breakfast first

Sewage Falling on Cedars

Late on Wednesday afternoon, while I was working in my office (in our basement), I noticed a tiny stream of water running down the wall -- never a good sign. When I went to investigate further, I realized that the carpet near the wall was completely soaked. Really not good. The leak was right below our kitchen sink, which had just been snaked the week before after the disposal backed up. It couldn't be coincidental.

We called up a plumber, who came out at 7:30 this morning. After talking about the problem, he said, Well, you've got to find the source of the leak. I can tear your walls apart for several hours at $150/hour, or you can try it yourself. I was pretty up for saving $600, so I told him I'd call him later. As a new homeowner, my toolbox is still pretty light, so I headed to the hardware store and picked up a 2" hole saw, a little flexible mirror, and a jab saw.

I was pretty sure that the drain line from the kitchen sink was just a vertical run into the basement, where it turned into a horizontal run. The plumber warned me that it might not be that simple, since there might be a lot of horizontal line to get to vent line, which we could see (from looking at the roof) was many feet away from the sink. He suggested that I start tracing the line starting in the kitchen, punching holes and peeking around until I found the leak. That sounded a little crazy to me. My gut told me that the leak was near the basement, not the kitchen. And since the cost of starting in the basement and being wrong was less than the cost of starting in the kitchen and being wrong, it was clear that the basement was where to start.

To cut to the chase: my hunch was right. Photos and details of finding the problem are in this photo album. The leak was pretty nasty, but it's isolated to a single wye joint and should be pretty easy to replace. The plumber's coming out tomorrow to replace it, so we'll see how it goes. The really good news is that, despite this leak looking like a long standing problem, there's no damage to the framing members. The first thing I did was poke a screwdriver at the sill plate, but it looks solid. What a relief.

In his classic How to Read a Book, Mortimer Adler talks about how marking up a book with notes and underlining, far from defacing it, personalizes it and makes it your own. The same is true of a house, I've found. The first time you put a hole in your wall, you switch from mere mortgage payer to true homeowner. Well, the first time you deliberately put a hole in your wall, that is.

Mobile Home Madness

Short but amusing article from USA Today on mobile homes in Malibu, California selling for significantly more than $1 million:

A two-bedroom, two-bathroom mobile home perched on a lot in Malibu is selling for $1.4 million. This isn't a greedy seller asking a ridiculous amount no one will pay.

Two others sold in the area recently for $1.3 million and $1.1 million. Another, at $1.8 million, is in escrow. Nearby, another lists for $2.7 million.

(via Dan Pink)

HouseBlogs

If you're into home repair, check out HouseBlogs for some good reading -- it's an index of home improvement around the world. My favorite feature is their map of the blogs, which lets me easily explore blogs in cities I've lived in. One of my favorite finds so far is Chateau Ste. Mold, a frightening story about new homeowners who discovered their 1895 home (right here in Seattle) was filled with black mold and had to be nuked from orbit. They're persevering, however, and rebuilding the house while they live in a 350 square foot studio. It's a pretty gripping tale.

T Minus 10

That's right, Miss J is a mere ten days away from her anticipated due date. Since we only moved into  the house recently, we've really had to work hard to get things into a reasonable shape for her arrival. Over  the past week, we've finally started getting things into a workable state. The nursery and the upstairs bed room have finally been cleaned  up and painted (there was a ton of woodwork to do), carpet has been installed in both, and furniture moved into place (what we have of it, anyway).

Off to the side you'll see a before and two after shots of the upstairs bedroom. Although the furniture is a bit random at this point (it's just stuff from our various apartments over the years), I think the room looks a lot more finished now. (As a side note, I used Behr paint, which I found has a nice finish and is easy to work with. However, my experience with their primer was just awful. It clumped up on me in minutes, even under ideal painting conditions, which made it impossible to work with. In the end, two coats of paint on things like the baseboard looked better than paint over primer.) Them ceiling light fixutres gotta go, though.

Much thanks to Ficus for risking life and limb to get our damn near infinitely dense dresser up some difficult stairs, and to Laurens for helping me struggle with not one but two queen mattresses up the same stairs and providing endless amounts of guidance. He's the guy who saved the day by telling us that we could get a split box spring for our queen mattress. I tried to pass that information on to another struggling homeowner, but alas, I was too late.

The baby's room got a similar treatment of paint and carpet, although the wall color is essentially terracotta. I didn't post any pictures of the nursery because, well, there's not much to show you -- we don't really have any furniture. Our main struggle has been with the crib. I'd like something modern and sleek, but almost all cribs look like they've dropped out of the 19th century -- not my taste. Ones that are modern and appeal to me, however, are quite expensive. Spending a good bit of money on a crib is even less appealing since we're going to use a co-sleeper at night for many months. The crib would only be used for daytime naps. (The nursery is on the ground floor.) Another wrinkle is that rather than using a crib as the baby gets older, I'm interested in learning more about the "Montessori child-bed" described in Montessori from the Start. (If anyone has any experience with that approach, please comment!)

We were ill-equipped for the baby in other regards, too, so today we did some serious baby shopping. Among other things, we picked up the stroller (a Peg Perego Pliko P3) and a Pack 'n Play to use in the nursery for naps for now. Glad that's done! Our struggle to prepare for the baby has been made much, much easier thanks to our kind and generous friends who have given us so many gifts, items their children no longer use, and knowledge about what matters and what doesn't. We appreciate it all so very much.

Tomorrow it's back to working on the house, and if the weather is nice, I'll take some length off of doors so they'll swing freely over the new carpet, and paint them. If the weather doesn't agree, there's plenty of other stuff to do around here.

Woah, I just noticed the time. Now we're only nine days away from the big event.

Period light fixtures

If you're looking for period light fixtures for your house, check out Schoolhouse Electric, based in Portland, Oregon. They have quite a large catalog, and I see several fixtures from our house in their catalog. (Bonus: check out the hardware section -- they sell push-button switches, and even push-button dimmer switches!)

Coming to you live from an empty house

The fellow from Comcast was just here to switch on the cable, and I just set the cable modem and wireless router up. I have the router in the basement, and I was thrilled to discover that I can pick up signal all over the house, even the upstairs (although signal strength is low there). Haven't tried the backyard yet.

On a somewhat related note, is there anything worse than having someone ask you to fill out a customer satisfaction survey about their work while they loom over you in your own house? My favorite question from the survey: "Did the technician make you feel valued?" Heh.

This is it

This afternoon we received a surprise phone call from our real estate agent informing us that the former occupants of our new home had vacated the premises a couple of days early and the house was ours. Early? Exciting! So after work, we headed over to West Seattle to see how the old place looked.

It was an odd experience. First, there was the shock of seeing the house empty. It looked different and, surprisingly, smaller. Second, there was the heightened awareness of all flaws. Did I not notice the stain on the floor before? Why is this door only painted on one side? Is this little thing the only closet in this room? Finally, there was the disbelief. We really own this? Yes, we really do.

We walked all around the house and started poking in all of the corners that we missed during our previous short visits. We were surprised and delighted to realize that the sellers were very cool and had the house cleaned thoroughly, top to bottom. We had been worried about what shape the house was going to be in, since we have two curious cats who will get into everything. Knowing that there's no bits of debris lying around in the basement is quite a relief.

At first, armed with my flashlight and a hypercritical eye, I was alarmed by all of the problems I was discovering (or noticing again), but gradually that alarm started to give way to the excitement of the possibilities of the house. There are dozens of small things we can do to improve it very quickly. Other changes (roof, furnace, electrical) are more substantial, costly, and time-consuming, but they'll no doubt be worth it. I can't wait to start attacking some projects this weekend.

Another shocking aspect of the house is just how darn quiet the place is! Having lived in apartment buildings in very urban areas for quite a while now, this is going to take a bit of adjustment for me. I think I'm going to be pacing around the house late at night for months, like last summer when we rented a little house on a beautiful beach in Kauai and I would lie awake all night convinced that someone was going to come in and murder us simply because there was no one around to hear us scream. I guess I just like being packed in tight with neighbors.

Still, this is one of the best things about this house -- it's in a quiet area, but it's still within walking distance of shops, restaurants, a movie theater, and, of course, a Starbucks (where Greg Nickels, mayor of Seattle and West Seattle resident, gets his coffee in the morning on the way to work, I'm told). And it's just a 10 minute bus ride (or water taxi ride!) to downtown. I think that's a great environment to raise a kid. Now I just need to get that nursery ready...

Statistics I can live with

The Seattle Times recently ran two articles on the local housing situation. The first article reports that the price of older homes is increasing faster than new construction in Seattle -- unsurprising, but still music to my ears (our home was built in 1929, which certainly qualifies as "older"). Of course, like all home stats, these are just comparing sale prices and aren't adjusting for capital improvements, so they're overstating the returns. Still, good news.

The second article covers Seattle housing appreciation from 2003-2004, and lists South Central West Seattle in the #2 position, at +22.7%. (The top spot belongs to the very plush, lakeside Madison Park.) Even though our house is in North Central West Seattle (according to this map) where returns were a modest +8.3% last year (but steady; the 5-year average is +8.2%), I take this as an excellent sign -- more people moving to West Seattle looking for good deals, raising values for everyone in the process. From the article:

"It's my view that Seattle is an underpriced West Coast city," said [Lawrence Yun, senior economist with the National Association of Realtors], pointing out that "people have been saying San Francisco is overpriced for the last 20 years, and it still keeps going up."

Having very sadly missed the boat completely in San Francisco, I hope this guy is correct. Signs certainly seem to indicate he is. Now that I'm in the game, all I can say is: Keep it coming. Keep. It. Coming.

Talk about mundane!

Our new house doesn't come with a washer and dryer (the previous tenants are taking them), so we need to pick some up. Any recommendations -- or warnings? I'm basically opinionless on this topic; without you, I'm at the mercy of ratings of Epinions.

This could either be really good or really bad

Another book for you tonight, this time on the home front: Todd Oldham's Handmade Modern: Mid-Century Inspired Projects for Your Home. I tend to like a lot of mid-century furniture (but not the period's urban design -- Mies van der Rohe, you make me so conflicted) so this could be interesting.

From the cover I see it was co-authored with Julia Szabo, whose excellent Animal House Style: Designing a Home to Share with Your Pets I picked up a few years back (and which I can heartily recommend). That definitely lends some weight in my mind to Oldham's book.