Shade and Space

First the Shade

Since the big tree fell we've realized one thing...our cool, slate gray-green outdoor living room is a fricken oven in the summer....holy mackerel does it get hot out there now. Pretty much direct southern exposure until about 4pm when the neighbors trees start to shade it a bit. I guess on the bright side we can finally grow tomatoes, peppers, basil, and citrus in the backyard...

We knew something had to be down before the 4th (yes this is a waaaaaaaaay late post) and our annual BBQ. We hit on the idea to buy a shade sail. This one is called a coolaroo...say it out loud its fun coooool-la-rooooooooo

With some eye bolts screwed into our massive deck beam (6by 10) and two lines out to the fence we were in business....well it didn't really go that fast but I forgot to take pictures of all the intermediate steps.

turns out, you gotta pay attention to the directions to get it to hang correctly...I only had to adjust two mounting points but it hangs pretty well and provides good shade. I just hope it doesn't pull the deck off the house or the fence down....

Now For The Space
We've also spent a ton of time organizing our 'stuff' on the bottom floor. This entailed lots of shelves and unpacking lots of bins.

This may not look like much but the shelf the helmets our on is new and the shelf next to the window is new and loaded with tools! The heavy bag is new too....so good for taking out work stress constructively.

Here's a long shot of the shop area. Just look at all that space! No big piles of lumber taking up half of it.

See no lumber! Some other stuff though but no lumber! Anyone need a tornado fire pit? Only slightly used....how about two 10' tall metal tulips that shoot 20' balls of fire? anyone?? anyone??? Beular?....Beular???

We even put up a hook to hang our work coveralls up on! And the shelf next to em...very well organized I must say.

Check out our big new shelving unit on casters! This thing was a costco special and its super nice. Its seriously beefy with each shelf capable of holding over 1200 pounds! And its on wheels so you can move it around easily. Next to it under the window is one of our stainless steel tables we got gifted. Fits in their perfectly and holds some heavy tools on the bottom shelf.

Ya, I know, goofy post, but it feels good to be able to finally take all the house supplies and tools that we were storing on the top floor and move them downstairs where they will actually be used and have room for them. Maybe its a guy thing but a well organized tidy shop makes me a happy boy.

Storage! Storage! Storage!-Lumber Rack

Besides 'stuff' we have acquired waaaaaay to much building supplies..just check out the photos below. We have a giant stack of lumber in just about every room that would fit it..

Here's the big stack of 2by4's in the main shop area.

Here's a big stupid stack of house siding, plywood, sheet metal, and random dimensional lumber.

Then outside under this tarp we have a huge pile of 2by6's, more siding, a bunch of beefy framing lumber, and some ipe from the deck we built at our old house.

Way too much lumber piled all over the place. We decided that if we had one single nice place to store it that we could save a lot of indoor space. We came up with a simple ladder type design and decided to put this lumber rack in the back corner of the yard.

With plan in hand I cut all the wood ahead of time. With all the wood I was going through I was worried that there would be none left to put on the rack! A worry that turned out to be unfounded unfortunately...

I next set up a station so that I could glue and screw the uprights together. We had a bunch of PL premium laying around so I used that. Its supposed to be super strong and water proof. I don't want this rack collapsing if it gets wet.

Action shot of me working on the uprights.

I let the uprights dry for a day before I attached the cross pieces. I set up a simple jig with some saw horses and glued and screwed the two outside pieces first.

Then I squared up the frame and held it in place using bungee cords and clamps and glued-screwed the rest of the uprights.

Here's a picture of a finished uh,...rack? The racks are 3' wide and built 4 of them that I plan to space out to 12'.

I reused the 'clear plastic tarp of planty death' under my rack. I am going to attempt to keep what ever is on the rack dry and I didn't want moisture coming up from the ground. I was worried about making sure all the racks were aligned with each other in all dimensions cause if they were not they wouldn't support the wood properly and the wood could get twisted-deformed from the rack. This part was not super fun and it was oh, 100deg in the backyard at the time...man I sure do miss that big tree...

With all the racks aligned I screwed 2by6's to the top and both sides to lock the racks in place. The rack seems pretty strong with a reasonable amount of shear strength. Here's me loading the rack from the lumber in the outdoor pile. I probably spent more time sorting the garbage wood from the good than I did actually loading up the rack.

