Moving the main support column

We are getting our kitchen cabinets from IKEA. We priced around and looked at the competition. We decided on IKEA because they have wonderfully designed modern space saving and uber-convenience features. IKEA also has an awesome kitchen designer in browser app. It is sluggish but worth the trouble.

The problem I was having is we have a couple of columns (bumps) on both long walls that support a huge beam. It was making it impossible for me to position cabinets. Originally, I was going to hack into the affected cabinets and just have the column crowd into them. Not a pretty solution. As I got more and more involved I realised that this crowding wasn't going to work on fancy cabinets because things like glass shelves and complex lighted drawers can't abide this sort of thing.

Here is one of the columns, the one on the other side of the room. They were pretty much the same.

Here is the exact beam a few days ago.

the plastic is attached to it, just to the left of Kassi.

I wanted to move the support column into the wall cavity. The overhead beam didn't extend into the wall cavity so I had to get creative. I hammered in a 4by4 shoring to support the beam leaving room for me to work on the old column. I also used a bottle jack and another 4by4 to ever-so-slightly lift the beam. The house creaked in protest. My adrenaline was coursing through my body. I do stuff like this at work all the time but having a safety net of a corporation and insurance keeps my head cool. Here I cannot make any mistakes because I cannot afford them.

I had to remove the old column and floor blocking. The blocking was bad and the column was in my way. I opened up the wall bay and made room for my new beam. I still needed to attach the vertical column to the beam and decided on a steel angle bracket that I could hide within the sheetrock compound.

I went to the local steel yard and got a big piece on angle-iron. I buy steel from them for work all the time and I told them it was for me personally (almost free). I drilled the stump of angle-iron and notched my cut to length 4by4 post.

Here is what my bracket ended up looking like.

And here it the new column hidden in the wall cavity in all its glory.

Sorry, it is a bit blurry. On the left you can see my insulating efforts. I buy rigid foam insulation, cut it to fit then I foam the edges to make a hermetic seal. I cannot use fluffy fiberglass insulation because my old house doesn't have a vapor barrier and any absorbent insulation acts like a sponge and causes things to rot. Someday soon I'll insulate, hang a vapor barrier and re-side my house.

New back door

Here is what our old door looked like.

I took out the door and that old window on the right. I installed a temporary header to carry the rafters while I ripped out that door and made the opening large enough for french doors.

I reused the removed siding and patched the window hole. 

Tabitha helped me tear up some more of the flooring and clean the mess. See the new window on the right? 

Here is the new larger opening. We can actually see our backyard.

New french doors.

This is their new home.

These doors were a pain in the butt to get hung properly. Between the old house and manufacturing discrepancies it took quite a while to get them to operate smoothly.

Kitchen progress.

The windows and door came today. I tore out the old crappy back door. The hole must be larger for the double french doors. I had to support the roof while installing a new header over the french doors. 

Panorama photos are great but skew things so much it is difficult to tell what is going on. I am standing where the fridge will go and spun from the back door toward the makeshift kitchen behind the plastic on the right. Tabitha and I installed the two windows on the exterior wall of the dining area. 

Tomorrow I'll install the french doors and probably tear up more of the floor.

Kitchen remodel

We are in the throughs of remodeling our kitchen. We are moving the kitchen toward the center of the house. I moved essential kitchen "things" from the old kitchen area (the new breakfast dining area) to a cramped makeshift kitchen.

This photo Kassiopeia is standing right in front of Fritz-the-dishwasher looking into the deconstruction zone.

Toly and I are tearing off the old drywall. I needed access to re-wire and re-plumb. I am enlarging the windows for a light dining area. Windows are waiting for me to pick them up. I must eat breakfast first.

Kassiopeia, her awesome hair, is helping bag the old walls.

The wiring was scary. Knob and tube, and romex wired together in-wall. sketchy...

Homedepot supply run.

Toly is an excellent helper. 

keeping busy

Tools in hand, learning life skills that will serve him well. 

Work like this is always a family affair. I can't imagine doing this stuff without their help. Tristan will always do the crappy job because he understand that is usually the MOST helpful thing he can do.

I'm off to get my windows...

Leaky Pipes

The cold water supply pipe sprung a leak Friday. I immediately bought one of those pipe wrap clamps to stop the leak. Everyone with old galvanized pipe should have one or two of these in their emergency tools/parts.

