New House Blog: Episode XXX - Green Island Time

You may have noticed that this Episode is late - it's been more than a week since the previous Episode. The main reason for this is that we've been taking it mostly easy since moving in. We feel we earned a bit of a break because of all of the work we have done so far. But we have not been completely idle. We have done a little unpacking, and we have done some unexpected yardwork, and some other work which we will discuss below.

 The cats are all settling in, and we have recently allowed them to roam freely about the house during the day (they still have to stay in the master bedroom at night).

 Another reason for the delay in posting this Episode is that my computer is under the plastic sheeting in my office (why is there plastic sheeting in there?). This is the first Episode to be composed on and posted from my iPad. I was originally concerned that I wouldn't be able to upload pictures, but we found workaround and here we are. I've found that touch typing on the iPad is not too bad. The keys are placed and spaced well.

Out Of The Woods

We are oficially out of The Woods Apartments. We turned in our keys and cleaned the place out. Here are pictures of the empty apartment.

The empty dining room

The empty master bedroom

Island Time

Our kitchen needed an island, so we got one. It was shipped to us from Home Depot, and some assembly was required. It's white, and it has black granite on the top. Pictures.

The new island

The new island

Green Time

Our neighbor, Peter, unexpectedly offered us two fruit tree seelings for free, which we gladly accepted - a Navel Orange tree, and a Dwarf Tangerine tree. We planted them right away, and here are pictures.

The Navel Orange tree

The Dwarf Tangerine tree

And Finally

And finally, for those who may have doubted that our seeds would take root in the tanbark-infested area of our yard near the sidewalk, we offer you this photo of our first blooming poppy. And that's it for this Episode.

Our first poppy

Time to watch some Olympics action and eat some cheesecake.

USA! USA! USA!
   bIsh!

New House Blog: Episode XXVIIII - Moving Day

Moving Day has come and gone, and we could not have done it all without help from some friends and family.  We want to give a big bunch of thanks to friend and fellow band-member Monika, Becky's sister Amy, friend and family member (it's complicated) Derek, and nephew Ethan, for all of their help.  We cannot express in words our gratitude toward these people for turning an Everest-sized job into a Mt. Uminum-sized job.  Thank you all from the bottom of our hearts.

We were too busy during the actual move to do any picture taking, so you'll have to settle for pictures taken one day after moving.  The house is still a mess, but it's less of a mess than it was yesterday.  The cats seem to be adjusting well, but they're a little clingy still.  We have them confined to the master bedroom for the time being, and we plan to slowly introduce them to the rest of the house.  Becky's office is mostly set up.

Here are some pictures of the house post-move-in.

The big room

This is also the big room.

Who here remembers Windows 98?

Becky's office again

The master bedroom and Daisy

A closet and a lot of bags of clothes

Our patio garden is all accounted for.

Some of them may look a little droopy.  A little water should fix them up.

With Garfield in the house the move is official.

A poorly-lighted picture of the fireplace room

Satchmo chilling out

Satchmo looking bit more serious

As I said, we will continue to post new Episodes of the New House Blog as we continue to spruce up our new house.  Just the future landscaping alone could fill up several Episodes.

Sadly, I can't finish my pie tonight, because I can't find a clean fork.  They're all in a box somewhere.  And no one has guessed the right kind of pie, yet, either.

Our house is a very very very fine
  bIsh

New House Blog: Episode XXVIII - The End Is Near!

We're here to talk about the end of paying too much for long distance phone...never mind. The end that we're really talking about is the end of our tenure at The Woods apartments in San Jose. I, Bish, have lived in The Woods complex for over 10 earth years, and Becky has lived with me in the Woods for almost two earth years.  Another end we're excited about is the end of paying rent and having a landlord.  It is not, however, the end of our New House Blog.  We will continue to post Episodes as we get settled in, do yard work, find more surprises to repair, get my office painted, and get furniture set up.

A New Beginning

Welcome to the first Episode composed and posted from our new house.  As I type this I am sitting in what will be my office, on the floor, eating my pie.  We have our internet hookup, and my computer is on the floor with me, humming quietly.  Every now and then the wifi receiver blinks its blue LED.  Sadly, my office is not yet painted.  We simply ran out of time before moving day, which is imminent as I write this.  That does not mean, however, that the walls are blank - keep reading, or scroll down, to see what my office walls look like right now before their real paint is applied.