But now look!! ALL the wood from everywhere, that's worth keeping, is now neatly stored on the rack. Hurray!! We can actually get to different types of wood without having to dig through a humongous pile of wood! Its all sorted and ready to go for our next project!! I was able to bring the tarp all the way up on the back and part of of the way up on the sides. I will put another 6mil tarp over the top of this so that the wood will actually stay dry!

Here's another beautiful shot of the rack from the side. There's even room for all our metal, plumbing supplies and the bits of 'nice trim' I'm saving for some unknown reason... I feel like I could open up my own neighborhood lumber yard!

Storage! Storage! Storage!-Shelves!

Help We are drowning in 'stuff'!!!

Ever since the 'giant tree blowing down incident of '09' we've been crowded for space. We just hurriedly moved everything from the tent, that we didn't chuck, into the spare 'bedroom' downstairs. The downstairs of the house is just full of stuff...to much stuff...so we decided it would be a good idea to build some storage for all the stuff....stuff, stuff, stuff...

I'm dumb and didn't get a decent picture of the room full o crap but just imagine that the entire room looks like this small section and you'll get the idea.

I decided to use up some of our spare lumber and build big massive shelves along one wall in the downstairs bedroom. The idea here was to build all this stuff without buying new stuff....it almost worked but I ended up buying a box of lag bolts...but that's it. Since the framing is open I decided to use it as part of the shelving, bolting ledger boards right to the walls.

Here's a shot of all the ledger boards installed. These shelves are extra deep at 3' So hopefully we will be able to store a ton of stuff on em.

Then I went thru our wood piles and pulled out all the checked, crappy wood I could find and cut it into shelf boards. And began screwing it to the ledgers.

The bottom two shelves are meant to hold the super heavy-beefy stuff which is why I used 2by material for the shelves. Here's a shot of both bottom shelves done. I had enough scrap 3/4" plywood laying around to do the top 2 shelves. I did screw in an intermediate stringer to support the ply as 3' is too far for it to span I thought.

And voila the shelves are almost filled. I decided to leave the shelves on the right double height for light weight tall stuff. It worked out pretty good for the big Halloween stuff. I pretty much was able to pack everything from the storage tent onto these shelves! and then some. Heck its practically a built-in I can put doors on it and call it a closet.

And here's what the room looked like when we were done. Along the right I built a storage area for the all the dang sheet metal we have acquired...its so floppy-joppy that it can be a pain to store. The clamp on the 2by4 can be moved in and out to accommodate different thickness's of stored metal and it keeps the large sheets from flopping over.

Going to have to come up with a project that uses a lot of sheet metal...

And here's what it looks like now after my bday present was installed....think my wife is telling me something by giving me an exercise machine for my 40th bday? Hmmmm..... we put the baby in her vibro-chair while we are working out and she contentedly falls asleep and lets us exercise...ya right...

In the area by the back door (where the spiral staircase is supposed to go some day) I decided to build some more shelves using the same methods. I wanted somewhere to put the outdoor stuff. The chairs, coolers, gardening tools, stuff like that.

And here's what it looks like finished....actually this is taken after the 4th so all my nicely put away stuff has been yanked out and put outside for the party. Imagine this neatly packed with stuff if you will...The gardening tools go in a rack formed by the shelves and ledgers, not fancy but it keeps the tools upright and the garden dirt out of the shop area.

A Mulching We Shall Go....

We've been super busy on the house trying to get a ton of stuff done before our 2yr housiversery this July 1st....so we've been really behind in posting pretend this was posted on July 2nd....as we had this done before our 4th of July party.

So apparently you can call tree services and get them to deliver you free much. It saves them the time of trucking it to the transfer station and it saves us the hassle of buying some.

The truck backs up and dumps its load....this was apparently from a large pine tree and their shredder must of been set on large...cause we got bigger chunks than I was picturing and lots of needles...

And here's our pile!

Here's Irene and the baby spreading out the mulch..wait...is she using a pitch fork? What could possibly go wrong?

And here's what mulch looks like spread around! Super exiting no???

