when it comes to the moneypit, Ben and i have been working with concept of zero-sum days lately. if something breaks, but something else gets fixed, then we can consider the day a wash. as long as the rate at which things break isn’t faster than the rate at which they are being repaired, we’re not losing ground. or our sanity.

for example – last weekend we got back from a week of vacation to discover that the garage door motor, after three weeks of faithful service, had given up the ghost*. but, later that night, we figured out that the reason the dishwasher wasn’t really cleaning anything was that we had the “high temp wash” button turned off, so it was just sluicing lukewarm water around on the dishes. so: zero sum day: garage door broke, but the dishwasher washes things now.

on thursday, after several days of heavy rainstorms, i came downstairs to discover black mold** blooming up a 4′ section of drywall on the enclosed back porch. which really shouldn’t have been too surprising given that water has been flowing out of the broken gutter, through scary shed, and running under that piece of drywall down the basement stairs (where, happily there is a drain that we recently had routed out). i spent the morning requesting bids from contractors for the gutter/siding/foundation work that we’ll need, and we bumped the demo of Scary Shed to the top of the to-do list. i’d call that a point for the moneypit. however, later that day we got home and discovered that the city finally turned the gravel pit in our front yard back into sidewalk. point for us. so, zero-sum day.

this weekend was a high-scoring, but ultimately zero-sum game.
point for us: Ben demolished scary shed***:

point for the moneypit: once we got Scary Shed out of the way, we discovered that power to the garage is run through a 12-gauge household extension cord buried in the back yard.

some really quality workmanship:

so i’d call that even. Templeton the Rat’s shanty town is no more; but now we need an electrical permit.

*when the garage door technician opened up the back of the motor, he literally swept out a handful of plastic fluff that was the remnants of the stripped out gears.

** i have no idea if it is The Black Mold that you always hear scary things about, or just a Mold That Is Colored Black, but either way we have to get rid of it ASAP.

*** why is it called Scary Shed? because the inside looks like this. and Templeton the Rat lives inside there. also, because we owned the house for a good three months before we had a chance to break the lock on the door and peer inside. during which time there was much speculation about what might be within. some voted for treasure, but more people were predicting bodies. it was neither treasures nor bodies: just some old cupboards, a half-eaten muffin, and a lot of rat poo.

the thing about living in the middle of a rehab project is that normal household tasks have this tendency to unfold into bigger and more complex projects than originally anticipated. russian nesting tasks. or, or…it’s more like our house is a clown car, stuffed with more problem clowns than you could have believed possible. you open up a closet and out come the problem clowns.

anyway. our bedroom closet still doesn’t have any shelves or clothing rods, meaning that on a good day, after cleaning up, it looks like this*:

while trying to find somewhere to put away the clean laundry, i decided to move all of our clothes that we don’t wear often (winter, fancy-dress) into the closet in the spare bedroom/office, which is the only closet that has a clothing rod. as i started hanging things on the rod it became immediately clear that it was too wide a span and that the rod would not bear the weight of everything i wanted to hang in there. it began to bow almost immediately:

so i stopped moving clothes. went to home depot. bought a bracket. located the studs. cut a piece of scrap lumber. installed a furring strip. installed the bracket. moved the original holders back by a 1/4″ to meet the 12″ standard because is anything ever installed right in this house? no. reinstalled the bracket, this time with the assistance of a level.**

2 hours later? clothes, neatly organized. it really is nice to live in an apartment where i can just fix things myself if they aren’t right, instead of waiting for a landlord to do it, or just putting up with it. but it’s a spectacular time suck.

* except without the drunk-goggles pano effect. the floorboards don’t really curve like that.

