Posted by K Sun, 30 Apr 2006 18:18:00 GMT
Treehugginess aside, I want central air. I have been living in the land of the uniseason, between 50 and 70 most of the year, and I get wilty and pathetic and whiny when the temperature goes above 75 or 80 degrees. Welcome to DC, wimp. Get ready for some suck.
Read more...Posted by K Sat, 29 Apr 2006 16:30:00 GMT
At this point a lot of the basic stuff is done… there are joists walls and subfloors and plumbing and electric ready. Framing is going up and drywall is being put in. We get kitchen measurements on Monday. Things are moving along.
Our contractor has an odd urgent way of phrasing things that I realized the other day is probably not intentional but sends me into a panic anyway. He also tends to not give us much lead time in procuring things, but I guess some of this is my fault and I should already have windows picked out, even though I don’t have measurements.
He gave us three days to come up with a showerhead (not so hard except for the whole have-to-order-it-online part since we can’t just pick it up and run it over). Last night he basically said “I need to know if you already chosen the windows for the dining room. They have to be 35×75 or smaller” and suddenly I feel judged and stupid like of COURSE we should have windows picked out. I know this is all in my head and that the judging and whatnot is not there, but I feel that way anyway.
So, this weekend we have to decide on said windows for said dining room, buy the sink/faucet/toilet/drain/light for the bathroom so that we have a leg up there, and send the contractor the next million dollar installment. I am thinking we should also decide on what to do about the kitchen window and get on that, as well. Next week is cabinet time. Then we can worry about sinks and countertops. The ongoing lamp-buying debacle continues in which I am outbid on every lamp I try to get on eBay. Right now we have light in the kitchen, dining room, foyer, and possibly hall. Ideally I would also like living room and main bedroom fixtures before we move in. Just because it might take some time to find the actual lamps we own once we move and it would be nice to be able to see in those rooms in the meantime.
I just saw last night that the owner of a small local DC natural food market (called, optimistically and enthusiastically: “Yes! Organic Market”) signed an agreement to put a store in about a block away from our house. This makes me very happy, even if it won’t be there until 2008. The yuppie in me wanted a Whole Foods there, but I feel less guilty about a nice local chain that only has four other stores, and it will not cause parking nightmares in the neighborhood like Whole Foods would. Granted, the wine and cheese selection will be nil, but if I ever open my wine and cheese shop up the street it means less competition for me.
Posted by Matthew Fri, 28 Apr 2006 15:27:00 GMT
Last night I watched an alarming program on global warming. I was already freaked about our potential gas bill after peeking at our neighbor’s bill in January. Having an old house is great but not if you’re paying to heat the outdoors. Our place didn’t have insulation but that’s been rectified. We still have a bunch of windows to replace once we get in there.
At any rate, electricity is another concern since I’ll be working at home all of the time and thus be home consuming electricity all of the time. The green electricity offerings in the area are encouraging
Pepco Energy Services offers 100% green electricity at $0.1147 /kWh for 12 months. Washington Gas offers a $0.1225 /kWh rate. Compare that with the $0.1143 /kWh that I pay to PG&E for baseline usage. This year and last we used over 400 kwh of power for 3/10-4/10. We went over the baseline usage and paid a more painful rate for a small portion of power. Seems like green electricity is competitive and there isn’t really a reason not to do it.
Read more...Posted by Matthew Fri, 28 Apr 2006 07:17:00 GMT
I’ve started to look into fixing all of the modern appliances that regularly drive me bat shit.
First, connectivity to the Internet. I need to compare the evil Comcast with services from RCN (http://www.rcn.com/). At first glance RCN’s 20Mbps download with 2Mbps upload for $90/month seems like the fastest speed I can obtain for a reasonable rate. My employer pays for $50/month so it is not as outlandish as it might look at first glance. T1 service is around $300/month which is still out of reach for a single home (but several homes . . .hmm). Sadly, I couldn’t find a provider that offered it in 20011.
RCN offers phone services as well but it is not clear from their site if the service is over VoIP. The second things on the list to fix is removing all dependency on the PSTN.
Unfortunately, I think it may have already been wired into the house. The only equipment requiring a TDM line is the ancient Tivo that I hope to replace anyway and a possible security system already installed in the house (likely to be non-functional). Turns out ADT is on top of it and offers a cell based service. Interesting. Wires come into the basement and everything becomes wireless.
Posted by K Tue, 25 Apr 2006 04:29:00 GMT
Even though things were quiet for a while (in that we didn’t hear a lot for a week or so) there has been stuff going on at the house. The electrician has rewired everything, the bathroom floor joists are removed and replaced, insulation has been going up, an AC guy came by today to give us an estimate (on ducts and also AC, separately, in case we want to do the AC proper later even though it makes sense to get the ducts in now), and most excitingly, the kitchen beam is now in. Check out the pictures.
