rtstarr

Saturday and Sunday.

Our first full weekend in the new place. We sleep in.

Not much happening here. Rena works on getting the bedroom ready, I attempt to make some sense of the downstairs. We are slowly putting things away, breaking up boxes..etc..

Rena spends some quality time painting the hallways, while I work on getting the kitchen ready for cabinet doors. We are really stuck at this point. We can't put anything away because we have no countertop or doors in the kitchen. So all of those boxes are stacked in the living room/dining room.

Sunday: Rena is over at her moms again cooking up a storm for the wedding. I stay home and rearrange the garage yet again. I end up hanging the old cabinets from the kitchen down there just to get them out of the way.

We end up going out exploring both days for food. We find that right around the corner and up towards the mountains there is a neat little area with some cool old restaurants. This area (Alta Dena) has a little place called "The Dutchoven Bakery" that has some awesome breakfast food and the same cookies that Rena used to get at some Indianapolis bakery when she was a kid. She loves the things and won't shut her yap about them. But its kind of cute to see her get so excited about something like that, even if it does cause an increase in overall mouth yappage. Let the Tony Slapping Begin!!


Note: Still no pictures. Rena won't let me take any of the house being in shambles. I have a bunch from the last week (about 3 weeks after the date of this post) that I will post tonight.

Rena's Birthday!

On this, the day of Rena's birth, we decide to take some time off.

We meet at the old place after work. Exchange smooches, and hand off the keys to Vic the Dick. We take a tour of the place and we tell him that he needs to get a mold inspection done because we found water damage from the old upstairs tenants all over the place. He didn't really seem to care. We also showed him the damage to our Wok box and told him about Rena's box of CDs that got water damage and molded. He keeps asking if the CD's are "still usable". And we say "no, they smell like ball sack and are full of mold" but he doesn't get it. He keeps insisting that if we can play them, then they are fine. We tell him we expect him to pay for them. A box holds 30 CD's, and only a few were still in wrappers, so that’s quite a bit of music that got destroyed. We plan to use this as leverage if he gets uppity about the wood floors... "can you still use them" I'll say.

He tells us that our place is dirty (we obviously didn't clean the blinds enough)and that his cleaning crew will have to come in and take care of it. Interesting side note: our neighbor Christy (who hats Vic as much as we do) saw his "cleaning crew" working on our place and ran in there and took snapshots of "them". She called Rena laughing and saying his whole cleaning crew was the same old man (Father of Vic the Dick) that had put the cardboard shit in our bathroom. I can't believe this guy forces his 103 year old father to do all this work. What is it about these California cheapskate barely-human being landlords? I just don't get it.

Anyway, so we head off after that and try to hook up with Justin and Hannah for a little dinner action in Burbank. They are busy, and we need to shop so we head over to Lowes to get some things for the weekend while they try to get home to meet us. It eventually starts getting late so we call it off and decide to have dinner ourselves since they aren't ready yet. We get a table, then get a call saying that they can make it. We eat a nice dinner while hanging out with good friends. The best part of the evening is Hannah and I talking shop (Did I mention that she is a Tech/ Marketing writer as well) while Justin and Rena's eyes glaze over. Usually we are the ones having to deal with listening to music industry work talk.

Sunday - Thursday:
Goals: Make the new place semi-livable

Ok, so its been awhile since I have posted. There are a couple of reasons for this.
1. The first week after we moved in basically we just accomplished 3 things: putting up clothes hanging bars in the master bedroom. Since we ripped out the old junk that was in there, we had nowhere to hang our clothes. We also spent most of the week looking for either Rena's shoes or pants. For some reason she could not find anything. And third, we basically just shuffled boxes around.
2. We had to clean up the old place. We spent most of the week over at the old place fixing up the mess we had created. We still had a number of things still over there to take to the new place, a bunch of holes to patch and a lot of dust bunnies to slaughter.

I spent most of Sunday trying to get the garage in order so that we could park both of our cars in it. There is A LOT of stuff in the garage. We had the movers leave the old fridge in the garage so that we could eventually move it into the small room downstairs which will eventually be Rena's pantry. All of the shelves from the old garage are still at the old place because we didn't have room on the moving truck.
This is a bit of a long story, but I guess I will tell it so you can understand why everything is such a pain in the ass regarding room in the garage:
Ok, here's the situation. My parents are away on a weeks vacation, and they left the keys to the brand new Porsche.......ehh scratch that. Will Smith I am not.

Ok, so in Pasadena California, it is the law that you cannot park on the street from 2am until 6am. This of course means we have to have both cars in the garage at night. This means that any project that we are working on has to be totally put away and moved so that we can park. It is a pain in the nut sack.

So basically, on Sunday I put up the shelving units from the old garage, and loaded them up with junk. I also tried to get as much stuff out of the way so that I could hook up the washer and dryer during the week. Rena is at her moms house baking. We have a wedding that we are both working on the 8th of April. So the next 2 weeks we spend alot of time doing that, and not so much working on the house.

Monday: All of our clothes are still in boxes/suitcases/on the floor. So we finally decide to put up the bars in the master bedroom closets. This is really exciting and fun. It is a temporary fix, since we really want to do something nice in that closet. For some reason, this saps all of my energy after work. This is the first day of the work week in the new house, and it is an epic adventure to find anything in order to go to work.

Tuesday:
We need to hook up the washer and dryer. I got all of the needed materials on Sunday and make an attempt to get everything rolling. I bought some super special washing machine hookup cables (the old ones were fused to the pipes at the old apartment) that had some kind of auto-leak detection thing on there. Which meant they only worked when they got the installers temper above a certain level. Which by my estimates were somewhere between puppy kicking and baby punching mad.
So after punching a baby about 10 times, I got the hot water line to finally work. Then it took Rena and I about an hour to get the damn dryer vent to hook up properly. We get everything hooked up...try it out, and the washing machine drain pipe starts backing up. Apparently we had some sort of clog. Luckily this is covered by the HOA. A guy comes out on Thursday and cleans our pipe with a huge assed snake. So we finally have laundry abilities on Thursday night. And this is when we realize that we have 3 flights of stairs to go down whenever we do laundry.

New project: Move laundry room to third floor.

Wed: At the old place cleaning - We had some wood floor "problems" at the old place. The shitty old floor in that place started to come up in places so I put some wood putty/ filler in there to take care of it. And it looked like total ass. Rena spends time packing the rest of the old kitchen and I work on the garage.

Thurs: At the old place cleaning still. We finish up, I twist my damn ankle tripping over some shit in the garage. We TOTALLY pack all of the garbage cans in the joint and head home.

Saturday:

Goals: Move on up...to the east side.

pics

Well after our exciting Friday night, we wake up extra early to get things done for the move. I went to bed last night feeling like ass, and woke up feeling the same. The big things that we need to do this morning are to move the fragile things (Rena's harp, my computers, sat. dish receivers, etc...) We get up, I pack the rest of the office, Rena hits the bedroom. Last night again it felt like everything was in slowwwww motion. But this morning we are knocking things out quickly. We load up the cars and head to the new place. As I am carrying my 2 huge monitors up to the 3rd floor I start to think about how glad I am that we hired movers. I am too tired to carry all of our stuff up all those stairs. This is the first time that I have ever used movers, and am nervous because of all the horror stories that I have heard about them adding charge after charge and holding all of your stuff hostage with demands for special lunches and cash. So my apprehension starts to build.

We unload our junk and head back to the old place. The movers only take cash, so I hit the bank and Rena hits the Starbucks. We get back to the old place with about an hour and a half before the movers arrive. They are due at 10 and Rena's mom and Paul are coming over at 9:30 to help. We continue taking things apart - we pack up the rest of the office and start to take our bed apart...and I hear a truck outside....I glance out the front door and see it....Delancey Street Movers. They are half an hour early. This is unheard of in the moving world. We are not really ready. If we would have had that last half hour, we would have been fine. The guys show up and I invite them in....they look like a line of recently released convicts. This is probably because they are a line of recently released convicts. The Delancey Street Moving company is part of the Delancey Street Foundation. It is sort of a half-way house for former prisoners, substance abusers, and people who need help. These people agree to live at Delancey for 2 years, learn a trade and stay away from their old habits. The trades include moving, culinary (they have a really nice restaurant up in San Francisco) and construction.

These guys were the most respectful, nice people that we have had the pleasure of meeting throughout our home buying experience. They went through the house, sized everything up and started carrying stuff to the truck. This thing got loaded like a mutha. All of our fragile items and furniture were wrapped in shrink wrap and handled with more care than I would have used on our junky furniture. In fact, there were a couple of items that I was hoping they would break....I'm looking in your direction, indestructible 5 dollar Ikea coffee table that we've been trying to break for 5 years....

It took them about 3 hours to pack up the entire house. I kept offering them lunch, but they kept refusing saying that they brought their own and that they would eat on the way from the old to the new place.

As they are packing up the truck, our energy level really starts to drop. Luckily Paul and Joyce were on hand to help with the finishing up process. As our furniture slowly disappeared, it became more and more apparent that there was more water damage to our place than we had realized. Last summer, the idiot people that lived upstairs (dumb and dumber) somehow managed to get their washing machine drain plugged up resulting in water getting into our kitchen. We came home one night and turned on the kitchen light, it immediately shorted out and I look up and the whole fixture is filled with water. We could have just thrown a goldfish and a bunch of pebbles in there and had a new pet. Anyway, we found that the water had made its way down the wall onto the wood floor in the living room, leaving a nasty looking rotted wood mess. Add this to all the dust bunnies and crud underneath our appliances and its amazing that we didn't die of toxic shock from breathing in that place.