** to do the job right, i should have painted the furring strip before i put it in, and touched up all the paint afterward, but that’s okay because lau is going to come visit and we are going to paint closets suprising colors.

ben and i made certain agreements regarding the house: he would fix toilets, i would handle all paperwork. he will tear off Scary Shed, i will paint the front porch. it’s a combination of playing to our strengths, and enabling us each to avoid the things we hate most.

when it comes to installing trim in the rental unit, our division of labor was such that ben would measure, buy, base paint, cut, and install all the trim and i would fill, patch, sand, and paint it. in the end, our respective tasks took us each about three weekends. ben’s dad helped him for one of those weekends, my mom helped me for one of those. so the labor division was probably pretty even. i worked my way through two audio books in the time it took to fill, patch, sand, caulk, tape, and paint the nearly 1000 linear feet of baseboards and window and door casing (we left crown moulding out of the rental unit entirely – it is a nice touch but there’s only so much time in a day).

here’s the thing about foundations. they are what you build everything else on. seems obvious, right? like all old buildings, ours has settled and nothing is square. and so despite the fact that the drywall is new, the walls bow and curve as much as 1/2″ from top to bottom around a doorway. at first we thought it was just a terrible drywall job, but then i had this epiphany about foundations. since we didn’t do a full gut rehab and take the walls down to the studs, the drywall was installed over the plaster and lathe walls. which are 1) 110 years old, and 2) naturally have curves and imperfections. if you put new drywall over an imperfect foundation, you get an imperfect finished surface. so ben had a lot working against him when it came to mitering corners and installing the trim. even though i made as many as 7 passes over every piece of the same trim, i’m still amazed at just how many feet he managed to cut and install.

since i love process photos, here’s a quick photographic journey of just one of the approximately 7000 corners and joints that i finished in the past month.

1: trim installed with a base coat of paint on it:

2: fill cracks larger than 1/4″ with an expanding foam:

3: after 24 hours, scrape any excess foam out so that it sits about 1/4″ back from the edge, creating a foundation for the joint compound in the next step:

4: use a joint compound like Patch n Paint to fill in every nail hole and imperfection, and to sculpt the missing materials in the corners:

5: after another 24 hours, sand away the excess joint compound. with a damp rag, wipe away excess dust, then run a line of acrylic caulk along the gap between the top of the moulding and the wall. if the gap is larger than 1/8″, fill with joint compound, first. then let the caulk sit on top of the JC:

6: tape, unless you’re a professional painter who can get paint only where he wants it. i am not one of those:

7: finished:

some days, a tiny patch of water-stained ceiling:

quickly turns into a Giant Toilet Operation:

kudos to my husband who reseated two toilets with new wax rings cheerfully and without complaint. for you, my dear, i will write all the leases and mortgage paperwork in the world, if you’ll just fix the toilets.

one of the simple pleasures of rehabbing a house is the seemingly bottomless opportunities to make caulk jokes. i sure caulked that up. nothing that a little caulk won’t fix. hang on, i’ve got wet caulk on my hands…for the 14-year-old boy in all of us, it never stops being funny.

like making fake blood, caulking things is on the list of weird tasks i happen to be really good at. there were several months, back in 2011 or so, that our apartment in berkeley was overrun on a daily basis with EIGHT INCH WIDE RIVERS OF ANTS (i do not exaggerate). first we tried all the hippy, natural solutions (orange peel spray, cayenne pepper, borax and sugar water traps), then we tried the ant baits and pesticide sprays, and finally an exterminator. but the only thing that was really effective was to determine where the ants were coming in, and caulk up that crack. over the course of one rainy, angst-ridden and ant-filled winter, we slowly but surely hermitically sealed up that apartment.

finally, something good came of all that ant-related ennui. i’m good at caulking bathtubs, sink surrounds, window casings…you name it.

it’s been a couple of weeks since the last update on the house and we’ve done so. many. things.

ben, with help from his father, installed window and door casings and basedboard through the entire rental unit. now i’m coming through and painstaingly filling, patching, sealing, caulking, sanding and repainting all of the trim (reinforcements in the form of my mother are coming in next weekend, thankfully). it’s an enormous job.

