Yesterday morning two compact men of Central American descent pulled up in front of the house and unloaded several thousand dollars worth of new appliances. At first we were worried when they took the boxes off the units in the truck, but they treated our shiny new children with care as they hefted them up the front steps and into the front porch. I stood back with my coffee, amazed, when the smaller of the two men carried our dishwasher up our front walk and into the house on his back. (Note to Sears: Send your deliverymen out with a Johnni-Lift or something next time.)
And then, it was time to say goodbye to the legacy range. The two men strapped it to the cart, carefully navigated through the hallway, and then practically threw it down the front stairs. Goodbye, lousy electric range: may you never spatter grease, burn cookies, collect hair, or stink up our house again.
B. the electrician came back and finished roughing in the electrical work as well. As with the rest of the house, we’ll have several dozen outlets and dedicated circuits for all the appliances instead of two ungrounded plugs and an extension cord—halleleujah, amen.
I followed B. last night by patching up various holes in the plaster, insulating the weight channels in the window sash (which were empty, no wonder it cooled off in that room so quickly) and slapped a coat of Kilz on the Pepto-pink walls. In one way, I’m glad I was laid off, because this room needs a lot more work than I expected to get it ready for cabinets.
In the wake of some bad news last Friday, we did what most Americans often do when faced with potential financial crisis: We spent lots of money. Returning to Sears on Saturday for the Columbus Day sale, we ordered a range, dishwasher and refrigerator for delivery next Monday. The range is a different model and make from the one we first chose-it’s a Kenmore Elite gas range, and it turned out to be more expensive than the original, but it’s got a bunch of features we wanted. Convection gas oven, a warming drawer, a simmer burner, Check the bullet list on that first link there—six bullets down. See at the end there? We’ve got Sabbath Mode. Ozzy Fucking Osbourne is going to cook the crap out of our Thanksgiving turkey while “Crazy Train” pipes out of the recessed Bose flush-mount speakers. Not that shaky Ozzy you see on the MTV these days-no sir. Sears got the circa 1980, bat-eating, Stoli-guzzling Ozzy our parents warned us about to saute the vegetables.
This weekend I finally got to the two projects that have been bugging me for weeks now. The upstairs bedroom (The Cream room) has been closed up for months, waiting for an electrician to come and hook up the wiring. Since that got accomplished two weeks ago, It’s been waiting for me to cut new baseboards and reinstall everything I ripped out. After I ran data, phone and cable to the basement and made several trips to the Lowe’s for lumber, I put in new shims and tacked the boards back into place for fit. Everything checked out, so the baseboards and cap molding are in and ready for primer.
Downstairs in the kitchen, the sticky mess on the floor that’s been collecting cat hair and dust finally got addressed this afternoon. I started at about 3 and by the third quarter of the Patriots/Steelers game I had everything on the east side of the kitchen up and clean. Observe:
There’s more under the cabinets and under the range, and the perimeter of the floor needs to be hand-scraped, but it’s beginning to shape up. After a good drum sanding to the point where it’s all an even tone, it’ll look much nicer.
As for the installation, we had a brief freakout with the cabinet colors. The color we thought was “red” was actually a sort of yellowish brown, and that was definitely not cool. After cancelling the original order, we got a pair of full-size cabinet fronts and compared colors with a sample of granite (the color is called Bianco Romano), and finally decided on the red. This set everything back by about two weeks, but that’s fine—we can use the time to get all the other stuff organized. The other good news is that the quote for the granite is actually a couple hundred dollars cheaper than the original ballpark I’d been given.
I took fifteen minutes out of the day and while I was waiting for other things to happen, started a sub-weblog for the house over here. At some point I’ll put it on the side as a permanent link, and add pictures and probably backlink all the various pictures and entries I’ve done so far, but for now, it’s plain-jane and informational. There you have it.
