little sisters” elissa and wylie up at crystal mountain, where they spend every winter skiing.

the same day i flew back from seattle, leonora and dan arrived from boston. (left) dan, leo and their friend andy, starving, waiting for burritos. (right) lovely handmade gifts from leo and dan.

while leo and dan were still visiting, mathew, the cats and i took off for tahoe with my parents. the 4th of july is CRAZY on our street so it’s always good to get the cats away from loud, booming, unpredictable explosions. but they HATE the drive.

i bought them “thundershirts” to help calm them down. supposedly the constant pressure is soothing to animals (and humans), sort of like a mini straight jacket. it helped but they still hated the drive. (above right) bella crying, arwen cowering on the floor. 🙁

ah, the rock cabin. like a giant cat tree. here they are relaxing on the spiral staircase.

mathew and arwen outside.

leaving day, the thundershirts are back on. and for anyone who thinks my cats are fat. the thundershirts prove it’s all FUR! 🙂

home after the long drive. snacks for humans and cats.

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in july we met up with our friends midori and andy and their son adrian. all three of them celebrate july birthdays. we had an ethiopian feast in oakland.

what are those?? ninja cookies! (and some brownies.)

in august mathew and his sensei khim celebrated passing their belt tests. khim is now a 5th degree black belt and mathew is 3rd degree. they had a party. i made ninja cookies. 🙂

morning glories in the back yard. and the most amazing fuji apples from our little tree. mark called them “rock star apples.”

an evening at terrapin crossroads in san rafael with mathew, mark and mike, visiting from austria. good food, live music and grateful dead memorabilia on the walls.

and what is THIS?

in august we went ziplining in the sonoma redwoods with our friends bob and irene. that’s mathew above.

that’s me! the location was beautiful and the ziplining was really fun.

in october misha and aja visited. here we are having an impromptu picnic in the backyard.

misha and aja were visiting because aja had a work event in san francisco and mathew and i got to go too! here are the brothers in a photo booth at the autodesk gallery, where the event took place. i love this photo. 🙂

a feature of the photo booth was being able to add filters and characters.

here we all are. but aja and i got distorted a bit being so close to the camera. that’s not how we really look!

and it wouldn’t be a “life” blog post without extra cat cuteness! they look like they’re taking a nap but in reality bella (on the right) was sleeping and arwen decided to join her. i’m not sure if arwen just wants to be with her sister or wants to steal the cat bed. a few minutes after this photo was taken, bella had left the bed to arwen who seemed quite happy to curl up in it alone.

bella enjoying my new knitting bag that i got at aja’s sustainability book launch party.

i just realized i still have lots more “life” photos to share but this post has gotten way too long. look for “life” part 2 coming soon! xoxo

planer vs heat gun

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Sometimes Bella likes to lie half hanging off shelves. No problem with heights, I guess!

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I did some more wiring. The garage was on the same circuit as much of the downstairs unit. And with all my fancy power tools… the breaker would trip. I added four circuits. Two for the garage, and two for our upstairs kitchen (which was also on the same circuit!) But it meant taking off more ceiling, and lots of conduit bending and pulling wire.

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Stringing the wire through the conduit took much longer than I thought it would. As usual, what I thought was a one day project was really a four day project.

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And now that the girls are three — they can go into the garage. Here’s Bella inspecting the conduit bender.

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Here’s Bella doing her best impression of an otter. Her hairy belly makes here look really big. heh. And Arwen taking a nap on her favorite blanket.

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Mole, Arwen, and knitting. Cozy! Arwen is on my lap as I write this. She has a unique squeaky rattling loud purrr…

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The wood that was the laundry room siding was thickly covered in flaking paint. Before I put the wood on the soffit, we stripped it with a heat gun, and it took many hours. I decided to try another (faster) method for the rest of the wood: a planer. For the first pass, I hooked the dust collection up to a HEPA vacuum to try to catch the (probably leaded) paint dust I created.

The process generated two full garbage bags of paint chips, and wore through a set of planer blades (paint is quite abrasive and I hit a few nails.) But I stripped about 300 linear feet of wood (both sides) in one day. Of course, this method only works on flat boards, but the heat gun takes about 10-20 min per foot per side.

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Here’s a picture of the pile of wood part way through planing. Some of the old wood is really beautiful tight grained wood. There are some rotten bits, but I’ll trim them off.

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Here’s another photo of some of the boards after planing. Next step is to rout a decorative edge, and edge the boards so they fit together neatly for the wainscot in the laundry room.

And now for a photo of Bella relaxing in the sun:

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Plastering Done

I mentioned before how good Arwen is at shredding paper. Well, she finally got her paws on a bill. I had to piece it back together with tape. “My cat ate it!” Good thing mole is really good at puzzles and found all the pieces.

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Above left: Unshredding. Above right, looking down through the skylight while I was plastering the ceiling.

