Out with the old: Final 2009 house resolutions check-in

To wrap up 2009, here’s the status of this year’s resolutions. Look for the 2010 list next week!

Here’s the original list: My New Year’s House Resolutions

…and here’s where we are in the waning days of 2009:

1. BETTER WINDOW INSULATION.
Mostly done. In the end, I ordered 1 3/8″ spring bronze weatherstripping  from Kilian’s Hardware, since the stuff I got from our local Ace was too narrow. They shipped promptly and have everything under the sun on the old weatherstripping front. With instructions from Working Windows, a phenomenal guide, I’ll hopefully finish up the last of the weatherstripping soon. Pictures coming once I remember to take some. (I’m doing a modified version of it without removing the sashes—not the recommended way, but so far it seems to be working decently, and significantly reduces the likelihood that I’ll screw it up and need to call in the pros. But it also means I would be much happier with a staple gun, which the Tool Library has—except that they’re closed till after the new year with all the budget cuts…augh.) And the bedroom window issues will be resolved by early 2010—yay!

2. DROUGHT-TOLERANT LANDSCAPING.
Mostly done. We successfully killed the grass, but then went to war with the oxalis. This isn’t done yet, but it’s mostly because I’ve been lazy and preoccupied with other things. I think I can safely say it’s a weekend (and a few hundred dollars’ worth of DG, stones, mulch, and plants) away from being complete.

3. PRODUCTIVE VEGETABLE BED.
Done! The garden did quite respectably this year, though it’s definitely still a work in progress. I continue to be in awe of the huge yields from some friends’ gardens, so I’ll keep at it. I put cover crops in this winter, so hopefully that will help, too.

Lettuce bed

4. NEW POWER STRIPS.
Done! Pictures are not exciting here, so you don’t get any…

5. CLOTHES LINE.
Done! But no photos till we get the landscaping done, since right now the yard looks pretty icky.

6. NO MORE LEAKY TUB.
Umm, done? We got stuck on this one, so I’m not even sure it counts as done. Technically, it doesn’t leak anymore. But in the process of trying to fix it, we broke it more, had to hire a plumber to fix that, and then discovered that it had been fixed incorrectly. Fixing the new problem turned out to be an even bigger project that will entail retiling the bathroom, so for now we’re living with a slightly imperfect faucet setup. Moral of the story: hire people who know what they’re doing, especially when you don’t!

7. RAIN BARREL.
Mostly done. After trekking all over town looking for the specific parts D. had in mind for this, we finally found them at Grainger in West Berkeley. He’s off this week, so with luck this might be finished before the new year. Pictures and maybe an instructable to follow once it’s all installed and caulked in, but Gene over at DIY Insanity has some great photos up of the barrels pre-holes on the new platform he helped us build last month (and by “helped” I mean walked us through pretty much step-by-step—thanks again!!)

Gene's photo of the barrels on their brand new platform!

8. RETAINING WALL & FENCE.
Done!

Another view

9. DISHWASHER.
Not done. But…WE ARE GETTING OUR FIRST BIDS ON THE STRUCTURAL WORK IN THE KITCHEN! This is my most exciting news. It won’t make the 2009 list, but it’s within reach at long last. (And it better make the 2010 list…)

In fact, it might be fortuitous that it took so long—if Obama’s Cash for Caulkers program really gets rolling, we’re all set to buy both our dishwasher and new refrigerator under it! And we may apply to be guinea pigs in Oakland’s version of CaliforniaFIRST, which spreads the cost of energy efficiency improvements over a number of years by rolling the cost into property taxes. When we take out our furnace chimney, we’ll have to re-vent our furnace and water heater, and it might be the ideal time to replace both. (They still have a few years left in them, but both are aging, neither is high-efficiency, and D. is itching for a solar water heater.)

So we’re 8 for 9 for 2009—not too bad, actually!

