interior, and coconut

here's where i stand sometimes to ponder where the day went.

what did i do? i ask myself. 

scooped the cat box. washed diapers. lots of poo related tasks, it seems.

joren's been getting lots done. completely un-poo related tasks, mind you.

notice the kayaks on the wall. getting lots of use.

above: the living room ceiling. to be filled with wood, fir i think.

or maybe joren's planning on lining it with fur. you never know.

good communication is a building block, something, something... strong marriage. something else.

let's back the crap up

yes. the dry wall is up. everything is a bit out of order. i blame the baby. it's convenient.

in fact, i'm going to start blaming her for  lots of things! it's easy and fun.

dry wall  fairy. no wings. no tutu. more diesel fumes and craney.

artsy interlude no. one

I just liked the composition of this snapshot.

Do you? How does it make you feel? 

It doesn't mean anything.
Except that we sometimes wear boots and use levels.

wires. that's all.

Before the insulation was sprayed, laid and tethered, Joren ran about seven thousand feet of wire. Wires? Wiring? And yes, it's color coded for fun and whimsy.

No reason behind any of it, as far as I can tell.

The bottom tubes are for water. Ha, bottom tubes.

They're here! They're here!

As promised, the less interesting posts including valves! and tubes! and pipes! are here. Sort of like Christmas came early. The kind with no presents, and lots of shouting, and no drinking. Yeah, get up and go to the bathroom if you need to. You won't miss much.

Uh huh.

Ok. There are some gauges here. That's sort of cool. Or is it? I've lost perspective. Yeah. Not that cool.

Portland! Come for the beaches... or mountains... wine country... waterfalls... or multitudes of homeless people...

...but stay for the box that heats the water. It's white!

radiate THIS

radiant heat? yes. that's what's happening here. molten lava, gin gimlets and warm urine will alternately will flow through the red, seemingly inflexible tubing joren is so lovingly laying. thousands of screws hold the boards in place. now we're using a roofing nail gun, because it's much louder and requires hundreds of thousands of nails. you do the math. or don't. in any event it makes sense. and more noise.

some of the boards are black. some are board color. forget that. they're just black and board color. mind your own business. it has nothing to do with the heating tubes. 

phase one of tube city happened this winter. hence, the fire. also, pre-insulation. joren's currently finishing up the laying of the tube right this second, not 10 noisy feet above my fragile cranium. what's not sound proofed? the basement apartment or my skull that's as thin as an eggshell. 

Let's all just pause for a moment

Is that too much to ask? No, it is not. It's not like I'm not asking anyone to bring me a burrito, or a lemonade which both sound tremendous right now, but no one seems to be doing that, so give me the moment. Ok. I'm going to backtrack because there are some not so interesting chapters I've apparently skipped in this missive. 

Like... insulation! So quiet. Me. I'm still noisy, but the walls are very quiet.

we're taking it to the next level here, people

my contractor assures me we want a level 5 finish on these walls, and dammit, if the baby's not going to pitch in, someone's got to get moving.

i call this phase: level 3.5, although they all pretty much look the same to me.

we're MOMENTS away from level 5. can you feel it? at the very least, can you smell it? or maybe it's just the pregnancy stench. hard to tell.

master bedroom. windows to the right, at the top, peek out onto the rooftop deck where i will in no time at all be sipping gin and eating li'l smokies. window at the end of the hall looks over the shed (remember how dubious i was about the shed, and damn if that didn't turn out nicely) and our neighbor nick. 

joren after dark

he gets crazy after 8 pm: late night mudding.

the baby's room. joren's next project: a scaffold-style crib.

it might not look fancy

probably because it isn't. but it's the coziest basement i will ever inhabit. with any luck, the only basement i will ever inhabit. this is the living room. it's where we do most of our living (aka watching battlestar galactica) when we're not hanging drywall. also, see the blue surgical drop cloth? you wouldn't know it to see it, but it blocks about .01% of the bathroom stink wafting from the other side of the wall.

we're kind of like mole people. you can mostly tell by my mole eyes. also, we're underground. below: kitchen/bathroom/laundry. i haven't experienced a toilet so close to a cooking facility since rural myanmar. also, hello, coconut! can you see coconut? open your eye holes. coconut!

boudoir. and the headboard? plywood storage!

a snow day in portland, oregon

the dusting that brings our lovely city to a screeching halt.

drywall fun

step right up and grab a knife. whoa. careful now. knives are SHARP! and pointy! not just for fun and throwing and juggling.

and i know it's a little blurry, but aren't these tulips gorgeous? also, the stitches. i'm happy to say joren did not execute this batch himself. although i hate to admit his self-ministered ones looked a little better. a little. the black thumbnail is unrelated.

more exterior

because the interior is still a bit "undeveloped", we'll focus on the "exterior" for a little longer. also, it's "sunny". we've had an unusually dry winter which makes for excellent "working on the exterior time" as well as "a super scaly beth".

look at the bottom of the photo below. see the window hole? if i were down there, i'd be waving. or maybe flipping you off. but probably doing a jig. that's our new apartment. it's fancy, but we try not to get too uppity in our basement digs.

put on your imagination caps for just a moment

it's hard to see, but besides all the resting and relaxing and cedar board staining, joren's plumbed and wired the entire house. i'd take pictures, but it looks like, well, a bunch of tubes and wires. fascinating!

we'll get an inspection on both soon and with any luck we'll begin the insulating. our home will be lined with hope and optimism and maybe a smidgen of regret and hints of despair. but mostly hope. also newspapers and straw.

cedar siding, part 74

this is where the milling, sanding and staining of the seven thousand cedar boards really gets exciting. hold on!

not that i didn't love the glow of the protective yellow paint stuff. or the profile of the tyvek.

this is what i like to call "the cedar staining station", or "potentially hazardous fume central". in between all the resting and relaxing, we stained about seven thousand cedar boards for the exterior--but not before joren milled and sanded every one, bless his heart. his charming wife insisted on 2 inch, perfectly smooth boards. none of that lazy 6 inch crap for us! we like to make things as hard as we can around here.

joren's dad was here for thanksgiving. the basses love to spend their vacation working. i mean, the the real basses. not the ones that marry in. the kind that like cocktails on the beach.

it's all mele kalikimaka around the jobsite

welcome to our holiday themed construction site...

the tree joren said we didn't need, but i stole one anyhow. i managed to dig into our storage unit and pull out some goodwill, christmas spirit and old bulbs.

the fire box! ready to burn a hole in your coat OR heart!

ahhh, vacation.

we're all feeling rested and ready to get back to work after our 3 month vacation, hence no blog posts. sorry about that. anyhow, i'm sure you had much more interesting things to do than check in on the house blog. eat a giant turkey leg! celebrate the birth of baby jesus! get out the illegal fireworks at midnight and wake up the neighbors! i love the holidays. equal parts bloating, loneliness and too much family. holidays.