non-friction.

That little bag on the back was a cruel joke. It caught ZERO dust.

My electric palm sander thingee got slower, slower and slower today until it sanded no more. Looks like I'm going to the pawn shop(s) tomorrow to shop for a cheap replacement: once again capitalizing on the misfortunes of the downtrodden. I've been using the handheld non-power one, but that gets to be a real b-i-itch when you're upside down on a ceiling (again, insert Lionel Richie song joke here). My mud abilities have improved greatly, partly due to the discovery of nylon mesh drywall tape, and partly because I'm just better at carving out something reatively smooth upon initial application, but there's still a fair amount of the big, gucky mess-type joints (before I got good at it) which are far harder and dustier to sand. My taping and mudding advice: go light, make everything as smooth and nice as you can with the trowel and add more layers later on.

In much bigger and more exciting news I called the Ken The Polished Concrete Floor Dude this morning. They're comin' on by tomorrow to initiate the ugly process of hacking out roughly 600 sq feet of travertine (is that a proper noun?) tile, as well as the staggering amount of smooth set beneath. This will be followed by transforming the concrete slab beneath into something smooth 'n' shiny. This means I have to clean up the moderate mess of tools, wood, drywall, etc. in the kitchen/living room tonight, something I'm not exactly motivated about. Waaaah. I'm told this whole transfloormation (I'm really knockin' 'em out of the park today with the puns) will take three or four days, but methinks it'll be more like a week. I'm sure I'll have plenty of news that's fit to print...

menace 2 society

So in not-actually-directly-related-to-my-house news, today I slacked off and took myself on a Vegas Vintage Architecture tour. Every time I think I've found the very last neighborhood with cool houses here, I end up finding more. In this case, I was tipped off by a couple homes from the veryvintagevegas.com site run by the realtor who moves all the old joints around here (it's a cool read, but he updates the blog pretty infrequently).

Since it wasn't too oppressively cold, I thought I'd hop on my neglected motorcycle and see if I could get it to start (the longer it sits, the worse it gets, and leaving the battery in cold cold garage doesn't help). It actually started pretty easily and off I went. For those who know the area, my initial destination was the Rancho and Alta area just northwest of me. I'd been up there during the summer when I was still looking for places, but it was a pretty cursory drive-by, because I knew the area was a little champagney for my beer budget. As it turned out the specific places I wanted to see today were in a gated area with a security boof, so I wasn't gonna try and bum rush the show. Wah-wah. The good news was there was plenty of non-gated real estate to explore, and oh my… some amazing, huge, opulent joints. The big difference between my 'hood and up here is that, though there are some great houses around me, the lots here are pretty small. But over there… clearly this was the Beverly Hills of Vegas circa mid 50's to mid 60's. All kinds of custom-built madness, some on huge lots, some just beautiful, some mind-blowingly tacky. One has awesome western murals painted all over it along with metal horse silhouettes and other western silliness… located on Palomino Ln… I kid you not. That couldn't be a coincidence (I would kill to see the wild-west trainwreck stylings of its interior). There was another house with giant, and I mean GIANT statues of horses and bulls on the front lawn. I should have taken a picture.

I accidentally discovered a whole other hood (east of Rancho between Charleston and Oakey). I actually tried to check it out months ago, but most of the entrances are blocked off. It's technically not gated, but you have to know where to get in. Here were more lovely places, some old, some newer, and I think I found my new favorite house in Vegas, which is located, get this, at 2001 Bannie Ave. Those who know me well know my all-time favorite film is 2001: A Space Odyssey. Maybe one day I'll buy the place and I can write a blog called "2001: A House Odyssey"… or maybe "A Cool Place Odyssey". The picture doesn't do it justice at all, but trust me, it's super mid-century awesomeness, it's huge (3500 sq ft), has a guest house and is on a giant corner lot.

So there I am, minding my own bidness, tooling around on my bike (which BTW, is a vintage 1974 Honda CB750, in very nice shape. This will soon be semi-relevant.). I'm not really driving up and down the same streets much, but I am going rather slowly for obvious reasons. There's barely any traffic in these neighborhoods. Suddenly some dude in a Nissan SUV turns left, driving directly toward me, stops and jumps out; I could've gone around him, but clearly he stopped for me. Judging from the his curt actions and the not-nice look on his face, I didn't think he was stopping to compliment me on the bike. (Old dudes occasionally gawk at it. Chicks, not so much.)

"DO YOU LIVE HERE?!?", barketh he.
 "Uh, no", I replied innocently.
 "WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?", barkethed he more.
(By the way, he wasn't a particularly menacing looking guy. For those of you with aspirations to randomly mess  with slow-moving neighborhood motorcyclists, removing your Bluetooth® headset might help to ramp up your intimidation factor.)
"I'm looking at houses. I'm into mid-century architecture. And old stuff. Look at my bike…old, restored... ", intoned I. Guy seemingly slightly embarrassed, but not nearly as much as he should be. I'm 40-years old, how old do I have to be before they stop treating me like a kid?!?
"Oh. Well we've had a lot of robberies here lately, and we have to watch out. You'd want people to do that for you too."

Well, I wouldn't necessarily stop motorists on the street. Besides, I'm no expert on burglarly/theft, but if I was gonna steal your stuff, I'd bring a bigger and far less conspicuous vehicle. It's real hard to strap a big-screen TV on the back of a bike with a cargo net on the passenger seat. Maybe those stealing-crap experts know some tricks that I don't. As an aside, earlier I rode past two separate pulled over cops and exchanged pleasant nods with each. Hmmm.

"I'm just looking at houses. I just bought a sixties place on the other side of the freeway. I even felt kind of bad because my bike's a bit loud", I offered.
"Oh, uh, sorry. Have a good New Year".

I wonder if he clicked that Bluetooth® headset on, called a loved one and told them he just did his McGruff the Crime Dog good deed of the day and took a bite outta crime. Or maybe he told them he randomly hassled someone flagrantly minding their own business. But I doubt that.

--------

By the way, I've accomplished a LOT in the realm of kitchen drywall patching. The ceiling already looked like swiss cheese, and not only did Handyman Keith have to cut more holes for the light install (and not the kind that the fixtures to into), but there were holes from all the lights I removed, missing chunks of drywall from when the plumbers installed gas lines for my dryer AND areas to fill due to removal of superfluous light switches. All in all, a great deal of drywall busywork, and I've made great strides. Photo essay forthcoming.

Update on Monday, January 2, 2012 at 11:24AM by celebutante

I got a better pic of that cool house (thanks to google maps). The carport/driveway awning thingee is kind of Frank Lloyd Wright-esque, no? (I'm getting all hoity-toity tossing around the names of the like, three architects I actually know the work of)

And while we're at it, below is the previous "Mitch's Fave House In Vegas" front runner. This has the distinction of being around the block from my place, so I drive past it every day, and everyone who's visited me is forced to listen to me yak about it. Amusingly, a couple of people seem to think the houses I like look like office buildings- one even said "dentist's office". BTW, that's a google map pic too- the current owner has fixed up the ugly dying grass landscape. As you can see from both places, I have thing for corner lots (the other place I almost bought in Paradise Palms was a corner lot). You can see this one has that cool room on top, and there's an outdoor spiral staircase in the yard that goes up to the roof; you can sort of see the guard rails in the pic. I've seen pics of the inside, and it's been very nicely updated. Wood floors, minimal furnishings, etc. And it sold for around $140k a year and half ago. Crazy!

And OH YEAH, it took me a minute to find it on google maps, but here's the aformentioned bulls 'n' horsies on da front lawn house mentioned above. Can you believe this s@*t? You really gotta wonder what kind of person lives here (and how many airport metal detectors their belt buckle sets off).

pretty lights, all in a row (sort of)

Though they don't appear very recess-ive, these are the ten recessed lights my handy-dandy handy man installed. Currently they have the wrong kind of bulbs and as you can see, are dangling out of the enclosures like some kind of trendy art installation. They're dangling because the enclosures somewhat stupidly (read: cheaply) don't include a bracket to hold the sockets. Apparently, the brackets are part of the trim rings which haven't arrived yet. I inspected trim rings at Home Depot yesterday; some appeared to have it, some didn't, so I'm crossing my fingers that the ones I ordered do, otherwise we shall have problems.

Hey, holy crap, there was a just a knock on the door. Look what just landed on my doorstep... trim rings!

I'm gonna go open them and see if they're gonna work. Wish me luck.

Thaaaat's more like it. The real-time experience of Mitch blog is riveting, no? BTW, those errant pencil marks are gonna get painted. One good thing about going with the cheapo 65-watt incandescent bulbs is that I now realize they're stunningly bright (the one above is dimmed down so it won't freak my camera out), so when I do finally spring for LED's, I don't have to get the super bright ones. The more affordable ones are literally about 1/3 the brightness of standard halogen incandescents, but there are enough fixtures that it shouldn't be an issue. As mentioned in an earlier entry, I had to order them from Home Depot's website because the stores don't stock the silver metal ones. Apparently the general public digs white, brown and probably tacky faux-wood grained hideousness. Semi-amusingly, these rings kind of look like silver-painted plastic, but are in fact brushed metal. If anyone accuses me of having plastic lights, back me up, ok?

back to our regularly scheduled programming...

