house226

I Know You Are Broke

2012-02-12T16:14:00.001-08:00

I Know You Are Broke, a photo by Mary Duan on Flickr.

In 1948, Pat Covici, John Steinbeck's long-time agent, wrote him this letter. Steinbeck had by then "pissed away two fortunes."

You will have to start over, Covici said, and indeed I know you will. "I am groping for something I am convinced you need."

Random Thoughts

2011-12-03T15:01:00.001-08:00

1. The last two encounters with my neighbor have ended with me either calling the police, or telling him (after a lot of gesturing and screaming "go fuck yourself" on my part) that if he didn't get out of my face, I was going to call the police. He can treat the rotating cast of screwed-up poohbahs he moves in and out of his house any way he sees fit—it's none of my business—but if he tries anything like aiming his garden hose at my kid's girlfriend again, or verbally harrassing my kids if they're outside playing baseball or walking the dogs, I'm getting a restraining order.

2. Nothing says Happy Holidays quite like a restraining order.

3. Speaking of a lack of restraint, I paid a service an exoribitant amount of money the Wednesday before Thanksgiving to have someone come in and clean the house. It's mostly stuck, or at least it seems to have made keeping it clean a little easier. It might just all be in my head.

4. Which is kind of stuffy right now. The wind had been blowing all week and my eyes have been extra irritated.

5. This is my favorite thing to listen to right now, and the video is also quite charming. My favorite thing to eat right now is a soft pretzel, from the batch Chuck made this afternoon, with mustard.

6. Al the Contractor, the one I believe is in witness protection because he goes by two different last names and I can find no evidence of him online (that's just not normal), recently messaged Chuck and asked him if we had any "before and after" pictures of the house. He can't find the ones he took and he'd like to have some for his portfolio. I'm thinking I might take pictures of the bathroom faucets. The ones where I can only get hot water. Or maybe the kitchen faucet, where I can't get any hot water. Or maybe the light switch in my dining room—the one that's too hot to touch.

I know. First World problems. I'll stop complaining about stupid shit now, I promise.

6. In the spirit of Blackbird and her recent "What I Wore" post, today I am wearing battered yoga pants, a white tank top and a grey cardigan from Target that is spattered with white paint. And Dansko Mary Janes.

Ticking Away

2011-11-26T01:06:00.000-08:00

I'm in full-blown not sleeping right mode. It's so wonderfully quiet at night. Nobody is asking questions or demanding anything. I just love to lay here and read and think. Sammy came home from his outing with friends around midnight and announced he hadn't eaten enough vegetables as of late, so i got him some radishes that needed cleaning, and some of the remaining bebe tomatoes from our garden...I would have cut up some carrots and celery if he wanted, but the radishes helped fill the need for crunchy-healhy. He and the puppers went off to bed, Bobby is downstairs on the computer, Chuck is snoring away next to me. If I can get my act together and get some sleep, in the am I'll make them all brunch: scrambled eggs with slivers of smoked salmon mixed in, or with ham. We have biscuits, croissants, some fruit I think.

The snoring, the snoring is setting my teeth on edge .... Chuck is on call all weekend, which means we can't leave the city.
He's going to start baking dozens upon dozens of batches of Christmas cookies instead. His mother's cherry-filled, oatmeal cookie will be one, and chocolate chip of course has to be another. Other than that, he needs a good shortbread, maybe a ginger molasses and maybe a whoopie pie? Not sure.

We're putting our Christmas lists together. I have Chuck's and he wants various kitchen things: some glass measures, some silpats for our new baking sheets, some silicon bowl scrapers and and a new pan. I've asked for a new sweater (this one, http://www.softsurroundings.com/P/Calida_Cardigan/) in grey; a new pair of socks, also in grey, from the cool sock place in SF and a new stash of Nava pencils from PH Design in Texas. I don't really need much of anything, but it's nice to have something to unwrap come Dec. 25.

Monday dinner gone awry ...

2011-09-05T23:31:00.001-07:00

Side of the house ..., a photo by Mary Duan on Flickr.

It started with the tomatoes. A little basil, some thyme, a pair of chickens flattened under a brick and Chuck's homemade fries. It ended with my esophagus seizing up about three bites into it. It happens a few times a year, and usually when I'm under great stress--I'll be eating and the esophagus will just stop working. Sometimes I can clear it on my own (you DON'T want to know how) and sometimes I need a trip to the ER following by a surgical procedure in the morning. No ER, but it's going to be a long night.

A Look Around

2011-09-05T02:36:00.001-07:00

Some corners of my house. I came home from work Friday, assembled the crew and said, "if I came home and you were all dead I would be embarrassed to call the police because its so messy. So tomorrow we clean." And so we did. A few hours and it's better ... Click on the pics to go to Flickr for actual captions. I'm still trying to figure out the new blogger interface ...

Front hallway, a photo by Mary Duan on Flickr.

Opposite view, a photo by Mary Duan on Flickr.

Dining Room, a photo by Mary Duan on Flickr.

Corner of the dining room., a photo by Mary Duan on Flickr.

Dining room, a photo by Mary Duan on Flickr.

Peace and No Boys Allowed, a photo by Mary Duan on Flickr.

Blackboard jungle

2011-09-01T00:45:00.001-07:00

DSCN1318, a photo by Mary Duan on Flickr.

Painted one dining room wall in chalkboard paint... yeah, yeah, I'm a good three years behind trend. But the boys kind of love it and so do we. (My mother-in-law's comment: A chalkboard in a dining room is just not normal.) To the left in the picture is the door that leads into the side foyer; on the other side of the chalkboard wall is the studio apartment, about 700 square feet, with gas fireplace and separate laundry. Flooring is newly installed, frige is new and bathroom is tiled, with a bathtub along one wall, then a separate shower. We hope to find a friendly, gardening-happy and dog-loving tenant by Thanksgiving.

We're happy to provide one of the raised beds we're building so the renter can have his or her own plots. We're thinking about bees and chickens are an almost certainty.
Looking forward to a three-day weekend of movies and reading and sprucing. My managing editor, sensing that I'm a stress monkey right now, suggested I not show up on Friday either, but I think I have too much to do. I'm taking a week off at the end of October and plans are in the works for a night or two in San Francisco. I plan to spend a day in a beach chair on Moss Landing Beach (outside Phil's Fish Market) reading and staring at the ocean.

Mostly, though, I need Blackbird to come to California and help me revamp my wardrobe.

Messy Kitchen

2011-08-14T02:23:00.001-07:00

Messy Kitchen, a photo by Mary Duan on Flickr.

Slow and steady...it may not win the race, but it's the only way we're getting anything done around here right now. Slow, as in we're still unpacking boxes and steady, as in hey! we're still unpacking boxes.

Above is a shot of the kitchen. We don't have actual counters (painted plywood for now), no backsplash and no drawer pulls yet. But we have top-notch appliances we bought for pennies on the dollar on eBay and Craigslist, enough space for everyone to be in there and we can pull off some pretty fabulous meals. The cool chicks at Urban Farmhouse have counters in the shop that are made of sheet metal, distressed to make them look like aging zinc and then sealed--they gave me the name of their sheet metal contractor today, and I think we'll probably end up doing the same for our counters. (If you ever get to Salinas and are looking truly unique items at an affordable price, this is the place.)

To the right of where I was standing when I shot the above, there's this:

Rest of the kitchen, the double ovens, the baking area, and then down the little hallway is the laundry room and a storage area. If I ever get it together, our earthquake or zombie apocalypse supplies will go into the storage area. I keep thinking, "Ack, if shit goes down (earthquake or zombies) we are so unprepared."

More pictures tomorrow. Shooting the corners of the house, posting them all ... happy Sunday. Laundry, baseball and maybe some roasted tomato soup and homemade focaccia for dinner.

Oh Joyous Three-Day Weekend

2011-05-28T01:04:00.000-07:00

Friday Night: Baseball on TV, cocktails, make-your-own-damn quesadillas, DVRd Too Big To Fail, hanging out with kids, eldest's sweet girlfriend and the world's worst dogs. This, on top of lunch with several member's of my Idiot Girls Action-Adventure Club (plus one token husband) made for a pretty happy day. New book I can't read because my new friend Murph says I have to read the first two books in the series first.

Saturday: AM yard work. Tomato and eggplant planting. Weeding. Farmers market. Arranging the front porch. (It's an excellent front porch.) Hang the giant wall of Ms. Rearrange closet, figure out what I don't need and donate. Listen to music. Clean the bathroom.

Sunday: Dinner party. Grilled deviled chicken under bricks; cucumber/yogurt sauce; homemade pita; roasted veg; whatever else people bring. Nate's ElMachino margaritas. Dessert by Carmela.

Monday .... Sleep late, laundry, books and movies. Maybe beach is it's warm enough.

Random Act of Journalism

2011-04-21T00:13:00.000-07:00

So a few weeks back, I wrote about the house for the Monterey County Weekly, where I'm the editor. A friend suggested wryly on Facebook that the story was a result of either an "egomaniacal editor, or a slow news week." In reality, it was time for our annual home and garden cover feature, it was my turn do to a cover piece and it's sometimes good to write what you know. Not that the egomaniacal part isn't correct. Being unsure of yourself is not a quality you can possess when you edit a newspaper.

Blogger, for some reason, won't embed the link. I'll copy and paste the whole thing at the bottom of the post.

This story prompted one city planning department employee to ask— out loud, mind you, and not as part of any internal or existential dialogue— "I don't know if I should be mad about this story or not." My theory is, if you have to ask the question about whether or not something should piss you off, then the answer is no. With a sharp blow to the head. Believe me, when I piss you off intentionally, you'll know it.

Housewise, there's more movement than before. We hosted a friend's birthday party last Sunday, which required us to get our acts together, clean a bunch, put a bunch away and socialize. But then the floor guy came on Saturday and started sanding the first floor, which means everything is all torn up and dusty again. He put the first coat on the living room and hallway, and it's lovely. Tomorrow he finishes the kitchen and I think, although I'm not sure, he may do the dining room as well. Next weekend, we start the great push to turn the front yard into a micro-farm. That should piss the city off too.

How renovating a house was as much about building tension as building a home.

By Mary Duan Thursday, April 7, 2011

How long into a renovation project is it reasonable to begin fantasizing about taking a hit out on your contractor? And by fantasy, I mean talking to a friend who happens to be a criminal defense attorney about the mechanics of actually taking out a hit on my contractor.

“No no, I really want to know. What are the chances of getting caught?” I prod my friend over coffee at the Cherry Bean in Old Town. “I mean, where in Salinas does one even go to hire a hit man?”

“We are not having this conversation,” he says flicking an imperceptible piece of lint from the collar of a very nice dark blue suit. “But if you get caught, remember to keep your mouth shut and invoke your right to counsel immediately. And then call me.”

He knows, and I know (and any law enforcement types who happen to be reading this should know) that I have no intention of actually killing anyone, or hiring anyone to do it for me.

But on Jan. 5, the desire was certainly there.

That’s the day that I realized I was fully caught up in the home rehab vortex.

It’s a place where actual time has no meaning, a bizarro land in which our contractor and the fire sprinkler subcontractor had so antagonized each other that the sprinkler company slapped a lien on the house – conditional lien release notwithstanding – and the contractor, in turn, threatened to sue them. It’s the day the architect hired by the contractor had metaphorically raised his middle finger to my husband and me from the safety of his office 157 miles away in Santa Rosa, saying, “I don’t work for you, I work for your contractor.”

It’s also the very same day a building inspector from the city of Salinas, a man known around town as “Red Tag Dave,” came full bore into my life.

If you’ve driven through Old Town any time in the past 121 years, you’ve probably seen the house. It’s the stupidly large Queen Anne next door to the mortuary, the three-story monster with 13 separate kinds of architectural gingerbread work, a turret and (strange in landlocked Salinas) a widow’s walk on the roof. Depending on which decade of rumor you’re listening to, the house has been a whorehouse, a halfway house, a flophouse, a meth house or a crash house where bored teenagers used to break in, break windows and banisters, get drunk and have sex.

One of those rumors is true. Based on the number of broken windows and banisters that had to be replaced, and the number of beer bottles we had to recycle when my husband and I bought it in February 2010, there has been nothing much else for the 13 – to 19-year-old set to do in South Salinas for the past three years other than break stuff, drink and fool around in the sad wreck of a vacant Victorian on Pajaro Street.

It wasn’t always sad, and it wasn’t always vacant. For 109 of the last 121 years, it had been a home owned only by two families: The Iversons, who built it in 1890, and the Rudolphs, who bought it from the Iversons in 1896.

In 1999, Diana Rudolph, the widow of Rudolph grandson Bertram Rudolph, looked around. She and her husband had raised their children in that house. But they were grown and gone, and so was he. She didn’t need that much space anymore, and Bertram had left her a wealthy woman; she sold the place for $240,000 to local real estate developer Eddie DeCarli.

Remembering the Salinas Valley real estate market of the late ’90s and early aughts is to recall the start of the insanity. Salinas rapidly became a bedroom community for Silicon Valley. Housing prices soared, business was good all over and DeCarli, by all accounts a smart businessman, bought the house as a side project with plans to turn it into office suites for attorneys or accountants.

He gave it a new roof, installed new rough plumbing, jacked it up and poured a new foundation. Workers gutted the inside to the studs, installed cabling for high-speed, Cat 5 ethernet – and tore out everything that made the place a Victorian. A 7-foot, hand-made copper bathtub was tossed to the curb. Hand-carved fireplace mantles were torn out. The pocket doors that separated some of the downstairs rooms also were tossed. (I’m told a guy named Mike has those. Mike, if you’re reading this, call me.)

Then in 2007, with the interior still gutted and the project incomplete, the dominoes began to fall. The bubble burst, and work on the house and several other projects DeCarli had going came to a complete halt; DeCarli, I’m told, used to spend long hours standing outside the house, smoking and staring.

