Robots will clean our house for us while we sleep

I'd like to repeat that, since it makes me so happy:
Robots will clean our house for us while we sleep.

Alright, it's actually "robot", singular. For now.

It's an iRobot Scooba, a hard-floor cleaning robot. It'll do our kitchen floor in about a half hour. It should be safe on:

• our bathroom tile and slate
• sealed hardwood
  
• concrete floors

It should be unsafe on:

• the cat
• all those who threaten us

and, eventually, (when it becomes self-aware on December 20th, 2019)

• us

Crank it up

One of the painters showed up this morning with a bucket full of window cranks. Hurray!

Up until this point we've only had two cranks, one upstairs and one downstairs. Every time I wanted to alter the state of window openness in the house I've had to run around with one crank, using it on each window like a hand tool. Well, those days are over!

Hand prints

Hmm, how'd all these smudgy little hand prints get here?




Oh, I see.

Hot water heater outlet covered

I'm not sure when this happened, but some time last week J.D. got someone in to install a proper waterproof box around the hot water heater electrical outlet. They also replaced the guest bathroom GFI outlet that I had swiped when the heater outlet blew.

Scoot

This may or may not be the use that James the architect envisioned for the wide, concrete floored hallway, but either way, it sure is awesome! Erin is zipping along on her Xootr scooter. Ronan is now seriously fast and agile on his LikeABike.

Water permeable threshold

This isn't good. There's some rare rain here in L.A., and we're learning interesting things about the house. Among them, this door frame isn't stopping the flow of water.

Another surprising one, when our awesome (and by "awesome" I mean "lousy") plumber installed the outdoor GFI plug to provide power to the water heater he didn't do enough to water proof it. It blew its fuse last night and then refused to be reset. Probably just a faulty piece of equipment, but still, shouldn't an outdoor water heater be able to resist water?

Elusive low voltage box

My fisheye photos were no help in locating the box in the guest bedroom for cable, CAT5, and phone lines. So, Angel started drilling holes. And continued drilling holes. And cut a rectangle out for good measure. Nothing. Aren't there line tracing gizmos for this sort of thing?

Measure once, mount vanity to wall twice

Thus begins the cataloging of the things that need fixing. The punchlist, as it is called in the house construction business.

This was a case of our plumber going ahead and using the pipe he had incorrectly placed as relative center for the vanity, rather than measuring the space.

Also, this is the wrong mirror; it needs to be swapped with the master bath mirror.

Zounds

Ronan's birthday party was a blast this past Friday. I wanted to give thanks to J.D. for getting the driveway cleared off in time for the party. This is the second time we've asked him to get tons of stuff finished in preparation for one of the kids' birthdays, and he's really come through for us in spades.

Wind power

This thing screams "do-it-yourself project" to me. This is a 2kw system, for around $3k, but I bet I could get a little bit of energy for free out of the whirly vents on the house and garage roofs (rooves?).

Guest closet shelving

We took advantage of a sale on shelving this weekend and decked out the guest closet with Elfa shelving. What a huge difference it makes! We were accustomed to having a single wooden bar running across the whole closet in our old bedroom, which, in hindsight, stinks.

The fact that they make it in "platinum" now, as an alternative to the traditional white wire shelving makes a big difference. It doesn't hearken back to the laundry rooms of our childhood homes quite so much.

(This is a stock photo from the Container Store website, and not our actual closet.)

Final building permit

Erin says: We've passed final inspection. Let's all stop and say Cheers to that! We do still have a few odds and ends, but they really are just a few, and we're fully living in our new space. Other than the backyard, my favorite area is actually our large hallway. It's a fantastic place to play, and I'm really loving the concrete floors. I'm sure as our little ones get older and I actually am able to spend an entire night in our master bedroom I'll love it, too!

Now on to my wrap-up:

Sixteen months. That's how long our 1200 sq. ft. addition took. Never in my wildest imaginings did I think it could get that bad. It would be easy to say that we have an incompetent contractor, or terrible weather, but neither of those is true. Here are a few things I've learned, for those of you out there who are thinking about embarking on construction or are in the midst of it.

• Do whatever you can to keep a good relationship with your contractor. Vent to your mom, your dog, your best friend, but try to keep things cordial with the guy in charge. It'll take you a long way.
• But. Call him at least every other day if you haven't heard from him. I think one thing that went wrong in our project was way too much downtime. We weren't aggressive enough in making sure that we were at the top of the list. We lost weeks and weeks in November, December and January. When I made it my goal to start calling him every day to check in, guess what? Things kept moving.
• It really, really helps if you trust your contractor/architect's taste. There are so many little things to pick out, and we were lucky that we could trust their taste. With a new baby and a three-year-old, we didn't have a lot of time to research every last grout color.
• Don't underestimate the mental toll. It was really, really hard to be home with kids while this was happening. Imagine random workmen wandering around outside in your yard at 6:30 in the morning, clearly waiting to get in. And you didn't know they were coming. And they're just wondering, do you know what color this trim is supposed to be? Now multiply that by 400 days or so, and add in the trucks blocking your driveway, the constant dust on every surface, the loss of any outdoor play area, and oh, let's not forget the noise. Would it have been better if we had just moved out? Perhaps, but then our budget would have been completely blown, since we went so far over schedule.
• Keep a spreadsheet of expenses. We thought we were saving money by, say, picking way less expensive tile than was budgeted, but somehow that "extra" money always went to something else, and we still ended up over budget.
• Don't do it. And I'm only kind of kidding. Honestly, I wish we had looked around at what was on the market a little bit before we did this. The house is growing on me, but it's going to take me a long time to forget the pain.

But stay tuned -- we'll continue to update; JP is planning a punch list extravaganza. I'm looking forward to our next solar power bill (especially since it's been over 100 degrees here this week), and I'm still angling for an orange front door. After property taxes, that's next. Thanks for joining us on our journey.
-Erin

HVAC inspection

The inspector called for an additional HVAC inspection, to the tune of $400, but boy are we glad he did. It seems there was a good bit of cold air blowing directly into the attic. This probably will save us more than $400 over the next few of months alone.