Yes, you heard it here first: the Nelson home has hot water, as of 11:40am today!

It took a Dream Team of professionals to connect the dots and shoot the troubles, but in just a couple of hours, we went from "you're kidding me" disaster discovery, to "you're good to go" final recovery.

The Team (never before assembled in one boiler closet until today):
Danny Castro, the ElectroMan-- electrician who wired the house and the boiler himself
Seth Spangle, the RadiantMan-- contractor who assembled and installed the whole radiant-floor and domestic hot water system (but left the wiring to Danny)
Mac, intrepid engineer with Howard Industries and manufacturer's rep for the boiler itself.

Wish I had been there to take photos and hand out chocolates, but I left for an appointment with an author soon after Mac had arrived this morning. More on that later.

The important thing is that now, after five weeks and three days of living in our new home sans hot water (and sans gas for much of the time, too), we really feel like the house is DONE. Now we can do laundry here. We can use the dishwasher. We can put away the crock pots that have provided hot water in every bathroom. We can take showers!

I cannot tell you what a relief this is. A huge weight off our shoulders. Just three days before my mom comes to stay with us for the weekend, too! Yaay.

(Next big challenge: unpacking and organizing all our books! woohoo...

March 29-31, Kathryn's dad & aunt helped us empty out the storage space that held our books and wall art (photos, paintings, posters), Christmas decor and all the kids' stuff that didn't fit into our small apartment. It felt great to close out that storage space and not have to pay rent for it the first of April.

Now, with the help of Reggie and Sheldon of Starving Students Moving Co., we have emptied out the storage space that held all the furniture we salvaged from 29th Street (plus chairs from my parents). Those guys were great-- friendly, efficient, and very strong:

"Um, do you want me to remove the drawers from that file cabinet for you?"
"Nah, I'm good." Sheldon hoists it into a hug and starts marching.
"Those drawers are stuffed full."
"Yeah, I can tell!" Sheldon trots up the stairs as if the cabinet is empty.

(...You go try to pick up a full file cabinet. Or a decent-sized empty one, for that matter...)

Because of them, today's impressive moving-in progress was actually fun. We even invited them to dinner but they had to get the truck back to the lot, etc. Maybe we'll see them at the housewarming in May.

I sure hope so, because in all the excitement and busyness, I completely forgot to take photos! By the time I remembered, it was just me and Kathryn and the ubiquitous Dorothy Steventon. She took this photo of us, all sweaty and grubby, with a happy huddle of furniture behind us:
[insert photo soon!]

Next major steps: getting our gas meter installed and gas service turned on, and the Big Moving Day coming up, April 19th.

Not to mention completing a slew of draft posts that cover the past several months of the life of this nascent urban home...

Ah, the house can breathe again! Getting rid of the scaffolding feels like getting a cast removed. The house did not necessarily feel shackled or trapped to me, although the scaffolding certainly restricted movement around the outside... but now that it's gone, what once felt "normal" now feels like wide open space. The sky is visible from anywhere you stand outside! If you take that for granted, wrap your home or work in scaffolding for 10 months.

With the scaffolding, our view of the stucco and roofing was mostly myopic, getting a close-up view of every inch of it, but only being able to see what's right near you, both due to the scaffolding everywhere.

Without the scaffolding, the big picture is suddenly in better focus, but I find myself squinting up at window recesses, wondering "does that need another touch-up or is it just a shadow?" To find out I'll need a really tall ladder. Or go upstairs and lean out a window.

Other news: the mini-split for the garage apartment is all hooked up and ready to go, except for the power cable, which Danny might take care of this afternoon.

Some background: besides Easter, my favorite holiday has to be Thanksgiving. I once saw an info package for college students who were preparing to leave India for a course of study in America, which described Thanksgiving as a "high holy day celebrated by a feast with close family members." At first I laughed because so few Americans consider Thanksgiving a "holy" day or at least do not celebrate it with anything like a traditional American understanding of "holiness" in mind. But think about it: Americans do go to great lengths, make surprising sacrifices, to be with their families on Thanksgiving day. It is the sort of commitment that normally applies only to very important religious events in cultures like Hindu/Buddhist India or many others around the world. And the "feast" bit is spot on.

If we Americans were to add God to our Thanksgiving, and really made it a "holy" day, what might that look like? A prayer before the feast? A round of toasts after the feast?

How about helping the less fortunate to feast as well?

My fellow Xtracyclist "Tone" has been combining his love of biking, his career as a bike messenger, and his concern for the less fortunate for eight years now, and makes me long to join him in his happy madness.

Here is his description of it:
Many People probably do not know what Cranksgiving is, so I will describe it briefly. Cranksgiving is an open-course bicycle race where riders go to different supermarkets and get one item of food at each store, then after visiting about four or five stores they go to the finish and all the food is donated to a soup kitchen or food bank.