we also: fixed the garage door, programmed new garage remotes, caulked the bathroom, bolted down a toilet, installed towel bars, installed robe hooks, key hooks, tool hooks, pants hooks*, hooked up doorbells, put up clothing rods and closet shelves, fixed the thermostat to the wall, started setting up the basement tool room, selected and ordered cupboard hardware, trued up cupboard doors, diagnosed, ordered parts, repaired and re-installed both dishwashers (one of which broke again), fixed the gasline to the stove, tested the bathtub for leaks, took apart and repaired the bathroom door, had the city replace the exterior water valve (which involved digging up our sidewalk and replacing it with a big pile of gravel), made no fewer than a half dozen trips to hardware stores, and like a dozen other things that i can’t remember right now.

nearly all of this work was done on the rental unit, and a good part of these tasks also need to be done in our apartment eventually. but it will be a lot easier to do this stuff once someone is helping us pay our mortgage. because, in addition to all the work listed above, we also photographed the apartment, made it a website, posted it on craigslist, held an open house, accepted applications, checked references, ran credit reports, wrote a lease, and RENTED THE APARTMENT!

we’ve gotten so used to the rental apartment being ours as well that it will be strange when we can’t walk through there. but having the first floor look occupied will be good for security as well for our bank account.

there were months where we were so impatient for the contractor to just get out of our way, and finally this past month we’ve been able to dig in and get our hand dirty and actually fix stuff. these are the simple pleasures we had in mind when we started this crazy journey 9 months ago. to fix something instead of buying a new one. to build something permanent instead of only investing in the transient. to have a place to use all the power tools that we received as wedding gifts. to (someday) construct the awesomest bookcase ever**.

* pants hooks 1) are a thing and 2) are key to my husband’s method of wardrobe organization. but then again, i have three different categories of tank top, so who am i to judge?

** we sometimes refer to this mythical, future bookcase as the 6-figure bookcase, since the desire to design and construct our own built-ins is what sparked the entire house purchase in the first place.

we’ve move in! i fear that our lives may never be free of plaster and drywall dust again. i’ve already mopped more times than i probably did in the year and a half we lived in our last apartment.* the cats don’t yet respect the territorial boundaries, which means that every time we leave the gate open one of them invades the other half of the house (dubbed East Germany and West Germany based on the cardinal layout of the house). snarling and hissing ensues until one of us chases the cats back to their respective Germanies. the other night we woke up to such an incident taking place on our bed. i cowered under the covers while ben yelled sleepily over the sound of their caterwauling, “wrong cat! wrong cat!” the double move has been a stressful transition for the cats, made worse by a parade of movers, electricians, inspectors, and in-laws tromping through during the first week of residence.

the really good news is that the house finally, on the 4th try, passed the city’s electrical inspection. the politics of this issue are complicated and not very interesting, but suffice to say that our house’s electrical system is reeeeeeeally safe now. the only item left on the contractor’s punch list is the water pipe seeping in the basement, and then he is out of our lives for good, fingers crossed. but to fix the pipe, the water has to be shut off at the street. to turn that off, a faulty valve must be replaced. to get to the valve, the city deemed it necessary to cut down the ginko tree in the front yard so they can backhoe the whole front yard (it’s a VERY small front yard). in another situation i might have fought to keep the tree, but this news arrived in the midst of move, tech, frantic unpacking, painting and carpentry. so i just rolled over and accepted the loss. once all is said and done we’ll pick out a new tree to plant out there. maybe another ginko, as they are supposed to be a sign of good fortune and prosperity, and I think the shape of their leaves is neat.

the rule i established in the last post continues to ring true: our dishwasher washed exactly 1.5 loads of dishes before giving up the ghost, and the next day the garage door jammed shut (thankfully with the car stuck outside, not inside). back to hand washing dishes and parking on the street. which frustrating, but we’ve both lived many years without either of these modern conveniences, so they go on the bottom of the list while we concentrate on preparing the rental unit instead. once there’s an income stream coming from the rental unit well be in a much better position to tackle repairs that require service calls.

