Here’s a shot from our trip to Venice. Isn’t that tilt-shift effect cool?

Under the Rialto Bridge

Well the coolest part about this shot (to me at least) is that I didn’t have to lug a tilt-shift lens with us on our trip. This is just a quick effect from a cool website that can make your photos mimic the tilt-shift look: http://tiltshiftmaker.com/

Enjoy!

To survive a 6+ Richter Scale earthquake first you have to make sure you don’t fall down. Keep your balance. Once the initial earthquake is over make sure to run out of the structure you were in and get to a safe place. In an ideal situation the staff of the resort at which you are staying will direct you to a safe and covered place, triage, and distribute food and water to everyone.

If you are at a resort in Costa Rica you may have to do just a little more to make it through because the resort staff may just decide to say something to the effect of “screw those tourists”; things like scavenging through the wreckage of restaurants and rooms for food and water — and toilet paper — in the dark, carrying firewood to make your own fire, and using as much charm as possible to convince some other tourists to let you sleep in their rented van. That evening you should then try to make arrangements for a helicopter transport — at any price — with virtually no levels of cellular service. When that doesn’t work you should then try to sleep in the van parked on the side of the cliff while it rocks back and forth quite regularly from aftershocks.

Eventually the next day, after not sleeping and sitting in relative terror the entire night before, you should then wait patiently for your $850 helicopter to show up for half of the day. While you wait you should eat the pineapples you scrounged, drink the remaining water and Coca-Cola, enjoy a cold Hershey’s bar (kept cool in the small cooler you picked up in the destroyed restaurant), and watch as the helicopters continually take out other people and leave you at the defunct resort. By some stroke of luck or through sheer force of will you will find another resort-owner-provided helicopter that can seat three out of the four people in your group and you take advantage.

The remaining person in your group should then get taken by four-wheeler across the ravaged countryside to meet up with the rest of the party.

The Red Cross should be in place by now, providing transportation for your party, sitting with luggage by the roadside, to a nearby refugee center. If your eyesight is good you should then accidentally bump into your travel agent’s driver and wrangle a ride back to San Jose where you then hook up with another driver to take you three hours to your next hotel on the Pacific coast. At that hotel you should immediately take a shower, eat, and crash on a comfortable bed.

When you return to the States you should then swear off eco-travel for at least a few years and stick to locations with minimal seismic activity.

Here’s where we were:

MAP

Here are some news articles about the earthquake:

Reuters
China Post
CNN

And here’s the room we were supposed to stay in (before the earthquake made that all moot):

I promise to have an updated picture of the whole arrangement soon.

It came unfinished so I brushed on two coats of Waterlox Marine Finish. I expect it to be relatively long-lasting, though probably not as durable as the Caesarstone we chose for our kitchen.

Basically it’s just like how you would handle a butcher block countertop with an undermount sink. Bamboo is naturally more resistant to water compared to other woods (though bamboo is actually a grass)…

Check back for more updates after our Big Move this weekend!

Here it is in all of its glory: The Master Bath Bamboo Countertop!

(I apologize for the poor quality iPhone camera picture)

We weren’t actually “bamboozled”, unless you consider the cost of shipping and installing our bamboo countertop was actually a few dollars more than the actual slab itself! We still saved a little (emphasis on little) over doing a Caesarstone countertop in the master bath. I think the bamboo looks a lot better as well with our choice of faucets and sinks.

Here’s a better picture of the faucet courtesy of the manufacturer:

We went with Kohler’s cast iron “Ledges” sink in white. Here’s the sink from Kohler’s website:

More iPhone pics of the master bath double vanity:

We like the inlay.

And here are some shots of the Caesarstone “Blizzard” countertop in the kitchen and sink we purchased from Overstock.com:

A better image of the sink:

Hopefully our appliances come this week so we can finalize our permits, get the rest of our plumbing, and move in before the end of the month!

After weeks of saying “I’ll install the cabinets in the master bathroom tomorrow” I finally hunkered down last Saturday and did it. The reason it took so long was because we had a bit of a technical challenge: the IKEA legs were too tall and the cabinets couldn’t rest on the floor because they would have been too low. That, and like the rest of the 85-year-old house, the floor isn’t quite level.

I decided that the best course of action was to use a ledger board to hold up the back of the cabinet on a level line and find some shorter legs for the front of the cabinets. Skipping over the fact that it took me almost four hours to attach three cabinets to a wall and get them level.

I’m also lucky that the kick plate will hide my jury-rigged leveling system for the front of the cabinets…

If you look closely at the bottom you can see some of my “handiwork”.

The door handles.

Our floors are shiny.

Agnes’ sister was still recovering so we couldn’t get any pictures of her, but Sam just couldn’t get enough of his son!

Congratulations to Lee & Sam!

So it had started very badly:

Our floors were the wrong color, our baseboards were trashed, and the same crew that did the bang-up job was back again to fix their mistakes. That foul-up meant our kitchen was still incomplete, further delaying our final electrical stuff and countertop installation.

Then our countertop and appliance supplier shocked us with the news that AMEX was not an acceptable form of payment — just as we were making the deposit.

While those were big problems they weren’t anything that couldn’t be solved with some more research, a good attitude, and a malted milkshake from Powells Dairy Freeze in Starke, Florida.