With the truck filling fast, the guys ask me which items we NEED to have taken by truck and what we can take on our own. I show them what we want to take and they start packing it in. One of the last things we asked them to move was this giant succulent plant that we inherited from Rena's aunt and uncle. It has thrived in our backyard and it was heavy when we got it, I’ve tried to move it a couple of times, but have always been put off by both the weight and the amount of spiders in/on/around it. One of these guys bear hugs the pot and carries this heavy assed plant all the way to the truck. When we get to the new place, he does the same thing up the stairs and out onto the patio. The guy was a real die hard.

We eventually arrive at the new place and the guys get to work unloading. Through all of this we are talking to the moving guys about the classes they are taking, the trips that the foundation takes them on, how much they enjoy being in the house and how they like doing a kick ass job on their work assignments. I didn't know much about the foundation before we hired them, but by this point I was extremely happy to be giving our cash to them rather than to some other jackhole place. They get all the furniture in and then start running the boxes upstairs...and I mean RUNNING. These guys were animals. They said they like to get done quickly, not only to save us money but so that they can get back to their house because they are having a BBQ that night. They quickly plowed through the remaining boxes and totaled us up. The cost for the move (we found out later) is about half of what other people have paid for similar services in the area, without having to put up with the used carsman-esque mover crap, and at the same time allowing us to donate our cash to a good cause. We found out at some point during the day that the guys don't get paid at all, they just have to do the job as part of their house duties. So it is in their best interest to get done early.
One thing I forgot to mention, after trying to get our precious precious couch up the stairwell into the living room, they decided it was a no-go. So we had to hoist it up over the balcony and in through the sliding doors. They wrapped the couch in a layer of plastic, a layer of blankets and then a thick layer of shrink wrap. Two guys lifted and pushed from the bottom and 2 movers and I grabbed from the top and pulled it up over the railing and into the living room. It was pretty sweet to see.

Near the end of the unloading, Kyrie (Rena's Sister) and Nader showed up and were ready to help us unpack or to put up cabinet doors. The place was in no shape for either of these things, and we were in no shape to do much of anything. I was exhausted, so I pretty much fell asleep upstairs while Rena and Nader attempted to put the grill together with Kyrie managing the process. Towards the end they find a huge dent in the front of the grill, and I awake to hear Nader yelling at someone at Lowes about it, over the phone.

We decide to deal with it later, they leave, and we go out to eat, come home and go to sleep. Our first night in the new house:. Its a weird feeling. Everything still feels like "that place we are working at but have no real connection to". Hopefully that will change soon.

Taking stock: one last thing. We still have an incomplete kitchen. We found out the countertops aren't coming until April 24th and the island is still in pieces in the dining room (we need to build that so we can give dimensions to Rena's dad for that countertop), and there are various places where we haven't installed ceiling lamps. Luckily, we have a fridge and some paper plates...so we should survive.

One thing I forgot to mention in the last post. It is now Monday day 9 in the new place. We finally get our DSL back today. I'll take some pics of the place tonight so you can see our "living" arrangement. Sorry the posting was infrequent last week, we were swamped with just trying to find underwear. And I had to come to work looking like Grizzly friggin Adams for 3 days while trying to find my razor.

One addition that Rena wanted me to make to the Wednesday/ falling down/ garage scraping post: While wiping off one of the ceiling pipes in the garage, Rena knocked down a set of keys.....which contained a spare set of house keys and a mailbox key...the same Van Damme mailbox key that I just paid an assload of money to have replaced. Damn you Sherman Hemsley...DAMN YOU TO HELL>...

Friday:

Goals: PACK! take a couple of loads over to the new place.

pics

I take a 2/3 day at work so that I can get home and help Rena pack. I drop a load of at the new place, then head to the old. Rena has taken the whole day off and got a lot of things done (getting couch and bed covers, getting some cooking stuff for the wedding cake she is making in 2 weeks, and some other general house related activities). I get home and immediately tackle the garage packing. Our garage normally has a lot of woodworking stuff and CD's in it, but most of that has already been transferred. We have a set of really nice racks that we use for storage in the garage (compliments of the Power-One Costa Mesa closing sale), the ideal thing would be to have the racks taken down at the old place and then put up at the new place so we could just chuck everything on them when we get there. This isn't going to happen with our time schedule. So I decide that the best course of action is to make a pile in the middle of the garage of pre-packed boxes so that we know what is ready to go.

This goes pretty well, I hit some snags here and there with old falling apart boxes and actually finding enough boxes to contain all of the small things that are scattered about. There are a lot of half-finished woodworking projects lying around that I have to decide if we want to continue with. But for the most part, it goes smoothly. Rena comes out to help, and we get all of the shelves torn apart. They break down to tall legs, short side brackets, shelves and long front/rear brackets. This results in a lot of heavy semi-sharp metal things lying around. Rena has the brilliant idea of wire tiring these things together since I am unsure if the moving guys would even touch this stuff while it was loose. We have the old sink (still semi-paint stained) ready to go back to Lowe's so we decide to make a run. By this point it is nearly 7 o'clock and we are starting to get tired.

We take stock of what we have in the garage: my industrial test bench (thanks Power-One!), the 600 pound antique stove, color coded tubs of holiday decorations, and a 10ft by 10ft box of Rena’s childhood dolls. We cry and head to Lowes.

We return the sink with no problems and we head over to the service desk to ask about using a 10% off coupon that we received in the mail the day AFTER we bought our countertop from them. 10% off of a countertop is a nice hunk of change that we would like to see back. It's a long shot (the coupon says not valid on special order items or some such nonsense), but we want to see what happens. As Rena battles that, I head off to find wire ties, a furnace filter, and some light bulbs.

A few minutes later Rena runs up to me and says that they'll do it. BONUS! The only problem is that they would normally return the item, then resell it to us with the discount. But since our countertop is through a 3rd party and already on order, it would result in us getting 2 countertops...not cool. So she looks through all of our recent transactions to find one over the necessary amount (300 bucks for those of you who are curious), and finds two things...jack and shit. It seems we have spent most of our money at H.D. and Sears. Well, then she says we can use the 300 as a credit towards another purchase...."hello new grill", thinks Rena.

Backstory: we got our current lovely grill as a wedding gift. It has had a rough life. In addition to normal wear and tear, it has been...lets just say....slightly abused. We have a nice little back yard at the old place that has its fair share of dirt and bugs. We had a black widow infestation last year that made me less than excited to climb inside and clean the damn thing. So there were a number of "dirty" areas here and there. Some water got into the ignition so we had to light it with a match every time we used it. And then last year we had one of our patented Game Night/ Guacamole cookoff contests in which I was using these kerosene/jet fueled candles to give me some light as I was BBQ'ing. Well, lets just say that I got a little too into the Guac and the games, and forgot about the candle and it burned a hole right through the right hand side of grill platform thing. Basically this grill is in ass shape. I am dreading moving it because it is full of nastiness and barely works. I have been slowly trying to convince Rena of the merits of a new grill...to no avail.

Fast forward to tonight. The grill fairies are smiling down on us, so we max out our counter credit and get a nice stainless steel commercial job loaded on our cart. Total price: 7 bucks. We get the beast back to the old place toss it in the garage and finish our cleaning. I toss my old desk into the alley knowing that it will be gone within a matter of hours just like the dishwasher I chucked back there.

Advertisement: If there is anything you need to get rid of, I recommend the alley behind Adams St. in Glendale. I swear people cruise that thing night and day waiting for junk.

The rest of the night is uneventful. We took a trip to the new place (before Lowes actually) and stayed up to 3ish packing, we set the alarm for 6 and drop dead.

Thursday:

Goals: Pack

Well, as I write this we are already on day 3 of being in the new house so it feels a bit strange talking about packing up the old place. Right now it is an empty stinking shell of its former glory. But on Thursday night, after work, it was a hotbed of activity. I ran by the new place directly after work to move everything out of the way in the garage. Everything was up against the door for our popcorn scraping adventure. With that fixed, I headed back to Glendale to help with the packing. We were getting more and more nervous in anticipation of the move, it seemed like all the packing was going in slow motion. We had made a good sized dent in the kitchen, dining room and living room. But the office, bedroom and garage were a complete disaster.

I got working on the office and finishing the living room, while Rena handled the kitchen. I think we might have taken a load over to the new place at one point, but I can't really tell you at this point. We were both irritable and cranky and ended up snapping at each other quite a bit, which is unusual for us, so we know the stress is getting to us.

Tomorrow: Rena is staying home to prep for the move (buying couch covers, getting boxes etc..) I am taking a half day and will head home to pack after that.

I have some pics of the new place pre-move in. I will post those later, since all of our computers are in pieces and we have no internet access for 2 weeks.

Wednesday:

Goals: touch up the edges of the upstairs painting, touch up the downstairs painting. Finally put a second coat on that one damn wall in the dining room. Remove the rest of the popcorn from the garage.

pics

The carpet cleaning guys call me at 11 and say that they are almost there. I meet them at 11:15 and they get to work on cleaning up our popcorn covered carpet mess. Rena shows up at 12 with some tasty lunch. We enjoy a quiet lunch together on the curb of Washington Blvd, and wait for the Chem Dry carpet cleaning guys to be done. It only takes them a little over an hour, and we are both out of there and back to work.

After work, I get to the place and start to paint the white trim in the office/bedroom. Rena arrives and starts to paint the dining room wall. I finish up upstairs and head down to touch up the parts of the ceiling that we got green pain on. As I am touching up the last section, I attempt to step back down off of the chair and step on the edge of a paint can that has been hidden by the giant mass of used plastic wrap on the floor. Next thing I know, Rena is hovering over me asking me if I am ok. Apparently I hit my head on the red folding table (with all the tools on it), on the way down.

