Coming together

It's the second to last day of September, which means it's almost October, which means it's almost the last month of work on the house. It's almost time for Rebecca and me to move out of the apartment we've been renting. It's almost time to move into the home we've been owning, but that has, for the last five months, been taken over by (mostly) men with heavy boots and big tools and sharp, clangy things that infuse the very pores of our residence with dust. 

We are champing at the bit. And yes, the word is "champing."

While the beginning of the job was all about the big picture and upgrades to the structure of the house, now we are into the details. Each day, we can see progress and change.


The downstairs shower is being tiled.

The tile man a-tiling.

The brown trim will actually be the trim that you see 

inside the niche. The seat will get a nice stone cover.

The military has been called in to restore order to our upstairs bathroom.

Vanity, thy name is We've Still Got a Ways to Go.

The grate on the deck has been installed, thereby allowing a good amount of light into the new room below.

Before

After

And now we come to the beautiful, exacting and sometimes exasperating task of selecting paint colors.

  

Jill French, on the left here, is our house painter. She and Rebecca discuss things like hues and saturation. 

Eventually, they turn to a higher power for inspiration.

And they receive the Word. Two Words, actually. And the Words are "cloud white." And the walls on either side of the staircase shall be cloud white forevermore.

A day in the life

8 a.m.
Wake to the serenade of pile drivers from across Mission Creek.

10 a.m.
Pay bills, including the latest from our contractor.

11 a.m.

Meet our friend Ellen at City Hall.

Self portrait by Ellen who really shouldn't quit her day job

That's Ellen on the left.

11:30 a.m.
Get married. Yup.

12:30 p.m.
Have lunch at the Hayes Street Grill. We eat there every time we get married.

2 p.m.
Head over to the house to meet the guy who measures the bedrooms for carpeting.

Tape measures are so 2010.
Greg here was able to size up the rooms just by pointing a laser thingy at the walls.

2:20 p.m.
Check out what's been done on the house since last week. That would be a lot. Most notably the floor got laid. As well it should on our wedding day. 

Our new burglar alarm got installed.

And the boys have been taking their sledgehammers outside. This is because whatever was originally holding the deck to the house has rotted away and has to be rebuilt.

So the last bastion of pastoral comfort at the ole Noe Valley homestead is now just another cluttered construction site.

3:30 p.m.
Return a pillow that didn't work out. Because this so-called "king-sized" pillow did not fit in a king-sized pillow case. The store person told me to go buy some kind of super-secret super-king-sized pillowcases that fit the super-special BioSense 2 memory foam pillows.

Uh-huh.

3:40 p.m.

Buy a new pillow. This means I will have to forego sleeping on my back as the new pillow is for side sleepers. I am a bi-sleeper; that is, I sleep on my side and my back. My pillow just can't handle that. Oh, there's a pillow out there for those who sleep on their backs and stomachs. But not one that can accommodate us back and side sleepers. We are separate but not equal.

This revolution's just getting started. The sleepers. United. Will never be defeated.

4 p.m. 
Go to the gym. Yay.

6 p.m. 

Come home and blog like the wind.

And you? How was your day?

While we were out (of the country)

What would summer be without a summer vacation?  Rebecca and I decided to do it up big this year by taking ourselves on an ocean voyage. To clarify, I mean we paid for the trip. Other people drove the ship we were on around the British Isles and Scandinavia.

Two stone-cold dykes in front of one dry stone dyke
Orkney Islands, Scotland

Very old dry stone wall
Orkney Islands, Scotland

Meanwhile, back in Noe Valley, work proceeded apace on our house.

Very new dry not stone wall
San Francisco, California

A team of crackerjack construction workers replaced the front windows with ones we can see out of. This might seem funnier if you read the previous blog post.

They installed a skylight over our new interior stairs.

And they put a lot of electrical wires and stuff all over the place.

They also did some new wiring in my office. Of course, before any work begins anywhere in our house, the boys must first wreak some mandatory havoc. The office was no exception.

At last -- a good excuse for writers block.

So . . . quite a bit got done, yes?

This is a picture of a Norwegian fjord. I was there a week ago.

And here's where I was today.

Just sayin' . . .