Months 1-4 of being a homeowner, and a foreword to 2022
Well. I’m finally pulled away from my place long enough that I can take a breath. I said in my last post that I’m neurotic until these sorts of projects are done, but I underestimated the level of neurosis I was capable of.
Since buying the place I’ve done very little other than work on my science, apply for fellowships, and work on my place. Days are uniformly structured, wake up around 5-6, work out if I have time, get dressed, get to work between 7-8, focus on my science, leave around 4:30. Get home around 5, take in some calories so I stay alive, work until 8:30-9, rinse, sleep, repeat. Not having a kitchen has been more disruptive than I anticipated. I normally cook about 95% of my meals, going out is a rarity. For three months I haven’t had a home-cooked meal. The little cash only Mexican place next to me was starting to get suspicious. At some point in there I tried to start dating, which fell apart when I realized I couldn’t make the time for more than once every couple weeks. Sorry [REDACTED]!
One unexpected benefit of this process is a heightened awareness of the design choices and craftsmanship of the places I go. Sitting in a bar, I see an unconventional ceiling mounted heater, outlet missing a cover, sloppy caulk job, well measured window molding. Doing this basically all on my own makes me appreciate the vast amount of labor that’s gone into building the world we inhabit. Everything takes a long time, and the materials and tools involved are all part of a complex interconnected network. Just happy to be here I guess.
I’m at the age where I think about my relationships to my parents more. When my parents moved to the states my dad worked two restaurant jobs while getting a master’s at night. Years of nothing but hard work. Spare one semester in undergrad I’ve never really had to work so hard that there was not much else going on in my life, and I’ve wondered if I was capable of it. Well…. Well well well. I’ve certainly learned something about myself. Many weekends I woke up not really feeling like I had it in me but started working and cranked out a cool 10 hours.
Heres a list of what I’ve done, in descending order for how unpleasant it was.
· Changed the valves under my sink: Jesus christ man. What a clusterfuck. When I was pulling out the old sink to clear space to lay down tiles I had to crank the old, fragile, valves shut with a monkey wrench. Little did I know, this would doom me in a couple weeks. After weeks of work, hauling and breaking down plywood, I was excited to get my sink in. Connected everything, wired my garbage disposal and drain, opened the hot water valve, nothing coming out but a slow drip onto my new cabinet. It was late on a Saturday, decided to call it a night and close the valve. Big mistake. Closing the valve elevated the drip to a constant spray into my face. Fuck! Now i’ve got a situation. Its not so much water that I can’t route it into the drain if I do a good job. Run to Home Depot 10 min before closing, get some big hoses, and clamps. Had to take off the hose connecting the valve to the faucet, its mostly closed so no big deal, right? WRONG. The instant I take off the hose the valve gives out completely. I no longer have a spray, but the full pressure of a hose of scalding hot water directed at my face. I’m sitting in a pool of water and am as soaked as if I had taken a bath in my full clothes. Figure out how to shut off the water after running around my complex leaving wet footprints everywhere, get a plumber over, he laughs at me and tells me he likes my tiles. Several hours of wringing out wet towels into my bathtub later its over.
· Scraped the paint to expose the wood beams in my living room: Went in so far over my head on this one. This is not a complex job, but tedious hardly captures it. I think start to finish I probably spent 80 hours scraping. To remove the paint requires a heat gun, and a razor blade fixed to a rod. Slowly, heat the paint till it starts to bubble, and run the blade under it to lift. Do your best to get long sheets of lifted paint. End the day covered in slight burns from globs of latexy paint. Thought I was done when I got past the brown paint, but, no. Another thinner layer of paint below. Repeat the whole process again. Not done yet, theres white paint residue, which I have to sand off. End the process looking like I was on the Dune desert planet, or whatever. No single step was hard, but facing up to doing the exact same thing for several hours straight, for days straight, for weeks straight tested my resolve.
· Removed a “pony wall” to open up the door way: This was one of the first things I did, and learned an unfortunate trait about myself, which was later reinforced by the faucet debacle. I wanted to open up the doorway between the main studio and kitchen. The plan was to build a big bookshelf to separate the bed from the rest of the space. I digress. Well, I break out the reciprocating saw; cut through some pieces of metal, wood. There’s outlets in this little pony wall, and they’re in steel conduit. I’ve only ever done minor electrical work and didn’t appreciate what kind of problems this would cause for me. I couldn’t move the outlet to the adjacent wall because of the conduit, so why not cut it out of the conduit… Dumb. I disconnect all the wires, there are a lot, and try to get it through the wall and re-wire. It half works and looks like an absolute mess. Because my condo is old, the electrical is wired to two circuits. Aka, turning off power to one shuts down my whole living room, where I have the AC. At this point, I’ve done enough damage. First electrician gives me a “fuck you” price, $1600, which I later find out means they just don’t want to do it. The next electrician hooks it up and gets it done for $200. Love u Eddie. Lesson learned, if you’re unsure about something, maybe pause and rethink.
· Refinished the floors: I think this is the point where I move from purely unpleasant, to mixed feelings. Driving a big heavy sander around my apartment for 8 hours was my idea of a good time. Required physical exertion, but so not much that it was uncomfortable. Didn’t go perfectly to be honest. I should’ve listened to the blogs and gotten an edger, instead of trying to the edges with my hand sander. It was also my birthday.
· Pulled staples out of the walls and beams: I felt like I was witness to a darkness that I hadn’t appreciated in the buying process. The previous owner had been stapling plastic ferns to the ceiling, which is an aesthetic decision I’m not sure I agree with. It took lots of tries apparently, as I pulled hundreds of staples out of the condo, one by one. Hard to put myself in the mindset of needing to put hundreds of staples in the wall. I still occasionally find a staple here and there.
· Patched and painted: Wow this guy was not good with drywall anchors. But, nothing like a fresh coat of paint. Made for some nice time lapse footage.
· Finishing cabinets: If I’m qualified to do anything it’s sand, stain, and finish wood.
· Obtained and broke down 13x sheets of 4’ x 8’ plywood: I love when my hobbies intersect into the way professionals do things, you know? With Mario visiting, we drove a rental pickup truck to a plywood supplier. A warehouse full to the brim with different types of hardwood veneered plywoods. The guy was unhelpful on the phone, so spent a while running through options, looking at samples, spot checking Mario’s math. Drove home slowly with 1500 lbs of plywood sticking out the flatbed. One by one, I brought them into my destroyed kitchen, laid them down, measured with a straightedge, and broke them down according to my spreadsheet. 1-2 sheets a day.
· Assembling cabinets: Getting though hours of youtube videos, weeks of planning, acquiring materials, cutting, transporting, finishing, to the final box that will hold my stuff is a feeling that’s hard to describe. Once I got the first few in (and dealt with my sink catastrophe) I sat there emotional for a while.
· Antique market: This was a beautiful little discovery. I love to haggle and I love weird people. There’s a whole world of people whose full-time job it is to drive around, buy stuff from families of dead people, loot junkyards, tear apart old thrift stores. I think that’s just great. I look forward to having some more free time to go back. I bought a desk, two moroccan rugs, a desk chair, and normal sitting chair.
Things I don’t feel like writing a blurb for
· Put in molding
· Put up nice blinds
· Built a closet
· Tore out the old cabinets
· Hauled trucks of waste
· Pulled wallpaper off the walls
Things I’m excited for in 2022:
Now that my kitchen is functional, I am no longer stuck on a linear path of tear out cabinets – tile floor – build cabinets – get appliances – connect sink – etc. In the kitchen I’ll be making pretty purely aesthetic changes. Put in a tile backsplash, put in counter tops, paint, put in some lights. Eventually I’ll build a workshop in my garage, and with a good deal of planning I’ll get to the bathroom.
More than the work I plan to do, I’m excited to get some control of my life back. I’ve got some songs turning over in my head and bits of lyrics in my notes, am excited to get back to my photography, painting, reading, writing. I’m excited to hang out with friends, date. I’m excited to play soccer and talk shit. I’m excited to put more energy into my science.
California is about to be going through what I hope will be its last attempt of squashing COVID. It’s going to be ugly, and it won’t work, but around the time I emerge fully back into the world, proud of what I’ve built for myself, I foresee a spring full of life. No half measures, masked interactions, shutdowns. Just a stiff drink, a shout at a bar, and a new understanding of ourselves, and a drive to extract all that’s important out of life.