The big news around the Lockardugan estate these days is a successful mortgage refinance, which (among other things) has consolidated several large bills into one smaller payment at a lower interest rate. We will be seeing additional benefits beyond a smaller monthly outlay, beginning with forward progress on the side porch and atrium.
To recap, the day before Finn was born, we installed a door between the living room and what used to be the exam room in preparation for renovations. Predictably, the 20 months since then have been filled with all-baby-all-the-time, so the exam room sat untouched while we gathered some shekels and got her moving under her own power. Our main stumbling block, even before she was born, was how to organize the space in the atrium above, due to the need for plumbing—the plan has always been to use that space for a master bathroom adjoining the front bedroom. The jigsaw puzzle goes together like this: In order to finish off the downstairs, we need to put piping in for the upstairs bathroom. In order to get piping upstairs, we need to have a plan for how the bathroom up there will be laid out. In order for piping to go in, we need a chunk of cash to pay the plumber.
So, we’ve got the cash. Now, for the plan. On paper it sounds simple, but we have been stumped as to how to fit a sink, toilet, and bathtub into a space surrounded by windows and flanked by a fixed attic staircase. Working with only one interior wall makes planning difficult, because a shower on an outside wall is always going to be chilly.
What we’ve got now.
We enlisted the professional aid of Mr. Scout to help visualize a solution to our problem above, and get the ball rolling on the space below. (The immediate goal is to have a working bathroom on the first floor in place by July 4 for parade-goers, and the long-term goal is to have a functional den completed by, oh, let’s say Thanksgiving.)
The upstairs room is, as mentioned before, completely surrounded by old, creaky windows. The basement steps drop down into the back third, right next to a doorway that was tacked on to the rear of the porch. The staircase is next to a surround which encloses the chimney.
Our checklist for the upstairs bathroom is:
- A shower
- A toilet
- Dual sinks
- A large, usable closet
- Sunshine
- An over/under washing machine/dryer (not necessary, but would be nice)
Option 1
Mr. Scout did some measuring and some thinking, and suggested a radical solution: Make the back bedroom the master. Flip the current “closet”, push it forward to meet the depth of the chimney, and make the back 1/3 of the space a dressing room. Chop the attic stairs and devise some kind of hinged stair solution that can be folded up and hidden. Delete entirely the doorway into the front bedroom. Delete all but a few of the windows on the side of the house and take back that wall space. Put a tub/shower against the back of the closet and some kind of vanity/built in cabinetry against the front wall with the sinks. And put the toilet along the outside wall so it’s not the first thing you see upon entry.
Option 2
I did another variation on this idea where the tub becomes a stand-up shower in order to fit the washer/dryer alongside; we’ll have to measure that exactly and see if it can go somewhere else instead. I’m not entirely sure I want to delete the doorway to the blue bedroom, but if there’s another way to arrange the room to make things work better, I’m on board.
Downstairs, we’re altering the original plan just a touch to make the new bathroom more usable. Mr. Scout suggested widening the room from 44″ to 50″, turning the toilet and widening the window above to center them visually, and then using a 24″ door against the office wall, opening inward, for entry. We’ll level the floor and tile it. The casement windows I was originally considering for the den will change to a trio of double-hung units like we’ve got throughout the house, and the back door will be enlarged from a miniscule 24″ to a standard 32″ 15-pane glass (although this one will be exterior-grade steel). I’m still on the fence about what to do with the window over the radiator on the back wall; it may come out and it may stay in.
We’re shooting to have a working toilet and possibly a sink in place, surrounded by some roughed-in drywall for our parade guests. After that hubbub dies down we can get to the serious business of new windows, siding, and what to do about the floor (the end cutting pliers and I have a date with the floor sometime very soon), as well as insulating the coal cellar below (more tigerfoam) and doing something with the rickety porch off the back.
Saturday morning, I let Finn talk quietly to herself in her crib while I snuck downstairs and got her breakfast together. Weekends are my days to wake with her while Jen sleeps, and she knows the routine well enough now that when I’m the one who opens the door, she’ll whisper, “Mama seepin” and stay quiet all the way down the stairs. While she ate her breakfast, I sipped coffee and planned out our route based on the yard sale signs that appeared Friday evening. After she’d finished and we changed her diaper, I dropped her in the backpack and we slipped out the door.
The first one was right around the corner, and it was the best of the day. For $11, I found a tricycle with a training handle, and three Melissa & Doug puzzles in fantastic shape. We ran them back home and then continued on into town for breakfast, stopping off at four more sales along the way. There were some interesting items and some total crap, but nothing we really needed, so we picked up food and turned for home. By the time we got back, an hour had passed and Mama was awake, so we sat together and enjoyed a quiet morning before the day got started.
Finn is getting more and more comfortable in the pool as the weeks go by. She tried jumping into my arms from the edge of the pool last week, and it’s now one of her favorite things to do. We try to stay in the water as much as possible, though, because they have the place chilled down to arctic temperatures for some unknown reason. Usually by the end of the session, she’s shivering even as she’s laughing, so we try to bundle her up into the locker room as quickly as possible. We’re actually going to look into switching facilities for that reason, because we don’t want to give up on swimming with her.
She passed out so completely on the car ride home that I had to scoop her up like a linguini noodle and pour her into bed without any lunch. While she slept, I joined Jen and we cleaned the house like a couple of tornadoes straightening up everything in sight for our dinner guests: S. and D., whom we haven’t seen in ages. They were kind enough to bring over a metric ton of awesome sushi, so we started pouring stoli & tonics and dug in. Finn stayed awake long enough to eat two full meals: a standard Finn dinner and an entire plateful of kid-safe sushi (cooked and vegetarian choices). After she went to sleep, we stayed up and almost killed the bottle. Thanks for a great evening, guys!
Sunday morning Finn and I repeated our quiet ritual and snuck out right at eight, hiking into town under a big umbrella to stay out of the drizzle. After picking up breakfast, we took the long way home, waiting for rainclouds to give way to blue skies. Finn chattered in my ear the whole way, making sure to say “seeyoulaterbyebye” to fire trucks, concrete trucks, pickup trucks, dogs, people, planes, flowers, and every person walking the other way. We took a new route and explored a whole area of the ‘Ville I’ve never really noticed, which was interesting.
At 11, after breakfast, we walked down to the center of Catonsville to take in the first day of the weekend Farmer’s Market with our friends J. and A., and we were pleasantly surprised by the amount of people who were there and the amount of people we knew. It was enough that for the first time, I actually felt like we were part of the community and not just people who owned a house in the neighborhood. The market itself was smaller than the weekday version, but with the turnout they had, I’m sure it’s going to grow quickly. We visited with friends, took in the stands, and picked up a wide assortment of sundries: A bison delmonico steak, six tomato seedlings (and one zucchini), a pound of organic strawberries, and one chocolate-on-chocolate gourmet cupcake.
With the new motor installed
In the afternoon, while Finn napped, we split up to attack different projects: Jen worked in the garden to plant seedlings and finish the back beds, and I started pulling the headliner out of the Saturn to get the sunroof closed. Following the directions I’d found online, I got the entire thing disassembled and down within about twenty minutes. Before I continued to page three, where it said pull eight bolts and remove the entire sunroof assembly, I decided, in a rare and uncharacteristic moment of intelligence, to plug the spare motor I’d pulled from the junkyard into the switch to see if it worked. To my surprise, it did—so I bolted it into place and closed the sunroof. At that point it was a simple matter to clip the headliner back up and bolt everything back into place.
After the tracks were down but before the glass went back in
Pleased with my success, I hurried to get everything cleaned up, then ran inside to give the newly-woken girl a snack, strapped her in the car, and hustled up 695 to the bike store to look at helmets and rear panniers before they closed for the evening. We wound up talking to the manager of the store, who was very helpful, and ordered a 1-3 y.o. helmet for the girl as well as a wicker and leather basket for the front of the tandem. We’ll have to return the pannier I bought—the whole point is that we got a free child’s bike seat at a yard sale that’s designed to snap onto a metal pannier, but the way this is constructed it won’t go on completely. So, back to the store I’ll go. (I found it hard not to be thinking about upgrades to my other two bikes while we were there, but we’ve got to get Mama something to ride first).
Dinner was quiet and delicious: leftover sushi and a garden salad, followed by our cupcake, split three ways. Finn has also learned how to clink glasses for a toast, drink a bit, then put her cup down and say, “Ahhh.”
When it was time to lay down, we wrassled on the bed in her room and made her giggle by kissing and tickling and zerberts, and then read a book until her eyes got heavy. She repeated, “Iluboo” as we closed the door and then quietly murmured herself off to sleep.
Wow, here’s a fantastic new repository of info for a shade-tree n00b like me: Secondchancegarage.com. I followed a link for interpreting a vacuum gauge and stayed for Let’s Create a Carburetor!.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
From Jalopnik.com, a bit of timely information: How To Rebuild An American V-8 Carburetor. I’m in the process of buying a couple of 2-barrel Holley 2300’s for rebuild and tinkering so that I can become both familiar and adept at working with them.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
This morning I found myself at the entrance to Crazy Ray’s just after opening, tools in hand, looking for a Saturn of comparable vintage in order to pull the moonroof switch and motor. I had almost given up finding one in the GM section when I stumbled upon a dark green SC-2 tucked away next to the motorcycle heap, and as luck would have it, it had a moonroof.
