[sic]

With our tenant Joe’s unexpected and sudden demise almost two weeks ago and the subsequent cleaning out of his belongings being completed by his brother yesterday I finally got a chance to get up there and take a good look around.

Susan I had initially planned on cleaning it up and renting it out for at least double if not near triple what the rent had been (Joe’d lived here since 1986), but on further review we’ve decided not to have to bother with all that and instead go ahead with our ultimate plan of reclaiming the space to the house by reconnecting the first floor to the second with an interior staircase and turning the 3 rooms, 2 half-baths and sliver of a kitchen up there into a master suite.

Flickr photoset of those thumbnails is here.

It’s gonna be a long, expensive process but so worth it to have the house all to ourselves and so much sooner than we’d expected.

Our neighbors to the south approached us a few weeks ago with plans to finish the parkway in front of their house (aka, the space between the sidewalk and the curb) by taking out the existing shrubs and laying down a blanket of Mexican beach stones dotted with some new succulents. He asked if we wanted to join in and that for a nominal fee he’d get enough stones to cover our parkway and also get his gardeners to rip out the decrepit, and broken-bottle and trash infested patches of ivy in the process, giving the stretch across the two houses a nice unified look.

I thought the stones might nicely accent the river-rock walls and so I checked with Susan to see what she thought and she was cool with it so we gave the plan the thumbs-up.
Three weekends ago the gardeners got started and got rid of the ivy and the shrubs and afterward our neighbor asked if we wanted them to demo the long cracked and semi-hazardous concrete slab that had long ago uniformly spanned the dirt between the curb and the walk and we said hell yeah again.

The next week the gardeners were back and did just that, as well as laid down the beach stones until they ran out.  And in looking repeatedly at the parkway directly across from our front steps afterward, I knew we had to do something to replace the concrete slab — not just because the stones needed a bit of a visual and textural breaking-up, but also because any passengers exiting or entering cars parked there might have an unsteady time of it walking across the loose rocks.

So Saturday morning I raided our backyard stack of its dwindling stock of the home’s original brick foundation material and after an hour or so of digging and laying and stuff had a bridge back with which Susan and I are both pleased as we await the remainder of the beach stones to be installed (click to triplify):

There are things that come part and parcel with living in an old house. There’s cool stuff like learning during a routine repair job yesterday that the locks on the bedroom door are 118 years old. And not so cool stuff, like a few months ago when I was getting a closer look at the extent of the cracked ceiling plaster in the living room and a chunk not the size of South America but certainly resembling the continent’s shape came down all over me, revealing the lathe it had become detached from however long ago. Lovely, isn’t it?

In the time since I’ve effected various cover ups, but when the last hastily taped pillow case came down awhile ago, we gave up trying to mask it and just let the hole be the hole until I decided to do something cheap and easy. Because I’m nothing if not cheap and easy.

As unlikely as it might seem there was some method to my madness. I knew the material I’d be using for the patch better be light, primarily because there was a certain precarious element to the remaining plaster as it was essentially separating from the lathe as well. So unless I wanted the rest of the panel to come crashing down, mounting anything like plywood or drywall to it wasn’t an option. Besides, the only way to attach anything would be to go straight through the plaster, which would crack it and let gravity do the rest.

No, what I needed was something lightweight that could fit up in there and could then in turn act as something of a brace by providing some resistance against the competing sections of plaster in hopes of stalling an furthing slippage.

The answer was cardboard and so I dove into our basement stash and came up with the biggest box we had and a can of spackle. Next I needed to transfer the outline of the hole onto the cardboard. At first I was thinking of chalking around the edge and just laying the box against it in hopes the chalk would transfer, but in the end what I did was securely tape a large piece of gift-wrapping paper over the hole and then using an X-acto knife carefully cut through the paper while moving the blade along the perimeter. That ultimately produced a template that I could then lay atop the cardboard and cut around.

The cardboard piece went in there imperfectly flexing inwards a bit rather than remaining flush, but then I wasn’t looking for perfect. All I was looking for was a solution that was easy to install and conversely would be easy to pull down when the time came to repair it right. So after roughly spackling it into place and sanding the spackle down after it dried I mistakenly applied a coat of magnolia white thinking that was the ceiling color. It wasn’t. Not only that the paint was semi-gloss so it glistened something fierce.

Thankfully Susan found the remaining ceiling paint she had down in the basement and after a coat of primer to cover up the gloss I applied it this morning. Here’s the before and after (click to triplify):

Like I said my main goal was to do something whose after didn’t look worse or was more noticeable than the before and I’m proud to say I accomplished that.

A small Flickr photo set of the D-I-Y progression is here.

Caught you! You lousy… paper… thieving…

Cat?!

Alas, after putting out the decoy paper this neighborhood feline proved to have the most interest of any of the parade of beings that my surveillance camera caught passing by between about 8:30 p.m. last night and a little after 9 a.m. this morning.

The switch-and-bait manuever occured around 5:40 a.m. and even though I finally declared the covert operation unsuccessful and shut it down about four hours later, I had fun reviewing the video clips captured from the cam to the computer and have compiled a sequence of stills for your viewing pleasure:

Better luck next week.

Chances are good that you as a resident of the city and county of Los Angeles are in possession of some sort of hazardous material. Maybe it’s an old computer monitor stuck in the back of your closet or that quart of Navajo White paint you bought from Home Depot to touch up the livingroom wall that got damaged when you threw your cell phone against it for reasons we won’t go into here. Maybe it’s that very cell phone.

Whatever the item or items may be, they’ve been hanging around primarily because you’re just too dang lazy you have better things to do but also because you have something of a conscience in regards to personal responsibility and you don’t want to violate any laws disposing of the stuff improperly. So it just sits and sits and before you know it you’ve broken another cell phone against a different wall and bought another quart of paint because you’d temporarily forgotten you had the first quart stashed under the kitchen sink, and so on.

So what to do… what to do, indeed. Fortunately for us greater and lesser Angelenos the County of Los Angeles’ Department of Public Works in conjunction with the City of Los Angeles’ Bureau of Sanitation operate regional Solvent Automotive Flammable Electronic (SAFE) Collection Centers that are staffed and ready to go to work properly disposing of the crap you can’t (the county also maintains a calendar of mobile collection events; more info here). All you have to do is take it to them — although as we found out there are limits to what they will accept.

See in our case, Susan and I had what I would categorize as a “total shitload” of old paint stored out of the way in the basement. Not only was there some eight years worth accumulated since Susan bought the house, but also a bunch of leftover cans from her tenant’s past life as a grafitti paint-out specialist for the city.

After the jump, is what a “total shitload” of old paint looks like (click to enlarge):

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Yeah, that’s right. I’d rather bust out the needle and spool — mangled knuckles and all — and suture up a saddlepack zipper that’s ripped free rather than plunk down the $14.95 for a new one. Some call it cheap. I call it frugal. And while I won’t win any awards for my stitchery, dang if the thing won’t last me another year or so. Or sew.