HFM

Over Thanksgiving, we house-sat/kitty-sat for our friend & neighbor Jon. While there, I quietly coveted his couch while we watched movies, hoping that one day I, too, may have such a fine couch. Then, a couple weeks ago, Jon told us he was buying a new couch, & offered us the old one, without even knowing about my secret desires. A Christmas Miracle! He brought it over to Mars last night, along with a very nice coffee table that also happens to be a perfectly sized dining room table for our tatami matted dining room. Thank you very very much, Jon! I tried to take some photos of the rooms this morning with my phone, but it's overcast & they just don't look good. I will charge up my real camera today & snap some pictures. I will take a photo of the roses blooming on the Monster Rose Bushes in the backyard, too. These photos will have to wait until the 3rd to be posted, however -- after working too hard over the past week, my hands are aching, so I'm avoiding a...

We didn't get anything done on the house yesterday -- I was putting ads up all day (it's our busiest time of the year), & Adrienne was out at a movie with Amanda, (finally) relaxing & recovering from the fall semester. Today, however, I am planning to put up curtains! And more ads. In the meantime, here is (an inadequate) photo of the incredible dawn this morning.

This morning I'm working from home in the almost-finished office, in the toasty warm house, watching the sun rise over the neighbor's house.

Done! We have heat! It's taken all of fifteen minutes to make the entire house completely toasty. 35,000 BTUs go a long way in this house. Hooray! Hooray! Hooray! Now all there is to do is to finally decide who would be a better Myrna Loy, Amanda or Adrienne.

Hooray!

Mr. Bunkport has been walking upstairs & downstairs repeatedly, carrying tools back & forth, for the past half hour. Amanda & Adrienne are discussing some sort of Risk-like game involving honeycombs & settlers, and trying to figure out which chocolate-covered nugget in the little bag has the candy cane in it. Oh, Amanda just found it. And she's not very happy about it.

The gas is now off, & Mr. Bunkport is banging around in the basement with pipes. Close to finished!

Mr. Bunkport just asked where the bathroom is. I had to think about it for a second.

Mr. Bunkport is back, & is making progress with complicated looking venting materials!

Mr. Bunkport has just run out to the hardware store. In the meantime, here is a picture of the picnic celebrating Amanda's quitting The Worst Job In The World.

Here it is, waiting to be hooked up!

Friends, our contractor friend, Mr. Bunkport, has arrived with the heater. It's such an exciting & long-awaited event that I am taking off my winter gloves, & live blogging it while we celebrate Amanda's last torturous day at The Worst Job In The World with our delicious picnic. Hooray!

The kitchen is about 16 1/2 feet by 9 1/2 feet. Easily twice the size of the one in the apartment. It is big (at least for us). It also happens to have features that make it perfect for those who may be littler than other people. In particular: low cabinets & countertops. Look how easy & ergonomic it is for our Master Chef to chop scallions: We're going to redo/upgrade the kitchen at some point, because the cabinets are basically constructed out of spare pieces of wood paneling (no, really). We'll find a way to have low counters in at least part of the kitchen, at least. "Don't you change the height of these counters!" In related news, Adrienne finally discovered a place in the kitchen where she can receive her favorite radio station: Today, after a lunchtime picnic celebrating our friend's quitting The Worst Job In The World, & tomorrow, we'll be working on the living room & putting up our Christmas "tree" just in time to have a ...

Adrienne has been working heroically through her annual end-of-semester cold to get the house unpacked. First success: the kitchen has officially been liberated from boxes. Photos to come. Last night we made progress on the living room. Now there are two places to sit. Next up: the office! Watch out office, we are coming for you!

Adrienne's famous tacos!

What a weekend! Friday: Stayed up until 11pm packing. Saturday: Up at 7am to finish getting everything ready for the movers. They came at 9:30, & we followed behind them as they worked, cleaning things & patching holes in walls. They wrapped up around 2:30, & we ran around the corner to borrow our friend's car (thanks Jon!) to pick up fragile stuff & plants that we wanted to move ourselves. Done by 5, I think, & over at Jon's with Amanda to drink celebratory champagne (thanks Jon!). Then a moving day/holiday celebration dinner with friends at our favorite Mexican restaurant, a short cab ride back to Mars (thanks Amanda!), & tucked into bed by 10pm. First night on Mars! Sunday: Slept in a little & then rolled down the hill to the apartment to finish cleaning ahead of the landlord's final walkthrough this morning. She's not supposed to deduct from the security deposit for normal wear & tear, but 1) she hasn't done any maintenance inside...

Today is our last day at 29th St. I've been here for about 4 years; Adrienne has been here for 9 or 10. To get around the fact that we have limited time to pack during the week, we've been packing for the last two weekends. That has its downsides (ex. 'Did we really pack all of the tupperware already? I guess I'll keep this hunk of cheese in this mug then.'), but having a little extra time has made it easier to sift through what we have & get rid of things, rather than just having to pack everything in a rush. We've given 5 paper grocery bags of stuff to Goodwill, shredded about two reams of paper, & have sent 10 other grocery bags full of paper & other recyclables back out into the world. So tomorrow morning, we will enter Mars with a load that's a tiny bit lighter. Today will be a busy day of running errands, working, & in the evening, packing like maniacs. No time for a long post about the house today, so I will just leave you with this ph...

From a smarty pants academic science website (http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/therm/entrop.html): One of the ideas involved in the concept of entropy is that nature tends from order to disorder in isolated systems. This describes the state of the apartment. And the state of our minds. As our good friend Amanda named it, we have Entropy Madness, & it will only get worse until Saturday at 9:30am, when the movers arrive. So no photos to share today, but I will note that the main progress made on the house yesterday was fixing several doors that didn't quite shut, while waiting in vain for the gas company to come & turn things on. As it turns out, we had written the wrong date in the calendar. The gas company is actually coming today. Entropy Madness.

Adrienne is already making plans for whipping the backyard into shape. In the meantime, after several weeks of rain & sun since the listing agent took the original Mars-scape photo: It's nothing we did, but I'll call it progress. Here is something we did, however: Pandafence! View from the Sloping Porch, when you've just come out of the kitchen. View from the back door, just outside the Sloping Porch. Close up. It was really windy the day I put this up, so I had issues with overspray. There's touch up work to be done in the white section, but the overspray around the outer edges gives the panda a sort of a glowing effect, which is neat. Who doesn't love a panda in the backyard?

As promised, here are more photos to round out the picture of the whole house. Here's the bedroom. And the view. We're going to frost the window or something. Keep the light, lose the shingles. That's the bathroom door. My back is to the dining room. There are no other windows in the room, & it faces southwest, so it's just the right amount of dim in the morning, & has great warm light in the afternoon. Here's the Great Sloping Porch. The one that is coming off in favor of a deck. Here's some shelves in the corner of the room. Just to give an idea of how not square it is. Mars is considered a detached house, but really, it should be considered semi-attached. Like most houses in the neighborhood, the neighbor's house is so close, you can't even really get in there to do anything. Not sure how the house next door was put up, since it's not like construction guys could get in there to even swing a hammer. The grey paint on the right of the photo...

As promised, here are photos of What's In The Basement. Number one, The Mysterious Deadbolted Room (which in the real estate listing was called a 'rumpus room'): Exterior . Front of house is towards right of photo. View from the back door, facing the front of the house. Note little window to the rest of the garage. View from opposite direction, toward the back of the house. Note second little window to the rest of the garage. The linoleum is likely from the 20's or 30's. Which is pretty cool, but also means it's probably asbestos. Hey, at least it's fireproof in there. The calendar on the wall is from 1955. The lighting is run on an ancient fuse box. The rest of the house is on the electrical system upgraded in 2007. The doorway on the right is the back door of the Mysterious Deadbolted Room. It leads directly onto raised wooden flooring that we will eventually take out to do some earthquake retrofitting on that post right there. And also to make way for th...

A little history about the neighborhood, from bernalhistoryproject.org : In 1839, Jose Cornelio Bernal received a land grant from the Mexican government, the Rancho Rincon de las Salinas y Potrero Viejo, that made up 20 percent of modern-day San Francisco. It is from him that Bernal Heights gets its name. He built his family home at what is now the site of St. Luke's Hospital. In the second half of the 19th century, Bernal Heights was la r gely rural cow pasture, farmed by Swedish, German, and Irish immigrants. The arrival of the railroad and a horsecar line along the old Mission Road in the 1860s linked Bernal to the rest of the city, and it began to grow. While a November 189 4 story in the San Francisco Chronicle described Bernal Heights as "this paradise of the agile goat and the speckled hen," tanners and brewers thrived along Army Street and Islais Creek, while Mission Street was already bustling with activity.... After the 1906 earthquake and fire, Bernal Heights ...

Hello, friends! Welcome to the crazy little Martian house we bought. The previous owner, Jackie, lived there for fifty years before her death in June at 88. It's a great house on a great block in a great neighborhood, & it just needs a little love & a little sweat to update it & make it sparkle. We'll be documenting our progress here, for our far-flung family & friends. So, to begin with, here are the before photos (taken by the listing agent). *** *** *** This is the dining room, which is the central room in the house. The place isn't quite as huge as the photos suggest -- it's a very comfortable size. The room behind the closed door had the washing machine in it. No dryer -- just a clothes line out back. We moved the washer down to the basement, because we needed to add a dryer. Eventually we're going to put in a second bathroom there; for now, I think the homebrew stuff is going in there. Yellow room is the kitchen. Room opening to the left is the...