Pulling the switch was a 5-minute project, but getting the motor out was another thing entirely. I wasn’t worried about saving the headliner, so that came out easily with a boxcutter, but the mounting nuts were small and hard to access, and I didn’t have a socket set. some elbow grease and the pliers on my Leatherman started the nuts, and within ten minutes I had it in my hands.
I had a little time to kill, so I browsed the SUV and import section for anything that might be useful for our existing fleet, and to see if there was anything new and interesting, but pretty much struck out.
After paying $21 for the switch and motor, I returned to the parking lot and plugged the new switch in to see if it worked; unfortunately, there was no response. The winding screw does work, so I’ll have to have Jen help me push the glass up the track while I wind the motor in order to close and seal the top completely.
This evening I decided I’d motor home with the moonroof open in the Saturn, and flipped the switch between the two visors. The glass lifted obligingly and then froze about 1″ away from the front edge of the opening, dead in its tracks. No sound from the motor, no grinding in the tracks. This has happened before, a number of years ago when Saturn was still in business and the car was under warranty, and they replaced the broken part free of charge. Now we’re on our own.
A search online revealed a detailed explanation of how to disassemble the roof of the car to get at the relevant parts (and take the entire moonroof assembly out), and another post contained the key bit of information I was looking for. GM, in its infinite wisdom, used a drive motor with a built-in manual gear to help wind the glass closed in the event of just such an emergency. In their customary stupidity, they hid access to this manual gear by covering it up completely, so in order to get a screwdriver on it, one has to remove the entire headliner. (Contrast this with our Honda, where there’s an unobtrusive plastic cap over the manual wind mechanism in the middle rear of the roof. Pop it off, and you’re in business).
So, tomorrow morning I’m going to head to Crazy Ray’s to see if they’ve still got one of the three SC-1’s from a month ago, and pull the switch to see if that’s the problem. If it still won’t close, I’m going to pull the headliner down over the weekend, crank the window closed manually, and just enjoy the breeze from the side windows instead.
Finn has been standing up and getting around under her own power for a while now, and one of her favorite things in the world is to watch Melmo on the TV—to the point where she’ll bang on the picture tube with both hands. She quickly figured out how to turn all of the components on and enjoyed hitting the power button on the TV repeatedly so that it would turn on, turn off, turn on, turn off, until the day when the button broke and fell backwards into the plastic case, along with one of the volume buttons. No big deal, really; we have a remote, the TV is at least 15 years old, and we’ve been considering a replacement TV for a long time. Until that day, however, I had to find a way to halt any expensive damage before it’s broken beyond repair, and make sure she doesn’t electrocute herself sticking her finger into the case.
Along with the greenhouse, a comically dangerous electrical system, and a half a ton of anthracite coal, we inherited a sheet of 3/8″ plexiglas when we moved into the house, which I figured would be thick enough to stand up to little hands.
I measured and cut a sheet on my table saw after taping the bottom half with blue painter’s tape to prevent scratching, and then clamped it on the edge of my worktable on the shorter side (so that the long side hung out over space). Using a propane plumber’s torch, I heated the edge by moving the flame back and forth slowly and applying gentle pressure to the free edge. After some time, the plexiglas clouded (because of the direct exposure to flame) but became pliable, and I bent it down carefully to an angle a little more than 90°. I placed the back of a chair against it while it cooled, and after about 20 minutes I had a clear shield made for our stack of components.
The bottom is deep enough that the components sit on top securely, so that their weight (and they are heavy) holds the shield in place. I’ve since cut about 6″ from the top of the example shown above so that it’s just a little higher than the XBOX. Finn can’t get her hands around the edges to reach the buttons, and our remotes work flawlessly through the plexiglas.
I then made a second shield for the TV and this time used a heat gun to bend the plastic, which was much more successful—there was no clouding or discoloration at all, so I’m going to redo the first one to match. The final step will be to buy a smaller rounded router bit (I have a 1/4″ radius bit, but I need something like a 3/16″ to work correctly) and smooth and round the edges off so that Finn doesn’t cut her fingers.
What Startups Are Really Like. I’ve been peripherally and personally involved in several startups, and this is a good breakdown of what it’s like. (via DF.)
File this under “future projects”. Make a Kegerator – Wired How-To Wiki
Hmm. I picked up a first-generation Xbox for $20 at a yard sale a few months ago, and i’ve played it sporadically since then (I now have a family, so it’s low on the list of priorities). This headline caught my eye, though: Transform Your Classic Xbox into a Killer Media Center. I have to do some sleuthing to see exactly what my Xbox configuration is.