Whose Blog is this?

Okay… since Tom and Jessie are neglecting their blog, I thought I would write a quick update on what I know about their lives.

Jessie: Jessie shall, from this time forth, be known as The Dancing Queen. We have always known that Jessie had boogie fever, but she is taking it to new heights in her new hometown of Boise, Idaho. She is taking salsa, west coast swing, belly dancing, dancing in the moonlight, and we expect to see her on the new reality show coming soon… So You Think You Can Dance, Senior Edition. In her spare time (between the dance shifts) she has been making dance videos (see her flashmob video on YouTube), and she bought a third house. Surprise Tom! (All right, Tom was in on it, but this was funnier. That’s right, Jessie, I said, funnier – deal with it.) She is bucking for a secondary title of Real Estate Tycoon, but I think you need to own at least 5 pieces of property or a hotel before you achieve Tycoon status. Jessie also makes an occasional appearance, every Wednesday and Thursday, at the Habitat for Humanity ReStore.

Tom: Tom spends much of his time looking over his shoulder waiting for whatever next prank Jessie has in store for him. He escapes from the pressures of home life by working at BodyBuilding.com as a professional trainer… of software engineers. Since he has been in charge, they have developed into a robust team of hardy engineers who can dead lift an 1million SKU e-commerce website without breaking a sweat. To help him keep it real, Jessie has made it her life’s mission to make Tom crack up in the giggles at least once per meeting. Where does that girl find the time? In all his spare time, Tom has indulged his Dancing Queen by joining her in the west coast swing class. He is a good husband. To escape from his Dancing Queen, he continues to fish (for hours at a time… hmmm… I wonder why? :) ) and loves to snowboard during the winter months. In addition, he has taken up krav maga – I think he can use antibiotics or a cream for that. (hehehe) To find out more about Interesting Tom, please call him or FaceTime – he amuses himself greatly and believes he could amuse you too!

These two pioneering young souls are also burgeoning gardeners, and will soon be the proud momma and poppa of 3 bouncing baby… chickens. Can you say fresh vegetarian omelets compliments of Chez Steiger? Furthermore, they are running a 2 week summer camp at the end of July, start of August for needy children from the Washington, DC area. That would be my children that “need” a break from me. Thanks again, Camp Steiger of Boise!

What can I say? I love these two, but I couldn’t stand looking at their out-of-date blog for one more day. Besides, they are here visiting and entertaining the boys, which frees me up for a little creative writing on their behalf. Farewell for now, denizens of cyberspace.
~Kelley (Tom’s sister)

P.S. For others who were wondering like I was, the friend stuck in Hawaii did finally make it home, but could still use supportive thoughts and prayers as she sorts out the aftermath of the extended vacation she was forced to take. Peace all.

Looking for a long shot

Jessie and I have a friend that is in a really tough spot so we are looking for a long shot for her. Her story isn't really mine to tell in detail, but I'll give the cliff notes here.

Our friend headed to Hawaii in February (arrived on the 17th) to attend a couple of frisbee tournaments. Shortly after arriving there she gets hit with a respiratory infection and goes to see the doctor. They put her on antibiotics and such which doesn't clear up the issue and pretty quick she gets told she can't fly back to the US on a plane because of the condition. Fast forward a month later, and our friend is still stranded in Hawaii. She has been living in a campground, run into some drama with locals and been to 3 doctors with no help. She has gone so far as to try and get a berth on a Princess Cruise ship back to LA with the plan to drive back to Boise from there.

However, she is being told by Princess that due to passenger security laws they cannot allow her to purchase a ticket from Maui to LA. This is despite the fact that she has talked to US Customs and Immigration and they have agreed to allow her to make the trip and pay the fine that would be levied against Princess.

So the long and short is this. Our friend, can't find a doctor to help treat her condition, can't fly while she is still sick and can't get Princess to let her on a boat. So I'm looking for that long shot connection where someone knows someone who knows someone who can help out. Please drop a comment on here and or send us an email if you might be able to help out.

Thanks,
Tom

Backsplash

Well, the backsplash is mostly done. We still have the section over near the stove to do, but it's much smaller.

The blue stuff on the wall is pureed Smurf that acts as a water proofing membrane because we stupidly used plain sheet rock. IF we get water behind the tile and IF Smurfette doesn't do her god-damned job, then tile will likely start popping off the wall.

None of tile for the backsplash was purchased new. I got over half of it from second hand building supply places and the rest I got from a friends leftovers (thanks Lisa!). When I finally looked at all of my "white" subway tile, I realized they are all different shades of white.