I managed to totally demolish the can of paint and also to dump the cup of paint I was using into the box with the sink that we wanted to return to Lowe's (since we found out our countertop came with a better free sink). After Rena determined I was ok, we went to work cleaning the paint out of the sink box, and I went to work trying to remember who I was and what the hell happened. The surprising thing is not that I almost killed myself painting the ceiling, but rather that it took me nearly 26 days to do it.

We finish the night up by unpopcorning the rest of the garage ceiling. This took about an hour since we are such friggin pros now.

Tomorrow.....we pack.

Tuesday:

Goals: I have no clue.

I got a call from the Lowe's saying that we could come in and pay for the countertop today...and the faster we pay....the faster we get it. So we decide to make this a packing day/ Lowe's day. I head over to the new place to do some cleaning since Rena has a late work engagement. I take out a bunch of trash, reorganize tools and begin to clean the upstairs bathroom which has never been cleaned since we de-popcorned it. We have also been using the bathtub to clean the painting supplies so it looks like the crime scene after Kermit the Frog has been decapitated by a Chicago style hotdog. I have no idea what that means either.

I get the call from Rena saying that she is ready to roll, so I head home, pick her up and we head over to Joyce and Paul's for dinner as they were nice enough to offer us some grub since their place is near the Lowe's. We get caught in some WONDERFUL So. Cal. traffic so it takes us about 45 min, for the 10 minute drive. We slop down their food, and head to Lowes. This is actually a non-event trip. Nothing exciting happens. We write our check, head home, pack for a bit, and hit the hay.

boooooring.....


This job site 25 days with no injuries

Monday:

Goals: Meet the counter measuring guy at lunch, go to the old place and pack in the evening.

We are starting to get nervous about the packing we need to do, so we decide it is a good idea to take a night away from the place to pack some stuff up.

During my lunch break I met the counter top guy at the new place and watched him measure out the countertop. I have never seen them do this before, and was really impressed with the template that he created. He actually put strips of balsa wood on the base cabinets and cut them to size. Then he hot glue gun'd the whole mess together and had his template. One thing about the measuring is that it made me change my mind on the color. With the samples right there in the kitchen next to the counters and the floor, the gray just looked too plain. There was another color that really popped with everything and still went well with the green in the dining room. The color was Borealis Blue. I called Rena to give her the lowdown and she admits that she liked that color all along, but thought I wouldn't like. Double score!

So I finish with Mr. Cabinet, and head back to work. After work, I high tail it home to pack only to be greeted by Rena with some awesome news.

But first some background. In the L.A. music industry scene, sometimes big named artists will decide to do a small show in a record shop to promote their new album. The problem with this is that they can't do any kind of formal planning or announcement or there will be massive stampedes and problems if word gets out just because of the number of people that just HAVE to be there. So they typically call the store the afternoon of the day they want to do the event to tell them that they want to perform. Word still gets out, but it really cuts down on the mob-factor when planning these things.

So back to the Rena conversation: "Prince is performing at Tower Sunset", she says. To translate from record industry speak, this means that "the Artist Currently Known as Prince will be performing at the Tower Records on Sunset Blvd." "Awesome", says I. We are pretty big Prince fans. And his concert that we saw a year and a half ago still rates as one of my number one shows that we have been to. And this was at the sold out Staples Center - a huge crowd. The Tower Records will only hold 150 people according to the fire marshal. So Rena explains that she heard from a colleague that there was rumor of him performing, and we gradually got more detailed information throughout the night (from other work friends) as we packed. She finally calls the manager of the store (another friend) and she confirms it, but says the fire marshal is stopping people at 150 heads, so we had better get down there and she wasn't even sure if we would make it in.

Oh, and here's some pics: Working on Townhouse on Monday

She decides to call someone at Universal Records (Prince's label) to see if we can get some credentials to get in. We get the thumbs up and we are on our way.

He is slated to perform at midnight. It's about 10:30 when we leave and it is raining like a son of a bitch and we need to get to Hollywood via Laurel Canyon Blvd...which is a windy mountain road. So we are strapped for time. Luckily there is a break in the deluge and we make it over the hill in good time, find some primetime parking and ease our way down Sunset Blvd to get to the show.

There is a HUGE line of people waiting to get in. Basically it is a first come, first served type of situation. We call our Universal contact, he meets us outside with two passes, and we walk to the front of the line and into the store. Which is such a sweeeeet feeling. We make our way in, say our hellos and get ourselves set up at the front of the crowd. Rena was at the very front, and I was right behind her. We were about 2 feet from the DJ and the backup singers. Prince ended up being about 10 feet to our left. It was AWESOME. They played a bunch of songs from the new album, and then finished up with some chopped up versions of "Purple Rain" and "1999". I could have used some "7" or some "Sexy MuthaFucka", but beggars can't be choosers. It was hot, crowded and the crowd was totally into it.

At the end of the show, Prince hands his guitar to a guy in the audience (who we later find out is someone Rena knows at Universal Records). It was a pretty sweet show, and our first time seeing a HUGE artist at one of these little late night instores. We got home at 1:30 and went into a coma.

Sunday:

Pics: Day 23 Photos

Goals: Grout, 2nd coat on everything that we are going to paint before we move in (upstairs at least), put dishwasher in place for counter measuring guy.

We get to the new place pretty early today. We actually remember to bring matches today, so I light the pilot on the hot water heater, and not only do we have heat now, but we also have hot water. Booyah!

I get to work cleaning up the tile (removing spacers, cleaning out some of the gunk on the sides) while Rena mixes the grout. We get done at about the same time and I move on to grouting and she moves on to painting the second coats upstairs. We really think its starting to look good up there. We are not painting any of the bathrooms or hallways until we move in, so those rooms are our sanctuaries from the mess that was Sherman Jordan Williams Esquire the Thirds taste in paint.

Joyce shows up again to help paint. She and Rena tackle the upstairs, while I finish the grout and begin cleanup. While waiting the 2 hours between grouting and cleaning the tile, I clean up the dining room window and downstairs bathroom in preparation for moving in. Once the bathroom is clean, I move all of the doors for the cabinets from the garage into the bathroom to keep them clean and to put them on the same floor as the actual cabinets.

Rena and Joyce continue painting.

When the tile is ready, I clean, fix any joints and then admire my handy work. It is really starting to take shape in the kitchen. I start to unpack the dishwasher so we can put it into place for the countertop measuring guy. I get it out of the box and Joyce helps me move it. She leaves, and Rena and I level the dishwasher, discuss exactly how we are supposed to mount the cabinet like end piece to the dishwasher (since it is at the end of the row, and needs to cover the exposed side of the Dishwasher). We move the fridge into place and power it up. Take some snapshots and then we are off to Joyce and Paul's for some tasty dinner. We finish the night off by packing...oh joy.

Tomorrow: Countertop measuring....packing.

And I really need to take my real camera over to the new place to get some decent shots…Rena’s old camera isn’t cutting it.

Oh, and one other thing. When we got home Sunday night, the ceiling above our bathtub was pretty much caving in. It seems that whatever the landlord had done upstairs had seriously f-dup the pipe and it was leaking like a mutha. We reported a small leak at the end of the week...but this was the mother load. Paint is peeling off of the walls and the water trail leads all the way back to the rear of the tub. The door is all out of wack so it won't close now. Why does this always happen on Sundays?

Saturday:

Pics: Day 22 Photos

Goals: Buy tile, get the heat on, lay the tile, paint.

We start off Saturday by going to the tile place recommended to us by Rena's mom. It's in North Hollywood so it is not too far. We end up finding tile that we like right away, so we only spend like half an hour there. Which was nice, since we have a metric assload of things to do.

We load up the Jeep Jeep with tile, grab some tasty Arby's for lunch (why is it that every time we go to Arby's...which is really only about once a year...Rena always has to tell me how the roast beef is "made"...uggg) Anyway, we head to the ole' HD to get some grout, icemaker hookup line, and some other sink related junk. We head back to the old place to change, grab some cacti to transport to the new place, and we are on our way. First order of business...hook up the new gas shut off valve we bought. This one actually works...Holy Shit We Have Heat.

We carry our spoils in and I get to work on laying the tile, while Rena helps. Once I find the line where we want to start laying, she gets to work on putting the last coat on the accessible walls in the dining room and living room. Joyce shows up and proceeds to help Rena paint.

I have been doing a lot of thinking about this new house and have a couple of ideas rumbling around in my head about our status. We originally wanted to do as much to the new place BEFORE we move in as possible. Because of Rena's cooking and our desire to live in a civilized world we were forced to take care of the kitchen and the popcorn ceilings straight off the bat. I don't know if I ever explained why we were doing all of this on such a short time schedule. But it is those reasons and the fact that I absolutely cannot stand carpeting that made us do what we did. We only had a month, but it always felt like we could do anything we wanted to the place with no consequences.

I kind of looked at the Townhouse this way...It's like a wild animal you found in your backyard....lets say....ummm a purple striped skunk. It's kind of cute, a little stinky and definitely pretty shoddy looking. But you want to pretty it up, comb its hair, put a bow on it and give it a bit of the Lennie from "Of Mice and Men" treatment. You have good intentions, but your execution might be a bit off. You want your skunk to be the bestest skunky in the whole world, but you are not the best groomer around, so a lot of your technique is good, but some of it involves poking ole Peppy with a sharp stick just to see what it would do. For the most part you do a good job, and Peppy starts to look better, you try new things out on him, those work...but you always, in the back of your mind, know that this is a wild animal and its not like its your real dog or cat. It will probably run away, you really have no bond or allegiance to it…so you can experiment and get a little crazy with it.