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I set up boards over saw horses so that I could reach the ceiling. Plastering the ceiling went quite well. I followed all the directions: “Blue” board as the base, then “Kal Kote” base coat, then “Uni-Kal” veneer plaster.

One problem I’d always had when plastering was there would be small patches of the plaster that would come loose as I was trying to polish the plaster. It was as if that section did not set up as fast. I’ve finally learned that when putting on plaster, the first pass must be very thin – basically scrubbed onto the surface so it’s almost translucent. If it’s too thick, it will get air bubbles under it, and that’s what was happening to me. Then, from the same batch, I come back and build the coat of plaster up to about 1/16 inch thick. This is the first time I’ve done that (the manufacturer’s instructions say to do that — it was just never clear to me how thin the first pass must be). It worked like a dream.

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So now the plastering is done in the laundry room. Here’s mole and Arwen coming to inspect right after I’d finished the walls. The plaster was just setting up; it goes a brownish grey until all the water evaporates.

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Then Arwen decided to get up to her old tricks and ran up onto the roof. Here she is walking along the ridge, with the sun setting behind her. Must be a great view.

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Not to be outdone, Bella jumped up onto the handrail and walked back and forth. Then she walked into the open window of the laundry room.

Tile Shopping

We had a week of hot weather for San Francisco. The poor cats have been losing their summer coats and getting their winter coats at the same time.

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Above is Bella trying to stay cool.

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Continuing on the shower rebuild in the laundry room bathroom, I made the shower pan. Because I’m using Kerdi as the waterproofing membrane, I use their special drain flange, and cast it into a bed of mortar.

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Above left is the finished shower pan. Above right mole is putting bondo onto the pressure treated wood we used for the back stairs. The wood gets incised when it’s treated, so has all those holes all over it. Looks much better when filled.

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Above: Before and after filling with Bondo.

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Over a year ago I made some balusters for the back stairs. I just got them primed, and will put them up soon.

But the most interesting thing we’ve done lately is go to Fireclay tile and we bought fancy tile for the bathroom. Above right are two nice decorative pieces we’ll add in. The only downside is that this tile is $$expensive$$ !!

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We went to their ‘boneyard’ and bought a couple of boxes of seconds at about 1/4 the price. Now we need to figure out exactly how much more we need and order it.

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Some other tile we looked at was at Latch tile in San Francisco. The person working there was super helpful and patient. Above left, cool shapes, but how to use it? Above right, these tiles are beautiful (reminded mole of her parent’s house) — maybe we’ll use a few as accents.

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We’ve been watching a lot of Downton Abbey lately… Funny, with all the fancy stuff “upstairs”, the thing that caught our eye was the tile in the kitchen. We may do something like this on the floor in the laundry room & bathroom. Above right Bella came to inspect right before I started plastering.

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This is the first time I’ve used basecoat plaster. It’s similar to plaster, but has sand in it. It goes on slightly rough so that the plaster sticks to it properly. Above you can see the ceiling after the basecoat is on and drying.

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On top of the basecoat, I put a finish coat of veneer plaster. I forgot how much I enjoy plastering. Yes, I did get quite a bit in my face and on the floor while working on the ceiling. Still, it’s very satisfying to start out the day with rough uneven surfaces, and end with perfectly smooth white plaster.

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In the laundry room, I taped all the joints. I don’t need to be very careful with the taping, because it will be covered in veneer plaster.

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Next: More plaster!

from cobbler to cement board

Our peach tree gave us lots of peaches this year. The tricky thing with peaches–at least the ones on our tree–is they all ripen at the same time.

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The peaches were not as sweet as last year, so Janeen made lots of peach cobbler. MMmmm. Especially good with vanilla coconut bliss.

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Arwen still loves to get into bags. I think she’s amazed at how a space can be created out of a folded up piece of fabric. She loves to be carried around in the bag, too. Oh, and we don’t need a shredder anymore: Arwen does a fine job of it. We have to be careful never to leave anything important out, though.

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Here’s a photo of me and Bella (above left.) Arwen and Bella are having a discussion about who gets to shred this piece of paper.

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This is an unusual view: Looking straight up at the ceiling of the bathroom-to-be beside the laundry room. I’ve used cement board on all walls and the ceiling.

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Above left is the shower with the niche, and above right is the space for the toilet.

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Here is mole painting on the plaster weld. I’m going to plaster the walls on two sides, and tile the remaining walls. Above right I’ve done a first pass with alkali resistant mesh and plaster over the joints. I forgot how much I enjoy plastering.

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Here’s the skylight in the laundry room. I finally put the drywall around the inside of the skylight. The photo is taken from two opposite sides of the skylight. Above right you can see I have curved the piece where the ceiling steps back (see above left on the right side). Next step is plastering – not sure if I know how to plaster a curve. This will be a challenge.