Yesterday B. the electrician was at the house for a full day, wiring the hallway, dining room, and upstairs bedroom into the panel. Feel that rumbling underneath your feet? That’s the earth shifting on its axis. He installed two work lights in the hallway so that the switch actually lights something, until such time as we can stop to breathe and pick out lights to install. They also highlight the imperfections in the cieling that I didn’t catch when I was mudding and sanding it…swell. Apparently the hideous chandelier in the dining room—the one that features a pull string for a switch—is actually wired to the dimmer switch on the wall, but the wires were cut at some point and they never did anything with it. The mysteries of this house continue to confound me. B. also pulled the legacy plug hanging from the baseboard in the guest bedroom so that I can install the cable/ethernet/phone jack in there, and he’ll do the one in the front bedroom when he returns for the kitchen rough-in.
On that front, Jen and I stopped in a local counter-and-floor showroom and looked through displays of floor tile on Saturday. The choices were at the same time overwhelming and unsatisfying. Too much foo-foo “fancy” tile, which either is produced to look “rustic” (usually meaning it has a rough, beveled edge, like it’s been worn away by years of use) and looks cheap, or suffers from a printed surface (when examined closely, one can see the dot-pattern that makes up the color) which I’d wager would wear off in about two years of medium-duty use. We left the store without finding what we were looking for for either the counter or the floor, but we had a better idea of what we were looking for.
As a proof of concept, I decided to introduce our tarpaper-covered floor to Mr. Hand Planer, on the advice of our friend Mark, who I now owe several strong martinis. I got a Bosch planer from the local rental center and pulled up about five square feet of tarpaper in five minutes, until one of the thin, hand-crafted German blades snapped. The rental center exchanged that one for a Hitachi model which suffered from a frozen adjustment knob (meaning it was set permanently for a depth of about 1/8″, or a quarter of the depth of the wood) which made it unusable. Pissed, I charged a new Hitachi and pack of blades to the HELOC account, and in about 2 hours had roughly one-third of the floor stripped. Once I can get a solid day blocked out (and the cabinets are finally gone), I’ll be able to plane the rest of the floor, run a medium-grit sanding drum over the whole thing, and we can stain/polyurethane it in preparaion for cabinet install—maybe a little more work than underlayment and tile, but the result will be so much better.
(I’d show you a picture, but I can’t find my camera-to-USB cord anywhere, and I have no way of getting the pictures off my camera right now.)
So we’ve begun the complicated dance they call ‘professional home renovation’. It’s a complicated number; it involves being clean and dressed by a certain time, and the steps are more tightly choreographed. I’ve always compared it to swing-dancing in a minefield, based on my previous experience.
Up until the reality of hanging thousand-dollar cabinets in an out of square room hit me, I was happy to do just about everything myself. For the more specialized and dangerous tasks, like hooking high-voltage circuit breakers up to the board, or sanding oak floors, I was happy to hire somebody in. But this kitchen is a whole project; there’s demolition, plumbing, electrical, carpentry, framing, and finish work to be done in a particular order, and it’s all pretty specialized. If I had a million dollars and a month off work, I’d actually be looking forward to doing things like moving the gas line, or hanging the cabinets myself. But this house is out of square in four dimensions—which means I’d wake up two weeks after I started with nothing done, holding a pile of sawdust and some nails, and have no recollection of where I’d been or how the basement got flooded.
We’re thrilled with the kitchen planning company we went with (more info on that later: Movable Type now has unlimited weblogs, which means the house will get its own specific page) and we already have a plumber we know and like. We had an electrician, too, but I kept losing his number. I’ll back up:
Two years ago, we moved into this wreck of a house with a few conditions on the settlement. One of them was for the sellers to merge both electrical services into one (the doctor’s office was separate from the house) and upgrade the panel, which dated back to the 60’s and was a brand known for its ability to spontaneously catch fire. BG&E Home sent out a crew the first week we were in the house, which was a minor miracle based on further experience—I’m not recommending them—which consisted of one very nice man named B. who came to sort out the rat’s nest of wiring in our basement. I was at work, and Jen was upstairs in the kitchen unpacking our collection of orphan dishes, when she realized somebody was standing in the back doorway: The doctor’s son, who smelled like he’d fallen into a bottle (this was before noon on a weekday.) Jen’s curiosity got her talking to this man, and she felt safe enough to walk outside with him, knowing that B. was downstairs and by the window. (I’ll let her tell the rest of that story.)