Actually it smells like Christmas so that's a nice feature...Irene read somewhere that the pine needles would keep weeds from growing....that would be nice...one thing that worries me....once this stuff dries out isn't it going to be one big layer of kindling? One dropped cigarette and won't the entire thing go up in flames?...oh well at least it smells nice...

Simultaneously, Irene put down this clear plastic tarp to kill the weeds in the backyard. No chemicals for these hippy gardeners!

Close up shot of the 'plastic tarp of weedy death' doing its thing.

And here's what it looks like after a week in the sun! All weeds baked to death!

Be Your Own Knifecatcher

Or Why Realtors Drive me Fricken Nuts.....

Here's the MadScientists guide to being your own knifecatcher...

1. Study the real estate market in question for several years, go to a lot of open houses and at least mentally track what you get for how much dough.
2. Rack up several years rehabbing old houses yourself. To build up an in-depth knowledge base of what things really need to be addressed in old houses and what it will cost to do them.
3. Use a service like Zillow.com that shows you important information like what the official stats of the house are and when it was last sold and how much it sold for.
4. Find your local building depts online permit check service. Alameda has one that can be found here. Look up the house in question and see what work has been done recently or ever, with permits.
5. Go to the open house, ask the realtor a lot of questions and take a lot of pictures.

Do that and no realtor will be able to pull the wool over your eyes.

Realtor Rant:Or why your average realtor is more like a shady used car salesman than not.

My dad has done sales jobs his entire life. He was lucky to land jobs where he got a reasonable base salary plus commission. He was a very good salesperson and did very well for himself and everything I know about sales I've learned from him. I feel like I've had a lifetime of coaching on what makes a good sales person and now I have some definite opinions on that matter.

1. For the love of Pete know your fricken product!!!! When my dad sold van conversions he could tell you every single detail about his vans and every detail about their competitors vans and what made his vans better than the competitions. What is it with Realtors who seem to just basically be at open houses to take up space and hand you their business cards? Countless times I've asked Realtors simple questions about places and they don't know anything about the house. Its always 'oh, I'm just filling in for someone else who really knows the house...yea right.' Get a pest inspection report and be familiar with whats in it. Get a real house inspection and be familiar with whats in it and get REAL estimates for what its going to cost to fix something. If another realtor looks me straight in the face and tells me a $100,000+ foundation job is going to cost ~$35,000 I'm going to lose it I swear!
2. Be Honest!!! My dad built a successful car dealership around a simple precept...'Never screw anyone over EVER!' You can make some money for a while screwing people over but that is NEVER a business model that works long term. I seriously fricken hate this 'willful ignorance' Realtors seem to have about the houses they are 'selling'. Take 5 minutes and do a permit check and be honest about what work was done without permits and if there are any complaints against the house. Why waste everyones time by obfuscating the truth?
3. Actually Learn How to Sell! I know the real estate market here has been detached from reality for the past several years but c'mon....learn to sell (see #1 & #2 above). I know that the one course you took in community college to become a realtor was just packed with useful info but please learn to sell! If you want to stay in this business after the boom you are going to have to hustle or die. Personally I think the SF Bay area can use oh, 90% less Realtors...I just wonder what get-rich quick scheme all these out of work Realtors will latch onto....bilking the elderly outta their savings with bogus investment schemes? Carnival FreakShow Barkers? (nah you have to actually have a personality and be able to sell to be one of those)...

Okay, Okay not all Realtors are bad.....just most of them...

1626 Alameda Ave....Run, Run away...

Read This:The following review is just my opinion and only my opinion I am not a professional house appraiser or inspector and I am not a structural engineer. The opinions expressed in this review are based on my own inspection of the property, the publicly available facts from aggregator sites such as Redfin and Zillow and the online permit database for the city of Alameda. I am not responsible for incorrect or missing data that appears in these sources. In fact, its probably best that you just ignore everything you read here as the lunatic ravings of an unbalanced mind.

This next house we actually saw two weekends ago but the place was just so horrible that I couldn't work up the courage to write about it until now...

1626 Alameda Ave 6 bedroom, 6 bath 4400 sq ft house that is a legal duplex on a lot not much bigger than the house for...wait for it....$1,04900 yes that's over $1mill dollars.....wow

This house does not have a Zestimate which seems suspicious to me. I've noticed several houses that are advertising on Zillow with ridiculous prices that don't have Zestimates??? Seems mighty convenient to me no?