That’s kind of how I feel about the house right now. It was a smelly, dingy looking wild place. But we wanted to clean it up, put that bow on it and make it dance like a trained seal. Whatever we did was ok...because it was a wild place, it really wasn't ours, we didn't live there, we always had a semi-cozy place to return to. But not today. We move there in one week. This place is ours now. This wild skunk has to be tamed. Whatever we do to this place, we have to live with it...so I am getting a bit nervous. I don't know if we can live in a skunk...mostly because I don't think we would fit.

Anyway, so Rena paints the spare bedroom/office while I lay tile. Let me just say that I love cutting tile. No sarcasm there. It is really fun. Luckily my bro left his tile cutting saw so I got to use that to do the dirty work. So I lay the tile, and the color starts growing on me. Rena wanted this slate colored stuff (similar to what we got) and I wanted a more polished marble type color. I like the glossy flat look and feel of it. So we compromised with a semi-flat slate looking tile. I finish up laying the tile and join her upstairs, Joyce is gone at this point so we are alone. She is working on the spare bedroom/office still, so I begin to paint the ceilings. Saturday night is kind of non-eventful. We are both dog tired, but we push on. She finished the first coats of the upstairs rooms, and I finish all of the ceilings in the place. DONE.

We decide to call it a night around midnight, head home and pass out.

Tomorrow, we grout, paint and get the dishwasher in position.

Friday:

Goals: paint the shit out of the upstairs.

I went to work a bit early on Friday so that I could leave early and get as much painting done as possible.

Before I plastic-off the upstairs hallway and spare bedroom/office, I decide to try to fix a problem that developed two weeks ago. A couple of the drawers for the tall cabinet are supposed to attach directly to the tall cabinet door and bull straight out from the cabinet, when you open them. The problem is that all of the drawers come with the same hardware (drawer, front and backs and rails). Two of them didn't need the front cover since they attach directly to the door. Well these covers got put on during the cabinet building frenzy last weekend, and now they are stuck, and won't come off. Rena wants to take them back to Ikea to exchange, but I believe (having testicles and all) that I can remove the front plates with ease. So I get down to business, prying, screwing, unscrewing, prying some more, smacking, grunting...etc.. Finally I get one off and realize that there is a large spring that I need to recompress to get it back into the shelf. I try to use the pliers to compress it and shove it back into place, but this only results in the thing shooting out bouncing off of the stove and hitting me in the forehead barely missing my eye. I think we will go to Ikea to replace these after we move in.

I begin by priming the ceilings in the upstairs hall, bathroom and spare room. They each get a coat before Rena shows up. She had a late night at work and didn't get to the place until almost 8. She gets cracking on the master bedroom trim again, as I finish up the priming of the master bedroom ceiling.

It is at this point that we decide we are freezing again, so we attempt to attach the new shutoff valve that I bought. We attach, and I smell gas. At first I think it is because I didn't tighten enough, but upon further investigation, I find that the 12in. extension pipe coming up out of the floor is all jacked up. I remove this pipe and decide to get yet ANOTHER shut off valve to replace the whole mess and just have the shutoff closer to the floor. For those keeping score, that’s the third shut off valve that I have to buy...so far in our collection we have a Big (Large in metric) to Big, a Small(Kai in metric) to Small, and what we really need is a Big to Small.

I end up giving all of the ceilings a second priming coat. Rena finishes up painting the yellow and we head home.

Status update: We take stock at this point. We need to lay the kitchen tile and install the dishwasher before Monday so that the countertop guy can come in and measure. Some of the other things that we would like to have done are: finish painting the bedrooms, finish painting the ceilings upstairs, and finish scraping the ceiling in the garage (more popcorn! oh my) and get the carpets cleaned before Friday.

One last note: This is officially our last weekend in the old place. We move next Saturday so things are REALLY starting to get hairy. We haven't packed too much, although we have been bringing things with us as we make trips back and forth. The old landlord rented our place, so he's off of our back. We are ok with not having the cabinet doors up before we move in, because we want to take our time with that.

Thursday:

Goals: Finish the last rows of hardwood flooring, lay concrete backerboard, paint.

Pics: Day 20 Photos

Thursday was only 4 days ago as I write this, and it seemed fresh in my mind up until about Friday morning, so luckily we have pictures to remind us of what we did.

I leave work and start off by laying the last 2 rows of hardwood flooring. We needed to wait until we got the cabinets installed in order to do this. Now that they are done, and the backerboard is ready to be installed, I needed to finish this up. This required laying down another full row, measuring the last row and table sawing it to fit. This was pretty easy, and really satisfying to finally see that strip of flooring done. It had become a nuisance and an eyesore because the unfinished edge was a trapping area for dust, dirt, plastic covering and other assorted nastiness. I did this and Rena showed up at the tail end of it.

We proceeded to work together to place the concrete backerboard on the floor so we could cut/break it to size. We whipped this out pretty quickly so it was on to mixing mortar and then to laying the board.

The drill mixing attachment that we bought was too big for our drill, so we ended up having to mix the mortar by hand. What a treat. We took turns mixing and finally got it to a consistency that was usable. I should also note that it is still ass cold in California this week, so I finally got the shut off valve from the HD the other day and attempt to install so we can get some heat. The "standard" cooktop range shut off valve that we bought is by no means standard. It is way too big for the gas pipe. So we spend another night shivering.

I lay the backerboard pretty quickly and then attach about 3 million screws to the stuff to secure it to the floor. While I am doing this, Rena is painting the upstairs bedroom our bright shade of yellow. This is one of those things that looked good on the paint card, but seems kind of intense in a real life wall application. I finish up downstairs and head up to help Rena. We are excited to actually get something done in the upstairs, since we haven't touched it in a couple of weeks.

Mood: better. The place is actually starting to look like a home to us. When we first were shown ole' JP (Jefferson Place?? nah.) It looked like a million other shitty apartments. And now at least the downstairs is starting to look like a place where we will feel comfortable.

Tomorrow: Prime upstairs ceilings, paint upstairs walls.

Wednesday:

Goals: Shop for concrete tile backerboard (wonderboard), tile setting tools, set up appointment for kitchen countertop, pack, gather tax information.

Today was a day away from ole' Weezie. Well, not really. I left work early to meet Rena over there because the new appliances were being delivered at 4:30ish. I wanted to take a look at the fridge to make absolutely sure it would fit with tile underneath. It's a pretty tight fit. I get there, and Rena has everything under control. It looks as though everything will fit perfectly. So we head out to get some dinner and to get our shop-on.

We have some tasty Crocodile Cafe, actually going out to eat instead of eating on the floor of the townhouse like we have been for the last 3 weeks. Our good friend Erick (whose band "Star Off Machine" is pretty kick ass) is working and tells us that our other friend that works there (Josh) just got a gig being the host of some new show on FX. Pretty good news all around. But again, having nothing to do with our townhouse. Actually, that’s not entirely true. He offered to help us move. For some reason, we've had just about everybody we know offer to help us move. That really says alot, because most of these people have seen our current place and realize how much crap we have. Still, it's a good feeling to have so many people care enough to offer. But anyway, we have already hired movers to get us out of dodge.

So we end up spending 3 hours at Home Depot looking at countertops. Our shopping choices were basically the big home improvements stores or the random take your money and run tile places in North Hollywood. I'm the kind of person who likes a showroom and maybe a salesperson who doesn't look like he 50% wants to rob you and 50% wants to stab you in the eye with a jagged piece of travertine.

So we opted for the big box store.

We ended up choosing Silestone, or Zodiac for our counter surface. Both are just brand names for quartz. I know the granite is the "in" countertop right now in Cali, but we feel that that trend is fast approaching its end, and is like sooooo 2 1/2 years ago. Is that California enough for you? For the record, I have never liked granite. I don't care for most of the color combinations or the patterns in the stone (looks like puke splatters to me). We are both more minimalist when it comes to such things, so the quartz works out well. Most of the patterns are more solid than granite, and the colors are more industrial looking. Plus it is more durable than most other countertops, so that is a bonus as far as Rena's cooking requirements.

Anyway, back to the HomeDepot. We try to gather all of the tools and things for the installation of the tile, look at their tile, look at kitchen sink faucets, and talk to a HD minion about countertops (they sell the Silestone there). I am not certain if this girl had ever been in a kitchen, or had even the slightest idea what a countertop was, but it didn't stop her from taking our order. We couldn't find the color we wanted, and for some reason they don't have samples of all the colors nor could she browse the web for us to look.

This is another side rant: Attention companies, I search the web before/after/ and while shopping. Please make all of your products available, and for you other business who don't even have a website...I'm sorry, but I won't be using your services.

So we finally get Wanda the Quartz Queen to process our order which allows a countertop jockey to come out and measure the business end of our kitchen. It's a hundred bucks for this service, and you pay when you check out. We still couldn't find the color we wanted and were becoming frustrated with each other because we both thought this had been decided weeks ago. We both had decided on a concrete-like gray color. They had one that was similar, but didn't have the speckly sparkly stuff that was in the one we liked. All of a sudden, Rena starts saying that we picked out some white one that looked nothing like what we had picked out originally. This of course makes me scratch my head, chalk it up to her being insane and forces me to become pushy with the color that we originally picked out. We become a little snappy at each other in front of the Home Depot Girl, but I think she was too busy looking up "kitchen countertops" on Wikipedia to notice.

Anyway, we finally realized that we were looking at the problem from two different angles. I had the color right and Rena was correct on the sparklyness of the stone. The stone that we liked the most was actually a Zodiaq, available only at Lowes. So we end our 3 hour adventure at the H.D., and head to the L.O.W.E.S.

We only have to wait for 45 minutes at the Lowes behind a typical annoying Californian family buying a new kitchen....metro-sexual, be-stubbled father, anorexic, hyperactive, do-rag wearing, granola snorting, psychopath mom, two Tommy Hilfiger wearing precocious rugrats named Jedediah and Tierra....and a poor grandmother who appeared as if she had just stepped off the mule train from Iowa and had a look on her face that said "I can't believe any of this spawned from my loins". I truly felt sorry for the woman.

