Day 18: Plants are in. Sprinklers and lights are both in and working on timers. Equipment is all gone and the site is clean. All that’s left is some tile repair (see previous post) and sealing the tile. And planning the party.
Day 17: More plants are in, and the crew finished adding mortar to the tile cap in back. Unfortunately during the process of putting in plants in the front courtyard, two tiles along the walkway were cracked. They’ll be replaced before the tiles are sealed, which should happen this week sometime.
Day 16: The end is in sight! Plants were delivered and some were actually planted. I let Watson and Linus out on the balcony to watch and of course they immediately jumped to the lower roof, but they couldn’t go anywhere from there so I let them wander around. I also got a couple of close-ups of a very large spider who has established residence below the balcony.
Day 15: The concrete cinder block retaining wall gets stuccoed, and a thick bead of mortar is applied to the front overhang portion of the cap tile. The back overhang is still bare, for now. Also, electrical outlets are installed both front and back.
Day 14: The front courtyard tile is done. (Or is it?)
Day 13: About half of the front courtyard tile is done. Some reinforcement is added to the cap tiles on the back wall.
Day 12: The back yard tile is done, including capping the retaining wall. The wall will be revisited a few times in the next few days as we see that laying a 12″ tile across a 6″ cinder block, leaving 3″ of overhang on each side, is not quite workable…
Day 11: Lots of tile! After the crew left (and the mortar was dry), we let the cats outside to check out the new back yard.
Day 10: Tile! Also, another crew came in to sort the contents of the debris box; it was only supposed to hold “construction” debris (concrete, dirt, bricks, etc) but anything and everything had been thrown in there and Allied Waste was making a big stink about picking it up. Even after the debris had been sorted, it took AW another week to actually collect their box.
Judge orders stop to warrantless phone wiretapping:
A federal judge ordered a halt today to the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping of calls between Americans and alleged foreign terrorists, saying the program violates the Constitution as well as a law requiring judicial approval for all electronic surveillance.‘There are no hereditary kings in America and no powers not created by the Constitution,” said U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor in rejecting President Bush’s claim that he had the inherent power to authorize the program.
The suspension of the program, implementing Judge Taylor’s order, is stayed pending appeal. Expect the full range of neocon dirty tricks to be deployed against this judge (the “activist judge” charge will be the least of the pejoratives leveled at her).
Day nine: More work on the new retaining wall and installing the plumbing for the irrigation system. Also, Comcast came back and put in an access box for the inadvertent splice in their trunk line.
Days seven and eight: Day seven was a Saturday, day eight was the following Monday, and we were out of town. The crew starting installing the irrigation system and building the new retaining wall in the back yard.
Day six: A big day! The concrete pour. Since there’s no outside access to the back yard, the concrete crew had to run a hose through the house. The New Canaan guys worked well with the concrete guys and got the back yard pad poured quickly. Unfortunately the truck didn’t have quite enough to fill in the drainage cuts or the removed section of the front sidewalk, so that was done later with manually-mixed concrete.
It’s 2006, in the San Francisco Bay Area of California. Why are there still people smoking? It’s disgusting, especially when someone comes up to my register (yes, posting by phone from B&N; again) smelling like he smoked a whole pack of the cheapest American cigarettes just before walking in to the store. Gross.
Another basically wasted Sunday afternoon at BN. I’ve worked out that between our second jobs we bring in about $800 after-tax each month. That would be tough to replace. With the landscape project wrapping up and the kitchen project just about to start, I would like to be home a bit more but then the extra cash would certainly be helpful for the inevitable budget overruns.
The point of all of this is that I’ll be staying for now.
Day five: More prep for the concrete pour, with framing and base-wire set out. A six-foot block of the front walk was hammered out so that the tile which would eventually lay on top of the pad would gently slope down to the existing grade.
Day four: The back yard, now completely cleared, is dug up to provide drainage. Channels are cut in the concrete pad for downspouts, and frames are set for the new concrete pad.
| From Google Video: a cat who not only has learned to flush the toilet, but does it over and over again. | |
Day three: more debris removal, digging out the rest of the retaining wall and sub-wall, accidentally severing the Comcast trunk line that runs through our back yard (oops), discovering that with all the huge shrubs removed, both the front and back fences are rotting away.
Day two: More demolition, digging out the concrete footings from the old deck and removing parts of the retaining wall from the back patio area.
Day one: The crew from New Canaan Homes arrives and quickly begins tearing out the old plants and dismantling the deck. By the end of the day, it’s getting pretty bare.
Day zero: We (mostly Jen) moved our patio furniture out of the way. This is what the front courtyard and back patio/deck areas looked like before the project started.
From today’s SF Chronicle: Some fear mall upgrade will oust small stores:
Town & Country Village in Palo Alto — the iconic, low-slung shopping center on El Camino Real that serves as a landmark for fans pouring into Stanford University football games — is getting a $20 million face-lift, but not all the shoppers and merchants there are happy about it.
We live nearby and visit Town & Country fairly often. I think everyone would agree the place needs a facelift and general upgrades, but I really do not want to see it become Yet Another Chain Strip Mall.
Mere days after mentioning Vagablog, I completely forgot about it in the series of SMS posts from Monday night. Look, no character limit when posting by phone!
Yay me, posting by phone from the 2nd job again.
Project Insomnia is Digg proof thanks to caching by WP Super Cache