“It was an ocean of pain,” says someone who watched it happen. “I’ve never seen anything so sad.”

The keys went back to the bank in 2008.

It’s discomfiting, knowing the way you’re trying to live your life has been born directly from someone else’s despair. But before we could wrap our arms around buying a house out of foreclosure, we had to wrap our minds around getting out of Berkeley.

We moved our family of four from Salinas to the East Bay in the summer of 2008, lured by a great tech job for my geek husband and the potential of a more lively atmosphere for the family. We bought a tiny, overpriced house in North Berkeley (home to the “North Berkeley Entitled Elite,” as my Stanford Ph.D. neighbor wryly quipped in his British-Indian accent) and tried to settle in.

A year later: Chuck and I pay an Oakland business called “The Rat Patrol” $500 to deal with an overwhelming rodent infestation. Tales of drug dealing, theft, fights and weapons at Berkeley High became routine dinner conversation. I nearly get run over every time I step out of my house (hey Berkeley drivers – you suck!). Don’t get me started on the needle exchange truck parked outside the entrance to my youngest’s summer camp. I look at Chuck one August night as we sit in our rat-tastic house three blocks from Chez Panisse, and say, “Not one more minute. I won’t stay here, not one more minute. Take me back to Salinas.”

Berkeley had rubbed off on us a little bit, though. Going into house hunting, we wanted two things – a walkable neighborhood close to things (coffee, movies, groceries), and enough space to raise a few chickens and grow our own vegetables. In Berkeley, urban chickens are nearly a requirement of home ownership.

But finding a house even while millions of people frantically mailed their keys back to various banks proved a challenge. We lost out on two places in rapid succession, our VA-guaranteed loan trumped by all – or mostly cash offers. Chuck was driving down Pajaro Street when he got the news about the last one, a mid-century marvel on a cul de sac near Hartnell College with a brick-hearth fireplace in the kitchen, a wood-paneled bar and rec room a la Mad Men in the basement and a neighbor with, gasp, chickens. Chuck saw the enormous “available” sign from Pacific Valley Bank in front of the Victorian, figured “Why not?” and headed to the bank.

Ben Tinkey, then PVB’s president, looked at Chuck for a long minute when he asked about the house. He reached into his desk, pulled out a key, handed it over and said, “Go take a look and see what you’re getting yourself into.”

As Chuck says now, a fine covering of drywall dust powdering everything we own, “When we decided to do this, I asked the wrong question. I asked ‘Can we do this?’ I should have asked, ‘How hard will it be?’”

“Why is the architect in Santa Rosa?” someone asked me. “They have perfectly good architects here.”

It’s true, they do. But the architect is in Santa Rosa because our contractor is in Santa Rosa. And the contractor is in Santa Rosa for a few reasons: We were working on such a severely restricted budget that I couldn’t get anyone local to take me seriously, and…

We were working on such a severely restricted budget that I couldn’t get anyone local to take me seriously.

What we were getting into was a wholesale rehab of the gutted interior DeCarli left behind, with our only means of financing it an FHA Section 203(k) loan. The (k) is vehicle of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development that allows a borrower to take a percentage of the loan amount to fund fixing up the house. With the loan comes the need for a contractor who can deal with the small mountain of paperwork the FHA requires – and a contractor with enough liquidity to wait patiently to get paid. Because after the city signs off on a section of work, the FHA has to sign off as well. No signatures, no cash, and the money is doled out in stingy increments.

That’s where Contractor Al and his sidekick, Architect Josh, come in.

We closed on the house in February 2010 and submitted our plans on March 13. On April 16, I started calling the Salinas Planning Department just about every day. On May 4, we got our permit to work on the 700-square-foot basement apartment. And on June 15, we moved in to that basement – me, my husband, two hormonal teenage boys who tower over me and love to wrestle with each other and a smelly, aging Jack Russell mix with an ever-worsening gastric disorder.

In the basement we stayed, until about three weeks ago. We moved into the big house during the worst cold snap in decades, and did it without having a working furnace.

The cataclysm of events that brought Architect Josh, Contractor Al, Red Tag Dave and us together built slowly over the last six months of 2010. Yeah, Josh technically was subcontracted by Al, but Al was relying on us (hamstrung budget, remember) to deal with a lot of local paperwork. The architect would do little things, like completely fail to address something the city required after a first round of comments – for example the location of the sewer hookups. When we pointed out to him that his error would cost us three weeks, and that he should expedite the plans at no cost to us, he said simply, “My contract isn’t with you, it’s with [Al] and will be billed accordingly.”

By January we’ve hired a separate crew to replace the Swiss-cheese roof on the garage, which looks like a set straight out of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, only with fewer cannibals. The work has been included on the plans; we know this, because we told Josh, “Hey, put the garage on the plans.”

Red Tag Dave arrives to do a screw inspection. (Consider the irony.) He sees the crew working on the garage and says, in essence, “Hey, what are they doing? You don’t have a permit for that.” But of course we do, we counter. Josh put it on the plans, because we told him to.

Sure enough, it’s not on the plans.

The inspector comes back the next morning and gives us 24 hours to pull a garage permit or the entire project – fixing the house we are desperately trying to move into – will be shut down. I can’t fault Red Tag Dave, because he’s doing the job the city has hired him to do – keeping people from getting away with substandard shit. But panic sets in.

Al rounds up his drywall crew with the rallying cry, “We’re out of here!” – because surely there is no way we can rectify this in a day. Chuck reminds him that Josh was supposed to take care of this. He uses the word idiot, he uses the word schedule. Al shrugs his little shrug, and the team goes back to work.

And then Chuck picks up the phone, calls the planning department, starts working on the garage permit and negotiates a truce.

I’m an architecture junkie. The best Christmas gift I received last year was a LEGO architecture kit. It came with an 800-piece set of Frank Lloyd Wright’s famed Pennsylvania masterpiece Fallingwater.

It will take hours to put together. Once I’m done, I’m going to put it on a shelf in the library and attach a little red tag to its facade.

And then Chuck and I will go outside and start work on our urban chicken coop. Salinas Mayor Dennis Donohue once told me it will be easier to open a medical marijuana shop in the city than it will be to convince the council to pass an ordinance allowing chickens in Old Town.

Our relationship with our contractor appears short-lived at this point – the rehab money is almost gone and what’s left on the interior is all cosmetic. Contractor Al even reached detente with the fire sprinkler folks, and the lien went away.

But Red Tag Dave and me?

Given the fact that we don’t yet have a final permit for the house, he and I have a long and egg-filled future ahead of us.

It's Been 382 Days ...

2011-02-22T21:57:00.000-08:00

Through "Red Tag Dave."
Through the World's Biggest Pain in the Ass Contractor
Through an Architect I Have Fantasized About Killing.
Through the Abject Stupidity of Buying a 122-year-old House Out of Foreclosure.
Through the "Who's on First" Antics of the City of Salinas Planning Department.
Through Living in a Basement With Two Teenage Boys.
Through...What Mean Thing Can I Say About the Permitting Department, Honey? I Kind of Like Them, They're Just Slow...

Tonight, for the first time since we bought this wreck in February 2010, we are sleeping upstairs.

And no, it's not done done. It's done just enough. Pictures this weekend.

Shower Dreams

2011-02-06T20:46:00.001-08:00

I used to write about architects and architecture fairly regularly when I covered land use and development issues for various pubs. (That was before I decided I wanted to kick our architect in the shins again and again and again ...) I'm still an architecture junkie though. I grew up in an architecturally significant city, we take vacations based on fabulous architecture ... hell, I even have the 800-plus piece Lego version of Fallingwater waiting to be built and red tagged.

Of the architects I've interviewed, my favorite was probably the late John Thodos, of Thodos AIA in Carmel-by-the-Sea. I wrote about the second home he designed and built in Carmel--the first was on the ocean and after he and his wife lived there for a time, they sold for it for an egregious amount of money and designed and built something smaller and a few blocks up from the water.

In any case, one of the best features about the Thodos' second home was the "wet room" that served as the master bath. Everything was tiled, there was no shower curtain, just a drain. "Cleaning up," John told me, "should be a pleasure. Bathing should be a pleasure." And when Chuck finishes tiling this room, and I never, ever have to see or speak to our contractor again (not that he ever responds to my emails) and the hot water heater is functional, I fully believe that cleaning up in this room will be a pleasure. (As an aside, Chuck says our contractor has really been quite fine in his dealings with us. I think Chuck is suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, with a side of Tile Fatigue.)

The Superbowl of Tile, Part 2
Originally uploaded by Mary Duan

During a break in the tiling action, when Chuck was slumped on the couch, he said to me, "You know, when we decided to do this, I asked the wrong question. I asked 'Can we do this?' I should have asked, 'How hard will it be to do this?'" As for me? I've come to the conclusion that the FHA 203K program is a program that can be gamed, only the home owners aren't the ones doing the gaming. And anyone who tries to do a major project in the city of Salinas more than once is an idiot. Call me "Exhibit A."

In the rest of the house, everything is painted. We went with Behr's "Frost" for the walls, and Behr's "Rocky Mountain Sky" for the master bath, the boy's bath, the half-bath downstairs, the studio apartment bath and the laundry room. (I'd link to the actual colors, but the Behr website is a pain in the ass.) We need to get the gas turned on in the main house, all of the outlets have to be wired and the floors are kind of a disaster, but we're planning on moving in to the top floor in the next two weeks or so. Our contractor will show up again when we are ready for the finish work to happen--and when I say finish, I mean, when he's ready to finish.

I've had a few people ask me, without really asking me, how we're affording this. I refer them to the economic collapse of 2008 that resulted in this house being completely gutted and never being finished, it reverting back to the bank in a foreclosure and the bank being desperate to get the loan off of their books. Chuck's also a geek and he paid attention in math class; between his full-time job and the house, he's also working his ass off, harder than any person I've seen.

More pictures here. And greetings to my readers from Raleigh, NC. That's kind of near Cary, isn't it?

Two words: proxy server.

Welcome to

2011-01-30T00:25:00.000-08:00

My new readers from the California State Teachers Retirement System, or CalSTRS, which as I have exclusively reported has nearly $1 billion invested in the Permira IV fund, the money behind the controversial strawberry fumigant methyl iodide. Controversial, and somewhat suspectly approved through a back-end run via emergency regulations and with what we believe to be the backing of very large amounts of lobbyist cash.

Thanks for reading. And through the power of Google Analytics, I know you have been. Maybe your time would be better spent figuring out how to divest from the fund. Or figuring out how to use a proxy server (my 13-year-old could teach you) so I don't know your web surfing habits.

For those of you who don't know what I'm taking about:

http://www.montereycountyweekly.com/news/2010/dec/09/the-midas-touch/

A Fast List

2011-01-28T21:00:00.000-08:00

1. I've reached a point in the renovation process where I want to take a hit out on our contractor. Perhaps I can get a two-for-one deal and he and the fucktard architect can go in the same shallow hole.
2. I was standing outside the Argonaut Hotel in San Francisco, where I am attending the AAN (Association of Alternative Newsweeklies) web conference, having a cellphone conversation with Chuck and expressing my displeasure about our contractor. A woman walking a little white fluffy dog passed me; the dog snarled at me, lunged and quickly clamped down on my leg. The woman didn't notice and kept walking.
3. It was at this point that I completely lost my shit. "Hey! HEY LADY! YOUR DOG JUST BIT ME." She turned, she sputtered apologies. I stormed off.
4. Didn't break the skin. It just left weird little fang marks on my pants.
5. I took a walk around Union Square and down Market Street this evening. On Market, a large man unzipped and peed on the sidewalk as I walked past.
6. And that just sums up 2011 so far.

Living Underground

2011-01-11T23:21:00.000-08:00

My dog appears to be having a nervous breakdown of sorts. He was very ill over Thanksgiving when someone (and I'm not pointing any fingers at Koly McBride), fed him fists full of turkey, ensuring the complete stoppage of his colon. The flow has resumed, but twice now since we took him to the vet the week after Thanksgiving, he's had these strange nights where he turns into that creepy little girl from "The Ring." You know which one ... "she never sleeps." And last night was one of those nights, where he sits and stares at the bedroom door, or paces and paces and then stares some more, then whines and scratches at the door to go out, and whines and scratches to come back in.

In short, the Oliver's kind of become an asshole.

Speaking of nervous breakdowns, tonight we were fighting over the shower. Well, two of us were—me and eldest. He was tormenting me and tormenting me, and acknowledging he was tormenting me by saying, "For the half hour each day you're awake and here, I need to drive you to the point of a nervous breakdown." Meanwhile, Chuck and Oliver were in bed, Oliver gnawing on his stuffed flea and Chuck trying to prevent him from gnawing on his stuffed flea by wrestling it away from him. Much growling ensued. It's exactly how you want to interact with a dog who appears to be losing his mind right before bedtime.

There is water in my upstairs bathtub, which the Oaxacans installed last week before they left. Unfortunately there's no heat upstairs yet, otherwhise I would be in the tub, with a rubber duckie, a margarita and a trashy novel, avoiding the creepy little dog and the agitator teenage boys.

Al and the Oaxacans are due in tomorrow, at which point they will begin texturing the walls. Three coats, sanded in between ... because the coat down here in the basement where we're living now, is cheap hotel with a touch of sleaze.

Seeing Red

2011-01-06T18:15:00.000-08:00

Here is a picture of a cement ball. This cement ball was one of my Christmas gifts from my husband, who bought it after I suggested that I had fallen hard for a cement ball at Urban Farmhouse in Oldtown Salinas. I love this cement ball and it is going into my garden, when I have a garden. Looking at this cement ball makes me happy.

