Rain control

We have a downspout in our backyard that pours right onto the brick patio. I've tried hooking up extender tubes to escort the water off the brick and into the yard. This has worked but only marginally, it either gets kicked or blown by the wind and detaches from the downspout.

Last weekend, in preparation for the rain, I executed a plan I had thought up a few months ago ---- buy a narrow garbage can and have the downspout pour into it instead. So I bought this "slim jim" 23 gallon can from Home Depot:

The problem is, with the heavy rain, it was filling up in about 3 hours. Dragging the can 10 feet to dump it out into the garden/lawn was difficult and a pain. This was finally realized when I went to empty it before work, dressed in work clothes and the darn thing fell over creating a small 23 gallon typhoon of water getting me wet.

So, to solve this, I drilled a hole in the lower side of the can, installed a ball valve hose bib. A standard hose bib fits a 1" hole pretty well. With some silicone, washers and a nut on the back side, the drain valve seems pretty sturdy.

Next, I took some old hose, and made a new hose out of with a replacement hose attachment:

Now, the slim jim can collect 23 gallons of water, and I can then turn the valve and pump the water anywhere within 15 feet. 

In the future, I'll build a more decorative box around the garbage can. And, when it's not rainy season, I'll disconnect the hose and store in the shed.

More house history

Exchanged some emails with a Sacramento Mid Century blogger who runs Eichlerific. And she pointed me to this website that has vintage aerial photography.

We know that some major renovations have been done to the house, and I wrote about the garage addition earlier

There, I showed the current aerial photo with the estimated additions (the fuchsia squares below):

HistorialAerials.com  has aerial shots of our house from 1957 and 1964:

1957,  Notice the sparse trees and where the driveway is located




1964, Trees have grown in the last seven years:

Garage progress

So, first post on the garage in a while...mainly due to focusing my energies on other parts of the house. I wanted to add another workbench to increase storage and general workspace.

Did this a few months ago using mostly left over scrap wood I had laying around:

Then, I added four pull out drawers (no pictures). This weekend, I got it nearly finished: 

Still needs a second coat of paint on the front doors. I'll be building more workbenches like this around two other walls of the garage. The sliding doors were really cheap and help keep things looking organized. 

Status: The Baby's room

The dresser is now complete (the photos I posted earlier were with just white primer).

Rachel embroidered this:

The bar cart

I've been wanting one of these bar carts for a long time, maybe since Mad Men season 1:

I think Rachel thought they were tacky. I persisted and almost convinced her. Then, a baby is on the way and the deal was when the little one moved out and went to college I could get one. I reluctantly agreed. 

After a Nate Berkus episode last week, I may have gotten Rachel to agree to the bar cart via an awesome loophole, the bar armoire (it even rhymes):

This is currently on Craigslist for $95, wouldn't it be perfect?

Baby's nursery just got a little more awesome

After we found these three prints on etsy. As mentioned previous, we've tried to have a woodsy theme to this nursery, foxes do that well:

Cheap art, again

If you subscribe to Veranda, Better Homes and Gardens, House Beautiful, and Martha Stewart Living as well as read the popular home design blogs such as Young House Love, Apartment Therapy and Design Sponge (as we do) you're going to see a few chevron patterns here and there.

Not wanting to be left out of the trend, we found some chevron fabric online for the decent price of around $10 a yard. But then there's another $10 for shipping and handling. Eh. So when we were in Target the other day and saw these chevron napkins, it was like game on.

Rachel wrapped the napkin over a piece of cardstock paper and mounted it in an Ikea frame we had bought a few years ago to decorate her office in Boston. Now, one corner of our massive (both in size and lack of decoration) living room is a little more trendy.

Rachel wanted me to post a better photo:

One last laundry post....

Added the second laundry shelf over the weekend. The contact paper is possibly temporary, not sure if it works for me. But for now, it works.

The laundry "room"

So, after getting the dryer vent issues fixed, I figured we might as well keep making the laundry area more functional. So, I repaired the leaky hot water valve, replaced the washer hoses with these super-duper reinforced hoses that as supposedly better than stainless steel:

I also put a plastic tray under the washing machine -- just in case.

