more of the same

mathew figured out the leak: an incorrect installation of exterior siding. on sunday we covered the wall openings with gypboard.

(left) the original plaster wall! (right) installing gypboard.

mathew drilling holes in the 2nd hallway for blow-in cellulose insulation. the holes go between each stud. once those top holes are drilled he drops a string and plumb inside to find where horizontal pieces might block the insulation, then he drills more holes below that.

we decided to strip the old paint and plaster skim coat off this third wall. pounds/gallons and years of paint were removed. then we stripped the 2 layers of wallpaper. the exposed plaster walls are quite beautiful in a rustic way, they look like walls in old buildings in europe.

saturday activities

mathew inspecting the ceiling and drilling holes for blow-in insulation we’ll install next weekend.

my cousin larry was back to paint the closet door he sanded last weekend. he ran a marathon in the city the next morning.

mathew installing batt-insulation above the doors to keep out drafts. i spent the day stripping paint then stripping wall paper.

i finally got a good look at the old wallpaper. mathew removing wallpaper.

dragging my feet

there were so many photos from this weekend that i’ve been putting off making a post. i was going to post the photos and no text and say, “figure it out!” but now that i’m typing…

i’m still in the middle of “destroying” this room and making it as ugly as possible. after the sanding it was time for the loose plaster to come down.

i screwed in plaster washers to hold cracks and edges in place.

my cousin larry came over to help; i put him to work sanding this slatted door from upstairs. (left, photo taken after the sanding was done. he’ll be back next weekend to paint it!) it was nice having someone work with me in my demolition room. mathew has spent the last few weekends, mostly in the garage, working on electrical/rewiring stuff. in the evening another cousin, jon and his wife florence and their two kids, makayla and malachi dropped by to see the house and go out to dinner with larry. of course, as usual, i forgot to take photos of our guests… and they brought yummy snacks. (right) here i am sitting with a wall where i’ve removed the plaster in a perfect line so that the new repairing gypboard can be screwed to half of the stud and the remaining plaster can be screwed to the other half. (does that make any sense?)

mathew installing yet another electrical outlet and finding a weird panel attached to the wall where he thinks a heater might have once lived. and we also discovered this weird green wallpaper on two of the walls in this room. previous owners had put a plaster skim coat over it but it wasn’t holding that well and easily chipped off. so the room gets even uglier…

my sunday started with a lot of plaster skim-coat removal. after making a royal mess i got tired of working by myself and went down to the garage to see what mathew was doing.

i found him in the garage causing trouble… i mean cutting lots and lots of holes in the ceiling. adding outlets upstairs means running wires in the floor below the living room. he also spent the entire day doing rewiring and fixing electrical stuff that wasn’t done correctly by the previous owners. (do you see a pattern?)

mathew thought it would be better for my morale if i worked downstairs with him in the garage. so then instead of demolition i was put on construction duty, cutting and installing 2x4s for a partial retrofit of the garage. there are these precariously placed steel beams in the garage that in an earthquake could fall over. i helped to make them safer (and felt quite manly in the process) by securing them to the floor above.

(left) after that bit of retrofitting i replaced the mesh on a window screen. (right) at 7:30 i’d had enough fun in the garage, but mathew kept rewiring until close to 10 pm. it wasn’t something that could wait, our tenant would have been without electricity!

hope everyone had a nice weekend. (next time i’ll cut down on the sarcasm…)

last weekend

hey everyone, i’ve been really sick and mathew has been really busy with his job, so here’s what happened last weekend.

the bathroom vanity now has drawers!

because of my lack of electrical knowledge i had a bit of a dangerous shock while stripping paint… my paint scraper slipped and must have hit something inside of the open outlet and there were huge sparks. (left) can you see the scorch marks at the lower right of the outlet? (right) and see that crater at the lower edge of the paint scraper? the sparks made that! luckily i was wearing gloves, a respirator mask, glasses and headphones. mathew says because it sparked against the outside of the plug, this is good because it means the box is grounded.

(left) meanwhile mathew was outside grinding off the bits that hold the useless mini half-gates at the bottom of our stairs. (right) and inspecting what the next steps will be for the cracked plaster wall in the living room downstairs.

a lot of the electrical outlets in this room were added more recently by a really BAD contractor. they were all placed at varying heights in the baseboards. they installed them by chopping out parts of the baseboard and then filling in the space with plaster. NOT pretty (see my scorched outlet photo above.) mathew is planning on putting them above the baseboards and then replacing the missing trim. (right) and while mathew and i are busy with demolition, scraping, sanding and general chaos, our friend and temporary downstairs tenant, mark was dancing tango with his girlfriend atsuko in the kitchen.

mathew up a very long ladder trying to uncover the reason for a leak.

(left) here i’m sanding to expose covered cracks in the plaster walls. (right) proudly standing next to my ugly work.

strange san francisco summer

instead of the standard summer cold and fog we’ve been experiencing heat waves along with the rest of the bay area this summer. the garden likes it…

there are also lots of mystery plants that are also thriving. last night we harvested cilantro and two types of basil.

i’m not sure if it’s normal for our neighborhood or because of high fire danger, but every time anything happens lots of trucks and fire engines show up! i counted 6 today, with one in our driveway, but i don’t know what the emergency was.

where did the weekend go?

sunday night mathew and i were both wondering where the weekend went. we both felt like we got very little done. but in looking at these photos, we sure kept busy.

(right) mathew took the drywall off the outside of the bathroom so he could wire an outlet into the inside of the medicine cabinet. (right) attaching a veneer strip to a vanity shelf.

(left) medicine cabinet with a hole cut for the electrical outlet. (right) our sonicare toothbrush, the reason for the outlet.

i spent the entire weekend stripping paint off trim in the living room downstairs.

drawers for the upstairs bathroom vanity.

years ago mathew had read about drilling holes in glass and was excited to finally get to try the technique on our medicine cabinet mirror. (left) he enclosed the area with a wall of putty then filled it with water to keep the glass cool to avoid breaking it.

he said the process was really slow, but it worked! (right) with knob attached.

the 4th

on the 4th of july we had dinner at our friends’ house in north beach. it had nothing to do with the 4th, we were just having a casual dinner with two good friends we haven’t seen in a while. most of the city was at the wharf for the fireworks show. later that night we could hear the fireworks but from what i’ve heard, the show was pretty much just colored clouds and fog.

just before midnight we made our way back to our neighborhood, which was still in the middle of celebrating (which it has been doing for the last few weeks…) there were mini fireworks shows going on all around us. we tried to photograph some from our bedroom window but they looked better in real life.

hope everyone had a nice 4th.