We Are ZINKs

Whose Blog is this?

2011-06-28T22:40:00.007-04:00

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

2011-03-15T01:02:00.002-04:00

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

2011-03-08T20:07:00.002-05:00

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

2011-02-12T12:12:00.001-05:00

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

2011-01-20T11:10:00.002-05:00

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

2011-01-09T11:10:00.001-05:00

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

2011-01-02T23:05:00.002-05:00

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

2010-10-04T11:13:00.002-04:00

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

2010-09-28T15:59:00.002-04:00

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

2010-09-14T19:47:00.002-04:00

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

2010-09-08T16:49:00.002-04:00

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

Cone of Shame

2010-09-07T11:54:00.002-04:00

Tom: I'd like to pull wires for whole house audio before we cover everything up with sheetrock.

Me: Well, I'm fine just having a little portable ipod speaker boom box thing.

Tom: <Look of panicky concern> But I want it.

Okay, the boy doesn't ask for much, so we took a 1/2 day detour to pull a bazillion unnecessary wires that may or may not be used in the future. Case in point -- we used an entire 500' spool AND had to go back to the store to get more:

I know my friend Holly feels my pain in that we simply don't care about this stuff. Our husbands want ethernet in every room and we just want a simple little wireless network -- secured, unsecured, who gives a rats ass. We now have two speakers in the ceiling of the main living area which required --- ACK!, more demo, in our temporary kitchen. For dust control, I taped up some plastic sheeting in the shape of a human condom.

Hey Peter! Thanks so much for coming to help us. Now, please just step into the cone of shame and be utterly infiltrated by plaster dust.

He was using the angle grinder to cut the speaker opening and that sucker somehow creates self-replicating dust particles.

Just to cut a 6" opening, we had to shop vac the Cone of Shame multiple times so Peter could see what he was doing. Tom was having fun shrink wrapping him in there.

Here's a tiny bit more progress with another set of drawers & temporary plywood counter installed. We also got the dryer vent installed so we have a fully functional laundry room.

And ceiling drywall is done! (With new speaker on the right). I was sooooo not looking forward to putting it up but Tom & Peter just knocked it right out. We finished planing the wood floor pieces yesterday and are hoping to start installation today. The floor is our biggest gamble in the project thus far, so we're hoping A) we have enough material and B) it doesn't look like shit, both of which are distinct possibilities.

-Jessie

Slave Labor, Day 1

2010-09-05T14:45:00.002-04:00

Hooray for us, Tom's brother Peter is here to help us for 5 days. This is what the kitchen looked like upon his arrival:

And after one full day of work, we have more drywall up, some cabinets installed, and a fully functional sink all plumbed up:

Progress! End of Day 1. And yes, we're pretty sure we screwed up by making tape joints right at the same height as electrical boxes, but it is done.

And say hello to our temporary kitchen we have set up in the living room:

New frig, old stove, new microwave -- the new stove & dishwasher are still in boxes in the right side of the photo.

We are soooooo glad Peter is here to help -- but still, he can make his own damn breakfast.

-Jessie

More Surprises

2010-08-19T12:23:00.002-04:00

Last weekend we completed the rest of the demo by cleaning up plaster edges to make them nice & square for drywall. In the exterior wall, we cut a 1 foot high swath in the plaster so we'd have a place to run new electrical -- only discover that there ISN'T ANY INSULATION IN THE WALLS. What the f***? Co-nun-drum. Do we just cover the wall back up and pretend everything is okay or do we take down the cabinets, demo the plaster & lath, insulate, drywall, and re-hang cabinets?

We chose the sledgehammer option. It just didn't feel right to leave a wall uninsulated when we had a chance to fix it, even though it's adding to our scope of work.

For the insulation, we went with 2 layers of 1.5" thick polyisocyurnate (yes, it's impossible to pronounce) rigid insulation. This stuff has a great R value -- we're going to get about R-20 versus R-13 for fiberglass batts.

I've been cutting this stuff with a handheld drywall saw and cutting around electrical & plumbing in the wall. It's a bit of a pain in the ass, but it's all very low tech and is pretty fast to install.

Of course, I'm covered in new white, insulative freckles. I hope this stuff isn't too toxic because I'm just not taking any precautions. I couldn't stomach wearing the sweaty dust mask any more.

In other news, I found some reclaimed wood flooring on Craigslist. We got enough for the whole kitchen for about $100 which saved us about $300 over buying new. Our neighbor has an AWESOME shop and is going to let me use his planer to get all of the pieces in good shape. They are from a gymnasium somewhere in Oregon installed around 1940. If we can pull this off, I think this floor is going to be kick ass. Of course, it's possible it will look like crap, but we're going to risk it.

Finally, some actual progress!! We hired an electrician to help us on Monday and we got all of the roughed in electrical completed. The inspector even signed off!

Three full days of construction after a full week of work makes one tired Tom.

-Jessie

Buyer Beware

2010-08-12T13:09:00.002-04:00

Well, we ran into a bit of a snag this week trying to demo the existing kitchen floor -- it was about 5 times as much work as anticipated. We saw on one of those home shows a tile floor being demo'd and it looked easy -- yeah, not so much in our case.

First, I smashed every square inch of tile with a sledge hammer to shatter them into tiny pieces and scooped all the debris into the garbage. Then, through bits of tile and mortar, crawled around on my hands & knees to remove all the of screws I could see.

The top 1/4" thick piece of plywood was screwed AND glued to the plywood below. The only option we found was to use a crowbar like a windshield ice scraper and just scrape little bits of it off at a time.

Back to hands & knees to remove all the screws fastening the bottom 3/4" plywood to the original diagonal plank subfloor. This layer was also glued down (@#$**%^%#$@ AGAIN!!). After trying several methods of plywood destruction, I finally discovered that using the circular saw to cut it into 6" square sections worked the best.

Then Tom developed this crowbar duel wield technique to pry up the smaller sections (this tactic required too much coordination for me). I'd say this damn floor demo has probably sucked up about 5 man-days worth of work. Ridiculous! Never saw this coming.

Tom broke one of the crowbars last night with a hammer. He immediately went into an Old Spice commercial -- "Look at me, look at your man, and back to me. I broke a crowbar."

If you're thinking -- why the hell did you guys even bother with all that work? That's an excellent question. One, we wanted the new wood floor we're putting down to be a smooth transition from the dining room. And two, because the existing floor was so thick, it was affecting the height of the counter from the floor level and would have caused us problems with new appliances and existing cabinetry.

If you consider tearing out a built-up floor like this in your house, think very hard and know that it's a really crappy job. Learn from our mistakes!!!

-Jessie

Bye bye wall, we don't like you

2010-08-03T13:27:00.002-04:00

I'm finally back from DC after spending almost the full month of July there working on our house. But, I was able to squeeze in some work on our Boise house the last weekend of July. Which is a good thing because we have to move in about a month so we're basically screwed.

Saturday morning, this is what the kitchen looked like. Our task for the day -- remove the load bearing wall and replace with a beam.

We built temporary stud walls about a foot away from the existing wall to support the joists. Sounds maybe a bit complicated, but really, you just wedge & shim the crap out of everything to support the floor above.

With all of the temporary supports in place, we are ready to start demo on the old studs.

It's just a wee bit nerve wracking to take a saw to these puppies. I probably should have unpacked my hard hat just in case the floor came crashing down on my head.

With most of the existing wall demolished, we just have to take down the last post.

The new beam is just two 2x8's screwed together. The end had to be chiseled to accommodate an existing beam.

Here, the new beam is in place but is just being held up temporarily with some spare studs. Soooooo close to accomplishing the day's objective.

Ta-da! New beam, new posts, no more wall to look at. Now we just have to build a kitchen. The next big hurdle is electrical stuff which is hugely complicated because our house has the old school knob & tube wiring which we need to update to current standards. Tom wants to do all this ourselves, but we might need to call in a contractor to expedite the process.

--Jessie

The plan...

2010-07-07T08:48:00.004-04:00

So if your here, you are likely already following the adventures of our rag tag fleet of fugitives fleeing across the universe... wait sorry, wrong show.

I figured I would give a quick overview of what we are actually planning for the house in case it hasn't been clear what we are trying to do. We really liked the feel of the main room of the house, and the lighting that it lets in is pretty spectacular.

The kitchen in the house was a small dark galley kitchen that was really cramped feeling and had some kinda lame finishes like the laminate counter top.

BTW - That is our Realtor Janet Thompson who was amazing at helping us find a place that needed just the right amount of love and attention and was willing to let us go over and over and over and over the house before we finally put an offer in...

So the plan is to open the kitchen up with a new support beam running across the room where the existing load bearing wall is, and then do to the living room side of the space with a half-height wall with a breakfast bar on the end. The before and after of the wall that will be coming down...

And because I am a total geek, I did a quick 3-D model of what the space will look like before and after just to help visualize.

So we have our work cut out for us, but the final product should make the room really amazing to hang out it and entertain. That is if we can ever get rid of all of the construction dust...

--Tom

Score one for Campfires - One less chimney in the world...

2010-07-05T23:49:00.003-04:00

After a long weekend our house officially no long has a chimney. When we last left our bumbling protagonist the chimney was down through the roof and most of the way down through the second floor. Yesterday I took the chimney down into the kitchen. That was only possible after I got my body to actually move again on Sunday morning... This is what the kitchen looked like at the end of Sunday.

This morning I went back to at the section of chimney in the basement. It took most of the day due in large part to having to work around ducts, but the chimney was gone by the end of the day.

The space looks pretty awesome with the chimney out of the way. The next shot was taken with the camera on the floor pointed up through all of the floors to the roof patch. It doesn't really do it justice, but its pretty cool looking up through all of the floors of the house.

Finally, if anybody is interested in what a disassembled chimney looks like here is what our current chimney looks like.

I had hoped that I would have the chimney all done on Sunday but I learned two valuable lessons this weekend. First - Bricks are very heavy, second... I am very out of shape. Regardless the chimney is now gone which is a pretty big relief. Next step, re-wiring the house.

--Tom

How do you like that Mary Poppins...

2010-07-04T00:15:00.002-04:00

Jessie and I have been feeling like we were at a bit of an impasse the last week or so on the kitchen renovation. We finally decided that we were going to move forward with taking down the chimney since we feel like we have a decent plan for reventing the HVAC.

The timing of course is perfect since Jessie flew to DC this morning so I decided to head up on the roof to take down the chimney solo... duh. I of course took precautions and told my family that I was going to be on the roof and that I would check in regularly, and if not to call the Boise Police and ask them to go by the house and look for someone with limbs twisted all over in the backyard.

Here is what the house looked like when we bought it.

I got on the roof around 10 AM after getting some tools together. I was worried about the mortar on the chimney being too hard to break up, but it turned out that I was able to just grab bricks and toss them into the yard. The pitch of the roof as steep enough that I wound up doing all of the demo from the high side of the chimney and decided that I would have to get roof jacks to to the patch. Here is the roof after an hour of demo work.

Once I got down to the roof line on the high side of the chimney I went into the house and started demoing the chimney there. Once I got the chimney down to where I could stand on it I used it as a platform too clean up the opening and work back the shingles that I needed to remove to work the patch in.

I trip to Home Depot and a few more hours on the roof with roof jacks, a hammer and a lot of sun and the roof was patched. This is the roof at the end of the day. The patch doesn't look great from the ground level, but it should be water tight so I'm happy with the work for one day.

I also want to mention that Jessie is SUPER lucky and won the local Home Depot drawing for June, so SHE (not me) now has a shiny new air compressor and pneumatic tools.

--Tom

Why kids love us

2010-06-25T18:11:00.002-04:00

Last night, we told our friend Leslie that she should bring the kids by to check out the mass destruction. Describing their reaction as "enthusiastic" doesn't even come close.

Victoria knew straight away she wouldn't be able to handle the sledge and opted for a hammer. Let me assure you, this did not slow her down a bit. She effed this wall up. Just look at her form and her little clenched fist -- I've never seen a 7 year concentrate so hard.

Several times she paused mid-destruction and gave a victorious roar like she just won a WWE match or something. I think the bubble gum pink outfit and jellies really added something to the visual. This is a girl after my own heart.

Preston, 12, went straight for the sledgehammer. He was pulled around by it quite a bit, but he just kept on swinging until the entire curved soffit was down.

Leslie said when she told the kids they could rock the demo, Preston was excited enough that he could barely form complete sentences. We got some big hugs when they left.

Ah yes, Team Steiger doing what they do best -- supervising. Child labor laws, what?

Victory shot. Never mind the live exposed wiring and nails that we're stepping on.

--Jessie

PangoMassion

2010-06-23T18:07:00.002-04:00

Operation Demo has commenced (code word PangoMassion -- I mis-spoke Mango Passion last weekend and we decided PangoMassion sounds like a cool wrestling move or something violent).

Upstairs, I removed crappy fake wood paneling and sheet rock surrounding the chimney. The pieces of sheet rock were held together with duct tape which does not bode well for the quality of previous remodeling efforts. I also removed the HVAC duct leaving a nice ankle-breaker hole in the floor.

The HVAC duct was removed all the way down to the basement. Bonus that we found Mr. Scarecrow in the closet.

The first thing I actually did was make a ghetto fabulous blind for this roaster of a skylight. I really should have done this at night since I'm pretty sure I have retinal scarring from spending too much time in this magnifying glass handling reflective tin foil.

I'm not sure if you've heard of Newton's lesser known 4th law: Sawzall + Sledgehammer = FUN.

Next up, getting rid of the closet that housed the HVAC duct. Unfortunately pour moi, this sucker is sheathed on both sides with cementitious wall board and wood lath.

Three sawzall blades and lots o'sledging later, I'm making some progress.

Buh-bye. Now, we just have to knock down the other side after we borrow a hand truck to move the stove out of the way. The chimney is going to be proverbial toast this weekend.

-Jessie

New Friends

2010-06-22T14:57:00.002-04:00

We drove 2 hours up to McCall, ID last weekend with our new friend Leslie and her 2 kids (12 & 7).

From what we can tell, McCall is where locals go to get away -- at 5000 feet, there are awesome winter sports and with a huge lake, cooler summer temperatures, golf courses, & parks, it's great in the summer too. Basically, it's a year round recreation Mecca.

Big Payette Lake is big enough that it takes about an hour to drive around. Luckily, there are many man-made sandy beaches to enjoy along the way.

Tom sure scaled this tree in a hurry after setting the camera timer.

We brought some liters of Coke and Mentos to impress the kids with our vast knowledge. As per usual, the kids think Tom is awesome and I am tolerable. (Victoria & Preston are on the right -- the other neighborhood kids were less impressed with our shenanigans).

We had a little soiree at our new house the day after we closed. I made it a dessert & adult beverage party to celebrate that I could finally eat desserts again after a 6 month hiatus due to the Steiger family bet. Let's just say that alcohol + desserts is WAY too much sugar in the blood. I would have killed for a veggie tray. I just noticed that in this photo, Tom looks like he's being amusing. FYI, those two people work for him -- I'm just saying.

The creative genius that is Leslie made us this awesome housewarming present (with an assist from Jena).

Somehow I have to figure out how to preserve and display this in our house. I guess I better keep it away from direct sunlight or the candy is going to get nasty.

There. You have made the blog, Leslie. Welcome to our little lives. =)

-Jessie

New Digs

2010-06-08T12:01:00.002-04:00

We are buying a house!

It's a cute little bungalow built in 1940 and is completely different than our timber framed contemporary house we have in Virginia.

The wood floors throughout the house are in great shape. This is a shot of the living room taken from the entry way. A small dining area is just around the corner.

However, the kitchen is not spectacular, so we're planning a fairly major renovation. New concrete counters, most definitely.

And this wall is going to come down to open up the kitchen to the living room. Of course, it's a load bearing wall and the "closet" houses an HVAC duct to the upstairs and an old brick chimney -- all to be demo'd. A sledge hammer would make a great house warming gift, FYI.

Here's the chimney & HVAC vent in the upstairs space. We're thinking a long term project might be to add more dormer space up here and make it into a master suite. Bedroom space on one side of the stairs and a bath/closet on the other side. Right now, you walk up the stairs and it's just one big open space.

Chimney demo will start at the top of course. It currently houses the vents for the gas water heater and gas furnace which creates another challenge. Since there are 3 doors to the back yard (sliding glass doors in the dining area & master bedroom) we're are going to close off the middle door and make it into a pantry area. It is adjacent to the kitchen and will expand that space nicely.