We'd like to thank the Comcast technician who hooked us up today.  We don't remember his name so we're going to call him Hjerkemer (pronounced "Herkemer").  Hjerkemer surprised us by showing up early - about 1/2 hour before the scheduled 2-hour time window.  He was friendly, he ran a new line into our house, he didn't talk down to us or treat us like newbies, and he likes some of the same TV shows that we like.  Thanks, Hjerkemer, for the outstanding service today.

Vanity To End All Vanities

Of course by that we mean that this is the last of the vanity replacements, much like the War to end all Wars was supposed to be the last big war.  We know how that turned out for warfare, but we are planning to not have to replace any more vanities in this house now that we have replaced the vanity in the third bathroom, the downstairs bathroom.  This project had some interesting challenges to overcome.  The first challenge is the fact that the floor under the old vanity is about 1/4" higher than the surrounding floor.  This means that we had to use several shims to level the new vanity.  The second challenge was the drain pipe.  Unlike all of the other drainpipes in the house, this drain pipe was partially of the glued-together type.  The pipe sticking out of the wall had a 90-degree elbow glued to it.  We hacksawed the wall pipe and glued on a new adapter that allowed us to use the non-glued 1 1/4" drain pipes we are used to (the kitchen drain is 1 1/2").  The new inlet pipes and shutoff valves went in very smoothly the first time, and all is leak-free.  Below are pictures.  We think you'll agree that the new unit is a big improvement over the old.  We also replaced the old mirror/medicine cabinet with a new mirror.

The old vanity with drawers removed

The old medicine cabinet with no drawers removed

With the top removed

What's that pattern behind the old medicine cabinet?

The old drain pipe and the new shutoff valves

We had to add some shims to make this level.  The location of the piping inside the vanity made it necessary to remove that drawer's innards and turn it into a facade.

The new vanity, sin, and faucet

The new mirror

The new faucet

We originally bought a different faucet than the one you see here.  When we opened the box, however, we discovered that the wrong faucet was in the box.  We've learned that this is something to watch out for at Home Depot.  If the box is not sealed, be sure to open it up and check its contents before buying.

Painting

The downstairs bathroom was also painted, and we installed a cabinet above the toilet.  A new shower curtain and rod were also added to this bathroom.  We are really pleased at how all three bathrooms turned out.

The new cabinet

The paint

The shower curtain

The paint in this room is called Eucalyptus Leaf.  It is a very interesting color.

















Espring

We finally got our eSpring water purifier moved over here and installed.  Final hookup was easy, thanks to our preparations seen in this Episode.  Here's a picture of it actually purifying some water.

Ain't it purty?

More Painting

Well, I think we can finally reveal the names of the last few colors, except for the colors in my office, which isn't painted yet.  You may have noticed in previous issues that the fireplace room was in the process of being painted.  We had to wait this long to reveal it to you finished because of the 2nd color we used in there, and in the hallway, for the trim.  This trim color made the whole job more complicated and added a lot of time to it.  The end result looks good, but it was a lot of work.  We also finished painting the big room and the stairway.  Below you will see some before/after pictures.

Before

After

Before

After

The colors used in the fireplace room are Red Brick and Painted Leather.  The commenter, Mom, came the closed to guessing the red color's name.  She guessed Brick Red.  This is the second time that Mom has almost guessed the correct color name. :)

Here is the big room, before and after.

It seems as though I didn't take the "after" pictures of the big room from the same angles.  Oh well, here they are, anyway.

The color used in this room is called October.  Just October.  Really, just that one word.  No joke.

And now the stairway.

Before

After

The colors used for the stairway are Red Brick, Blackberry Harvest, and Painted Leather.

Bonus Paintage

Did I say earlier that my office is not yet painted?  Well, that's not entirely accurate.  What I meant is that it has not been properly taped, brushed, or rolled, and it does not have the finished paint pattern, or colors, that I envision for this room.  It does, however, have some new paint on the walls.  

Modern art?

What is the artist trying to say here?

A work of true genius!

As you may have guessed, we used these walls in my office to roll out the paint roller sponges.  Should I leave it like this or paint over it?  How many colors can you correctly identify here?  Note that we didn't use this room for every single color.

Bonus Question

What kind of pie was I eating?

We are witnessing the dawn of a new
  bIsh

New House Blog: Episode XXVII - Shedding Some Light

Welcome to the latest Episode of our New House Blog.  The other day we discovered that we're not too far from the area of town known as Little Saigon.  This designation is officially recognized by the city of San Jose, and there are signs in the area proclaiming this appellation.  One characteristic of Little Saigon that we noticed is the abundance of Vietnamese and Chinese restaurants.  It seems to be a fairly nice area, and we may have to check it out in more detail some time soon.

We also had quite an entertaining lunch that same day.  We were at a Panda Express in a shopping center just a few blocks outside of Little Saigon, and we were eating outside on the sidewalk by the parking lot.  The first group to to go by was a singing group on a trailer that was pulled by a pickup truck.  They had speakers, microphones, a guitarist, a drummer, and three or four singers.  The first time they came by we didn't know who they were or why they were serenading the parking lot, but the second time they came by they were accompanied by a man handing out cards advertising a Pentecostal congregation nearby.  Basically they were advertising and looking for new attendees.  The singing was overly repetitive, and the singers were not always on key.  The second group to come by was a group of walking protesters, shouting out sayings in Spanish.  They were a couple of rows away from us, so we didn't get to see their signs or find out what/who they were protesting, but they seemed to be peaceful and did not seem to be disturbing anyone.  The third group to come by were a couple of young women asking for donations for their cousin's funeral.  We gave them a couple of bucks.

This story is relevant because we were on our way to our house to continue prepping it for move-in.  On to the prepping.

Shedding Some Light

Our windows had to go.  Yes, they let in light, and to some extent they kept out matter from the outside, but they were old, single-pane, aluminum-framed mostrosities from the '70's.  They were probably original with the house, and they didn't open very well, if at all.  They also didn't seal up right, the screens were damaged, and to cap it off some of the windows in the big room had their screens on the wrong sides.  That is, the screen was on the outside of the house, but it was on the non-opening side of the window!  We dared not open those windows for fear of the massive amount of bugs and leaves that would get inside the house.  They clearly had to go.  And now they're gone.  In their places are new windows, and sliding glass doors, from Brothers Windows.  We chose Brother's Windows based on a recommendation from Becky's good friend, Marj.  The new windows let in light, the seal up nicely, they keep foreign matter outside, they all have working screens, and they keep a lot of the heat out.  We have noticed a real difference in temperature with the new windows.  And we can now open up more of them when there's a nice breeze blowing.  Here are some pictures of our new windows.

The upstairs bath, with Apple Orchard paint

 Please note that we are not showing you all of the windows here - that would take up too much space, and you would get bored and stop reading this Eipsode.

The master bedroom window

Becky's office window

The kitchen window and sliding door

The big room windows with screens on the correct side

From the inside - Can you guess the color?

The 1/2 bath

The 1/2 bath is the only bathroom to get the obscured panes.  The other bathroom windows are situated high enough that we didn't feel the need for obscurity. The paint you see above is not called Butternut Squash. :)













Shedding More Light

Windows are not the only source of light in our house - we also have electric lighting, some of which you have seen in previous Episodes.  The light we are talking about here is the light fixture in the downstairs bath.  Note that this is not the same as the 1/2 bath, even though both are downstairs.  We refer to our baths as the upstairs bath, the downstairs bath, and the 1/2 bath.  The old fixture had to go.  You will understand when you see the picture below.

It's not pretty.

Yes this is the same light fixture that is being advertised in this Episode.  As we have mentioned at least once previously, although we present things in general chronological order, we might not always present them in exact chronological order.  In this case, the old light fixture was pulled, but the replacement project wasn't complete until after the outside photo had been taken.

There were no major surprises with this job, although we did have to replace the old light fixture box because it was not compatible with the mount for the new light fixture.  Fortunately, we did not have to make any new holes in the wall, as we did in this Episode.  One reason this was fortunate is that this bath, for some reason unknown to us, has a very thin wood paneling on the walls, and making a hole would have required cutting through this wood paneling as well as the sheetrock.  Here, then, is the project in pictures.

This is the worklight we used.  This bathroom doesn't have a lot of natural light, and with the power to that part of the house off our lighting options were rather limited.

The new light j-box

Please note that this is mounted much more solidly than it looks like it's mounted.  We had to add some shims due to the large section cut out of the thin wood paneling.  Also note that the wires are not actually touching each other - it just looks that way due to the perspective.

The new fixture, illuminated by the work light

The same fixture, illuminated by itself

Is that another new color of paint?












Closet Repair

This may seem like a small detail, but it is an important detail.  In the closet in the master bedroom the hangar rod only had a socket on one end - the other end was hanging freely.  We had to correct this if we wanted to hang clothes along the whole rod, and so we did.  With the assistance of a Home Depot employee we found what we were looking for, and now the hangar rod is properly mounted.

Bonus Question

And now for tonight's bonus question: What is the name of this color?

Here's a hint that may not help at all: You've already seen this color in another picture above.

We are seeing the light at the end of the
   bIsh