No problem though -- I sorted and counted all the different shades and developed a little formula to make sure I grabbed the same proportions of each color every 1o tiles. Too geeky for you? Yeah, well I have a high threshold for these things. Anyway, I only spent about $20 on tile for the whole kitchen, which is totally worth a little effort with my calculator. Plus, we really like the end result of having a little color variety, but it's not overwhelming. Another successful project at Chez Steiger.

-Jessie

Latest Project

This is going to be redundant for anyone who saw my photos on Facebook, but I'm proud of this little thing and wish to share.

I built my first piece of furniture.  I had a rough design in my head, shopped for second hand building materials, designed, cut, assembled, painted, and varnished all by myself.

If you are like my Dad, your first question is what the hell is it?

It's right next to the front door and will hold almost all of our shoes.  The little basket/cubby things hold hat, mittens, scarves, and will likely just be a dumping ground for other stuff.

I spent about $100 on materials, but almost all are reclaimed or recycled (except about $10 worth of stuff -- hinges and some 1x2 furring strips for the frame).  The wood that is painted yellow is old fence boards I bought at Habitat for Humanity Restore (fyi, I now volunteer there about 12 hours a week).  My back up plan for a similarly functioning new cabinet would have cost $400.

The wood that makes the top and bottom is old barn wood siding I found on Craigslist and then sanded and varnished.  I LOVE the color of it.  Note to Steve: I would have liked to have the top and bottom overhang the body of the cabinet more for aesthetic purposes, but I didn't have enough material.

The drawer pulls and boxes I found at antique shops.  Tom dislikes the flowery hatbox, but he'll get used to it.  The other two boxes are old cheese containers.

Anyway, I love it.  I had fun hunting for materials and building something out of other peoples junk.  I've already started acquiring materials for the next project that I might even try to sell.  I'm sure I won't even clear minimum wage, but that's okay with me.

-Jessie

Finally -- Counters

After much wrangling and ridiculous field engineering, we finally have our damn counters in place. It's a little anti-climatic because of all the hurdles but it's a huge relief to have this part of project completed.

Cocking the caulk gun.

Tom invited over a few strapping middle-aged lads to lift the 300+ pound behemoth. Good thing he works with bodybuilders / software developers.

Once the counters are in place, they get a coat of wax to help protect the sealer and give them a nice shine. We'll probably re-apply the wax several times over the next month to build up a nice layer.

And now the final results:

The color additive we used was cleverly called "brown," but after polishing, they almost have a pinkish hue to them. When I hold up our green cabinet doors and white tile though, it seems to tone down the pink factor a bit. I really hate pink.

The larger white and green stones are actually aquarium rock. I noticed when I polished that the color of these rocks is just on the outside (duh, in retrospect). So, we started with a lot more green aggregate but a lot of the color was polished away.

One things I'm not happy about (which Tom wants me to stop pointing out to people) is that a lot of the edges look different. I somehow messed this up when polishing, but I'm not really sure why. We had pretty poor lighting in the garage, and I think I rushed through parts of it because I was cold and tired. So, the counters are a little uneven, but a day later, I'm already noticing it less. Overall, we were much less anal retentive with these counters than we were with Peter's, and it shows a bit. Still very relieved and happy to have them -- especially considering we only spent about $800 on them or $23/SF.

-Jessie

Mythbusters - Steiger Style

We've accidentally turned into the Myth Busters.  I'm sure everyone has heard of the myth that you can create a completely self contained plastic enclosed room for, oh say, disposing of a body, right?  No?

You people really need to watch more Dexter...

As Jessie mentioned last post we got caught at the end of the fall with countertops just out of the forms and freezing temperatures. Normally, we would polish the counters in the backyard and then move them into the house for final installation. Instead the counters have been sitting in our dining room for a month while we waited on a break in the weather or tried to figure out what we are going to do.

Where that hose is running across the backyard is where we ideally would have had polishing setup... /sigh

Well we finally decided that polishing in the garage was going to be the only real option to get this project moving again. We setup tables for polishing on and then stapled plastic sheeting all around them to help contain the water that comes with concrete polishing.

This is the outside of the "kill room" wall protecting our tools

This seemed like a great setup. No problem at all that we could foresee... hmmmm.  Jessie started in on polishing on Friday afternoon and ran into a few snags.

1 - The garage slopes nicely to the door end and we wound up with a pond of water outside the garage and seeping under the wall.  Not ideal in freezing overnight temperatures.  I spent a bit of the evening house sweeping water out in the alley and yard to minimize the ice rink that would be there on Saturday.

2 - The garage has a bit of a weird electrical setup. Its run as a leg off of an external GFCI circuit. This meant that the first time Jessie went to polish the inside of the sink and threw water up onto the fluorescent lights overhead it tripped the GFCI and put her in total blackness. After doing that a couple of times the fixture was "damp" enough that we were having a hard time getting the GFCI to reset. Jessie was pretty safe as the polisher is has an isolated ground power cord, but it was  an annoying setup for sure.

