Ah, the things you find hiding behind nailed wood panels...

Hello Lazy Web. What is this thing?




If you squeeze it in the direction the arrows below indicate, it compresses a little bit, with the prongy-side sliding into the metal casing.


In the Dungeon, there is a panel labeled "Phone Connection: Remove Screws Only". Of course, it's nailed shut, with no screws in sight. After pulling out the nails, it turns out it's an old school screw-down connector; actually not that interesting. But down in the bottom of the box I found those two things up above.

Anybody have a guess?

House Project #6: From dungeon to...slightly less scary

So we have a room off the side of our garage. No one seems to know what its intended purpose was. There has been mass speculation as to what its use is and what we should use it for.
-Grow room (there are multiple outlets half way down the wall and multiple places for lights from the ceiling. However, as we found out yesterday, none of the outlets actually work)
-Wine cellar (there's actually two vents that expose it to the outside as well as a window. Plus we already have a wine fridge...)
-Hobbies room (this is how it was staged when we looked at it. Complete with yoga mat, artist's easel and paintings hung on the wall)
-Vampire/zombie slayer training room (the room is actually quite long and narrow so would be good to practice the crossbow)
-Bad dog/child/guest room

While all ideas are interesting we are, at the moment, choosing to go down the boring path of using it for storage. (Although we did use it as a Kiwi kennel for a few days while workmen were in and out of the house and backyard.)

What to do?

Not sure if Kiwi approves...

House Project #5: Paintin' the town with primer

Yesterday Ben and I spent the morning finishing up taping the bedroom and putting on the primer. We went with a primer tinted closer to the color that we want to end up going with. Needless to say we are not pros at this put I think once we paint the final layer it will look okay. The color certainly brightness up the room. We definitely needed the paper on the floor, because well...we're just super messy like that.

House Project #4: Let there be light!, cont...

So the building of the skylight continues! I must say that is does add a great deal more light into the room without being too bright. We're still planning on getting/making a shade for those guests who like to take dark naps during the day.
And it's successfully weather its first storm as we had quite the downpour last Saturday. Luckily the window part was already in (as opposed to the day before where there was just a tarp covering the giant hole in our roof).

House Project #3: A good ole fashioned shower raising, cont

So I bet you thought we were done with the shower right? Well here is the beginnings of a sun tunnel that will placed into the ceiling so we'll have lots of nice sunlight turning the day.

House Project #2: Pest, pest go away...gone!

So the pest work on the corner of the house was finally completed last Tues! I must say they did a great job finishing and I can't even tell that any work was done there. Yay for a structurally sound house!

House Project #5: Paintin' the town red cont.

So we finally made it to Home Depot this weekend and picked up some paint samples that we liked from our color swatches. We decided to paint swatches at various places around the room and have possibly come to a decision! Until then...fun with paint!

Swatches, swatches everywhere

It was late, what else can I say...

In the mean time we're still clearing out of our old apartment. We are down to just a few boxes left of kitchen stuff and to finish cleaning the kitchen and we will be out!

Moved in!

So yesterday we hired a couple of guys to help us move all of our big furniture. Ben had to drive all the way to Mill Valley in order to pick up the Uhaul (yay living in a university town during graduation week!). It worked for the best though as we needed to pick up a ladder over on that side of the Bay anyway.
We had been slowly moving boxes over in our car throughout the last few weeks but there was still plenty to move yesterday! I think it only took 3 hours and two trips to move 95% of our stuff over. Of course since we're still having work done on the bedrooms all of our stuff and is either in the garage or in the dining room. We are actually sleeping in the living room at the moment! (Good incentive to finally buy some paint for the bedroom!)

I'm not too sure how tomorrow morning will go while I try to get ready for work considering that most of my clothes are in bags (both the traveling and garbage kind).
There is still a couple of car loads of stuff left at the apartment and plenty of cleaning to do. (I think I could fashion an entire Kiwi replica out of the dog hair that is on the floor...)

Things we've learned in the last 24 hours:
1. We didn't have hot water.
2. We didn't have gas to heat the water (see above).
3. There was a small earthquake not too far away yesterday that probably triggered our earthquake shut off valve.
4. How to turn the gas back on.
5. How to relight the pilot on the water heater.
6. Our refrigerator is not magnetic. (This is perhaps the most traumatic and sad discovery I have made. What am I going to do with all of our cool magnets?!)

House Project #4: Planning a Skylight

What would building be without pretty pictures? We had measured the hole in the ceiling (24" square) and the height to the roof (20" on the high side, 14" in the low), and decided we didn't want to open the ceiling any closer to the light currently there. I got to spend this morning playing trigonometer, drawing tringles, deciding on angles, taking sines and tangents to calculate lengths, and finally figured that a 30° angle, a 20° angle, and two 10° angles would make our skylight the prettiest. I had to draw a picture to make sure my spoken version made sense to the folks building the framing.

Yay Pictures!

p.s. I can't post the working page; it's too messy. well, maybe later.

Ethernet? Wireless? The Networked House of the FUTURE!

Ok, while Christy's off replacing door knobs, cataloging paint, and doing other useful things, I was drawing pretty pictures. I want a couple of things out of the internet connection in our house.