Later on, after seeing the work he’d done, we got to talking with B. and asked him if he did electrical work on the side, pointing at all the ancient, deadly outlets around the house. He gave us his cell number, and I promptly lost it in the shuffle of housework and an upgrade to OS X. We tracked him down through BG&E, who gave us the number of his current employer, and I did a little social engineering with their receptionist to get his cell number. He came back out to hook up the wiring I’d prepared in the bedrooms, and a fair price for four hours’ work turned into a fair price for eight hours’ work (through no fault of his). He also got to meet Jen’s Mom, who had that particular ability of the terminally ill to ask probing questions into his personal life. He took all this in stride, which meant he was Good People. At this point he’d left BG&E Home and was working for another company, but was doing work for us on the side so we weren’t paying the markup. Unfortunately, I lost his number again during one of the many moves up and down the stairs before the wedding, and my focus was directed elsewhere after we returned from the honeymoon.
I should also add that my previous encounters with electricians have all been expensive and unsatisfying: For example, the job done in my first house was three times as expensive for half the work (and I’d done most of the prep, thinking it would save money.) This did not make me happy, and I decided never to re-hire that particular white trash electrician and his toothless apprentice.
Now that we’ve got the gears whirring, I realized we had to track B. down again through the various things we knew about him. Jen did a search online and found his old address down the street. (Aren’t the internets wonderful? Isn’t that also a little frightening, too?) There was no phone number associated with the address, and 411 couldn’t tell me anything. We decided to do a little footwork, and stopped at the address last weekend. I rang the doorbell, and we waited outside for a few minutes, but nothing happened. As we were walking back down the sidewalk, the door opened, and a woman in the throes of a massive sinus infection asked if she could help us. It turned out that this was B.’s wife, and that she didn’t have his number (they’re separated) but she’d pass along our information. We gave it to her, apologizing for getting her out of bed, and put the whole thing in the hands of the Sky Pilot.
As I was driving home yesterday evening, I called Jen to talk about dinner plans, and she told me she was talking with B., who was standing in our living room! He’d heard part of the story from his wife, knew of only one family on that side of Frederick road he’d done work for, and stopped by to see if it was us. As Jen explained all the work we had, his eyes got bigger and bigger. We stood and caught up for about a half hour, and he seemed happy to know we were looking for him. The sense of relief we have for getting him on the job is immense—he’s reliable, he’s good, and we like him. We’ve got first dibs, but if you need a good electrician in the Baltimore area, let me know. Because we have his number.
This afternoon, I signed the documents for a Home Equity Line of Credit to finance Kitchen II: A Contracting Odyssey, which will be staged in a limited (I hope) run at our house this fall. We have an appointment with a kitchen consultant on Saturday to begin the process of picking out cabinets and drawer pulls and countertops and all the other assorted epherma, and it feels good to finally be on the road (after much foot-dragging, hand-wringing, research, and correspondence.)
I’ll most likely be documenting the process here or someplace close by (I’ve been toying with the idea of another sub-weblog on this site with updated information on the house renovation progress, but that would take time that I don’t currently have to set up.) from start to finish.
Just so you don’t think we’re sitting around eating bonbons all day, here’s a picture of the upstairs hallway with the new paint job. Apologies for the color shift- it’s a little too blue here.
I’m not sure how to feel about this story. Should I be happy that the area is experiencing a boom in renovation and growth? or should I be sad that “2/3 of the home sales were to investors, who don’t plan to live in the houses?” Or the auctioneer reminding investors that there’s no rent-control in Baltimore, “so you can raise the rent whenever you want?”
I’d like to think that more people moving into the city and surrounding areas will boost the tax base and make things a little better.
That area above the porch roof is now blue, and the three ghetto windows have been scraped and glazed. This is the second-to-last major section of siding that needed to be painted, and these windows are probably in the worst shape compared to the rest. For some reason, there were never any storm windows installed on the atrium, so the windows took a beating. Next up is a good priming and then two coats of high gloss enamel.