Pre-baby preparations

With a baby on the way, life is going to change fast.  There are a few last-minute projects I wanted to complete before the baby comes along.

Baby Room

The third bedroom in our house was used as an office, with two giant desks and one little twin bed.  We sold the desks and setup a new workstation in our master bedroom (see post below) and had a clean slate to work with.  We added a full-sized wall decal on one wall that looks like tree branches with leaves and birds, bought a crib, changing table and an organizing shelf.  Finally we added drapes that have an organic leaf pattern to match the wall decal and a nice glider/recliner chair for us.

Home Office and New Computer

Hanna has needed a new computer since her PC crashed last November.  Our new office is tight on space, so a full-sized desktop PC with a huge tower was not going to work.  All-in-one computers fit the bill nicely.  We knew Windows 8 had a terrible reputation but we were unable to find a new desktop computer with Windows 7.  (I later found out that Microsoft did develop a new "downgrade path," which allows you to upgrade to Windows 8.1 PRO, and then you have the option of paying MORE money to downgrade to Windows 7.  What a shitty company Microsoft is.)

To make a long story short, we bought a really nice ASUS all-in-one Windows 8 machine and had it for 10 days before we returned it to Costco.  The operating system is as bad, if not worse, than everyone says.  I spent 9 nights trying to install the required updates, and all it did was result in crashing and high frustrations.  That was in December.  For whatever reason we did not want a Mac and we hit critical mass 8 months later in August when Microsoft still had not responded with a better operating system.  We finally made the move to Mac, and all I can say is I wish we had done it years ago.  Every single printer, router and peripherial device we have attached to it has just worked.  I can't say that in the least about our two Windows PC.  For example, it took hours to configure our PCs to wirelessly print, something the Mac did automatically.  I have 12+ hours into trying to get the wireless scanning to work, and never did get it functioning.  I was playing around with the Mac one day and noticed a little icon that resembled our printer.  I clicked on it and it started warming up the flatbed scanner.  Amazing, it worked without even setting it up.  I bought a mount kit and neatly mounted it to the wall above our desk.

The Mac is fantastic, and even though the new workspace is small, it did completely free-up a room for the baby.  Our desks were always cluttered with paper, now we don't have room to have a cluttery desk.

Home Electric Vehicle Charging Station

A standard 120 volt home outlet can only safely put out 12 amps over long periods of time, which is 1.4 kilowatts of energy each hour.  The problem is our Nissan Leaf electric car has a 24 kilowatt battery, so do the math on that one--a fully discharged battery could take up to 17 hours to recharge.  I posted earlier that my friend Stuart helped me install a 240 volt outlet in my garage last March, so now I need a charging station to get that power to the car.  The charging time gets cut from 17 hours to 3 hours, MAX.

Charging stations safely get that 240 volts to the car through an electronic handshake with the car.  When you plug in the car, the car tells the charging station how much juice it can accept at one time, and the charging station responds by telling it what it can provide.  They come to some sort of electronic agreement that I have yet to hear, and the computer code tells the relays inside to close and provide power to the car.  All for the price of about $600-$700.  Some folks much smarter than me learned the code, open-sourced it and made DIY kits that come with all the necessary parts to solder together and assemble yourself for about 1/3 that cost.  Here is the final outcome:

Building it myself allowed me use a cord long enough to pass it through the wall through a series of conduit and L-B fittings so the charging station is inside the garage protected from the elements, yet the plug that attaches to the car is outside where the car is parked.  I also used this opportunity to do some cable management with the smart irrigation controller sitting next to it.

And here is the charging holster on the outside wall of the house.

Backyard Lighting

A lot of neighbors complement us on our yard and yard lighting on the front of the house and now I want some of that for *us* to enjoy in the backyard.  My desire to add more outlets and another 12 volt outdoor transformer for the lighting was low, so I took a different approach.  I knew I had enough overhead in my frontyard lighting transformer, so I split the circuit and ran an underground cable to the backyard.  I installed a waterproof switch on the fence so I could isolate the backyard lighting from the front. This way, when the transformer senses darkness and turns on the frontyard lighting, the backyard lighting will come on and off with that circuit if it's in the on position.  In the off position, only the frontyard lights remain on.  I added some nice little stainless steel deck mount lights and an LED flood light under each of the two backyard redwood trees to uplight them.  It's subtle, and should look good with other plans I have for the backyard.

Make-shift backyard switch:

Recessed deck lights and redwood tree up-light

Lawn & Sprinklers

Everyone knows I prefer native plants to lawn, but our backyard had this weird, ill-placed planter that I wanted to go away.  The easiest solution was to cut the concrete that surrounded it and extend the grass by those few feet.  This, of course, required moving a bunch of sprinklers, amending the soil and adding new sod.  The weird planter is now gone.

Fun

We have made some time for fun stuff too.  From what I can remember, a day at Stinson Beach, weekly mountain bikes rides after work with friends, a 23 mile mountain bike ride on the Emigrant Trail near Truckee (loved this trail!!), an evening river boat cruise on the Sacramento River Hornblower, a concert at Matt's house, Signal Peak 4x4 trail run, camping with friends at Silver Fork, a huge family reunion in Modesto and a really fun baby shower at our home.

Stinson Beach

Emigrant MTB trail

That's it for now, I will be sure to post when the baby is born and we get settled in our new lives.

Utah and New Mexico & more home reconfiguration

Life has been busy lately, and it's about to get a whole lot busier.  We made a few changes to the configuration of our rooms to create a dedicated baby room, made time for outings with friends and even had time for a short vacation.

Let's start with the bathroom vanity.  In case you did not get the memo, golden oak is not in style, and our house has(d) plenty of it.  I did some reading on the internet and found a technique that was worth trying.  The key to this cabinet transformation recipe is this--you must start with a product that has an existing finish; this will not work on bare wood.  You simply give the cabinets a quick rubbing with a scotchbrite pad, lay on a coat of General Finishes Java jel-based stain; wait 24 hours----> add a second coat, wait 24 hours----> third coat, wait 5 days----> add a coat of General Finishes water-based poly acrylic, wait 24 hours----> second coat of poly, wait 24 hours----> third coat and you're done.  The amount of time spent prepping and actually doing the coats is fairly minimal, however the time inbetween seems rather significant.

I also replaced the vanity's old exposed hinges with Austrian-made Blum Blumotion european hinges with soft-close, which required drilling the back of each cabinet door to accept the hinge cup, and also added some fantastic looking brushed stainless door hardware that matches the finish of our shower door.  Here is the result:

We couldn't be happier.  We have about $60 in materials (stain, tape, brushes, etc.) and around $150 into hinges and hardware.  We could have found hardware for less (we paid full retail at Woodcraft store), but we fell in love with these.  Why Austrian-made hinges?  Because Hanna and I LOVE Austria and it's because it's what was available.

Last week we had the carpet in house replaced with Mohawk Smartstrand, which seems to be some of the most durable carpet out there.  Smartstrand has softness that approaches that of silk carpet, but with the stain resistance of polyester.  Since we had to remove all of the contents from the three bedrooms and closets, we found this to be a great opportunity to do some reorganizing.  We went to IKEA and bought a HEMNES bookcase and HEMNES floating shelf to make up for some book storage we lost in the room that will now be a baby room.  One side of the floating shelf is bridged to the upright bookcase, the mid-point just happened to fall right on a stud in the wall, and the two corners are supported by sheetrock molly bolts rated for 66 pounds each.  We found the IKEA BESTA BURS desk to fit almost perfectly underneath.  The desk is sort of iPod-like, finished in a 'floating glass white.'

We also bought some IKEA BESTA shelves that we configured with one drawer on top and two shelves below for additional storage in our master closet.  I bolted them to the interior of the closet, leaving 29-1/2" of space between the wall and the shelf so I could mount the sliding IKEA KOMPLEMENT pull-out pants hangers.  Finally, there is an angled wall inside the closet that was perfect for mounting three IKEA TRONES shoe cabinets.  The closet is organized like nothing I have ever owned before.  (No picture, yet)

Outside the house, I finally did something about our weed garden in the front yard.  I picked up 1-1/2 yards of decomposed granite and applied it about 3" thick to suppress weeds, then threw a few Arizona sandstone pavers in that I had leftover from another project.  This should significantly reduce the amount of weeding I need to do compared with the pea gravel that it replaced.

Hanna's brother got married in Jemez Springs, New Mexico on May 25th, so we drove out to attend and do some hiking along the way.  We are officially sick of Interstate-5 through the Central Valley and SoCal, so we went over Highway 80 past Tahoe and Reno, then took Highway 50 across Nevada, then south on Highway 93 and stayed the first night in Cedar City, Utah.  There is a reason they call Highway 50 the "loneliest road in America" but man is it beautiful compared to I-5, particularly if you like high desert.

Loneliest road in America

The next day we picked up Interstate 15 and went south, with the cruise control set at 85 mph, mostly in compliance with Utah's incredible 80 mph speedlimit.  We skirted south of Zion National Park on Highway 59/389, picked up 89A/89 to Tuba City, then east on 264 to Gallup, New Mexico.  The drive from Cedar City to about Tuba City is pretty nice, but we find 264 and the route we took last year across Highway 98 (out of Page, AZ), Highway 160 and 191 to be pretty ugly, mostly spoiled by the Indian camps where trash is openly and almost purposely piled everywhere.  It is such a shame because the land is beautiful.  From Gallup we continued east on I-40 to Albuquerque, NM.

Navajo Bridge over Colorado River

 On Saturday we hiked part way up Sandia Peak, Sunday was the wedding, and Monday we headed towards home. Wanting to take a slightly different route, we went west on I-40 to Flagstaff, AZ, with the scenery starting to get pretty nice at this point), and took 89 north back to Hurricane, UT, where we spent the night.

The next day we woke up early and headed into Zion National Park.  Last year we went through here during the National Park closure, so we got to see the park completely de-void of people, but we did not have the opportunity to hike.  We boarded the shuttle and hiked Lower and Upper Emerald Pools.

Following the Emerald Pools hike we re-boarded the shuttle to the top of the park (furthest north) for the Riverside Walk Trail.  This paved trail leads to the mouth of the Zion Narrows, which is a hike people gear-up and hike *in* the river and up through the narrow gorge.  This has been on my bucket list for a while; and when we reached the end of the paved trail and the start of the Narrows, we decided we needed to do at least a couple hundred feet of it.  We plunged in wearing our hiking shorts and hiking shoes, and found it to be refreshing on this 97 degree day, and it felt safe, so we pressed on for about a mile.

The Narrows is a pretty remarkable place, with the Virgin River flanked by several hundred foot-high sandstone walls on either side, it is a must-do.  We plan to return some time in the future and hike more of the trail.

We stayed that night again in Hurricane, UT, then continued home by driving west to St. George, Utah, north on Highway 18 where we saw the "Biggest Loser" vans and contestants doing a film shoot at Snow Canyon State Park, then reconnected with Highway 56 to 93 and US50 back home.  It was a great little getaway, and we plan to return to central Nevada with the 4Runner at a later date to explore the myriad of dirt roads that lead off to cool places around the Toiyabe Mountain range.

Master bath remodel

I bought our home in 2009 and since day #1 I have thought to myself “who's idea was it to carpet the master bathroom?”  The house has this excellent master suite-style bathroom with dual sinks, a walk-in closet and separate toilet room, but then the builders installed a generic looking shower-over-tub and carpeted right to the vanity.  This had to go.

The contractor started gutting the bathroom on a Monday morning, beginning by stripping out the old bath tub and shower enclosure and taking the walls down to bare studs.  The shower valve was changed and the plumbing was all moved a few inches to the right to center the shower handle and shower head to the new center of the room.  The shower area will be larger than the tub it replaces.

Tuesday morning.  The floor drain had to be moved from to the center of the shower floor, which required jack-hammering the concrete slab and extending the drain line to the center of the space.  This job was one of the big reasons I didn’t do the shower remodel myself.   And I wanted this project to be done before 2020. 

Blocking was added 12” up the walls and a 4.5” high curb was added.  We brought the curb out to a 45 degree corner of the wall and added about 5” to the width of the shower area.  On Wednesday the hot mopper added slope to the floor and mopped the smelliest asphault-like material onto the floor and 12” up the walls.  The house would smell like a new highway for days to come.

Thursday the tile guy put hardiebacker on the walls to hold the mortar and tiles and began tiling the walls.  Friday he did the shower floor and bathroom floor.  Saturday he grouted and finished the tile job.  No more carpet in the bathroom!

After the grout was dry, I followed my tile guy’s recommendation and sealed the grout with a product called 511 Impregnator.  While I was at it, I cleaned the grout in the laundry room and spare bathroom and sealed the grout there as well.

The following weekend we went camping with Rose and Stuart at the newest National Park in the system, Pinnacles National Park.  It was formerly a National Monument, but now it’s a National Park--the rock Pinnacles the place is named after seem not to notice the name change.  The camp sites were nice and we did a lot of hiking around the various pinnacle-strewn rock faces. It was a nice break from the construction zone going on at home.

Now we’re at two weeks since the tile guy finished his job and our new shower door has arrived.  I helped Stuart install his a couple of weeks back, now it’s time for mine.  I loved the quality of the hardware on Stuart’s door and loved the modern trimless appearance, so I placed the same order.  These doors have very little adjustment for out-of-square and I haven’t seen a house yet that is square anywhere.  We had our challenges but it’s installed and looking good.  

Overall, we are very pleased with the results.  It will be nice to not have to step into a tub to take a shower, there is vastly more room inside and the shower doors really help modernize the bathroom.   Next steps are to replace the rupture-prone corrugated water supply lines with new quarter-turn ball valves and stainless steel supply lines, new floor moulding and possibly moulding around the bathroom windows.  We will attempt to stain the vanity, add new hardware, new faucets and possibly replace the single large mirror with smaller dual mirrors, and we’re not sure if we will replace the countertop and sinks; we will wait and see how it all looks together after staining the vanity.

The Ides of March

I had my decade birthday in February and this month it was Hanna's turn for her decade birthday.  For the past couple of months we have been gearing-up to spend the weekend at the Mojave Desert with friends.  As we got closer to the trip, the morning sickness and general nausea seemed to be getting worse, so we unfortunately had to call the trip off just three days prior to our scheduled departure.  200 miles of offroading, tent camping and several days away without any services just wasn't going to work.  We both really wanted to go to the desert and celebrate Hanna's birthday, so I booked a very last-minute trip for us to Palm Springs.  We stayed two nights at the Westin Mission Hills Golf Resort and Spa in Rancho Mirage, and one night at the Aqua Soleil in Palm Desert (which was only because we couldn't get that first night at the Mission Hills Resort). 

We drove down Thursday morning and arrived in Palm Desert late afternoon, checked into our hotel, then headed to a local Thai restaurant for dinner.  We spent most of the evening relaxing by the pool and spa.  The following morning we had breakfast at the Aqua Soleil's restaurant and drove to the edge of town to hike on the bluffs on the Bump 'n Grind trail.  It was hot, with the temperatures in the mid to high-80s, which didn't help with Hanna's nausea.  We turned back, now setting our sites on relaxing by the pool at the Westin Resort.  And speaking of pools, Palm Springs seems like such an unsustainable place to me--from our vantage on the hike we could see Palm Spring's thousands of acres of the greenest, lushest grass with nearly every home containing a swimming pool in the backyard, and yet, outside of the developed area it is nothing but dry desert sand.  With the extremely dry year we've had so far this season, the northern California reservoirs are critically low, with mandatory water conservation in most areas of Sacramento.  Meanwhile, Pyramid Reservoir near L.A. was brimming (98% full, to be exact), the miles of golf courses were irrigated every night and we literally saw not one sign encouraging water conservation of any type in Palm Springs.  Seems crazy, but whatever.

We loved the pool so much that we found ourselves ordering food pool-side to be delivered to our cabana; not even the high prices were enough to get us to leave our spot.  The Westin is beautiful--the grounds are surrounded by water features, rock ledges, waterfalls and lush landscaping.  We had a really nice dinner at the resort's Pinzimini Italian restaurant on Hanna's birthday.  Overall, the trip was really relaxing.  

Westin main entrance

The resort pool

The golf course in the middle of the desert, next to the resort.

House-wise, a couple of minor projects this month.  The neighbor behind me split the cost of a new backyard fence with me.  We hired a guy that did Hanna's parent's fence, using steel posts and redwood fence boards.  The new steel fence posts are square with a flange on each side, so a fence builder can box the metal post in wood to conceal it. 

My friend Stuart helped me one afternoon install a 240V outlet in my garage for charging the Nissan Leaf electric car.  It drops the charge time from 17 hours to 3 hours.  

Finally, Hanna and I got in a day on the slopes while there's still snow.  The ski season has been terrible this year due to the drought.  We skiied at Diamond Peak on the Nevada side of Tahoe.  Views of Lake Tahoe are excellent and it's always fun to ski a new resort.

We have a bathroom remodel that starts this week...more on that later.

New future addition to the family

We have some exciting news to share; Hanna is 13 weeks pregnant!  The new world of parenting should bring us a lot of fun and exciting new challenges in our lives.  Due date is September 18. 

Forty - cuarenta - quaranta - vierzig - 40

I had a birthday this month, and not just a little birthday, this was the big 4-0.  A few days before my birthday the Associated Press published an article “Things that turn 40 in 2014.” On that list were things like, oh, cel phones, the ATM machine, Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon album was released…that’s enough to put it all in perspective. 

On the Saturday before my birthday I was heading to Matt and Renee’s house to feed their cats while they were out of town, with dinner planned shortly after that with our friends Mike and Marin.  I pull up in the empty driveway and open the dark house, head out to the garage for the cat food only to be surprised by 25 of my closest friends.   It was all a huge surprise for me, and an excellent one at that.  It had all the makings of a great party…good friends, appetizers, beer and shots of Fireball, ping pong and air hockey, a piñata and just to ensure a successful party, my own taco truck.  Chandos Tacos, one of our favorites at the monthly taco truck nights in Roseville, was sitting in the driveway churning out all-you-can-eat tacos to us happy taco patrons.   I have the best wife ever, she sure knows how to make me happy.  There were some excellent gag gifts too, including custom-made plasti-dipped bi-focus safety glasses, something every 40-year man with a garage needs.  

Sweet new bi-focus safety glasses with anti-loss chain

chili pepper pinata

Not everyone liked the mix of Fireball and Smirnoff Iced Cake flavored vodka. (Who's idea was that anyway?) 

The taco truck awaiting us.

My alternating Fridays off have afforded me some time for some projects around the house.  I helped Stuart add power to his 4Runner in the form of a new TRD Supercharger and he in turned helped add power to my garage in the form of a 240V outlet for a new charging station for our Nissan Leaf.   The electrical service panel is on the outside wall of the garage, so we simply cut a hole in the sheetrock in the garage, pulled some 6 gauge wire from the service panel through the new hole , installed the outlet box and wired the outlet and landed a new breaker.  I had some gutter cleaning to do, which became pretty obvious last week when it rained and all of my gutters were overflowing.  I seam-sealed the driveway, mowed the lawn for the first time in about six weeks, leaf cleanup and finally dove into our taxes, oh joy.

Speaking of the Nissan Leaf, I am thoroughly enjoying this car.  It is such a pleasure to drive and we have used it for virtually all of our driving.  The car keeps track of our driving automatically, and from January 18 (day of purchase) to today February 18, we have logged 1,172 miles and burned 276.5 kilowatts of electricity.  At 10.8 cents per kilowatt, the cost for driving that 1,172 miles would be $27.65, but we have done most all of our charging for free at the public chargers at my office and near Hanna’s office.   Electric cars are the future; I can already see it.

We hiked Hidden Falls Regional Park (must come back here for mountain biking) and an unmarked trail that looks down on the American River from Ponderosa Road out of Colfax.  I also noticed a single track mountain bike trail off Highway 20 just outside of Nevada City that I need to investigate.  (And yes, us 40-year old people need to write stuff like this down so we will remember.) 

2014 already?

Happy New Year!  Now I realize just how long it has been since my last update, and quite frankly, I have no idea what I've done in the past two months.  I recall high-60 to low-70 degree days in January when it should be raining, which enabled bike riding, a hike near Clear Lake, a trip out to Folsom Lake to see historic low water levels, oh, and Christmas and New Years fell in there somewhere.  I usually have a series of on-going house projects but lately all I have done is build a Trex patio extension in the backyard.

A few months back I changed my work schedule from a standard 40 hour work week to 9 hour days with every-other Friday off, which has been really nice.  And recently I went a step further to spend more time at home and less time at work.  I have taken public transportation to work the entire seventeen years I have worked at my job.  Much of that is due to my office's busy location down near the State capitol, and I sort of took my time for granted and accepted public transit as a part of my life.  I finally came to the realization that I was losing an hour each day either riding my bike or driving to a park and ride and waiting for a bus to take me downtown.  Same story going home.  In short, I leased an electric car for the next 3 years to get me to and from work.  It's a 2013 Nissan Leaf, which is not only my first electric car, but it's also my first new car ever.  The car commute means I get home more than a full hour sooner than before.  For someone used to cycling every day and taking public transit, this feels like complete freedom to be able to run errands on my way home or stop and see friends, without first having to come home and change out of bike shorts.

The car is really fun to drive.  It accelerates quickly without making any noise, it handles well, it is so high tech it feels like a little spaceship.  I can set a timer on the car so the cabin is pre-heated for me in the morning before I get in, it has navigation that shows you how far you can go on your current charge, where to find charging locations and it even tells you how many of the chargers are being used and how many are available.  I can check the range of the car remotely on my phone, tell it to turn on the AC or heat if I'm about to head out, but probably my favorite feature right now on these 40 degree mornings is the heated steering wheel.  I still love my bikes, but I love them even more when I *want* to ride them, rather than *have* to ride them.

The Leaf is rated at 129 miles per gallon 'equivalent,' but obviously it doesn't have an engine so it burns no fuel at all.  I can charge the car for free at work and Hanna has free public charging next to her office as well.  I also get to hog the carpool lane with the Prius's and drive like I'm entitled because I'm destroying the environment slightly less than those around me. 

It doesn't look like much; I kind of feel like I need a license plate frame that says "my other car isn't this lame" or "my other car is a truck."

Please note, I didn't buy white again.

Spaceship interior

And finally, if you ever had any doubt whether or not electric cars are catching-on, just take a look at the top of the parking garage at work:

In that photo are 20 Nissan Leafs, 2 Ford Focus electrics and a Chevy Volt (partial electric).  These cars are the future...