CoSar Casa

I wrote this in May of 2016, shortly after we bought the house and long before we considered building an addition, but never published it because I was hoping for beautiful, Pinterest-worthy pictures with which to show off my home improvement prowess. <cue hysterical laughter> When we bought this house, it wasn't exactly a fixer-upper, but there were definitely some areas that needed to be addressed. The master bathroom (keep in mind that this was a 1960s master bathroom, so it's basically a small closet with a toilet, sink, and shower stall) (For anyone who is interested, I've read recently in a couple of places that the terms "master bedroom" and "master bathroom" is considered racist and sexist by many and the industry terms are evolving in some cases. But I'm using it here because most people know what it means)So here's what the bathroom looked like. It's not terrible. (" It's TERRIBLE" - Jules)  I tore down

Sorry it's been so long since I've blogged. I have three drafts ready to be finished, but between Jules' new job, things on the addition moving fast, and life stuff, I'm way way behind. Lots of exciting things are happening in the backyard, but today I wrote a post about my recent neck strain and it's a better fit on my other blog than here. So if you want to read it, head over there . 

I started this post on June 27th. I never finished it because it hasn't gotten any better. So I'm going to post it because I think we are nearing the end and I hope to move on. (And they finished the framing and drywall, so there are fewer cracks and holes but we're in the middle of another heatwave so other than that, it's basically the same.)

The plumber, Rich, was in the garage today running the gas line up through the rafters and back down again to connect it to the line on the other side that had already been placed. He had to leave the garage door closed, because if it were open, it would have covered the place on the ceiling where he needed to run the line. We're having a bit of a heat wave in San Diego right now, and it got up to 88 today in our neighborhood. When Jules got home, she wanted to see where the new gas line was running, so we stepped out into the garage. It was so hot in there that we lasted about 45 seconds before we wanted to go back inside. Rich must have been out there for at least two hours in the middle of the afternoon, on a ladder, near the scorching hot roof, running that gas line through the rafters. Since Jules spent a good part of the day on Sunday clearing out the garage where the plumber would be working, most of that wall is empty right now, so Jules was thinking we should drywall

Hello! Jules here. You haven’t heard much from me because I, like most of you reading our blog, are wowed by Kelly’s amazingly conversational writing style and, I, like most of you, am a tourist keeping cadence with Docent Kelly from one blog post, “we’re walking; we’re walking; we’re walking” to the next blog entry. Let me fill you in on what happened after the earth below the weeds was rediscovered, and we came home from work to find a Q*bert reboot made of rebar, and Kelly stared at the build crew from every window in the house. (Big ups to those of you who rocked Q*bert in the 1980’s!) See? Q*bert! I had no idea what was going on here but I thought they were building a giant piano. Wow!!!   Yep, that about sums it up. Wow to the stress, the surprises, the neatly stacked cut-to-size piles of lumber. Then boom! In one day the piles of lumber were transformed into a seemingly massive structure in our backyard. You can see that day in this two-minute timelapse vide

Well, we do live in San Diego, so there is a lot of sunshine. And despite my neglect, the roses appear to be holding up. My point is, it's been a stressful week. It doesn't help that I went into tech for The Imaginary Invalid at The Old Globe. For those of you who have no idea what that means, it translates to a 60-hour work week with me getting home past midnight most nights. Getting home at 12:45 am after a 12-hour day and then having to wake up at 6 the next morning so I can shower and get ready for work before meeting with the contractors to select windows so I can be back at work at 9 makes for a long, exhausting, stressful week. So, on Friday, when we found out that the engineer changed a window from a slider to a casement and the house got framed before anyone caught it, I was pretty upset. When Ali designed the house, she had a 4' sliding window in the bedroom. Mommalinda thought the window was way too big, so we made it smaller, not realizing at th

I went back to work a couple of weeks ago, after having several months off, and that's when the construction started in earnest. Today is my day off, and the framers are here. (I'm pretty sure that's what they are.) The first hour they were here, I was popping around the house, from window to window, watching them. It got weird. Now I'm sipping my coffee and sitting in the massage chair and watching them through the sliding glass door. That's less weird, right? A LOT has happened since my last post, but with me being so used to being a lady of leisure and then suddenly going back to work full time, I've neglected to keep you informed. They replaced the sewer line and filled the dirt back in, so now our front yard is the barren wasteland it used to be and no longer a pile of holes and dirt. Bonus, in tearing up the yard to replace and install everything, they also tore up a lot of the vegetation that we hated! I'm being serious here. I imagine

We had three major fears when embarking on this project: 1. Our 57-year-old sewer line would need to be replaced.  2. Our existing roof trusses would have termite damage.  3. There would be bodies buried in the backyard. Angry at being disturbed, they would turn into zombies and eat our brains. Aaaaaaaaaand the winner is*:  The entire sewer line needs to be replaced.  Because it looks like this: That rusted, crumpling, pipe-looking thing? That's a section of what remains of our cast-iron sewer line. But look how pretty that new pipe is! The plumber for Ritz is going to replace the line from the house to the city. The ACTUAL worst case scenario would be the sewer line under the foundation of the existing house cracking significantly, because that would mean tearing into our foundation and then having to do a major remodel costing tens of thousands of dollars. We're hoping not to have to do that for a few years!  Oh, and hey, in case you were worr

Don't you hate it when you get home from work and someone's torn up your yard and dug a big trench through it? Not us. Aren't you glad you're looking at a picture of a trench for a new sewer line? After we signed off on the designs, it seemed like it took FOREVER for the plans to go to all of the engineers and for the city to issue a permit. (Real time? Five weeks. Slightly less than forever.) Then we had a kickoff meeting, and the next morning all of the contractors came over to walk the property. Jules and Mommalinda stayed inside (it was pretty early) but I was out there, taking pictures and asking questions. Matt in the background, then Billy, Dale, Ed, and Sharzad Juan and Billy, Billy and Ed. Yeah, Billy is in EVERY PICTURE. I suspect vanity.  You could tell this crew has worked together for a long time and I loved listening to them problem-solve. Little things, like the electrician musing, "Maybe we should put a subpanel on the

Okay, so I kind of started in the middle with the whole, "we're tearing down the pergolas" thing because I was all exhausted and proud at the time. But I never got to the "Why we're doing this" thing. So let's back up. My in-laws have been living in the same enormous 6 bedroom house since they purchased it in 1979. It was great when they were raising three kids and had various other relatives living with them throughout the years, but as they grew older, it became increasingly apparent that it was just too much house for them. However, my father-in-law was firmly planted and rather stubborn, so we helped them when we could but for the most part, let them be. When he died three years ago, it became increasingly apparent that things had to change. If it was too much house for two people, it was waaaaaay too much house for an elderly woman who had, in keeping with her generation, left most of the home maintenance to her husband. We spent many weekends

Watch this space - it's going to be unrecognizable pretty soon. I don't mean the blog itself, I mean the backyard. We are having all of the concrete torn up and the yard regraded. Most of the concrete is in terrible shape, and we don't love the strange sidewalks to nowhere but more importantly, the yard slopes TOWARD the house, which is less than ideal, especially when you're about to pour a new foundation. Demo on the concrete starts this week, and Jules is out of town, so that meant that we had to remove everything in the backyard that we wanted to keep before she left. So that's how we spent the weekend. Just so you appreciate the magnitude of that, here is the backyard from the listing when we bought the house: The brown shed on the far left and the blue shed in the side yard were essentially just termite colonies and had to be torn down before we moved in. But I fell in love with the two big pergolas next to the house.  Another shot of the pergolas.