We eventually got the countertop guy to give us our forms and we set it up to be measured on Monday. We high tailed it out of there and dropped everything off at the new place and went home to crash.

Mood: Hating the world...I still need to do my damn taxes. It is at this point of the year when I hate being a contractor.

Tuesday:

pics: Day 18 Photos

Goals: Anchor new/moved cabinets, finish patching kitchen light ceiling hole, continue to prep for appliances (a.k.a. make a path), paint if we have time.

Well, we are feeling swamped today. The appliances come tomorrow so we are kind of in a holding pattern until we see exactly if everything is going to fit. I stop by the 1950's TruValue hardware on the way to the new place after work. I left semi-early because I have to meet the locksmith at 6. One side note that I haven't mentioned is the fact that we haven't had a mailbox key to the new place since we moved in. The previous owner failed to give us it, kept saying he was sending it, never did and finally we gave up. So the locksmith comes and wants to charge me 95 or 110 dollars for either of two locks he can put in our mailbox. I tell him that they told me 30 bucks on the phone (which a different company did). 95 dollars for a 20 dollar lock? What a friggin rip-off. I get it for my price and send the guy on his way. Let me just tell you how full this mailbox was. There was all of our mortgage info, our refund check from escrow, my new bank account checks, about 10,000 offers for security systems, life insurance and satellite systems. Plus a number of holiday cards for Sherman Jordan.

Speaking of ole' SJ, this is the previous owner's name. Yes, Mr. 1947 Alarm System, Mr. Hollywood Gas Stove, Mr. uses a size 34 men’s belt to hold up the dryer vent, Mr. The only wall I will paint in this whole place is the entry area and I will do it PURPLE.....has a name. This is where I come up with all the crafty and nonsensical nicknames for the new townhouse. Of course in my mind, Sherman Jordan is Sherman Hemsley (George Jefferson), so it’s not that far of a stretch for me to call the house "Weezie". Of course, Rena is probably the only person in the world who understands how my idiot brain works, so she gets these "jokes" and promptly ignores them. Everyone else probably just thinks I've been eating paint chips. So I can't recall what names I have used in the blog for the townhouse, but I have been alternating between "Sherman Williams", "The Sherman Hemsley Home"(a kind of double Chuck Norris kick to the face reference to George Jefferson and the Henry Horner Homes in Chicago. Another side note: the HH Homes were a notorious high rise project on the west side of Chicago. I'm not sure why I associate our new place with that neighborhood; it might be the semi-ghettoness of it or just that I like the alliteration).

Either way, it has been difficult to come up with a name for our new place. Maybe after we finish something and move in it will strike us.

So Tuesday finds me hanging the light near the front door, sanding the light hole above the kitchen. Eventually we are going to throw some can lights up there, lowering the hole about 6 inches and drywalling it over. I want to reuse the fluorescent lights in the garage so I will be transferring those down there at some point. I've become quite the spackling pro over the last couple of weeks, and enjoy doing it. Unfortunately it just takes so long. I finish up anchoring, measuring and spackling and decide to help Rena who has begun painting the dining room and putting a second coat on the living room. I don't know if you can tell from the pictures, but the Dining room is the same color as the living room, just two shades lighter. I really liked the dining room color after we got it up, so we are pleased. The downstairs is really starting to come together. Of course we don't have any of the trim or crown molding yet, so our painting looks a little spastic.

We hit the downstairs hard, and are able to get the entire living room second coated, the dining room 1 1/2 coated, and all the mess cleaned up for the appliance delivery.

We also need to bring some new music to the new place. We originally brought a box of soundtracks and a box of various, and they are starting to wear a little thin. You would think that a couple with as much music as us wouldn’t have to listen to “Everybody Dance Now” 4579 times in 3 weeks.

Mood: Better than yesterday. As Rena said, "at least painting gives you some immediate gratification:

Tomorrow: Receive appliances, shop for tile and countertop.

Monday:


Goals: Finish putting together cabinet pieces, clean up kitchen in prep. for appliance arrival, organize tool mess all over the house.

Rena and I are starting to freak out. Well, let me be more descriptive. We are vacillating between being completely calm and being completely overwhelmed. A month seemed like a long time when we first set out on this project. But it seems like the last 2 weeks have been slow going on the weeknights. We vow to get a metric assload of work done this week. And also decide to prioritize things that NEED to get done before we move in. It looks like more and more things will have to be completed after we move in. The main things now are to get tile in the kitchen, paint the rest of the walls, install the cabinet fixtures and doors and get the carpets cleaned before we move in.

One good piece of news is that Rena's dad is going to help us by making the countertop for our island. We just need to send him the dimensions ASAP so he can help us out.

Monday was a weird day. I was at the peak of my sickness, Rena was late getting to the place, and things once again are moving in slow motion. One of the main questions I have regarding the cabinets is how exactly do I fill in the gaps between the kitchen sink and the side base cabinets. Ikea drone #1 and #2 both said we needed to get the smaller sink cabinet to work with our setup. "Simply use a piece of filler to fill the gap" they say. So I am trying to see how exactly all of that is supposed to fit together. So I decide to put the door on one of the cabinets so I can see exactly what I am working with. To do this, I need to install the lazy susans and the brace for the drawer. I do this eventually and see the cuts I need to make to install the final filler pieces. It doesn't look too bad. But I want to wait until we have the appliances to see exactly where I need filler, so I can do all the pieces in one shot.

Remember yesterday when we decided that the small 12" cabinet was sticking too far into fridge-land? Well we decided on a plan of action. We were all prepared to just forget that end cabinet and leave it open and maybe add some shelving later. But I figured out that we could move the tall cabinet 2 inches to the left, move the above the fridge cabinet the same distance, and then use a piece of filler between the above the fridge cabinet and the 2nd left side cabinet. Problem solved.

The only problem was the railing for the fridge cabinet ended about an inch short of where we needed it, so I had to drive another anchor in the wall to hold it. This was hard. The cabinet is high and heavy and Rena is short and light. We eventually got everything moved, leveled and supported. But it killed a big part of the night. After that, Rena concentrated on consolidating tools and trash, and I set out to fix the giant light hole in the kitchen ceiling that was left over after we removed the old light panels. The edges of the box were drywall sheet ends, so they were rough, and needed to be taped and spackled. I got that done, and we headed home.

Mood: worried.

Sunday:

pics: Day 16 Photos

I also put the listing page up where I found the townhouse. Rachel Raia was/is my zip reality real estate agent. You might think she looks like a psycho in that picture, but I always thought that she was kind of hot in a "I will eat your soul" kind of way. Come Get Some...

Goals: Finish leveling and securing the base cabinets.

Well, Sunday started out wonderfully. After we had our dinner with the helpers on Saturday night, we went home and proceeded to get cozy on the couch. I of course fall asleep instantly, only to be awoken by a piercing scream a few minutes later. It seemed our slipshitz of a landlord had done something to the sink in the upstairs unit (we had a few messages saying they were turning off the water on Sat.)which caused all the water they had been flushing through the system to come up through our bathroom sink. Rena had walked into the bathroom and gotten a foot full of cold water. We call and wake his smarmenian ass up and tell him that he had better be here first thing in the morning to clean the mess up.

A little background on the landlord and his "plumber". He uses the same homeless guy to fix anything that goes wrong with the place; electrical, structural, plumbing, roofing, windows, etc.. He absolutely refuses to use anyone else.

We go to bed, and wait for his call on Sunday morning. He of course calls 2 hours after he was supposed to be there, and when he finally does call, he says the plumber is sick and he won't be coming at all. I think he just doesn't want to pay the guy (or any guy) to work on Sunday. I and Rena tell him to call another plumber like a sane person would, since our bathroom is currently unusable and we would really like to take showers and not step out into a cesspool. He eventually comes over (Rena had to wait for him, I had to meet Kyrie and Nader at the new place) to clean up the mess himself with paper towels. He gives Rena the song and dance about the plumber being sick and how he doesn't trust anyone else to work on it, because other plumbers he has hired have caused more damage than what they fixed. "Like your plumber did to our bathroom," says everyone in unison.

Anyway, I get on the phone with him as he is cleaning around our toilet and berate him for being a bad landlord, a bad person, and generally being annoying. After arguing with him for 20 minutes I finally tell him to just clean up the mess (to my satisfaction) and do what he needs to do to get the sink fixed. At this point, I just felt like being an ass to him to get back at him for being so evasive and borderline retarded.

He wouldn't listen to the reasons why we were upset (being delayed for 3 hours because of his F-up). He thought we were upset because we couldn't use the damn sink. Here is a typical snippet from that phone call and maybe you can see why I was such a dick to him:

Tony: Look Vic, we just wanted the sink fixed this morning at the time you said it would be fixed.
Vic the Dick: You know in the olden times, people got along with only one sink and they didn't complain.
Tony: Ok...I'm not paying 1300 bucks a month to live in the "olden times" in a place with one sink. I'm paying that much to live in the here and now, in a place with 2 damn sinks.
Vic the Dick: I do you favor by not raising your rent as much as everybody else. You I raise 25, others I raise 50 dollars a year. You get a good rate.
Tony: You are changing the subject, I am talking about how I pay for a service and expect what I pay for. I don't give a shit how much you raise the rent for other people....and, by the way, we would have been out of here after a year if you tried to pull that 50 dollar shit with us. The rent of the place next door (a different owner) which is a mirror image to our place is 200 bucks cheaper a month.
Vic the Dick: Why all the anger Tony, we have a good relationship, you just need to be patient.

Tony: No, I am upset because you run a bad dishonest business. You said you were going to take care of this 3 hours ago, and now you say it won't be until tomorrow. You are wasting Rena's time. I need her over here. I am really upset because you don't answer simple questions.