Here is a bad shot of the outside of the house....The place was soooooooo wrong in so many different places that my head was spinning and I couldn't take any pictures....Towards the end it was all I could do to keep smiling and not run screaming from the place...

Okay the positives: The house is a legal duplex that appears to of been one from the beginning. Its got parking for two small cars in the garage and two more in the driveway.

Okay the negatives: Wow, where to start....

1. Attic has been converted into an illegal unit with no permits. A permit check shows not one but three complaints to the city about this illegal unit the last one being in '07. The new owner will have to most certainly deal with this. My bet is that the city makes em rip it all out and turn the space back into storage.
2. The house has been used as a boarding house for the past many, many years with every room rented out separately. To make this work bathrooms were added in weird places...like in a niche IN the kitchen, separated from the kitchen by just a louvered bi-fold door....There is at least 3 illegal bathrooms in this place....
3. All the bathrooms have CARPET!!!, carpet in the bathrooms....yuck...
4. There is an illegal 'owners unit' in the basement...substandard height, with a weird mini-kitchen-bath combo....this unit also has at least one complaint against it in the permit record.
5. Roof needs to be replaced
6. Not sure of the foundation.
7. No reports done! How you gonna sell a million dollar home with no reports? No pest or house inspection....
8. Looks like a serious mismash of original galv and new copper plumbing tacked on.
9. This illegal 4-plex only has a 100amp service...waaaaay under powered.
10. No backyard or front yard to speak of.

Conclusion:

Run, run away faaaaaaaast!

It would take so many hundreds of thousands of dollars to fix this place up and make it legal and safe....its making my head spin again trying to figure this out....lets say you can convince the city to normalize the two illegal units....I'm guestimating $500,000 to have pros do the work for you...even when the place is all done its not going to sell for a million in this market...maybe $900,000....so, to me, the place is worth no more than $400,000 and I think that that's being very generous....

The house is large and in a very nice neighborhood near Franklin park so maybe it will sell...who knows, the houses I've written about so far have not sold like hotcakes....

1291 Caroline-Knife Catching Again...

Read This:The following review is just my opinion and only my opinion I am not a professional house appraiser or inspector and I am not a structural engineer. The opinions expressed in this review are based on my own inspection of the property, the publicly available facts from aggregator sites such as Redfin and Zillow and the online permit database for the city of Alameda. I am not responsible for incorrect or missing data that appears in these sources. In fact, its probably best that you just ignore everything you read here as the lunatic ravings of an unbalanced mind.

Here we go a here we go a here we go again...

Today's Gold Coast open home is 1291 Caroline st. A 1471sq ft 3 bed 1.5 bath high basement Queen Anne cottage on a not huge 4000 sq ft lot for the price of $789,000. The 'zestimate' for the house is $691,000....most people tend to think that the zestimates are high so...wow these guys might be a little bit optimistic.
The current owners bought the house in 2000 for $525,000 and have not put a legal penny into the place since then.

First off I have to say the realtor who has this listing is really on the ball. This house was on the front page of the Real Estate section in one of the local Alameda papers one week and then the next it was on the back page as a 'feature' and she's advertising on Craig's List. At least the homeowners are getting their place promoted intelligently...there was a steady stream of people looking at the place when we were there.

Looks great from the street I think. This house was built by the same firm that built ours...Marcuse and Remmel. Its got a nice sized front yard with good plants. The garage door is giving us hope that its got a nice big bottom floor that we can use as shop and storage space.

Walk up the stairs, which are a little wobbly...and you get a decent little front porch...According to the pest inspection there is a lot of dry-rot in this area that is going to need to be fixed.

Walk in the front door and you have this nice big front room....wait a second...its waaaaaay to big. 'Someone' removed the hallway wall and a wall separating the two front rooms....A permit check says that no work has been done on the house 'legally' since 98 when there was a reroof...the hallway wall is probably load bearing so who knows if the ceiling joists are over-spanned?..I'd bet they are... But it is a nice looking room.

