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1970s Shore Home

Kitchen Design First Draft

March 18, 2015September 26, 2016 Kelly

The first draft of the kitchen layout came in tonight. It’s a start, but there’s definitely some stuff I want to change (and a few things I realize I forgot to tell the designer). The coloring is all mine, it came to me black and white.

I totally forgot to tell them we plan to remove the soffit (i.e. the drywall box above the cabinets), which would make the space above the refrigerator way less awkward. I’m not sure if we’d raise the cabinets up higher, maybe just the ones above the oven? I’m short so I don’t want to put stuff too high, but it would be nice to have more clearance between the microwave and the range.

I’m really not sure how I feel about the island. I plan to tape it out this weekend to see how it feels in the space. It adds some much needed counter area but I’m worried it will feel awkward. I do like that one person could be cooking at the range, one person could be cutting veggies by the sink, and one person could be prepping on the island without anyone getting in each others’ way.

I forgot to tell them to put in a double sink, and I just generally don’t like the layout for the area by the window. One solution would be to move the dishwasher into the island (easy since the kitchen is above an open crawlspace). It would mean running extra water and electrical lines, but it might be worth it to get that space a little less awkward. Alternately I could just pick out a smaller refrigerator which would free up some space and give us more room for a bigger sink (but it would still be off center, which I might just have to live with). The off-center-ness of the sink would be a lot less irritating with a lower profile fixture as well.

Seeing this drawing has me convinced we should remove the little partial wall that is currently next to the fridge (visible here). It makes no functional difference but it makes the room seem much more open without it. The wall does have some electrical in it so I’d have to have that moved. An electrician is coming down on Friday to quote everything.

1970s Shore Home

Paint Colors

March 17, 2015September 28, 2016 Kelly

I spent a while tonight trying to pick paint colors using the Sherwin Williams tool, which served us well before. It’s harder with this place though. I love bright bold colors but the rooms down the shore are so small that it could easily feel overwhelming. The furniture is also much more mis-matched hand-me-downs so I need colors that play well with random sofas.

For the upstairs bedrooms I’m thinking of going with a shade of grey, and then using duvet covers to add colors. The beige carpet is killing me. It is a slightly warm shade of beige so I have to be careful to pick walls that compliment it well or else it will just look dirty (jk it is dirty). The color currently stops below the slanted part of the ceiling, which makes it feel like it’s caving in of you. Whatever color we pick will be extended all the way up to the flat part of the ceiling.

I love love love the blue color we used in our guest room in Philly (“Drizzle”) but I wouldn’t want to do it in all four bedrooms, and I’m not sure how I like it with the carpet.

Gray Clouds

Drizzle

Mineral Deposit

Classic French Gray

The downstairs “master bedroom” is the largest bedroom in the house. It has parquet floors which I haaaaaaaaaaate but given the amount of other work the house needs I’ve gotta live with them. My favorite of the choices is the dark color, but I feel like a dark bedroom isn’t very ‘beachy.’ My beloved Drizzle doesn’t look so great against the orange wood of the parquet floors. I’ll probably go with the lighter of the two grays below.

Drizzle

Serious Grey

Jubilee

Dark Night

Meanwhile I’m trying to get everything ready for the weekend, which is Demolition and Contractor Extravaganza. Friends are coming down on Saturday to help rip out the kitchen and prepare the walls for painting. I have two different HVAC estimators coming out, an electrician, and a crawlspace guy. It’s gonna be a busy weekend.

1970s Shore Home

Asbestos for everyone!

March 11, 2015September 28, 2016 Kelly

It’s cheap, lasts forever, fireproof, what more could you want from a miracle material? – My dad, on asbestos

I knew this going in, but oh god nothing is ever easy with home repairs.

Let’s start with what we knew going into this: the house is covered in asbestos. Literally. It has asbestos siding, but it’s in good shape so who cares just leave it alone and we’re fine.

We also knew the house had inadequate flood venting. Aside from driving up the cost of flood insurance the inadequate venting traps moisture under the house which makes the wooden structure rot faster. So we knew we’d be spending about a thousand dollars on replacement/additional vents.

What we did not know is that the vents are placed in such a way that they can’t be replaced without cutting into the siding. Which is made of asbestos. Therefore the cost of replacing vents is more like $2500. Ouch. “But,” the venting contractor said “if you were planning on replacing the siding anyway I could do the venting while the siding is off and that would save you a lot of the labor charges.” I assure you, with the laundry list of things to fix on the house I was not intending to replace the siding.

From what I’ve read asbestos siding lasts damn near forever, so I’m leaning towards not replacing it. I’m going to have someone come out and give a quote tomorrow but I can’t imagine the cost being worth it. Opinions from anyone who has done this before are appreciated.

Speaking of asbestos, did you know that some vinyl floor tiles contain asbestos? Me neither! I cut a chunk of vinyl out of the kitchen floor and am sending it off to a lab to have it tested. We should get the results in a week or so. I don’t even want to have someone look at the roof (which will need replacing within the next few years) because I’m afraid to find out how much asbestos it is full of.

So yeah. Asbestos. Fun stuff.

1970s Shore Home

The Shore House is Ours! (With Photo Tour)

March 9, 2015September 28, 2016 Kelly

It’s official, we are now the proud owners of a shore house next door to my in-laws!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kellbot/16744448546/

Closing took a while. Aside from the usual shenanigans we had to sign 30 pages worth of affidavits saying that we were not various other people who share our names and owe many other people lots of money. I’m not sure if this is unique to this area or not, it was definitely new to us. The title agent was also so disorganized I won’t be surprised if we get called back to fix some of the paperwork later. But we’ll deal with that later … it’s ours!

After closing my dad helped me take photos and measurements. I got some OK photos but honestly by the end of it all I was so exhausted I could barely function. Here’s the nickel tour…

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kellbot/16563081377/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kellbot/16769191101/

https://www.flickr.com/photos/kellbot/16769290702/

https://www.flickr.com/photos/kellbot/16563102397/

https://www.flickr.com/photos/kellbot/16744500326/

New Construction Townhome

Crazy Ideas

March 7, 2015September 4, 2016 Kelly

So planning a kitchen is exciting stuff, which is good because dealing with structural problems is pretty boring (but also expensive). But today I’m taking a break from the real world of home improvement and diving into insane(ly cool) stuff. Because I need a break from researching gas installation and hot water heaters. Here’s 3 things we’ll probably never actually do to the house, but would be pretty cool.

Idea 1: Dormers

The house has a very steep roof in order to accommodate the 2nd floor. It makes the upstairs bedrooms feel a little claustrophobic.

One way to open the room up would be to add dormers to the roof. Check out the difference it made in another cape cod style house with a similar roof:

The downside is that adding dormers is crazy expensive and it can be tough to do without making the outside of the house look completely stupid. We’d probably need to hire an architect to design something I don’t hate, and the permits could be a pain. Permits are always a pain.

Idea 2: Pub Shed

We’re about to have a huge back yard, which is totally new territory for us (no pun intended I swear). In addition to the decent sized yard the house comes with, we’re removing the fence between us and the house next door. For the time being it will just be a nice large area for my in-laws’ dogs to run around, but I won’t lie: a bar shed is a mighty enticing idea:

I like the idea of a pub shed because it gets parties out of the kitchen and into the back yard. There’s already a shed on the property, converting it probably wouldn’t be TOO hard… but I’d want a fridge out there and then it suddenly becomes a much more complicated project. Also, flood zone.

Idea 3: A sweet deck and maybe a pool

I thought the idea of having a pool at a shore house was completely absurd and redundant. Then I visited my coworker’s beach house with a pool and completely changed my mind. I mean the ocean is cool and all, but you can’t stand in the ocean with a refreshing alcoholic beverage. Or at least you really shouldn’t.

SJSR435452Q — The back of the house. It wants a deck.

An in-ground pool isn’t practical on the island but above ground pools are really ugly. The best solution I’ve seen is to build a deck around the pool. With this idea we could even incorporate the bar shed in a way that has it elevated out of the flood danger zone! Or put the shed on the ground for a swim-up bar. The possibilities!

In reality I don’t really want a pool badly enough to deal with the maintenance, but we’ll probably put a deck in eventually.

With my home improvement palette refreshed I now have the energy to return to more mundane real world decisions. And deal with the utility companies. And the contractors. It’s shaping up to be a very busy spring.

1970s Shore Home

Cooking with gas

March 4, 2015September 26, 2016 Kelly

I feel like I spent half the day on the phone today. A bunch of it was getting the utilities set up down the shore. The best part of the process was getting transferred to 3 different people at the water department, only to finally learn that the water bill transfers automatically with the deed.

The house currently does not have natural gas hooked up. I’ve been looking at electric ranges and cooktops, and in order to get something I can stand to cook on we’d have to go fairly high end. Meanwhile it turns out if I get a gas range the gas company will hook it up for “free” (in quotes because they know they’re getting a customer so it’s more of an investment with guaranteed returns on their part). This is of course assuming there’s already gas in the neighborhood, which is yet to be determined. Apparently the rep I talked to on the phone has to turn that question over to someone else with a divining rod or something.

Assuming gas is available, I turn my attention to the heating system. Right now the heating system is a heat pump with a broken auxillary heating element. On the one hand, the aux heat is basically a big toaster and should be an easy fix. On the other hand the heat pump is over a decade old and those things only have a lifespan of 10 years or so. In general the heating system is pretty low on our priority list; we won’t be there much in the winter and there’s electric baseboard heat to supplement the heat pump. BUT if we were to get a gas furnace put in to replace it there are some nice rebates and incentives from the gas company. Also gas heat is much cheaper than electric.

The hot water heater was also on the inspector’s list of appliances near the end of their life expectancy, and that would also benefit from being converted to gas. I looked into tankless heaters but I’m not sold on the proposition. It’s very likely we’ll have both showers in use at the same time and it sounds like a tankless would have trouble keeping up with that.

There are so many expensive appliances to replace. None of them are urgent, so we can spread the costs over a few years, but still. The stove is the only non-negotiable thing that has to be upgraded sooner rather than later. The one in there is an ancient electric coil stove and I just can’t with those things.

The gas company’s spiritual medium, or whomever keeps track of what lines are where, will be in touch by Monday to let me know whether gas is even a legit option for us. Then I have to decide whether to start down that rabbit hole. So many expensive decisions to make.

Update: The gas company got in touch with me on Thursday. They left an inaudibly garbled message on Chris’s cell phone and emailed me a bunch of PDFs. One of the PDFs is literally a one page document that just says “For Rebate Information, visit our website” in 72 point font. At no point did they confirm whether or not gas service is available to the house. Looks like Friday will be another day of phone calls.

1970s Shore Home

Kitchen! Kitchen Kitchen Kitchen!

March 2, 2015September 26, 2016 Kelly

We’re still a week out from closing on the house, but due to the timing of the Ikea kitchen sale (now) I’m trying to line up as much as I can so we can hit the ground running and take advantage of the sale.

If you remember from the huge to-do list the kitchen currently looks like this:

I mean, it's not the worst. — I mean, it’s not the worst.

It actually doesn’t look too bad in this picture, but in person the cabinets are all sagging at odd angles and the counter top is some sort of faux-stone print laminate. I’ve seen much worse but for somewhere we’ll be cooking big family meals I think we can do better.

We’re going with Ikea for the new cabinets because they hit a good spot between price and quality. I know there’s much higher quality stuff you can get, but since the house is in a flood zone I’m not about to put fancy all wood custom cabinets in it. The modular sameness of Ikea is actually appealing because should the worst happen we can just replace the damaged cabinets ourselves.

I plan on installing the cabinets myself but I’m hiring a designer to do the layout. There’s a ton of important stuff to consider in a kitchen design that I’m just not familiar with. Also the more time I spend with the Ikea kitchen planning tool the more I want to scream and run away. Reviews for Ikea’s in-house planning service are a mixed bag so I’m going with a third party designer.

At this point I have spent a ton of time on Pinterest looking at kitchens. Here’s the general style we’re going for:

This is the direction I'm heading in — I’m not a huge fan of open shelving but I like the blue beachy look here and the tile backsplash.

For flooring I’m 90% sold on wood-look vinyl plank. I like the way wood looks but the kitchen floor extends into the laundry room and that just seems like asking for trouble. Vinyl tolerates water much better than something like Pergo and isn’t as much of a pain to install as tile. From what I’ve read 80% of the work is in the floor prep. If your floor is flat then everything is easy and it looks good for years. If your floor is not flat then it pops and warps and looks awful. I guess I’ll be spending a few weekends this summer elbow deep in leveling compound.

Not really sure what we’ll do about appliances. I hate hate hate electric coil stoves like the one that’s there. I’m debating springing for an induction cooktop. The rest of it seems fine, if a bit old. It’s tempting to move the fridge into the laundry room to use as a beer fridge and get something a little nicer for the kitchen. This is where I start to hyperventilate with the kitchen planning. In order to plan cabinets you need to know the size of your appliances, but the cabinet layout influences the appliance choices!

My next step, after closing, is to take a million measurements of the kitchen and adjacent room (which is sort of a dining room I guess) to send to the kitchen designer. Start to finish usually takes 3 weeks for design/revisions, during which I’ll remove the existing cabinets and poke around in the walls to see if there are any nasty surprises. I told the designer I’m willing to consider moving plumbing / electrical or cutting a passthrough window into the living room, but it would be a pain in the ass. All three walls are load bearing so having anything done to them won’t be cheap or easy.

So yeah. DIY kitchen installation with professional design. I know just enough to know that I have no idea what I’m getting myself into. Friends who have been though this: TELL ME ABOUT YOUR KITCHENS!

Hacking, Programming

WordPress Post Inserts Are Super Slow

March 1, 2015March 1, 2015 Kelly

Logging another one of my “weird wordpress problems” here.

We use a plugin called Buddypress Private Checklist to offer wedding to-do lists to our members on the Offbeat Bride Tribe. It was written many years ago by our old developer, and I’ve been vaguely maintaining it in our open source plugin repo on git. But it was a hack when it was written (old dev’s words, not mine!) and we’ve grown a lot over the years. It’s in need of a major upgrade, and the first item on my docket was the fact that it takes forever to load the initial default tasks into a to-do list.

The initial task loader takes a CSV full of default tasks and inserts them as posts into the Worpdress database. We have 124 tasks and it was taking five minutes. I expect a loop of 124 inserts to be a little slow, but five minutes is insane.

The posts, which are a custom post type, also use custom taxonomies to organize them. When I disabled the taxonomy inserts, done with wp_set_object_terms(), everything ran quickly. When I tried the plugin on a fresh install it ran quickly even with the taxonomy information. Disabling all plugins and going to the default theme didn’t change anything. I finally put together a test page that just looped through a bunch of post and taxonomy inserts, and watched it with Query Monitor.

After every new taxonomy term is inserted, wordpress runs wp_update_term_count(). On something the size of a personal blog this is not a big deal. On a community with 40,000 posts and 900 tags, this takes maybe half a second. Doing that 124 times takes forever. Thankfully there is a way to disable this excessive recounting, wp_defer_term_counting().

function insert_many_posts(){
  wp_defer_term_counting(true);
  $tasks = get_default_tasks(); 
  for ($tasks as $task){
     $post = array(
       'post_title' => $task[content],
       'post_author' => $current_user->ID,
       'post_content' => '',
       'post_type' => 'bpc_default_task',
       'post_status' => 'publish'
     );
     $task_id = wp_insert_post( $post );

     if ( $task[category] )
        //Make sure we're passing an int as the term so it isn't mistaken for a slug
        wp_set_object_terms( $task_id, array( intval( $category ) ), 'bpc_category' );
  }
}

Now the whole loop takes about 10 seconds. Hooray!

Uncategorized

Well, there goes the afternoon

February 19, 2015March 3, 2015 Kelly

My coworker showed me a website which lets you easily create animated gifs from your webcam.

So yeah if I don’t get anything done today you all know why. PS you can make your own here.

New Construction Townhome

Fix All The Things

February 16, 2015September 4, 2016 Kelly

Inspection was last week. Man, 40 year old houses sure to have a lot of shit wrong with them. This is really the first time I’ve had to deal with most of this stuff. The places I lived in college were post-civil-war era shit holes slowly collapsing into the earth, but I was renting so I didn’t care.

Aside from the usual working/parenting thing, my spring will be spent coordinating or DIYing a whole bunch of household stuff. I can’t tell you how AMAZEBALLS it will be to have access to the place next door (my in-laws’) so I can retreat to the peace and quiet of somewhere that is not a construction zone.

In some ways it feels completely ridiculous to even start listing this stuff given that we haven’t closed yet. But I’d really like to get the major stuff done in time to enjoy the house this summer. So we’re getting quotes now in order to hit the ground running at closing. We close in 3 weeks and that feels forever away but is actually super fast given that we just put the offer in at the beginning of this month. Part of me is still thinking I’m jumping the gun, all “don’t count your chickens before they hatch,” but I don’t think “bracing for what could be thousands of dollars in repairs” is the same as chicken-counting.

Hello kitchen. I can't wait to destroy you. — Hello kitchen. I can’t wait to destroy you.

First, contractor stuff. I.e. stuff I am nowhere near insane enough to even think of trying to do myself

New heat pump. We could theoretically get the old one fixed maybe, but I can’t imagine any situation in which it’s worth it to fix a 15 year old heat pump. The energy savings alone make a new more efficient one worth the money.
Structural stuff. Yeah that seems rather important.
Exterior grading. The slope of the land is towards the house, which is kind of awful if it rains.
Engineered flood vents. These will help keep the underside of the house from rotting, which seems like a good thing.
Replacing an oversized circuit breaker. Easy but not something I want to DIY.
New countertops in the kitchen. Goodbye laminate.

Second, DIY stuff. Little things I can do myself. Or big things I can foolishly do myself.

New kitchen/laundry room floors. I want to do wood but vinyl plank is probably more practical.
New kitchen cabinets

Next, Stuff I’m on the fence about. Aka stuff I could do but don’t want to.

Painting. Painting sucks, y’all. It really really sucks.
Replacing the not-grounded outlets with GFIs. I can do this myself easily, but we might spring to actually have the outlets grounded.
Carpet cleaning. I mean I can rent a steam cleaner from the grocery store but I feel like a pro would do a better job?

Last, stuff that will have to be done in the not so distant future. This stuff isn’t on the agenda for omgrightnow, but it was all earmarked as “aging, budget for a replacement” by the inspector.

Roof replacement. Yeah, that’s gonna suck. Here’s hoping the current roof hangs on a few more years. But at this point we need to at least have someone come eyeball it once a year. I don’t want to find out the hard way when the roof fails.
Water heater replacement. Now accepting arguments for/against tankless water heaters.

We’ve got until Saturday to decide how to approach this with the seller. Obviously a lot of this stuff is “nice to have” and therefore not something we’d bring up with them. But the structural stuff, grading, and flood vents are definitely things that need to be done sooner rather than later. Fingers crossed the negotiations go OK and we can get a credit towards fixing it.