Vic the Dick: We have a good relationship...blah blah blah.


He never really got the point of why I was mad. He wasted 3 hours of our Sunday with this B.S. instead of being honest with us from the getgo. He still thinks I am mad because we couldn't use the sink for two days. The plumber eventually showed up half an hour late on Monday.

I guess this is supposed to be about Townhouse remodels and not slackjawed landlords.
So Kyrie and Nader show up at around 11, and we get to work on leveling the base cabinets. Kyrie worked on vacuuming the mess upstairs and putting together the shelves for the tall kitchen cabinet. Sunday was kind of a slow day, the work we were doing wasn't glamorous and was slow going. Rena picked up the lamps we had ordered from Lamps Plus on the way over so we've got that going for us. The highlight of the day was the trip to the old school Ace Hardware. We all went for the ride just to get warm. We got some more wall anchors and an electrical box so I can move the box that is for the fridge (it is in the way of the cabinets) My and Rena's head cold seem to be getting worse. After we get the last cabinet level, Kyrie and Nader leave. Rena and I stick around for a bit to clean up. She had been sanding the upstairs ceilings all afternoon, so she cleaned up that mess. I moved the electrical outlet and patched up the hole where the old one was.

As we were getting ready to go, we decided to take some measurements to admire our new kitchen. The last 12 inch cabinet sticks out an inch longer than it is supposed to. The Fridge won't fit. Shit.

We decide to leave the last cabinet off (which was never installed due to the outlet needing to be moved) and to deal with it on Monday.

We head home to change, head to Home Depot to buy a sink. Then over to Joyce and Paul's for dinner.

This just in from the Norwegian Contingent: Kai says:
"Indiana viewers might laugh at a 46 degree day??" Us Norwegian viewers feel neglected!!!

To tell you the truth, I didn't think my Norwegian fan base was that big. But now that I know he is reading I will account for his sensibilities: So, the temperature was cold to us, but was probably 156Niner° in metric which would have confused some of our less worldly readers.

Saturday:

pics: Day 15 Photos

So this is the big daddy day. Getting the cabinets installed. Luckily we have Kyrie, Nader, Justin and Hannah coming to give us a hand.

Goals: Assemble cabinets.

Rena and I get up early to go look at floor tile for the kitchen before we head over to the place at noon. We ended up seeing only one place and couldn't find a decent tile that was a decent price, so we decided to hold off. We met a guy working at a tile place in North Hollywood that seemed like he was giving us some good information, so we have some additional leads now. We did find a really nice tile that we liked (limestone, I think) that matched what we both want for the room.

We head over to the new place, stopping to get some lunch materials and beverages on the way. At this point I should mention that for the last week or so, it has been freezing in Southern California. And as we came out of the store Saturday, the temperature seemed to have dropped about 20 degrees. It turns out that the high for Saturday was 46 degrees. Let me say that again, 46 DEGREES! The heat is off in the new place because the gas is turned off, because there is no shut off valve on the stove gas pipe. So let’s just say that it is mildly cold in the place. Our only form of heat is physical exertion and the work lamps (which actually put off quite a bit of heat). Now I know you Indiana viewers might laugh at a 46 degree day, but those of us who have become accustomed to something a bit more hospitable are freezing our asses off.

We arrive, and attempt to clean up the place as much as possible before people arrive. Kyrie and Nader (Rena's sister and boyfriend) roll in around 1ish, and Justin and Hannah (our hero from last weekend and his lovely wife) are hot on their tail. We get the introductions out of the way, and the boys are hot to trot and want to get in on the cabinet action. I had read the instructions a few days before, but have been swamped getting everything ready, so I didn't entirely understand the wonder that is the Ikea cabinet building process.

We decide to start on the right wall because that side is less visible in case we do something horrible. The Ikea high cabinets install using a railing that attaches to the walls, and the cabinets are bolted onto that. It's a pretty straightforward process that seems simple enough in theory. We had some problems determining the correct height of the cabinets, because the Ikea directions conform to Plato's idea of the "perfect" cabinet. A perfect cabinet that doesn't actually exist in the real world, but one that our cabinets would nonetheless constantly be compared.
....sorry got sidetracked. Our kitchen was built by blind midget yetti's so, our cabinet height doesn't really compare really well to the "perfect" cabinet height described in the ikeabible.

So using this knowledge, we mount the railing too high the first time. This after Nader marked out the Ikea inspired railing height, and me disagreeing. Turns out Nader was right...score one for the Iranian contingent, score zero for the pasty faced Polish/Native American moron.

So we move the railing to the correct height, slide our anchors in and set the first cabinet on the wall. We are all so excited that we simultaneously take a step back, gasp and watch the cabinet fall off the wall. Luckily Nader's thumb caught the cabinet on its way down and broke itself rather than letting the cabinet break. So for those of you keeping score: Iranian thumb contingent: 0, Ikea Wall Cabinet: 1.

The next 2 wall cabinets go up relatively easy. And then we get to the above microwave cabinet. (Did I mention that we didn't know Nader's thumb was even hurt until Sunday? What a champ). The last cabinet on the right side of the room is the microwave cabinet, and it sits directly under that old oven vent that we weren't going to use anymore. Unfortunately, the vent was not done using us.

The vent causes the ceiling to bow down, and in turn caused our cabinet not to fit. We had already mounted the railing, and decided that it needed to move down about an inch to mount the micro-cabinet. The problem was that 3 other cabinets were already mounted on the same railing, and we didn't want to take all of those cabinets down again. In comes Nader's angle grinder which I use to cut through the railing while it is still on the wall, and so begins our love affair with all things angle grinder.

We eventually get the cabinets on the right done, and start working on the top left cabinets. These go in relatively easy. We had some problems locating studs, and poor Nader had to run back to the hardware store to get anchors and things that I should have bought before Saturday...I blame it on the head cold. My mind was not working nearly well enough. We ran into the same problem with the rails and the tall over-fridge cabinet, so Nader got to try his hand at angle grinding into the wall to cut a railing. As a bonus, he also got to use my dremel tool to cut through the steel. The sparks and little heat given off by the cutting devices were enjoyed by all.

We finish with the upper left cabinets, and started working on the base cabinets. This required a lot of angle grinding of holes for water pipes. The angle grinder is a great tool, but is really not the best tool for cutting through cabinetry. The burning smell and smoke drove us away from the kitchen.

By this point it is nearing 9 o'clock and we are all getting ass tired. So we decide to head out to get some dinner.

Oh...you may be asking "what were the girls doing during all of this?" and my answer to that would be....looking pretty and offering morale support. Then I would get slapped and would say "they were building all the shelves, and finishing up building all the remaining cabinets that Rena and I didn't finish (for the island, the tall base cabinet, the sink cabinet etc...)". They seriously kicked much butt getting those things ready for install. We also found out that not only is Hannah an accomplished writer and figure skater, but she is also a master drawer builder.

Friday: (again)

pics: Day 14 Photos
Ok, so this week went by REALLY fast.

Goals: Assemble as many cabinets as possible in prep. of installing on Saturday/Sunday.

One of the things that has plagued us since the beginning of construction is the lack of light in our place. A lot of the light fixtures had to be removed for painting and scraping and therefore are useless. One breaker is permanently off because we had bare wires exposed. And for some reason the breakers in our place correspond to random outlets and lights throughout the house. So we decided to hang the new dining room light that we bought to give us some more light. There are pictures on the website.

Rena and I put together all of the hanging cabinets (minus the fridge and microwave cabinets) and the two corner base cabinets. We had a slight dilemma when we realized the exhaust hood for the old stove was in a place where we were putting a new cabinet. Which would mean that we had to move the vent over about 8 inches to the right to fit the new kitchen layout. This was a problem that we really didn't want to deal with, but we found out at the end of the day on Friday. Luckily, I did some research when we got home, and our microwave doesn't have to use that vent. So we decided to cover it up with the cabinets.

I think by this point we are both coming down with a head cold that is making us both irritable and cranky. We wrap it up at around 9-10 and head home.

Thursday:

Goals: Clean up the trash bags left over from the week, divide the cabinets into piles to check to see if we are missing anything and to make assembly easier. Start building cabinets.

Well, we have a slight kink in our plan. Back-story: Our idiot landlord started pestering us the day after we gave him our 30 day notice to show our apartment. He came over the day after and said he wanted to show it that weekend. We said the place was in no way ready for random strangers to be walking through it.

We're not rich folk, but we do have a lot of camera equipment, cd's, computer equipment and random other things strewn about the apartment in preparation for packing and due to negligence from our being at the other place all the time. We said no way on showing, and he got all up in arms and demanded that we look at our lease, and said that he can show anytime he wants with 24hr's notice because it says so in the lease and that the weekends were the best time for him to show the unit, blah blah blah. He is one of those types of people that I can't stand. Like a bad used car salesman he tries to tell us the benefit of having random strangers walking through our place. "It will rent sooner, and thats good business." he says, as if we care about his good business. From what I have seen this guy can't find a renter who isn't a complete derelict, and has never rented a place before the people move out. So I anticipate 3 weeks of random goobers schlepping through our house.

We talked to Joyce (since she is a landlord) and got some good advice, and I got crafty and looked up the California Civil Codes on renting and found out that our toolbag landlord has to give us 24hour WRITTEN notice, can only show from 9-5. and cannot show on the weekends. In addition, he is subject to harassment laws if he disturbs us too much by showing multiple times. I typed this up in a nice letter and sent it off. Well this put the fear of Starr into him and he came sniveling around Rena the other day like a dog with his tail between his legs. He must have realized that he just screwed himself on us being nice and letting him show during the prime hours. I am more than prepared to allow him to show on the weekends, for a nominal fee. I read about a couple of guys doing that on the web. It will teach him for being a dick to us from the get go.

So that brings us back to why Thursday was a short night. We only had enough time to take out the trash and sort the Ikea cabinets (we were only missing one door thing and 4 hinges which amazed me). Then we had to go home and clean up the place because he wants to show on Friday. I made sure to build every packing box that we had in the house and place it in front of closets and doors to cause as much problem as possible. I know it is a little passive aggressive, but we have enough stuff to worry about without having to think about the types of mouthbreathers that he is caravanning through our pad.

He finally rented the place above us this week, and those morons were up until 1:00 dropping things on the floor over our bed. At least we had a month of quiet when dumb and dumber moved out. So his track record for renting to jackholes is unbroken. .....stop looking at Rena and I like that.

Hopefully he gets the message and backs off (he is showing the place to 4 people today which I think verges on harassment). Luckily for him, Rena is going to be there today to watch him. When I am there, I am more than prepared to be sitting on the couch in my boxers watching porn and scratching myself when he shows up.

Tonight: we build cabinets.

Wednesday:

Goal: Rest, shop for ceiling lights. Rest some more.

We decided to make today a rest day. We needed to get away from the place for a day to gather our thoughts and to get some sleep. We both got home from work at around 5, and went to the Lamps Plus in Glendale to look at some lights that we had seen on their website. They were having a big sale, so we wanted to take advantage.

When we got there, we ended up having a sales guy who was just off the boat from Nigeria so we had to pretty much walk him through the sale. He was full of enthusiasm but not too knowledgeable on Lamps or for that matter, Plus. The lamps that we liked in the paper looked like ass in real life, so we decided to look around some more and ended up finding some discontinued lights that were half the price of the ones we had originally picked out. Bonus. We also got a longer hanging light for the upstairs stairwell, since that is a larger space and needed something a bit more "hangy".

After that, it was time for our romantic dinner. We headed down the street to Foxy's (a standard Glendale haunt) and to our surprise they had a bunch of new wait people working there. We got a new waitress who gave me a great idea. This has nothing to do with townhouse renovation (unless the idea makes me millions and allows me to buy new townhouses, pay people to fix them up, and then burn them to the ground just because I can). But my idea is for a new restaurant....a more upscale version of Hooters for those of us who like some mystery and nuance in our sexual dining. Our waitress last night had one of those sexy voices that made everything she said sound AWESOME. Even Rena was ready to order triple desserts from this girl. I have had one other experience a few years ago down in the OC, when we were out to breakfast with Joel and Heidi. This girl had a voice that drove us all crazy (by us all I mean excluding Heidi and Rena). I want to open a restaurant like that. Where the waitpeople all have sexy come hither voices that make people want to order more beer and dessert. They would wear normal clothes, and patrons would buy all kinds of wine and 50 dollar steaks...making me millions....then I would burn the place to the ground, just because I could.

Anyway, so tonight (Thursday) we are sorting through the cabinet pieces so we can start assembly and hopefully install over the weekend. We got all the parts that had to be shipped out of the Ikea warehouse in Bakersfield this morning. So we should be good to go.

Tuesday:

Goals: Put a second coat of paint in the kitchen, second coat of paint on the living/dining/entry room ceilings. Clean up garage in preparation for cabinet assembly.

I left work right after 5 to get as much work done by my lonesome as possible. Rena was at an instore for work (Bad Religion) and couldn't make it. I did have a nice suprise when Rena's mom (Joyce) called and said she was bringing dinner over and wanted to help me paint.

As a side note, Joyce and Paul (Rena's stepdad) have been truly wonderful with helping us get things done. They keep volunteering their time to come over and help out wherever they are needed. They have been awesome.

I started out by washing out some of the painting materials. We have been pretty good about keeping the brushes, rollers and pans all cleaned and ready to go after each day. We've only lost one brush to neglect since we started this project, so I think we are doing well.

I needed to put a first coat of paint on the dining room area, followed by a first coat of the entry area and downstairs stair ceilings. I wanted to do these first so that I could put a second coat on the living room, and then hopefully hit those first areas again for a second coat before the end of the night. I got finished with the dining room and entry areas just as Joyce arrived. We had some turkey chili and then got down to business. She worked on painting the kitchen and I finished up the ceiling. I managed to get a second coat on everything so I am satisfied that the ceilings downstairs are almost done.

I should take a moment to reflect on our decision to scrape the ceilings and keep them flat by ourselves. The cost of getting someone in to do it was prohibitive with our budget, and I think we did a decent job of it. There are a couple of rough areas that I would like to spend some more time on, but our schedule doesn't permit it, so it will be a post-move in project.

The other open issues are the cabinets. We have them all in the garage, they need to be assembled and installed. One portion of the cabinets are for an island that we want to build in the dining room, instead of having a table. I have been busy working out in my head the best way to build the island (we need a base wall to hang the cabinets from. And we want it to be powered and lit. Luckily, we are building a server room at my company and the contractor had some extra drywall that I just snagged today. So that should help with that project. So it looks like we will have to drill a hole for electric cabling in our new hardwood floor (cue horror music).

Joyce and I finished up our painting projects and decided to call it a night at 9:30. I cleaned all the painting utensils and got the hell out of Dodge.

Wednesday is a night off. We are having dinner and maybe buying some ceiling lights. Rena and I are both wiped. So we want to recoup tonight.

No pictures for Tuesday or Monday because I forgot the camera. I will get some tomorrow.

Monday:

Goals: Paint the kitchen, finish the dining room ceiling, and clean up the floor mess.

I head over straight after work, and get into cleaning up the mess we made over the weekend. It is pouring rain, so things are getting wet on the patio, so I remove what’s out there and clean up all the tools and lights and tables so that I can sweep. I vacuum out the kitchen, clean up all the left over refuse and begin painting the kitchen walls. Rena shows up with some tasty Crocodile Cafe, and we have dinner on our new wood floor.

Afterwards, we decide to cover the new wood floor with plastic sheets to protect it from painting and general home construction debris. This takes about 4-5 years to do and when we are done, we are both ready for the night to be over. We decide to muscle our way through getting the first coat on the kitchen walls, and then call it a night.

Tomorrow I need to finish the dining room ceiling and start assembling cabinets. One thing I didn't mention is the fact that there are a couple of spots on the living room ceiling that need to be sanded and filled again, but I think we are 90% done with that.

Tonight Rena has work stuff to do, so I'm on my own.

Sunday

pics: Day 9 Photos

Sunday started out a little slow. We decided to pick up the cabinets before we finished the floor since we had the trailer and also since the floor was 3/4 done.

We have looked at a lot of cabinets and for our budget we decided to go with the Ikea stuff. It seemed to be just as well made as similar stuff from the big home improvement stores, but seemed nicer looking. So we decide to get to the Ikea early so that we can have them approve our design to make sure we didn't miss anything, then wait for them to pick the product from the stock room. One thing to remember about any large store in California on a weekend is that more than likely it will be the either the 9th or 10th circle of hell when you get there. Ikea was the 11th.

We waited for 2 hours for our order to get processed, all the while protecting our Ikea drone from the endless onslaught of questions from the drooling minions that slobbered their way over to her. Their system there is pretty damn stupid. She takes our order, and then proceeds to enter it in their computer system. Which happens to be be in the middle of the sales floor. So every leg draggin’ yahoo in the s. cal area keeps coming up and interrupting her. So we decide to form a defensive barrier around her for the duration of the sale. Rena and I making out on one side, and Bob talking about his genitals on the other. That kept most of the slackjaws at bay.

So we finally get the order processed, wait in line to pay, wait in line to tell the customer pickup department to process our order and then head out for lunch.

We hit Lowe's for some cabinet hanging items, then back to our apartment to wait for the Ikea call. Rena heads over to the new place to prep the kitchen for install so Bob and I don't have to drive the Jeep and trailer all the way to Pasadena.

Ikea eventually calls and we head over. What greets us are 3 huge carts packed to the rim with cabinet parts. I am regretting this already. It takes us about half an hour to load the trailer, and we are on our way. We don't want to take the freeway, so it takes us about 45 minutes to drive from Burbank to Pasadena. What a joyous trip.

We arrive, unload the trailer, and begin to finish the floor. Rena helps out for a bit, but has to leave to go get ready for an interview that she has on Monday. We finish the floor and decide to call it a night.

Saturday

pics: Day 8 Photos

Goals: Finish getting ready for wood floor install. Which means removing flooring from kitchen and dining room, removing kitchen cabinets, removing the rest of the floor trim and cleaning up the mess.

We get a decent 10:30ish start which was caused by our late Friday night painting marathon. Our good friend Justin was all about helping us out this weekend since his lovely wife Hannah was out of town and he had jack and shit to do.

We stopped to get some beverages since we expected a house full this weekend. My brother was on his way from Phoenix with the load of flooring with an anticipated arrival time of 2pm. Justin actually beat us to the Townhouse, and let me tell you, we found out over the course of Saturday that he is one ass kicking hard worker. He impressed the hell out of everybody and saved us a lot of time and work. He's a friggin honorary starr in our book.

We started by clearing the kitchen. And trying to figure out how to remove the cabinets. We decided on the blunt force method of cabinet removal. We went to work on removing the countertops first, a bunch of prying and pounding got the left side off, and then we discovered that the "L" portion of the counter (that attatches to the sink) was held together by some sort of metal plates that did wonders on my recipricating saw. We then decided to unhook all the plumbing under the sink and dishwasher. Some of the connectors looked like something out of a 1970's outhouse, so I am glad we are replacing them. Speaking of the 1970's, something must have died in the garbage disposal around 1972, because it stunk up the kitchen horribly.

