A lever large enough; moving the world one stove at a time.

Teddy Roosevelt once said "I could move the world if I had a big enough stick" (or something like that). During his time the world was surely a simpler place, the tuberculoses had been tamed (through fresh air), the safety bicycle was all the rage and new industrial-age conveniences were making their way to consumers via catalogue order (a catalogue was like the internet 1.0 in that you could buy household goods while still pretending not to get distracted). It is this industrial age that we have to thank for our many modern conveniences of home automation - our dish-washing machines and our pet drying cabinets etc. And so it was with the spirit of industrial age technology that we set out to find the perfect home cooking device - a gas stove.

And so... as has been our way we found a (seemingly) great deal in a (seemingly) nearby town for another leviathan kitchen appliance:

Leviathan means sea monster like

The only byline in the ad that didn't get much attention was the small print of the shipping weight - 674 lbs. Granted, not something one looks at immediately while prematurely celebrating the ebay auction... but probably something I'm keen to look for now. Anyone who has moved anything knows that it's only a matter of how many guys you can call to help out and this one, realistically was a 4 dude proposition. With two dudes on the selling end, Mason and I were off to Hamburg Pennsylvania.

It was February

After a few months of storage, i'd shaved the beard, Mase had ditched the jacket and we heaved this thing into place with the help of Steven.

All while Alli feverishly assembles temporary Ikea cabinets in the background.

the vårde rhymes with part-ay

Backyard unraveled; Pull this thread as I walk away

never more true

We've dabbled in a few of the cardinal sins throughout the renovation process. It can be argued that the act of renovation/ addition is a greedy self serving act, that the care and focus on the work has resulted in an unhealthy pride of place and that the whole act itself stems from an heaving lust brought on by the home design buff-books stashed throughout the house like some teenagers purloined stack of playboys (This may be why Terence Conran is know as the Bob Guccione of the interior design set)...

"at least one of us is honest about selling sex appeal"

...Now i'm proud to add gluttony to the list - for if gluttony be the sin of over-consumption then we have dined once too often at the table of demolition. Backyard circa yesterday:

This is all part of an effort to correct one of the houses quirks that has the rear yard 3' above the first floor. Here's the back of the house the day we bought it some 17 years ago. We like to imagine that during the excavation of the house the extra dirt was just piled in the back yard and graded flat.

So call it gluttony for demolition or abuse or whatever but it is an over consumption of some kind. This house, like the Weezer's sweater, will soon be naked.

Back Breaking Labor of Love - the return to familiar ground

Aside from a completely failing HVAC system we consider the contracted work to be complete. While we punch out the last of the list we return to familiar ground once again by taking on the finish work in the house that, for one reason or another, we held out of the base contract. We've been burned by shitty craftsmanship in the past and while we may not be experts we have the luxury of time to get something to fit right, or at least take the time to find good solutions. We've had the benefit in our careers of seeing good craftsmen at work and we know how rare and valueable they are... one day I hope to hire one, in the mean time we make do.

The epic tile journey last month needed completion and so we set the weekend aside again to take on the project. We had originally budgeted for professional installation but he quit after leveling the floor without notice, so it was back to the shed for the old tile saw (insufficient) and then off to the hardware store to rent the right one.

I've learned in the past the benefits of a bigger hammer so i rented the biggest tile cuttingest hammer they had, pinned up the 'construction doc' and set to work.

In keeping with our long tradition of overcomplicating standard home owner choice... the tile we found is an encaustic cement tile. Our research found that encaustic tile originated in France and has fallen out of favor lately but is an old tile making method prized for its pain-in-the-ass weight and challenging installation protocol. We can't mention the grout proceedure without using the F word... or C word so it's best not to ask. These also have the benefit of looking almost exactly like ceramic tile while being twice as thick and puzzlingly more fragile.

I got a scare during the dry layout when i found one of the boxes contained two miss matched tiles... I immediately checked the rest of the patterned boxes (and foolishly only the patterned boxes) in case we didn't have enough to finish. Thankfully, this tile was the only anomaly.

note the extensive use of OSHA approved footwear throughout the project

eat your heart out Lululemon

Day 2 (Sunday) was a 6am to 6pm mad dash. once the patterned runner was down the rest of the work under the stove and cabinets could run a little faster.

This is about when disaster struck. The last box of white tiles was filled with half tiles- why this wasn't discovered sooner when we could have use half tiles to space the job out in hidden places... I'll never know. Call it murphy's law or call it dumb luck, or call it instead par for the course.. but we found ourselves exactly 1 box of tile short from completion, placing me back at the mercy or overnight shipping from upstate new york.

-at least we could put the refrigerator into its final home

[Red] Snakes on a [concrete] plane; I'll have the Sam Jackson

good mother@#$%ing choice

Renovation, as in life, is a balance of "wants" and "needs". Every day we face tough choices between selfish acts and selfless action. I may have 'wanted' to continue using my crocodile mile deep into the month of October but I 'needed' to go to work last fall so difficult choices had to be made. Similar indeed to another balance of want and need we faced in the decision to heat the kitchen floor. The heat in our house continues to come via 18th century technology - hot water is boiled in a device called a "boiler" and radiates throughout the house from things called "radiators". At it's most primitive a cast iron pipe flows water to a cast iron box, it heats up and you feel warm. Radiators are effective, and boilers are efficient and quiet so we're hard pressed to remove the working system to be replaced with a forced air system. The trick has always been to find a way to live with the hulking cast iron box that provides the radiating unless of course you could find some other thing to contain the hot water to do the radiating...

Which brings us back to the awkward "snakes on a plane" Samuel Jackson references. Boilers can pipe hot water anywhere and any surface - if large or conductive enough can transmit the heat - in our case the kitchen floor provides such surface and area. We set about running loops of pex tubing on top of the newly installed/ insulated concrete floor and beneath the future tile in an effort to free ourselves from the oppression of one more cast iron box. Plus, people are happier when their feet are warm and we've spent the last 50 years trying to heat our heads with forced air systems - it makes sense, you're probably wearing socks right now (I know I am). So out with the weekend and in with the red tubing:

I imagine the pex tubing to be snakes in this reference

and the concrete floor to be the "plane"

The pex lays out like air drying pasta and eventually plugs into a separate heating zone on the boiler in the closet adjacent to the kitchen.

The boiler has been named Sam Jackson just to make things easier

ready for tile

Punch out: The list goes on.

Which one is the contractor?

The benefit of hiring a general contractor is that you now have somewhere to direct your gripes. In our traditional relationship of construction Alli gripes to me about fit, finish and detail and I in turn go back to my shed and weep softly. Now together we have formed a gripe alliance and our treaty is the project "punch list". As the work draws down we put on our "designer hats" (no not those designer hats) and nit pick the finish quality of everything until the contractor quits. This is a time honored tradition and I'll be damned if i can't pick a nit better than most.

In the modern era between working professionals these gripes are never really verbalized but rather volleyed back and forth as camera phone photographed grievances. scanning through the photos that pile up I occassionally come across these grainy images in no order that were snapped when someone saw something they didn't like and didn't want to forget. I present to you in no particular order the badminton match that is our passively aggressive traded cell phone photographs. If a picture be worth a thousand words then truely a text messaged photo of poor jobsite maintenance is worth a marital counseling session at least.

now that's some good carpentry