Skunkworks

Today's planned topic of high gain windows will have to wait for another day.

Occasionally, Nancy works on what she calls "Skunkworks projects." This Wikipedia link will give you some idea what I'm talking about. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skunkworks_project These are usually projects that management would like her to do but they are a ways down on the priority list. Sometimes they are projects that she thinks management may not think are worth spending time on. Sometimes they are just cool ideas that she thinks she could do pretty easily. Sometime she works on them when she is frustrated with what she is supposed to be working on. Other times, she works on them on weekends, just for fun.

A while back, she was in a conference call meeting and her boss, Joe, said that he thought that they should do something. Nancy replied that she had already done that. Then Joe said it would be cool if they added something else to which she replied she had already done that too! Then Joe said "OK, Nancy what am I thinking of now?!" Today, Joe used one of her skunkworks projects as part of a demo for a major film studio in LA. He said they loved it!

Today, I did a little Skunksworks project of my own. I am working on taping the drywall in the living room but the place was getting to be a mess. Nancy even commented that I am good at making a mess... I have a cheap shop vac that has a piece of paper over foam for the filter. It has never worked very well, especially for drywall dust. Really, it just sucks up the dust and blows it back out the exhaust port! It was time for a new shop vac.

As I was making my shopping list, I remembered that Nancy was having to dig through piles of stuff this morning to find the clothes she wanted to wear today. Living out of boxes and piles on the floor gets old after a while... Our closet has not had a clothes rod, ever since we moved in 7 months ago. I asked Nancy about putting up a clothes rod. What she really wanted, she said. was two sets of shelves and rod between them, just like I put in at our last house. Off to the store I went...



As you may notice, I didn't take time to paint. I did clean the walls first. Pretty good for a knuckle dragger, huh? The shelves are going to have to come back out when we paint and carpet the bedroom anyways. Now she wants new closet doors....

The Broken House II

The second "cuz we wanna" project has been to open a doorway between the living room and the family room. We also wanted to raise the floors in both rooms while we were at it. Nancy really wanted to do the kitchen first but I thought that the living room project was something I could work on while I was still working. As it turns out, I didn't get much done except tear stuff out and frame the new doorway. "Grandpa, is your house still broke?"

Our house is a 1500 sq ft., 3 bedroom, 2 bath, ranch (meaning single story) with a living room, family room, kitchen and a small eating area. It was built in 1964, back when there was a Ford auto plant where the Great Mall is now(which was called the "San Jose" plant since no one knew where Milpitas was.) This was before GM built their plant, which became NUMMI (the joint venture between Toyota and GM,) and is now Tesla (makers of electric cars.) These homes were built for the new expanding working middle class.

There are about 6 different floor plans in our subdivision. Ours has a perimeter foundation except for the living room and the family room, which are on a slab. Our living and family rooms are side by side in the southwest corner of the house. Both of them were a step down from the rest of the house. The living room has a 8' x 4' window that looks out at the backyard and has a flat ceiling. The family room has an 8' sliding patio door to the backyard and a vaulted ceiling. Originally there was no connection between the living and the family room. To get from the living room to the family room, you had to step up into the hall, walk down the hall five feet and then step down into the family room. To get to the eating area, you could either go through a narrow door and through the kitchen or you could step down into the family room and then back up into the eating area.

A previous owner had made a large window-like opening between the living and family rooms. When we first moved in we had one sofa in the family room and the other in the living room, both of them back to back against the opening. The temptation was just too much for the grandkids - up one sofa, through the opening, down the other sofa, step up into the hall, down into the other room, up the sofa.... I tried moving one sofa away from the opening but it was too late. Up one sofa onto the sill of the opening, back down onto the sofa again. Up onto the sill... What I really wanted was a doorway there anyway!



It was an easy enough job to take out the sill and the studs below it. There was one romex running through there which I routed up and over (slab floor, remember.) I then jacked up the beam in the family room ceiling that rested on the window-like opening header just a tiny bit so I could remove the header. The header was a little small and had sagged a little. I turned the header over and reinstalled it, raising it so that it would set right below the double top plates. I wanted to make space in one corner of the living room to put a big screen TV, so I made the doorway opening a couple of feet narrower (which helped with the under sized header problem.)