The back yard comes with a chicken coop! Fresh eggs for breakfast for all visitors!! There's also a full two car garage which will be our awesome shop. I've already started acquiring tools from Craigslist -- the back of the truck is full of stuff because I don't have anywhere else to put it.

This will be our bedroom. There's another bedroom and one bath on the main level. The attic space can be 1-2 bedrooms and there's a family room and another bathroom in the basement.

The wall on the right is mostly coming down (leaving part of it the width of a refrigerator). This is going to be a BIG project -- we're about at code orange on the panic scale, but the confidence meter is hovering at about 7.

The main bath is small, but that's okay. This house is costing us just over 50% of what we paid for our house in Virginia in 2000! Plus, the location is AWESOME -- we are within a mile of the farmer's market, food co-op, parks, library, greenbelt bike trail, bars, restaurants, shopping, movie theater, etc etc. Oh, and all of the friends we've made so far live nearby. This actually facilitates something I've been craving -- impromptu get togethers.

Here's the door we're going to close off and turn into a pantry (kitchen is on the right and if I backed up a step, I would tumble down the basement steps). We're still negotiating a few things after the home inspection, but if all goes well, we'll be closing on June 18.

Well folks, this is no longer a travel blog and is heading into Phase II: OINK's Home Remodeling.

-Jessie

Snooze Fest

2010-04-30T11:24:00.006-04:00

I'd like to apologize to everyone for that snooze fest of a blog that my dear husband just wrote. In case you didn't read it, here's a quick synopsis: Blah blah, boring computer stuff, blah blah blah. I can assure you that he did not even give me the option of editorial rights and it was posted surreptitiously in the middle of the night.

Today is our last full day in the trailer and I couldn't be happier. I was fine living in a trailer while travelling, but we have been permanent residents, with our own electrical meter, in a trailer park, for two whole, endless weeks. Living here is the opposite of fun and most definitely the opposite of cool. But tomorrow, glorious tomorrow, we get to move into our rental house.

Here's just one of the many, many reasons why I'm glad to be moving out of this tiny little box on wheels. I'll no longer have to unpack the stove or microwave before using them.

So, when we first announced that we were moving to Boise, we got a lot of "uhhhhh, seriously?" But we really like it so far. Houses are affordable, people are extremely friendly, there's a decent emphasis on green things and buying local, and the access to recreation is awesome.

We took this photo last Sunday on our way up to Table Rock in the Boise Foothills. This spot is about a 30 minute walk from the front door of our house and has views of the Owyhee mountains and downtown Boise. We don't even have to get in a car to go on a hike!! I LOVE that part and have already gone on several hikes by myself during the day. Click here to see a map of the Ridge to Rivers Trail System that we have access to.

And here is a view from Camel's Back Park looking out over the neighborhood we hope to buy a house in. The "North End" is full of tree lined streets with cool little bungalows and craftsman era houses. We're shopping around for something that needs a lot of cosmetic work (kitchen or bath remodel, refinishing wood floors, knock down a wall) but not something that needs to be gutted down to the studs or has structural problems. I just toured 9 houses on Wednesday and I think we can find something that we like. Plus, we'll be able to buy a house for less than half of what one costs in the DC area. It's hard to argue with that.

-Jessie

For all one of you that would care...

2010-04-29T09:14:00.001-04:00

So my work system in the new job is a Ubuntu Linux box. I LOVE open source software and its really refreshing to be in an environment where Windows is not a hard and fast standard. We have developers on Linux, Mac and Windows and its each team members choice what OS they use. Since my team is going to be doing a lot of Java and since a lot of our existing systems are LAMP I decided to go with Linux. This has meant climbing back up a bit of a learning curve since I haven't used a desktop Linux environment in a few years, having only run servers for home use.

Before I ramble off on down the "how cool is open source software and why are you using a proprietary OS" path I'll get to the point. We are still living in a trailer where we don't have wireless access cause we are "full time" residents... /sigh. This is not the high point of our living arrangements, but this too shall come to pass. Without WiFi we have been using our Sprint Broadband card a lot recently for Internet access. This works great on the Windows boxes since you just fire up SmartView and away you go, but I haven't been able to get this to work on Linux. Till Last night.

So for anyone who might be interested in setting this up here is what I've discovered.

1 - We have a Novatel U760 USB GSM modem. When you plug it in it is initially detected as a mass storage device. I've had to plug it several times till it auto-mounts a volume.
2 - Once a volume is automounted you should be able to check dmesg and see that its a CDROM file system that is mounted.
3 - Unmount this volume and re-run dmesg and you should see the device be detected as several ttyUSBx GSM modems.

NOTE: I think there is a way to fix this by using the USB mode switch software, but I didn't get that far into it last night.

4 - Once the modem is detected I fired up gnome-ppp to mess with the settings. I wound up running it under sudo since in normal user mode it was throwing errors trying to access pppd. The plus side of this is that if you start it from a terminal you get all of the STDOUT messages for debugging.
5 - Set the modem settings as follows:

Username - Internet
Password - Internet
Phone Number - #777
Setup (Modem) -> Device - What ever ttyUSBx you are using
Setup (Modem) -> Speed - 460800
Setup (Options) -> Check Ignore terminal strings

All the other options should be able to be left defaulted. Click Connect and you should be off and running. Like I said, most of you are going to glaze over and won't even have gotten this far. I'll try and make sure that we mix some "fun" posts in with all the technology deck. :)

--Tom

Technorati Tags: ubuntu, linux, sprint, mobile broadband

Business Idea

2010-04-21T15:08:00.003-04:00

Hey folks. I need your help coming up with a buisness name. I'm a bit stumpified and could use some of your fine creative juices.

I'm going to start a little one-woman show providing structural engineering design on new homes or renovations. I'd like to specialize in alternative building because I've been told there's a need for someone like me, and it's pretty easy to work on projects all throughout the US. But, I also want to focus on green home stuff -- I can do consulting, teaching, or plain manual labor for the things we've worked on over the last year. Straw bale, concrete counter tops, plaster, tile, solar tubes, etc. etc.

My brother tells me that my business lacks focus. I agree, but still, those are all of the things I want to do and think I am capable of doing. How do I come up with business name that can encompass all those things? Maybe I go with a simple name and a slogan to describe the services?

It should have some version of Green, Eco, Sustainable, Natural, Alternative, Earth-Friendly etc, etc. And probably have a reference to Home, House, Shelter, Dwellings, Space, Building

Here are examples of a few names, but I need some more ideas since I'm not crazy about any of these:

Sustainable Digs - Home Design, Consulting & Construction
Natural Home Design & Renovation
Natural Building Concepts

I don't know, it took me way too long just to come up with three ideas. The first one is starting to grow on me though. Please partake in my virtual brainstorm!!

Jessie

Here Piggy Piggy…

2010-04-04T13:20:00.001-04:00

Well, we are now OINK’s – One Income, No Kids.

Tom accepted a job as a Director of Software Development at Bodybuilding.com in Boise, ID. He had to bench press the conference table to get the offer and somehow he summoned the strength.

As you can imagine, we’ve had a whirlwind week. We drove 600 miles from California to Boise last Friday and spent the weekend exploring the city. Tom interviewed Tuesday and received the offer before he walked out the door. So we got a cup of coffee, discussed the deal, and accepted the deal an hour later. On Wednesday, we looked at one furnished house for rent, drove halfway down the block, turned around, and agreed to rent the house for the next 3 months. The Craigslist listing for the house is still at http://boise.craigslist.org/sub/1666769010.html if you want to check it out.

On Thursday, we caught an early flight to Denver to visit my aunt & uncle, cousin, my parents, and my brother & his family. It’s a full house with excellent food, laughter and lively debates on politics and religion. Good times.

We’re staying in Denver through the 8th and flying to Omaha for the weekend so we can get all of our stuff out of my brother’s basement. Then a 1200 mile drive to Boise in a U-haul and Tom starts work on April 19.

Anyway, there are lots of big changes in our near future which we’ll keep blogging about, but the travels have officially come to a close. Thanks to everyone who has followed along thus far and joined in our journey. I think we’ll follow up with some sort of introspective blog and reflect on the last year, but not today – there’s leg of lamb to be eaten. =)

-Jessie

Tile Mania

2010-03-22T11:41:00.001-04:00

Well, I’ve spent a good part of the last month hunkered down in awkward positions -- in a bathtub.

I cut and installed every piece of tile in this bathroom (except for an assist from Steve on 2 mitered quarter-rounds; those suckers are tricky).

Isn’t is so cheerful and lovely? All the tile is hand-crafted Mexican tile, so each piece varies slightly in width, height, thickness, and glaze color. They can be a real bitch to install, but you end up with interesting variations in tile pattern. On more than one occasions, it felt like I was in tile purgatory.

But I persevered. Other people kept offering to help, but I stubbornly wouldn’t allow it. This is MY baby. Even though this is not even my house.

Hot damn! Check out this curvy section! That took more time than I care to admit. I did the terra cotta L-shaped pieces at the base of the tub also.

The sink backsplash was my first tile effort, and I was hooked.

Some of the older tiles have a crackly glaze which is very pleasing to the eye.

And one more photo for good measure, because it makes me happy.

-Jessie

And now for some failures…

2010-03-18T21:52:00.001-04:00

NOTE: Apologize for the errand posting that was emailed to subscribers of feedburner. Not sure why they decided to fire up the wayback machine, but hope you enjoyed the /NOTE:

Like Jes said in the previous post, we have been going gang-busters on getting finish work done for a final inspection on the 26th of March. So apologize again for the blog being so quiet. Some people don’t want to see work projects that we are doing anyway, but hey, we enjoy them so your gonna get them whether you like it or not :)

Now for this post. There are two notable failures that I wanted to cover quick so people can see that not everything we touch turns to gold (not like that was really a concern, but just saying). Some of you will remember that we were working on a solar panel to go on the trailer when we were in Arizona.

I’m not sure I can really call this one a failure, but needless to say we are in Northern California and said solar panel is in Arizona. The panel itself came out great and output exactly the power that I had calculated that it would. Open circuit voltage in good sun was 19.6 volts and closed circuite current was 7 Amps giving roughly 140 Watts of peak power. The panel was producing enough power than when I went to check it the first time I shocked the crap out of myself and arced the lead on my multimeter hooking it up. Some pictures of the final panel built out are below.

So what went wrong you ask? Well, a week before leaving the panel was done and Jes and I decided to work on getting it on the roof of the trailer. We discovered that in framing the panel out I had increased the size just a bit and it would not fit where originally expected… oops. Then as we started looking at how to mount the panel we discovered that the trailer roof it nowhere near flat. It is crowned front to back and side to side. Combine this with the fact that there are limited roof joists to attach to and you have… a lack of a solar panel.

We just couldn’t find a place to mount it that we were sure would stay connected well at 55 MPH and wouldn’t cause a roof leak. So kind of a half failure.

I’ll cover the other failure tomorrow… so check back.

--Tom

Biosphere II

2010-03-14T19:57:00.002-04:00

So, sorry for going radio silent for so long. We’ve been working our little (or sizable, depending on how you look at it) tushies off helping our friends finish construction on their house before their permit expires in 2 weeks. We’ve only taken 1 day off in the last month! We are tired, but happy -- learning lots of things, being productive, living simply.

Anyways, before we left Arizona, we drove up to Tucson and toured Biosphere II. There’s some really good photos on their website that really show the size of the facility, which we didn’t capture well.

I thought it was named II because there was another, smaller project elsewhere. But nay, those clever little scientists named it Jr. after the great planet Earth – the original biosphere. This giant facility was built in the 90’s and was mainly financed by a rich dude from Texas. The intended purpose was to create an enclosed atmosphere that could completely support human life.

Acres of trees & gardens were planted to generate the right amount of oxygen to support 8 people who agreed to be airlocked in this thing for 2 years. They only needed outside assistance a few times to prevent their total annihilation – not too bad considering the unchartered territory they were venturing into. The photo above shows the layout of their food garden. It didn’t produce quite enough food and they had to get by on 1200 calories per day while working rigorous 12 hour shifts, 7 days a week.

The tour took us down into the mechanical bowls of this engineering marvel. Seeing real air locks was neat – it felt very Star Trek. But ohmygod, it’s apparent no one from OSHA has visited this place. We’re walking by high pressure steam tanks and main distribution panels where you can just turn valves or shut off switches, no problem at all. Just wearing a neck tie down there would be dangerous.

We paid $16 each to go on this tour. It is not worth that much, but the mechanical LUNG of the building is worth at least $10. Does everyone remember high school chemistry and the ideal gas law? In an air tight, enclosed facility, what happens when the hot Arizona sun is baking acres of green house all day? The air expands as the temperature increases. So the extra volume of air flows into this mechanical lung. The roof of this baby weighs 20 TONS but there is enough air pressure to raise this sucker.

The 20 tons of steel is connected to the outer walls of this huge tank by a flexible membrane. The steel posts hanging from the roof hit the floor as the air temperature decreases. For emergency relief in case the whole place really overheated, there is a chain attached to the roof. If the chain is pulled tight, it releases a big hammer and smashes the greenhouse glass above to the let the air escape. I hope I explained this well because it was frigging awesome.

People only lived in the Biosphere for 2.5 years. It is currently used as a research laboratory to test ideas in a controlled environment. They do a lot of research related to global warming, carbon dioxide levels, etc. etc. They have 3 or 4 large greenhouses representing different climatic zones.

The indoor forest areas (rainforest above) are similar to visiting the US Botanical Garden or even the Baltimore Aquarium. But the mechanical lung – man, we totally geeked out on that one.

-Jessie

We’re still here… promise

2010-02-26T10:07:00.001-05:00

Sorry that the blog has been a bit non-existent recently. Between doing a job hunt for me and all of the projects that we are working on here we haven’t been spending much leisure time blogging. We will post some pictures of the work that we have been doing recently in the next couple of days. Jessie is getting to be a master as doing tile with hand made tiles and I’ve been getting my carpentry on.

--Tom

Please help if you can

2010-02-16T11:44:00.002-05:00

My uncle’s 220 year old farmhouse burned to the ground yesterday in Greenfield, New Hampshire. No one was hurt, but they lost everything, including 2 housecats and 8 sheep (in an attached barn).

The house is obscured by the tent, but this is from Conrad & Ellen’s wedding in 2002. My parents served as their wedding party.

Here’s the house reduced to rubble. My cousin sent the following message on how you can help. Thanks in advance to anyone who can find a way to share. --Jessie

Hello to all,
You are being contacted because you are family or friends of the family. You might have already heard, but my parents house just got destroyed in a fire. My parents and our dog flash are okay, but all possessions were destroyed, leaving my parents quite devastated.
As you know, Ellen and Conrad are, two very hard working people who have never asked for anything and lost everything when their home burned to the ground yesterday. They would not ask for help even now so I am asking for them. To help with immediate needs before insurance comes through, you can make a donation via the paypal link Dave set up (see below) or you if you have items/services to offer, you can find their address as well. If you would like ideas, please contact me or my brothers.

On behalf of my family, thank you for your love and support.

Paypal:
https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=69M3BJVN6GRSY

Send me an e-mail jessiesteiger AT gmail.com if you would like their mailing address to send goods.

Odds and Endings…

2010-02-14T11:13:00.001-05:00

We have officially left Arizona. We had a great stay and accomplished a lot. Lets just run down the list of projects from our hold over in Arizona.

Concrete countertops – Check
Remove 6 compacted truck loads of Tombstone Rose – Check
Clean out a garage and make 2 dump runs – Check
Install Solatube skylight – Check
Brick in a small section of flooring – Check

Not too shabby for a couple of months, and we had a great time hanging out with the family. Here’s a picture of the walkway that we bricked in.

The square blocks are actually the concrete counter tops samples that we repurposed as pavers

Oh, I forgot – we also caused some serious red-neck style death to plastic army men. Ohhh yeah… that's right.

The old 3/4 plywood from our pour tables put to good use…

Thats right… we kept shooting into the darkness… love halogen work lights

We are settled back in Northern California and work has started on projects to get the house here done for final inspection. We’ll post some of those projects as they move forward.

One quick note to all our friends in DC, I hope it stops dumping snow on you guys, but Jessie and I are a little sad that we missed the monster winter.

--Tom

Let There Be Light

2010-02-05T13:05:00.001-05:00

Since we’ve been mooching off of Tom’s parents for nearly 2 months, we decided we should do a little sumpthin-sumpthin to repay them.

The existing stove vent.

So, we tore out a non-functioning gas stove in the family room and installed a solar tube. What is a solar tube, you ask? For the environmentally uneducated, let me esplain.

Demo of an asphalt roof is the opposite of fun. Having bits of asphalt explode into your eyes is the (opposite of fun)^2.

Basically, you punch a hole in your roof, punch a hole in your ceiling, run a reflective metal pipe between the holes and you have yourself a solar tube. They bring in lovely amounts of natural light and can be installed in a day.

Here, the new flashing is installed. The roof area to be patched is huge because the flashing piece for the stove was enormous.

We bought our sweet daylighting system from Solatube – pretty much because they were the first company to show up on a Google search and they have a distributor in Tucson. The 10” model we purchased was $325 ($350 w/ tax). Did you just make a scrunchy face and think, “that’s kinda pricey” ??? Well, in the spirit of every infomercial ever made -- BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE…

Sorting through parts on the roof. I’m starting to notice that I generally looked confused in photos these days.

If you act in 2010, you federal government will give you a tax credit of 30% of the cost of the materials. That’s nearly $100 off! AND, your state government might have credits as well!! AZ will give you another incredible 25% off the INSTALLED cost.

Tube installed and roof patched. The plastic dome has a little reflector inside that points south to bring in the most light possible. We are “cautiously optimistic” that our roof patch won’t leak – much.

The company we bought the tube from would have charged $500 to install it for us. With tax credits, the final bill would have been $275. Plus, I just found the same model online for $279, so I guess we could have saved another $50 by comparative shopping.

Interior shot before the Solatube was installed.

Interior shot with the Solatube installed – this was taken at 10am, so the ambient light hasn’t even peaked yet.

And I say unto you, let there be light.

We’re very happy with how this product performs and the relative ease of installation. I’m not sure the photos really demonstrate how well it lights up a previously dark corner in the room. When we have a house again, we plan to install several of these – kitchen, bathrooms, & dark hallways will be the likely candidates.

Let us know if you have any questions.

-Jessie

Too Good to be True

2010-01-29T20:00:00.001-05:00

FYI, this tile adhesive product SUCKS.

We had to tear down about 2/3 of the tile backsplash, grind the adhesive off the walls & tiles, and then re-place all of the tile with proper tile mastic. Thus the minor delay in posting finished kitchen pictures.

But, we worked until 2 a.m. last night to finish up the tile and get the kitchen functioning again.

This is the kitchen before Team Steiger was let loose.

And the final product!! I wish we could take our baby with us…

Now, just the facts, ma’am:

1) We installed 38 square feet of counter for a material cost of just over $1000 giving us a per square foot cost of about $27. Not too shabby considering nice counters at Home Depot or Lowe’s are advertised around $75/SF (installed).

2) BUT, we each spent over 100 hours on just the counters (this does not include demo of existing counter, carpentry to make the existing cabinets level, plumbing, or tile). If we had charged $80/SF, then we only would have made $10.00 per hour. Gonna have to get MUCH faster if we intend to supplement our income this way.

Close up shot of the polished aggregate. So shiny.

3) This was a sh**load of work. If you think you could knock out a project like this in your spare time, you are crazy. I highly recommend starting with something smaller and simpler, like a bathroom counter. That being said, it is doable for someone with a decent shop, common sense, and some medium carpentry skills. If you want to build your own counters, please feel free to contact us for some advice – we even have a spreadsheet of all the materials we bought and a log of the hours we worked. OR if you want to hire us (for more than $10.00 an hour!) let’s definitely talk. These were just too much work to do for free again (sorry Amanda).

This little deelio took several hours to build, but it’s way cool. Everyone who sees the counters thinks it’s the best feature.

And now, some lessons learned on this project. This might be helpful for anyone attempting a project like this but it’s also for our future reference before we forget. Thank you internet!

1) We originally used 1/8” strips of melamine to make the template and they SUCKED. They are way too flimsy. So, yet another run to the hardware store to buy 3/16” wood underlay (luaun) which worked quite well.

Zoiks! The curvy part of the sink took FOREVER to grind & polish. Curves are not my friend – not on my thighs and not in my concrete.

2) Don’t make an L shaped section if possible. It was a pain in the butt to maneuver. If I had a do-over, I’d change the location of the joints and avoid this shape.

3) Sure, the sink cut out looks awesome, but it was a lot of work. Consider choosing a large basin sink that is the full depth of the counter (like this one from IKEA), so the counter just butts up to the sink.

4) Everything has to be level. One of the tile hot plates had warped a little when it was grouted so it didn’t quite lay flat in the form. When we started grinding, there was a bit of lip to grind down.

5) We did 3 effing coats of slurry on the main counters. When I did the pass-thru section, I left the first coat on really thick and that did the trick. Thick slurry = more grinding but less work overall.

6) Anything cast into the counter (hot plates, cutting board, etc) needs to be masked off while grinding.

This is my token Architectural Digest photo.

There are probably other things, but honestly, I am tired of thinking about counters. Still, we are so damn proud of this project. We put a lot of effort into it, but I think all of it paid off – even if our theoretical hourly wage is crap.

-Jessie

ps. Photos of the whole project can be seen here.

Power from the Sun…

2010-01-29T11:19:00.001-05:00

The solar panels are coming along. A bit slower than we would have liked since we have had some finish work and some gotcha’s getting the kitchen completely ready to go, but we’ll leave that for another post. In our last post, the solar cells were being soldered together.

Solar PV systems have a fluctuating power output based on how much sun is available, so they rely on a device called a charge controller to regulate the power that is produced. In most cases this is used to charge a battery (this is how we are going to use it). The charge controller is generally rated for a set amount of both voltage and current. In our case we have a charge controller that has a max amperage of 10 Amps and a max voltage of 100V. Our solar panel is two parallel smaller panels of 36 series cells each. A little math gets us to the fact that the panel will output 20V at 7.2 Amps in a best case scenario. That is around a 140 watts of solar power.

So we have the strings of cells soldered together and the next step was to attach the cells to the panel. We used clear silicone adhesive to glue down each of the sets of cells

Fun with silicone… putting the strings of cells in place was a bit nerve wracking since they are so brittle.

The panel sections all connected down. There is still some interconnect wiring to be soldered in that is not shown in this picture.

The panel is a layered affair starting with an aluminum frame that I custom built from a scavenged frame of a broken hot water solar collector. I cut them down on a band saw to make L angle pieces and then cut and bent them to get the frame shown here.

Bottom side of the scavenged frame.

The frame in all its recycled/scavenged materials glory

Next we are putting down a piece of thin aluminum sheet metal (also scavenged) to provide some weather protection for the panel backing.

Sheet aluminum on top of frame.

The cells are attached to heavily primed and painted 1/4 inch plywood which goes on top of the sheet metal

The framing sections that hold the panel pieces in place.

Then panel sections are housed in a channeled frame that I made from ripped down 2x2 and 2x4 lumber. This was also heavily primed and painted.

This is the how the final panel will look with the addition of a sheet of Plexiglas on top.

There will be a sheet of 1/4 inch Plexiglas on top of this to protect the cells and the whole thing will be through bolted together with stainless steel bolts. Hopefully, we will get the panel fully assembled by the end of Saturday and the weather will give us some sunshine to mount this on the roof of the trailer and get all the internal wiring done. Someone asked (sarcastically I might add :) about the weight of the panel. I think the whole thing is going to come out weighing around 30 lbs which is pretty good for that amount of power. I tried this out at twilight (literally… the sun went behind the mountains while I was setting the panels up) and was still getting 16.85 Volts and 1.36 Amps with no direct sunlight, so I’m pretty happy about that. We’ll see how this actually works once we get it all assembled.

--Tom

Ahhhhh, yeeeaaaahhhh

2010-01-25T11:26:00.001-05:00

We are victorious!

The counter install went perfectly (as opposed to smashingly, which Maya pointed out could imply smashed fingers).

Tom’s brother, Peter, invited over a few hulk-like friends to execute the heavy lifting. It only took half an hour to get everything installed. I felt a bit useless just watching the guys move the pieces…

But I didn’t care, I was just so damn happy that everything FIT.

Now, for some detail shots:

We cast into the counter a glass cutting board and made a little slopey drain section that heads straight to the garbage disposal.

Can you pretty please admire how well the sink turned out? When we slid this section into place and I realized it fit PERFECTLY, I was jumping up and down and hugging Tom. Geez-US, what a huge relief.

Oh yes, more gorgeousness with the tile hot plate.

After the counters were poured, we decided to use a leftover bag of concrete and make a little counter in the pass-thru area. The area used to have a row of these tiles, but we salvaged them and cast them into the counter. This piece is not even waxed yet.

This is just a little sample shot of what the polished surface looks like. It’s kind of shocking to run your hand across the surface because you know that the counter is made of rough concrete, but it’s as smooth as a granite counter. Plus, this is just way more bad ass than granite, in my opinion.

We applied a second coat of wax….

and it’s so shiny, you can see my reflection.

And now, we move on to the photos of the whole beautiful thing:

Oh wait, we decided to start the tile backsplash. Finished kitchen pictures will appear probably tomorrow along with our “lessons learned” on this project and some advice if you want to tackle something like this for yourself.

Instead of using mastic or thin set, we tried using a spray adhesive which seemed to work reasonably well. It’s claims that you can grout one hour after placing the tiles, which is why it was purchased, but we found that claim to be BS (or GMS, right Chelsea?).

Even though we started at 8:30 am, we worked on the tile until it was finished at 1:00 am. Hard core, right? I’m pretty sure that’s the longest day I’ve ever worked.

Plus, it was COLD last night. Any tiles left outside were starting to freeze to the table and little frosty bits of residue were accumulating on the tile saw. But did we give up? Oh no. Tom got out his stash of cheap vodka (with blue food coloring) that we used to winterize our trailer water system and poured some in the tile saw. I love how engineers always find creative little ways to fix problems.

Okay, I think that’s enough for today. One more post about counters and then we’ll move on to new topics (finally!).

-Jessie

Am Nervous

2010-01-23T18:53:00.001-05:00

Okay, tomorrow is the BIG day and I am getting nervous. We have sealed & waxed the counters and they are being installed tomorrow. If the sink opening doesn’t fit properly, it is MY fault and it will take a significant amount of finagling to get everything to line up. We have 2 additional strapping young lads to help maneuver the pieces, so here’s hoping every thing goes smashingly tomorrow!

-Jessie

Almost There!

2010-01-18T16:53:00.001-05:00

Almost where you ask? Almost to the point of being able to install these damn counters and move on with our little lives.

This is day 1 of polishing using 50 grit & 100 grit diamond resin wet polishing pads. The rain gear I was using was completely inadequate and I got soaked anyway.

Plus, it sprayed so much concrete residue in the air it left my hair gray. You can see the red where my head band was. Fun times.

On day 2 of polishing, I really got serious. Don’t be surprised if you see this look on the runways for spring fashion week. Men’s fishing waders, Teva sandals, REI rain coat. Yeah, I’m gonna need a day of watching chick flicks, mani-pedi, even <gulp> shopping to get back an ounce of femininity back.

The polishing reveals the aggregate in the concrete (pretty) but also brings up some voids (not so pretty). This photo is after we’ve applied slurry TWICE.

So, with any luck, the third times a charm. We had some leftover Sakrete mix, so I screened it through 3 layers of window screen to get out the rocks & most of the sand. Add some water & color and you have yourself some fine lookin’ slurry.

The surface gets scraped off so there’s not too much sanding to do later.

What? I look like I’m having fun here. I think it’s because Peter was flipping Tom off with his blue rubber gloves on.

The slurry process is best as a two person, Mr. Miyagi inspired operation – one applies the slurry in a wax-on, wax-off motion and the other scrapes a la “paint the fence.”

The left side of this piece is still wet so you can see how the final product will turn out when it is fully slurried, polished, sealed, & waxed. Pretty, non?

-Jessie

The Other Project - Solar Panels

2010-01-17T12:32:00.002-05:00

In addition to the concrete counter tops we are also working on building our own solar panels from rejected solar cells. These rejected cells are available for about 20% of the cost of an unblemished solar cell. These cells were rejected because they either have very small chips or had some defect when they were being manufactured. We got 140 Watts worth of cells from eBay for around $120.

The soldering station that I setup on top of a table saw, and one completed series of cells

So we are in the process of building a panel for these cells to go on the top of the trailer. There was an old non-functional solar hot water collector laying around so that has been dismantled and a lot of the framing is being cannibalized to make the new panel frame out of. We cut down the frame to make some nice lightweight aluminum angle frame and the backing sheet metal will be the new backing on the panel as well as re-using the glass front panel.

The first step for the panels was to figure out the cell configuration. We are going with two series runs of 36 cells which will give about 20 V of output power each. These will be connected in parallel to provide around 7.6 Amps of charging current for the trailer battery.

The back of a set of cells... the three pads are where the next cell is connected

Each of the cells had to be soldered together. To fit the panel dimensions this means that creating 8 sets of 9 cells in series, 4 of which will be connected in each half of the panel. There are three solder pads on the back of each of the cells that need to be connected. This turns into a lot of soldering and the cells are very fragile. I managed to get all of the series connections, but just barely. All of the spare cells that we started out with were broken by the time I finished.

Putting flux onto the pads for the next cells to be connected

Soldering the cells into the string

The next step is to put together panel mounts for the cells and then get the frame put together. We are going to be using heavily primed and painted 1/4 inch plywood for the backing. The next step is working out the detailing for the panel edging. We'll post some of the work on that after we get it prototyped. More to come.

--Tom

OK. Seriously. We Rock.

2010-01-13T23:00:00.001-05:00

Today was the great unveiling of the concrete!

The first step was to pry off the sides of our forms. This was a bit harder than it looks. Especially in the areas where we, err, overdid it with the silicone.

We flipped the piece over and then had to pry the base of the form off. This was also harder than we thought it should have been. Turns out, the spray adhesive we used to adhere the decorative aggregate was a bit stronger than we expected. Our anticipation level at this point is ridiculously high. We know the sides have turned out okay, but how will the counter actually turn out? Are we screwed or are we awesome sauce?

Ta-da! Awesome sauce, indeed. It looks splotchy now, but just wait until I polish it up and make it shiny.

Speaking of polishing, I did a little test run today with some of the samples we made. I was a bit smarter this time and donned full fowl weather gear. If the polisher was a Care Bear, it would be Splashes-a-Lot.

All of the pieces have little holes all over the place. This is okay – we didn’t screw up. After I do some of the polishing, the holes will be filled with a slurry coat (cement & water) and then polished again.

When Peter got off work, he helped us uncover the two larger pieces and move everything outside for the polishing. The sink knockout (my baby) turned out beautifully. Unless, of course, we go to install it and it’s 6” off, then I blame Tom.

And here’s the whole sink section with cutting board and drain. Isn’t it so pretty?

We used a furniture dolly to move the behemoths outside. This piece clocks in at about 250 pounds.

I cannot express how relieved we are to have the counters out of the form work knowing that they don’t suck. We have over 100 hours each into this project so far and while there’s still work to do, we are in the home stretch.

Yeah. Evil wife + evil brother = Bad times for Tom. Peter initiated the whole nipple clamping incident and he took the photos, but I guess I am implicated by posting it on the blog. But just look at how much he likes it…

-Jessie

Those pour countertops…

2010-01-10T12:49:00.001-05:00

Technically speaking we did the counter top pouring yesterday, but since we were so far behind on keeping people updated on how the form work was going we decided to break it up into two posts.

We started mixing the Sakrete 5000 psi concrete right around 10 AM. Out plan had been to do mixes of 3 bags per run, but we found that this was just too much material to get a good mix in the drum. We also discovered after the first mix that we needed to have all of our initial amount of water ready and mixed with color when we started. The first load was a pain to get mixed right since we added the water in 3 smaller batches as it was mixed wit the color. Lessons learned.

Masks were necessary for putting the dry mix in. I did a good job of watching Peter load most of the bags

The mix. It only looks like a drum full of baby poop…

The process that we used to fill the forms was to put concrete in up to the rebar level in the form and then use a concrete vibrator that we rented to consolidate the material and try and minimize the voids and air pockets on the bottom of the form (top of the final counter).