Here is a not terribly comprehensive list of things currently making me unhappy: our idiot architect; our contractor; architects in general; the city of Salinas building department; contractors in general; famous architects of the 20th Century; building inspectors; anyone threatening to red tag our project; and, oh yeah, our idiot architect.

If he didn't live three hours away, I would drive to his house and kick him in the shins. You might remember him from previous posts. He's the one who told Chuck he didn't work for us, he works for our contractor and only takes direction from him.

This week, we find ourselves at the point of screw inspection. (Consider the irony.) The drywall is up, the screws are in place, the inspector was scheduled to come out and inspect the screws so Al and the all-Oaxacan construction team could commence taping and texturing.

Here is a picture of the drywall, pre-screw inspection.

Simultaneous to preparing for the screw inspection, our friend Grady was gathering his own team so they could come and shore up the garage. Built around 1900, the garage features a chimney, a canning room, a swiss cheese roof and feral cats. It looks like something from "The Road," albeit with fewer cannibals. The garage was to have been included in the plans. The plans the architect drew. Because Chuck told him, the garage needs to be included in the plans.

The inspector shows up yesterday to inspect the screws, sees Grady and the gang working on the garage and says something along the lines of, "What the fuck are they doing? You don't have a permit for the garage." Au contraire, says Chuck; it is on the plans, because I told the architect to put it there.

You can likely figure out the rest. It's not on the plans. Inspector comes back this morning and says, "It's not on the plans. You have until 4 p.m. to start the process of getting a separate permit for the garage or I am red-tagging the entire project." Upon hearing this, our contractor rounds up his crew and says, "Ok boys, we are OUT OF HERE for the rest of the week." Because Chuck surely isn't capable of getting the permit issue dealt with in four or five hours.

Oh yes he is. Yes. He. Is. Ten minutes later, he has a response from another guy in the Building Department (I guess I can't hate all of them) telling him what he has to do. The building guy tells him the email exchange officially launches the garage permit process and there will be no red tagging. The inspector comes back and signs off on the drywall screws, and that will be the last inspection on the house until the final. Contractor starts kvetching about starting work on the garage prematurely until Chuck, undoubtedly using the voice I like to think of as ex-Navy officer, tells him: "The screw inspection was supposed to happen three days ago, and the garage was supposed to be included on the plans by your idiot architect. Had you been on time, and had the architect done his job, none of this would have happened."

Chuck needs a drink. I need this project to be done.

My other Christmas present was the Lego architecture kit, which includes an 800-plus piece set of Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater. (I'm an architecture junkie.)

Once I finish building it, I am going to put it on a shelf in the library, and attach a little red tag to it.

Drywall, Baby

2010-12-14T22:39:00.000-08:00

Yeah, ok. Get off my back. I'm the den mother on a pirate ship and time for pleasure writing comes infrequently.

Here's what's going on with the house. We got the final permit. After being told by the city of Salinas that we had to jump through a number of ridiculous hoops, including sheer-walling the entire structure with a rare type of plywood available only three days a year in a jungle in Borneo, obtaining a letter from the owners who lost the place to foreclosure testifying to the fact that the existing sheer-wall had been installed correctly and then sacrificing a virgin up on the widow's walk (but only when the moon was full) we would be good to go.

Al and the All-Oaxacan Construction Team has been here for two weeks now, and finally, finally, progress is being made. They have insulated everything, there is drywall going up and the electrical is mostly being finalized. We drove to this very shady granite place on Saturday at the port of Oakland and picked out our slab. (How you know you've married the right person? You see a slab, he sees a slab, you both go "oooh" and it's the same slab. While we lack fixtures, we are having Christmas dinner here. If you're reading this and you're a) a relative to whom I'm actually still speaking or b) a friend lacking family nearby, you are welcome to come here. It's slightly less white trash than it used to be.

Pictures soon. I have to find the damn camera cords yet again.

You Can't Kill the Rooster

2010-10-24T22:45:00.000-07:00

To paraphrase David Sedaris, when shit (like a snail-slow architect who shows you nothing but disdain and a schadenfreude-ridden city building department that loves not giving you a building permit) brings you down, sometimes you just gotta say "fuck it" and sand yourself some motherfucking floors.

(The swearing quotient on this blog is about to go up. As of Oct. 27, I will no longer be working for the American City Business Journals chain, where I was once pulled into my editor's office and scolded for calling Pat Robertson a douchebag on Twitter after this guy read the tweet and ratted me out. I'm not sure what the "E" in his name stands for. I'm thinking "exceedingly earnest." Just so we're clear: anyone who says that Haiti got what it deserved when the 7.0-magnitude earthquake hit because the country once "made a pact with the devil" is a douchebag. And a journalist who rats out another journalist for saying so? Well I guess he's just a company man.)

But I digress.

About ten days ago we got the comments back on our second building plan submittal. There was a list of 30 things that needed to be re-done on the plans before we could resubmit. I'd say about 70 percent of this falls squarely on the building department, because they were decidedly unclear when they gave comments on the first round. But the other 30 percent, I'm laying at the feet of the architect. There were things that should have been done on the second round that he knew about, that were spelled out and that he still didn't do.

Chuck emails him and says the following: "Since these comments were all there the first round and you did not address them properly, I expect you to make the changes and overnight the plans to me at no cost."

The architect shoots back this: "As for my fees, my contract is with (the contractor) and they will be billed in accordance with my contract with them."

And this is the point where Chuck loses his mind. Because Chuck? He's the guy who does his job. And right now? Everyone else is pretty much the other guy.

As a result of us still not having a permit for the main house, it's safe to say Thanksgiving is fucked. I'm hoping that Christmas is not fucked as well. But having a new job at a paper where journalism still means something is reason to celebrate and damnit, I want to have people over for a soup party before I start.

We got some of our furniture out of storage and set up the dining room. Hung some lights, hung some art and polished up the dining room table, but the floor looks like hell. Underneath layers of grime and some type of paper-backing (because at some point apparently some idiot thought it would be a good idea to lay down linoleum on top of the pristine, clear redwood planking), there is beauty to be found. But it's going to take more than a wet mop to make it happen.

So yesterday, we rented a sander.

(to be continued ...)

The Miracle of the Freecycle

2010-10-17T22:38:00.000-07:00

Got this off of Freecycle:

So after we get it restuffed, what kind of fabric? Crushed velvet? Blue and white ticking?

Advice, please.

ETA: Blogger seems to give people problems commenting. So here's what some of the Facebook gang has to say:

Matt Hanner I like the red velvet idea but you'd have to have the little hanging gold dingleberries to pull it off.
On a serious note it's got a fantastic shape. I love the lines of the arms and the back.
10 hours ago · Like

Matt Hanner I bet a high quality zebra stripe would look good on it.
10 hours ago · Like

Patti Rosenberg I was going to suggest a leopard skin pattern, but zebra would be nice, too. Either way, in crushed velvet. Make sure it doesn't have bedbugs, though.
9 hours ago · Like

Joseph Divar Purple zebra or cheetah stripe.
9 hours ago · Like

Smadar Lieberman Meer Your big items should always be neutral. Accessories are where you bring in pops of color, like rug, side chairs, etc. Save the zebra/cheetah/leopard/giraffe for something smaller and less expensive cuz you will get sick of it
9 hours ago · Like

Michelle McGurk I can't see the ticking with those lines, needs to be a fabric with a little shine or softness.
4 hours ago · Like

Smadar Lieberman Meer i vote for a tone on tone cut velvet, with a modern pattern (not your grandmother's cut velvet)
3 hours ago · Like

Godzi Linda I'm kinda voting for the the OliverHair, could be velvet...
about an hour ago · Like

Pam Valentine sort of depends on what the rest of the room is like. You can bring home sample swatches and see how they look in your room. Would suggest doing that before deciding. However, the sofa is beautiful! Dont get someting that is dryclean only if possible. Velvet is very difficult to clean.
24 minutes ago · Like

A Tempest in a Long Island Iced Tea Pot

2010-10-16T10:33:00.000-07:00

I'm taking this post off the beaten track. But before I do, a quick update.

Yes, I still want to kill our architect, or at least kick him in the shins until he cries like a little girl. He neglected to put something on the second round of plans the city told him he needed after the first round; when Chuck told him he needed to get his act together, put a rush on it and that we wouldn't be paying for him to correct his own mistakes, he responded: "I don't work for you, I work for your contractor."

Oh yes he did.

Here's the thing: the city, the architect, the civil engineer and even Al the Contractor seem to exist in this alternate universe where time has no real meaning. What should take a week in the real world takes three weeks in Bizarro Building World. Chuck and I, on the other hand, live in Deadline World. He writes and implements code. If his code isn't perfect and the implementation flawless, portions of a Fortune 100 company stop functioning. I write news. If I don't, I lose my job.

Which leads me to the point of today's post, construction, the Blue Goose Bar & Grill and the Montessori Learning Center. Our youngest son is a student at Montessori. He's a 7th grader, a foot-and-a-half taller than his teacher, he's rocking the beginnings of a mustache and I know for certain he is the only student who walks to and from school. Shrug. When he lived in Berkeley, he took BART by himself and that was almost two years ago.

Montessori is kind of special snowflake land, but it works for us and has for 11 years. Both boys are Montessori kids.

The Montessori building, along with a former restaurant around the corner, are owned by the same guy, Chris Evans. I wouldn't know him if he stepped out in front of my Mini as I went screaming out of the parking lot at a high rate of speed. I don't know if he's a good guy, a bad guy or a neutral guy. No clue. But I know he is trying to open a new restaurant around the corner from the school and this means one thing for certain: he's got a masochistic streak a mile wide. Anyone who tries to get anything done in the city has a masochistic streak, but it's especially true if you're going into the food business.

Evans and his partners (I guy I do know and like quite a bit, Todd Fisher) are seeking a full liquor license for the place, which shares a parking lot with Montessori. The school is freaked out because they have visions of Blue Goose customers running down the little Sams and McKenzies and Ashleys and McKennas at Montessori. The Blue Goose is freaked out because they've already invested a shitload of money in trying to get this place open (tip: never, ever buy your equipment first) and Montessori is standing directly between the restaurant and those 300 percent markups on liquor sales.

The local newspapers have gone out of their way to get the story wrong, or at least forgotten a small thing like fact checking. The students aren't gone by 3 p.m., for example. Evans may have put $1 million into tenant improvements of the Montessori building, but that comes back to him in a little thing called rent, as another example. And neither story noted the stop work/permit violation notice plastered to the future Blue Goose door. For more on that, read on.

The school had to battle to get a restriction placed on the liquor license that says no hard liquor sales until 5:30 p.m. And don't let anyone fool you--it was a battle. I seriously doubt any of our kids are going to get run over by a produce salesman on an afternoon bender, and Chuck thinks this is mostly a tempest in a tea pot. But given that Evans already has a stop work/permit violation notice on his door, a sign he's willing to ignore the law when it suits him, I feel better having the restriction in writing. He owns both buildings, he has a right to run a business and the school has the right, in accordance to its lease and generally accepted practices of running a school, to keep its students alive.

It could be a win-win situation. With booze.

The way the city works, though, the poor shmoes might never get open. But if they do, I plan on being there on opening day, ordering one of Todd's burgers and a martini.

But only after 5:30 p.m.

Meetcha in the Morning

2010-09-22T00:10:00.001-07:00

Chuck's going to meet with the planning people in the morning and explain to them why it's no longer necessary for them to justify their jobs by making our lives more difficult. And then he's probably going to need to drink. I'll be at work writing a third ROP story because I move on to a piece on Prop. 23 for Thursday and a focus on the Irish Innovation Center on Friday. I also need to blog about alternative forms of payment -- I interviewed two great CEOs last week that work in the payment space but on very different models. Wences Casares of Bling Nation is working on mobile payments via a simple cell phone tag. Danny Shader wants to make it easier for the unbanked and underbanked to pay for goods and services with cash by facilitating the transactions at 7-11.

This weekend will be serious theater weekend at night and serious yardwork weekend by day. I'm ordering bulbs to plant in the bed along the front of the fence, where we also will plant rosemary bushes. I'm getting tulips to go along the retaining wall. I'd like to get one or two of these to hang on the wall, but they're fairly spendy and at 20-by-20, I'd need a lot of them to make any impact on the ugliness of that wall. I'm sure Perfectly Tasteful Grady has a better solution and will let me know when he reads this.

It's theater weekend because my son's show premiers at the Paper Wing Theater in Monterey. He's in the ensemble, but has a couple of great fight scenes and he dies beautifully after being shanked in the final scene. The play is "Repo, The Genetic Opera.' We'll be working the house at night this weekend ... come by and say hello if you read this.

La Ciudad

2010-09-14T23:51:00.000-07:00

Dear City of Salinas,

Between you, me and the flagpole, I think you could be doing better. How many construction projects do you actually have going on right now? And I'm not talking the illegal ones that you occasionally ferret out and red tag. I'm talking actual projects. With contractors. And homeowners willing to pay the permit fees.

It shouldn't take me a week to get a meeting to discuss your asinine water consumption and discharge issues with our landscaping. Is our permaculture consultant a little too hippy for you? I have to calculate down to the last tomato how much water I'm going to consume? Are you kidding me?

Sincerely,

Mary

P.S. I'm having urban chickens. You can come by and red tag the coop.

Anthony Bourdain on Gordon Ramsey

2010-08-21T00:39:00.000-07:00

Taken at a talk Bourdain gave in Santa Cruz a few years ago. Amuse yourselves with this while I figure out how to take a hit out on our architect without spending the rest of my life incarcerated. And also how to talk my husband out of one of the dumbest ideas in the history of dumb or ideas.

I Like Living Here. What's Your Excuse?

2010-08-12T00:26:00.001-07:00

"You live where?" I get that question a lot.

Salinas. I live in Salinas.

I like it here. I just can't help myself.