I snapped this picture as nonchalantly as I could. The young mother was sitting directly across from her newborn baby…smoking a freaking cigarette and blowing smoke (inadvertently, I hope) right back into the baby’s carrier.

The reason for the stop, other than the fine milkshakes at Powells, was because we found an alternate countertop supplier in Gainesville, Indigo Green Home store. We were incredibly excited to go because the perfect substitute for the CaesarStone we had chosen was the recycled glass countertops from Coverings Etc.:

…that is, until they rung up at $4600 $ a slab (and we needed 3). $14000 for counters was a little bit out of our budget for this project.

The trip wasn’t a total loss. We put in an order for a bamboo counter for our master bath. That should really add some nice spa-like qualities to the room.

Continuing our upward trend was the flooring company’s surprising 180-degree turnaround on the floors. They went from mismatched, discolored, and dull to deep, mysterious, dark, and glossy. We are extremely happy with the results of the second run at the job.

The living room

Dining room (temporary table)

The kitchen with ADEL birch cabinet doors

A view of the APC Cork plank floor. It’s soft!

Agnes’ studio

Our floor contractor wouldn’t start until we had the A/C systems running for two weeks so that the moisture would work its way out of the pine floors. So after we waited for JEA to finally hook up our power and the A/C company to finish their third attempt at installing our two Trane units, we called the floor company to start their part of the job.

Adding urgency to the flooring situation was Agnes’ sister’s baby shower, which was scheduled to be at the Dellwood House on Sunday, January 27. Because we had worked everything out to give the floor company over a week to do the patches, sanding, staining, and coats of polyurethane, they committed to a finish date of Friday, January 25 “at the very latest”.

As it turns out “at the very latest” wasn’t quite as accurate as they had originally predicted.

The contractor got a later start than originally planned, Thursday instead of Wednesday the prior week, and worked at a less-than-speedy pace up until Tuesday (or so our neighbors reported). So on Tuesday the contractor called me in hopes of extending his deadline to Saturday, which would basically ruin our chances of staging the already incomplete house for the baby shower.

That wasn’t going to happen. I told him that he was just going to have to meet his deadline and speed up the pace a little bit.

Mistake #1: Apparently holding some people to a deadline means they will do the absolutely poorest and quickest job possible to hit that date.

The floor patches didn’t match the rest of the floor at all and the guy managed to get stain on most of the baseboards and doors.

It reminds me of the Michael Keaton movie Gung Ho.

Mistake #2: Color is important

In this case it meant the flooring guy forgot to do a “test board” to show us how the stain would look on our floor.

When we started the process we had to choose a stain and I remember the conversation vividly:

Me: “What’s the darkest stain you’ve got?”
Flooring company: “Ebony”
Me: “Great. We’ll go with that”
FC: “Are you sure? Because on pine it ca—”
Me: “We’ve seen it on pine. We like it that way. That’s what we want.”
FC: “Are you sure?”
Me: “Yes! [dammit!]”

Unfortunately when they ordered the stain they didn’t actually get the “Ebony” color I picked, which looks like this:

They instead ordered “Jacobean”, which looks like this:

Which on our floor looks like this:

The Result

Agnes was furious. I was upset but at the same time very happy I paid by AMEX — and told the company so.

So they did the entire house in the wrong color, got stain on the freshly-painted walls, doors, baseboards, and generally did a really awful job.

Now the same crew is over at the house sanding off the stain and redoing the entire job. I have a feeling that the owner’s regular checkups on the job will influence the quality of the re-do.

At least the baby shower went well…

We had to really encourage the floor company to meet their promised completion date of tomorrow (Friday) — and even now it’s still not guaranteed that both polyurethane coats will be done on time. Of course the last thing we want is a rushed job, but with that being said the Baby Shower for Agnes’ sister is on Sunday and we’re going to do our best “Flip This House” impression on Saturday to get it at least slightly presentable!

Here are some pictures of the pre-finished floor. Hopefully the next time I post the floor will be much darker and kind of glossy!

If the floor isn’t done tomorrow I may have to don my Cobra Kai t-shirt and go “No Mercy” on somebody. Here is some Karate Kid inspiration for the floor company…

The weekend at the house was a qualified success. Thanks to the help of friends and family: Jonathan, Ed, Chris, and Sam, we were able to get the cork floor down in the kitchen, two layers of polyurethane on the cork, the in-wall speakers installed in the studio/presentation room, and all of the base kitchen cabinets built.

I say qualified because an extra wrinkle was thrown in at the last second on Saturday that ended up altering the course of Sunday’s work.

The short version is that we decided to put on a second coat of polyurethane over the cork and realized all too late that it wasn’t dry yet! All was okay after doing some sanding and mineral spirit rubbing. Here’s a picture from the first (and uneventful coat of poly).

My Saturday and Sunday both began like this:

Funny thing is today when I came out of Lowe’s I saw that another Prius chose to park right next to me. Sadly I know this wasn’t coincidence because I tend to park next to other Priuses/Prii when I’m able. It’s something strange that us Prius owners do!

Here’s a bonus picture of Agnes’ Prius after one of our recent trips to IKEA Orlando. These things can lug a ton of stuff. I think they’re pretty well suited for construction