Ship's Blog: February, 2006

The rain was pouring down today while I waited at the house for Home Depot to make a delivery. I've been phoning and faxing with them for a few days to make arrangements. The Home Depot near the house we are selling caters primarily to contractors, so they never really know what to do when a homeowner is the one placing the order. I think they expect to deliver to a construction site, not the garage of a 1959 suburban home.  Read more »

Since starting work on Kathy's house, I've met lots of her neighbors. I felt bad when we were over there on the weekend, because I'd get out of the car and neighbors would wave at me. I'd shout, "Hi Sam, how ya doin'?" Of course, Kathy has never met Sam, and here I am, buddy-buddy. I remind her that with her long hours and her hour-and-a-half evening commute, there was no way she was able to meet her neighbors.  Read more »

We have our first pass of plans ready for how to makeover Kathy's house. It's ambitious, but compared to what we had to do on our house over the summer, its peanuts. Okay, well, maybe I won't go that far as to say peanuts. However, I am convinced this will go more smoothly, simply because I now have good people to work on the house that I can trust on to finish in time.

The house is a tiny one: three bedrooms, but just over 1000 square feet. It was built in 1959, when Tara Hills was an up-and-coming housing development attracting young families.  Read more »

When we moved into our house over the summer, we had almost no time to pack and move and no space in which to put our stuff. Because so much work was still being done on the house, anything we moved in was subject to being moved out for a day when work progressed to this or that room. Given that we were combining households, that was a lot of stuff!

In the case of my flat in San Francisco, we had to move everything on schedule. Luckily, we had some leeway with Kathy's house, because she owned it. We moved what we needed, knowing we could get the rest. Which made it, out of necessity, a partially deferred moved. Anything that was a duplicate or a daily non-essential (like all my old photography equipment being stored in her garage) could wait until we had somewhere to move it to.  Read more »

This is my last week for working on our garage before turning my attention to prepping Kathy's house for sale, so I'm trying to make the most of it. This means that I've been doing one of my favorite things - getting rid of things!

Having run many of my own massive de-cluttering operations, as well as having helped others organize their spaces, I'm intimately familiar with the challenge of how you get rid of all the stuff you've agreed to part with. Letting go is one thing...but where do you let it go TO? Sometimes it's not so easy figuring out how to get stuff out of your space.  Read more »

Today I put on my Junior Rat Patrol hat and met with the inspector from the pest control company. I had asked him to come out for what's called an "exclusion inspection." That's where they look at all the potential entry points into your house to figure out what changes you can make to keep critters out.

Having declared war on rodents, I've already done quite a bit. I've had all holes in crawlspace vents blocked. I've trimmed trees back from the roof so as not to provide a jumping off point. We removed the Yucca Palm monster that may have served as a nesting place. We don't leave any food outside, not even birdseed.  Read more »