It is hot here for precisely four days a year. Almost every afternoon, the marine layer rolls in off the Monterey Bay. We're seven miles from the coast, but there is nothing between us and the ocean--no hills--to keep the cold from coming in. I come home from work and drive through what we call "Chill Hill," that grove of eucalyptus on 101, and the temperature will drop 20-degrees in less than a mile. This means my cashmere and I stay connected throughout the year. That's the kind of weather I can get behind.

I like it here because although John Steinbeck was born and raised here, he saw all of its deep flaws and wrote about it accordingly. (According to stories from my husband's family, Steinbeck really only liked one person in Salinas, the Rev. Kemper, late pastor of First Presbyterian Church. When the government was sending Japanese-Americans to internment camps during WWII, the rev bought all of the farms owned by local Japanese Americans for $1 each and held on to them, selling them back when the insanity of those camps ended. That was an establishment guy Steinbeck could get behind.)

I don't know if the church would do the same this time around. They seem to be more of a 'round up the usual supects' group. But I hear they have a rather lively rock band on Sundays.

And while the establishment didn't love John Steinbeck in his life, they love him in his death, enough to realize when you have a Nobel Prize-winning author on your hands--bad attitude or not-- you capitalize it by building a museum and holding an annual festival in his honor. This year's events featured a dress-your-dog-like-Steinbeck (or a Steinbeck character) contest. My friend Carmela made her German Shepherds tuxedos, a la Steinbeck at the Nobel Prize Ceremony.

They're kind of cute in a, "hey, is that a German Shepherd in a tux?" kind of way. Carmela is the dog whisperer of Salinas. If you have a pooch with issues, she will tell you that your dog is fine, it's most likely you, the owner, who is the problem.

I like it here because you can buy potted orchids for a few bucks at the farmer's market, because the guy who thought, "Why not pot the orchids before selling them?" is from here. And now that he's made a fortune from his idea, he sends poor, smart kids to college.

I like that there is now a Sausage King of Salinas. Butch Francis, an upstate New Yorker who came here who knows when and now makes about 400-pounds of sausage each week. He also makes the world's best chili. Every Saturday, by the end of the Old Town Salinas Farmer's market, two crockpots of it have been emptied.

We've been doing a lot of trekking back and forth to Berkeley this summer, because Bobby is attending theater school at the Berkeley Rep, and Sam went to computer camp at Cal. We'll get off the 980 and head down MLK, past all of the fabulous Berkeley things--the yarn bombed signs and sculptures, the Arnieville tent city set up to protest Schwarzenegger's proposed cuts to Medi-Cal. The restaurants and stores we used to visit. Life's rich pageant. And I'll think to myself, "Why? Why didn't you like it here?"

And then some Trustafarian on a $4,000 bike will ride out in front of my car, flipping me off while doing it, and I remember. That's why.

Salinas is delusional in its own way. Right now the city is searching for a national agency to help it re-brand itself--there's no money involved, but the city is willing to share the proceeds of t-shirt and mug sales. I don't know how you rebrand something that wallows in self-loathing, but it's going to be fun to watch.

Before, After and Enduring

2010-08-07T11:46:00.000-07:00

At one point, Roger the Painter got stuck on the roof.

Everyone was gone. He was working alone, and was moving between peaks when somehow his ladder slipped. He had his cellphone, but he didn't want to call 911. (I guess it would have been kind of embarrassing? but better than sitting up there for hours wondering how the hell to get down?) A guy riding a bicycle through the alley heard him call out for help and repositioned the ladder for him.

So for three days straight, after all of the sanding and prep work, they painted. Cream base, white trim and black accents. 15 gallons of trim paint alone. For an extra $100, Roger prepped and painted the stairs and porch a dark grey. The concrete bottom step is still there, but we eventually will build out the stairs and landing.

The painting is mostly done. Roger the Painter is coming back on Tuesday to sharpen the edges, razor blade the windows and finish some of the highest trim. Al is sending along one of his Oaxacan Faithful to install the water main, so it will feel a little bit less Clampettish. Right now we're getting all of our water from a hose.

The city finally approved our SPR-site plan review-the document that determines if we're complying with Salinas zoning regulations. This means we can now submit the for the building permit for the main house, which will be another month of my life that's never, ever coming back.

I'm a little grumpy right now.

Just This

2010-08-03T22:23:00.000-07:00

Neither time nor energy for anything full blown right now. B and I are up at 5:45 every weekday morning so he can make the three-hour shlep to the Berkeley Rep School of Theater. I don't know where my SD card reader is, thus I can't post pictures of the fabulously painted house.

So until the weekend, I leave you with this:

We are living like the Clampetts, pre-oil strike.

No No, Trust Me, It's Gonna Be Great!

2010-07-18T23:04:00.001-07:00

No No, Trust Me, It's Gonna Be Great!
Originally uploaded by Mary Duan

I promise I'll be better. I post more. All of the witty things I think of during the day, I will jot down. Starting tomorrow. But for now, there's this.

I had a dream Friday night that Al, our contractor, decided on his own to paint the house purple. And when I begged him to stop, he said, "No no, trust me--it's gonna be GREAT!" and kept painting it purple.

I hate purple.

I'm reasonably sure he won't do this. His crew just spent three days sanding the entire thing by hand. All of the gingerbread-work, all of the cutouts, on ladders, by hand. I just wanted to give them all hugs, especially the one guy who managed to shoot himself in the hand with a nail gun last week (and then got shot in the same hand with a framing nail by someone else about the same time). But my grasp of Spanish is tenuous, and I didn't want to have to explain that the gringa lady wants only to bring them snacks and means them no harm. I'd probably end up speaking Russian mid-sentence and then none of us would understand what the hell was going on.

They're coming back at the end of the week to do the actual painting. I think Al is worried the result is going to be too austere--it's going to be white, cream and black, the stairs will be gray and the porch ceiling blue. Our friend Grady has declared the black is to be used sparingly. "Think of it as eyeliner for your house," he said. "But what if my house is kind of a slut and wants to wear too much make-up?" I asked him. "Then we should just paint the door come (expletive deleted) me red, and call it a day," he said.

I had coffee this morning with The Cuddly Hero of the Masses, Salinas Mayor Dennis Donohue. (I'd like to trademark the Cuddly Hero name, but it dates back to the early 90s, when John Garamendi was insurance commissioner and I was covering civil courts in LA -- the Daily News reporter called him that, so it's not original.) Annnnnnyway ... as he and I were parting company, Chuck came up and asked him what we had to do to get an urban chicken ordinance passed in the City Council.

Because chickens? We're having them, ordinance or no. But Chuck, being the law-and-order type, wants to do it by the book.

Dennis flinched when we mentioned it.

"It will be easier to get a medical marijuana ordinance passed around here," he said, running away.

Sometimes You've Just Got to Say, What the Cluck

2010-06-23T21:02:00.001-07:00

One of the goals of living in this house is to produce as much of our own food as possible. There's enough space--really more than enough space--for an expansive vegetable garden. (My husband is a canning fiend-how many men do you know who have their own pressure canners and love to use them?) We've planted four citrus trees and four pomegranate bushes already, and have tomatoes, peppers, strawberries and corn going in some temporary raised beds we put in so we could feel like we were making progress while waiting for the permits. Once we move in this weekend, I'm going to clear out the bed that runs along the cinderblock wall separating us from the funeral home next door (yeah, funeral home next door. They held services for John Steinbeck there before his ashes were interred at a local cemetery) and start planting the berry bushes that eventually will cover the wall. I'll start the herbs going as well--I've gotten some good advice from the folks at Rocket Farms. The water department is coming next week to install the new water main, and once that's done we'll start working on the drip irrigation system for the beds that eventually will cover the entire front yard.

And we want chickens. Urban chickens. We got fairly spoiled living around the block from Fred Dodsworth, who along with his wife Linda has a very active egg operation going in their backyard. But urban chickens were no big deal in Berkeley; it wasn't unusual to see one that had escaped from its yard and gone wandering down the street. There were far weirder things to see in Berkeley.

Stress
Originally uploaded by Dave-F

(Photo used with permission under a Creative Commons' license.)

Fresh eggs are out of this world. Nothing compares, at least nothing you can buy in a store. And so it is with a heavy heart that I make the following proclamation: I am about to become an urban chicken outlaw. Because in the city of Salinas, there are no chickens allowed--at least not in my mixed-use neighborhood. (Meth labs? No worries. Illegal car repair shops? They turn a blind eye. Urban chickens? You're a scofflaw.)

I understand completely that noise and smell are concerns. We only have one living neighbor, Mike the Sprinkler guy, with whom we share a fence on the north side of the house. The three houses next to his are all empty and in foreclosure. On our other side is the funeral home, behind us is an alley, and across the alley is one restaurant and a bunch of shops. We're not planning on roosters, and fewer than a half dozen laying hens for eggs, with the coop positioned in the rear yard adjacent to the alley.

It's not a matter of "if you do it right, you can have them" as far as the city is concerned. We're going to seek out a conditional use permit, because I believe in following the process just to amuse myself. We'll lobby the city council, we'll seek the CUP, but in the end, we're probably going to become illegal chicken ranchers.

They're lucky Chuck won't actually let me get a goat.

El Grupo, FMLN and You

2010-06-20T12:48:00.000-07:00

This morning my husband and I drove our eldest son Bobby to San Francisco International Airport for a flight that will eventually land him in El Salvador. To the question, "Why is your son going to El Salvador," my standard answer is officially, "Because I am an idiot."

I guess the real answer is somewhat more difficult to figure out. My son has parents who are overeducated overachievers who way the hell oversheltered him for the first 14 years of his life. And then we moved to Berkeley two years ago and it all went to hell. Sort of. I think the best thing about Berkeley is that it's a great place to raise free-range children. Our youngest, Sam, started taking BART by himself when he was 11 because his best friend moved to the other side of the Caldecott Tunnel. We would drop him at our end, they would pick him up on their end. We armed both of them with bus passes and let them head off to Eudamonia in downtown Berkeley. Or to the ledges outside of Berkeley High where the skate punks gather. And every time they walked out the door, my heart would seize until they came home.

And then I moved them back to Salinas and pissed them both off.

I think I'm hoping Bobby will figure out his life during a few weeks in Central America. He's a low-ambition kid, a smart as hell, exceedingly eloquent 16-year-old kid who has no interest in performing for his parents or for his teachers. He always has a few books going, he loves theater and music and baseball. He thinks he wants to join the Peace Corps, but that could change by tomorrow.

Our friend Max has been planning this trip to El Salvador, Guatemala and Belize for months. His wife, Feliciana, needs to be in Guatemala for the next nine days to ... celebrate? mourn? the first year anniversary of her father's death. Max is going to take his boys, Bobby and a fourth teenager--the son of another set of friends--surfing and hiking and for Spanish lessions in El Salvador before they head to Guatemala on Thursday, where they will work at a clinic sponsored by Max's congregation and hopefully help out with any work that needs to be done at Feliciana's house. She was raised in the mountains, three hours away from electricity, and with both of her parents gone, the small farm and the house now are hers.

We met all of them at the airport this morning, where Dr. P, the mom of the fourth teen, asked me how I was doing with the trip. Because her husband (we'll call him RFM, for Really Famous Musician) was freaking the hell out. Dr. P will be joining them on Thursday, when I will start freaking out a little less.

"I'm freaking out too," I said. "Do you have your prescription pad? Can I have some valium?"

She didn't and I couldn't. But we sat in a lounge area while the boys got their boarding passes and talked about our worries.

Chuck: Dengue Fever. You're on your back for eight days and you can't take care of your own basic needs.
RFM: Nodding. Yeah, that's a bad one.
Me: I'm worried about kidnapping, illegal organ harvesting and Central American jails.
Dr. P: You can't be worried about organ harvesting. That's not a legitimate fear.
Me: It's my fear and I'll worry if I want to.
RFM: Condoms. I forgot to tell him about condoms.
Me: Yeah, we went over that one last night.
Dr. P, eyes widening: Condoms? You don't think ... really? Condoms?
Me: They're teenage boys.
RFM, sighing: I'll go tell him.

We lingered on as the boys and Max wended their way through the security line. I wrapped myself around my baby's neck and hung on until it was embarrassing for both of us.

And then I let him go.

Almost Maybe

2010-06-15T23:26:00.001-07:00

The apartment seems so much smaller now that it has walls.

Small is relative, of course. But with two adults, two men-children (a 16-year-old and a 12-year-old who is almost taller than me), plus a smelly little Jack Russell, the accommodations will be at the very least cozy, bordering on, "Oh for God's sake, go outside and play catch until it's too dark to see the ball" as we prepare to once again live together in the basement at House226.

We'll be moving in next weekend. We were hoping for this weekend, but Chuck won't be able to start tiling until Friday.

What's good: the together part. We've been living separately (me and the dog at our friend Todd's, Chuck and the boys at his mother's), for almost three months, and everyone is going a little crazy. Bobby is leaving this weekend for two weeks in Guatemala and El Salvador, and lately when I go to see everyone after work, I'm getting frantic communication from my mother-in-law. He's been sleeping all day, she says, he hasn't eaten or drank anything and she's worried that he will die in Guatemala because of his heart condition. (He's been sleeping all day because he stays up all night, he's a teenager and he's on vacation. How that translates to death in Guatemala, I don't know. I didn't say it made sense. Work with me here.)

What's hard: the together part. I thought we were cramped in Berkeley (1,200 square feet, plus the rat-to-human ratio was against us) but the basement at 226 is about 800 feet. It should only be for a month or two, and the boys will be gone for about a month of it at various camps, but it will still be tight. It will give us time, though, to work on the yard more, get everything planted that I want to plant and possibly keep the hookers from invading the yard on Sunday mornings.

