Summer Hiatus

Not much has happened lately, except for taking delivery of a new fridge and fighting for a discount, since it arrived dented from shipping!

Summer is Lisa's busy season at work and with her stilting ventures and the weekends have been full of things to get done outside of the house, so renovations are largely on hold for now. I mean to spend my spare time planning the next steps, drafting revised floor plans, setting timelines and doing exploratory surgery on my walls to find out what parts can be removed. "Ah, but the best laid schemes of mice and men..."

Bicycle renovations?

Bikequiz

1. Do you have a bike? (If not, but you want one, skip to question #7.)

2. Does your bike need maintenance/repair? (If you answered, "I don't know" to this question, see #3. If you said yes, skip to #9)

3. Does your bike make noises like a male elk in mating season?

4. Have you hit a large object with your bike or been hit by a large object while on your bike recently?

5. Have any bits fallen off your bike lately?

6. Do your brake levers pull most of the way back to your bars when you try to stop? (If you donBikequiz't know what brake levers are, proceed immediately to question #9)

7. Do you want to get a cheap, sturdy, functional bike?

8. Are you interested in rescuing a bicycle, as opposed to buying a new one from the store?

9. Do you sometimes/often/always feel intimidated by those bike shop guys?

10.Would you like to have a bike mechanic that you can really trust?

11.Do you want to learn how to fix your bike?

If you answered "Yes" to any of these questions, you should check out JETT GRRL Bike Studio! You can get a bike, get your bike fixed, learn to fix your own bike or even just learn how the thing works...

1925 Adanac St. BACK door
Vancouver
604.255.5097
jett_grrl@hotmail.com
www.jettgrrl.com

*This posting is unofficial word-of-mouth advertising from a rider who's halfway through the beginner workshops. Tracy's awesome!

Form vs. Function

I just removed another 'handyman special' addition to the place. I tend to refer to these lovely little additions as vestiges of Frank. He had installed two wooden rods at about 6' high over the bathtub, parallel to the shower curtain rod. I think they were meant for drying clothing. They do function quite adequately as a towel drying spot, but the things were ugly as hell. Also a bit of a hindrance to anyone over 6' tall who wanted to get clean vertically. Our catsitter-on-retainer, Mike, had some serious issues washing his hair in the shower while he was here.

Had Debbie Travis seen this place before we started on it, I think she would have had an aneurysm. I can't count on my fingers & toes the number of bizarre, stop-gap customizations that ol' Frank did to the place. He seemed to take pride in using hardware for some other purpose than intended, like towel rack brackets to hold up glass shelves. Usually his ideas would require some extra bits of wood & double-sided tape to hold it all together. Imagine Macgyver as an interior designer, & you'll have an idea of what we're dealing with here...

Next on the list is the odd, wooden handle in the tub enclosure. It looks like a paper towel rack made in a grade eight woodwork class.

SPRUNG!

Our building actually has one of the nicest gardens around the neighbourhood. Spring has revealed that fact.

CLICKY

Not much renovating.

We've been busy doing everything but renovating lately. Shopping Main St., socializing, stilting, visiting the Okanagan, unpacking, stilting some more. The weather's been great: warm & sunny most days. Grouse Mountain's flash of white is turning dirt-coloured as the snow melts.

I love this neighborhood. Living on the Drive was great, but after 8 years... The heart of the Drive, around 1st Avenue & Commercial is still great, although longer-term merchants are getting priced out with rent hikes by greedy landlords. It's gone a little more upscale. You can tell how high the rent is by how spacious & open the stores feel. Places like Beckwoman's or Kitchen Corner can only survive when the rents are cheap.

What depressed me was watching the area around the Skytrain stations & 10th Avenue take a nosedive. When we moved into the neighborhood in 2001, the dealing was minimal & panhandling was common. 10th & Commercial is now a major drug dealing corner, with a regular crew of junkies & dealers crouching on the corners & creeping through the shrubs to shoot up or smoke behind the dollar store. There is a gamut of panhandlers to walk through when exiting the station. There's broken car window glass all over the streets & used needles in everybody's gardens within a 4-block radius. I no longer feel confident & safe about walking to the video store there in the evenings. That says a lot, as I've always felt that Vancouver is a safe city & I refuse to fear walking alone at night.

To be fair, I don't have a problem with panhandlers if they're not aggressive, or junkies, as long as they don't use my back garden to pitch used sharps. It was the dealers I was worried about. If anybody's going to be armed, I think it's likely to be them, the guys holding the valuable stash of heroin or crack.

Although Mount Pleasant used to be famous for its prostitution problems, they're long gone. Despite our proximity to Canada's poorest postal code, the Downtown Eastside, I see less wrenching poverty & no dealers on my way home from work. Nobody's doing 're-ups' in front of my home & I've never seen the cops stop anybody except drivers going through red lights.

"It looks like someone took the mountains away."

It's rainy in Vancouver today. The view is totally different when it's like this. On a clear day, we can see the mountains really well, but today it looks like someone took some scissors & carefully snipped round the buildings at the waterfront. It's just a wall of white beyond that. The spires of the church & the red gantries on the docks stand out even more against the cloud bank. The view is completely urban--rail yards, busy streets, parking lots, warehouses, buses, the Skytrain, office buildings, storage facilties. Quite a few trees poke up between all these buildings, but virtually all of them were planted--we can't see any natural forests when the mountains are curtained with rain clouds.

Living with this view for a few weeks now, I find it hard to believe I stayed 5 years in the claustrophobic confines of our previous place. The townhouse was three storeys tall, but there was really no view. You could only see houses & other places in the co-op, all of which were within a hundred metres of you. Here the next building in our view that is as high as we are is several blocks away. You might think that in an apartment building--stacked on top of & next to our neighbors closely--we would feel more closed in, but the opposite is true.

laundry & sushi

I've tossed aside all thoughts of renovating in favour of doing laundry. I've done at least 4 loads in the last 2 days & I can't wait to do more. It's such a novelty having machines right there in my home. It's nice not to have to hoard quarters for the coin-op too. Simple pleasures...

Now, if we could just get the kitchen unpacked so we can actually eat here, that would be great. We've been subsisting on bagels, cheese, beer & apples. Plus sushi. There's a cheap sushi place within walking distance; we ate there last night. We had chicken yakiudon, chazuke, california roll, negitoro roll & endless cups of tea for $11.50. Including tip & tax. Kishu Island is one of those "japanese" places that japanese people don't actually go to, which is owned by someone called Nguyen & entirely staffed by people who are not japanese. Not exactly authentic, but cheap & tasty!

The move from hell is over.

I think I've said those words more than once, & not just this time. Every time has been horrible. Moving is one of the most stressful experiences, next to divorce & death of a family member. I think this time has definitely convinced me that I need to hire movers next time. My wrists were injured in late February from a stilting fall & this move has aggravated them again. Opening heavy doors, carrying stacks of textbooks & boxes of stuff are a major strain on my poor skinny little joints. My knees fared better, luckily.

Last night we got the last carload of stuff in here & started unpacking. I got the bathroom mostly sorted out & Oliver rearranged the office somewhat so there's now room to use the computer.

The kitchen will be a monumental task--where should we put stuff? But more importantly, where will stuff fit? I think we have less cupboard space that our last place, which wasn't enough. Until we renovate, anyway. I plan to carefully plot out the kitchen refit to eke every possible square centimetre of storage out of the space that we have.

However, the kitchen reno is for later. For now, we have to make do with what is left of the manky 1970s cabinets. I say what is left of them, because good ol' Frank removed about a third of them--who knows why.

The whole apartment is going to be a work in progress for quite a while...

We're in!

Thought we'd loosen up our stiff muscles by running 10 km today. Or, rather run/walking. We did actually run for at least 15 minutes of the thing, but we walked most of the time. Finished in about an hour and 25 minutes.

Out with the old...

I read an article in a renovating magazine that advised spending a large portion of the reno budget on furniture. The theory goes that it will improve the appearance of your home & thus the resale value. Then you get to take the furniture with you when you go! This just makes me lean farther towards buying a 'Wassily Chair' or two. They retail at about $1200. Expensive, but I know I won't get sick of it--I've loved these chairs since I was in high school. It's a classic, designed by Marcel Breuer in 1925 for his friend Wassily Kandinsky. The design of tubular steel & leather straps is said to have been inspired by Breuer's Adler bicycle. I love it because it looks to me like a drawing of a chair--nearly invisible in terms of how much space it seems to occupy. A nice feature in a condo. I also think that it might work well with cats & kids. My theory is that the cats won't really sit on it much because it doesn't have a level seat & it's somewhat slippery. Kids couldn't really do much to it either--there's no fabric to stain & they could use it to pull themselves up as they're learning to walk, or crawl right through it.
Whatever new furniture we buy, I'm enjoying purging the old stuff. There's so much hand-me-down furniture in this place that I don't like & actually have never really liked. We put up an ad in the co-op lobby & Oliver's been posting all the stuff on Craig's List. So far we've found homes for some shelving, a tv stand & some old computers. There are still a few things we need to ditch, like the futon couch, more shelving, a coffee table, half a dozen end tables... It feels good to be starting new in the place we've bought.

And I thought yesterday was bad...

...today even my fingers hurt. Especially the one I hit with a hammer. Twice.

One bedroom is more or less floored. The master bedroom is about 3/4 done. I honestly don't think I'll be able to move tomorrow...

What doesn't kill you makes you... sore.

Ooh, my everything. Moved two truckloads of stuff today, thanks to Super Mikey. Then I put down the underlay (for the laminate) in both bedrooms. Not difficult, just awkward: lots of crouching & kneeling. If you ever lay floors yourself, the first thing you should buy is kneepads. We bought them weeks ago & have been wearing them regularly. Very sexy.

So, tomorrow: more kneeling. Theoretically, we can get the laminate down in one day. Theoretically. I know it's supposed to be easy, but I'm preparing for the worst. Honestly, so far we've had very few problems with the whole project. Hope putting that in writing doesn't jinx us... ;)

"...that's brave."

People's reactions have been interesting. From reacting to the amount of green in the place to comments like "you are doing it all yourself? ...that's brave" (which always leaves me with a sense of apprehension), to the older asian man who came up to me in the line-up in Rona while we were buying noise-dampening underlay and checking out the laminate cutter to ask what it was we were buying and asked how we could have learned so much about installing flooring. When I told him we were learning as we went along, he said: "you've taught me something today".

What I don't think many people have really understood is how much time it is taking up to pack, move packed things, plan what to move, buy materials, move building materials into condo, install materials, deal with two bureaucratic bodies in two housing complexes, book trucks/cars, pick up trucks/cars, recruit some volunteer labour, paint , arrange for a visit from the pest control company during business hours...the list goes on. All of which we have done in the evenings while working full-time days. We get home around 9-10, feed the poor kitties that have been awaiting our arrival and watch the news before falling asleep on the couch before dragging ourselves to bed.

Yesterday, on our way to pick up the nearest pickup truck (conveniently located next to nothing central or any form of rapid transit), Lisa and I both got stuck at work after hours for various reasons, waited for the arrival of a bus that supposedly runs every 8 minutes for almost half an hour, only to have the bus driver turn down a street that had no trolley lines and lose his electrical connections and have to exit the bus with everyone else and catch another that sort of went in the same direction and walk an additional 8-10 blocks to the car which was booked for 40 minutes before we arrived. We barely had enough time to run our flooring purchase errand in Richmond and unload the rather heavy boxes into the bedrooms to acclimatize to their new environment for 48 hours, so the boards don't warp or split when installed.

On the way home, we realized how little time remains and how much there is left to do. It seems a daunting task indeed, especially when you factor in how much we need to get done in both places before we can move the rest of the stuff.

But, I want to leave off with some of our successes that hopefully make all the stress and aching muscles worth it. Wait'll the new flooring is in place, then you'll really see the difference.


BEFORE:


AFTER:

some new pics

12 days... Eek!

We've moved the moving day... We're getting out of the co-op a week early so they can paint & someone else can move in May 1st. So we have only 12 days to sort through our worldly possessions, pack most of them up & haul them over to the condo.

