comrades

Well, we seem to have survived the night of the young pyromaniacs. Our town still allows people to buy and set off fireworks for the Fourth of July celebration, and so most of the evening is spent in a haze of gunsmoke and the sound of mortar rounds and screaming shells going off. Some of the displays were quite beautiful, but I at least get a little nervous about misfiring fireworks and the potential for accidental blazes. I managed to get nearly the entire lawn well watered yesterday, which helped a little and then kept an eye on the house and yard.



I finally figured out how to get photographs out of my iphone, so here is a picture taken on Wednesday of almost the entire span of the addition.



On Thursday the electrician arrived and began putting in the new electrical meter, circuit breaker box, and the supports for the power cables which will come in through the new roof. The electrician says the power supply will be enough to support power for a 3000 square-foot house, which is almost twice as big as what this place will be when it is finished. So I guess I don't have to worry about power issues for awhile, if ever.



The new breaker box which is on the interior wall of the pantry.

You can see the riser for the power cables above the box. This neighborhood was built in the late 1940s and so all the power comes into the houses from overhead cables rather than buried underground.

The building crew arrived and went right to work at eight o'clock. I left them vitamin water and cookies, and I came home to the result of their day's labors and took pictures. I'm very impressed. I can't believe how quickly it goes up and starts looking like a real house. My contractor says the roof trusses should arrive soon.



This side shows the pantry room door, and the picture window into the family room.



And this side shows the same picture window and the window into the office.

Click for interior shots of the rooms. ( Read more... )
The things you learn when working with contractors -- because I'm living in a World War II era house I'm permitted to put in windows of the same size as the original windows, they call it "grandfathered construction". Technically all modern construction should have windows that are even a size larger -- large enough to admit a fireman in full rescue gear. The windows certainly will be big enough to permit everyone to bail out if necessary. There are small homes in the neighborhood built in the same time period as my own with very small windows that probably would not allow an adult human to escape in the event of an emergency. I think if I was renovating one of them I would upgrade the windows for safety's sake.

The framing-in was started yesterday, with the builders working in 103-degree heat. I gave them vitamin water and access to the house so they could get cold water and maybe cool off if they needed to.

We had more thunderstorms and dry lightning last night, but I don't smell any more range fire smoke. Not sure if that means there weren't any new fires made, or if the breeze is pushing the smoke up the valley.


This side will hold the office and the bathroom. A bathroom with a window, yay!


The start of the family room wall. The large opening will hold a big picture window.


The view of the work area yesterday noon. The power cords are fed through a hole in the wall around the old piping into the kitchen, which has modern grounded outlets. Heh, no outside power sockets on my house (yet). I think I asked for one on the new addition. More to come, the guys are just driving up.

After three years of hard graft and copious amounts of alcohol, Victoria has graduated from law school.

This is me being pleased. Oh yes, so smug.

Ah, well placed faith. It’s a good thing.

Now, to assist packing the rest of her life into boxes. Which I assume is my role in all of this.

Originally published at everything is made of jam. You can comment here or there.

Got a call midweek from my contractor saying the lumber for the framing would start to show up Monday or so and that the roof trusses were on order. Once the material arrives the framing-in will start and evidently that goes very fast. He said, "soon it will look like a house!" Cool. :)

This meant I had to make a decision on what color shingles were going to go on the roof. I took Friday off as a little minivacation, so Mom and I went down to the contractor's office and looked at samples of shingles and siding. We were torn between a color called "weathered white" and another color called "pewter". The weathered white looked like its name, while the pewter looked like a nice medium gray. I was leaning toward the pewter color because it would make a very lovely contrast with the pale siding we wanted. The very nice lady in charge of the office said there were two homes the contractor had just re-roofed, one with each color, so we could go and see how it looked in daylight. I got the addresses, printed out maps from Google maps, and then Mom and I went on a little drive around the area to find the homes. It turned out it was time well spent, the weathered white colored shingles actually look like a soft silver gray in daylight, which is a color I really like and so did Mom. The pewter shingles looked almost black -- very handsome -- but in this climate in the full sun they would really retain the heat. So we decided on the weathered white shingles and a siding color called "Pearl", which is a very pale warm gray close to what I have on the house already.

The concrete is now hard as... well, concrete. I've been walking over it as I drag the hose and sprinkler from one end of the yard to the other in an attempt to keep the lawn alive. Summer is here with a vengeance -- it has been 105-107 degrees F the past few days, ugh. Looks like the weather may moderate toward the end of the week, but is IS July, and that means hot. This probably means the various builders may be showing up very early in the morning to beat the heat. Guess I should get to bed before 1 am, huh?

Here are two photos from last week.



The concrete slab all nice and set up. This is before a bunch of birds decided to poop on it after eating wild cherries. :P



The back of the house as it looks right now. The exposed wall doesn't look terribly nice, but it is holding up well despite the vagaries of the weather. As of this moment it is wind storming outside and there were big thunderheads on the horizon before the sun went down. Maybe if we are lucky we'll get a little free water out of the deal, but this time of year we are just as likely to get a dust storm rather than a rain shower.

The concrete folks very nicely strung the hose from the old washer faucet and nailed it up along the side of the house to keep it out of the setting concrete. Someone also turned on the exterior faucet on the front of my house which was a really big help since I'm now using that to run all my sprinklers. At some point, the plumber is going to replace all that old piping and life may get a little bit easier in terms of the water supply.

And so my slow slide into a photo/sketch/progress blog continues.

After a bit of searching, I managed to find some superb photo reference  [warning - not safe for work due to breasts] thanks to notcot.org, which helped me with a few of the finer details in the head structure.

It’s not perfect by any means.

The beads I’ve used for eyes give it a very intense stare, so I think it would be worth continuing the robot head concept, but with the new face.

Originally published at everything is made of jam. You can comment here or there.

This whole sculpture exercise has taken on a therapeutic aspect a little like sketching.

Which is good, considering there is not nearly enough caffeine in this house to make my brain properly spark off at the moment.

Originally published at everything is made of jam. You can comment here or there.

Mugabe knighthood to be withdrawn.

He might ignore economic and cultural sanctions, but he's bound to behave now we're taking his honorary knighthood away.

Take that, sirrah!

-DW

I don’t know why, but I’m having a terrible time with Bunny as a drawn comic lately. I think I realised this when I spent roughly an hour staring blankly at the IMP and coming up with nothing that didn’t seem like a tremendous cop-out.

I was going to do a comic related to the late George Carlin, but as I haven’t really gotten into his material, I felt it would be a bit dishonest and too easy. A little like making jokes about the iPhone.

So I went back to my sculpting, because I enjoy it and it’s easy to lose myself in it. That’s a worrying thing to admit in a public place, but that’s how it is.

So, here’s Otto. I lost his hat for a bit, but I’ve found it now.

Originally published at everything is made of jam. You can comment here or there.