Or at least that's the hope of Dawn, the nice woman who owns the restaurant across the alley from our back fence. I met her the other day when we were there talking to Al, arguing over the carpeting he wants to put in the basement bedrooms. (It'll be nice, he said, a change from the rest of the apartment. Yeah, I said, it will be like traveling to a new world -- ooh, I was in Tile Land here in the kitchen, but I think I'll go to Carpet Land here in the bedroom. He won that round, because the carpeting is less expensive than the laminate. But if he thinks of suggesting carpeting for the main house, I will cut him.)

Anyway, Dawn saw us outside and introduced herself. She's so happy people are moving in-if we need anything, please let her know. And maybe people living there will keep the hookers from climbing over the fence like they do on Sunday mornings.

Whadda what?

"Why Sunday mornings? Why do you think they choose Sunday morning?" I asked her. "I honestly don't know, but here's the part of the fence they've broken down trying to get into your yard," she said.

Speaking of the yard, there's a new group called Sustainable Salinas that wants to transform people's lawns into vegetable gardens. They're looking for a yard where they can run a pilot program, and they want to talk to us about using our yard as a test case. I'm excited about the possibility--it's what we want to do anyway, and we have a small budget for the raised beds and irrigation--but this could mean some free manual labor too.

Losing It

2010-05-23T15:20:00.000-07:00

I had a weird little week, almost all of it unrelated to the house until today.

Tuesday: Blew a tire on 101 while driving to work. End up being towed back to Salinas. No, I don't have a spare tire. It's a Mini-there's no place to put a spare.

Wednesday: Mostly normal until 5 p.m., when I got an invite from Gov. Schwarzenegger's office to attend the launch of the Green Products Institute the next morning at the Googleplex.

Thursday: Drive to Google. Trying to find parking when the driver of the Jeep in front of me stops, throws it into reverse and slams in to my car while trying to snag a parking spot of his own. It really was a slam, because his bumper rode up on my hood. (That sounds sort of dirty, doesn't it?)

Thursday, 15 minutes later: Go into initiative launch. YouTube founder Chad Hurley is adorably nervous introducing the Governator. What's Rosario Dawson doing on stage, besides looking chic? Google is like heaven, with dogs everywhere, bicycles everywhere, sand volleyball courts and free food. Green products, yay, green certification, yay, and then Arnold drops the bombshell that Toyota is going into business with Tesla to make Electric Vehicles in California. For the next 10 hours, I do nothing but that story.

Friday: Take the Mini to the shop to get the estimate from the guy's insurance company. As an aside, GEICO? I've never met a more on top of it company. They set me up with a rental. I head out, stop at Safeway to grab lunch and go back to the office. Somewhere between the grocery store and the office, my purse disappears, with my new driver's license, two credit cards and my new camera in it. Geico calls, $3 k in damage and they mostly have to replace the front end.

Saturday: Make a critical error in judgement in agreeing to see Magruber. Not only the worst movie I've ever seen, but possibly the worst movie ever made.

Sunday: Husband goes to the house and finds out that one of the contractor's guys has forgotten to lock the door, someone has broken in and thrown around a bunch of construction materials. I go to the Salinas PD to file a report and am told my the cadet at the desk that I can't file a report because I don't have ID. I tell him I don't have ID because my purse was stolen. He suggests that maybe I should call my husband. I suggest instead that I call the watch commander. Which I do. Extra patrols at night until we move in and the promise that the cadet will never do something that stupid again are forthcoming.

Aside:

The watch commander sent over a patrol car. We were over there weeding and planting some berry bushes. The officer asked when we bought the house and whether we were going to have offices there. It's the second time this week that someone asked if we were planning on having offices there (because the previous owner was going to turn it into an office building) and it was the second time someone seemed perplexed that we were planning on living there.

I think there's a supposition that if you're a white professional living in Salinas, you're going to choose to live somewhere not Old Town. (Not true.) There's a supposition that if you're white, you probably think Old Town is dangerous (not true). If you think Old Town is dangerous, I believe you've never lived anywhere dangerous.

Salinas is a funny place. It's deeply screwed up, but it knows it's deeply screwed up. That's a mindset I can get behind.

Berkeley? Deeply screwed up and never really wanted to admit it.

Meet Al

2010-05-19T21:53:00.001-07:00

Al
Originally uploaded by Mary Duan

This is Al.

Al is our contractor. And the fact that he is standing in my front yard means one thing: work has begun.

When we last left off, it was May 4 and we had just found out that our permit was approved. It meant that Todd the Barista could stop threatening the permit department with sudden denial of caffeine. It meant that I could stop crocheting a voodoo doll that looked strangely like the head of the planning department. It meant that work could start.

But Al had a job to finish in San Something or Other. San Rafael, maybe. I'm not sure. He came down last week to pay for the permit, purchase his Salinas business license and start figuring out the job site. (One thing he figured out almost immediately: his foreman would be sleeping at the house during the week so all of their tools wouldn't get ripped off. Some little rat bastards broke in a few weeks ago before we put new locks on the doors and broke a window and damaged most of the screens.)

Mike the Sprinkler Guy started installing sprinklers in the basement this morning, and plans to finish installation for the whole house by Monday. Al and his guys started working on installing the new water main today, and called for the rough plumbing and electrical inspection for tomorrow. He doesn't expect to pass; he is, gasp, an out-of-town contractor, and a city usually likes to flex their muscles a little bit with the new guys. (Do not make me start crocheting again, Rob the Planner.) Once the rough inspection is complete, I get to have walls--hopefully sometime next week--and shortly thereafter, I get to live with my family again. In the basement.

In the basement, because this permit is for the basement work only. Before we get the permit for the rest of the house, we have to finish the site plan inspection. We had to hire a civil engineer (I'm referring to him by his last name in the same tone of voice Seinfeld used to say "Newman!) for the parking area and curb work, and his plans just came in today.

Friday, we will hit IKEA to buy cabinets for the basement, and order the tile. The strawberry plants are doing well, as is Sam's corn, and the lemon and lime trees are full of buds. One of the pomegranate bushes also is thriving, but I'm not yet sure about the other two.

(As to why we chose a, gasp, out-of-town contractor: I needed one qualified and certified to do an FHA 203k project, and when we started this process, I couldn't find one in Salinas. There is one now, but his website just launched this year.) So for every Salinas resident who is a winner of the lucky sperm lottery (meaning your grandparent's grandparents came here 150 years ago and bought all the land, leaving their offspring with a grandiose sense of entitlement and very little ambition) and has shot me a look or questioned why we're using a, gasp, out of town contractor?

Now you know.

Liftoff

2010-05-04T10:52:00.000-07:00

After six weeks of begging and raging and begging and raging, as of this morning, we have a building permit.

Thanks to my housemate Todd, who as owner of the Cherry Bean Coffeehouse in Salinas has reminded the permit people every morning for the past week that if they want to continue enjoying their caffeine, they should move faster.

Expanded post to come later.

Stop Calling, Stop Calling I Don't Wanna Hear Anymore ...

2010-04-16T22:03:00.000-07:00

First, watch this. It's incredibly charming and will put you in a mood better than the one you're in now:

Last Tuesday marked the one month anniversary of submitting our plans. One month, we were told by Plan Checker Joey, was about how long it was taking to turn the plans around between the three departments--planning, fire and engineering--doing the checking.

Joey finished in three weeks, with a list several pages long of changes the city required of the architect. Fire similarly was done in about three week, and we all know what they wanted. Architect Josh turned Joey's list in about a week, while also getting the proper cuts and drawings we would need to find a fire sprinkler company that would actually answer the phone when we called and not treat us like complete chumps because the think we have more money than we really do. (As an aside, those rumors about the economy making businesses more responsive because they need the work, and local government entities being more responsive because they've come to realize the value of a taxpayer base? Complete bullshit. But I digress.)

Where were we. Planning? Check. Fire? Check? Engineering ...

Where was engineering?

When I was freelancing full-time, I wrote one and sometimes two stories a week about Salinas. I got to know some of the city folks fairly well, including the head city engineer. So on Wednesday about 5 p.m., I called and asked to speak to said engineer and threw in my affiliation so he would remember me.

He was in a meeting, the very nice lady on the phone said. Would I care to leave a message?

I would, I said. I gave her my name, my number and asked her to write down the following exactly as I said it.

"Please tell him I said, 'You are sucking my will to live.'" I told her. She giggled and said she would pass on the message.

Two seconds later, my phone rings. It's another woman from the engineering department who in a very cautious tone asked what my message was regarding. I told her, 226 (street name redacted so crazy and not particularly bright stalkers have a harder time finding me). She said she would give him the message as soon as he was out of his meeting.

Ten minutes later, my phone rings again. Engineer: Hello, how are you, why am I sucking your will to live?

"226 (street name redacted, yada yada)," I told him. "Yes," he said, "I just got the draft last night, but the name on them is Chuck M(complete last name redacted, crazy stalkers, see above)."

"Yeah," I said. "I'm Mrs. M. And you're sucking my will to live."

Engineer said that completely unrelated to my call, he was taking the plans home that evening. They then would go back to the junior planner (not quite sure what she's been doing the past month) and if they were clean, they would be ready on Monday.

Which is good, because our living situation is becoming untenable. (Not mine, really, because Roommate Todd, a completely intense person when it comes to his professional life as a coffeehouse owner, is a most laid back roommate around. Feed him once in awhile and he's happy.) But Chuck and the boys, who are living with his mother owing to the cat allergy thing, are having a different experience.

I know it's not unusual for adult children to move back home with their parents due to the economy. I left for Northwestern when I was 17 and with the exception of a few weeks here and there, I never lived at home again. Chuck left for the Naval Academy about the same time, and with the exception of a day or two here and there, the U.S. government owned his ass for the next nine years, with me taking co-ownership halfway through.

That was almost 20 years ago. I know it's stressful going from living by yourself to suddenly having your adult son and two grandkids living under your roof. But the stress is getting to everyone.

Our friend Larry shakes his head at our situation. "Your life has become a sitcom. Professional woman moves in with gay roommate, her husband and kids move in with his mother, and your best friend teaches homies how to quilt." My life has become a sitcom--a really bad one.

Reality? Check.

2010-04-04T12:59:00.000-07:00

By the time this is over, I'm really going to need sprinklers, because I'm going to need to build a meth lab in the basement to pay for all of it and I don't want a little chemistry accident to burn my house down. That's right, people-I'm breaking bad.

The city of Salinas, the California Water Services Co. and the state of California: I'd like 10 minutes alone in a room with you and a fire hose, because you people have quite the little racket going. Other people ticking me -- pretty much anyone exchanging carbon dioxide for oxygen who has ever picked up a hammer, and anyone who lives indoors.

Since the Holy Week Sprinkler Debacle began, I have gotten conflicting messages from everyone. The fire marshal said the Redevelopment Agency told us we would need sprinklers; they most definitely did not. Someone telling you your project requires sprinklers is not something you just forget or blow off. Because had they said it, it would have been included in the scope of the work that defined the budget--the one the contractor drew up, the one the FHA consultant approved. The Fire Marshal told me to call the Water Company and request a flow test to determine whether or not we needed a new meter (kaching! that's another high four figure outlay!) and the Water Company guy laughed at me and said, you need a fire protection company for that! (And he said it with a "duh" in his tone. Nothing ticks me off more than someone giving me a "duh" tone. I've got teenage sons for that--I don't need it from a professional in the course of doing his work.)

So we started calling the fire protection folks last week. We plan on getting bids from three companies. What I've found so far is that they base their bids on the number of sprinkler heads required--one guy told me he averages $210 per sprinkler head, and another told me he averages $150 per head. The $210 guy gave a quote of $8,700, I need someone closer to $5,000. (He also said we needed 11 heads in the basement apartment--a space that is only about 700 square feet.) Nobody can give me an accurate quote until our architect (the only one involved in this I don't want to kill quite yet) sends the correct plans showing the side cuts and the lighting plan.

Why I want to take a fire hose to the state of California is mixed into the middle of all of this. A half dozen people so far have told me that installing a sprinkler system is something a drunk monkey can do. A friend whose husband is an undercover narc told me he spent his teenage years installing systems for his dad, a residential developer, and that her husband offered to show us how to do it in an afternoon.

The problem is that under state code, you can't hire a sprinkler expert to design a system and then do the installation on your own. Whoever designs it installs it. It's possible to find an engineer to design a system, I think, but if they're going to charge $3 or $4k for it, there seems to be no sense in having someone design it and not install it.

This house has been a complete and total blight on Old Town Salinas for more than a half decade. It's been worked on, foreclosed upon, bought, worked on, foreclosed upon, and on and on. It's boarded up and waiting for us to start work. If sprinklers are part of the work, so be it.

I want to get everyone--the planning folks, the fire folks, the FHA folks, the water folks--in one room and give them a message: We are going to do everything right on this to the greatest extent possible. But I am going to move into this house no matter what. The whole "better to ask for forgiveness than permission" doesn't apply here. I'm asking permission until they prove their unwillingness to give it; I am not going to ask for forgiveness. It's really almost time to get out of my way.

Water Water Everywhere ...

2010-03-31T16:47:00.001-07:00

The highlight of my day: I flooded the entire front of my housemate's home with toilet water, tried running to the rescue (of what, I'm still not sure) and hit the slippery tile in my Born boots with such force that I plowed into my 6'3", 280-lb. husband, took him to the ground and knocked my head off the floor.

It was the highlight, though, because when the city of Salinas reviews your building plans and tells you that you're going to need to install a sprinkler system on a renovation project that has only a $140,000 total budget, you really can only go up from there.

I'm on vacation this week. I've been told vacation is supposed to be relaxing. For the most part, it has been. It started last Wednesday when my husband drove me to Mineta-San Jose International Airport, kissed me goodbye and sent me to the adult version of craft camp. I spent three-and-a-half days at Ft. Worden, in Port Townsend, WA, at "Artfest," run by the husband-and-wife team of Tracy Vaughn Moore and Teesha Moore. I made stuff. I hung out with women (and a few men) who also made stuff. I ate good Thai food. I nurtured my inner child-or some bullshit like that. Mostly it was fun; I learned a few things, met some great people and created some cool stuff. But I have trouble relaxing. I think I came pretty close though.

Sunday was No. 1 son's birthday. The little hosehead turned 16. I remember when he was cute and little and didn't talk back. Now the mothers of his female classmates refer to him as "delicious" and he wants the keys to my car.

But yesterday, the day of the Great Flood, we also got comments back on our plan submittal for House226. Chuck was reading along and then he came to the Fire Marshal's section, the one that said "you want to build three units, you get to install fire sprinklers." He asked the planning department about sprinklers before we even set down this road, and they said, not needed. (Apparently they were talking about some other plans, plans that exist in another dimension or something like that.) The fire marshal said the Redevelopment Agency told us we would need sprinklers--they most assuredly did not. But here we are and we need sprinklers before we can pull the building permit and get to work.

The fear factor came in yesterday when someone told us a system would run about $50,000. That is a show stopper, a mail-the-keys-to-the-bank show stopper. That would take one-third of a budget that's already up against the wall. We mostly sat around stunned last night, but Chuck reasoned that there are too many people with too much to lose on this deal--our FHA consultant, for one, and our contractor, for another.

The contractor bid, and the consultant approved said bid, without any consideration for sprinklers. The FHA consultant today? Less than helpful. Default is certainly an option, he said. And so is making sure his license is suspended, I thought.

We tried to figure out a way around it. What if we went down to two units? What if we made it a single-family? The city wants multi-unit housing, yeah, but it wants this house painted and fixed up and generally deblighted more, doesn't it? Chuck ate a valium the dentist gave him for an upcoming procedure, and followed that up with a beer. I made meatloaf and tried to be chipper, but then I flushed the toilet and walked away from it, only to find myself covered in toilet water an hour later. I woke up about 6 a.m. today and spent the next few hours panicking.

My husband could build a nuclear reactor out of spare parts in the garage, but this confounded even him. There was a lot of sitting around and holding his head in his hands today, as one unhelpful email after another came in. That's when I decided to visit my new hero, Salinas Fire Marshal Tom Wiley.

After going through the situation with Wiley, and being told the RDA had told us about the sprinklers (uh, no they didn't) I asked him how much we could expect to pay for the sprinkler system. He said $1.25 a square foot installed. Cheaper if we do it ourselves. "It's just orange plastic pipe and couplings."

"You mean, it's not $50,000?" I asked. And that's when he and his cohort, the plan checker on the fire side of things, giggled like teenage girls. "Who told you that? We're in the wrong line of work."

$1.25 per foot comes out to about $5,300. We can work that into the budget. I have to get plans to the various local fire protection companies and see what's what. I also have to get in touch with Cal Water Services Co. to request a bucket test and see if they can go off of our existing meter. I tried doing that today--they're supposedly open until 5 p.m., but the woman who answered the phone today said they closed down at noon today. And she giggled nervously when I asked to know why.

If they can't use our existing meter, it could be pricey, Fire Marshal Wiley said. But it's still doable.

"I wish you would have come and talked to me yesterday," he said. "We're not here to throw up roadblocks."

There is not enough sedation in the world to completely eradicate the suck that was yesterday. Chuck is still pretty grumpy, because we've gotten the royal runaround from everyone but the Fire Marshal. And we failed at the most simple thing, a thing you think we would have learned after our business debacle: always, always get it in writing.

But I'm not giving up on this one without a serious fight.

Citrus Heights

2010-03-20T16:14:00.000-07:00

When you're dealing with a project of this scope, and waiting on plan approval from the city so your contractor can pull permits and start working, you take progress anywhere you can get it. Right now, that means working on the overgrown, oversized yard.

And it means meeting Berta:

We were unloading this morning's Home Depot run, the beginning of the guacamole garden: a lemon tree, a lime tree, a Haas avocado tree and (completely unrelated to guacamole) a pomegranate bush. The plan was to plant the lemon and lime trees on one side of the front walkway; when they're large enough, they'll be trained on a trellis over the walkway--it makes harvesting easier, and walking underneath it when the trees are in bloom smells fantastic. The pom bush (and another we'll buy) will go in front of the wheelchair ramp, an enormous concrete structure the previous owner put in so the office building he planned would be accessible. We're leaving it so the side entry and rear apartment also will be handicapped accessible.

But before we could plant anything, we had to deal with the weeds.

It's been raining in Monterey County for what seems to be a month straight and the weeds were out of control. I didn't want to spray them with weed killer and wait for them to die before we could start cleaning up, because the house already looks like crap and I didn't want to add to the blight. So the plan was to chop and wack and deal with murdering them on another day.

I dragged Grumpy the Teenager and his baby brother over to the house around noon. We were getting out of the car when this tiny, oldish Mexican woman wearing a hot pink "Flirt" t-shirt approached.

"Honey," Chuck said, "This is Berta."

(And her cicle! )

Berta lives a few blocks over and was out for her morning walk. She wanted to know if she could help.

I tried to explain to her that I had a couple of guys coming over shortly to do the heavy duty stuff, but she was fairly insistent. And given my Spanish sucks, I ended up asking, "Ok, how much?"

"Not too much," she said. I shrugged and said "ok," and for the next two hours, Berta hand-cicled the weeds from the side yard.

The boys and I were working on the side bed along the wall, where weeds with thick stalks and deep roots had taken hold. Bobby took the shovel away from me to work on the bigger roots and Sam wandered around in a sweaty little haze. Berta came over to help. At one point I turned around and she was gnawing on one of the weed stalks.

She must have caught my look, because she said, "No, it's ok, It's not bad." I asked her if it was sweet and she said, "No, but it has water in it." (D'oh!) I offered her a bottle of water and she took it with a grin. With a little Spanish from me and a little English from her, I learned her son works for the city motor pool, she goes to an Evangelical church, she does some housecleaning on the side and she's interested in renting one of the apartments when they're ready.

The comedy team of George and Tony (Jorge and Antonio to each other, George and Tony to their customers) came over to knock down the big stuff. They were working on a house near my mother-in-law's so I pulled over and asked them to come and take a look at the yard and give me an estimate. They just started doing yards because as George put it, it's hard to find a job right now and he's got kids to feed. They did half the yard today (equivalent to my remaining checking account balance after kids' tuition and tuition deposits for next year) and will come back at the end of the month to do the back half. They asked if they could take a picture of the before and after. ("My girlfriend won't believe we got a job this big," George told me.) Snap away, George, snap away.

Next week we'll do the layout for the actual vegetable gardens and lay out the weed barrier. We're doing raised beds in the front with tomatoes (cherry, paste and some heirloom), eggplants, peppers (sweet and jalapeno), cucumbers, zucchinis and strawberries. I'll take better and more frequent pictures as soon as I figure out where I put the camera charger.

Oh Bank of (Redacted), How Thou Dost Vex Me

2010-03-19T10:10:00.001-07:00

Part One

Yesterday was not a banner day in our little quest to make this house a home.

Prospect Mortgage sold our loan to a large bank, which while understandable is still is sort of like having an intermediary sell your soul to Satan. We signed documents that had our first three months of payments built into the loan, meaning we don't start paying the mortgage until June 1 (when we anticipate moving in). But the bank in question thinks we're already three weeks late with our first payment.

I got this news via IM from my husband. I'm at work, trying to arrange interviews for stories, he's at work, where his group is undergoing a massive reorg that has him switching from a much beloved boss to a completely unknown entity.

Him: This is weird, I keep getting phone calls from a 1-800 number.
Me: Give me the number.
Him: 1-800-Yada Yada.

I call it, it's Bank of (Redacted).

Me: It's Bank of (Redacted).
Him: Huh, wonder what they want.

Massive fight ensues. Call them back, I say. You call them back, he says. I don't have the information I need to talk to them, I say. You have as much information as I do, he says. Repeat four or five times.

So I call. They want to know where their first payment is. I explain to them that we're not supposed to pay until June. They say, "As if!" (As an aside, it took me 45 minutes to get through to a live human being. The first time they hung up on me, the second time they transferred me into the void, the third time they hung up on me and the fourth time a woman looked up our account, said "You're late," and then told me to talk to whoever originated the loan.)

This is the point at which I felt like vomiting. What if we were wrong? Are we wrong? Did we sign the wrong papers?

Chuck reached out to the folks at Prospect Mortgage and they responded quickly, saying we were right and that they would fix the problem. I tweet to the bank's Help account that help is what I need and get a call from a very sympathetic Sharon about an hour later.

We don't have a resolution yet, but they're working the problem. Apparently the bank was in the middle of processing the payments and just decided to throw the fear of God into us for grins. Or something like that.

Part Two

Not knowing if we had screwed up on our end and were actually late on a payment and wrong about the documents is minor in the general scheme of things, but it added another element of uncertainty to a situation rife with it. Family-wise, we're split up right now, with Chuck and the boys living at his mom's place, and the dog and I living at our friend Todd's place on the opposite end of town. Someone commented to me today to "enjoy the vacation," but I miss being with the kids and I miss my husband snoring. I joined them for dinner the other night and ended up with hives the next day, probably from spending 90 minutes with the cats.

We're waiting for the city right now to either request changes to the plans, or issue a building permit so we can get started. Once we can get started, we're going to do the basement apartment first, because we can at least all live there while the rest of the house is being worked on. It's such a beautiful day today, and is supposed to be for the rest of the weekend, that we're going to work on the yard this afternoon/evening and tomorrow--lots of weeds to slaughter. Orchard Supply Hardware is having a 20 percent off sale on all living things, so we're going to check on their fruit tree situation and may start planting the lemon trees.

I had a personal day today because I need to renew my driver's license, only to discover that today is a state employee furlough day and the DMV offices are closed. I spent hours at the Cherry Bean Coffeehouse (my third place) making work phone calls and going through paperwork, etc. There was a little excitement--a run-by robbery. Guy came in, asked for a cup of water and then grabbed the bills from the tip jar and left.

He then came back an hour later and hung out long enough to be arrested, sans cash, of course. He had spent it on cigarettes.

A Tautology in Five Parts, Or What Happens When You Let Your 15-year-old Pack His Own Belongings

2010-03-08T22:33:00.000-08:00

Me: You packed your goddamned cell phone, Bobby?
Bobby: I didn't know I was packing it.
Husband: He is eligible for an upgrade.
Bobby: Cool, what upgrade can I get?
Me: You can get the kind of upgrade one gets when one packs their goddamn cell phone.

Color (Colors) Colors ... and Layout

2010-02-20T14:35:00.002-08:00

Architect Josh is working on the site plan review, which is how the city determines that the usage of the property will conform to zoning standards. For example, since we have three units (two apartments and the main house) the site plan needs to reflect there is enough off-street parking. The site plan review is supposed to be ready by next Wednesday, and it may take a few weeks to get approval. While this is going on, though, we can submit plans for the basement apartment.

And that's good, because the bank that rhymes with Chase has finally, after 18 months of agony and runaround and all-around nastiness for our friends, accepted the short-sale offer on their place. Assuming it appraises at the offer level, it should close by mid-March. That's when we'll be homeless, so we need to move fast on the basement apartment. We could all stay with Chuck's mom until the apartment is done, but there's a little problem in that she has cats and I have the worst cat allergy imaginable.

Our contractor was going to show up on Feb. 22 to start exterior painting, but it's supposed to rain every day next week. He's going to wait until there's a three day window of clear weather and start then, which should be March 3. In the meantime, click on the picture and roll over to the notes on the pic to see what the colors will be and where the colors are going. We're going with Glidden, and Glidden's website doesn't make it easy to share stuff on a blog, but the three exterior colors are Dove White, Toasted White and Onyx Black for the trim highlights.

Below is the layout of the first floor. Architect Josh has some of the rooms mislabeled, but that's more a matter of our personal choice for where we want the rooms to be. What he has labeled as the dining room, for example, makes sense as the dining room, but it's where we're planning on having the family room. It's larger, has a fireplace and there's room for the hellaciously cheap (I mean seriously inexpensive) projection system we picked up off of Craigslist. (College kid won it in a golf tournament auction, college kid needed the cash for tuition more than he needed a projector and screen. And thus he sold it to us for a fraction of the original cost.) Lost looks awesome projected on a wall.

The area labeled Master Bedroom 2 is actually one of the apartments. The other apartment is a basement unit below that, with a separate entrance.

The room labeled as the living room on the plans will be a library/sitting room, and the family room will be the dining room. Next to the stairs, that weird little sink area is a pantry, with space for dry storage under the stairs. It leads into the laundry room.

Upstairs floor plan. The boys will take the two front bedrooms and share the middle bathroom. Oldest wants the turret room, of course; youngest will take the other room that doesn't have a turret but does have a gas fireplace. And we're in the back two rooms.

Oldest just commented: I really want to be living in our house. I know how he feels. It's been a long, strange trip to get even this far, and it's weird to own a house you can't actually live in. Yet, anyway.

Et Fin

2010-02-05T22:54:00.001-08:00

So the email came today, wire transfer complete and title recorded. The house is 100 percent officially ours.

And even though it's pretty much screwed up the industry by which I make my living, can I just say, "Thank God for Craigslist?" Because thanks to Craig and his list, we are buying about $15k worth of appliances for about $2k -- 36-inch Thermador five-burner cooktop for $275; Thermador double ovens, only used twice and in pristine condition, victim of a kitchen remodel, $475; new in box range hood, victim of a client that changed her mind, $500; brand new JennAir refrigerator, from a new homeowner who changed his mind, $750. The frige alone goes for $2200 new, so considering our appliance budget is $3k, I think we're in good shape.