Jessie was the mix master and handled the color additives and water levels in the mix

The concrete vibrator… insert your own joke here, goodness knows we did through out the day

Then once we were happy that the concrete was consolidated we filled the form the rest of the way up and hand packed it to consolidate it down. We could have use the vibrator again for this portion, but it was a huge pain to maneuver and splashed concrete all over the place so we limited its use to the bottom where it was more critical.

Once the form was filled we screeded the top of it to level the material out and pull off any excess. Then the top (bottom) of the counter was trowelled as smooth as possible. A couple of people have asked why we didn’t just do a poured in place countertop since it would have minimized the form work that was needed. If you could see how many lines I wound up leaving in the surface of the counter you would know why we went with an upside down cast system. Trowelling concrete is definitely something that needs experience.

Packing the form to the top

Screeding – Which is a word that no spell check seems to know

Trowelling the finish in, not a good job for someone with any OCD tendencies. Must… make… lines… go… AWAY!

After trowelling we cleaned off the form edges to help make breaking the forms as easy as possible. Finally once the concrete has started to setup we clipped the wires that were holding the rebar cages in place and smoothed out those holes in the concrete.

Overall it took us right around 3 hours of pretty continuous work to get everything poured, finished and our clean up done. It seemed almost a little anti-climactic compared to how many hours went into the prep work up front. It was definitely a frantic feeling morning though since we were having to keep mixing while we were placing and finishing concrete, and you always thinking about the fact that the concrete is curing and you are kind of under the gun time wise. Still with my brother and his sons help it went pretty smooth. We’ll find out for sure on Wednesday when we break the forms.

Tay being helpful as always :)

The pour all done. Now we wait nervously for four days

There have also been a couple of questions about how we are going to get all of this concrete in place once it is finished. The short answer is brute force. We have 4 sections to put in place with the L shaped piece that goes into a corner being the most awkward. The others are just going to be heavy. The total counter is around 800 lbs so figure each section is around 200 lbs more or less. Its definitely going to take some man power so we will be calling in some favors and paying people off with beer and pizza I’m sure.

--Tom

Last of the Prep Work

2010-01-09T17:34:00.001-05:00

The last of the prep work has taken place over the last few weeks on & off with much help from Tom’s extended family. Merry Christmas - now get to work!

We had some help from Kyle fastening the sides of the forms. Every hole had to be predrilled & countersunk so we didn’t split the melamine. We had no less than 4 drills with various bits going.

Once the sides were installed, then we had to tape off all the joints and seal them with a bead of silicone. This gives the concrete a nice, soft rounded edge and keeps it from bleeding through the formwork.

The joints between sections of counter are connected with a piece of plexiglass which is also held in place by silicone. Plexiglass is used so that if the joint ends up all wobbly, at least the pieces will line up with each other. FYI, black silicone is used so that you can see where you need to clean up on the white melamine.

The form work is held in place by melamine buttresses. These are screwed down into the pour table and also into the side wall of the form. Using the right length of screw here is critical.

Ten year old Daniel got a quick lesson on using the drill press to pre-drill the side rails & buttresses. Child labor laws, what?

Cameron (17, pictured) and AJ (12) were in charge of cutting and marking the pieces of #3 rebar.

Here are the sink & faucet knockouts installed. Making the sink knockout SUCKED. We tried to buy 2” foam, but there wasn’t any at multiple stores, so we thought, “no problem, we’ll buy 1” foam and glues pieces together.” Sounds easy, no? Except that 1” foam is really 1 & 1/16” and 2 different types of adhesive I used dissolved the foam. Then the band saw I was using to make the cardboard template and to cut the foam was having problems so we had to stop to fix it. THEN, the clear tape I put around the outside to make a smooth edge kept coming off. Anyways, a lot of effort went into the sink knockout. I’m still a little concerned that the edge will be a little bumpy in spots and will require a lot of grinding. Tom had some better luck with the faucet knockouts, but not much.

Here you can see my purdy black silicone lines. There is also a grouted tile that we are casting in place to be a hot plate (there will be one on each side of the stove). The concrete sealer can delaminate if hot things are put on it, so this is a protective measure. Plus, it will look cool. The little white aggregates were ordered from a concrete place and are held in place with spray adhesive. When the surface is polished, we should see this aggregate come through.

Another nice, custom feature that we have in the counter is a fixed glass cutting board and a slopey section to wipe food waste directly to the garbage disposal. The cutting board caused quite a delay when FedEx lost the package (it’s been in Hagerstown, MD since 12/29) so we gave up on the original and ordered a different one which just got here yesterday. We had to build the slopey section twice because we scribed it wrong the first time (Damn it! We forgot that everything is upside down. Our first major error due to forgotten upside down-ness).

Then we plopped down some foam blocks to support the rebar cages and held them in place with some wire. The wire gets cuts after the concrete is placed.

And voila! The fully prepped counter, just begging to be drowned in concrete. Just outside the frame are three sacrificed chickens for the Gods of Cement, Aggregate, and Water. On the morrow is judgment day.

-Jessie

Family Bet

2010-01-04T15:31:00.001-05:00

If you recall, we made a little familial bet in August where everyone gave up something yummy until Christmas. Four of us succeeded and two failed (Cameron & Tiffany, if you must know) and we renewed this bet idea, this time involving ALL of the extended family.

Tom enjoying his first beer since August – approximately at 10 am Christmas morning. There’s just nothing better than getting lit while kids are opening Easy Bake Ovens.

Me & both of Tom’s sisters have given up sweets until June 15. Ack! What the hell was I thinking? My only access to sugar for nearly six months is going to be fruit and coffee drinks. If Tom is wise, he will keep plenty of these things on hand.

Four out of seven nieces & nephews joined us on a hike the other day. Chelsea (19) has given up soda & ice cream, Cameron (17, top right) has agreed to run 6 miles a week, AJ (12, bottom right) has given up candy, and Taylor (13) has given up canned beverages AND has agreed to do ALL of his homework. To add extra incentive for Taylor, I told him I’d give him my winnings if he makes it to June.

We found a few inches of snow in a shady canyon after we climbed about 2000 feet. We also found two backpacks and several water jugs left behind by illegal immigrants which is extremely common in this area.

Tom and three other relatives have agreed to a specific amount of exercise each week. If an adult fails in their mission, they have to put $100 into the pot (kids $50) which will be split by the winners. With 5 kids and 7 adults, this could get interesting.

This is a fun little way to encourage some healthy behavior in our family. There’s nothing like some friendly competition to keep us honest. Now, if I can only figure out some strategies to sabotage the rest of the group…

-Jessie

Happy holidays to you all…

2009-12-30T17:47:00.001-05:00

Belated for sure, but we wanted to wish everyone a happy holidays. We’ve been blessed this year to be able to share time in a lot of peoples lives both family and new friends. Its been incredible trip for us so far and we have been blessed to make so many new friends along the way.

We’ve had a great Christmas in Arizona with all of the family in town.

I realize its nothing for our friends in DC who got a ton of snow, but we wound up with a covering of snow here a couple of days before Christmas. Very abnormal for Arizona and made it a bit chilly in our trailer.

We’ll make some updates shortly with some more info in the concrete countertop project. We hope everyone has had a great Christmas and that your New Years is even better.

--Tom

Progress and Setbacks

2009-12-24T12:15:00.002-05:00

We have made some significant progress on the countertop over the last few days, but also struggled through setbacks at every step. We feel sometimes like we’re inventing the wheel, but we’re plowing forward.

Step 1 was to build a template using strips of 1/4” mahogany lauan underlay. We started with a sheet of 1/8” melamine which was truly sucktastic. It was so flimsy, we had a really hard time ripping it into strips.

Once you get usable strips, you lay a piece against the wall, then put another one in the front taking into account how much the counter will overhang the cabinetry. Tack these down and then hot glue the side pieces into place. Each piece is left intentionally 1/2” short in each direction so you don’t have to mess with cutting them exactly to length. This is an important step in the process because, guess what, the walls in your house are never true, and your cabinetry is never square.

We also used our handy dandy, super duper polisher of joy. You start with a 50 grit diamond resin pad on the wet polisher and work your way up to 3000 grit. It is wicked smooth when finished - we just kept rubbing the samples after they were polished. This is about what the finished color should look like, except we bought these shiny, white, small stones to place in the form. These will show up as larger aggregate when polished.

We moved the template outside and laid it out on 3/4” melamine to mark the cuts for the base of the form. Because the bottom of the form will be the top of the counter, it is quite important to flip the template upside down.

To keep things straight in our constantly confused heads, we made marks on the template when it was inside with black sharpie and then switched to red sharpie when we flipped it upside down.

The pieces were ripped using a circular saw with a jerry rigged guide. We couldn’t use a table saw because nothing in the existing kitchen is square. I should mention that it was WINDY this day. We were engulfed in mini cyclones of sawdust and every time we tried to move a piece, we were working against a sail.

Suckers – Cameron and Kyle thought they were visiting for a vacation, but we put them to work immediately.

We also built and leveled a pour table. This should have been an easy part of the process, but we tried building it on sawhorses first so it would be at waist height for all of the successive steps. Nice idea, but the plastic sawhorses we had deflected horribly as soon as you put weight on them (specifically, the weight of Tom). The pour table has to be level and can’t deflect when the weight of the concrete is on it (about 800 pounds for the entire thing).

So, the pour table was moved to the floor. FYI, this whole thing has to be done inside because concrete needs to cure in 50 degrees or warmer for 3 days. Tom had a fantastic time shimming the table – twice. First round was a learning experience, second round he got it right. We really enjoy doing things twice for no reason.

On one of our many, many, many shopping trips to hardware stores, I spotted this crazy vehicle. Do you think it’s blue book value is higher with the custom paint and bobblehead job?

-Jessie

Its all about the color…

2009-12-20T11:08:00.001-05:00

First things first… to all our friends in DC… Brrr. Hope you are all enjoying the snow and haven’t run out of milk or toilet paper yet.

The concrete countertops are still moving forward albeit not as quickly as up to this point. We had a somewhat no progress day yesterday trying to get form tables built. The pour table is where we will be building the forms and pouring the counter tops. As you might expect they need to be pretty strong and they need to be dead level.

We are trying to build one long (16’x4’) table to pour all of the counter pieces on in one long form. There will be joints integrated into the form, but doing it this way allows us to make sure that the joints are going to be very tight when we install the counter. The issue that we ran into yesterday was finding saw horses and materials that would stay level and support the weight of the counter. The plastic saw horses that we started with bowed at the bottom of the legs and definitely were not going to be strong enough. We also were seeing some very serious crowning and rolling of the edges of the plywood either from them coming warped or from being stored on the floor raised on 2x4’s

So we are revising and revamping our table pouring plans as we speak.

We also ran into an issue with the colors. All of the samples came out too dark for what the “client” wants so we are searching for a pre-mixed color alternative. This will wind up being more expensive, but its important to get the color right since the counter will be around a while. This is a big lesson learned for us. Agreeing on a color is a big deal and something that needs to be done up front so that getting materials in is not a critical path item that slips schedules.

We are still hoping for a pour date of December 26th, but we’ll have to see if that works. So far we are one day behind our schedule and don’t know what out color will be or how long the material will take to get here.

The one bright spot from yesterdays adventures was that we worked some with the wet polisher on the samples and it makes for an incredible finish on the concrete. The aggregate comes up super easy and looks really beautiful and the surface polishes to a glass like finish. It pays to have the right tools. I wish we had some pictures of Jessie soaking wet after polishing up the samples, but the camera was absent from most of our work yesterday. We’ll take some pictures today, promise.

--Tom

Re-zult!

2009-12-18T11:39:00.001-05:00

Fine, I admit it, we are awesome.

New sink with plumbing fixtures installed, functioning, and not leaking. The faucet will have to be removed temporarily when we install the concrete so it can be mounted on the top of the counter.

Pretty new drains installed by master plumber, Tom. I’m sorry to say that I don’t have any plumber butt pictures to show you.

There were only 1001 steps to get to this point. But let’s see how we did with the goals we set:

1) Return the kitchen sink and counters to a usable state in two days.

Check! Finished by 3:00 pm on day 2.

2) Go to the hardware store no more than three times.

Check! Only went to the store twice. We have a bunch of stuff to return, but we’ll have to go anyway to buy materials for the next step.

3) No crying allowed (though whimpering while rocking back and forth in the fetal position is okay).

Check! Although Tom slipped while screwing in some framing and drilled my hand instead. No crying, but much swearing.

4) Not call a plumber for help.

DAMN IT. Failed. The hot water shut off valve didn’t work at all. Tom tried to change it out, but it wouldn’t budge and we were afraid that we would bust a pipe. So, a plumber was called and he fixed it in less than an hour to the tune of $89 plus parts. Gah!

To fit the 3/4” plywood on the counter, I used my father-in-law’s table saw across the street and sherpa’d the piece across the street to my brother-in-law’s house. It’s heavier than it looks.

Then we had to route a channel in the plywood so the sink would sit flush on the counter.

I got jiggy with the jig saw to cut out the sink opening.

I also popped the concrete out of the forms and set them up at the house with some of the coordinating items in the kitchen. These are the three samples using increasing concentrations of the “buff” color. Our favorite one is the middle sample.

Same thing, but using a “terra cotta” color. I think these turned out too reddish to use in this kitchen, but I like the color.

After we were relaxing yesterday afternoon, Tom just bounded out of the recliner and RAN to the front door for no apparent reason. He returned with our new wet polishing tool that we need to make the concrete smooth & shiny. He had checked the UPS tracking online and it said “delivered to doorstep.” This tool will require a bit of practice on our samples before we dive in to the real thing, especially since the instructions are of no help as they have been badly translated from their original language. This is how we are supposed to replace the grinding wheel:

“Simple wheel replace: accroding (sic) to inch/metric screw track offload/install grinders or cutting wheel with the face spanner.”

Huh? Good thing we are mechanically inclined.

-Jessie

More Counters… and Sinks

2009-12-16T22:53:00.001-05:00

Well with two days of leveling and re-framing cabinets to take concrete I would be very happy to never see a bubble level again. We have been busy however as the following video documents.

If your reading via email you can check out the video here. I’ll give special thanks to anybody who can tell me where I set down that Philips screwdriver after you watch the video.

--Tom

Part 3 – Plumbing Prep

2009-12-15T18:54:00.001-05:00

I think I’d like to see the following question posed to readers of a home improvement, DIYDS (do-it-your-damn-self) magazine:

What most closely describes your feelings regarding home plumbing projects?

a) Abject misery

b) There’s always something that goes wrong

c) They take way longer than anticipated

d) They’re a great way to completely f*** up a weekend

e) All of the above

f) Oh Jessie, you silly moron, plumbing projects are easy and fun if you aren’t functionally retarded

While I do admit to being a complete moron, I still bet that 99% of respondents will choose option E. And so it will likely go with our next step in creating concrete countertops.

Existing sink

The new shiny sink is deeper and the drains are in the back of the basins rather than the middle.

So, out with the old sink and in with the new. All we have to do is move the garbage disposal to the other side of the dual basin sink, move the p-trap, lower everything by 3 1/2” (because the new sink will be mounted UNDER the counter), install a new sink & faucet, and possibly move a shut off valve if it conflicts with the garbage disposal. Easy, no?

This little project is further complicated by the water filtration system (big blue tank).

Oscar, the most excellently large cat, was most excellently unhelpful while sorting through instructions. (Ladies – I know you’re impressed by Tom actually reading instructions, but let me tell you, he’s just looking at the pictures).

We have measured, assessed, reassessed, planned, schemed, sketched, computer modeled, calculated, consulted, bought way too many parts, and achieved new high scores in mental 3d Tetris. Tomorrow we begin with actual work. Our goals are to:

1) Return the kitchen sink and counters to a usable state in two days.

2) Go to the hardware store no more than three times.

3) No crying allowed (though whimpering while rocking back and forth in the fetal position is okay).

4) Not call a plumber for help.

Oh yes, our engineer blood still runs thick. I drew some scale drawings to make sure the shut off valve will still be accessible with the new garbage disposal location. Tom sat next to me on the laptop drawing a computer model in Google SketchUp.

Can it be done? Will we achieve the ever-elusive state of plumbing bliss and enlightenment or will we be filing for divorce in the near future?

-Jessie

Concrete Countertops: Day 2 – Demo and Prep

2009-12-15T01:00:00.001-05:00

So with our samples poured and curing it was time to do some prep of the counters themselves. My brother took some time off to help us get through some of the heavy lifting, but had to channel the Hulk before he could start

We started by taking off the existing counter tops and Peter followed that up with taking down the tile backsplash around the kitchen.