Anybody want a desk? A console table? A black end table? A vacuum cleaner? A futon & couch frame? PLEASE somebody take them away... we have so much stuff that we should have gotten rid of ages ago. We're not really downsizing much in terms of square footage--from about 1100 to 870--but there's less out-of-sight storage area. The layout of this townhouse encouraged the squirreling away of junk--we could stuff it in a room, out of sight, out of mind.

This week is flooring week. Underlay, then the laminate. I have no idea how long it will take to floor the bedrooms... anybody out there have experience with click-lock floating floors? We've seen videos & read how-to manuals...

Anyway, back to my sorting.

Work, paint, sleep, work, paint, sleep...

I feel like all I've been doing for the last two weeks is painting. Wake up, go to work, go to the condo, paint, go home, sleep. Repeat daily for two weeks. Add spackling as needed. However, we're almost done & the place is starting to have personality. A very green personality.

Here are some shots of the work, including the hiding of Vent Thing.

Vent-Thing

Anyone have any idea what this thing is? It has a couple of thin wires in it, one yellow, one blue. I call it "Vent-Thing" and will be hiding it behind drywall and plaster soon. It will become a mystery for the ages. I am thinking about putting a time capsule in there for future generations to find. I'm not kidding, a newspaper from this year, some recordings of current music, personal anecdotes, etc.

Why am I so willing to embark on such an adventurous renovation? Why do I not fear living in a construction site for the next year(s)? Why is living with sawdust in my hair and chips of plaster on my floors so comfortable? For the last year, it's been all I know. See below.




This was me using my computer during window replacement, wearing gloves because it was early january and a nice, dry-cold below zero day, which rarely happens in my locale, but did mean that the workers tracked in frozen dirt, rather than the usual mud on their boots.




This was my living room one day. That big hole where the door was goes outside.

subfloor prepping

Last night while Lisa was in her German class, I went into the new place and did some work on the subfloors to make sure that we are ready to lay the hardwood flooring.

With the carpet ripped up and most of the underlay gone, I was left with row upon row of nailheads sticking out just a few millimetres from the floor. These nails are not in nice, straight evenly-spaced rows. No, they are in ragged bunches, like groups of little nail hooligan teenagers, just begging to be taught a lesson.

Now, it is possible that the sound-dampening underlay might just hide these by compacting a little more in those areas, but I wouldn't want to find out it wasn't enough while I was laying the actual hardwood planks down and have one or two of them bulging out at weird angles.

I tried prying up some of the nails, but they are big suckers, about 4-5 inches long and twisted like corkscrews. Easiest thing to do was nail them further down into the subfloor and cover any dents with levelling compound. Pity the poor downstairs neighbours as I worked, beer in one hand, hammer in the other, but it is all even and ready for the levelling compound and underlay, once the walls are painted.

Here's some history on the neighbourhood.

I dream of green

Our ceilings are now green. Wait! Before you scoff or choke on your food, let me say that it's a very light green. And the walls will be darker, so it won't look quite as weird as it does now...

Thank you Traci & Phil for your help yesterday!

The bedroom walls are ready to paint: cleaned, crack-filled, sanded, primed. I can't believe how much time we spent making the hideous monstrosity in the master bedroom into a smooth, white wall...

We are calling another painting 'party' for this coming weekend. Anyone interested should email us or comment here.

Reno Hall of Fame

Yesterday most of my family trooped through our condo. I think I gave the "grand tour" about 5 times. I'm starting to have a memorized repetoire, like a tour guide, about what we plan to improve & how bad it was originally.

We got a late start, but accomplished quite a bit. Cathy played chauffeur & helped lug paint & supplies from the co-op to the condo. Aaron & Sarah arrived next & immediately got to work spackling, sanding, edging & painting ceilings. Mike arrived soon after, bringing Sheila & Barry through (grand tour #3) & joined in the wall-smoothing efforts.

We took an early dinner break at Hawker's Delight & grabbed hot drinks for the walk back down Main Street to the place. On the way, we bumped into some old friends of mine (Shelly & Ian) who, coincidentally, live a block away from the condo. That was one thing I thought I'd miss about living on the Drive: bumping into people I know all the time.