We need to buy a stackable washer and dryer set for the upstairs apartment, but I think we can find those used and in good condition as well. The upstairs apartment will get our current stove, refrigerator and dishwasher, and then we need to find appliances for the basement apartment.

Decorator Grady and the architect are meeting tomorrow to go over the kitchen design and talk about a few other things, including adding closets and a doorway in the master bedroom. Every room is overlit--since it was going to be an office building, they went nuts adding can lighting fixtures in every room, so they're going to talk about dialing that back a notch or two as well.

On Sunday, we choose exterior paint colors. I thought the contractor only included a single color in his budget, but it turns out he planned for three, which is great news because Chuck is afraid of heights, and I don't want to overtax the one friend who offered to break out his mountain climbing gear and scale the building. Grady is thinking cream, bright white trim and black accents, but I'm not sure. It's a big crazy house, and I want to make sure the colors are right.

So we're happy. There were so many times when I thought this thing was going to fall apart, and we finally made it to the finish line. The financial finish line, anyway--now comes the fun part.

My friend Jay keeps referring to the place as "the compound" and he's not too far off. It's big, but there are reasons for it. We want to be able to grow a lot of our own food, and there's room for that here. I have a sister 20 years older than me who for reasons I won't go into here is going to need to be taken care of after our mother dies. There's room for that here too. With the state of California's economy and the higher education system, I envision kids who are going to be living with me for awhile even after college. (Or maybe that's just wishful thinking. I left home when I was 17 to go to college, and except for vacations, I never moved back. I will miss my frustrating little hoseheads when they go.)

And if the zombie apocalypse ever happens, we're going to put our friend Kyle the Marine on the widow's walk with a .50-cal, and our friend Sean the Ex-marine on the perimeter.

Closer We Are to Fine ...

2010-01-29T23:13:00.000-08:00

It looked like we were going to have to pull the plug on this earlier this week. The seller--Pacific Valley Bank--was running out of patience. There was a potential back-up buyer down at the planning department asking questions, wanting to know if he could turn the house into offices downstairs and living space upstairs. The underwriters for Prospect Mortgage found out the insurance amount we needed at close had been miscalculated and they weren't sure we had enough in the account.

Then Perfect Friend Terry put a wish in her Tibetan Wish Box, muttered some sort of half-Irish, half-Japanese incantation over it and told me to calm the hell down. (I made up that last part. She really handed me a valium, patted my hand and said, "there there.") And yesterday, after one more freak out with the insurance company, came the phone call from Prospect we'd been waiting for. You're CTC--clear to close.

Documents have been ordered, we sign on Tuesday and close on Friday.

We're in San Francisco for the night, the annual birthday trip to one of my favorite cities. Usually the boy children get left behind, but they got righteously indignant at the idea this year, for whatever reason, that I didn't want to celebrate my birthday with them. So after a lecture from their father ("We're doing everything that mommy wants and nothing that you want, so no complaining, no fighting and just deal with it,") off we went. Lunch at Delfina Pizzeria (good, but expensive), a walk to 826 Valencia and the famed Pirate Supply Store (San Francisco's only independent pirate supply store, of course) and dessert to go from Tartine's.

The skies opened up between the Pirate Store and Tartine's. Hopefully tomorrow will be clear, because I'd like to hit the farmer's market at the Ferry Building before we leave. I dragged everyone to see "Legion" at the Metreon-I'm a sucker for religious Apocalypse flicks. Everyone kvetched about how bad it was, but how can you go wrong with Paul Bettany in body armor?

So. Next Friday. We close and then the fun begins. It's an FHA 203K rehab loan, which means the clock is ticking on the contractor--he has six months to get everything on the list done, and he can't take any draws from the loan until he's hit certain benchmarks. We picked the kitchen, pantry and laundry room tile -- very simple, relatively inexpensive, easy to install and, as Grady says, it goes with everything.

I'll start posting more pictures as we progress. But for now, we're happy the light at the end of the tunnel isn't attached to a freight train anymore.

Welp. Hmmm.

2010-01-20T23:47:00.000-08:00

Just when we though we'd given everything to the lender, got the reappraisal completed satisfactorily and were waiting for the closing documents to be ordered, the mortgage company emails to say it needs documents that we already provided to them a few months ago because, get this, "the fax was fuzzy."

We're on the clock with the bank. And I'm so tired of having the twice-weekly conversation with my mother about why we haven't closed yet. Today's conversation mostly entailed me saying, "I don't want to talk about it. No, I don't want to talk about it." I haven't explained the intricacies of what we're trying to do because it's more trouble than it's worth. But at least she's stopped asking me to explain the Internet to her.

If we lose the deal, we get our escrow money back. My birthday is on Jan. 31. If we lose the deal, I'm getting on a plane next Friday with my husband and we're going to Vegas for two nights so I can drink fruity drinks from the gigantic wall of alcohol-based slurpee machines at the MGM Grand, eat cheese, pay homage to Bouchon and lay in the whirlpool tub and cry.

And then we're coming back here and getting busy finding a new place.

Budget Items

2010-01-06T23:45:00.000-08:00

I haven't actually sat down and gone over the contractor's proposed budget for the project item by item yet, because the project is still in a state of flux. We haven't even been clear on whether or not we need an entirely new set of plans-the bank didn't get the plans assigned when it foreclosed, and the previous owner is holding the rights hostage for an insane amount of money.

I hope they look nice decorating his walls. That's about all they'll be good for in another week or so.

Designer Friend Grady asked an architect friend to meet with the city to find out what it wants before we can proceed. According to him, the city wants a site plan review and all the mechanical drawings, but given that nothing in the exterior is going to change, we don't need to do all the elevations. The architect also said the city is "giddy" that we're doing three units instead of two. I've met some of the city folks--giddy is not a word that comes to mind.

Under the FHA rehab loan we're finally approved for (a few more i's to be dotted, then we're through) we can take half of the total of the house price for redoing the house. Here are some of the contractor's budget items. (This is by no means a comprehensive list.)

Gutters (repair damage and install downspouts): $1,265
Priming and painting exterior: $17,100
Dry wall installation, tape and texture:$19,480
Interior paint: $10,850
Tile (side entry, bathrooms and laundry room): $5,030
Bathroom vanities with marble tops: $4,265
Kitchen cabinets: $11,900
Pest fumigation (tenting the whole house before the work starts): $4,753
Permits, plans and fees: $11,427

A lot of this is going to change. We're going to do the interior painting ourselves, so the labor portion of that item will go down. I thought the bathroom vanity item seemed high until I started looking at vanities online. Grady suggested we hit the salvage yards around San Francisco, and another friend of ours knows a guy who knows a guy who knows another guy who does marble. What seems low is the kitchen appliances-$2,900, and that doesn't include a frige. I think we're going with IKEA cabinets in the two rental units. We had them in the kitchen of the guest house at our old place, and they looked good and functioned well.

Any suggestions on good salvage places around the Bay area?

Tales to Tell (No New)

2010-01-03T01:09:00.000-08:00

Waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting. The loan is in underwriting, although it's supposed to be finished this coming week, and we're supposed to close on Jan. 8. Although we were supposed to close last Wednesday, but the loan was still in underwriting. And it's entirely possible they will have new questions or documents needed on Monday and thus won't really be out of underwriting at all.

In short, no new tale to tell. The bank that holds the deed has extended us to Jan. 15.

We made a decision on Saturday that seemed a hard one at the time, but now makes sense. We've decided, at least until the chimps are gone, to not go the B&B route and instead rent out both the two-bedroom basement apartment and the rear unit of the first floor, or what was to have been the master suite. It's about 700 square feet, and had the original owner finished the project, it was to include a kitchen. Now it will function as an expanded studio or small one-bedroom for someone, with a good sized bathroom, a kitchenette, bedroom and living room with fireplace. Our downstairs space will include the main kitchen, family room, dining room, laundry room and library. Upstairs are four bedrooms and two baths--we'll take one of the front rooms and the bath, and each chimp will have a rear bedroom and share a bath. The other upstairs bedroom will be a guest room or office.

Assuming we can rent out both spaces--the basement for $1,100 and the back suite for $800, a large portion of the mortgage will be covered.

So given that we don't own the place yet, there wasn't much to do over the holidays except dream. Our friend Grady Harp, who has better taste than all the rest of us combined (including you, dear reader), came over and made some suggestions--for example, the bizarrely placed powder room on the landing of the staircase will become a very large storage closet. The garage that Chuck badly wanted to knock down? Grady has convinced him to keep it, because it will cost less to jack it up, pour a new foundation and put a new roof on it than knocking it down, carting it away and building something new. (I don't think the garage was built with the house in 1890, but it does have a cold-storage room for canned goods. Given that Chuck's canner is usually in use, it's a good room to have.)

And we spent a lot of time walking the yard, planning this and that. Rather than fencing in the front, I'm going with box hedges. The potager will go in the front yard on the left side because it gets the most sun. The urban chickens will go in the back yard along side the alley, and the croquet course will go along the yard opposite the potager. I've been told that goats aren't allowed in the city limits; we'll just have to see about that.

More pictures are posted here.

House 226 - The Gingerbread Edition

2009-11-28T00:50:00.000-08:00

Random musing: I'm always enthralled when anyone talks about how busy they are, as if busyness were a virtue. "I'm so busy" and "I'm a very busy person," they will say, and rattle off an endless list of crap they would, could, should be doing, if they weren't so busy telling me how busy they are.

Being busy doesn't make you special. It makes you like everyone else on the planet. And talking about how busy you are doesn't make you special. It just makes you kind of a douchebag.

You know who you are.

*************************

Did I mention how busy I am? I didn't? Good, because if I ever do, feel free to kick me in the shins. I'm on day two of a four day weekend and we've been almost constantly occupied, but happy and relaxed. We had family and friends and friends of friends to dinner yesterday. Chuck did the turkey on the grill, and it was some of the best turkey I've ever had. Did her recipe for mashed potatoes, there were salads and cheeses and wine and hours of geek talk. After dinner, endless rounds of Rock Band (I get booed off the stage after 30 seconds, so I just kicked back and read.) When everyone left, I watched the last four episodes of Dexter and creeped myself out.

Today began Gingerbread '09 -- The House 226 Edition. The National Steinbeck Center is holding a gingerbread house building contest (take a minute to consider the irony) and we decided to enter. And then someone (I'm not saying who, but he just happens to be in bed next t0 me snoring) decided we should do a gingerbread version of the house we're trying to buy.

Did you know that building a cupola out of gingerbread is a pain in the ass? We have most of the first floor done (Chuck made the dough, I rolled, cut and baked) and tomorrow we're off to San Francisco with the boys and one of their friends to hit The Candy Store for decorations. We'll probably take the boys to a movie at the Metreon and have dinner at the Ferry Building, the happiest place on earth.

Chuck met with the FHA appraiser today (on the real house, not the gingerbread one) and barring any unforeseen circumstances, we should be in escrow next week, and close before Christmas. And that's when the fun really starts ...

It's Been Awhile ...

2009-11-20T21:15:00.000-08:00

Sorry. Sorry. It's been awhile. But with the exception of my exuberant "bank has the offer" post of last week, I don't blog from work and all I've been doing is working. Special sections to get out the door before Thanksgiving, and the beast known as ROP ("Run of paper," or as snarky journalists like to call it "Rest of paper") must still be fed.

Feed the beast.

So to catch everyone up:

1. Bank received offer.

2. Bank accepted offer.

3. We are working for full loan approval and should know about that in two weeks. No loan approval, no house, so I'm still trying not to get too excited about it all.

4. Termite report done. We need the FHA appraisal.

5. Chuck met with a contractor who specializes in FHA rehabs. He's based in Napa, but apparently he does these projects all over the coast. He comes in, brings a crew and they work on nothing but that project until it's done.

6. The budget, contractor said, is going to be tight. But it's not undoable.

And did I mention the previous owner wants a rate that can only be described as usurious for us to get the rights to the plans? Fifteen large -- that's $15,000 -- for the rights to the plans. The bank offered him $1,000 and put a clock on even that. I'm not holding my breath.

All of our friends who are cheering us on right now are asked the same question: how do you feel about painting? One friend, a climber, said he's willing to strap on a harness if need be. Others have offered to wear bikinis and set up a churro stand on the sidewalk to raise money--and that's just the men.

Please know that when the time comes, and there's painting to be done, I fully expect most of you to disappear from my life, never to be seen nor heard from again.

Also, am I totally insane to want this as the bathtub in the master bath? In no way, shape or form can we afford it, so does anyone know a good source for black market Japanese bathtubs?

Perfect Friend Terry, who gave up being Irish American when she married a Japanese American and morphed into the perfect Japanese daughter-in-law, said when Japan's Crown Prince and Princess traveled the Central Coast a few years back, at least one farm family she knows of installed a high-tech Japanese toilet, just in case the Prince or Princess needed to relieve themselves while visiting. This is a people that take their fixtures seriously, folks.

Bank Has the Offer ...

2009-11-12T16:36:00.000-08:00

We made the official offer today.

And now we wait and see whether it's accepted or rejected.

You Want Answers? I WANT THE TRUTH ...

2009-11-07T23:20:00.000-08:00

The truth is that at least for now, we have no answers. But we should by Monday afternoonish. That's when we'll find out from the lender whether or not they want 5 percent down or 10 percent down. If it's 5 percent, we're ok. If it's 10 percent--we have the world's largest bake sale, charge $100 a cookie and invite everyone we know. That means you.

Here's what's going on:

Chuck met with the head of the city planning department on Wednesday. What we learned is that the code differences between what the previous owner had in mind and what we have in mind may require some additional electrical outlets (no big deal); more heating, because the standards between what he wanted and what we want are different (semi-big deal); and the possibility of putting in a firewall between the garage and the lot next door (not a big deal) because the garage is right on the property line.

Apparently the city has been out to look at the roof and the foundation, and they say that both look good, but the permits will have to be researched to make sure all that's left is the final. We have to do some seismic stuff--the washers that bolt the house to the foundation are the wrong size.

Chuck also met with the savant contractor--the one who is brilliant with plaster and wood and such, but kind of a nightmare of a business person. He gave us a number, it jibed with the number Chuck had arrived at after hours and hours of measuring and pricing. Rafael may be a nightmare, but he's our nightmare, and one we know how to deal with. Also? His work is flawless. He's just going to require a lot of babysitting. Which we're going to be able to do, because once the main house has walls, a complete kitchen and at least one functioning bathroom, he's going to move into the rear apartment. In keeping with the idea of naming all of the room after Steinbeck themes or novels, we're calling that apartment the "Tortilla Flat."

Chuck also met with the bank, which agreed to our offer price if they're completely out of the deal in terms of financing. They don't want anything to do with this house for a second longer than necessary. So what's left then is the construction loan and mortgage.

You're seeing a lot of Chuck, Chuck, Chuck, and may be wondering where I am in all of this. For right now, I'm not really anywhere. If and when we have the deal in place and move forward, I'll be pricing and buying fixtures, pricing and choosing appliances, figuring out the kitchen and looking for tile. Once the walls are up, I'm also going to be doing a lot--if not all--of the interior painting. (Those of you who know me and are laughing right now? Shut up. I know it took me three years to paint the living room of the old house, but I've changed! I swear I've changed!)

Does anybody really change, though?

Onward we go. None of this would be possible or happening without the largesse of our friends, who are lending us their house until their bank gets its act together and accepts the short sale offer that's been pending for months. I wake up every morning in what used to be my friend's office, and it's surreal. It takes me a minute to remember where I am, and I am humbled all over again.

Oh What a Tangled Web We Weave When First We ... Buy, Sell or Renovate Real Estate in Salinas

2009-10-30T20:42:00.000-07:00

Shenanigans. It's the only word I can think of to describe everything that's gone on with this house in the past 10 years. Not quite illegal, but not quite on the up and up either. Just like a lot of what goes on in Salinas.

(Not bashing Salinas, let me add. I love it here. I moved BACK here, remember? But the town is full of shenanigans.)

Somewhere around 2000, the owner twice removed had applied for a permit to turn the building into a house/bed and breakfast. Fabulous, we thought. We can use those plans. But for whatever reason, probably the passage of time, those permits lapsed. (Interesting that permits lapse when it's convenient for the city, but remain enforced when that's convenient too.) The last owner came in, paid $20,000 for a permit to turn the house into office space, and commenced the work.

That was a very expensive permit: $20,000, paid to a city that then, as it does now, desperately needs the dollars. But the owner lacked a little document called a site plan review, an absolute necessity and one that should have gotten the place red-tagged, but never did.

New roof, new foundation, new electrical and plumbing all were put in. And never inspected. I wouldn't expect they were ever signed off, because the bank foreclosed before the work was final. But there were no inspections along the way either. It would seem logical that the foundation would be inspected before interior work commenced, but that never happened.

And this is probably my favorite part; the previous owner still owns the rights to his plans. They were never transferred to the bank when the foreclosure happened. So while the bank has a copy of the plans, we're not sure they can actually give them to us (although they already have). If we can't demonstrate ownership of the plans, will any architect be willing to revise them?

Strangely, the previous owner isn't answering the bank's phone calls.

I feel bad for the guy, I really do. He over-leveraged and lost a few tenants at another project he owned while he was in the middle of building another house, and that's how his collapse occurred. Someone told me that as he was in the final days before the bank took back the property, he would stand on the street in front of the house, smoking and staring, smoking and staring.

The lack of plans, and lack of clear direction, leaves us in the real estate equivalent of limbo. Not heaven, not hell (not yet, anyway) but limbo. Do we need entirely new plans? Can we get the old plans? Do we need an entirely new site plan as well? And most importantly, what is it all going to cost.

Chuck met with the Redevelopment Agency this week, and they expressed their deep and abiding hope (i.e., desperation) that something good would happen to this property. It's in an RDA district and could qualify for some financial aid. Before California started teetering on the verge of bankruptcy and raided redevelopment coffers to keep the lights on, there was RDA money available for things like facade improvement--painting, landscaping, etc.--but that money is now gone. "God, we just want to see the place painted," the RDA guy told Chuck. We want to see it painted too, painted and a lot more.

Next up is another meeting with the city planning department (they told our agent that they found Chuck "very workable" because he asked smart questions and dressed appropriately. Dressed appropriately? That earned an eye roll, I think.

Stay tuned. I've put the fantasies about what the place could look like on hold for the time being, because in limbo, there's no room for fantasy. But if I was going to fantasize, there are apple and lemon trees in the side yard, and raised beds for growing vegetables in the back.

Not that I'm thinking about that.

This American Life

2009-10-27T21:22:00.000-07:00

I've been listening to podcasts of This American Life on my commute. It's strange because I'll be driving and listening, driving and listening, and will suddenly realize I have no idea where I am (it's a straight shot down 101 from here to San Jose, so it's not as if I'm really lost) nor do I have any clue as to what's happened the preceding 15 or 20 minutes. Coupled with the fact that in the past three days I've lost my debit card, bounced a check (which I never do) and couldn't find my parking pass while it was sitting in my bag, I think it's safe to say I'm losing my shit.

Sam just walked over to me and asked, "Why exactly did we leave Berkeley?" I once again explained my reasoning, asked him why he wanted to know and he said, "Just wondering why you ripped me away from my happy life."

So. That's good then.

Chuck met with an assistant city planner today, and she said the city is very interested in seeing something good happen to this house. Their preference is for something mixed use or commercial, given that it's so prominent and so close to downtown, so I'm thinking strip club or maybe medical marijuana clinic.

I kid. I'm a kidder.

Chuck and I have talked over the past few days about turning a few of the rooms into space for a bed and breakfast. There's already a separate apartment we're planning on permitting and renting out. But I've told him, in no uncertain terms, that he is to say neither the words "bed" nor "breakfast." He can say, "morning meal," he can say, "the place where a lot of people sleep." But he can't say "bed and breakfast," not to anyone with power.

I fear the city, and with good reason: dealing with them can be a nightmare.

Take, for example, our old house. Also a Victorian, it had a separate structure that may have been a garage at one point, but had already been turned into a non-permitted guest house when we bought it. At one point, we pulled permits to make it a legal dwelling, and descended into an 18-month nightmare in which we were told we needed French drains, no wait, we didn't need French drains, yes you need French drains, wait, who told you you needed French drains, go hire a soil engineer ... etc. We gave up and opened the cafe instead. (See, Stupid Decision No. One, subset A.)

Fast forward to now, and the city will not allow Mafeway, which bought the house when they relocated us to the East Bay, to sell it because of the non-permitted guest house and the fact that permits were pulled, but never completed. In order to sell it, they want Mafeway to bring it up to code, which means either converting it back to a garage or maybe putting in French drains. Who in the hell knows at this point.

Back to now, redux. City planner, really helpful, wants to see some mixed use. So naturally Chuck tells her we were thinking about a bed and breakfast.

This apparently caused her great joy and has led to a meeting with someone from the city Redevelopment Agency. There are still more issues to be discovered, which the RDA will tell him about tomorrow. We still don't have a yes, we're going forward, but we don't have a no either.

I admit there are few barriers to making it happen. There is handicapped access, and one of the suites has a separate entrance. If it makes it easier to deal with the city, I throw up my hands and say, ok. Salinas and the surrounding area has about four major events a year that are potentially bed and breakfast worthy: the Steinbeck Festival, replete with European tourists who are Steinbeck fanatics; the Redbull U.S. Grand Prix; the Rodeo (shut up, you judgmental, intellectual snobs); and ... screw it, I can't think of a fourth.

And who knows. Maybe we'll never end up renting out a room to anyone. Anything can happen.

Really what Salinas needs to make it a tourist destination is a way to get rid of the six miles of land between here and the coast. It would decimate the nation's artichoke production, and given that I'm fond of Ocean Mist Farms that would be a problem.

Stress-Induced Nightmares

2009-10-25T11:53:00.000-07:00

This weekend we're hosting two of the 11 people from Berkeley who didn't make me stabby. Fred Dodsworth, who's been a journalist, designer, editor, publisher and rabble-rouser longer than I've been alive, and his wife Linda, a saint (you have to be to be married to Fred) who runs the Alameda County WIC program. We're drinking coffee at the Cherry Bean and talking history and Howard Zinn and house issues.

I had three nightmares last night, and I think they're all related to drywall. The house (as you can see from the picture here) doesn't have any. It has Cat-5 cable throughout, because the previous owner was going to turn it into an office building for attorneys or CPAs. It has a gas insert fireplace in almost every room, and the electrical and plumbing are mostly all roughed in.

But there's no drywall.

Someone we trust (as opposed to the first contractor we talked to, who wanted money up front just to give us a quote on the job--do I look like I just fell off the turnip truck??) told us the drywall would run about $4 a foot, which means the ceilings alone would run $20,000. Just the ceilings. Which would bring drywall for the whole interior close to $50,000.

Considering we need a complete kitchen, all of the bathroom fixtures and plan revisions, $50,000 for drywall might be pushing it.

Here, in order, are the three nightmares I had:

1. I was walking down a road and a man holding a baby out of his car window drove past and threw the baby out. He then refused to allow me to help the baby. (Definitely a Salinas metaphor.)

2. I was driving down a freeway and there was a jumbo jet, pulling another jumbo jet, taking off in front of me. The lead jet went airborn, pulling the other jet into the air behind it, and then both crashed and blew up.

3. I was walking down the hallway at my youngest son's school and stopped to talk to our friend Jay, the vice principal who has been in our kids' lives since 1999. He told me Thursday was going to be his last day at work and after that, nobody would ever see him again.

We're going to walk over to the house and show Fred and Linda around. They're suggesting we name all of the bedrooms after themes in Steinbeck novels. I told them they're welcome to stay in the Poverty and Despair Suite any time they visit.

The Beginning: Blowing Up Our Lives

2009-10-22T22:25:00.000-07:00

I'd like to think that my husband and I had reached the end of making a series of really, really stupid decisions. The first stupid decision was to put our life savings and some of our home equity (I know, I know) into opening a cafe with a couple of friends who, when things finally went to hell, we spoke to only via a very expensive attorney. (Hi Paul. Thanks again. Great work.) We spent a few weeks stumbling around in pain and grief over having lost the business, but we've come to realize that loss was inevitable. The location sucked, the city sucked in working with us on the permits and planning, and the market for a tiny, charming, upscale food place was non-existent.

The pain and grief over that loss, though, was replaced by anger when we got the complete bank statements for the business and realized there was a shitload of money missing.

(Not missing exactly--we know where it went. It went on vacation and out to dinner and to the vet and on multiple trips to the gas station and out shopping for new cell phones and other toys with our former friends.)

We did what any sensible people do when they're grieving. We blew up our lives. My husband started getting signals that all wasn't well at the huge, Silicon Valley semiconductor company where he had worked for 11 years and decided to change jobs. His new company offered him a relocation package that included buying our old house (for less than we owed, mark this "Stupid Decision No. 2") and we moved to the "Gourmet Ghetto" neighborhood of Berkeley. ("Stupid Decision No. 3.")

Berkeley, people swore, would be fabulous for us. So intellectual. So vibrant. So ... completely overrun with vermin and hippies and opinions and drugs that I found myself pretty much unable to breathe. Everyone knows about the hippies and opinions and drugs, but rats are North Berkeley's dirty little secret. Early last spring I gingerly asked one of the neighbors I liked (there were 11 of them that didn't make me stabby) if she had any pest issues, and she nodded sadly and handed me the number of "The Rat Whisperer." Berkeley made me anxious, Berkeley made me scared. I grew up in Chicago and I couldn't hack it there.

I also needed a grandma back in my life. One who was retired and available and who would be able to keep an eye on the boys after school and make sure they weren't doing the stupid stuff adolescent boys do until one of us got home from work. One such grandma happened to live in Salinas.

On Aug. 8, I looked at my husband, laying in our bed in our rat-tastic North Berkeley house, and said, "Not another minute. I won't live here, not another minute." On Aug. 10, he contacted the real estate agent who sold us the house, arranged to pick up a U-Haul the following weekend and we started packing.

The Berkeley house sold in nine days.

Now the only problem with moving back was we had nowhere to go.

My husband's new company (rhymes with "Mafeway") had spent a year fixing every tiny thing that was wrong with the old house they purchased from us. A year because they hired a savant of a contractor, a genius when it comes to wood and plaster, an idiot when it comes to time and budget. But the day before we were going to make an offer to buy our old house back, someone else came in and bought it.

About 18 months ago, some friends left Salinas for job reasons. He's a chef, she does marketing for golf courses, and while he lost his job here due to downsizing, he got a gig as executive chef of a very nice, very busy hotel in Sacramento. But they were never able to sell their house. And then the bottom dropped out, their house went under water by $400,000 and they were so unable to sell their house that they finally asked Chase Bank, "Where do you want us to send the keys?"

The bank told them, "We have 300,000 people in line ahead of you. Why don't you just hold your breath and we'll get to you when we feel like it."

For the past 6 weeks, we've been squatting in their place while we try to buy a house.

Which brings us current and to the point.

We've found the house we want. It's a circa-1890 Victorian with its original plank flooring. It was in the middle of being rehabbed when the bottom dropped out; the owner was unable to finish the project and the property reverted back to the bank.

The house is stripped down to the studs. But we look at it and see everything that's possible.

We should know in a week if it IS possible. There are meetings with the city to be had, and plans to alter and financial details to be worked out. But there are five bedrooms, and enough room for family and friends and the way of life we missed in Berkeley.

This is the story of House226.