After getting the existing counters removed we started working on supplemental framing and getting everything level to put on 3/4 inch plywood for a substrate that will go under the counter.

The 3/4 in. will provide load distribution for the counters weight and a clean level surface to place the counters on. The plywood that we got was a bit warped so Peter provided a “counter weight” so we could nail the counters in place to try and take the bow out of them.

We finally got all of the plywood in place and much of the counter is ready for countertops. Here is the end of the day hijinks, lead by Jessie of course.

--Tom

New Project – Concrete Countertops

2009-12-13T21:11:00.001-05:00

Merry Christmas to us – we are building concrete countertops for Tom’s brother while we are in Arizona. Prepare yourself for a Steiger step-by-step, how-to, oh-shit-we-really-screwed-up, oh-wait-it’s-not-as-bad-as-we-thought diary of events over the next few weeks (or months if it goes badly and then it might become a blog about tile or Formica).

This is the existing kitchen that we are working with. The plywood counter on the left used to be the white tile you see on the rest, but it has already been demo’d there.

We decided that our first step should be making 8”x8”x2” samples for some colors that are available at the local hardware store, Sutherland’s. We used some table saw action on a 12” x 8’ x 3/4” melamine bookshelf to make the pieces for each of our 6 test molds.

Always fans of good site organization, here is the Team Steiger prep table for the ensuing mess. I geeked out earlier and calculated exactly how much we would need of each material to fill each test box – 11 pounds of dry concrete, 20 to 54 milliliters of liquid pigment (depending on which shade we were going for, and 2 cups of water.

Here is the loverly dry concrete mix. The aggregate was a prettier array of color than we imagined, so it will be interesting to see what they look like when polished. This 80 pound sack of 5000 Plus High Strength Concrete by Sakrete runs about $5 at Home Depot.

I scavenged some liquid medicine delivering devices to measure out the volume of color. The color is pretty thick, so this process ended up not being so scientific. Still, I felt like I should have a lab of beakers and increase my usage of the word “titrate.”

The pigment mixed with the water was fairly intense. As you might guess, this color is called terra cotta.

The concrete mix for countertops is not flowable like you see when it’s rolling down the chute of a concrete truck. We just picked it up by the handful and packed in the form. Then we banged the box on the table to consolidate the material.

We screeded the top with a scrap of 2 x 4, then troweled the top to make a smooth-ish finish. When we make the real countertop, it will be flipped upside down so that the troweled area will be the bottom of the counter. Interesting side note – spell check doesn’t recognize screeded or troweled – I’m not sure why these actions can be performed only in the present tense.

And voila! We will let these little buggers cure for 4 days and then pop them out of the forms. If one of the colors is acceptable, then we will plow forward and start on the real kitchen. These samples will become our guinea pigs for finishing techniques and then likely be cast into the yard as weird pavers.

-Jessie

Fare Thee Well

2009-12-10T13:30:00.001-05:00

Well, we started our 1100 mile drive to Arizona this morning. We are meeting Tom’s family in his home town of Sierra Vista for the holidays. It will be nice to see family we haven’t seen since March, but we also had to say good bye to our new family in Guinda, California.

Mud slinging, father-daughter duo, Steve & Mari.

Meg, Tom, & Steve, finishing up the wall in the above photo.

We lived with Steve & Meg in their unfinished house, ate our meals together, and shared our little lives for about a month. I experimented using their wood stove to make it multi-task to cook our dinners.

We got to know their friends and their daughters, Mari & Annie. This photo is at Trinidad Beach outside Eureka when we visited Mari & her boyfriend, Noah.

Tom, Annie, and Sarah finishing up the third corner of the house. Craziness tends to set in at the end of a non-stop plaster day.

Ahhh yeah – a little Texas Hold’em in our home on wheels. Lacking proper poker chips, we used a box of Steve’s tile spacers. Not bad in a pinch.

Meg, Steve, Mari, Annie – thanks for adopting us and being open to having crazy strangers just show up on your doorstep begging to be put to work. We love you guys and hope to see you again soon.

-- Mix Master Jessie

Eureka, I found it… and Arcata

2009-12-06T20:40:00.001-05:00

We’ve spent the weekend hanging out in Eureka and Arcata in Humboldt county on the northern coast of California. Its been a fun weekend visiting with new friends here and getting to know the two towns. Arcata has Humboldt State University in it and the two towns have a kind of funky hippie feel to them. Quite cool actually.

The north coast is beautiful with a lot of Redwood groves and varied scenery. We saw nice mountain regions, forests, rain forest and coastal beaches. Everything you could want.

We also took a quick trip out to Willow Creek to the farm that Annie a friend of ours lives at and got fresh right from the field cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli and pumpkins. Its going to be a great salad.

Speaking of food, Noah, one of the folks that we are staying with, made homemade Manicotti for dinner last night and we had fresh Dungeness crab the night before for dinner… the food alone makes this an interesting place to consider living.

--Tom

Why I Like to Play with Mud

2009-12-03T21:51:00.001-05:00

While we’ve been spending our time plastering walls these last few weeks, I’ve been thinking about why we like to play with mud. It certainly isn’t glamorous and it’s downright uncomfortable sometimes – our hands are chapped and dried out from the clay, we constantly plunge our hands into cold buckets of water or plaster, little pieces of straw get wedged under our fingernails, our backs ache, our muscles are sore, it’s dusty, etc., etc.

So, why go through all the trouble? For me, I get the sense I am creating something out of nothing. We are using dirt from the site, some sand, chopped up straw from a few bales, and water to create the exterior surface of the house. Imagine siding your house in $100 worth of raw materials. What a novelty to create your own building materials basically for free. I imagine that eating vegetables from your own garden has a similar amount of satisfaction. It’s like every time I smear a handful of plaster on the wall, it’s a little step closer to being self-sufficient. Like I’m a toddler again telling my parents “No! I want to do it myself!”

It’s also a very forgiving medium to work with. It’s easy to fix mistakes and it’s low tech. We really just eyeball the wall surface to make sure it’s plumb – this will leave some variations in the finish, but who cares? It’s supposed to look hand-made (not shitty hand-made like my junior high pottery class) but more artsy. There’s just so much texture in every handful of plaster – squishy, gritty, slippery, cool, moist, fibrous – unlike anything I’ve touched before and it just feels good in my hands.

Does that make any sense or do you still think we’re nuts?

--Jessie

We are still alive… promise…

2009-11-28T12:58:00.001-05:00

I know, I know. All of you were probably getting worried that we were captured by a radical right wing northern California militia or something, but have no fear. We are safe, sound and although a bit tired very happy. We have been working pretty furiously doing final finish earthen plaster on a straw bale house in the Capay Valley in California. The project has been awesome and Meg has let Jessie and I kind of take over the exterior finish part of the house so we have been in full project management, work day mode. We have 75% of the house plastered and are planning to get the last set of walls done this week.

I’ll be pulling together a couple of posts about some of the progress and a lessons learned post so we can remember later the good and bad of this project. In the mean time here is a small video of time lapse pictures we took while finishing the 3rd wall.

For those of you reading via email the video is available at this link.

--Tom

Will Build for Food

2009-11-19T00:08:00.001-05:00

Finally -- we found a natural building project to work on! Last spring, I posted on a straw bale listserv that we’d be willing to help on any natural building projects in exchange for a spot to set up our camper and food. It’s been almost 6 months since we’ve really gotten our hands dirty and we’ve been completely absorbed in building rather than, say, blogging.

Welcome to Meg & Steve’s straw bale hybrid home. What the heck does that mean? The middle section of the house with the redwood siding is built using conventional construction methods that you might find in any average house. The two wings of the house have a timber frame for the structure and straw bale walls that are in the process of being plastered by yours truly.

Here’s me doing some interior patching of the base coat of plaster. In straw bale walls, the actual bales are coated with a fairly rough coat of earth plaster (clay, sand, straw, water) about 2” thick.

The bedroom already has the finish plaster applied. Finish plaster uses the same ingredients, but the clay, sand, and straw have been sieved or chopped to be much smaller particles. Pigments can be added to achieve a wide variety of finish colors.

This is the basic view of the main living space (the bed is just in there temporarily). They have technically moved in, but they haven’t received their occupancy permit yet and will have to move all their stuff out before the final inspection. The whole house is about 1200 square feet with 2 bed/2 bath, but with this open room, it feels bigger to me.

Steve really did a beautiful job on the Japanese inspired wood work. This is just one of many pleasing details.

Here, Tom is patching some exterior base coat plaster that cracked at the window. I think he’s actually filling some of the void with some long straw that is dipped in slip, twisted up, and packed real tight into the wall. Slip is water with a little bit of clay mixed in. When it dries, it helps give those wads of straw a little bit of strength and they’ll maintain their shape.

The solar array on their shop is more than enough to supply all of their power. Their home is in the Capay Valley in northern California, about 90 minutes from Sacramento. We’re really loving being here right now as Meg & Steve are great people and they’re letting us just cut loose with any part of the construction that we’re willing to learn. We’ve experimented with some lime plaster, learned how to tile a shower, and tomorrow we’re going to start the finish plaster on the exterior.

We get to learn some new stuff – they give us a place to camp and feed us yummy food with lots of fresh fruits and veggies from the nearby organic farms. This is exactly what we need right now, so we’ll be staying for a few more weeks to help them finish up before their permit expires.

-Jessie

Fresh pumpkin pie and great people…

2009-11-15T12:26:00.001-05:00

We spent the weekend in Sacramento with Jessie’s cousin Wally and his family. It was a great weekend to come in since they were doing a Friends Thanksgiving on Saturday night. This is such a great concept where all of the friends get together and have a very low key potluck style Thanksgiving dinner before all of the family Thanksgiving festivities takes over.

We had a great time and got to meet some fun people. They had a blow up bounce house which all of the parents chipped in on to entertain the kids and it was a huge hit.

This is not our pie… images stolen from here

I decided to take on making a pumpkin pie since the couple that we have been working with the last week gave us a pie pumpkin when we left for the weekend. It turned out awesome. We got two pies out of the one 6-8” pumpkin and it was a big hit for desert. I have to say if I do this again I would make a fresh crust rather than a store bought once since I think it would finish the homemade taste up. We were having too good a time and didn’t grab the camera at all last night so no pictures. The one above is pretty close to how the pie came out. Overall the first shot at a homemade none canned pie was a success.

--Tom

World’s Finest

2009-11-08T12:41:00.001-05:00

So, here we are in Redding, California, home to not just one, not two, but THREE claims to the World’s finest things.

First, we have the World’s largest sundial. It’s actually a suspended pedestrian bridge over the Sacramento River and a mighty neat feature, if I do say so myself.

The deck of the bridge is made with translucent glass panels so as to not disturb the spawning salmon below by casting a huge shadow. That seems kind of fishy to me. Yes, I agree with you, I need some more coffee before I experiment with lame puns.

Here is Tom on the bridge ogling some fisherman. He just thinks that waders are so HOT – he really can’t help himself.

Which brings me to our next subject – the World’s largest fly shop. We briefly stopped at Mecca, but Tom restrained himself and didn’t buy too much. And, just in case some wise ass writes in and tells me about an even larger fly shop in Lower Slobobia, the guy at the counter said they’re the largest in the U.S and probably in the world.

Then, we’re driving down the highway one day, and I spot a billboard that says – “Greenest Hotel in the World.” What? How the heck do they measure that? First of all, it’s beige, not green. This claim seems a bit dubious to me, but they have all the green essentials – recycled materials, low flow fixtures, PV, and they don’t allow anyone to shave their armpits.

Back near the Sundial Bridge, there is an arboretum with a children’s play area. We liked these whimsical little huts simply made by weaving branches together.

Also in the children’s playground were these little tunnel things into a stand of bamboo. It seems Tom thinks he’s a bit smaller than he actually his, because he got a little bit stuck in here.

There is a tile mosaic fountain in the arboretum with all sorts of plants and animals embedded in it. Neat-o.

After two awesomely rainy days trying to explore Shasta-Trinity National Forest (which would be pretty sweet when dry), we gave up and headed west to Whiskeytown National Recreation Area for a hike up to Boulder Creek falls. Sadly, the falls were not made of whiskey.

A tight rope walker I am not meant to be. I am still excruciatingly slow at stream crossings. But, I have a pretty good track record of staying dry, so bite me.

Cool, pointy tree we saw at the arboretum. Can anyone identify this?

-Jessie

Green Eugene

2009-11-06T12:58:00.001-05:00

Jessie and I were both pretty impressed with Eugene when we passed through there. The area is scenic, the University gives the city a lot of energy, there is a strong focus on biking and alternatives to driving around, and it seems from the couple of days there that sustainability and alternative energy are a big focus of the city.

A shot of campus. There is a lot of green space around campus.

There were solar panels and solar hot water heating on a lot of the buildings. This in an area that is actually somewhat overcast a lot of the year. Below are a few shots of some of the alternative energy downtown.

This office building is covered with 269 solar panels. Assuming 100 watts each (and they are likely 200 watt panels) they are generating a peak of 2.7 kWatts of power.

This was kind of a dive looking apartment that had been burned out, but even it was covered with solar panels.

This is a combined residential and commercial space downtown. They have PV solar, hot water solar (the roof in this shot) and water cisterns for rain water recapture.

This is the PV array on the residential and commercial space.

Eugene is definitely in the running as a new place for us to live. The one major problem that we have is jobs. Unemployment is around 10% in the city and doing some cursory searches there were not a lot of jobs that jumped out as being up our alley’s. We’re not ready to stop travelling yet at any rate so we will be keeping an eye on the Eugene area through the rest of our trip.

The University of Oregon campus was pleasant to spend time at. It has a lot of small green spaces spread around and the layout of the campus is walkable, but not cramped. We did a walking tour while we were there and realized its an easy campus to get around on without a car. In fact they discourage students living on campus from having a car. Here are some shots from around campus.

This is the new business college building. It has a beautiful atrium inside and those are solar panels for shade screen on the front.

This waterfall / sculpture was designed by a student who was losing her sight.

I think this was where the Computer Science department is located.

One of the smaller bike storage places on campus. I missed a shot of the one outside the largest lecture hall that can seat 550 students.

There are a few more pictures from our Eugene visit in the album here.

--Tom

Shasta

2009-11-04T15:58:00.001-05:00

Mt. Shasta is quite beautiful, but when I hear the word Shasta, I think of those stupid Fanta soda commercials. “Shasta, Shasta, don’t you wanta?”

However, this was our lovely little FREE campsite in Shasta-Trinity National Forest last night. You can just barely see the camper through the trees.

We were camped, perhaps illegally, in a pull out along a stream. We would have loved to sleep with the windows open to listen to the gurgling stream, but alas, it was way too cold. We both laid in bed this morning, under the comfort of down, waiting for the other person to get up first and start coffee.

Here I am cooking by headlamp to conserve battery charge. When we get to Arizona for Christmas, we are probably going to get a new battery that holds charge longer and hook ourselves up with solar panels. Now that the sun sets by 6, it’s a rather long period of time to entertain ourselves in the dark.

We have taken you up on your night time entertainment suggestions and went on a Wal-Mart scavenger hunt the other night (we also went to a U of O volleyball game in Eugene). When we were hunting up our items, I saw Tom and jumped around a corner to take a picture of him. This picture is not so funny, but Tom said there was a family behind me who was very confused by my actions and started looking at Tom like he was stealing stuff.

And here’s our baskets of goodies (Tom’s on top, mine on bottom). I dominated this challenge. We decided to give up when I was working on my last item to put away (ash tray filter) and Tom still had SIX of ten items to return to the shelves. All too easy (said in menacing Darth Vader voice).

-Jessie

Roller Derby

2009-11-02T17:51:00.002-05:00

I was flipping through a Eugene newspaper and found out that they have a roller derby team, the Emerald City Roller Girls. I think when we settle down, I want to be on a roller derby team. I just have to learn to skate, learn the rules, and increase my bad-ass factor. I also need a sweet name. In case you're not familiar with roller derby, the girls have names like Susan B. Agony, Agent Orange (for a chick with red hair), or Demi Gore.

I was trying to think of a name for me that incorporates Jessie/Jessica, red hair, or white skin. I'm not coming up with much yet. So far, I have Jessica Gimpson or Jesse Maims. Please send in some ideas so I can check this off my bucket list.

Vanna Fight?
White Lightning?

I don't know. I don't think my name ideas will strike fear into the hearts of many.

-Jessie

Go DUCKS…!

2009-11-01T14:08:00.001-05:00

Well this weekend we got to see what a college town in full football fever looks like. Combine that with the fact that it was Halloween and there was a lot of energy around campus and in downtown.

We couldn’t get tickets to the game since it was completely sold out, but we did walk over to the stadium and cruise through the parking lot to see what all was going on in the way of tailgating.

This is the team coming in on the busses. Everybody on the street kind of went wild cheering as they drove by.

It was pretty amazing watching the number of people who were walking, biking and driving into the stadium. At 2:30 PM there was a constant flow of people coming in wearing their green and gold.

The tailgating was going on furiously when we walked around. I am always amazed at what gets brought in for tailgating. Tables, grills, whole smorgasbords' of food… that level of dedication is impressive. I tried Kinnear-ing some pictures during our walk through, but I suck at it miserably so most of them didn’t come out.

I did get a decent shot of the whole parking lot. Ducks fan’s like their football.

Shortly after this the big nasty rain cloud you can see opened up and dumped on everyone. It was a soggy walk back to campus. Apparently the game was very good and the Ducks took home another win so I can only imagine what the party scene was like last night around campus.

--Tom

Eugene Oregon

2009-10-30T13:41:00.001-04:00

We’re spending a few days exploring the city of Eugene, Oregon. It’s a potential new final resting place :) for us so we figured we would give it a look. The city has about 200,000 people in the area and has the University of Oregon with around 25,000 students enrolled. It also is very bike friendly and has good fishing in the area, so its got a lot of what we are looking for in a new home.

We went to a lecture on campus last night for something to do so we could get out of the trailer. It was by a professor of physics, music and international relations. An unlikely combination you’re thinking… you might be right. The lecture included a very high level discussion of astral physics, Bach’s fugues and the social impacts of molecular biology. We both found the experience a bit disjointed and also had a difficult time with the strong Hungarian accent. His overall point was that we have advanced our knowledge of science and technology at a radically faster rate than we have our ethics. This combined with the accessibility of things like molecular biology to everyday citizens can have negative impact on society.

As I said the lecture wasn’t all that cohesive, but it was kind of fun, was free and is the kind of thing that we like about a college town. Always stuff like that going on.

The one complaint we have about the Northwest in general right now is the wetness. Its hard for things to dry out in a trailer when its like 95% humidity all of the time. It also makes for some very scary morning hair on Jessie’s part.

See what I have to wake up to every morning…

We are going to be taking a campus tour today so we might have some pictures for tomorrow… assuming the rain holds off still.

--Tom

Seattle and the Northwest…

2009-10-26T22:45:00.001-04:00

We just finished a nice weekend in Seattle hanging out with a friend of ours (Omri). We found a nice RV park close to downtown that had a pool, hot tub and a sauna which was pretty nice to take advantage of.

We went out to some cool bars, ate at some nice restaurants, ate too much sushi and did an enjoyable hike on Cougar Mountain (insert your own joke here).

We’re in Portland now for a few days and then we are headed south into Northern California and perhaps back into Utah for a bit. Its amazing how fast time flies… it seems like we just left AZ last spring and now we are 6 weeks from heading back that direction for Christmas.

Its good to be back on the road again and hopefully our adventure will get more entertaining again shortly. Sorry that we don’t have any pictures from Seattle… we were slacking on the camera carrying.

--Tom

Don’t Come a Knockin’….

2009-10-23T12:35:00.001-04:00

When we’re not camping at a campground, we have limited battery life to run lights for a long time. We can generally watch a movie or a few TV shows on the laptop, but that gets boring. There’s the obvious answer, but in the interest of preserving the suspension on our trailer, what else can we do now that it’s dark at night?

So, we’re soliciting ideas from the peanut gallery. In any random, generic town in the US, where can we go after dinner to entertain ourselves? Bonus points to people who come up with ideas that are free or cheap (say, less than $15). Let the creative juices start flowing!

-Jessie

Wrestlemania

2009-10-18T15:56:00.001-04:00

When I was a kid, I routinely kicked my brothers ass in parent-sanctioned wrestling matches.

My Dad was our unofficial wrestling coach. He taught us how to dig our chin into our opponents back, how to inflict maximum rug burn damage, full nelson’s, headlocks, etc. etc.

When puberty hit though – I was SCREWED. Josh had to make up for years of torture where I’d pin him down and perform Chinese torture on him. Sooooo, it’s possible, that I deserved this.

And this.

Here is Baby T playing with a balloon that just refuses to pop in Uncle Tom’s boots. Of course, “Uncle Tom” actually sounds like “Uhn Om” and he pretty much refused to say anything resembling “Jessie” until yesterday. We were trying to get him to say Aunt Jessie one night and something came out more like "Auntie Em” so my parents taught him to call me Toto instead which he can say perfectly. So, fantastic – I’m Aunt Toto. I’d love to hear any more stories on how bad nick names are born.

Ahhh, yeah, rockin’ out on the Wii. The toddler decided to show us up by working the guitar and mic. He just needs some sweet sunglasses to be totally bad ass.

Making some brownies with Grammy.

Babies have mad skills when it comes to eating messy foods. He actually looks a little drunk on chocolate.

Josh found this lame-o t-shirt in his closet. We made him impersonate Spiderman by pretending to swing from webs any time he moved around the house.

-Jessie

Decorating on a Budget

2009-10-13T17:58:00.001-04:00

My brother & his wife challenged us to decorate the outside of their house for Halloween on a $20 budget. Easy-peasy – check out what we accomplished over the last few days:

I admit – Tom is the creative genius behind the entire concept. Everyone else contributed but Tom was the mastermind.

The scarecrow head, witch head, and large spider were all made with 2 coats of paper mache over balloons.

Yeah, Tom, ummm, working the paper mache on the witch nose. He had a really good technique.

The finished witch is AWESOME and we made it practically for free. We made the broom from some sticks & straw, the old graduation robe was in their “tag sale” box, and the hat was from a garage sale for a quarter.

Amanda painted the face of the witch and it is just so cool.

I painted the face of the scarecrow and it’s just a *tad* more simplistic.

But I stuffed the scarecrow in all the right places, if you know what I’m saying.

Here, we’re adding some finishing touches to the spiders. Tom glued pieces from a metal pie tin to give the spider some bling.

Bad ass spidey comin’ to get’cha.

Little baby spiders surround the momma spider. These spiders are made from an egg crate pieces and strips from a cardboard paper towel roll. The web is a metal pie tin with pieces cut out of it.

Ahhh! Our creation revolts and we’re treated to a fang-tastic death.

This piece is all Tom. He free-handed the skeleton bones to make a stencil.

And a few ghosts to round out our display. The heads are held up with plastic milk jugs and the hands are golf balls.

They now have the most awesomely decorated house in the neighborhood. We ended spending closer to $40 -- $14 on straw bales, $2.50 at a garage sale for a BUNCH of stuff, $15 on spray paint & urethane, $4 at Goodwill, and $5 on some miscellaneous things. But who cares, right? The decorations should be reusable next year and they ROCK. Plus, we had a lot of fun building all this stuff. Christmas ideas are already brewing…

We could probably have our own TV show on TLC or something.

-Jessie

Sustainability… what does it mean to you?

2009-10-12T00:14:00.001-04:00

As most of you know part of Jessie’s and my reason for embarking on this trip was to expand our knowledge of how to live with less impact and more in harmony with the planet. When we have conversations about this or when we are talking about it with other people the word sustainability gets thrown around a lot. We often talk about wanting to live more sustainably, or how something is or isn’t very sustainable.

That got me thinking about what that word really means. Its a pretty good buzzword for the “green” movement, but I have a hard time really defining what the word means. Does it relate to being carbon neutral, energy efficient, locally sourced…etc? So I’ll put this out to all you blog readers out there, how would you define sustainability?

I’d like to solicit your thoughts in comments. If you read this through mail delivery please click on the posting and give us your thoughts.

One a somewhat related note there is an article about how straw bale housing fits into the UN’s 8 Millennium Development Goals as set out in 2000 at the following link. One of the main people referenced in the article, Laura Bartels, is a friend of ours who does amazing work with native American tribes around replacing FEMA trailers with straw bale homes. That pesky sustainable word shows up in the articles too as part of the “Achieving environmental sustainability” goal. Laura is an amazing person and her company Green Weavers Inc. does some very impactful work.

--Tom

We Can AlCan

2009-10-08T15:40:00.001-04:00

This blog title came from my Dad who is still giggling with himself about all the blog titles he can come up with. Tom is next to me rolling his eyes and saying, “seriously? You’re going to use that?” We are currently in Omaha, visiting my brother and my parents flew in from Connecticut for a little family reunion.

The fall colors through the mountains were spectacular.

But first, we had to drive down the AlCan and get ourselves into some warmer weather. We drove 2100 miles in 5 days – that’s not a ton of mileage everyday, but our transportation is a little slow on the uptake. They were still 10-12 hour days.

Wow. Tom just pulled “Racing River” out of his butt. I’m pretty sure he’s right though. Color me impressed.

Oh geez. Now my Dad is conniving on how he can get my 2 year old nephew into trouble so he can watch him have a time out. He thinks it is very cute & funny to see a little kid standing in a corner and crying. I’m gonna get in trouble for putting that in writing. That sounds worse than it is – my Dad loves his grandson more than anything and plays with him more than anyone else. But, it is funny to see a 2 year old get “disciplined.”

We have a series of pictures taken while driving over this mountain pass. There are some blurry branches in the foreground.

Anywho, we drove and drove and drove and finally reached our destination – Salmon Arm, British Columbia where we stayed at a friend’s cabin for a few days. It was an extraordinarily nice respite after all that time sitting on our asses, listening to audio books.

This is an old homestead (circa 1890’s) at 108 Mile House in British Columbia where we spent a night.

The homestead is still open to the public as a park and museum with a bunch of old farm equipment & tools. Who could pass up a shot of this giant chainsaw?

Our plan after the cabin was to drive for 2 more days to get to Portland, Oregon where we had a flight scheduled to get to Omaha. BUT, we were thwarted by – you guessed it – our truck. Im-pa-see-blay!!! We were getting everything ready to go the day before we were supposed to leave, and the engine started whining like a little bitch. And the brakes were acting up too. We absolutely did not want to drive 600 miles with unreliable brakes.

This rest stop is across the street from the homestead and was a very pleasant spot to spend the night. We watched the sun set eating our dinner of black beans & rice at a picnic table.

SooOOOO, we got on the phone with United and rearranged our tickets to fly out of Kamloops, BC and dropped our truck off at Toyota. We fly back to BC on Oct. 19 and then will have to drive into the U.S. – hopefully not on snowy roads.

We shall see……

-Jessie

Brrrrr

2009-10-02T13:41:00.001-04:00

Before we left good ole Squarebanks, we visited the Cold Climate Housing Research Center (CCHRC) to check out their state-of-the-art facility that opened in 2006. Built as a living laboratory, over 1000 sensors throughout the building monitor temperature, humidity, indoor air quality, foundation movement, and other important data-type stuff.

Along the driveway is a large solar array with several different types of solar panels. Although solar panels operate more efficiently at cold temperatures, there is hardly any sunlight in the winter to produce power. They produce quite well during the long summer days, but with a reduced demand for power, much of their output is wasted.

Large battery bank for the solar array.

If Alaska had a net-metering law, solar would make more sense, but you have to be really dedicated to the cause to spring for solar panels (most states have some form of a net-metering law – it basically requires electric utilities to roll back your electric meter while you’re producing excess solar power, effectively using the power grid as a battery bank).

Much of their research has gone into finding a cost-effective, energy efficient way to build houses for the cold climate. Most Alaskan houses have just been built the way they are in warmer climates and they simply don’t work well. This detail is what they are recommending for this climate – most of the insulation is rigid insulation on the exterior of the house and is outside the vapor barrier.

I realize this photo doesn’t look like much, but this is a small sewage treatment plant for the building. This building has about 25 staff and is not hooked up to the city sewer system and does not have a septic tank & leach field. The tank, from Lifewater Engineering, can be plopped on a concrete pad outside and works all winter long in HARSH climates (up to –60 F). A system for a small household (1-3 people) costs $14,000.

The building has 2 separate living roofs. This one, oddly on the north side of the building, has a ton of vegetables and flowers growing around the perimeter. The staff has lunches & harvest parties up here. Seems like a cool place to work -- “hey Bob, I’m gonna take a break and go thin the carrots.”

Just because it’s a research center, doesn’t mean there can’t be some artistic flourishes. This is just one of many decorative stair railings in the building.

There were many, many other innovative features to the building, but I didn’t take very good pictures that day. They are going for platinum LEED certification (which is the highest level) and the facility is just top-notch. If you live in Fairbanks, they give tours every Thursday at 2 pm for free and it was well worth the time. Their website also has a ton of information on the building and the research they’re doing.

Jessie

A Walk In The Park…

2009-10-02T12:42:00.000-04:00

So we are still doing some catch up on what we did while we were visiting in Anchorage. We took off one afternoon and went and walked around in the Bicentennial Park around Anchorage. The park is pretty big and has a ton of hiking trails in it. There was a section of trails that were closed due to bear activity in the park, but we didn’t see anything that didn’t go on two legs. The trail we walked was pretty amazing with the fall colors.

There were a ton of mushrooms out since it has been pretty rainy and I got some good detail pictures that I think came out pretty cool.

Terry and I had a good time playing with the GPS functions on his iPhone and google maps. It was amazing how accurate the locations were. We could literally watch ourselves walk along the trail as the GPS updated our position. Very geeky, but very cool.

--Tom

Spring Creek Farm…

2009-09-30T12:41:00.000-04:00

While we were in Anchorage we took a side trip to Palmer since we had heard there was a pretty active sustainability focused community there. We didn’t really know where we were going and didn’t really have any place specific to visit. Jessie, through the power of the inter-web, found Spring Creek Farm which is an organic farm outside Palmer that has a CSA, farm school, and works in coordination with the Alaska Pacific University doing masters program work. The farm was a pretty cool setup and we talked for a while with Steve Rubinstein who runs the farm with Anne-Corrine Kell.

The farm has a really cool farm school where they teach half-days of school for home-schooled kids that are focused on agriculture and outdoor lessons. The school has about 15 kids from kindergarten through 3rd grade ages. Its a really cool program and is used by a lot of the home schooling families in the area.

This is the farm school class room. Very cheerful

Jes and our guide Jenn talking about the farm school

The farm has three current greenhouses, one of which was creatively made out of recycled doors.

This greenhouse has a twin. The white tank allows the water to pre-heat before being put on the plants.

I love this greenhouse made from old doors… its speaks to me.

There is a huge new greenhouse being built on the property which they are hoping to get 3 season growing out of. The greenhouse is being set up to have a lot of alternative technologies in use. The front of the greenhouse is almost all clear story and there are some plans to use water stored in the greenhouse and hot air generated from solar gain to heat the beds that the plants are on.

This is the big new greenhouse being built.

Another shot of the greenhouse – all of the angle space will be glass to absorb the sun.

The main function of the farm is a CSA that feeds 40 families shares of organic vegetables. The CSA plot was beautiful even fairly late in the season.

The crops in the CSA

More CSA crops.

I have no idea what kind of flower this is, but I thought it was nice looking.

The whole operation was very cool and we had a great time looking around. Our tour guide Jenn was incredibly generous with her time and took us around for several hours with no notice. We can’t say thank you enough.

--Tom

The Port of Anchorage and Coca Cola

2009-09-28T12:45:00.001-04:00

I know your thinking, what do these two things have in common. Well, honestly… nothing. We are playing a little catch up on what has been going on in Alaska for us over the last few weeks and I wanted to talk about a couple of small adventures we had in Anchorage.

Jessie and I have been challenging ourselves to find free or cheap fun stuff to do wherever we are since we don’t have an income. While we were in Anchorage one morning Jessie started googling around for stuff to do and discovered that the Port of Anchorage has a free tour that they run once and hour on Saturdays during the summer to raise public awareness of what goes on at the port. Best of all they give you lunch while you are there… free lunch… oh, yeah!

The Port is undergoing a huge expansion where they are filling in some massive amount of the tidal and non-tidal areas and putting in new piers, docks…etc. The following is a picture of the construction stolen from their website not taken by us.