I will spare you further details, but If you care to learn more, you can check out a web site I set up to present the first eight years of Cranksgiving as they were organized by me in New York City:
http://www.moon-shine.net/cranksgiving/
Also, if you want to check out the flyer I designed for this year's Cranksgiving in York, PA, I posted it as an Adobe Acrobat PDF file here:
http://www.moon-shine.net/cranksgiving/Cranksgiving-YorkFlyer.pdf
.And if anyone in NYC wants to ride in the Cranksgiving race "under new management" there, then here is the NYC flyer:
http://www.nybma.com/images_flyers/cranksgiving2007flyer.jpg

I'm going to search the web for something about Cranksgiving in LA, and hope that he meant Los Angeles, not Louisiana.

Here's to creative celebration of holidays! "Skol!"

Yes, the floor finishing is in process. The first two coats are done and cured, the third coat is pending. I slipped in to take some photos of the results, sliding around in my socks on the slick, faintly fragrant floor... which bears only a passing resemblance to the dusty-soft grout-flecked floor of three days ago!

See for yourself: here is the dining room floor being laid...

and here it is FINISHED!

Here is the living room floor, sanded but unfinished...

Here is the living room floor, finished!

You're looking at Cinnamon Mix flooring, by the way.

Most of the rest of the house is Hevea flooring (orchard salvaged trees from rubber plantations). Here it is, all sanded and prepped...

Here it is, finished!

We are using Varathane water-based low-VOC "DiamondCoat" floor finish. It beat out Minwax on a test piece of Hevea, imparting virtually none of its own color and drying to a clear smooth finish. Good stuff.

Okay, this blog has always meant to be "slow" (two or three posts per month, max) but I've been so busy IRL that the blogging glacier has frozen to a complete stop.

But something has happened that calved a fresh posting off this glacial blog: THE STUCCO HAS BEGUN.

It has already felt like the final stretch this past several weeks, with hardwood floors mostly done, cabinetry and tile in process, painting/patching/catch-up stuff really happening. But with the loooong delays on exterior stuff, from roofing to insulation cladding to lathing the whole beast, it felt like half the project still languished in the "rough trades" phase. Not any more! Now we really HAVE turned the corner toward completion.

Feast thine eyes on wondrous things:

First the doors and windows and front porch trellis and fascia boards are taped off with plastic to protect them from the stucco...

The stucco crew uses a hose to blow the stucco onto the lath, and it gets everywhere.

And it fills the lath nicely too.

Here is the stucco pump (noisy!), and its hose (twitchy!).

The stucco guys use plastic sheeting to protect the neighbors too. That pressure hose really does shoot flecks of stucco everywhere.

This first layer of concrete is called the "scratch coat". It fills the mesh and any voids, and is left intentionally rough so the next layer of concrete stucco will adhere to it. For that reason, when there's a lot of it, it gets troweled like this, with long deep "scratches" in it.
Stick around, you'll learn something here.

Here is the noble crew that is doing our stucco. They would have finished the entire scratch coat on both structures in a single day except that their boss noticed that certain bullnosed corners weren't turning out perfectly straight. More on that later...

As for the inside progress you've missed till now (which I hope to fill in later: I have a lot of half-finished draft posts in June, July and August that you can't see yet), we now have:

Hardwood floors! Here is one Terramai floor, in the master bedroom.

Tile floors! This is the guest bathroom, the only bathroom that's fully tiled so far (more on that later!)

Linoleum floors! This is the real stuff: jute fiber backing, made of natural linseed oil and fine-ground cork bark, all natural colorants. Thick! Sustainably harvested, no offgassing.

Cabinetry! This is the guest bathroom countertop (the only one that's finished so far). But a lot of the other cabinetry is done, including the other bathroom vanities and the kitchen cabinets:

As for me, I'm in the final throes of finishing my last intensive block of classes in my master's program, so you won't be getting another blog post for a while. Not unless something earthshattering calves off a post from this glacier-paced blog...

...sadly, there are a couple of drywall/framing details not quite finished! Here, Kevin Piero opens the laundry room wall to install a row of glass block, as the paint appears to creep along the ceiling toward him.

This is our Plan B to let natural light into the laundry room, since for various reasons we can't have the Solatube we'd wanted.

Other examples of drywall/framing details still to finish:
• the hearth and flue enclosure, and pocket door, for the master bedroom--

• the Loftroom flue enclosure--

• the Library door hasn't arrived, so it's not even installed yet--

As soon as it gets here, though, it will be hung, the pocket framed and drywalled and taped and mudded, and it will get painted along with the rest of the house.

And what a difference paint makes!