Now we have to pick a bunch of tile out for the bathroom floor. They are going to finish up some stuff this week and should be ready for that stuff soon. I think we know what we want, but we have to order it from Rockville and have someone pick it up and deliver it to the house for us. Whee. Also, time to make a sink decision so the plumbing rough-in can get in.
Posted by Matthew Thu, 20 Apr 2006 05:17:00 GMT
I think we actually have made a decision on the cat transportation front. But, before I cross it off the todo list I’ll document what we decided. After to talking to my sister who is a small animal vet I was a bit freaked out. She suggested we take Seymour in the cabin. Clearly she has never driven in a car with Seymour. If the howling doesn’t convince you to pull over the pathetic mewling makes you cry and the tears force you to pull over. No way am I subjecting a plane full of humans to that torture.
Checking the United web site we were able to confirm that they do have a pressurized cabin for your pet’s comfort. It is not however clear if that cabin is air conditioned. The airline can refuse to take your pet on your flight (period) and will if the heat at your destination or origination point is too severe. The temp here in San Francisco isn’t really a concern. But DC in July could certainly melt poor kitty. Therefore one of us will be flying direct with the cat on United leaving SFO in the early evening and arriving in DC in the late evening. We’ve yet to decide who is doing the driving. More on that in my next post “Human transport”.
Posted by K Tue, 18 Apr 2006 04:56:00 GMT
We might have some counterspace-at-a-premium issues in the new kitchen (or, maybe I am pretending we will so I can look at stuff like this), so I have been thinking about how to get things off the counter (also, our cluttered counters right now kind of drive me crazy. Go hide, rice cooker. Blender, you are very pretty but I hardly use you). Feng Shui aside, magnetic knife storage on the wall is cool. Bad thing: do you really want to smack knives on metal every time you put them back? Ugh, I don’t. Not only will it screw up the blade, but that sound!
Well, the the Acacia magnetic knife storage bar is at your service (you can see other ones and buy them here). Genius. I suppose they might not be too hard to make if you can do that sort of thing. But eh, my not-very-sexy knife block was about the same price, I think.
Posted by K Sat, 15 Apr 2006 04:55:00 GMT
I finally got around to putting up the rest of the before-we-ripped-it-apart pictures. They are over here.
Also, we made the first commitment to something to put in the house, with a pair of kitchen pendants.
I am also in the process of buying some wacky lamps on eBay, one of these and one that I can’t find online right now (it looks like sails stretched between two rings, kind of).
Also, I think Fireslate is out of the countertop running, not that it was ever a number one contender. I think it gets too blotchy and stained even if you try to take care of it.
Posted by K Sun, 09 Apr 2006 17:03:00 GMT
More pictures of the now-finished demo can be found here and I understand they are cleaning up that junk in the backyard (some of the stuff did not come out of our house, like that wicker thing and that fence-looking thing, so I guess the neighbors are using our yard to get rid of stuff).
I am currently being a huge dork and am making scale drawings of all the kitchen walls and planning out the cabinets. I think we are going with IKEA since they are cheap and rated highly by Consumer Reports (higher than other cabinets I was thinking about). I am conflicted about countertops… Corian remains stupidly expensive, I think, even though I can’t be sure. Concrete is cool but a pain, stainless is expensive and gets fingerprinty, and I am kind of interested in soapstone (even with the possible need to oil it) just because if it reminds me of seventh grade science class. How could it be bad?
Budget woes abound since we have to replace a lot of plumbing and wiring (which really isn’t so surprising, but still, very sad-making for our wallets), so we have to sit down and figure all that out. We may be moving into a house with unfinished floors if we run out of cash.
We also went out yesterday and looked at flooring, with the bathroom floor in mind. I just can’t get behind any floor tile that isn’t 8 bucks a square foot because it is all ugly and/or boring. Well, actually, most floor tile is ugly and or boring except I like hex tile, which is eight bucks a square foot. We did find field tile that is not horribly expensive ($3 a square foot) which was exciting but kind of useless since we need the tile there and not here.
So we also looked at and considered or ridiculed wood, engineered wood, bamboo, engineered wood that looked like bamboo, cork, vinyl tiles (we actually found one cool pattern), rubber tiles (which I want but will be very pricey and seem to be a pain to get if you are a residential consumer type person and not, say, a hospital), linoleum, and bright pink carpet.
I also got to fondle my faucet some more. I will pull the trigger and just buy it soon (somewhere cheaper than that). I have been mooning over it for five months now.
Also, one of our neighbors-to-be dropped by and told our contractor that she had an original door to the house she would give to us if we wanted (I think she is getting rid of it otherwise). I love our neighborhood. I kind of like our 1940’s door but this one sounds like it would let a lot more light in, and I am all about that (of course, I have to talk to Matt about this before I write back). But thanks, neighbor we do not know yet!
Posted by K Sat, 08 Apr 2006 21:04:00 GMT
I will post more later, but demo started a week ago, is now done, and our backyard looks like this:
