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 Joni's condo kitchen update is nearly done. (See the project up to now.) Joni's friend and fellow nurse Patti is helping out, and she files this report:
I'm home from the mountains and went to see Joni's kitchen today. It's beautiful! I am thrilled and so is she. (Click photos to enlarge.)
Joni opted to have a friend who is a "tile guy" finish the tiling. She helped him and said that our thin set was definitely too thin. He applied it the same as we did; it was just thicker. We'll never make that mistake again. The tile guy also did the grout work for her and had a tile saw to cut the few that required adjustments. I think she had just had it with the mess we had to clean up after using thin set that was too thin.
We are very close to being done. I think one day or so of clean-up just may do it. We need to finish some drywall work and put a finish coat of paint on the kitchen walls. And then we'll replace the switch plates.
Joni is already talking about how to carry the mood and color palette from the kitchen into the living room. I can't believe the balance that the chocolate-colored panels at the top of the cabinets (see that here) provides to the tile. I really don't know if it's just dumb luck or if there was some intuition at play in the color choice. However it came to us, I'll take it. It's beautiful.
We have one more issue to resolve: how to hang pendant lights from a solid beam over the breakfast bar. I'll be asking your advice in a future posting.
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 By Ariane Wiltse
My mom arrived last week with the best of intentions. Like other relatives who have come before her, she came to help with my house in the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans. She also came knowing that we’d be working in temperatures hovering around 95 degrees with 95% humidity. And, the air conditioner in the trailer is busted.
Mentally, she had prepared for the heat. But she hadn’t prepared for the mosquitoes and fire ants. They made a buffet of her, leaving her arms and legs a red, swollen mess. After her first night here, she had 50 bites. (Yes, she counted.) I’m sure she’s up to hundreds by now. I, on the other hand, have about five. I don’t know if being better acclimated to summer in New Orleans makes my blood sour to the little suckers. But they sure find hers sweet.
Heat and bug bites aside, we weren’t able to get much done on the house this week. I had hoped that between my mom (“Mama Lin"), my friend Beau, myself and another worker recommended by a friend, we’d be able to knock out the rest of the foundation. But the worker decided that he didn’t want to work this week, leaving me scrambling for another set of hands, and I found those with Andy.
I’m also partly at fault for the delay. When Beau and I and Mama Lin poured the concrete footings and set the piers in the front of the house last week, I hyper-focused on making sure the damn things were level. And in my obsessing, I missed the small detail that the piers weren’t in line with the house. In fact, they set a good six inches too far back, clearly missing the sills.
I didn’t notice this little problem until we were about to install the sills, after the concrete had had a long weekend to cure. Seeing the distance between sill and piers, Beau grabbed the sledgehammer. He said he was preparing for the inevitable. (He’s become an expert, of sorts, at breaking rocks in the hot sun.) I figured there must be some kind of way to fix the piers without going to such extremes. But Beau said to do so would only be doing a “Peanut job.” (See what we mean by a "Peanut job" below.) The piers had to go.
Andy stepped in and found a middle ground. A post-Katrina volunteer and graduate student from the University of Wisconsin, Andy moved here after finishing up at school. I called him the day before, pleading for help after my scheduled worker decided to take the week off. Andy has worked on lots of crews, so he brought a degree of expertise and rationality that was missing from the trifecta of ignorance among me, Mama Lin and Beau.
Speaking with the authority of the anointed, Andy suggested that we wedge a pick (his favorite tool) and a crow bar under the concrete slabs to finagle them forward. This sounded like a fine idea to me, so I grabbed my camera to document the Moving of the Slabs. Beau kept the sledgehammer close. He knew he’d be vindicated.
The first one moved quickly and easily, so quickly that I almost missed the shot. The second one didn’t work out so well. I tried to encourage Beau and Andy from behind the camera: “Heave! Ho!” But it was no use. The damn thing wouldn’t budge. And even if it had, it probably wasn’t the best-made concrete pier. It was our first attempt at pier-building without experienced supervision. And it looked like it too. It might as well have been duct-taped and bubble-gummed together. A real Peanut job. So after much deliberation, I sacrificed the pier to Beau and his sledgehammer.
Because the concrete footings and piers need at least three days to cure before we can put weight on them, losing one pier to the sledgehammer put us back several days. We’ll get the foundation in the front of the house finished this week, but the remaining 24 feet of sill and half a dozen piers on the side of the house will have to wait until I return from vacation. Bummer.
See the story so far
Continue reading "Dispatch from New Orleans: The foundation saga, cont." »
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 You know those great big houses the team from the ABC series "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" builds for deserving families?
Well, sometimes those big houses turn out to be just too darned big.
That's what happened in Sandpoint, Idaho, to Eric Hebert. You can see Eric standing in front of the 3,678-square-foot home built for him and his late sister’s 11-year-old twins, whom he is raising.
According to an article in the Bonner County Daily Bee, Eric works all day and spends most evenings taking the kids to basketball and soccer practice. Keeping up the big house is just too much for him, he said.
Plus, Eric said, heating the big house was costing him hundreds of dollars a month in electric bills, and that was on top of the home's gas bills.
And so, hoping not to seem ungrateful to the neighbors who helped build the home for him, he put it up for sale. The house has been appraised at $552,244, but he's listed it and the acre of land it sits on for $529,000.
Here are other "Extreme Makeover" homes that have been put on the market:
Pennsauken, N.J. — The utility bills for this home were said to be from $700 to $1,200 a month, and property taxes were more than $6,000 annually.
Atlanta — The ad for this palatial "Extreme" home says if you buy it, you can own a part of history.
Big changes, people! On the Fourth of July, this blog will move to my own website at www.kathyprice.com and I hope you will join me there to continue the conversation. I plan to blog more about my own projects, as well as the projects of others, green remodeling, the rebuilding of New Orleans and my general love of home.
You will continue to find my 11-year Pardon Our Dust series alive and well in the Sunday Real Estate section. In fact, the story about two bathroom remodels done in 13 days is scheduled for Sunday, July 6.
Also, I'm in negotiations to write a book with the star of a home improvement TV show. More details on that later, on my own website, when the deal is done.
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As you know if you've been keeping up with my blog, I've recently become enthralled and obsessed with the rebuilding of New Orleans. I visited the first time in mid-February and have been there now four times.
So it was with some excitement, in my own Southern California neighborhood, that I came across this door left by a neighbor on the side of the street.
As I drove by, the morning sun glinted through the orange, green, blue and yellow of the fleur-de-lis stained glass. I backed up, got out, did an inspection and called my husband: "Can you bring your truck to pick this up?"
He said: "Do you think you need to stay and guard it?"
Of course! This was too good. Bill was amazed at the solidness of the tight-grain fir of the door. It's heavy. Bill said they don't make doors like this anymore. And we got the door framing to boot.
At home, I researched the fleur-de-lis symbol, which you see everywhere in New Orleans and which has become a symbol of the rebuild. See it here spray-painted on an old refrigerator after the hurricane.
The symbol is found all over Europe, especially in France, Spain, Scotland and Germany, and in the United States in southern Louisiana cities such as Lafayette and Baton Rouge, as well as New Orleans.
Where I will use the door, I'm not yet sure. It's only 30 inches wide, six inches too narrow to replace any of my exterior doors. But I just realized it's the perfect width to replace the door from the hallway into my bathroom, where I'd like to get more natural light. Can I imagine myself soaking in a tub while the morning sun from the living room lights up this window? Oh, yeah! I can see it.
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By Ariane Wiltse
As the big day approached, the day when we'd jack up the house, cut out the old sills and rebuild the piers, I began to take great joy in watching my good friend Beau squirm (he's standing while watching my dad Joe).
"What's the matter Beau?" I asked as he paced incessantly, stealing peeks at my crumbling brick piers. "Afraid we'll drop the house and squash you?"
Now, I don't want to come across as too bold, and Lord knows I don't want to jinx the job -- we still have a good little bit to do. But so far, we've replaced all the sills and piers along one long side of the house without so much as a stubbed toe, let alone a squashed Beau.
And for that, I have my dad and cousin to thank. My 60-year-old "Papa Joe" and 50-year-old cousin Markey spent five hot, humid and hard days here recently working from dawn to Miller time (4:30ish) rebuilding my disintegrating foundation.
In that short period, they replaced 46 feet of 6-inch-by-6-inch sills, poured 24-inch-by-24-inch footings with 4,000 pounds of concrete and rebuilt 22 concrete block piers, setting footlong steel rebar and pouring more concrete inside each cavity. Then we added termite shields, shims where necessary, and leveled the old gal.
Had I been forced to hire a contractor to do the same work, it would have cost, according to estimates, from $10,875 to $13,400.
While my family and I worked on the foundation, Beau busted up the front concrete porch. (Visions of his feet jutting out from underneath a flattened house, Wicked Witch of the East-style, had become problematic.)
Sledgehammer in hand, Beau chipped away at the solid, steel-reinforced structure for a solid two days. (You heard me -- Beau the computer geek was breaking rocks in the hot sun.) I asked him to sing us a little ditty while he swung the sledgehammer, perhaps a Woody Guthrie chain-gang tune, or at least "I've been working on the railroad, all the live-long day," but he refused. Instead he stuck iPod plugs in his ears and turned up the volume to some political podcast. He didn't seem amused, but he never complained.
On their last night in town, and as a small gesture of my gratitude for all their help and hard work, I treated Papa Joe and Markey (Beau didn't return my call in time) to dinner at Commander's Palace, one of the best and most highfalutin' restaurants in New Orleans.
After dropping my family off at the airport, I got to thinking: I don't know many people with as large and close-knit a family as mine. Although we have our disagreements (we are a passionate and proud people prone to stubborn arguments), I know I can count on a crew of kinfolk, as they can count on me. Few people in our fast-paced, cross-country modern world can pick up a phone and ask parents, siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles (living thousands of miles away) to put their lives on hold and come help with a big, nasty and hard job, especially in the New Orleans summer heat.
For that, and so much more, I am truly blessed.
See the whole story in pictures
(Photo: Ariane Wiltse)
Continue reading "Dispatch from New Orleans: From the ground up" »
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Isn't this bedroom yummy? It's in the Rosarito Beach vacation condo that Don and Gigi Maurizio remodeled.
Gigi, an administrator with the Glendora Unified School District who lives in Claremont, told me she found the headboard (which is really a footboard) for $5 on closeout at a Pier One Imports store. That was the starting point for the room.
To make reading in bed more enjoyable, Gigi's husband, Don, a professor in the technology department at Cal State L.A., mounted the headboard at an angle. He joked about spending more on the lumber to mount the headboard than the headboard cost.
I love what Gigi did with the "canopy" treatment. It looks so cozy, but it's really just two rods sticking out of the wall with a piece of fabric hanging from each, and tied back at the wall. (Click on the photos for a larger view of this.) And the starfish hanging overhead came right from the beach just beyond the condo patio.
On the floor are ceramic tiles that look like slate; this tile is found throughout the house. To the right, you see a small table and chairs that might not seem in sync with the rest of the room. Those pieces were not bought new (as were most of the pieces for the remodel) but hold great memories for Gigi: The table is where she wrote her PhD dissertation.
Just above the table, the curtains — with seashells tied onto them — are quite in tune with the sound of the ocean waves just outside the window.
(Photos: Los Angeles Times)
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How Don and Gigi Maurizio spent the money on their Rosarito Beach remodel:
Construction
Demolition: $3,000
Scraping textured plaster walls: $500 (labor)
Staining beams: $500 (labor)
Cabinets: $7,200 (materials)
Tankless hot-water system and connections: $1,800 (materials)
Tile for floor, patio, shower and bath countertop, including grout: $7,700 (materials)
Granite countertop in kitchen: $2,000 (materials and labor)
Tube-type skylights for bathrooms: $500 (materials)
Glass block for windows, shower: $250 (materials)
Exterior doors, windows, screens: $2,000 (materials and labor)
Interior doors and hardware: $2,100 (materials)
Mirrors, mirrored closet doors: $700 (materials and labor)
Closet shelving systems: $300 (materials)
Sinks, toilets: $1,000 (materials)
Plumbing fixtures: $900 (materials)
Lighting, bathroom fans: $1,900 (materials)
Forced-air heater, ductwork and specialized vent covers: $2,000 (materials and labor)
Window coverings, shutters: $1,000 (materials)
Appliances: $3,200 (materials)
Fireplace gas logs and propane adapter: $340 (materials and labor)
Change/move plumbing and gas lines: $1,200 (materials and labor)
New electrical wiring, outlets and switches: $1,100 (materials and labor)
Painting: $1,500 (materials and labor)
Additional labor: $5,000
Miscellaneous and hardware: $5,200
Related costs
Duty fees to declare items at the border: $1,000
Gasoline/insurance for weekly trips: $4,000
Termite fumigation: $200
Lodging until condo was habitable: $2,000
Furniture and electronics: $6,800
TOTAL: $66,890
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I found this photo over at the excellent L.A. Land blog. Where do you suppose these two guys are heading with this action?
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Click to see the latest on Kathy's Remodeling Blog
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How did Don Maurizio puzzle out the cabinet installation in his Rosarito Beach kitchen? Click here to read the whole story.
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Joni's condo kitchen update is nearly done. (See the project up to now.) Joni's friend and fellow nurse Patti is helping out, and she files this report:
