I like to watch the Home & Garden channel to see house porn and get ideas for our place. It’s kind of a spectator sport sometimes, because the people featured on all of those shows have absolutely no taste. Here’s the setup: an otherwise normal looking couple has their house on the market for eight months, and they can’t understand why it’s not moving—could it be the fact that they’ve decorated it in Early American Frat House? Young couples who would ordinarily throw judgemental looks at me in the Starbucks live in condos that look like the bed of a municipal waste truck.
Then, some expert blows in, forces them to dispose of their stuffed animals and model train periodicals in a humiliating yard sale. Afterward, they throw the remaining furniture out, buy some window treatments, paint the place in colors other than white, and Voila! the house sells. Miraculous!
There are other shows, like the ones that feature flipping (how’s that working out for you this year?) and renovation, and I like to see what people have done with basket cases like ours. I steer clear of This Old House, which is made for WASP-y hedge fund millionaires who can afford to hire The Largest Crane In Connecticut to lift a barn over a pond, or install enough solar panels to light a municipality. I also avoid While You Were Out: even if you have the hottest carpenter on TV, a $1,000 budget will only get you cheap-looking custom furniture painted in one ugly color.
Mainly, I like to watch so that I can find solutions to problems that only this house presents. What do I do if I have no heat in my kitchen? How can I replace a slate roof without declaring bankruptcy? Where can I find replacement valves for my radiators?
Usually I’m disappointed because these programs are only interested in answering easy questions, like which end of the hammer hits the nail? But once, I saw something that got me excited.
For the last couple of years, I’ve been back and forth as to whether I should start replacing all the windows here at the Estate with vinyl, or find some way of making the existing windows better. A few weeks ago we had a guy come and quote on new basement windows, and on a lark had him quote separately on the dining room windows (which are long past saving). Surprisingly, the price was reasonable—much less than I’d guestimated.
As it suddenly got cold outside, I kicked around the idea of going room by room with vinyl. This place seems to have gotten draftier with each passing year, even in the rooms where I’ve scraped, repainted, and recaulked the storm windows. Where we’re losing the heat is in the weight pockets on either side—a 6″ deep cavity covered by two bare pieces of ¾” thick wood, hardly an energy efficient solution.
Vinyl sucks, though. It’s ugly. I like the warble in our existing windows, which were built in the days when glass was still imperfect and contained lines and bubbles. I like the look of wood. And the two vinyl windows that predated our arrival are cheaply made and already discolored. Plus, some botoxed “realty expert” on one of the house programs said that buyers don’t like vinyl, and are looking for natural wood windows wherever possible. This statement got me to thinking, but I took it with a grain of salt, only because the program was filmed in Southern California, where their idea of cold weather attire is long pants and a warm macchiato.
A couple of years ago I saw something on one of those programs, and dug around to find it online: the Pullman Manufacturing Company, who make a product called window balances. Essentially, it’s a spring-loaded cord that fits into the pulley pocket used by sash weights. Cut the weight cord, pull out the pulley roller, and replace it with the window balance, then attach the end of the cord to the bottom side of the window, and there’s no need for weights anymore—which means the void can be filled with insulation (somehow).
I missed the sales rep this afternoon, but I’m calling tomorrow to buy four. I’m going to test it out in the living room to see how much of a difference there is, before I make a final decision on vinyl.
Jen and I took advantage of the one sunny day this weekend to get the hell out of town. We pointed the car at the Bay Bridge and visited Easton, MD, which happened to be hosting a Waterfowl Festival, which meant that the streets were blocked off and filled with people. From the website, I would have expected lots of guns, decoys and hunting equipment, but it felt more like a wine festival in New England. The town itself is pretty, and it’s filled with lots of fussy shops filled with potpourri and “new antique” furniture—it’s obvious there’s lots of money there, which I would not have guessed. After walking around the town and checking out the sights, we stopped into the Restaurant Local to get out of the chill and have some cocktails, and stayed for a delicious dinner.
I could have used this a couple of weeks ago: How to use a Creative Commons license, by one of the editors of BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow.