3 - One of the hoses that we had planned to use was frozen so Jes wound up stringing together three other sections and they leaked like sieves at each of the connections.  We fixed this with one 100 ft section for Saturday.

Jessie after finishing off the 200 and most of the 400 grit. Counters are starting to look nice.

Despite the issue Jessie suited up again on Saturday and knocked out the polishing up to 400 grit which is the point where we slurry the holes in the surface.

Jessie's polishing get up. Doesn't she look warm?

The counters are finally starting to have the beauty that we remember and it getting exciting to think we could be installing these bad boys next weekend.  We are off to snowboard this morning and then slurry in the afternoon so stay tuned for more exciting developments.

MYTH - Dexter can single handedly build a forensics proof body disposal room in a few hours.  - BUSTED

--Tom

When I Grow Up

Happy New Year, my little blog-o-philes. If there's anyone who might still read this after a 3 month hiatus. What can I say? I've been channeling slow and lazy little worker bees when it comes to house work.

That being said, when you look at our progress over the last 3 months, it looks like we're moving along nicely:

For starters, we actually poured the concrete counters. After making 6 color samples, we decided to go with a warm brown color.

Here, I'm adding aquarium rock we got at Petco for like $3. Way cheaper than the shiny rocks we bought for the counters we made last year.

However, we totally screwed the pooch when it came to weather. We had to bring the counters inside the house before we traveled for Thanksgiving and they've been in our dining room ever since. The ideal situation would be to polish them outside, but it is just too cold. So, this week, we're setting up a Dexter-like kill room in the garage to contain the water spray and will build a ridiculously complicated drain system to funnel the water outside. Case in point, Tom actually suggested building a coffer dam out of Play-Doh to solve our water problem. This idea was met with scorn and ridicule, though I did give him props for using "coffer dam" correctly in a sentence.

We FINALLY removed all of the black plastic and cardboard that was covering and protecting the wood floor. This helped tremendously with feeling like we are living in an actual house and not just a construction zone. We still don't have very much furniture and places to store things though, so our crap just lays around the house everywhere. The aggravation level of this extreme disorganization is slowly building and one of these days I'm going to snap and accidentally drop a few grand at one of those over priced home organization stores with the way too bubbly sales people.

AND I unpacked most of our kitchen boxes so that we have a fully functional kitchen and aren't using our light weight trailer utensils any more. What a luxury to have ceramic plates again.

All the shiny appliances are in and the base cabinets are painted (yep, those are old cabinet doors we're using as counters -- they're more functional than you would think).

We just need one more coat of paint on the cabinet doors and drawer fronts before they can be installed. Then we can panic and beat our head against a wall that it's just way too much green and we royally screwed up. Even if we hate it, we'll probably just live with and get used to it because I really, really, REALLY don't want to do this again.

Anyways, that's the house update. I'm trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up. I had a bit of a melt down a few weeks ago because I just can't take all this alone time. I started volunteering at Habitat for Humanity Restore and I have a Master Naturalist class starting soon to help occupy my time. I've started applying for a few jobs, but the pickings are still slim in this economy. We can afford for me not to work (which, truly, is fantastic) so I'm trying to figure out if I should just get a job or fill my time with more volunteer activities. I know, I know, what a nice problem to have, right? Well, it's still hard to decide. I definitely like the flexibility of being able to choose my own schedule, but I find that much of my identity is tied up in being an engineer and I don't want to lose that. I'm guessing stay at home parents and retirees struggle with that also. Any advice from you folks who have successfully navigated this particular mine field?

-Jessie

Time Off For Good Behavior

Well, Team Steiger actually DID SOMETHING FUN this weekend rather than working on the house. The last time we went out of town to enjoy ourselves was mid-June -- this is clearly no way for proper OINK's to behave.

We drove about 3 hours up wonderfully curvy roads that followed a sparkling clean river up to Stanley, ID. Stanley is basically in the middle of recreation mecca with access to National Forests, Recreation Areas, Wilderness Areas, lakes, rivers, trails, hot springs, and more. The photo above is the Sawtooth Range, which we didn't even get to -- there is much to explore with Stanley as a base camp.

We decided to hike to a hot spring -- easy 7.2 mile round trip hike along a river -- except we took a wrong turn and hiked up Blue Bunch Mountain. After a little research, I've discovered that the peak of Blue Bunch (which we were nearly at when we turned around) is 4 miles straight up with about 2600 feet in elevation gain. After a grueling uphill hike, we decided to turn around and take a different branch of the trail that we encountered AT THE VERY BEGINNING of this hike. Idiots!!!