Next, I repainted the alcove in the same color as the living room, Cornerstone. We had two gallons of it left over.

Before:

Progress:

Two shelves will be going up (one is actually already in place, but don't have a photo at the moment).

Here is a pic of the dryer vent routing now -- much better:

The chimney cap

Just following up on a previous post about painting the chimney cover....here it is in all it's new found glory:

A lot better than this:

The front fireplace

I've never smelled a fireplace that's as bad as ours. The flue is closed and yet it still smells from time to time. Not all the time, but sometimes. So I cleaned it, and this helped some.

In addition to kind of smelling like a smoky fireplace, it's also not totally pretty inside:

That doesn't look so bad...

... but if I use the flash: 

While the prettiness of a fireplace is trivial, we don't even use it so it might as well look decent. Right?

So, I got some black Rustoleum heat proof paint (resists up to 1,000F) and painted the inside. Not only should this block in a lot of the smell, but it looks a lot nicer now too:

The Woodland nursery, a beginning

We've begun to actually decorate the baby's nursery in the woodland or "woodsy" theme.

The painted white hutch thing, got some wood grain pattern to the backs of it.

For the wood grain, we were going to use this paper from Paper Source:

But it's not cheap, and shipping nearly doubled the price. note: both Portland and Boston had a Paper Source ----- closest one now is Berkeley.

So instead, wandering the aisles at OSH the other day, we stumbled upon wood grain contact/shelf liner paper for $8:

We were going to use foam core board, but after I saw that it was $3 a sheet and each sheet would do one section ($3 x 5 = $15) I began to rethink and remembered that Home Depot sells jumbo moving boxes. One large moving box later ($1.39) and we had the boards to mount the shelf liner paper to.

Some careful measuring and cutting was all that was left:

Room, before the hutch was finished:

Oh and I also painted the back of the door.

Solving a mystery

So we had assumed that our house originally had a 2 car garage and that they took half of that garage and made it a part of the awesomely large kitchen. Last night, I crawled into the attic above the garage and found evidence otherwise:

That's an old exterior vent ----- this was the old outside of the home (there's one on the other side of the house too). So basically, what they did was took the one car garage, converted it into part of the kitchen. Then built a whole new garage and added it to the side of the house. 

Here's a bird's eye view ---- the pink boxes show the additions to the house:

The attic space above the garage was insulated with R-11 insulation (Energy Star recommends R-38 and higher is better). Bonus is that there was mostly plywood over that ---- so tons of Rubbermaid storage boxes of holiday decor could be relocated here!

Dryer Venting part two of two

So after I realized our dryer vent was out of code, I went to work on it on Saturday. This first step involved cutting away the sheet rock to get better access to it:

One problem with this dryer vent is that there is nothing to attach the pipe from the dryer to (there is no flange). You basically just stick the dryer vent in that hole, which doesn't impress me. 

Next, I climbed into the attic. It was a bit like an Indiana Jones movie as far as the cob webs went: 

But I hacked my way to the dryer vent coming up from below. And pleasantly found that what I thought was the dryer vent in the back of the house was not. The dryer vent went up through the roof and vented above. Very cool.

However, it was still not up to code. There was about five feet of flexible 3" pipe. Code is 4 inch and should not be flexible. I climbed up onto the roof to inspect the venting and found this:

That perfectly cut hole is, I think, from the dryer snake I used a few days ago ----- about the perfect size. 

I ended up pulling out all of the dryer vent, and replacing it with 4" round solid tubing in 5 foot sections. Additionally, I cleaned out all of the lint from the roof vent and put in a standard elbow at the dryer side to make attaching the vent from the dryer easier. Not super impressive, but this is the new pipe coming up into the attic and making a slight bend to exit out the roof. 

Here it is exiting:

While I was up on the roof, I removed one of two non-functional satellite dishes, swept the leaves off, cleaned out some of the gutters and took off our above pictured "Home Saver Pro" ----- chimney cover. And gave her a good cleaning, coat of rust inhibiting primer and a final coat of rust inhibiting charcoal grey paint. 

Lastly, I made a cover out of wood to repair the square hole I cut into the wall: