Prosthetically Hip

Shut the Front Door! Er, Shutters!

August 3, 2010 3:31pm

The shutters came back all painted, and were installed today. It’s SO DARK inside!

 

 

We had the best time at your party…

July 25, 2010 8:52pm

So, the party seemed to go particularly well, and our house is in much better shape than it was 48 hours ago.

On the upside (as if the other parts were a downside), I finally got to see the new Eureka episode. Sweet.

I took some photos of the house, and need to review them before posting them. So, for the meantime, here’s the picture of me balancing on the fence and hopefully committing mosquito genocide yesterday morning:

Is there any part of me that isn’t tired?

July 24, 2010 8:45pm

Right now, there may be something vibrant, but I don’t know what. Today has been quite the long day after an equally long week. I got up around 8 this morning, and have been non-stop until now working on and around the house. We’re hosting a going-away party for a friend and co-worker of Bea’s tomorrow, and nothing gets you into gear to get things done like having a party.

Bea’s been busy on and off with rollerderby things today, so I called in Jason as a trusty set of hands – in exchange he got some cash, a ticket to the derby game, a cold beer, a shower to save a trip back to Jefferson, and a handful of levels of Dr. Mario.

A list of, but not limited to, things accomplished today:

• Installed and painted missing board in fence
• Installed and painted an additional 6′ of fence
• Spread anti-mosquito pellets and sprayed insecticide on the jungle next door
• Finished installing baseboards
• Patched a hole up by the ceiling
• Cleaned! Organized!
• Re-installed lights on back porch
• Moved and did a prelim cleaning of the old clawfoot tub
• Installed on the wall old iron bars for a window as a pot rack
• Rounded up weeds
• Cut hole in a baseboard for the dryer vent
• Dog-escape-proofed the back fence (mostly for the neighbor’s small dogs)
• Cleaned the trim of the ceiling of the back porch (DIRTY!)
• Kicked ass
• Took names
• Drank beer (ongoing)

Bea took what should be an awesome picture of me balanced on the top of the fence spraying down the neighbor’s yard, but apparently didn’t send it to me to show you here. Maybe tomorrow.

There’s more cleanup/organizing/etc for tomorrow and some painting, but overall things are looking much better.

And the only thing I wanted to do today – to watch the new episode of Eureka (with Whil Wheaton) – didn’t happen and probably won’t. It’s ready to go, but Bea’d probably yell at me for it.

Several Levels of Failure

July 14, 2010 10:27pm

I know several things went well today, I’m just going to harp on what went wrong:

• Truck needs an oil change/transmission fluid/pretty much every fluid change.
• One of the big 5-drawer tool chests is pretty banged up. Waiting ’till above is done to return. Hopefully tomorrow.
• 4 trips to Lowe’s today, got almost all I needed through process of elimination. Then lost a piece.
• There’s a mosquito loose somewhere in my office
• Looks like tomorrow will also be oppressively hot.
• Running out of things to write about for NaBloPoMo

I know I know, first world problems.

Sing it, Front:

Organizzle Fo Shizzle

July 12, 2010 9:26pm

If there’s any one thing (and there’s not) that’s holding us back from that “done” feeling for the house, it’s the back room. The back room, by itself (~17′ x ~34′), is just about as big as Bea’s old house and more problematic. It’s been de-junked, gutted, there’s been leaks upon leaks, the flooring has been completely replaced, and at this point I’d say we’re coming to the final leg of the race. While we’re almost there, we are /so/ tired.

There are in my opinion two final hurdles, presented in the order that I think they should be completed. The first is the trim and baseboards. They need to be painted THEN installed (we went with high gloss paint – very thick and runny). The setback is that I just am not a fan of painting, and this process takes up a lot of room. I guess if I just set it up tomorrow, we can knock the painting out tomorrow night and install them Wednesday. Then comes the install, and I guess I’m just overly paranoid about cutting sections too short.

The second part is organizing. The back room is a mess, but compared to what we inherited, it’s a goddamn neatfreaks paradise.

A mere glimpse of what we inherited (you should click through the set):

 
Now (without picture prep tidying):

 
So, it would appear that Sears is having a pretty rad sale. I want to put in a workbench against the section of wall between the washer/dryer/sink and the bikes – supported by drawers/toolchests on the edges and a wall brace or two in the middle. Anyways, I got two sets. I was on the fence as to whether I should get a second 7 drawer, but I figured it’s the same as buying the 5 drawer at full price and getting the 7 for free, and we’d still probably put it to good use.

I can go pick them up tomorrow, so I reckon I’ll do that and just stick them somewhere else ’till they’re ready to go in. I’m really looking forward to not only getting my tools good and organized, but finding and filling in the gaps.

Hooray for organization.

I Shutter at the Thought

July 8, 2010 11:33am

So. Excited.

When we bought the house, there were two missing elements of what most would consider to be the “classic New Orleans style” that I really wanted: cast iron vents on the underside of the roof/balcony, and louvered shutters. We installed three vents in the front to give the front attic airflow a while ago, and I’ll hopefully be installing a pair in the back next week. Today, the bottom two sets of the shutters are being fit, having the hinges installed, and will head off to be primed and painted “shutter green”. The three pairs upstairs are a day behind.