The next step was to remove the Pergo flooring in the living room. When we did this we discovered mold under it! A thorough investigation revealed that under the house was wet. Not standing water, even though there were previous signs of that, but definitely wet! Hence, the french or trench drain project mentioned in my previous post. (At this point we haven't finished the drain, just dug the trench. We'll get back to that after the ground dries out a bit and we get the old concrete torn out of the backyard so we have some place to put the dirt. More on that some other day...) We also found that the original asbestos vinyl floor tiles were still mostly there.

After cleaning up the floor and letting it throughly dry, I put down 6 mil plastic, followed by pressure treated 2x4s topped with 1 1/8" t & g plywood. This made the top of the plywood even with the subfloor of the hall. We also put rigid foam insulation between the 2x4s. You could feel cold air coming in from the crawl space in places so I filled all the gaps I could find with spray-in foam insulation. The plan is to install floor tile in most of the public areas of the house.




Tomorrow, I'll tell you about trying to find a "High Gain" window for the living room...

The Broken House

I have decided to post some blogs about our house project. Many of our earlier projects were of done out of necessity: fixing water leaks, repiping, having the drains cleaned, fixing the sagging roof, installing a new furnace, putting in a french drain... Now we are getting to doing some of the things we want to do.

The first of these, non- necessary projects we did when we had the furnace put in. The ceiling in the hallway was originally 7' 2" high. Don't ask me why. There wasn't anything in that space except one electrical wire, which was easily moved.




When we bought the house, the furnace was in the garage. The old cold air return used to run through the crawl space and into the bottom of a coat closet. When a previous owner remodeled the kitchen, the coat closet was eliminated. The cold air return plenum was rebuilt out of aluminum and came up a 2x4 wall to a register in the entryway. The cold air return ducting was all knocked apart and the bottom of the aluminum plenum had corroded away. The supply duct in the attic also had a 5" gap in it. If the furnace had worked, which it didn't, it would have pulled in air from the crawl space and blown it into the attic! It was time for an all new system.

After struggling to find a convenient location to put the cold air return, we decided to put the furnace in the attic. This solved the cold air return problem as well as made the furnace more centrally located, It also made more room in the garage, which I would like to use as a woodworking shop someday.

We had a 96% efficiency, 2 stage gas furnace, with all new ducts and cold air return installed. It was decided that the best place to install it was over the hallway but there was a problem. The joist were 10" lower there. I didn't like the low ceiling anyway so I raised it up to 8' like the rest of the house. It looks much better now.

We also added recessed can lights on 3 way switches, a hardwired smoke detector, and and an outlet in the hallway for the vacuum. Today I hung new drywall on the right side of the hall. On the left side you can see where I have added temporary drywall where the old ceiling used to be. That side will have to wait until we remodel the entryway.

The name for this post comes from our grandsons who are continually saying that our "house is broke."

Ogle Yard Projects

We have been working hard on some yard projects recently. I wanted to put up some comparison pictures but all of the older pictures are on an external hard drive that I don't have the time to deal with right now.

I pulled out pavers and some large plants from the backyard. Mitch and Dad took out part of the patio. Dad relocated their raised bed from the Santa Cruz house and put it in our backyard and made it double the size. We rototilled, put in sprinklers, and put in sod.















In the front, we had some trees taken out and the shrubs. Last summer, I had taken out the pavers on the far side of the driveway and in the fall I planted some bulbs and some plants we had in pots. Last summer, we put in the retaining wall and had the house painted in the fall. When Bill and Barb were here a few weeks ago, they helped us to put in a deck (well, it is not done yet) and started a rock pathway. We are also putting in sprinklers in the front.

Christmas 2009, Part 3

Skiing

Half Dome from Glacier Point

Happy Easter!!

These are pictures from the Chihuly Exhibit at the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix. Our next door neighbor is a ranger there and treated us a couple weeks ago. The picture above is of his piece titled "The Sun" - I thought it was appropriate for today. Dale Chihuly is a glass artist who has pioneered in glassblowing- all of his sculptures are blown glass. The Sun is over 700 tubes wired together. For each exhibit (it's a traveling exhibit), the pieces are wired together, so the pieces never turn out the same way. Chihuly also comes to the location, and chooses where he wants the pieces and builds the garden into his art. It was amazing! Even just the Desert Botanical Garden was incredibly beautiful.




Heather and I in front of a very rare crested saguaro- this is a mutation that only happens rarely.







Happy Easter!
Love,
Laurie