The following day I bought the necessary fittings and pipe to fix the leak and re-plumb the entire cold water plumbing.  As I started working, gathering supplies and tools Toly (age 7) asked Whatcha? I asked him if he wanted to help. He gleefully said sure.

Crawling under our house is not as bad as some crawl spaces I have been in. Working on hands and knees makes for slow grueling work. Toly was instrumental in helping gather, transport tools and supplies to the further reaches of the crawl space. I explained exactly what we were doing and he really really helped. I had him trace the cold line and put tape on all the cold pipes as a marker. We didn't want to cut any of the hot water supply lines or, God forbid, any of the gas lines. It is a tangled mess of pipe doubling back and forth of hot, cold and gas lines. Together we sized up the entire cold supply to all the fixtures in the baths, kitchen, utility/laundry room, outside spigots and water heater supply. We formed a plan to logically and efficiently re-route all the cold water plumbing.

We did as much prep work as possible while the dishwasher and laundry machine finished their cycles. When it came time to start cutting on the pipe we needed buckets to catch the residual water. Toly scampered from under the house and retrieved some buckets. Water still got everywhere regardless of our efforts to the contrary. Luckily the entire crawl-space is covered in billboard tarp. Otherwise we would have been more than soggy. We would have been covered in mud and watery filth.

I showed Toly how to clean pipe and fittings. I taught him the different sizes that we were using and the different names for the fittings. We referenced shapes and angles from his everyday life. He really paid attention and I could see several leaps in understanding in his brain as they occurred. We were under there for a few hours my knees were killing me and my legs were cramping. He had been helping all this time without any promise of reward or special favor.

As I rested in a dryish spot I explained to him how helpful he was being to me and that the deserves a special treat. He is still undecided what it will be as yet. After we cleaned, fluxed and fit together the pipe we braced it  and I showed Toly how to solder the fittings together. Melting metal fascinated him. The tiny droplets of excessive solder were an especially big hit. We used a few sharkbite fittings in places were it is impossible to safely use a torch. Sharkbite fittings are way too expensive to use everywhere but sometimes necessary.

Here is some of the pipe that we removed we left an entire abandoned 50 foot section attached to the rafters because it can wait until next time.

 It feels so good to have re-plumbed all the cold supply lines in copper. No more drinking water from old galvanized pipe. A major leap forward in making our home "RIGHT"

The next step will be to replace all the hot water pipe. Even though there are fewer hot water fixtures re-plumbing the hot water pipe will be at least equally as complicated because I want to install a recirculating loop to the water heater so that we don't continue to waste water while waiting for it to get hot.

A daunting obstacle

Our backyard had been overrun with bamboo. The previous tenants simply let it invade. Invade it did. Several months ago both our side neighboring fences blew over during a wind storm. We promptly bought new fencing and replaced the fence on the west side of our house. The east side was a bit more daunting. It is where most of the bamboo was encroaching. I needed to address the invasion before committing to building a fence. It took several months to muster the courage to begin this task. Winter illness, then a new baby, then life generally got in the way. Now O'Melay birthday season is upon us. Tristan says all he wants for his birthday is to have his room done. The precursor to being able to do his room has been completing the east fence.

Tristan is a good boy and totally deserves his own room. So in an effort to try to get his room ready for his birthday in August last weekend Friday I started digging the trench for the bamboo guard.

Several blisters later and a mild sun burn I buried the heavy plastic barrier two and a half feet deep. Everywhere you see exposed dirt was completely thick with bamboo culms. Miserable digging--not as bad as Ozark rocky clay soil though.

It isn't actual bamboo guard. I couldn't afford the official product. What I installed is super heavy PVC roofing material I was given recycled from a commercial roofing company.

I used the concrete rubble to hold it in place while I back filled.

The following Friday (this past Friday) I started the fence. digging holes, pouring cement and letting it set over night. This morning we hung all the planks and voilà... a fence

Then later this evening we got ambitious and planted our fruit trees. It is finally our home. Fruit trees = Future food and sustainability.

the super dwarf peach

the dwarf meyer lemon

the blenheim apricot 

and a santa rosa plum

Best of all they are now protected from that bad bamboo.

Our back tomatoes seem to be doing ok. The tree collard on the right and some swiss chard on the left.

 Tomatos tied to our bean arch.

 Cucumbers should start climbing on the other side soon.

 The compost bins that I built a few weeks ago to take the extra compost from berkeley free compost. They were mostly full a few weeks ago.

 Rome picked out a Romneya poppy, we'll plant it very soon.

Georgiana

Born March 3rd at 9pm. Eight pounds five ounces of O'Melay joy.

It is sweet to see how much the kids love her. 

She has been nursing constantly.

Toly is especially attached. He didn't want to leave her even to go to park day.

But, Rome is the self professed "main" big brother. Everyone else has already had a younger sibling.

My work has been brutally busy

I say this as an apology for not making a blog entry yesterday.

It is funny how clumpy things get. No matter how much planning to try to keep things steady they naturally seem to clump together regardless of efforts to the contrary. Suppliers outright lie and say "such and such will be here in a few days." It usually ends up days or weeks later. Meanwhile, I have scheduled a crew and the construction deadline approaches.

ENOUGH complaining.

Things are generally wonderful at my job. I have just the right mix of challenges and successes to make me fulfilled.

Tabitha has been in the garden. Our fall/winter garden should do very well. We had an excellent dinner the other night that included our own red swiss chard. There is something about growing something then eating it fresh that makes it so incredible. Surely freshness isn't the only factor. I just can't explain it. It is one of the things that make gardening so rewarding.

And then there is this...

YMCA

I am trying to go swimming regularly. I love swimming. I missed it terribly when we lived in Missouri. We would go to the creek occasionally but it isn't the same as being able to go swimming anytime you like.

The pool at our local YMCA is a saline pool and extraordinarily clean. Well, there are actually three pools. One shallow pool mostly for kids babies and pregnant women. It is very warm--too warm for me. The deep pool is medium temperature and where I take the kids to "family swim." We try to swim a couple of times per week. Kassi and Tristan are full-on swimmers. Toly is almost there. He can dive under to the shallow bottom to retrieve stuff. Rome is still aquatically challenged. He wears a strap on floaty. Although, he is exceptionally comfortable in the water. It won't be long before he will swim without the floaty.

The Lap pool is great the perfect lap swim temperature. It is huge, Olympic sized. Swimming today I got a second wind and swam twice as long as the last time. My arms are still like noodles hours later. I'll probably keep to this amount for a while.

Half of the vapor barrier is in

Here is the pile of urbanite aka pieces of concrete.

The kids helped me finish getting all of the urbanite from under the house. I'm not sure why it was there. I entertained lots of reasons why it might be there but all of them ended in someone was lazy. So those big pieces of concrete were there because of laziness--and now they are not.

I wrestled with the tarp in the front yard to be sure that it would unfold the right direction once I wrestled it into place. Unfolding it was crazy exercise--haunched over pulling with all my strength while Kassi and Toly weighted the part to stay in place. That tarp material isn't the easies thing to work with under the best of conditions. Eventually after probably an hour I was pouring with sweat and panting like a dog on a hot summer day.

We did it. It is now covering half of my crawl space.

It seems so much better under there already. Next weekend we'll finish the second Half

The crawl space under our house.

Our house had a high humidity issue last winter. This is probably due to water pooling along the east side after rain. This water/moisture found it's way under our house. Also, the down spouts didn't direct the water away from the foundation around the rest of the house. Early last spring along with installing our raised bed out front I put in a french drain to alleviate the pooling issue.

During this past summer at my job we installed solar on a house that had the crawlspace finished-off with a heavy-duty big top style tarp. It was sealed to the edges of the foundation and made for the most pleasant crawl space. I instantly thought 'I wish I had some billboard tarp like I used everywhere on the farm.'

I called all the billboard advertisements for billboards in search of my quarry. All my efforts ended with "no, our customers don't want their branding misappropriated." As the summer sped by my search became more frantic. Finally, Tabitha found a place that sells used billboard tarp online--they re-print black over the Advertisements. The prices are substantially more than I wanted to spend but still an excellent value. We bought some.

Under our house was a significant amount of urbanite scattered around trying to poke holes in my newly purchased vapor barrier tarp. Yesterday Toly, Kassi and I began the arduous process of removing the urbanite. Most kids would be horrified of going under a house where a spider might live in the dark. I admit they were a little scared at first--I cleared most of the cobwebs prior to soliciting their help. Their residual fear was easily overcome with the prospect of helping Daddy work. They are such good kids.

We hauled over two dozen full five gallon buckets of the smaller pieces and the better part of a pickup truck bed full of the larger pieces. Some of the pieces took both Toly and Kassi pushing and rolling to get them out. We worked and worked. After several hours, Tabitha suggested that we take a break and go to the local nursery. Boy am I glad for that because I am very sore today and surely would have been much worse.

After church today I'll install tarp on the Western half of the house after a few more buckets of little pieces. The eastern side will be a bit more tricky I'll need to cut-in around the chimney foundation and other obstacles.

Once this tarp is down I will start installing some pex lines for some under floor radiant heat. I have some electrical things to finish. Then there is the task of removing all the galvanized plumbing and replacing it with copper. But, first I will install some lighting under there to make all the above work easier.

I'll add some photos to this post later today... so check back.

Post Halloween diabetic roller coaster

The kids had a blast for Halloween. We went to a local business district first. Loads of candy were consumed. Everyone gravitated toward a favorite and trading ensued. Several blocks from our house in Berkeley is the resound Halloween street of nightmares. They close off the street from cars and really embrace the holiday.

Here Rome as Buzz Lightyear is navigating the spooky path to his goal.

Tristan as the 9th doctor from Doctor Who BBC television series--yes we are nerds here. 

Toly is the redeemed Darth Vader--you can't eat candy with that mask on anyway. 

Obviously Kassi is Indiana Jones. 

The following morning, we bribed the remaining fifteen or so pounds of unconsumed candy away with a myriad of promises. Magic the gathering cards for those so inclined. A trip to In-and-Out Burger--chocolate shakes for all. And finally a trip to the YMCA pool for an extended swim. I should have also taken them to the sauna to sweat out all those toxic additives and food colorings they consumed. 

Rainbow stairs

The upper floor of our house is basically the Kids floor. Kassi's room is mostly finished--except finishing out the closet eaves. The main room up there is currently shared by Tristan, Toly and Rome. We are trying to finish out the front room (Tristan's room) before the Baby arrives. We are expecting a little girl Georgiana in late February.

One of the main obstacles before we could start on Tristan's room has been the rough oak planks that were being stored in there to be made into stair treads. They need finishing, staining, sanding and cut to length. We love our house. It just turned 100 years old this year. The stairs are a homage to Roy G. Biv.

We got the spray paint at the local art supply store. I was skeptical that spray paint would work. I've never had much luck using the stuff. it never seems to cover well and always runs and drips for me. Maybe I'm too impatient. I must report this paint was fantastic. Montana Gold professional spray paint is amazing stuff. It is about twice as expensive as normal crap spray but well worth it.

The color selection is amazing. It is worth buying a can just to see what you have been missing. 

NaBloPoMo

As some of you know I used to blog very regularly.
Life has gotten in the way of late. Tabitha has convinced me to do national blog posting month. NaBloPoMo the month of November. Stop by here and encourage me.

I will officially post today

Toly has been in the hospital

tabitha has documented our recent hospital life

http://omelay.blogspot.com/2013/07/anatoly-hospitalized-part-1.html

there are links on the right to several parts of the story.

k-)

Local forager

We have gradually ventured on bikes further and further from our home. Our latest discovery is the bike path that traverses Berkeley through Albany and onto El Cerrito ending finally in Richmond. We only went as far as El Cerrito. It is an amazing ride along and above the BART installation. It winds through houses and parks with little pit stops for sitting and enjoying the scenery.  The kids love to ride bikes. Rome is still on the trail-a-bike so we go at a pretty good pace.

We are continually on the lookout for ripe berries and fruit. Blackberries are in season as well as Plums and Loquats. Wild plumbs are on the backside of their season and very sweet--too sweet. Blackberries were a huge hit. The kids love them and as we rode along they would yell-out "BLACKBERRIES" as we came upon a patch. We found a Santa Rosa Plum hanging low over the bike path laden with fruit. Kassi was standing on my shoulders tossing down fruit while rest of were eating them almost as fast.

I just went to mapmyride.com and mapped our route 13.5 miles. we did that route yesterday and the day before. Over 25 miles in two days is quite a bit for our first rides.

GARDEN...

In other news Toly and Tabitha's garden is doing amazing. We have eaten several tomatoes even a cherokee purple. There should be a flood of tomatoes very soon. We have a couple of small squash and similarly sized cucumbers--a couple more days for them. We have eaten two eggplants. Pole beans are just reaching to climb. There have been dozens of meals of swiss chard. The dill has bloomed and forming seed heads. Toly and rome have eaten a few carrots--albeit one was baby one.