Floors Galore.

In addition to continuing to lay pennies (Thanks MAdams for letting us buy $42 in pennies) on the office floor, we decided to re-do the floor in the upstairs 'working' bathroom. I am typically against wood floor in bathrooms but this bamboo floor looked really cool and is ultra-renewable and pretty low cost.

Of course like all projects this one really had its hurdles to jump over, the first one being the clawfoot. The tub is 90+ years old and weighs I would say right around 400lbs. I quickly realized I was not going to be carrying it on my own. In addition the pipes were pretty old and there was very little room to grab the drain pipe to try and remove it. My MacGyver solution was 2 hydraulic car jacks on either end of the tub and a dolly. This sort of worked. The jacks lifted the tub very easily but the pipes were so rusted together that despite all the connections being loosened they pulled the plastic drain pipe out of its connection to the main drain. (Actually it also looks like PaGyver never glued that joint... amazing it didn't leak at all.)

After that discovery I loosened the no hub connector to the plastic and jacked the tub up until the entire 18" drain pipe cut off was above the floor. Then luckily i was able to separate the tub drain from the stub. The tub had to stay on the jack however because the tub drain is still 4" below the bottom of the clawfeet. Wheeled the tub out and got to work.

Next hurdle was that the door was too low profile to allow for the thicker floor. 30 minutes of hauling the door up and down the stairs and slashing the base with the router and it was all set.

From there it was a lot of cutting custom floor boards and gluing the panels down. Putting the tub back in left some nice compression marks in the new floor, but its still a vast improvement. From there it was pretty easy to re-connect the "broken" pipe and glue it in. First try no leaks, all good! Still need to floor around the toilet but it was very late when we finished the tub area and I was still tired from traveling.

I really like how it came out, and have some custom bamboo quarter round toe boards in mind to match. Also have some crazy ideas for paint.

Lessons learned: Small diameter car jack wheels will dent floors. Routers are the most versatile of tools. Old plumbing sucks.

Other random events: Clovers have taken over our yard completely. It looks very cool but I am really really glad we went with raised beds because they are everywhere.
Got rid of the old water softener last night. Thanks trash guys (they must hate us)
The garden continues to outgrow our demands for lettuce and spinach. 1/2 tomato plants is producing heavily. Peas are producing very well. Sweet potatoes are coming in strong and Belle has some artichoke started.
Thanks MaGyver for watching Kai and all of the 'epic family for having us over for turkey. I had a great time.

Siegecraft

In 7th grade social studies, we were assigned to build a budget for a family living at the poverty line.  I got an A-.  Surprisingly, the teacher didn't take issue with my pollyanna claim the family could save 10% of their income for emergencies.  Instead, he felt that the daily breakfast of cereal and OJ "lacked variety."  I pondered this over my daily ration of cheerios and OJ.    

I've found myself doing themes and variations of this same assignment ever since.  Minimum wage wenching at a Renaissance faire was easily the hardest work (and best accidental diet) I ever had, even with parent-subsidized R&R during the weekdays.  At one point in my salaried past life, I was saving 60% of my income to cover business school which made the b-school travel and carousing feel as self-indulgent as an Enron team building event.  At another point, I obsessed (and still do) over financial independence: cutting costs and setting up enough passive revenue streams that you work because you choose to, not because you have to.  Now, with hundreds of thousands in the money pit, realization of FI is illusory.  Now a good month is one where I earn more than I spend at Home Depot.  

Lately, I've been pretty intrigued with the refrain in Game of Thrones:  Winter is Coming.  Sure, Southern California doesn't really have seasons, but if some catastrophic event were to allow, say, Zombies to walk the earth, how big of a lifestyle hit are we talking about here?  To that end, MacGyver and I are loosely following another 101 [things] in 1001 [days] meme.  I'm hoping it's a more interesting way to grind out those really arduous house projects that have no end in sight.  One meta-goal I'm pretty excited about is "6 month siege," though we'll probably have to leave the fort for work.  Full list is here.   

Penny floor details

Houston we are out of pennies!

Mysteries of the penny floor disclosed: There was not much online about how to install a penny floor. Plenty of articles describing the floors with pictures, but very little info on glue, flooring material etc. Those guys used a black grout, it looks like the people here used thin set. Not really sure what these guys used but I am very happy that I am only doing 100sqft. I got a tip from the comments here stating that resin was used as a topcoat, that gave me an idea.

We definitely wanted the floor to be sealed. While having exposed pennies age would be cool we figured it would be too hard to clean and too cold on the feet. I had an extra gallon of polyurethane snowboard resin which has been very useful in making random things so I figured I would give that a try. As I mentioned before the first attempt was to actually put the whole thing in the snowboard vacuum bag and essentially veneer the pennies onto existing laminate tile. I never made it that far because I discovered that hand laying these is easier and not that difficult. I wanted the mould to be extremely precise (when intersecting pennies are 5/8" to center, pure diameter they are 3/4". So I used a 3/4" router bit on 5/8" lines. It came out ok, with some gaps, but the real trouble is intersecting the tiles. I probably could have got it working in the vacuum bag but it would take a long time to build all the 1x1 tiles even 4 at a time.

Hand laying is the way to go. Polyurethane resin works very well and it holds my snowboards together so I know it has pretty good impact strength. It has very poor tensile strength so I expect cracks in the first earthquake. To strengthen it I could have laid a layer of fiberglass mat under the pennies, but I hadn't really thought of that and it would increase the cost. Once dried the surface is very smooth and not cold at all. As you can see from the picture below the resin amplifies the pennies shine when exposed to light.