there was a deadline for getting the rented moving boxes unpacked and returned; after that we’ve tried to turn our attention away from our apartment and focus on getting the rental unit ready. ben’s father and step-mother came to visit last weekend; while i was in tech and working 10am – 1am shifts every day, Ben and John put up half the moulding in the rental unit and Michele cooked meals and unpacked all of our kitchen and books. for which i am eternally grateful, as “unpacking” would otherwise have literally been dumping the boxes out on the floor in heaps an hour before the box company came to pick them up. with Michele’s help there is a functional sense of order to the apartment that will carry us through the remaining weeks of work on the rental unit.

books on shelves and dishes in cupboards go a long way, but our space still looks raw – there’s no window or door casing or baseboards, so you can sort of look into the guts of the house. i suspect the danger is that we’ll quickly grow used to it and stop noticing how unfinished it looks. the fact that we have to get the house reappraised and refinanced within a year will provide a useful deadline; otherwise there’s the risk that 5 years from now we still wouldn’t have any moulding up. there are no window coverings, so we just try not to walk too close to the windows while naked (no sense in offending the neighbors before we even meet them). none of the closets have shelves or clothing rods in them so stuff sits in boxes and suitcases and heaps on the floors.

and those pesky jobs, which pay for us to have this nice new project house, they want our attention, too. Ben left for California last week for work, and I’ve logged three 70-hour work weeks in a row.

to say we’re stretched thin is an understatement.

but at the time of writing, i’m on a flight to California for a much-needed, long-anticipated 4 day vacation from all things house and work. i will dress like a viking and run across san francisco with my husband, brother and sister-in-law. i will meet my 8-week-old nephew for the first time. i will go to Maker Faire and be inspired by all the cool creative things on display, i will hike in marin county, go for a run across the stanford campus, eat tofu tostatas in Mill Valley, admire the fog rolling across the bay, and maybe, just once, sleep the ef in. we’ll be back to house and work reality on Wednesday. till then.

* cleaning is really really not our forte

so, i think that this photo pretty much summarizes everything about the quality of the work that the previous owners did in our house:

(that’s the sticker explaining how to install the bathroom medicine cabinet. which is most definitely installed upside down).

ben and i have a new rule for the MoneyPit: just because something breaks off in your hand doesn’t mean that you broke it. we’ve spent the past 5 months fixing the big things that were done wrong; now i expect that we’ll spend most of the next year chasing down the little things. bathroom vanity installed upside down and so high that my under 5’4″ guests can’t see themselves in the mirror. crooked kitchen counter jams a drawer shut. the kitchen faucet leaks back down into a bucket under the counter. the bathtub handle doesn’t stay on. doors that won’t stay shut, or won’t stay open. mushy floor boards that need to be pulled up and supported. rain water that seeps under the shed and down the basement stairs. rats (or rabbits. let’s hope for rabbits) that tunnel in under the back stairs. gutters that leak directly over the back door. the list is WAY too long to post it all here. and this is before we start making the upgrades and hacks that were the whole reason we WANTED to buy a house. a customized bookcase installation. premium kitchen lighting. closet shelves that make sense. a basement workshop. backyard fire pit. a coldframe for starting tomatoes early. raised vegetable beds.

still, it’s ours. we’ve both lived in other apartments with at least as many broken items, but have never been free to just FIX things, because they weren’t our buildings. there was nothing to invest in. i know that buying a shiny, fully-equipped and modernized condo makes a lot of sense for a lot of people in a lot of housing markets, and i don’t doubt that there will be days in the future when i want things to just work. but for our own first house purchase, we couldn’t wrap our brains around buying a box of air*. we wanted the visceral experience of getting dirty and using our hands to make things. well, we got that. plenty of dirt, plenty of stuff to make. about 20 years’ worth, i’d estimate. there will be days that i hate this. i pretty much hate this part right now – walled in by boxes, electricians tracking drywall dust up and down the apartment, our domestic lives generally in chaos. but if we can look past the toughest six months, i’m still glad we opted for the project house.

* i realize that the definition of ownership, and the freedom to customize, varies greatly with the condo building. but i was particularly struck when a coworker, years ago, explained to me that in her luxury high rise apartment building, she technically owned her unit from the paint inwards. all i could think was how bizarre it was that she owned a million dollar box of air.