Kitchen Chronicles: Color inspirations

Initially, color seemed like one of those fun details that we could save till the end of the kitchen renovation process and have a little fun with. As it turns out, it’s a decision we need to make fairly early on in the process, since the color of the cabinets will drive a lot of design and cost decisions. (Specifically, we need to decide whether we’re doing painted cabinets or natural wood, since that in turn affects flooring choices and both affect the bottom line.) So I dug up several art pieces I’d been saving for a while and had them matted and framed over at Kuhl Frames + Art in Uptown. (Miraculously, I also got through the whole framing process without having to buy D. the Devo poster he’s been eyeing that’s part of the Lil Tuffy poster exhibit the shop is hosting right now! Yes, that would be the only poster in the whole show that costs more than all of our new appliances put together will…)

The first two pieces are old fruit labels that my aunt and uncle gave me years ago; I’ve been toting them around ever since (note the nice crease down the snow owl one!) I think they’ve been in no fewer than seven different apartments in five cities over the last decade—augh! So it’s long time they were framed. It’s hard to see, but the frames are actually a very deep brown with a light cream mat.

Fruit labels

The third piece is by Olympia-based artist Nikki McClure, who does crazy beautiful paper cuts. (I got this one at Issues off of Piedmont Avenue, where they usually have a nice assortment of her work.) Seriously, I’d wallpaper our house with these if D. didn’t have a say in it! (But he does, so we also have some old school Shepard Fairey from back when he was still counterculture. And also, cute photos of elephants with little children.)

Nikki McClure print

So obviously our kitchen is not going to be striped in red and black, but I do want a color scheme that this art can accent. We’re leaning strongly towards painted cabinets right now, and D. is adamant about not wanting a white kitchen, which is the more traditional “look” for an Arts and Crafts house. So instead, we’re exploring lighter creams, grays, or greens—plus a few natural woods—for the Shaker-style cabinets, probably with a wood floor and dark countertops. That actually gives me a nice palette to work with, since we can potentially keep the walls in the sage family, which makes the red and cream a perfect complementary color. Or we can use some yellows, which could look really nice with gray cabinets and red accents. I like the look of the green cabinets too (D.’s favorite is a color called “silver sage”) but it just seems like the kind of thing that we could get tired of in the years to come, and then we’re pretty locked into the color. Bleh.

Anyway, for now, I’m stalking Sunset, Apartment Therapy, Design Pad, and the many house blogs out there for some inspiration and ideas. Know anyone with good green, gray, or cream kitchen cabinets to look at?

Kitchen Chronicles: The (not so) bad beginning

Yep, it’s that pesky kitchen again…

In the last episode, we discovered that there were far too many complicated and expensive things that needed to be fixed with our circa-1939 kitchen (with a 2007 “facelift”) for it to make much sense to do the project piecemeal. Instead, we started saving up for one big overhaul. We’re not quite there yet, but I’ve decided to go ahead and start working on the plan and talking to contractors so that we can get this thing rolling in the new year. Not exactly a bad beginning, per se, but certainly a far more expensive (and stressful!) one than we’d originally envisioned.

First things first: to save those of you who really don’t care about our kitchen from having to wade through what will probably be a LOT of posts about the renovation process in the coming year, I’m going to start titling and tagging any kitchen-related posts as “kitchen chronicles.” Read ‘em if you like kitchens, or ignore ‘em if you don’t.

Crafting the plan
One of the first things I did once we decided to tackle the entire space was to sit down and make a list of the current problems and the multiple roles we’d like the space to serve. Here’s how we envision it:

• More light!
• Better flow from the dining room into the kitchen into the breakfast room and out into the yard
• Preserve the breakfast room function, if not the physical division of space
• Allow the breakfast room to double as a mud room (which it sort of does now, but not terribly well)
• Create space for the dog’s bowl and supplies
• Create a continuous work surface somewhere in the kitchen itself
• Eliminate the “wall” of cabinets that you walk into when you enter the kitchen from the dining room
• Preserve the California cooler, the only original element in the kitchen
• Preserve the ability to close the kitchen off from the rest of the house
• Create a kitchen that fits into the historical aesthetic of the house

That’s a lot of different pieces and different jobs for a relatively small (13 feet by 17.5 feet, counting the breakfast room) space to fill. We’re still playing around with different configurations to get there, but right now, the plan is looking something like this:

Here’s what we’re starting with, as a refresher:

And here’s what we really started with, courtesy of our neighbor. This kitchen is actually  from the blueprints of our house’s mirror-image twin. I flipped it in Photoshop, but that would be why “screen” and “glass” are still backwards. (Or rather, I’m lazy and that’s why they are.) But you get the idea, and you can still see where the original walls and counters were, which is pretty crazy! In our house, the wall between the porch and the breakfast room was taken down as part of the 1939 remodel and the ironing board was moved.