While Handyman Keith was installing the lights yesterday, I was pulling down all the extraneous existing and sometimes inexplicable lighting seen below. Oh how I hateth a ceiling fan, and there's millions of them here. The good news is that, while a supreme pain in the ass to install, they're super easy to take down. And fortunately they didn't do too much damage (i.e. large holes) with the ring of six of fluorescent tube fixtures. (the smaller round holes are where the recessed lights went in. The huge round hole is actually an HVAC duct, so that'll just get a new regulator cover)

Since we eliminated numerous light switches (previously mentioned "Winchester Mystery House of Electrical" phenomena), I need to install smaller light switch wall boxes and fill in drywall accordingly, as well as filling in the holes left by now-adandoned ceiling lights. This is a blah, time-consuming activity, and surely one that isn't very interesting for you to read about, so it could be a little quiet for the next few days.

light bulbs over my head

This whimsical drawing looks EXACTLY like me. Except for that whole black thing.Still in the midst of the recessed light install, and while that happens, I've been insanely researching what the heck kind of bulbs to install. Frustrating this, because you have three choices these days:

LED: the current cat's meow of lighting. They're super efficient (50-watt standard incandescent bulb gets replaced by something in the 6-10 watt range). The caveat is that the cheap ones suck (poor reliability and weird greenish light quality) and the good ones are around $50 a pop. The four in the kitchen are less critical because I don't care if they dim, so I have more options, but I want the six in the main room to be dimmable, so that'd be $300 in bulbs. No thank you.

CFL: aka Compact Fluorescent, basically those swirly guys in a spotlight-shaped package. Not as energy efficent as LED, but still about 75% better than standard incandescents. There's decent options here in the $10 range for the non-dimmable variety, so I'll probably go this way for the kitchen. BUT, and that's a big but, it seems that dimmable fluorescents are the illumination equivalent of "military intelligence", i.e. they range from bad to worse. Many tales of flickering, total failure, etc. and they seem to be exacerbated by using multiple lights on a single dimmer, which is exactly what I'm going to do.

Halogen: Standard old-school incandescent. These work great, but are the least energy effcient, though I can offset that a bit with aforementioned dimmer. And they're cheapest by far. They also get hot, but my enclosures are, in theory, rated for this kind of thing so hopefully I won't set my attic insulation ablaze (which reminds me, I need to buy myself a responsible homeowner fire extinguisher).

So it looks like I'm gonna go with halogens at about $4 a pop. As mentioned, they're the least energy-efficient by a large margin, but on the other hand, buying six $50 LED's is around $300 and it'd take a LONG time to make up the $275 initial outlay on my energy bill (I call this The Kind Of Math Toyota Prius Owners Don't Like To Consider prior to purchasing their homely glorified golf carts). Besides, I'm sure that within a year or two, LED bulbs will cost a fraction of what they do now, so I'll splurge when they're in the sub-$10 range.

I promise Mitch blog is gonna get more exciting real soon. Oh yeah, I'm about to ok the estimate for the fancy Semi Handmade cabinet doors and panels. It's super pricey there and I'm trying not to think about it (while trying to think about how cheap the Ikea cabinet guts/frames were). It's still all cheap cheap cheap in the grand scheme of fancy modern kitchens, but big $$$ for my economically inclined self.

today's light update.

Picked up these suckers at the Home Depot today- a dozen 5" recessed light enclosures. I actually wanted another six, but the only other box they had was wide open. Since I only need ten for the initial kitchen/living room install, this should be fine. Going to order the trim rings online today as well. In the meantime, today I did this:

That's a rough diagram of their locations (the two on the left aren't really that close to the wall). I figured out where everything should correctly sit mathematically, then realized that totally wasn't gonna work. I ended up using a combination of math and and seat-of-the-pants "this looks about right" engineering. My handyman told me to just punch small holes in the ceiling where I wanted them before he started, but I quickly realized that measuring, say, 120" with a tape measure by yourself on a ceiling is impossible. Instead I put masking tape X's all over the floor with measurements written on them with a Sharpie. He's gonna start on it this week or next week, and we'll transfer the locations from the floor to the ceiling.

In the meantime, I still need to get a bunch of dimmable CFL PAR 30 bulbs (which I'll probalby get online, Home Depot has a craptastic selection) for the six in the main room, and standard PAR 30's for the four in the kitchen. Also need to switches and dimmers. I'm not doing anything too crazy, just a switch for the four in the kitchen, and dimmers for the six in the big room and the Sputnik chandelier (you can see it in this pic). Also need to get the bulbs for that guy. It still hasn't arrived; better check the tracking number on that...