Progress continued to slow in week 39 of our remodel as the project began to draw to a close. At this point, construction was pretty much complete aside from cleaning up a few minor issues, some of which you can see in the gallery. We kept the painters busy right up to the last minute fixing various mistakes. For example, if you look closely at this photo, you can see that the horizontal trim between the shingles and the siding on the two front gables is the wrong color: it’s yellow instead of white. There were a number of small issues along those lines, and the team was, for the most part, really good about addressing even very minor concerns.
There were a few notable developments in week 39, however, and the most significant by far was the connection of the house wiring to the PG&E pole behind our shed: for the first time in nearly a year, we had consistent power inside the house! This let us see our hallway chandelier lit for the first time and gave us a chance to try to figure out which the many light switches in the great room (twelve, if I’m counting correctly) controlled which fixtures. Three months later, I still don’t have it down.
Having power was a prerequisite for getting another critical piece of infrastructure up and running: the Internet. We made an appointment to have an installer come by on a Saturday and, in contrast to the debacle we went through trying to get the Internet hooked up at the rental last year, he showed up on time and had a good handle on what needed to be done. He ran a fiber optic line from the pole in the backyard to the communications box on the side of the house and pulled it from there to the office closet through the crawlspace, feeding it up through the smurf tube the electrician left behind for precisely this purpose.
After that, he mounted AT&T’s hardware on the back wall of the closet next to where our network gear will sit, and we were done. It was a little strange having Internet access in the house two weeks before we planned to move in, but given the experience we had in the rental, we didn’t want to take any chances.
Utilities aside, the construction crew also put in a new heating vent under the cabinets in our master bathroom, replacing the ceiling vent that was removed to make room for Julia’s bedroom. This addition came late in the process because we didn’t realize that there wasn’t a vent in that room until quite a while after the initial HVAC work was complete. I’m glad we noticed, even belatedly, however: the tile floor can get very cold in the winter.
With all the major work complete, Enzo gave us the OK to start bringing things over, and that’s exactly what we did. Julie landed a couple great finds on the neighborhood Buy Nothing group, including a couple comfy chairs for the family room and a free refrigerator for the garage.
We got the refrigerator from a very nice couple that was clearing out their long-term rental for a move to Minnesota, and they gave us a couple bookshelves for the boys’ bedrooms, as well. All they asked in return was that we get the stuff out of their house. So, we repeated the process from May: we rented a U-Haul, loaded it up, and drove it back to our place. Things went a little more smoothly this time, the fact that we were parked illegally on a narrow little street for almost an hour as we loaded the truck notwithstanding; if nothing else, Joe and I had more experience pulling things up and down the truck’s ramp, and there was never any real risk of the refrigerator falling off the dolly this time around.
The couple even gave Joe a pair of convincing-looking katanas that they didn’t want to take with them. As weapons go, I’m not sure they’re serious enough that you could use them in an actual fight, but I am sure they’re serious enough that you could hurt yourself with them if you’re careless, so we asked Joe to put them on a high shelf well out of William’s reach.
The refrigerator itself had been used as a wine and beer fridge in the couple’s not especially weatherproof garage for quite a while, so cleaning it up, inside and out, was a project in and of itself. It ended up taking most of a weekend afternoon, but it worked out wonderfully in the end: for the price of a little manual labor (and a moving van), we got a perfectly functional refrigerator (not to mention a pair of bookshelves and some swords).
You may recall from our week 36 update that Enzo expected to be finished the week of June 14, which would have been this week. We didn’t hit that target, but we were close, and the path seemed clear for the final inspection the following week.
Occasional Dispatches from San Jose 