The plan is still very much a work in progress and we have a lot of things to work out (like whether we can actually move the doorway, for starters—and if we do, how do we set it up so that the door closes, given that it’s a swinging door right now, and apparently you can’t put a pocket door in without stripping both sides of a wall down to the studs?) Our kitchen is awkwardly sized—too wide for a good galley layout, but too narrow to really accommodate an island. Most people with this layout—and there are a surprising number of them given how many bungalows are floating around town!—take out the cooler and stick the refrigerator there or make this into a U shape, but I really love our cooler and would hate to lose it. So, no U.

Kitchen Work Plan

1. Disconnect and move stove and refrigerator; demo all cabinets. Remember to buy new toaster oven and borrow hot plate or microwave from somewhere before we get to this point!!
2. Demo furnace chimney; re-vent furnace and hot water heater through wall or to exterior of house as needed. Explore the possibility of using the new Oakland iteration of CaliforniaFIRST to upgrade to a high-efficiency furnace and solar water heater at the same time.
3. Remove tile floor, baseboard trim, sink backsplash, and washer/dryer hookups on breakfast room walls.
4. Widen doorway between breakfast room and kitchen and figure out what kind of door to install here.
5. Insulate outside wall behind sink, and add heat to the kitchen.
6. Finish open walls and install new flooring and new trim to match the original.
7. Install new cabinets, open shelves, sink, dishwasher, backsplash, etc.
8. Install new counter. Paperstone, maybe?
9. Install (or acquire freestanding) benches for breakfast room and mudroom areas. Install coat hooks.
10. Install new light fixtures and exhaust hood.
11. Replace back door with better insulated door. Yay Obama tax credits!

The million dollar question, of course, is how much all of this is going to cost. (Hopefully not a million dollars!) We’re on a pretty tight budget for this project, so the goal is to do as much of the work ourselves as seems feasible and wise. That probably means lots of fun demo-ing things, but leaving some of the finishing to the pros. I shipped off some paint and dust samples to be tested for lead a few months ago and was psyched to learn that the paint and plaster in the kitchen are effectively lead-free, so we can demo our hearts out. We also need to figure out where the cabinets are coming from. I’m getting a few estimates from local cabinetmakers, since that’s our ideal scenario—but we may end up back at Ikea if we can’t make it pencil out. We’ll see.

So with that—welcome to the City Homestead Kitchen Chronicles!

Our house 85 years ago!

Another quick post, because as a lot of you know, we have been extremely busy the last few weeks with a number of things! (Updates coming soon…)

But I did receive this incredible photograph today from a great-granddaughter of the Kiedaisch family, who lived in our house from 1921 to 1927. She found my house history post earlier this year and, astoundingly, dug up a photograph taken of our house sometime in the mid-1920s by her great-grandfather Walter Kiedaisch, who was a Bay Area photographer.

Our house circa mid-1920s (courtesy of the Kiedaisch family)

Even the small snapshot yields a lot of intriguing information:

The garage. We now know our garage is at least 80 years old! We’d talked to the City about this at one point since they had no record of the permits to build it; now I know why (and can conclusively prove that yes, it was definitely there when we moved in…) We’re pretty sure it isn’t original since it’s built up against the house and you can see where the doorways were modified at some point, but this means it was probably built by either the Kiedaisches themselves or by Joseph Smith, who owned the house from 1919 to 1921 after buying it from the original owners (who built it in 1915). The garage does have something of a 1920s vibe going on, too, so that would make sense. (Sadly, that look is almost gone today after the previous owner ditched the original garage doors and replaced them with a generic automatic door to get the house ready for sale. Convenient, but man, I wish she’d kept them…you can even still see them in the Google Street View photos of our block, which is just cruel!)

The adjacent rear lots. You can see the buildings on the lots behind us pretty clearly in this photo, which is interesting because both lots were redeveloped in the 1960s into apartment complexes. (The houses to either side of us, in contrast, look pretty much the same today.) I had envisioned cute little bungalows on these lots, and have often griped about how close to the lot line the 1960s developments were built. (Trying to figure out ownership of a shared fence last year, I even found a Planning Commission memo from the 1960s chiding one of the property owners for violating the property line setback rules; he was fined a relatively small amount and the building was unchanged.) As it turns out, though, even the original buildings must have been pretty close to the lot lines to be visible in this photo. (The one on the right looks like it’s practically in our next-door neighbor’s backyard—the condos there today have a bit of a buffer, at least!)