• open, unencrypted guest wireless that won't take all my bandwidth and can't see private stuff (like backups)


• secure, encrypted wireless network for my laptop


• wired ethernet for high speed media transfer for photos and movies


• transparent backups on the encrypted wireless and ethernet networks


• use equipment I've already got

Here it is*:



This is the design, but I haven't worked through the configuration yet. I'm probably not going to until after we move. Expect another post here in another 2-3 weeks with results.

(created using Gliffy)

House geeking

So there were a number of old paint cans left in the garage when we got the house. Since we were doing work that might require needing some touch up paint or repainting I figured it would be a good idea to go through the cans and either throw them out if they were empty/too old or figure out what color they were. It only took an hour or so but I was able to have a good size "get rid of" pile and an orderly sampling of colors. There are definitely some colors that I have no idea where they occur in the house. Interesting...

Gratuitous Kiwi photo

House Project #5: Paintin' the town red

Okay so we're not painting anything red...but our bedroom is a dark color that we just don't like much (I think someone called it Baby Poo/Puke Brown). Plus whomever painted it didn't do a very good job so it's a good excuse to paint it a color we like. These are our initial choices...

House Project #4: Let there be light!

So our second bedroom is going to be a second bedroom/office, mainly Ben's office. Because it's tucked into the back of the house surrounded by trees and an apartment building it stays fairly dark during the day. What better way to lighten it up than with a skylight! So currently there's a large square cut out of our ceiling while we figure out what shape we want the light well to be...

House Project #3: A good ole fashioned shower raising

We knew after buying the house that one of the first projects we wanted to do was to make the ceiling in the shower higher. For the average height person the shower ceiling would probably have never been an issue but for those of us being around 6 feet washing our hair was going to be an issue. We had noticed that all of the ceilings surrounding the shower were 1-2 feet higher than the shower itself. So we thought "why not just raise it up?". No one seemed to think we couldn't do it and our contractor suggested we should do it before moving in, so thus began project #3.

We also decided that since we were raising the ceiling it might be nice to cut an opening in the wall to allow the steam and moisture to escape back into the bathroom and hence towards the fan. This would also give us a shelf to put shower things. Granted this will be too high for most people, so yep that will be where the pricey stuff goes!
Additionally we will also be adding a sun tunnel but that won't be happening until we replace the roof (alluding to future projects!).

As you can see, Ben is now very happy to be able to throw his hands up like he just don't care (and not touch the ceiling)!

House project #2: Pest, pest go away...

This is the first major house project that we are having done. When we bought the house there was a significant pest report (however, not unreasonable for our area). During our inspection period we had the pest guy come out and talk us through the report. It was really helpful to be able to ask him questions and get his opinion about what things were higher priority and what things could wait (of course if we had a money tree in the back it wouldn't matter, but we only have the redwood...*sigh*).
Basically he told us that anything structurally related was a must, which only pertained to one corner of the house (phew!). So starting at the beginning of the month we've had scaffolding at one corner of the house while they took out some wood structure with dry rot. The following are photos of the work in progress.

Scaffolding from top to bottom

Dry rot!

All gone!

New boards

Next layer

Chicken wire!

They were expecting to finish this week but unfortunately rains came so they've had to postpone for awhile.

It's been interesting to watch the progression of house layers and amazes me that these structures actually can stand up!

House project #1: Disappearing doorknob

So we have a variety of house projects that need to be done. Some we will be doing ourselves (or at least we think we will be...) and others hiring experts will be the way to go. Some projects are major involving city permits and potentially weeks of work and others will be managed in just a few hours (granted for people who know what they are doing it would probably only take a few minutes...).
So without further ado...House project #1 was completed last Tues!

For some reason the doorknob on the second bedroom was replaced with a very unattractive brass knob.

I'd found the original knob that matched all of the other doorknobs in the house in the garage. After making sure that the original knob actually worked and there wasn't some mechanical reason it had been removed, I set about replacing it. After two hours, borrowing the plumber's screwdriver, frantically searching for the proper screws and accidentally covering myself in graphite I successfully replaced my first doorknob!

Ah the gloriousness of homeownership!

Pre move in photos

As promised here is the photo tour!

From the street

Living room

Dining room

Kitchen

Upstairs:

Bathroom

Bedroom

Second bedroom

Backyard

Redwood Tree!

Holy crap we own a house...

So first a few disclaimers:
1. This blog was wholly inspired by our friends Cassie & Tim who also recently bought a house. They will probably be much more proficient bloggers than we will be and therefore you should also check out their blog: cassieandtimsfirsthouse.blogspot.com

2. The irony of this blog's title is that, in fact, we do not actually have a patch of grass to call our own. There is currently no grass in any part of our property. There are dreams that this may be remedied in the future. What we do have is a giant redwood tree in our backyard. However, naming this blog "A Redwood Tree to Call Our Own" would only make us sound more Berkeley than I am willing to admit we are.

3. Once photos have been posted, some people may wonder to themselves, allude or just blatantly ask if we bought this house solely based on the kitchen. This would not be entirely untrue. Of course there are other reasons that we bought this particular house (the neighborhood, good backyard, good space), but honestly Ben could probably write an entire post, multiple paragraphs long extolling the virtues of the kitchen, so yes it certainly did factor into our decision.

4. Photos will be forthcoming, I promise...