Once on the correct trail, the hike was easy except that we were pretty tired. I think if you look close, you can see my O-face in this photo because the water was so numbingly c...c...cold. My legs were numb about 1/3 of the way across the middle fork of the Salmon River.

But all was okay with the world when we encountered the hot springs. With no cold water source to temper the intense heat of the hot spring, a series of 4 shallow pools were constructed to utilize evaporative cooling.

On Sunday, otherwise known as the Day of Very Sore Legs, we had a massage (yes!) before we drove back to town to see our newly finished wood floors.

We decided to fork over $350 to a floor refinishing contractor to sand and finish the floors and it was money well spent. The floor is incredible. To us at least, it's really more like functional art than just a simple floor.

Oooohhhh, just look at all of the color and texture variation! This floor flirts with me, serenades me with romantic ballads, and recites poetry. Sorry Tom, I have some new wood in my life. =)

-Jessie

The Tides Have Turned

Oh, how the tides have turned on our little project! <Clouds part, angels sing, golden sun rays on my skin, and other shiny happy descriptive phrases>. Our friends from California came and helped us out for a week and what a difference it made!

Before they arrived, we had a fully functional kitchen, but most of it was located in the living room.

Shazam! Look at the transformation -- we have cabinets, my new deliciously shiny stove, and finished wall & ceiling surfaces.

Steve is a builder and is quite well versed in the art and science of cabinet building. I was basically an assistant and supply getter all week and did my best to learn and keep up with Steve.

Ye Olde Cabinet Shoppe

I cut and assembled one tiny cabinet basically in the time it took him to finish the other 98% of the kitchen, but I think I've got the basics down and possess the audaciousness to fumble through building some cabinetry in the future.

I added trim pieces to the existing cabinetry to make them look like the Shaker-style cabinet design we're going after. Every little surface still has to get sanded, primed, sanded, primed, sanded, painted, and painted again. That's pretty much going to be all Jessie since I don't trust Tom with paint brushes. My pre-adolescent nephews are better painters than Tom.

All of the pieces for the cabinet doors & drawer fronts are all cut but all but two still have to be assembled. Our work is far from done, but it seems manageable now.

We have an assembly table set up in the back yard, but we can't just blitzkrieg it all because we have a limited number of clamps to hold the glued panels together.

This is a finished door & drawer front (minus all of the sanding & painting).

And the hardware we plan to use along with the cabinet color. Holly, look how well the color goes with the ceramic oil thingy you got us!

I don't want to downplay all that Meg accomplished this week too. She did a ton of detailed sheetrock work and applied about 7 gallons of joint compound. We are VERY grateful for that work being done because we are both sucktastic at all things involving joint compound. The ceiling & walls are now ready for me to prime & paint this week.

Thanks guys for all the work last week -- I'm experiencing a distinct increase in my mental health. We're both feeling big jumps on our optimism scales!

Jessie

Floor Update

This is pretty much just an update for Peter since we promised photos of any work on the floor.

I sanded most of the floor today. I started with medium grit but then changed to coarse grit sandpaper to even out the edges.

And here's a little section I wiped clean with a rag.

-Jessie

Rectangle of Punishment

To finish prepping the $^&*%^$## subfloor, we borrowed a belt sander from our neighbor and went to town on it with extra coarse sand paper -- which is basically the consistency of lava rock.

This baby pummeled all the leftover bits of plywood and the copious amounts of glue and left us with a (mostly) level floor.

Quick unfurling of thin foam floor underlayment....

... and the floor installation begins! We rented that floor nailer from Home Depot for about $50 and it was TOTALLY worth it.

Here's the first few rows in place. The first piece is a new section of solid oak to form a solid transition between rooms & types of flooring.

The installation went fairly smoothly -- it's really just a giant puzzle that the boys were great at solving. Every now & then, a piece wouldn't line up exactly, so they chiseled it a bit to make a snug fit.

I'm pretty sure someone just farted here.

All done! We think there's just enough pieces to finish up the entry way beyond, but it will take a little more time and use our advanced puzzle skills.

Is it possible to fall deeply in love with a floor? All three of us totally are -- it has such a lovable charisma. We're also unanimous in the opinion that the extra effort was completely worth it because it's so purdy.

Here's a little section we sanded and wiped clean so you get a better idea of what the finished product will look like. Not so mottled, but still oozing character.

We LLLLLOOOOOOVVVVVVEEEEEE it!!!! And we love Peter for all of his help this weekend. And we love Peter's wife, Jen, for being a single mom on a long holiday weekend. All of the progress made over the last few days has relieved some stress and put a spring in our step. Thank you!!!!

-Jessie