The front steps. We had wooden steps originally! (Our next-door neighbor still does and it’s pretty traditional for a California bungalow, so this isn’t totally surprising—but today the steps are concrete.) I am a little bummed, though, because when we had the foundation inspected recently in preparation for the kitchen remodel, the inspector oohed and ahhed over our concrete steps, noting that ours were in better shape than those of almost any other house its age that he’d seen. D’oh! Now I know why…

Otherwise, though, the house looks strikingly similar today, right down to the curves on the sidewalk. (Even the sidewalk itself looks like it might be the same…guess that really is due for replacement!) The front yard has since been terraced and landscaped, but we knew the previous owner had done a lot of that work, and from what our neighbor says, before then the yard looked, well, basically the same as it did in the 1920s. It’s very likely that this was the original paint job on the house, too, since it would have been barely ten years old (if that) when this photograph was taken. Hard to tell what the colors actually were, but it gives a sense of the aesthetic, at least. (The stucco on the side of the house behind the garage wall is cream, though, so that may have been the original color; in later years it appears to have been painted light green at some point.)

Anyway, just a very cool find! A huge thanks to Michelle for sharing this great piece of our home’s history!

Winter! (Or: All the things we said we’d do before the rains….)

The first snows fell in the Northern Sierras last week—and this week, winter arrived in the Bay Area with a bang, shattering the rain records as the remnants of a Pacific typhoon swept in.

This is happy news for our garden and our fruit trees, which have been gasping for water the past few weeks. (I’ve been holding off on any big watering efforts because our clay soil stays moist for a few weeks, and, well, the rains were coming!)

This is less happy news for other members of the family:

You're serious? Umm, that's okay, I'm good here, thanks.

And even less happy news for:

• Our rain barrels. Yeah, they’re still in the garage. We just need to build them a platform, but unfortunately neither of us knows how to build a platform. Bleh.
• Our rafters. Umm. A few of them have been Bondo’ed where the knob-and-tube electrical wiring used to be attached….but the rest still need to be patched and painted. Maybe this weekend, if things dry out enough before then (and we finally find a ladder that’s tall enough!) We lose major points on this one since it’s actually a leftover project from last summer….augh! (We replaced the wiring right after we moved in to placate our insurance company.)
• Our bedroom windows. We still have not replaced these because I haven’t had time to go debate the whole permit issue with the City. (I did finally talk to people there, but got two completely contradictory, mutually exclusive answers from the two departments that are ostensibly supposed to approve our window replacement permit. Ugh. I hate bureaucracy!)
• Our baseboard gravity registers. I took these apart three months ago to try to strip the paint off of them. Then I discovered that they’re actually broken (from being forced open and shut, I think). Then I discovered that when the heat was installed, someone creatively stacked a bunch of wood together to “frame” the register, and when I took the register off, the wood moulding fell apart. Then I ordered new registers only to discover that the size is off by half an inch. Argh. Somehow this needs to get fixed before we have to turn the heat on…

So I guess a busy work weekend lies ahead!

Lead!

No, that’s not a directive to Mayor Dellums (though if he’d like to take it as one, I have no issue with that!) It’s that other kind of lead.

After a great tip from a reader (thanks, Len!) I recently called up the Alameda County Lead Poisoning Prevention Program (ACLPPP) to see what they could tell me about lead testing and lead safety, especially in soil. First, I have to say—these guys are rock stars! They called back promptly and had all sorts of information to share. A couple of days later, I received a complete lead test kit in the mail, with detailed instructions on how to test my soil, paint, and dust.

I picked out nine areas—five sections of the backyard, two painted areas, and two dusty windowsills—and sent off the samples to be tested. (For FREE!) Just a few days later, along came the results in an emailed PDF.

The results…
First, the bad news: the paint on the woodwork and the dust in the window sills have a whole lotta lead. We pretty much assumed as much—in a hundred-year-old house, it would be unusual for glossy trim paint not to have lead in it—but now that we know for sure, I’m having to rethink my strip-the-woodwork project. Lead, like asbestos and other icky airborne things, is not especially dangerous if it’s adhering properly to the painted surface (and you’re not licking it), but if it starts to flake off or chip and create paint flakes or dust that can be inhaled or eaten by small children or pets, it’s a bad scene. And you’re not supposed to remove high lead paint with a silent paint stripper (which was my plan), and I really don’t want to mess with the toxic chemical agents that can remove it safely.

But happily, there was good news too. Specifically, the paint and plaster in our kitchen do not have lead in them to speak of—and that’s very good news, since someday soon we’re hoping to tackle the kitchen renovation, and it will be infinitely easier to attack the woodwork and wall demolition if we aren’t simultaneously worrying about lead abatement and controlling lead dust.

And, perhaps even more importantly, our soil—all of it!—passed with flying colors, with everything testing on the very low end of the “lead safe” category (150-500 ppm). (In fact, the lead levels were barely higher in the soil from the ground than in the potting soil from the nursery that I threw in as a control. That may say more about the nursery soil than about our soil, but there ya go….) This is especially good news because it means we can begin to plant veggies in other areas of the yard, and we also don’t have to worry about trying to make the yard lead-safe (which would be a frustratingly painful process, since you basically have to dig everything out and replace the soil). So that was very welcome news.

…and what to do about it!
Based on this news, I’ll be repainting the woodwork in the dining room with a safe high-gloss paint to seal all that badness inside—and, of course, leaving a note for future owners that stripping the woodwork is probably not the bestest project to take on! (This is probably not the end of the world, since I’ve recently discovered that past owners of our house were—how shall I put it—”creative” (and resourceful!) in cutting out the woodwork when heat was installed, and consequently there’s not much to restore near the heating vents. And when my woodworker uncle came to visit a few months back and checked out our front door—nicely stripped—he noted that it had clearly been intended to be natural wood on the outside, which is apparently a quarter-sawn oak veneer, but not on the inside, which is plain old Doug fir. Ah well.) Luckily, we also own a HEPA vacuum, which is the best way to clear a home of dust and paint chips.

I’m still undecided on the living room, where the paint is stripping pretty cleanly, the wood is in better shape (and was nicer to begin with—beautiful elm and quarter-sawn oak) and there might be some merit to finishing the project. It’s just that it’s a very, very BIG project—and we already have a lot of other big projects to contend with right now. On the other hand, I don’t want to repaint if we might really strip it all at some point, because that just creates more unnecessary work. We’ll see.

This has some implications for our window project, too. The dust from our window troughs also tested high (not as high as the paint itself—but still high enough above the “safe” level to be of concern). Again, not terribly surprising, but something to think about nonetheless. One big source of lead dust in old houses is windows and doors opening and closing—and one good way to get rid of this problem is to replace the windows. So as we work through our window rehabbing and replacement work, we may decide to replace all of the bedroom windows instead of just the two with dry rot to ensure that none of the bedrooms have lead problems. If I can find a good place that will strip the windows, I may go that route as well. We may also re-prioritize to do these in order of use rather than in order of condition. A few of the windows have also had strips of unpainted wood set into the side jambs, which I think was intended to facilitate movement (or replace rotting wood perhaps), but has the added benefit of eliminating one of the two pieces of lead-coated wood that meet each time the windows open.

How much lead is too much?
The most confusing part of the lead testing, at least for me, was figuring out how much lead was too much lead. The kit we got came with baselines for safety, but I found some of them a bit high. ACLPPP uses 1,000 ppm as the “safe” threshold for soil, for instance, and 250 ppm for child-safe soil; in contrast, the state of Minnesota uses 100 ppm as their threshold for bare soil (although they don’t require soil above that level to be removed unless there are visible paint chips). The EPA claims you can plant in soil under 1,500 ppm, except for root vegetables, which you should grow in soil under 1,000 ppm.  Other sources say you can garden under 500 ppm; others say no, only garden if the soil tests under 100 ppm. (Notably, even our nursery soil came in at 140 ppm!)

So what’s really safe? With the information we have, I feel comfortable using our general soil (which tested in the low 200s) for everything except for leafy vegetables and herbs. (Fruiting plants and other plants where the edible components don’t grow directly in the ground don’t absorb as much of the lead and other soil contaminants as leafy vegetables and herbs; with root vegetables, the contamination is largely from surface contact, so you can mitigate this by simply peeling and cleaning these vegetables.) We’ll continue to grow those higher-risk plants in our raised beds with nursery soil (even though this will screw up the crop rotations—argh!)