We managed to get the rest of the lower cabinets out and then decided to remove the linoleum flooring to prepare for the hardwood. This stuff was like iron bonded to the floor and the process was slow going. We decided to break for lunch, while Joyce went to get us some more crowbars to help in removing the floor. After some tasty egg salad, I got a call from my brother and he was about an hour outside of town.

Joyce returns and we go to work on the floor. We get about half of it up before bro shows up. Then we realize we can lay the hardwood right on top of it because the linoleum is so thin. Joyce departs and Bob and I head out to buy some underlay for the flooring. Rena and Justin decide to handle the upper cabinets when we are gone. Bob and I head to Ikea to pick up the backing since it has a decent price on the stuff. When we get back, Rena and Justin have removed all of the upper cabinets, the tall cabinet, the oven and cleaned up the kitchen mess. They rocked hard when we were gone.

We immediately get to work laying flooring and get a nice assembly line system going; Rena and Justin pounding the connectors, me running up and down the stairs to get boxes of flooring and cutting pieces and Bob pounding the stuff into the floor. We call it quits at around 9:00 to save the neighbors eat our CPK and head home.

All in all, the last two days we have gotten a ton of stuff done.

Friday!
pics: Day 7 Photos

Goals: prep the downstairs for hardwood installation: remove carpet, paint as much as possible, and finish ceilings.

Well its finally Friday, and we have a lot of things to get done before we can install the wood flooring this weekend. I leave work and meet Rena at the house. She finishes sanding the upstairs ceilings, and I begin filling the bad areas with putty. The ceilings upstairs aren't nearly as bad as the living room, so this goes smoothly. We get a call from Rena's Mom saying that she and Paul are coming over to help us finish stuff up. Paul shows up and gets the tour of the destruction and then Joyce shows up with some much needed Church's Chicken. One advantage to moving into the semi-ghetto is that there are Church's Chickens about. The chicken hit the spot and we got back down to work.

Rena and her mom attacked the purple wall with a second coat of primer...and this about did old Grimace in. He is looking more and more whiter as time goes on. It's hard to say goodbye to an old friend like that...but he won't be missed. Paul got a taste of drywall dust in the upstairs bathroom, and I finished spackling upstairs. We both moved downstairs to tackle the already primed living room/dining room ceilings in preparation for painting.

We whipped through that, and at the same time Rena and Joyce finished up the purple wall priming. We all decided the next step to getting ready for wood flooring was to remove the nasty living room carpet. Joyce led the charge and soon we were pulling up carpet and tossing it off of the balcony.

With the carpet removed, we proceeded to remove staples while Rena pulled up carpet strips with the crowbar. This was a task that everyone enjoyed immensely. The only task more exciting was prying up the linoleum tile in the dining room/kitchen.

Joyce and Paul decided to leave at around 9:30. We thanked them for their help which was MUCH appreciated. And Rena and I decided to do some painting. I painted the living room ceiling and she painted the living room walls. We lasted until about 12:30 and then headed home.

I think we are back on schedule as of today.

Ok....so we didn't make the shopping trip short. We did however buy paint for the downstairs rooms, the hallways, doors and trim. And we also picked out a lovely shade for the master bedroom. We ended up going to The Great Indoors to check on some light fixtures that Rena had looked at, and while we both liked the fixture, it seemed that most of them had some sort of chain that they were hanging from that just looked too cheap and not sleek enough for the look we are going for. We ended up finding a light we both liked that fit well in the dining room kitchen area.

We were home by 10:30 tonight, and plan on getting a good nights sleep and hitting the house HARD again tomorrow night.

My brother Bob is coming into town on Saturday to deliver us our daily hardwood flooring, and to forgive us our mess, as we forgive our purple painters. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from escrow....amen.

Ok, I'm spent....Tomorrow the goal is to finish sanding the upstairs ceilings. Paint the downstairs ceilings and prep for floor removal and cabinet removal.

Day 5. Well we are a day behind schedule. We heard from my brother that he is bringing enough Cherry Flooring for the whole place on Saturday. We need to take it up a notch to get the place ready for the install. Our original plan was to ignore the upstairs ceilings after we had sanded, since most of the time critical items were for the downstairs areas. But now that are putting flooring upstairs as well, we need to get that done ASAP. We also need to get the kitchen cabinets ripped out before then as well so that we can get the flooring in.

Goals: Prime the ceilings dowstairs, in the upstairs stairwell, and sand the remaining unsanded ceilings (bedrooms, bathroom, closets) if there is time.

We ended up tearing out the crappy closet hanging systems that they had in both bedroom closets before we got started. We decided to move from there to priming and we managed to get the entire first floor done by midnight. The purple area was especially difficult because it butts up against the staircase.

We originally had planned to take Thursday night off to buy paint and tools, but we are going to go in then to finish priming and sanding the remaining ceilings. We will make our shopping trip short.

Woo hoo...the last day of February. This is the day we were originally supposed to close. But since we ROCK SO HARD...we got to close early.

Our goals for today were to cleanup the dust mess from sanding the ceilings, and then begin priming. This didn't work out so well. We had trouble coming up with a decent way to deal with the dust. The shop-vac seemed to be seriously pissed off at us for days of abuse, and our real vacuum cleaner ended its life pretty quickly in a belt burning display of epic proportions. Eventually we decided on a dual strategy, with me sweeping the ceilings, walls and floors (starting on the top floor) down to the entry area, and then vacuuming it up. Rena followed along with the geriatric shop vac to get the remnants. It took a few hours for me to sweep through the whole place, but I think we got a large portion of the dust out the door and in the vacuum.

By the time we got done with this, it was already past nine, so we decided to mask some things off and save the priming for Wednesday. The good news is that I figured out what was wrong with the shop-vac. We had a solidified piece of drywall and popcorn jamming up the intake hose. I go that out and we were golden.

We headed home, upset that we had fallen behind schedule. It looks as though we won't get the walls painted before the flooring is installed.

Goals: patch downstairs ceilings and finish sanding. Cleanup the rest of the popcorn mess from Sunday.

Monday started off slow. There was a huge rainstorm all day so moving things in and out of the place was not happening. This was our first day working directly after work, and we ended up staying until 10:30. I started off by finishing sanding the 1st floor stairwell ceilings, while waiting for Rena to bring some tasty Crocodile Cafe food. By this point, we are both really tired of being covered in drywall dust. But we feel the end is near as far as dealing with the mess. Our plan is to finish patching and doing the light sanding so we can prime tomorrow. I patch my way across the living room and dining room, and make my way towards the stairwell. While I do this, Rena is doing something....cleaning up...I believe and masking things off for priming. To tell you the truth, I can't remember. I am typing this on Thursday, and the days are starting to become a blur. I do know that we finished up and headed home confident that we would be able to prime the ceilings and the horrible purple wall on Tuesday.

The reason we are rushing to get the ceilings done, is our schedule calls for the wood floor to be installed starting on Saturday, so that the cabinets can be installed directly after that, and then the appliances can be delivered.

We accomplished 100% of our goals on Monday, so we were feeling pretty good.....but on Tuesday we had a bit of a setback.....

pics: Day 3 Photos

Day 2 of the Renovation project started earlier than day 1. We were up and packing at around 8-9, and after making breakfast and relaxing a bit we were on our way. Let me just start by saying that we were both pretty sore getting going this morning. Rena's hand was getting cramped and my arms were sore as hell. I guess I should list our goals for each day so that people can play along at home:

Goals for Day 2: Finish removing popcorn from the Dining room, and completely remove popcorn from the top floor. If we have time, completely do a first sanding pass on the first floor.

The day started off by me removing the dining room lamp (which I have decided is never going back up) and Rena scraping the rest of the dining room. I decided to wrap up everything upstairs in plastic to prepare for wetting and scraping. I got about halfway done, when I realized that the ceiling in the master bedroom was coming down VERY easily. I decided to take advantage of this and grabbed the big scraper. It took about half an hour to do the whole room, which was REALLY fast. While I was doing this, Rena was busy removing the ceiling popcorn mess from the downstairs, which took about as long as actually scraping the stuff off.

When I finished the master bedroom, Rena joined me and she scraped the upstairs bathroom while I wetted the ceiling, cleaned up popcorn mess and finished covering everything.

When Rena finished the bathroom, we both decided to tackle the other bedroom, which turned out to be a huge pain. The ceiling was really stubborn in this room, and really wore us out. As we neared the end, we decided that we needed lunch. We took off after we had finished the room, but not before I did a test section of the upper stairwell, which looked to be the hardest section yet (due to tall ceilings and slanted surface).

I managed to leave a trail of drywall dust and chucks all over the El Torito in Pasadena. I don't think they were too pleased.

We found a woodworking store on the way to lunch that I had read about online. They have molding, flooring and staircase stuff that might be useful later.

Back at the pad I begin working on scraping the final large area (the upstairs hall and stairwell). It is actually going pretty smooth, and then Joyce and Paul (Rena's mom and step dad) show up to see the place and bring us goodies. We give them the mini-tour since everything is covered in plastic and half the upstairs ceiling is hanging in pieces.

They want to help out, but there isn't much to do since nothing can be done until we stop scraping and sand everything. So they depart and leave us to finish. I finish with the hall ceiling and begin cleanup work, and Rena starts to tackle the stairwell since She is a champ on a ladder thanks to her being on them all day long at her stores. She finds a way to reach the tall ceiling and proceeds to kick ass. I finish up the hard to reach parts and then we are done with the big pieces. There are 3 closets left to finish, and we tackle those, and then begin clean up.

Before we leave for the night, we sand the entire downstairs with the rough sandpaper in preparation for spackling and sanding on Monday.

We accomplished all of our goals, and we are feeling proud of how much we are getting done.

I'll post pictures of some of this soon.