The tour was pretty cool. They bus you into the port and talk about how much goes through there. Something like 90% of goods sold in Alaska come through the port, so if the port shut down, all of the stores in Alaska would pretty much be out of inventory in like 4 days. Obviously, port security is pretty big here.

There are two major shipping companies that work through the port, one that drives their containers on via trucks and one that loads them in big stacks via cranes. Apparently the trucks are faster to load and unload, but the crane operation can hold somewhat larger container counts. Here are a couple of shots of the container ships.

The crane on and off ship setup.

The roll on and off operation in the background. You can just make out a white tractor trailer container coming off the ship.

After we had done the port thing we somehow started talking about the Diet Coke and Mentos thing, and Jessie and I were amazed that the kids had not been exposed to this. So of course a trip to the store for some Diet Coke and Mentos was in order. We started with small 20oz bottles and then worked our way up to 2 liters. We also tried to do a rocket from one of the 2 liters, but it was a total dud so no good pictures from that.

Terry and Muskrat getting ready to set off a fountain

Dueling fountains and the ensuing slurpage

The two liter was a big hit!

The boys thought it was great fun to try and drink from the Diet Coke as it was fountaining up from the bottles… who are we to stop creativity. :) We did this previously with our nephews in DC and it was as much fun as I remembered, albeit still as sticky as I remember also.

--Tom

These are the people in my neighborhood…

2009-09-26T14:24:00.000-04:00

So, we were effectively stranded for over 11 weeks which drastically changed our plans for visiting Alaska. We are SOOOOO thankful that this happened in a place where I grew up, Tom went to school and we know a bunch of people who were willing to help us out6

John & Vanessa who let us park the trailer in their driveway, use their bathroom & laundry room, and opened their house to us for almost 3 months. My brother and their son were best friends for much of their childhood. They’ve been on multiple vacations with my parents.

Jeff Yauney (Tom’s old boss), towed our trailer for us once we arrived in Fairbanks and hooked Tom up with a 2 week contracting gig.

Tom’s sister Tiffany, Kyle, Chelsea, & Cameron who had us stay at their house for 3 1/2 weeks. Cameron gave up his room for us and slept on an air bed.

Rolf & Heather gave me something to do by working on their home design. Rolf also towed our trailer for us once and we had many great meals at their house. This was our first time meeting Heather and she was so easy to be friends with. Their 2 year old daughter has a crazy infectious laugh – I dare you not to smile when she’s laughing.

Sally & Michael who let us stay at their house our first week in town (with 2 small kids, another visitor, and a dog).

Sally’s parents, Fred & Claudia. We spent a day at their house helping frame up a new barn. I spent MANY weekends there from 6th-9th grade. They’re like my runner-up parents.

James Schropp is an old co-workers of Tom’s from UAF. James & his girlfriend treated us to an awesome dinner at a Cuban restaurant with Russian wait staff that do not speak English. Our orders were terribly screwed up, but we still had a great time.

Gloria, Anna, & Chuck provided us with much entertainment while in Juneau.

Arlayne Knox (Tom’s sisters husbands step mother –what?) who loaned us her car while she was out of town.

Jim Loftus, my old boss, let me set up shop in the office for a day and use some books from his library.

Cori Arnold, who was in town visiting a friend, and got together with us for lunch.

Holly & Terry who were available for last minute visits & let us stay in their house for quite some time.

Michelle Curtis (friend from high school) who hooked us up with her parents in Tok after we broke down.

Peggy (referred to as Aunt Peggy) who was Tom’s mom’s roommate at UAF. She provided open doors, yummy meals with way too much food, and a comfy couch for movie watching.

Anyone who is reading (especially commenting) on our blog. It’s quite fun to get blog comments and often makes us laugh.

If you’ve read this far, I understand this isn’t the most interesting post we’ve written. But since we’ve intentionally stripped ourselves of so many things – jobs, house, and all the stuff that goes with them, our community of friends fills in any gaps that they left behind. During our travels, we’ve stayed with over a dozen different people (some complete strangers) and are just so thankful for everyone who has participated in our journey.

Jessie

On the Road Again

2009-09-25T10:41:00.001-04:00

Okay, we ACTUALLY, FINALLY, UNEQUIVOCALLY, have our truck back and are heading south this morning. Ginormous thanks to everyone who helped entertain and house us while we were in Alaska.

Nice sunset illuminating the UAF Museum.

Jessie

The S word…

2009-09-23T12:52:00.001-04:00

Yup, its official. We have now overstayed our time in Alaska. First snows of the season started last night. Admittedly its a light snow and shouldn’t stick, but still… snow and travelling in a trailer are not highly compatible.

Yup, that is snow. It would be pretty if it wasn’t so inconvenient

Luckily I winterized the trailer last night so our plumbing should be fine. It does however make it a serious pain in the butt living in the trailer right now since we have to use water containers and capture all of our waste water so the flush tanks don’t freeze. We wound up moving into John and Vanessa’s basement last night. Once again I can’t imagine how this would have gone without friends and family around. Here’s hoping the truck gets back to us soon.

There was a visit by two young moose yesterday afternoon, which was pretty cool. I got what I think are a couple of good shots of them.

Moose got hops… moose can jump like 6 foot fences, so this was nothing

Moose hanging out at Vanessa’s outdoor buffet.

--Tom

Missing Our Friends

2009-09-22T15:17:00.001-04:00

Before we left Anchorage, we went to a magical place called Bouncing Bears. It is a large warehouse space filled with various bouncy things you see at carnivals, BUT……

Adults are allowed!! Awwww, yeah. When all four adults got on this bouncing pillow, it was moving so much that none of the kids could actually stand up. You can see them behind us impersonating dead fish.

The vertical punching bag things were awesome just to run and dive into. I did this many, many times. I would totally have a birthday party at a place like this.

However, this obstacle course one totally did me in. Down a slide, not too hard (except for the extreme wedgies – yow-zah!).

But then you have to crawl through tunnels and SQUEEZE through these ridiculous contraptions. When you pay to use this facility, you get a 2 hour session for about $6. After the first half hour, we were looking at the clock all bug-eyed going, “it’s only been 30 minutes!” Oh yes, we were already getting tired. Bouncing around constantly is a tough business.

It looks like Tom is pushing me over here, but it’s equally likely that I just fell. I had slippery socks.

What a grand idea for a business. Does something like this exist in the D.C. area? If not, someone should start a franchise. Although, there is a high concentration of lawyers there which may be a bad idea. Get yourself some good insurance.

This photo was taken from our friends’ deck. I’ve seen lots of moose, but I don’t think I’ve seen a moose with a magpie roosting on its rump.

And poor Holly – a teacher outnumbered by three engineers. While putting away leftovers, she grossly underestimated the spaghetti so we mocked her and took pictures. I am thankful she is a good sport and likes to laugh more than she likes to be right. =)

We will miss them very much. This is the longest we’ve seen them since college and it was very sad to drive away.

In other news – still stuck in Fairbanks with snow in the forecast over the next few days. We are winterizing our water system today so pipes don’t freeze. We’re hoping to have the truck back in a few days but I’ve said that many times and been wrong. This sucks to be stuck here still.

Jessie

She’s a Steiger… yar!

2009-09-18T06:00:00.000-04:00

AUTHORS NOTE – If you want the full effect you can see this post as a video blog here or if you’re reading on-line embedded below:

Ahoy, today is bloggin challenge round doncha know! You landlubbers may be too daft to know, but today is both Wench… err Wife Appreciation Day and also Talk Like a Pirate Day, yar.

So the old cannon ball and chain committed me to writ’n a post’n about how exceptional she be while keeping to the piratical vernacular! That which follers be said same…

So about the wench as which has afor to now commissioned this same said posting. She’s truly more lovely to me than a galleon sunk low the water with bullion and not but a handkerchief and a parasol to protect itself. She has a voice more enchanting than the crack of a cannon twerd the broadside of an ill protected merchant marine.

Avast, she brings me more joy than days of shore leave with a full purse and a port full of loose wenches… err… I mean flowing ales. She surely shivers me timbers like no other… if you know my meanin. For me fruit cures scurvy no better than her kiss. Truly I say, I would sail the river Styx with a host of the dead and pry treasure for Davie Jones locker itself it if would buy me one more hour in the presence of my best wench and first mate.

Now I’ll be shoving off and wish you strong winds and broadsides to the navy ships as I hoist a flaggen to wives everywhere. Your lot is hard, may your men be harder, YARRRR!

-Black Heart Tom

Oh the freaking humanity…

2009-09-16T19:01:00.001-04:00

Just when it seemed that everything was coming together and we were going to be able to get out on the road again… the truck has some more problems.

The engine sounded a little bit rough when we got the truck back, but we figured it was just us being over sensitive since the engine self destruct of ‘09. However, in the 1200 miles of break in that we drove, it did not get better. So when we went in Tuesday for the last oil change I asked them to try and figure out what the noise was. After a day of diagnostics they asked us to bring the truck back on Thursday so their major engine guy can take a look at it. The suspicion (which lines up with what a friend of ours in town thought from listening to the engine) is that the valve clearances are off and need to be adjusted.

That doesn’t sound so bad… err… except that in order to change the valve clearances, the cam belt train (or something) has to be removed and then new shims have to be ordered. The words “shims need to be ordered” makes me shiver since that is one of the things that had to be done several times the original time, and every cycle takes around 3 days to get here.

Oh well, we will find out for sure what the story is tomorrow, but realistically we aren’t going to get headed south until middle to end of next week. The fall colors are here in force and time is not on our side to get out before it gets so cold that travelling in the trailer is very unpleasant. Jessie says she is feeling like Vizzini from Princess Bride… “Inconceivable!” -- “You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means.”

From Hotel Alaska (you can check in, but you can never leave)…

The Steigers

Rent

2009-09-15T21:48:00.001-04:00

So, where have we been parking our trailer all this time we’ve been stuck in Alaska?

In the driveway of family friends – since July 13. They are good friends. My brother and their son were in karate together around 2nd grade so I’ve known them most of my life. My parents have vacationed with them even after my brother crashed their snow machine (ugh, snow mobile to anyone in the lower 48) into a tree. We have been using a bathroom in their basement and using the laundry room on and off for the two months we’ve been here. Since we’re not really in the business of free-loading, we took on a little landscaping project as a rent payment.

This “walkway” leads from the basement exterior door out into the garden. An attempt was made several years ago to build a walkway out of repurposed field stones, but it quickly became a lively habitat for weeds.

We ripped out and excavated the old walkway, installed edging & filter cloth, shoveled a bunch of sand, and re-laid all of the stones. Tetris-savant Tom was in charge of stone layout.

I channeled my inner archaeologist and spread a cementitious grout product between the stones. Once the dry grout is in place and any excess is swept off the stones, the whole area is wetted several times to activate the cement.

Voila, the finished product. I am standing on a stair that we also built (see previous photo).

We are fairly happy with the end product, but some of the smaller, thinner stones wiggle a little bit when you walk on them (you can see the small gaps between the stone & the mortar). I don’t think there is a way to correct this unless we had actually set the stones in concrete. The grout product we used is firm when you touch it (that’s what she said) but is springy and doesn’t really lock the stones together. The larger, heavier stones seem to be doing fine.

Anyways, we’ve been in their driveway for quite some time and this was our way of saying thank you. It has been an enormous relief to have a safe, quiet, and FREE place to live while we were stranded. Its difficult to properly express how much we appreciate this. Thanks John and Van.

Jessie

Fall Has Fallen

2009-09-12T12:13:00.000-04:00

Last Sunday, we drove up to the Glen Alps area of Chugach State Park (only about 20 minutes from the house) and went on a little hike.

This area is high enough that I believe the terrain is considered sub-alpine. The foliage is noticeably different on the drive up the hill.

Yeah, you know you want tickets to this gun show. The kids were very excited about the prospects of a real gun show, but then I explained it was only a saying about their muscles – much disappointment ensued.

Here’s a fairly clear view looking north at the Alaska range. The tallest peak in the center is Mt. Denali and I believe the 2nd tallest is Mt. Foraker. FYI – these mountains are about 150 miles away. Must – buy – zoom lens. (If you zoom in on Picasa, you should get a better view).

Three year old entering a cool “cave” formed by some seriously wind blown hemlocks.

The weather was absolutely perfect – clear, sunny, maybe low 60’s. The parking lot was full, but I remember trying to go to Great Falls in the DC area on a nice day and turning around because there were too many damn people. This isn’t really a problem in Alaska.

I am trying to think of something funny or at least anecdotal about the day, but I’m not coming up with anything. We had a good time just enjoying the scenery and the company – not too much to write home about I guess. So I’ll sign off with a quote of the week:

“I have to poop but my butt is jammed.”

-- Uhh, anonymous 7 year old Alaskan boy

Our Poor Neglected Dust Covered Blog

2009-09-11T16:04:00.001-04:00

Or so says Tim Belcher via a Facebook comment.

Yes, yes, we’ve been neglecting our blog duties. It’s hard to live vicariously through us if we’re not sharing the details, eh? It’s just that we came up to Alaska primarily to visit our best friends in Anchorage, and due to our truck troubles, we have a very brief visitation window. It’s been hard to make ourselves sit at the laptop with our fingers on home row when we could be doing fun stuff with our friends. You understand, yes?

Last weekend, we went to the Alaska State Fair in Palmer. The weather was AWESOME and it was crazy crowded by the time we left.

I was going to try & buy this sweet bedazzled swimsuit, but it wasn’t my size.

Star fish, anemones, and sea creatures, oh my. The Sea Life Rescue Center had a little touch tank.

Dad – Check out the cool antique tractors! You know you want one.

This alpaca had just spit at a little kid who got too close. It was gross, but oh so funny.

This 17 month old, 950 pound pig had just given birth the previous night. There were 11 piglets all jostling around for her ginormous teats. The piglets were kinda cute with their little curly wagging tales and waddling around.

The Matanuska Valley grows some huge vegetables thanks to all the sunlight. This pumpkin clocks in at 594 pounds and is slowly being crushed by its own weight.

I’m not even sure how one would use 83 pounds of rutabaga -- “Hey kids, would you like some more rutabaga pancakes?” “Drink the rest of your rutabaga juice.” “Rutabaga ice cream, anyone?”

And the new World Record Holder in cabbage – 127 pounds. That’s a lot of borscht.

If you split Alaska in half, then Texas would be the third largest state. In the long, cold, dark winters, it’s fun to think of ways to torment Texas.

Jessie

Hope

2009-09-05T21:38:00.001-04:00

Welcome to Hope, Alaska.

Pretty, no? We met up with Holly’s parents there to celebrate the 7 year old’s birthday – he likes to be called Maverick (yes, after Top Gun) so we’ll just go with that to protect the identities of the innocent.

The day was most excellently lovely, as you can see in the pictures, but if I could just make the blog scratch-n-sniff, then you could truly appreciate the experience.

The smell of rotten fish permeated into the very depths of our nasal passages. I wish we would have had a video camera with us to capture a fish so teeming with maggots that you could HEAR the maggots jostling around for the best flesh. NAS-TEE. We quickly moved on to another area nearby that wasn’t a fish graveyard.

This is Resurrection Creek in Chugach National Forest. No dead fish = good in my opinion.

Everyone tried their hand at fishing and everyone was unsuccessful. No injuries by errant hooks reported.

Three generations of Alaskans fishing the same creek. Happy Birthday Maverick!

And this is why I love my eagle scout husband. I expressed a desire to have a grilled turkey & cheese sandwich for lunch and Tom fashioned a home made panini maker out of willow branches for me. You know you’re jealous of his mad skills.

And I’d like to take this opportunity to announce the grand opening of ZINK’s Panini Makers. On sale now for only $20. Act now and we’ll include a hand made marshmallow roaster AND hot dog cooker absolutely free! Money back guarantee! Shipping and handling is $29.95.

Jessie

South Central Alaska

2009-09-01T12:11:00.001-04:00

We are now happy hanging out in south central Alaska. The truck has seen around 600 miles of highway travel and its been running well. We drove down to Anchorage where our friends Terry and Holly have graciously opened their home to us. They have two boys (3 and 7) and its a blast hanging out with them. Not to mention I am learning more about airplanes and transformers than I ever thought you could.