In other news I noticed that the site (graf snowboards) where I learned how to make snowboards is no longer online :(. Going through that process taught me so much about laminate construction and exposed me to some great tricks (vac bagging)

Sticky fingers.

Lots has happened so it is about time for an update.

Did some mini projects during the week which included playing with fire, which has always been a hobby of mine. I burned the paint off of the brass chandelier in the office and re-wired it. It was not too bad to get the paint off, and we left some of the tarnish and burnt paint on for the distressed steampunk feel we are going for with the office. Rewiring it was quite a pain because of how the thing was built, in my confusion I ended up soldering it together 3 times, then running late live wired it in with rubber gloves on. Fun times.

Sunday was family day with Belle's mom, uncle and grandfather coming over and MaGyver coming down. We did the standard tour for the fam and before hitting original mike's for dinner I prototyped the first couple tiles for the penny floor. I had built a jig that was supposed to let us resin in a 1'x1' tile at a time, but in testing that simply did not work. I had also hand laid a tile with pennies and a resin top coat which came out much better. Based on this we decided to forgo laying tiles and simply penny over the existing floor. As of tonight, we have laid and coated about 2% of the floor, and it looks really good. Pics to come (I don't want to touch my phone with such sticky fingers.)

Once the floor is done, the office will be complete, just need to shuffle furniture around after that.

In addition to that we also removed the old in window AC unit, which was very gross. The kitchen looks noticeably better.
Scraped some more wall paper off the bedroom walls.

Meeting more of Belle's family was very cool, all very nice people (Hi!). Grandpa had some very interesting stories and it was very neat seeing him relate to some of the older parts of the house. I wonder if after another generation the nostalgia of seeing a push button lightswitch or a raised tank 'crapper' will be forever lost. I enjoy those details of the house for their difference and uniqueness, and it was interesting to see someone to whom they were so ordinary and familiar.

Mini project madness

Yesterday felt highly productive despite no large project being worked on by either Belle or myself. Friday night saw the completion of both the wiring work in the front room, and the painting in the office. This meant that we could move the computer/projector into its more permanent home in the front room and allow the projector to return to its cabinet instead of sitting on the floor. The morning was spent moving furniture around and setting up the picture location on the wall.

Afterward we moved to the pond. The water tube had been floating in the middle of the pond for a while and with the empty corner baskets really kept it from looking finished. Last week I had built a new bamboo spigot so that got installed while Belle planted some new vines on the corner baskets. The pond looks better than it ever has, woot!
We then took a trip to the homebrew store and home depot for a couple more projects the main one being a kegorator for my homebrews. The setup uses a converted wine chiller with enough space for two corny kegs and the 5lb CO2 tank. We have a bruery orchard white clone in there now that used lavender from the garden. One of my goals for the garden is to grow 100% of the ingredients needed to make a good homebrew.


Finally I really wanted to install the lantern over the castle gate to give it a finished look. That became the third mini project of the day and it got popped in as well as the flood lights over the back door getting replaced. The lantern is on a motion sensor but I cant get the sensor to detect anything so I just switched it to test mode which is always on. The whole thing is on a timer switch in the back porch.

Electrical

As a birthday treat I got to rewire the front massive living room. This was not very fun mainly because the previous owner had a lot of dogs and would apparently let said dogs run around and poop in the crawlspace. There was also quite a lot of rat shit as well. Crawling in this stuff is not entertaining.

Since this job was more than just a direct upgrade/adding a single new outlet I needed to do a pull all the way back to the breaker. Naturally getting the correct parts meant the customary multiple trips to home depot. Installing the breaker and the conduit was fun with the power going off and on about 30 times as I did some wiring then cut some conduit. After the first plan on where to run the conduit would have had me entering the basement directly on a floor joist we had to scrap that plan and come out the side of the breaker box instead of the bottom.

With the conduit installed and the romex in the basement then came the fun task of pulling the wire and tacking it in place. I pulled to the first outlet in the line split off a junction box and stopped for the night, completely filthy. The next night was Halloween and the neighborhood really got into the spirit of things. I quickly got some more wire pulled as Belle distributed goodies. Then as I was out of the basement getting more staples and wire nuts Belle called my phone from the front of the house to send me on an emergency candy run. I suppose my costume was homeless bum who sleeps in the dirt. $30 worth of candy procured and just in the nick of time as Belle had 3 lollipops left in the candy bucket. I was very happy to see lots of trick or treaters come by. Our neighbors mentioned that the the last owner kept the gates locked for the previous 20 or so Halloweens. Gave a random tour (number 6?) to a very nice lady from down the street and gave up getting any more done on the electrical. Spent the rest of the evening chatting with neighbors and kids. Chi got to make an appearance and spooked some kids but most were very excited to see her.

Tuesday I went back down for dungeon crawl #3, and we now have 4/6 outlets done in the living room and wire pulled for the other two. One more crawl and I can tear out all the knob and tube down there.


Other things we have done:
Moved the koi pond to the front porch
Carved pumpkins
Stained and installed crown moldings/footers in the office. Thanks cousin T!
Started wallpaper removal from the bedroom ceiling.
Built a new koi pond spigot out of larger bamboo.
Mandatory 3 trash bins filled to the brims.
MaGyver continued to work on the rose garden.