It’s a little more straightforward on the paint front: this summer the “lead-free” standard for new paint dropped to 90 ppm (down from 600 ppm up until this year), and the feds define anything above 5,000 ppm as being “high lead.” Since our kitchen and trim paints came in at 150 ppm and 7,500 ppm respectively, there wasn’t much fuzziness there! (What to do about the high lead paint is another question altogether—and there are just as many schools of thought on that as there are on the gardening!)

Want to get your own lead test kit?
If you live in Alameda County, you can check out the ACLPPP site for more information on ordering test kits or having someone come out to your home to do a free inspection. (These resources are geared towards homeowners, but there are programs for renters and landlords as well.) The cities of Oakland, Berkeley, Alameda, and Emeryville also have a variety of programs to pay for lead remediation and other work; information on those is also on the ACLPPP site.

Window woes

So we’ve finally decided to bite the bullet and replace some windows. We’ve been holding off on this in part because we had so many other big (and expensive!) projects hanging over us and in part because the first bid we got was pretty daunting, but now that the last of the costly “necessary” projects is done, it seems like a smart time to do the windows while there’s still a 30 percent tax credit available.

We’re lucky in that our wood windows are all original, a pretty unusual feature around here, where a lot of bungalows were “updated” in the 1960s with aluminum windows or more recently with vinyl. Because of that, we’re not touching most of them—the windows that are in decent shape (which, fortunately, is the vast majority of them) are just going to get rehabbed and weatherproofed in the hopefully not-too-distant future when I actually learn how to do this. (For now, I’m cozying up with Working Windows, a really good how-to book on repairing wooden windows.)

That still leaves three problem windows, though. The double-hung windows in our bedroom and bathroom all face southeast and consequently seem to get the weather in its extremes—sun in the summer, rain in the winter. As a result, the windows and the jambs are all warped and have a great deal of dry rot, so rehabbing these windows is a gigantic project. In the meantime, they let in drafts and rain in the winter months. Add to this that the bedroom windows are the only windows in the house where we have noise problems (they’re a short distance from the building next door with only the garage in between, so there are no trees to buffer the noise) so they seem like great candidates for replacement with double-paned windows that will block the noise and fix the rot.

Getting the bid
So we started down the estimate path. I’m getting pretty good at this now that we’ve undertaken several major projects with contractors, and we’d already decided to try to stick to Oakland-based businesses if we could. Luckily, there are two very well-regarded window places just a mile from our house, so that was a good place to start.

Window Place #1 came out and gave us a very thorough estimate after requesting a series of photographs of the windows from all angles. Their plan was to completely rebuild the windows so that they would be indistinguishable from the originals, but would have the benefits of modern windows. This sounded great, but was unfortunately way beyond our budget. If I had a lot of money to spend, though, I wouldn’t hesitate to use them—they seemed very competent and very invested in the historic preservation of the house. Since these windows happen to be the only ones in the house that are visible to exactly no one but us and our next-door neighbors, though, I was comfortable with not having a 100 percent match. (Plus, I’m planning to put the old windows in the basement in case some future owner comes along and wants to rehab them for real, so I don’t feel too bad.)

Enter Window Place #2, which gave us  a much more reasonable estimate to rebuild the sashes from Doug fir so that they match the style of the original windows, although they won’t be exactly identical. They make the windows locally in their Oakland shop, so we really liked the sound of that. They would replace just the inner workings of our windows, leaving the moulding intact inside and out—another key concern. Best of all, while their windows aren’t cheap, they’re definitely in the realm of possibility budget-wise.

Too good to be true?
Sounds great, right? Except for one thing: because their windows aren’t officially rated for energy efficiency by NFRC, they don’t qualify for the tax credit, even though the glass is the same. The only windows they sell that do qualify are clad window inserts (basically, windows inside a frame, which means knocking out the frame that’s there now) from a national company, which wasn’t quite what we were going for. So we’re in the odd position of choosing between more expensive, not-locally-made windows that may end up costing less with the credit, and locally-built windows that we actually like better that aren’t mass-produced and thus don’t qualify. (Apparently there’s a somewhat intensive NFRC certification process that, I guess, isn’t worth the cost for the little guys.)