A classic game of bone crusher

We went down to the inlet and did some hiking with the kids. As part of some strange Zen ritual Holly made me carry rocks back to the car… not sure why everyone else didn’t have to but I just hummed “Ohhhmmmm” and moved out.

Have rocks, will travel

There were some really cool clay deposits on the beach. Maisy (the pooch) spent hours chasing a tennis ball into the water and back, she could not have been happier.

We are heading out to Palmer today which is a bit north of Anchorage. Its supposed to be a cool community that has a fair number of those sustainable and green nut jobs hanging around, so we are going to look for them. The other plus side is that the Alaska State Fair is there so we expect to have some good people watching at least part of the time.

For all you knitters out there Holly has an awesome knitting blog here and chronicles the going on of Bubba and Muskrat also.

Its nice to have our own wheels again and we’ll probably be posting more frequently now since we are back out doing stuff again.

--Tom

50 Days Later

2009-08-28T12:33:00.000-04:00

Is this a blog about a bad zombie movie idea I have? Maybe. Keep reading.

We FINALLY got our truck back!! I would Toyota jump at that, but I’m not that happy with Toyota. I guess I will Lucky Charm kick instead since I currently don’t have a beef with them.

This process took over 7 whole weeks. What were they doing all that time? I’m going to attempt a breakdown:

Week 1: Diagnose problem, get approval by corporate, order parts.

Week 2: Wait for parts since “2nd day air” is not in their vocabulary.

Week 3: Install parts and realize diagnosis missed some crucial parts. Re-order and re-wait.

Week 4: Do nothing. Playing hard to get drives the ladies wild.

Week 5: Break new part that came in. Re-order and re-wait. Still haven’t learned about modern day shipping methods.

Week 6: Dangle yummy food in front of customer, dragging the drooling fools along, promising every day that it should be ready “real soon.”

Week 7: Build some sort of Rube Goldberg-esqe machine out of truck parts to fry an egg on a dismantled engine.

Day 50: Reassemble everything and finally return vehicle to customer.

The icing on this cake of engine failure is that we have to drive the truck 500-1000 miles of easy driving to break the engine in. That means no towing. We’re going to drive to Anchorage to visit our friends and just leave the trailer in Fairbanks until mid-September when we plan to start heading south.

Still, we are uber thankful that this was all covered under warranty since the grand total covered by Toyota was almost $16,000 -- $10k for parts, $4k for labor, $1500 for towing, $500 for rental car. We are also thankful that we broke down for 7 weeks where we have friends and family. We have driven though many isolated shit holes that we could have been stranded in.

Now, about this zombie movie idea…

Jessie

Things I Love About Alaska

2009-08-27T15:13:00.001-04:00

We’ve seen some things recently that I haven’t seen in the last 10 years. When I drive past them, I think “ahhhh, I love my quirky home state.”

We’ve seen way too many of these setups. I was only able to snap a shot of one, but I assure you, there are several in this small town. Good news – this one’s for sale.

There is a classic Alaskan bar halfway between Fairbanks and Nenana:

You think Dick even knows what p.c. stands for?

Just outside Fairbanks on the way to Anchorage, this was sitting on the side of the road. Why? Who builds a teddy bear memorial? Did a teddy bear tragically lose his life on this stretch of road?

And of course, Mt. Denali, which is the tallest peak in North America at 20,320 feet.

Mt. Everest has a higher summit, but if you climbed both mountains from their base, you’d have 6000 additional feet of elevation gain on Denali (the base of Everest sits at 17,000 feet on the Tibetan plateau, base of Denali is at 2000 feet).

There are other unique or goofy things about Alaska, but they’re harder to take a picture of. People just have a different attitude here – and I love them for it.

Jessie

The power of community…

2009-08-27T00:30:00.001-04:00

Most of the people who read this blog know that my background is in Computing and specifically I have spent 10 years in the computer security industry. I’ve worked on a lot of different aspects of that problem from network monitoring to consumer virus protection to phishing and brand protection. I know a lot of people in that industry still and a few of them are doing something that I think is way cool.

There is a new company called Immunet that has a method of protecting people based on a community approach. I’m not totally up to date on the technology specifics of this, but what I understand about it is very compelling. Essentially the community helps protect others in the community based on what is happening on their computers.

You can join the community here, and they are also on Facebook and have some integration to the Facebook community if you are a FBer.

Pass the word around to your friends and family of both the real and virtual kind.

--Tom

PS – If your using a 64bit OS they are working on a version so keep checking back. I’ll put a note in a future blog when its come out.

Taking All Bets

2009-08-21T07:00:00.001-04:00

These are some photos of the truck in the shop as of Thursday afternoon, August 20.

Not TOO bad from this angle.

Ouch. My poor baby has been eviscerated. The service department guy was like “we’re not going to see these photos all over the internet are we?” NOOOOOOOO, I would never do that.

The latest story is that it is ALMOST done and after installing the last cylinder head, they had to order some shims. The order was supposedly placed on 8/20 and should arrive Monday. Now then, care to wager when we’ll actually have wheels again? Could this possibly extend all the way into September? That still sounds crazy to me, but it’s only 10 days away. The betting period will be closed at COB Monday.

So, what have we been doing to pass the time? I am mostly going stir crazy. Tom picked up a 2 week contracting gig with his old employer, so he’s been keeping busy. I helped a friend of ours with the structural design for his house that he’ll be building next summer.

Here’s my setup at the library. After several pages of calculations, I thought my head was going to explode. I am just not used to thinking very hard. (Please make jokes at my expense – I am desperate for entertainment).

We would have traveled somewhere last weekend, but they kept saying that the truck would be ready “any day now” and we thought we might have to return the rental car (small credit to Toyota for saying we can keep the rental until the truck is done). Still, I was geared up and ready for a fight if they told us to find our own transportation. It at least gave me something to think about for a few hours.

We’ve been doing some other stuff too, but it is tough being stranded. The fun factor of our adventure is definitely at a lull right now. But it’s about to pick up in about 6 hours after we arrive in Anchorage to visit our friends. We are driving the rental down – I’m going to drive to inflict maximum damage to the car that can’t be seen with the naked eye.

Jessie

Is a very cheap car good?

2009-08-20T13:28:00.003-04:00

So the new Nano car from Tata in India is out and apparently a huge hit. It sells for about $2500 dollars and they are selling like hot cakes. They have also just passed safety and regulatory standards for the EU and will soon be for sale there for around $3500.

Amazing - transportation for the people... accessible and affordable motor vehicles.

This seems like a huge technology achievement, but is there a cost that we are missing here?

We are past the point of peak oil and the world is looking at a shortage of non-renewable resources and energy in the very near future. Is is good for the planet that we are spending time ensuring that cars (a huge source of fossil fuel consumption and greenhouse gasses) are available to more and more people. It seems like we just can't get our feet off of the accelerator that's pushing our planet and our ecosystem toward a cliff that we can't get back from.

I will say I feel a bit like a hypocrite since we are driving a V8 Truck. But our overall footprint is less than if we were living in a 3000 sq ft home with just the two of us, and I look forward to when we settle down and I can work on getting a fully bio-diesel or SVO vehicle setup so we can kick the petroleum habit.

I do still want to see the automotive industry globally wake up to the fact that we need not just fuel efficiency, but we need alternative fuel vehicles. The R and D for things like this to meet mainstream customer demands are long (10-20 years from some of the articles I've read) and we can't wait until we are out of fuels to start looking at this.

So I guess my final take on the Nano is that its an impressive work of manufacturing cost control, but its still the same old same old from an industry that needs to evolve before we destroy ourselves.

Here is the link to a video story on this from CNN.

/rant

--Tom

Bad Poetry Contest

2009-08-17T13:23:00.001-04:00

I have noted from my super helpful web resource that Weird Contest Week (8/17-21) coincides with Bad Poetry Day (18th). Why not put the two together and have a Bad Poetry Contest?

I am certain that my Dad will beat me at this, but here is my entry anyway. Let the brain cogs start turning!

In Alaska, I am stranded
Toyota left me empty handed
Oh, how I miss my Tundra -
This stinks like frumunda.

And Tom’s entry:

Fairbanks is nice and Juneau is cool,
getting an engine rebuilt is a whole lot of drool
the temperature is dropping, our time is going fast
we might have to tow our trailer out of here with an ass.

Any type of poetry is acceptable, as long as it sucks. The winner will receive a sweet postcard from us. Or maybe some moose nugget swizzle sticks if we’re really blown away.

Jessie

Challenge Issued – Challenge Accepted

2009-08-12T19:00:00.001-04:00

Our 17 year old nephew, Cameron, was spouting off on how he wants to get a 6 pack to impress the ladies. “Better cut back on the sugar you eat, especially soda, if that’s your goal,” a wise aunt & uncle chimed in unison. “In fact, we BET that you can’t give up soda until we see you again at Christmas.”

Exhibit 1: Drinking soda while playing poker.

He surprised us and accepted the bet on the condition that we give up something tasty too. Tom gave up beer and I have given up ice cream until Christmas. Others have joined the Lent-on-Crack bet too – Chelsea gave up chips, Tiffany ice cream, and Kyle donuts.

Exhibit 2: He brought a Coke with him on a HIKE.

If the kids fail, they have to cough up $50 and the adults will chip in $100. Any funds will be split equally among the surviving challengers. On our last night at the house, we all decided that anyone spending Christmas with us should join the bet too. It has to be something you partake of often that is not good for you. We also extend the challenge to anyone reading, but without the financial implications – just your pride on the line. (Unless you feel like chipping in the money if you fail, in which case we will split between Chelsea & Cameron’s college funds).

Who is with us??

-Jessie

Fishing in Juneau

2009-08-11T23:24:00.001-04:00

If your in Alaska and your at all a sportsman you have to go fishing. Its is one of those painful ironies in life that I only discovered my love of fly fishing AFTER I had left Alaska. The fishing in this state is stunning. Arctic Char (grayling), native cutthroat trout, all different varieties of salmon, dolly varden, all this and more are available in the waters of Alaska.

Needless to say I took my fishing gear with us to Juneau and I bought a 3 day license for one of the times that my nephew Cameron was off work and we went out and hit the water. We fished Montana Creek in town which is a beautiful clear water creek that runs walking distance from my sisters house. The Chum Salmon were in the river thick and there are apparently Dolly Vardens in the water also although I didn’t see any of them.

We went to the lower section of Montana Creek two days in a row and then I drove to an upper section of the Creek on the third day. The water was betwen 48-50 degrees all three days and I was pretty happy that I was able to hook-up on all three days. Day 1 I had 4 fish on and got on huge on onto the gravel bar we were fishing off of, but it got away when Cameron tried to snag it and then snapped off the fly when it got into some fast water. This Salmon was big enough that Cameron’s hands would not meet when he tried to pick it up. I would guess around 5-6 lbs. The other 3 connects were spit out by the salmon and I lost one other fly. Blue and red pattern streamer flies were the winner of the day and quartering the stream above where the salmon were holding and letting the fly drift down and through its swing before retrieving was the way to go. two of the hits were on the drive, two were during the swing, and one was a foul hook when stripping the fly back in.

Cameron had only had about a 3 hours of casting practice before we went out, but he took to it very well. I gave him some pointers and his cast was measurably improved when we called it a day. My thanks to Al and Steve who taught me to cast and gave me good instruction to pass on. Cameron has natural talent for fly casting which helped immensely also.

We did have two funny “catches” during the second day. At one point Cameron was taking a break from casting and was standing in a riffle behind me with the net. Apparently the salmon got comfortable enough with him standing there that they swam down and he lifted one right out of the water with the net! We were both laughing pretty hard since I hand yet to connect despite casting for over an hour that afternoon. Later as we were wrapping it up for the day I was kneeling by the edge of the gravel bar and a salmon stopped to stage and hold right in front of me. He just sat there for a couple of minutes and as a test I reached in and was able to grab him around the base of the tail and literally lift him out of the water. That was my only catch for the afternoon and also was pretty damn amusing.

On day three I went out and fished the upper section of Montana Creek. You can drive to a parking area that is about 15 feet from water access and then walk up and down the river. The water runs about 2-4 feet deep other than some pools and is about 20-30 feet wide and very clear. A perfect casting river, and my cast had two days of practice at that point so I was really enjoying getting some nice long up stream casts to hold areas. I got one nice big salmon on and got him to my feet, but he was big enough and I was fishing my 5wt so I didn’t manage to get him into a net, it was a fun fight though and I had him on for about 15 minutes getting him into my feet.

There were some Halibut carcasses that had been dumped in the river by the parking area and I was amazed by how big those fish are. I knew they were big, but I guess I hadn’t really seen it in person. Here is a picture of my fly rod next to one of the carcasses to give an idea of scale. The reel on my fly rod is about 3 inches in diameter.

So in summary, the fishing was awesome and I’m looking forward to trying to get out and do some more in the next few weeks while we are doing some more travelling in South Central.

--Tom

Experiments

2009-08-09T14:52:00.001-04:00

I am a huge nerd. I am always craning my neck when we drive past construction sites and trying to figure out how things work. This is a fairly standard Steiger conversation:

Jessie: Whoa! Look at this – what do you think it is?

Tom: I have no idea.

Jessie: How do you think it works?

Tom: I have no idea.

Jessie: <slaps Tom upside the head> Well, let’s try to figure it out anyway.

Tom: <rolls eyes> Great. Sounds like loads of fun.

Then we have a little geeky debate about what the purpose of the object is and why it works. I generally drag Tom through these educational sessions, but I think he secretly likes it.

So, you can imagine my sense of joy when we can actually perform a little scientific experiment. A few years ago, we had our nephews stay with us for a fun-filled weekend and tried the Mentos-into-Coke experiment. I believe I was more excited to try this than 7 & 9 year old boys. (Note: If you try this, I recommend fashioning some sort of Mento-delivering device like a funnel – otherwise you can’t get more than one Mento into the Coke bottle before it explodes).

The other day, my niece told us about an experiment they did in physics which just had to be repeated. Girls supposedly have a lower center of gravity than boys, so if you stand with your legs completely against a wall and bend over to pick up a chair, the girls should be able to do it maintaining contact with the wall and the boys can’t.

Apparently the chairs we were using were just too heavy and we had some better results when we switched to a metal folding chair. I was still not able to do it. Some possible reasons for my failure that all suck – my butt is too big, my muscles are too weak, or the wall wasn’t plumb (I’m sure that’s the one). Please send in any other experiment ideas we can try and then we’ll post the results on the blog. Join my geekdom!

We are flying back to Fairbanks tomorrow even though our truck is STILL not finished. They went to install the last cylinder head and dropped it so another one is on order. We are understanding people, accidents happen, but when four phone messages were ignored by the dealership, that made us angry. We are gearing ourselves up to be in demanding-customer mode when we get there tomorrow.

Jessie

Kayaking

2009-08-07T13:16:00.001-04:00

On Wednesday, we rented two tandem kayaks and spent the day with our niece & nephew. The weather was nice, but unfortunately was hazy due to more forest fires.

According to Google Pedometer, we kayaked about 8 miles which is much further than I would have guessed. We started at Echo Cove which is at the end of the Veterans Memorial Highway. Even though Juneau is connected to the mainland, there are no roads out of town which effectively makes in an island. We looked into taking a ferry to Sitka & back so we could see more of the coast, but it was more expensive than renting kayaks and paddling ourselves seemed fun.

As the more experienced kayakers, Tom & I sat at the back so we could control the rudders. This was much easier to steer than using just the paddles, in my opinion.

We probably saw at least ten bald eagles up close. This eagle was huge and majestic, but we had our crappy camera (water proof) and he was backlit so the photo isn’t that great. I already edited it some but I don’t have the skills to make it prettier.

Cameron was intent on paddling like a crazy person back to the boat launch, so I just took it easy, steering him in circles while balancing a paddle on my head. I know, I have mad skills.

Perhaps he wanted to get back quickly because of wet underwear chafing after he tipped the kayak getting out at a pit stop. We, of course, showed no mercy and took our time getting back. The bilge pump supplied by the rental company came in handy though.

We saw a whale on the paddle back to base which was way cool. I saw a big lumpy thing rise out the water, spew some water, and dive back down. Then I said, “Whoa! Did you see that big fish!” – which everyone pointed out to me was a whale. Yeah, way to go, genius. In my defense, it was a small whale and we couldn’t get any pictures because it barely came out of the water. But it was close enough (less than 100 yards) we could see & hear it come up for air about 10 times. It was a really nice ending to a good day.

Jessie