 
These suckers will not only cut out a lot of the harsh afternoon sun/heat and save us electricity, but add tremendously to the value of our house and its “curbside appeal”. At the end of the day though, I care more about the aesthetic and how happy it’ll make me feel to just look at them.

And for what they’re costing, they better make me happy. Just kidding.

A Healthy Dose of #003300

July 2, 2010 5:40pm

Or: Going Green. Ish.

I’m what you could call a quasi-environmentalist. I do care about the environment, but in all honesty, I’m only going to take it so far. Reducing your ecological footprint might be great, but reducing your spending footprint is too. I do think that it should be easier to live cleaner – like the city-wide recycling. I pay ~$9 a month for curbside recycling twice a month. And Target takes in glass to recycle. It’s rad, easy, and an easy habit to get into. It also just plain makes sense – why use something once and dispose of it when it has the potential of being used many times and then turned into something else? And when that’s done, the cycle can start again!

 
It’s like those damn 12 or 16 ounce bottles of water I see people with – the Evian/Abita Springs kind, not the heavy-duty backpacking variety. Let’s look at the pricing. Say an average bottle costs $1.25. Doing a little math on my recent S&WB bill, it looks like it costs $.004/gallon without all the extra fees. That’s comes out to $0.0005/16oz bottle. That’s 1/2500th the price! If you were to drink one 16oz bottle a day for a year, you’d spend $0.18 in tapwater and $450 in bottled water – not to mention all the other stuff you’d save – like the 114 extra gallons of water required for production and purification, the 9 gallons of oil required to produce the plastic bottle, and all the rest that goes into printing labels, shipping, etc.

 
Would you rather spend a Quarter or a McKinley for water for a year? For me, it’s a no-brainer – that $450 will pretty much cover the cost of some much needed attic insulation. That leads me to this: at the end of the day, “being green(er)” boils down to one thing – Will it save me some green? Let’s face it – money makes the world go ’round. I can’t believe I’m about to quote the movie Twins, but Danny DeVito’s character said it well: “That’s why it’s called money. Because you need it.” If I can reduce the strain that I put on this mostly blue (but now more orange/brown down here) planet and save some cash at the same time – well where the hell do I sign up?

If there one thing that everyone but Entergy stockholders want, it’s lower bills. As a renter, that usually just means changing the thermostat so the A/C or heat doesn’t kick on as much.

As a homeowner there’s that, but also the drive to make improvements for longer term benefits. And as the owner of an older, larger house, trust me when I say those bills get high quickly. Summer AND winter. Recently, I’ve been making / planning improvements lately to help make my house a bit better:

• Recently replaced a powered attic fan in the front. Sweet jeebus was that hot.
• Today, start work on installing unpowered vents in the roof for the back 2 attics.
• Shutters! Glorious expensive louvered shutters! We get harsh afternoon sun through five 9′x3′ single pane windows daily.
• Installing R-38 insulation in the back attic. Big room below, no ceiling insulation.
• Installing and programming A/C thermostats.
• Looking into insulation under the house.

And for those of you keeping track – yes, we have three “attics”. The rear two aren’t super high, but they’re still dark, hot, cramped places that house magical air cooling devices.

The front of the house which faces West is the two story part – we’re looking at the back here.

Replacing the fan in the 2nd floor attic made a HUGE difference. I left a remote thermometer up there to get an average read on the temp – it seemed to hover at 120° – and I know it could have been far worse. I kept my eye on the temp here and there for the following few days, and it seemed to peak at 100°. The A/C unit up there is under noticeably less strain now. I spent ~$80, and who knows how much reducing the strain on the attic will save me over the coming summers.

In the next hour or so, work will commence on installing an unpowered vent on each of the rear attics. When I find a pair I like, I’ll install some vent intakes on the back porch like the ones on the front:

Gotta have an intake and and outlet if you’re going to have flow. You know the old saying, “Science: It works, Bitches.”

Once the rear attics are vented, it’s insulation time. I mean, why bother cooling/heating an area if your newly conditioned air is just going to float away? The back room by itself is just shy of 7,000 cubic feet (17′W x 34′ L x 12′ H) so it can be a bit difficult to heat or cool. Cooling the attic and keeping the heat from seeping one way or another will make a huge difference.

On the other side, I would like to insulate underneath the house, but come winter I’ll just close off the spaces between the piers – merely keeping “fresh” cold air out from underneath goes a long way too. And that’s something I’ll do even if we do insulate underneath – I’m a big fan of (cheap) passive insulation.

At some point I’d like to do a solar install, but that day is not this year – I’d guess it’s about 5 years away. There have been some really exciting and fascinating developments lately in the realm of solar efficiency, and I think they just need to mature.

Between Slashdot, Lifehacker, and Global Green’s Build It Back Green project, there are tons of resources for you to only educate yourself on how to make your home more efficient, but how to do it yourself and save money twofold. Gotta spend money to save money, amiright?