With this fabulous mantle with the original tile! This is the exact twin to our mantle! Cept ours is not painted!The fire place was originally a coal burner but the chimney has been knocked down sorta...not even knocked down into the attic with the roof patched..just sorta knocked down to within a couple of feet of the roof...To the right of the fireplace is a cool built-in with a pass-thru into the kitchen.

Nother shot of the 'great room' from the other side looking back towards the front door.

The main level of the house has one bath..ugh that means parents, kids, guests all share one bath...

It appears that the bath was redone very recently. The granite counter-top and fixtures and cabinets all look pretty much brand new....also not done with permits. But hey its got double sinks!

You can walk thru the bath into the 'master bedroom' not very large and its got 4 doors! One to the bath, one to the hall 2 for closets (hey its got 2 good sized closets) and one into the next bedroom...

Nother shot of the master bedroom... The bedroom layout of the house is kinda weird. it goes bedroom, bath, bedroom, bedroom all with interconnecting doors and doors to the hallway except for the bath which has to be accessed thru one of the bedrooms.

Here is the dining room with the other side of the pass through and a nice little bay window.

Between the dining room and the kitchen is this weird little area where more walls have been removed without permits. I can't figure out what this area was originally maybe a butlers pantry or something...

The kitchen is decent sized with a decent amount of cabinets. This kitchen also appears to be redone, with the glass subway tile backsplash, the countertops and the appliances looking new but not the cabinets. The kitchen is also in an addition to the house. It looks like it was done a while ago as the framing lumber matches the original part of the house. I could live with the kitchen.

Other side of the kitchen has the fridge and pantry shelves. Not a bad setup really. The open door there matches one we had here at our house also.. unfortunately ours was so rotted we didn't deem it worth saving. But walk thru that door and you get...

The interior stairwell to the bottom floor. This is another 'period correct' stair that's dang dangerous to go down and would not ever meet modern codes. The door to the right at the bottom opens into the back yard.

Turn left at the bottom of the stairs and you have this nice laundry room. Look up, they stapled fabric to the underside of the joists to give the area a more finished look. Whats that door on the left you say? The room with the tiled floor?

Well its the 'half bath'...now this room doesn't even have a sink so I'm not sure if it can be officially called a half bath? But don't worry you can always walk out around the washer-dryer and wash your hands in the laundry sink.

The doorway on the right brings you into this little area. The ceiling down here is maybe 6'-6"...so not legal unfortunately. Also whats not legal is all the lighting and outlets in this area....you are only allowed one overhead light and one outlet in a storage area...so lots of electrical done without permits here...I think this was where the kids hung out.

To the right is this little home office area with its own door to the outside.

The rest of the bottom floor is broken up into two sides by the major load bearing wall...One note about this wall...the house had a partial foundation replacement at one time but the center wall is still sitting on bricks and I think both ends of the house are also? So at one time someone came in and redid the 2 long walls of the house. Don't know when it was done but it doesn't show up on the permit record...The slab down here is also not a 'real' slab its just a 1" rat slab as they are called...

The other side has the garage door you can see from the front and more storage. You can see the chimney on the left taking up space...House has a conventional water heater and forced air furnace. With the joists exposed I could see evidence of lots of wack-a-doo wiring and evidence that the house has galv water piping that looked not new.

The backyard is gorgeous...small but gorgeous. This shot shows the entire depth of the yard...

From another angle here's the patio a nice little hangout space.

Decent sized side yard on the one side.

itty-bitty sideyard from the other side.

Conclusion:

The house was nice enough...but small. The front yard is definitely 'Halloweenable' but the backyard is just waaay to small, no room for a garden, and a koi pond...All the un-permitted structural mods gives me pause also. The layout of the bedrooms also just wouldn't work for us...unfortunately the house is just a little too small for us...if the bottom floor was full height legal living space that might change things..but right now the place only has one real bathroom...throw in the replacement of the brick foundation and putting a real slab down there and re-plumbing the house and fixing the wiring.....I just don't see how its worth $789,000

To make it work for us we'd need to dig down 2' on the bottom floor and make that legal living space...that's a $125,000 foundation job and there is no way in heck the city would let us do it....not in a million years. So for us again the house is maybe worth...nope its not worth anything to us cause we could never make it work for us.

Oh I forgot to mention... Happy Fathers Day to all the dads out there...