Jeebus, it’s getting so that I can’t listen to NPR anymore without getting totally scared out of my head about the economy. Gas is at $100 a barrel, some Chinese government dude mentioned selling off some of America’s ridiculously huge debt, mortgage companies are imploding like crack whores after a day in the drunk tank, and our state and federal government are bickering over budget shortfalls. Meanwhile, the President is rattling our debt-leveraged sabers at Iran. I wonder when this country’s creditors are going to call in their chips and start repossessing aircraft carriers and national monuments?
It’s funny—all this stuff is happening, and there are still twenty or so retards running around the country shaking hands and making speeches, angling to be the next President. I don’t know what’s going to happen next year, but I’m thinking whoever “wins” is going to get handed a big shit sandwich when they take office. And, if the current talk is to be believed, we’re all going to be in a world of hurt by that point. All of this talk is enough to make me stockpile water and ammunition in the basement to wait out the Big One.
What I’d like to see tomorrow is for the Dow and all the financial analysts and the brokers and the Fed to take five, pass around a big fat joint, snack on some Doritos, and agree to chill the hell out. Because I don’t want to run a business in the middle of a recession.
Not much to write about here at Idiot Central…not much that’s exciting, anyway. Yesterday I spent about twelve hours at my desk working on various projects, and things are progressing slowly but steadily on most fronts. It suddenly got nail-bitingly cold here in the Mid-Atlantic region, cold enough that I’m praying every night to the Fleece Fairy for more layers. Plans to upgrade some of the windows here at the manse have been put on hold until further checks roll in, at the risk of a mutiny led by my chilly feet. Leaves are changing color and beginning to cover the lawn, which means I have to bust out the blower and start bagging before Christmas. Thankfully, I was able to fix the carburetor on our crappy lawnmower last Sunday, and cut the back half for the first time in two months (you laugh, but with the drought, it wasn’t growing anyway). Three hours later, it was covered with leaves again.
Ha, ha. Karma is a bitch, boys. A Washington publisher is being sued by several conservative authors over book royalties. The plaintiffs include the Swift Boat asshats and several others. Favorite quotes: “It suddenly occurred to us that [the publisher] Regnery is making collectively jillions of dollars off of us and paying us a pittance.” He added: “Why is Regnery acting like a Marxist cartoon of a capitalist company?”
Um, no, dude. They’re just acting like a capitalist company. See how that feels? That’s called “Middle Class America”.
November 5, 2007: 7:56PM. We saw our first Christmas-based commercial on TV (for a card company hawking a singing snowman on a toboggan).
Let the consumerism commence.
Our friends Nate and Kristen just had their kitchen remodeled, and before demolition, they offered us two built-ins that came with the house. Never one to turn down another time-intensive project, we selected the smaller of the two, which was the top of a hutch. This piece has two solid three-pane doors with good brass, and the wood is hard (pine? poplar?) with a nice grain and no knotholes: perfect for a bookcase or even a buffet.
I got the entire outer shell heat-gunned and sanded yesterday, and about 1/3 of the lower shelf to see how thick the interior paint is. Both of the shelves actually come out, so doing the interior will be less work than I’d thought. Then, I have to knock the glass out of the doors and strip them carefully (windowrames are the worst) before we can start testing stains. Hopefully I can get it all sanded by Thanksgiving.
I would have had a ‘before’ shot here, but I forgot to switch the settings on my camera at first, and they’re all blown out.
I’ve been stymied for the last few days by a particular bug in Internet Explorer that wasn’t letting me make pretty images like I wanted to. Thanks to this article, I found a workaround that solved my problem, made me slap my own forehead, and reaffirmed my faith in my coding abilities.
WOW. This is so awesome, it gets a full-page post. An SD memory card with built-in wireless capability, so that pictures taken on a camera can be uploaded to a computer or a Flickr account (or one of 14 other online photosharing services). Still using CompactFlash (like me)? They’re testing CF adapters for the SD cards, and expect to have them ready in a week.
That’s some cool shit, there.