The MacDeskBlog

Michelle and I spent most of the weekend wiring and plumbing. First, we had to pick up a refrigerator from Michelle’s former house in Petaluma and haul it to her storage unit. It took a crazy amount of time to shuttle the frig, what with traffic, searching for some odds and ends in the storage unit, and Michelle thinking that it was a local U-Haul rental instead of a one-way. So, we worked on the house from about 3pm until sunset Saturday, then all day on Sunday. Michelle was a trooper, even though she wasn’t feeling well Sunday. She mounted all of the outlets and switches downstairs, except for the ones which go in the four walls which don’t yet exist. Then she pulled wires from box to box, stripped the ends, and tied on the pigtails with wire nuts. I spent Saturday moving the outlets in the upstairs outside walls from the baseboards up to 18″, where current code says they should be.

Sunday was all about plumbing for me, and drilling. I reconnected the water main, which included repairing the one inch pipe where it had to be cut in two places in order to insert new floor joists for the second floor. One of the connections from the water main in the ceiling to the water heater needed to be disassembled and rebuilt. The other needed to be remounted and reconstructed from the ceiling to about halfway down the wall. Once I got both sides of the water heater pipes hooked up (minus the water heater), and shut off the shutoff valve on the cold water line right before the water heater, I thought that the lines were ready for testing. So, I opened up the water main and let some water in, then turned it off again. Everything looked fine. So, I opened it up again to charge the lines and test for leaks. Michelle found three of them right away. Oops. The first one was pretty obvious, as water was pouring out of the end of the would-be hot water pipe full force. I had swapped the cold and hot lines when I mounted them. Big oops. The other two were the two cuts in the south wall going up to the kitchen sink. I knew both of those were there, but just didn’t think through the layout of the plumbing before turning on the water, thinking that the shutoff valve would prevent water from hitting those. Swapping the hot and cold lines from the ceiling to the water heater was not a big deal, though I did get a nice little 1/4″ third degree burn on my hand to show for it. Ouch. Then I moved over to the kitchen sink lines. I had to extricate the line with the two cuts in it (happily one line with two cuts instead of two with one). Once I had that out, I decided that it was a good time to put the new lines in where we’re moving the kitchen sink under the window. “Under the window?” you might think. It’s true, the window right now extends beneath the counter, but we’re making it smaller in order to extend the counter and move the sink to the middle of the wall.

Wielding a high power, right angle drill while standing on the “do not stand or sit on this step” at the very top of a ten foot ladder is quite an experience. Not one that I recommend actually. The drill hit a 100 year old nail at one point, stopping the bit and transferring the energy to the drill itself. My head narrowly evaded the drill. Another thing to avoid is attempting to drill through 100 year old redwood with a paddle bit and no leverage. I gave up on the paddle bit after one hole and switched to a smaller auger bit. Auger bits rule! It was nearly 7pm by this point, so I only assembled a couple of water hammers and stems, and put them into place before we called it a day. I need to pick up some supplies before hooking up the water heater and tying the new kitchen sink lines in later this week.

I didn’t take pictures today because the house doesn’t really look different. As I write this, I realize I should have taken pictures of the water heater pipes and the front main, and some of the wiring, at the least. I’ll try to get some during the week.

I have two more nights of work on the house this week before we head to Maui for vacation this coming Saturday. The rest of the evenings are already booked up with a business dinner Monday and Giants games Thursday and Friday.

Work on the house is wrapping up and winding down for the time being. Steve and the crew are finishing up the downstairs walls, the upstairs closet and the upstairs bathroom. We were delayed a bit by a wrong lumber order at the end of the week. The correct supplies arrived Saturday afternoon, so we’ll be able to proceed on Monday. Once they have finished up those portions, I’m going to need to take a break for a while. I’m focussing them on just getting the house livable again for now. The current plan is to resume living in the house as soon as possible, do as much as we can on our own and with help from friends (I haven’t been tapping that pool so far, but need to), and recharge the checking account enough to resume with the bigger ticket items such as new siding for the upstairs (I only have enough for the downstairs so far), the slab floor, and the windows.

First off, here’s a picture from last weekend of the house back down, sitting on the new walls. Notice the lovely lack of steel protruding from the front of the house. The shear wall on the south (left) wall is complete, while the north wall has partial shear wall in the picture. I’m pretty sure that the north wall has full shear wall now, as should the rear wall where it has studs. We’re leaving a gap in the rear wall until we can get a Bobcat through to the backyard to remove a whole lot of dirt, which will be after the slab gets poured downstairs.

PG&E finally came by to hook up the temporary power this morning. I spoke with Michael Woods again yesterday. He tried to play the blame game by pointing the finger at the City of Berkeley. I didn’t let him off the hook. I don’t think he took it to heart at all. Very unfortunate that PG&E has no accountability nor responsibility in their service planning group. Giving credit where it is due, Mr. Woods was the only person in the entire office who actually called me back at any point in time. While his service sucked, he stands head and shoulders above the rest of the office, as far as I can tell. Very unfortunate.

I’m heading over to the house tonight to try to fix the phone line, which got soaked in a rain shower last week, and to work on the water line. I doubt I’ll have time to work on the electrical too, but I certainly will if the phone and water go well. I’ll also get a chance to look at my new full wall closet and the footing for the stairs. I’m not sure if any of the stairs will have been framed by tonight. I just spoke with Steve, and it seems that current building codes make my preferred stair design illegal. So, we’re switching to a more generic picket style design. It should still look nice and keep pretty well with the character of the house. We just won’t be able to put planters on the stairs, which could have just led to water damage anyway. Probably for the best. The picket style was the runner up, and I almost picked it from the start.

I’m 35 today. My house isn’t ready for me. We passed rebar inspection for the footing for the front stairs this morning, but the rain all day prevented us from pouring the concrete. I’m giving the crew the weekend off. They busted their tails for the last three weeks to try to make the goal of today which I set. There was just too much work to do. Time to step back and re-evaluate a bit. Time to remake the schedule based upon the work remaining instead of driving it off of my birthday. I’m a little disappointed, but I’ll get over it.

PG&E still has not connected my temporary power pole, which was approved by the City on March 25th! I raise hell today. I spoke with several people at PG&E and lodged complaints which each of them. I even called the California Public Utilities Commission (after filing a complaint electronically) and the service representative I spoke with was very helpful, connecting me to PG&E’s headquarters. I also spoke with the City of Berkeley twice. The first time they resent the service authorization to PG&E. The second time I had them send me a copy and follow up with a phone call to PG&E. Of course, I still have not received a call back from PG&E’s Service Planning group, so I don’t know whether raising hell has gotten me anywhere. If not, I’ll just have to continue next week. I hate having to complain in order to get service.

I noticed that I had turned off one of the two methods I was using to monitor Apache on the server. I had left on the ineffective method and disabled the less ineffective method (I almost said ‘more effective’ but it’s still just restarting Apache after it has hung, so that’s not very effective in my book). So, I switched them, turning off the worse of the two and re-enabling the other. Apache has already restarted five times since then, so it’s an improvement. I’m also going to re-evaluate prioritization of the MacDesktops server configuration. I’ll probably but it up a few slots.

I really wanted to meet the target for the house. Now that we didn’t, I don’t see a big difference in missing it by two days or two weeks. That philosophy might shift, but that’s where I am today.

My father sent to me from Seattle chocolate made in Berkeley, where I live. Scharffen Berger is good stuff. And a book, Chocolate : A Bittersweet Saga of Dark and Light. Should be a fun read. Well, I’m off to the Giants game with Michelle, mom and John. I hope the Giants do better for my birthday than they did for Brett Tomko’s yesterday.

Well, I decided to add a blog to MacDesktops. At this point, it will mostly be to record the trials and tribulations of the foundation replacement fiasco for “the building formerly known as my house”. I’ll toss in some stuff about my site as well.

My house is 10 feet in the air right now, standing on 6 piles of logs, while the remnants of a brand new but horribly wrong foundation are being jackhammered out. The foundation demolition was supposed to take about a week, but we’re closing in on two already. The horribly wrong foundation, as it turns out, was way over-poured in some areas and way under-poured in others. The garage, on one hand, had only a 2 inch slab. The perimeter foundation, on the other, was 10 inches thick, and 34-38 deep deep, standing 10-12 inches above grade and 3-6 inches above the slab. Ugh. The latest estimate is that we’re supposed to be finished with demolition by Friday. I hope this date doesn’t slip by too. Really need to get back on schedule and back on budget.