Just as getting the drywall hung was like putting skin on the exposed bones and tendons of the house (making a HUGE difference: make this a link to that post), now it is as if we are seeing the house go from "lounging around in its underwear" (being smoothly mudded but still obviously under construction) to "dressing up for company". Suddenly the house doesn't just look "better", it looks "NICE!"
[photo A & B]

...at least WE think so...
[photo B & C]

...we think the wall color is quite fetching. Of course, we picked it. And this is just the primer coat.
[photo D & E]

The best is yet to come: the hardwood floors are spreading fast thanks to Seth's "flooring ninjas", and the cabinets have definitely arrived.

Today set a record for greatest number of trades or interests present at the jobsite in a single workday!

Nerio Luna and a helper showed up first, he's the drywall guy.

Marlin and Ed, from About Fire Suppression, also came early to fix a couple problems with the emergency sprinkler system.

Bob Sawyer, his assistant Karen, and I met with Moises Arredondo the cabinetry guy, taking final measurements before he gets started on cabinets throughout the house.

Bob made some progress on the downstairs fireplace enclosure (which he is building personally) before he had to get back to the office.

Ian and his Heliopower team showed up to install the racks for the PV panels on the garage roof.

Danny "Electro-Man" Castro came to bring Ian up to speed on electrical stuff, and to wire the boiler and its various pumps.

Eddie Arellano came to look over the remaining pickup carpentry, and see what tools he needed to finish prepping the Stucco-Mate for being stuccoed. He left Frank to spackle the entire house and garage. (Frank stayed till 8pm! He was the last to leave)

Corey White and four of his younger brothers came to grind off the last of the spalling from the iron handrail.

Andy Barraza came late to pressure-test the radiant floor plumbing and tidy up a few things on behalf of 180 Design & Build.

And I was there for much of the day, doing cleanup, roughing in a ventilation passage and meeting with Marlin, Bob, Moises, Ian, Danny, Eddie, and Andy in turn. Including myself, that's 22 people and ten different organizational identities in a single day!

I would post photos of each of them hard at work, except my wonderful Sony digital camera won't work anymore.

I think it's clogged with drywall dust.

Okay, Quik-R is simply and inexplicably unavailable on the west coast. They won't even ship it to us.

Something called Tuff-R was a possibility, but the cost seemed exorbitant.

Multiply this price by 300 and you'll see why we didn't go with it. No, we did not find a significant discount elsewhere.

But we found something with less frills (unlined) and half the size (2x8 sheets rather than 4x8) but probably the right stuff for the job. It's also reasonably priced, and we got a volume discount. Called "stucco-mate", it's a one-inch-thick extra-dense styrofoam panel, tongue-&-groove so it fits tightly together and forms its own moisture barrier, and with weep channels on the inner side to let any condensation or moisture penetration drain down and out the bottom, rather than establish mold and mildew colonies against the concrete wall. Contractors who know about it call it "blueboard". I was so eager to get the stuff up I failed to have someone model a piece of it for a photo, sorry.

Six hundred sheets of Stucco-mate is a LOT of styrofoam. Since we were going to store it in the garage, I had it delivered through the alley. From one direction the approach was blocked by low-hanging electrical and telephone wires, so the driver came at us from the other direction. This flowering tree blocked his approach.

The driver and I had to break off branches to get the load past. I cut the bigger ones back with my trusty Leatherman's saw blade.

We carried it in through here (following our cheerleader Joy):

...and stacked it to the ceiling, nearly filling the garage with it!

The driver was a GREAT help-- together, he and I unloaded the entire shipment in less than an hour.

THANK YOU, sir! I wrote down your name to properly honor you and can't find that anywhere. Comment here and remind me.

We may have found our answer to exterior insulation.

First we looked again at Dryvit EFIS (Exterior Foam Insulation System). It has a relatively high R-value and lots of good press, but it is also expensive. Prohibitively so, for our budget. The Dryvit racket operates partly by keeping all its parts integrated in a single package for the consumer: you have to hire an authorized Dryvit contractor to do the job, and that person must use 100% Dryvit-branded components, down to the colorants of the non-cement "stucco" outer layer. You aren't supposed to be able to buy any of the Dryvit stuff piecemeal. So if you want any of it, you buy the whole bundle, from your local monopoly (the authorized Dryvit installer in your area).

Well, Bob thought he might have found a way to get just the insulative sheets, install them ourselves and put whatever stucco we want over the top of it. Two problems arose: the reputation for fragility that Dryvit has (dents easily), and the manufacturer's warnings that you must use polymer-based stucco coating (not much dent protection there) not a stucco based on portland cement (which doesn't mind the occasional ball impact).

And the price was still not thrilling us.

Enter Quik-R. I still don't know how I stumbled across this stuff, having never found it in umpteen Google searches. I think it was a tip from Seth Spangle. But it seems perfect for us: it is just one inch thick, has an R-value of 6, comes in 4x8 sheets, and is lined on both sides so it doesn't break too easily (it's really styrofoam on steroids, after all). But it does not weigh much and can be cut with a utility knife.

And the price is actually reasonable.

Now the tricky part: getting our hands on the stuff as quickly as possible!