I find this whole thing puzzling, given that the whole point of the tax credit is to green the country. Seems like windows that are energy efficient and don’t need to be shipped across the country should be worth extra! Not to mention that they create local jobs, and don’t we have a whole separate stimulus package just for that?? Argh.

Borrowing more trouble….
And then there’s the other big bump we hit. Two of the windows are in our bedroom, and the existing double-hung windows don’t meet modern bedroom egress requirements (ironic given that I climb in and out of them regularly to water the plants on the garage roof!) To do the project with permits, we need to put in casement windows or a bay window, which turns the whole thing into a much more elaborate renovation than we have the desire (or money) to do—and it completely disrupts the architectural integrity of the house. (Even then, we might not meet code, because apparently it specifies that the window needs to open directly onto a street or yard, and ours open onto our garage roof—c’est la vie!) California does have an Historical Building Code which has more flexible requirements for egress (we either just make it or just miss it depending on how you measure), but to qualify we have to be designated a historic structure first. Augh.

The rules around replacing just the window sashes are very vague—basically, the chances that the inspector will allow us to replace the windows as-is are about equal with the chances that they’ll shoot down our project and require us to put in casement windows, and it just depends on which inspector shows up. We don’t really object to casement windows on principle, but it just seems wrong, somehow, to completely ignore the history of the house. (D. is a lot less picky about this than I am, and just doesn’t want the cost of the window project to spiral out of control.) Not to mention that there are two exits from our bedroom, one of which leads into the sleeping porch where there are not one, not two, but THREE huge casement windows that are easily climb-out-able if there ever were an emergency.

Again, this whole thing is just puzzling, given that ostensibly everyone involved (the City, the state, the feds) wants us to be making our house more energy efficient. And theoretically the City even wants us to be preserving the historic features of our house, according to the General Plan. *sigh* Gotta love bureaucracy.

What would you do?
So I’m a little torn on all of this. We can pick the local window guys and just pass up the tax credit. (This might be okay if we end up taking on another project that would qualify, which is a possibility—but by the end of 2010? Hard to say.) Or we can get the windows we don’t especially want because they’ll be cheaper at the end of the day.

Or we can decide not to bother with this project at all and just add the money to the kitchen fund instead, which I have to admit is looking more and more tempting….

2009 House Resolutions Check-in: June

We’re just about halfway through 2009, so I figured it was a good time for a resolutions check-in.

Here’s the original list: My New Year’s House Resolutions

…and here’s where we are today:

1. BETTER WINDOW INSULATION.
I have the bronze weatherstripping, but have yet to install it, so….partly done? Also got a great book, Working Windows, from our local bookstore after reading a stellar recommendation of it—it pretty much covers the weatherstripping (and everything else about wooden windows) from start to finish, so assuming I can master the art of removing and replacing the stops, I should be good.

2. DROUGHT-TOLERANT LANDSCAPING.
Yard is (mostly) de-grassed and ready for paths, woohoo! Everything else is mulched in for the year, ten cubic yards of wood chips later….so let’s call it sixty percent done.

3. PRODUCTIVE VEGETABLE BED.
Lookin’ good so far! Summer veggies are all in as of last month. Leaf lettuce and arugula coming out our ears, and (knock on wood) even the tomatoes and squash look happy so far….

4. NEW POWER STRIPS.
Done!

5. CLOTHES LINE.
Picked out—I think we’re getting this one since D. wants one that spins—but not yet actually ordered, since I keep balking on the price (but also had issues with the crappiness of the $50 version that Ace sells….) Does that count?

6. NO MORE LEAKY TUB.
So, so close….tiled and everything! Just waiting on the fix we need to install the new fixtures, which will complete the picture (and actually fix the leak, which in the end turned out to be in the tub spout).

7. RAIN BARREL.
Have the barrels, but haven’t set them up yet. Halfway there?

8. RETAINING WALL & FENCE.
Supposedly this will be done tomorrow! (Currently we have no fence at all, although oddly, and fortunately, the Labradane seems to be oblivious to this.) Probably the most exciting development on the list so far. We’ll see if it’s still exciting once the new fence is actually up… (In the end, the company who manages the building we share this fence with chose the contractor. Somewhat against my better judgment, I didn’t pursue getting photos of their work or anything, as I was too exhausted by the year+ it took to work this whole thing out, and figured some fence was better than no fence. But for the insane amount of money it’s costing, I hope we like it….) We did not, sadly, get to use reclaimed wood on this. Luckily the fences on the other two sides of the yard don’t involve retaining walls or significant demolition work, so we should be able to tackle those ourselves when we finally get around to doing them—should be a lot easier to manage.

9. DISHWASHER.
Umm. Yeah, not so much….but hey, there are still six months to go!

Porch planning

One of the things we’ve been pretty lazy about over the past couple of years is actually doing anything about our front porch. We sit out there occasionally, but it desperately needs a bench or some chairs or something going on out there. (I got a tiny bit organized earlier this spring and put a few plants out, but now it looks even barer than it did before!) Some new neighbors recently moved in across the street, and the first thing they did was put out porch chairs, which got me motivated to finally push this project a bit.

So: porch furniture. D.’s preference is for a bench, and for the past year or so I’ve been watching Craigslist and eBay and the local salvage yards for a suitable bench that isn’t too long (four feet long and a couple feet deep seems to be the perfect size, since the entire porch is a little over six feet long, and there’s just under two feet between the back wall and the door jamb) and ideally doesn’t block too much of the window, but still has a back. Finding all this in one bench has proven to be a bit tricky (okay, that’s an understatement!) so this weekend I finally started looking at buying something new.

Here’s the space:

Porch steps

The Labradane, lounging on the porch

...and the space we have to work with

What seems like the best thing to do with this space? I’ve toyed with both the bench D. wants and with the concept of two small chairs that could go at either edge of the window with a low table in between to avoid blocking the window itself; either way it’s not symmetrical because, well, the window isn’t centered over the porch to start with. There’s also a little side ledge that’s visible at the edge of the photos that’s quite nice for sitting and reading—but when you’re sitting there, you’re completely invisible from the street, and I also like the idea of being able to sit on the front porch and engage with (and be able to see!) the neighborhood, too.

So, I’m stuck. If I could get a clear vision of what belongs in this space, I’d be up for getting something custom made—doing that with our planters out back turned out to be an extremely good decision spacewise (and wasn’t much costlier in the end, either). But to do that, I need to be able to picture this hypothetical porch furniture….augh!

Ideas, anyone?

Hey, look—grout! (And tiles!)

Took way too long, but we finally have tiles that pretty much match, and grout and caulking to seal the deal. We spent about six weeks looking for tiles that were indistinguishable from the existing tiles—finally found them at Lowe’s after one of the local tile stores guessed that our chunk of sample tile might be a Dal-Tile color. As it turns out, it’s American Olean, which seems to be pretty exclusively available at the big box stores, but that’s made by Dal-Tile, so not a bad guess. Unfortunately the nearest Lowe’s is in Union City, so it took a while to finally make it out there….luckily they had eight tiles left of this color and size buried on the back of a shelf. We bought all the ones that weren’t chipped, just in case we have to do anything else on this in the future. (The new tiles are the four touching the valve; everything else is old.)

When I finished grouting, I also used a whitener that our hardware store recommended on the old grout to try to get a close match. It still needs to be sealed, but it’s looking pretty good overall. The only big issue has been that our original tiling was done pretty terribly, so lots of tiles aren’t lined up or flush. The funny part is that I never noticed this before, but once we started working with the tile, it became pretty evident, and now I see it every time I look at it. Argh. (D.’s decided that he wants to rip this all out—that would be at some future date after we win the lottery—and retile it with a clawfoot bathtub to fix the look. We’ll see. On the upside? or downside? that means I’m not doing the floor anytime soon, since it’s silly to do it for aesthetic reasons if we might realistically replace the tub at some point.)

New valve and tile

….and speaking of doing something else on this in the future, it turns out that the nice round plastic piece is supposed to be behind the tile, not in front of it. I’m not sure if this is a problem with our plumber or the depth of our wall and valve, but the end result is that the valve trim that finally came in the mail last week doesn’t fit on the valve. Augh. There’s about a half-inch gap between the escutcheon and the wall. So now we have to figure out a solution to this that hopefully doesn’t involve knocking out the tile and reinstalling the valve.

*sigh*