The funniest thing about Shelly & Ian is that, despite not having seen them for a few years, they knew all about the condo & our real estate quest of the last 6 months. Shelly teaches & carpools with our Super Sleuth realtor/cousin(-in-law), Traci's boyfriend Phil. (Try saying that 5 times fast!) So she had heard all about the ups & downs we've had offering on condos in this crazy real estate market. Small world...

So, anyway, as promised: besides providing food & drink to all who help work on our place, I also offer fame. See the ever-growing RENO HALL OF FAME in the left sidebar of this blog. Thanks guys!

View

From Yaletown to down along Main St. towards Chinatown. Visible mountain (Hollyburn Ridge?) holds Cypress Ski Resort

Across the False Creek Flats to Strathcona. Grouse Mountain in background.
Further east towards Commercial Dr. and parts beyond (like Mount Seymour).

Wallpaper Archaeology

We discovered even older paper under the stuff in the master bedroom. It was actually kind of neat, sort of a golden metallic giant cedar motif. Very 1970s BC.

Shag

Before:

After:

Decisions, decisions...

We need to start painting the walls this weekend. Which means I have to decide exactly what colours & where they'll go. I say "I", meaning just me, because Oliver is "chromatically challenged". (I think that would be the PC term for colourblind.) Subtle differences in colours that have a red or green tint are lost on him. Eggplant vs. navy, pink vs. beige, mossy green vs. grey, lilac vs. sky blue: these distinctions mean nothing to him. Thus, I must take on the heavy mantle of responsibility for the colours of our new place.

Woohoo! Carte blanche!

Anyway, I'm thinking turquoise/teal-ish, wasabi/lime & lighter variations on that theme. To anchor things, we'll have black or dark brown picture frames & furniture. Can't have the whole place looking like a cell from an undersea shot of The Little Mermaid.

Bad Pic

Bad pic of the shag rugs in the bedrooms that doesn't do justice to how truly awful they were. When we pull them up, the room fills with floating particulate from 30+ years of dust mites and disintigrating shag-a-delic lung-clogging evilness.

Pics on their way

Things sometimes have to get worse before they get better. Pictures are coming, but keep in mind that we need to break a few eggs to make the particular (h)omelette we have in mind. The "during" photos are possibly going to look worse than the "before" photos.

We know what we are doing, really we do...

Day Two (rhymes with mouse poo).

Sunday was productive, but didn't feel quite as satisfying. I guess because we were doing the messier, more detail-oriented work. Like scraping mouse poo out of the cupboards over the fridge. *shudder* We removed the last little shreds of wallpaper from the walls in the hall & master bedroom, then scrubbed them to get the 30-year-old wallpaper paste off.



The place still smells of old man & dog... I hope that's just the carpet in the bedrooms. Otherwise we're going to have to become air-freshener junkies.

The good news is: the parquet looks like it'll come up easily. Whatever glue he used is not particularly sticky now. Anybody want 300 square feet of slightly used parquet flooring?

Next step is to get rid of the last chunk of carpet in the master bedroom & spackle the walls. Oh, and patch the walls--there are at least TEN places where old Frank cut holes into the walls to access various wires & ducting. Instead of patching them with drywall once he was done, he tacked thin bits of masonite or card over them. The walls remind me of my patched jeans...

Day One.

And so it begins. This afternoon, we packed up various & sundry tools, dragged them over to the condo & set to work.

Oliver & I removed two layers of wallpaper from the master bedroom & most of the thick, painted-over textile-based wallpaper from the hallway. Although, honestly, we didn't take all of it off today: I gleefully ripped several swaths of the top layer of blue & purple rose wallpaper off the walls last night when we got the keys.

We've left the wallpaper in the bathrooms so far... but I don't want to keep it. The master ensuite has a black & shiny gold blobby pattern: oh so seventies. The main bathroom has a bizarre lumpy wallpaper that looks like it's made of string...

After donning cheap (but surprisingly effective--no sneezing at all) dust masks, we tore the one-inch-deep bright green shag rug into manageable strips & bagged it along with the disintegrating foam underlay. The second bedroom is now a shag-free zone!

Tomorrow we'll tackle the master bedroom carpeting. And the mouse poo left behind by the previous owner. Thanks, Frank!