Married Life as Opera Bouffe

A couple of weeks ago Michael and Jeff opened one of the kitchen walls and pulled out a section of The Weekly Oregonian, dated Thursday, December 29, 1904. We finally got around to browsing through the fragile pages, which crumble at a touch, and took a few snapshots. The snippets of articles, ads and stock analyses are a wild lens onto the year Justin's great grandmother was born.

Here's a sampling, taken from the above photo:

Married Life as Opera Bouffe
CHICAGO, Dec 5.--Degradation of the marriage tie, as illustrated in the life of Mrs. Grace Snell Layman, who has just been granted her fifth divorce, was denounced by judges today.
"This woman's career has been a rank travesty on marriage and the sacredness of its obligations," said Judge Brentano.
"Mrs. Snell, or Layman, or whatever her last name is at present, has turned the married life into opera bouffe," said Judge Mack.
Mrs. Layman was married first when she was 16 to Frank Coffin, a dancing master. She got a divorce from him and married him a second time. Again she got a divorce from him and again married him.
Mrs. Layman is under 40 and still pretty. She is said to be comtemplating a sixth marriage.

We put together a slide show of dozen or so clippings that feature ads for Chinese Herbs and male dysfunction remedies, and blurbs about criminal youth, the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition and an attempted rat-poison-and-beer suicide, all of which you can view by clicking here.

Closet Space

Part of the first floor stair well landing is a closet. To the left of the closet we'll have a bench (for puttin' on shoes) and a "mail sorting" table (more of a mini household-affairs organizational area) so that we can try to keep the kitchen relatively clutter-free of paperwork.

Pilings and Pads

Several 6x6 deck pressure treated posts have been fitted into the aluminum plint brackets. Concrete pads for the front, back and main decks went in this afternoon.

Wood Grain

100 years after the wood on the right was harvested to build the original home, the wood on the left was harvested to do our remodel.

The other day Michael pulled us aside to show us how much tighter the grain on the original stuff is. Trees grown for construction today are selected for their rapid growth, which means that they are relatively sustainable (i.e., we don't have to chop down old growth to feed our building appetites--we just plant more fast-growing trees). On the other hand, the newer construction-grade stuff is not as strong, straight, or beautiful as the older tight grain lumber, hence the high prices folks are willing to pay for reclaimed, salvaged, and re-milled old growth wood.

Tube Migration

Our plumbing is a series of tubes, not too unlike the Internet. We are going to put different stuff into our tubes, of course. For the past few days, Dean, our master plumber, has been installing new plumbing and tidying up existing stuff--mainly to reconnect it to the main lines and to get it moved into the walls, chase, and closets.

One thing that strikes me about Dean is that he is a bit of a sculptor. He has a real intentionality for the aesthetics of his finished plumbing. No kidding.

Like any plumber, he's got about a dozen different shapes and angles of plastic to work with plus varying lengths of tube, and that's about the extent of the palette. The size of our house doesn't give him a whole lot of space to work in, especially considering he's now working around heat ducts and flues, electrical wiring and switch boxes, doorways and windows (inside and out).

The result is something you could put in a gallery or a bonsai garden: elegant, sweeping curves of plastic that hug the contours of the framing and cleverly placed junctions fitted into impossible corners without sacrificing function. Our plumbing, spreading and branching as it goes from basement to first floor to second, unfolds like a plastic tree into the house's cavities.

This is plumbing you look at and you just know is the best plumbing on the block.

In addition to the art installation, Michael soffited about 10 inches of the kitchen ceiling along the wall containing the window to accommodate the upstairs toilet trap, which incidentally, is an original installation, not a piece of Dean's work. It makes more sense for us to drop a strip of ceiling than to try to re-plumb that trap. We simply don't have any vertical play unless we do some massive changes to the plumbing and the way it's run in the house.

In this photo, the toilet trap is just to the left of the green spray-painted dot on the right.

The green dots on the soffit are where we're going to install the kitchen stereo speakers. The two green streaks of paint on the wall mark the locations of the room audio controls. More on home audio in a later post.

• 5/6 :: Eliza adds : But is that a kitty in the photo, too?

Evening Glow

The windows framed on the interior wall will allow sunlight to pass from the stair tower into the kitchen in the evenings. If you look directly through the foreground window, you can see the second window behind it, framed in the wall above the doorway opening to the stair well.

The metal column is a heating duct for the upstairs bathroom. It's rectangular in shape so that it fits comfortably inside normal 3.5" wide framing.

Take note of some of the details in this photo, which I took yesterday evening. The next photo was taken today, and there are a couple of changes.

Nude Scene

Not much here but asphalt and dirt. The form for the main deck stair pad is out to the right at the rear of the photo. In the foreground to the left we've dug footings for the back entry deck and recycling center. There's a half ton of sound proofing under the blue tarp. The driveway is its temporary home until we lay flooring in a few weeks.

Pad Form

Tomorrow we will pour concrete into this form. The long edge along the left of the form will be the landing point for the front deck stairs.

The southeast corner of the house foundation is on the right edge of the photo.

North Annex Wrap

The North Annex is sheathed and wrapped. The electrical meter is on. This part of the house is going to look a little different than what it used to look like. One significant improvement is that the lattice skirting is a thing of the past--it looked bad and wasn't doing anything to support the structure. The upper portion will have matching siding as before, but we'll probably cover the bottom three feet with something slightly more daring, like corrugated steel.

Slate Green Challenge

I encourage all of our loyal readers to participate in the Slate Green Challenge. It's a seven-week program that helps assess your carbon footprint while introducing tangible steps you can implement to decrease your fossil fuel consumption. It's packaged in the form of articles and associated quizzes, and has a problem-solving, not nagging, approach.

One thing that's surprised us is how large of an impact some seemingly small choices have on our personal footprint. We're feeling mighty good about our decision to purchase all new low-e windows and up the R-value of our insulation. We're feeling mighty guilty about our penchants for air travel.

Earth Advantage: Update

Seems that, since our March meeting with Earth Advantage, the organization has opted to phase out their remodeled-home certification division. LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design), the most widespread and arguably well-respected "green-building" rating system, has yet to implement a remodeling certification process. Both groups are currently focusing solely on new construction.

Alas, this leaves us without a badge to pin to the house (or our lapels) in honor of our efforts. Good thing we were doing it for the karma, eh?

Look in the near future for a summary of the specific "sustainable" aspects of the remodel.

Romex

A roughed-in switch box with 15A Romex for our stairwell lights. Romex is a brand and common term for the hundreds or thousands of feet of copper electrical cable run through probably 99.99% of American homes and businesses. In other countries I think they call it a Royale with cheese.

Breaker Box

Statewide Electric is doing our electrical work. These guys move fast, and they've indicated that they haven't even hit their groove yet. This is the electrical panel in the basement. It doesn't have breakers in it yet, hence the sparse look.

Front Porch Excavation

The concrete guys will be back on Monday to pour the footings for the front and back porches (the deck footings are already done). They'll also be pouring concrete pads for all three stairways. You pour pads when you need something other than dirt on which to terminate the bottom of your stairs, unless you want your bottom steps to rot off. One of our early lessons in home ownership: earth-to-wood contact equals trouble.

We're not quite finished with the excavating. We need to run plumbing and electrical out to the garage, so we'll be trenching for that as early as next week.

Hogging

Dean, our plumber, was on site today ripping out old plumbing and making room for the new stuff. In this photo he's hogged out a hole for the bathroom sink drainpipe. Hogging is different than drilling. To hog is to tear out in chunks, usually leaving a rough finish. Drilling produces particles of dust and leaves a smoother finish. Hogging typically takes a lot less time than drilling, which makes it a useful process for a plumber.