It's been nearly two years since we've updated this blog!

Here's a quick recap of all that has happened since we last posted (6/15/09 - EEK!).

June 2009

Our basement was broken into WHILE WE WERE HOME!! We, obviously, are all okay. Joel chased the guy out of the house, but not before he stole Hun's purse. Two things to note: 1) the thief took the purse with everything in it, but dropped Hun's work blackberry outside of our house (really, you took everything EXCEPT the blackberry?) and 2) Hun also threw both Baker and Cooper out the window to chase after the guy - yes, out the window.

In happier news, we also flew home to celebrate Hun's baby sister, Catherine's graduation from Union High School.

October 2009

We went home to Seattle and Vancouver for a week to see friends and family.

December 2009

Celebrated Christmas at home and got our first tree!

December 2009 - February 2010

Experienced SNOWPOCALYPSE, SNOWMAGEDDON, AND SNOMG! The months of December and February was brutal here for snow, each storm dropped about 18-20 inches of snow.

Take away message: Hooray for snow days from work, boo for being trapped inside your home for nearly a week!

During the December storm, Washington Hospital Center put out a call for experienced snow drivers with 4WD. Joel wasn't doing anything better, so he decided to go help. He drove over to Virginia and picked up several doctors and nurses. For his trouble, a week or so later, we both came down with swine flu. During the February storms, he decided not to be a hero and stayed home.

June 2010

Traveled to New Mexico for Joel's cousin, Caroline's wedding. Hooray for sunshine and desert heat!

We also removed and installed a new 40 foot long load bearing wall. Lucky for us, our friends, Brody and Hilary, came over to help hold our house up while we did it.

August 2010

Hun traveled to Montana 3 out of 5 weeks for work. Highlight - riding in a Black Hawk helicopter with the doors open flying over the Missouri River. Very windy, but so cool.

October 2010

Hosted Hun's parents for the first time in our home. They visited for just over a week. Despite the initial shocked with current status of our house, after a few days, they settled into our life in the basement. Hun's parents have never owned pets, but by the end of their visit, they were calling themselves "grandma" and "gra ndpa" to the dogs.

We took a weekend trip up to New York City to see the sights and eat dim sum. Hun's favorite part was watching her mom eat the relish tray at Katz's Deli - she loved the pickled green tomatoes! Or was it eating Afghani street food her dad at midnight just off of Times Square?

November 2010

Hun celebrated another election night on the road. This time she went to Las Vegas, Nevada to work on Senator Harry Reid's re-election campaign. She worked with the smartest and sweetest high school kids to get-out-the-vote. Together, they walked a lot of precincts those last few days, but they made sure to make a quick stop for corn.

Yes, for those of you who don't know about the corn lady, listen for the honks. Not car honks, but a bicycle honk. You should immediately find the source so you can eat this. Can Hun be any happier? Plus, Senator Reid won his election by 5 percent!


December 2010 - January 2011

3 1/2 weeks in Toronto, Singapore, Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, and Hong Kong. Maybe we'll add another post with pics from the trip...

In the last two years:

- Hun learned to quilt, make jam and build a terrarium. She has also had a couple amazing dinners (Komi, minibar, Restaurant Eve).

- Joel started a new job, successfully finished his first overnight sailing race, and "harvested" a whitetail doe.

- Baker only gets smarter and stealthier in his quest for new adventures. He has learned to "tunnel" where he walks between our legs in a figure eight and has become quite the bird/squirrel hunter. Joel took him up to Pennsylvania a couple months ago, and Baker did a great job hunting chuckers and pheasant.

- Cooper is still the sweetest dog. Ever. He's very protective of his family. He can "speak" and roll over. As for hunting, Cooper has proven himself to be gun shy, but is learning to control is tendency to charge after birds/squirrels.

And that brings us to the past month or so. One of our biggest projects to date - tearing off 100 year old stucco. Yes, all four walls came down in a span of three weekends. Again, our amazing friends came to do some serious demolition. And Joel's dad, Jim, also came out from Vancouver to help. As Joel says, he's spent the last 5 years trying to figure out how to avoid this project. It was messy, dusty, dirty work. Thankfully though, it wasn't hot, and now our house has a nice new skin of 1" thick foam.

Over the next four days, our house went from this...

to this...

to this...

We know what you're all thinking: I hope they are getting some sort of royalty from Dow Corning. You hear that Dow Corning?!? We are on a corner lot in DC and are advertising your product for the city to see! So far, no return calls yet, but we'll keep you posted.

For those who want a reminder, here is the first picture we posted on our house:

It will have to stay this way for a little while until we get to the siding installation phase (fall 2011, hopefully). In the meantime, we've installed all but one of our windows (the biggest cost to our home renovations yet!) and are turning to work on the inside. Excellent timing since the weather is starting to warm up and get humid around here.

Hun's garden is doing great with all the rain we've received over the past couple of weeks. This year, the peas are growing where the tomatoes went and vice versa. She has squash (yellow, green, butternut and acorn), cucumber, watermelon, peppers, kale, chard, brussel sprouts, beets, spinach (both savoy and smooth leaves), carrots and lots herbs in the box now. The strawberries are growing like never before and with luck, we will get blackberries this year (or else this bush is going to the dump!). Hope this garden will get plenty of sunshine over the next few months!

In the meantime, we hope to update this a little more often than every two years. I know we keep saying that, but this time we're committed. Stay with us as we start work on our first floor and help us decide on which doors, fixtures and wallpaper (gasp!) we will choose.

Thanks for being patient with us!

Because my Mom has been bugging me to update the blog, we'll start with the house...

We've done some work in the yard, mostly just maintenance, but we also built two raised beds for a vegetable garden. After about 2 months in the ground the garden is doing really well, and we have salad greens every few days. The beets are close to being ready, and the cucumber and squash plants are getting big - lots of blossoms. The herbs are doing well, and the strawberry plants have taken hold. We've picked all the blossoms off the strawberries this spring to let them take hold, so hopefully we have a good crop next year.

I had a load of free wood chips delivered by a tree company last week, so I am slowly getting them distributed around the property to keep the weeds down and control the mud when we have our spring storms. Last week was really stormy, and we had quite a bit of mud all week long.

The bigger news is on the inside of the house. When I removed the old (east) front door and put in the new staircase from the basement to the first floor, I had to remove the staircase from the first floor to the second floor. That was last memorial day. A bit over a year later, it was time to build a new staircase up from the first floor. The last bits of the old staircase, that let us access the second floor with a step ladder, are in the way of some air conditioning ducts, and air conditioning is a big priority this summer, so the stairs have to go.

Building stairs is one of the most challenging parts of framing. When building walls or floors, things that are 1/4" off aren't that big of a deal, and "pretty level/plumb" is often good enough. Building stairs is much harder, because the acceptable margin for error is more like 1/16", and if the treads aren't level you are going to feel it. There are a lot of parts that all have to come together in the same plane to get it all to fit. I hate it and love it all at the same time.

We started by demolishing most of the east half of the 2nd floor. All the fixtures of the bathroom, all the interior walls, all the ceilings, the attic stairs (which would be at the diagonal braces you see in this picture) and the floors.

I managed to save the floors. There isn't any subfloor, it's just the finished floor on the joists. The flooring is heart pine. In the 20's they used it as utility wood, 90 years later it costs about $35/sf, if you can get it at all. I'm hoping to salvage it and use it for the ceiling over the front porch.

I built new load bearing walls on the first floor on either side of the stairs (I'll add the pictures later, they are on Hun's camera). The walls are funky here, because the second floor exterior wall doesn't rest directly over the first floor exterior wall. Someone got creative with the framing, and it has made life interesting. But I got everything properly supported with permanent and temporary walls, I sistered on a couple new joists with glue and bolts, and then busted out the sawzall.

Cutting floor joists is just one of those things you have to do on faith.

When I cut the first one, there was some creaking and popping, but it only moved about 1/16", so that was a good sign. The second joist didn't make any noise, and it moved even less, so I knew I had things properly supported.

Working up there was a little dicey.


I was climbing around over the top of the basement stairs, so at most it was about 17 feet down.

But Hun was out of town and the dogs were (mostly) smart enough to leave me alone, so I was able to concentrate. They don't like me climbing ladders or moving around up there, so they just went and hid for most of the day.

After cutting all the joists on one side, it was time to add the new headers. As you can see here, about 60% of the joists rest on a 2x6 wall, but the four at the end are floating. The header bridges the gap between the the load bearing wall and the joist that was sistered (it's the new 2x8 at the end of the cut joists).

Here you can see the first 1/2 of the header.

All the joists attach to this 2x8, and then another 2x8 is added to strengthen it. This double 2x8 header rests on the bearing wall, and ties into the double 2x8 joist.

It's not as complicated as it sounds, and if you look at as the weight of the roof and the walls and the floors trying to find their way down to the ground, you can (or at least I can) picture how the structure will behave.

Here it is from below, with the header finished, and the temporary wall supporting the floating joists removed.














One nice thing about the old balloon framing (where the wall studs rise the entire height of the house) is that the interior walls only support the floors above them and provide stability to the exterior walls. It makes projects like this easier because I don't have to support the roof.

After I finished the floating header, I moved to the other side and installed the other header. By comparison, it was much easier, because it has a wall beneath it the entire length, and it only supports a few joists. Most of the 2nd floor exterior wall is supported by a tripled 2x10 beam I installed earlier.

Once the stair opening was framed, it was time to build the staircase. I had four 16-feet long 2x12s. I did a lot of careful measuring to lay out the staircase. It had to be exactly right.

It takes a while to cut the notches out of the stringers. It is repetitive and boring.

But once done (and with some help from a second set of hands - thanks Ken)...

...you pretty much have a staircase

With my goal for the weekend clearly in reach, it was time for some nourishment...


That would be a 32oz bone in, prime, dry aged ribeye steak, with mashed potatoes, mac and cheese, green beans and a salad. I washed it down with a liter of mineral water.

That isn't a plate by the way, it's a serving platter. The knife on the left isn't a steak knife, it's a full sized kitchen knife.

Think I was hungry? But I didn't eat it all...

... I had some help.













After dinner my newly devoted construction crew decided to escort me back to the job, just in case I needed help.





















A couple of hours of table saw work, a handful of screws and a couple tubes of glue and we have a finished staircase.















If you have a sharp and critical eye, you will see that the top edges of the headers are not flush with the joists. No, it's not a mistake. The joists are true 2x8, while modern lumber is 1.5x7.5. I am happy to say that everything came out plumb/true/level/square.







To the land of projects future...






















So that's the state of the estate. I'm more than happy with how things turned out, and crossing this milestone opens up quite a few new projects large and small. It looks (fingers crossed) like I can have the air conditioning installed in the next few weeks, though who knows how well it can cope with our wide open and uninsulated house. It will at least take the edge off at night.

I had a busy weekend cleaning up after this project, with 2 trips to the dump (1-2 more to go) and quite a bit of sweeping and organizing tools. This week I can demo the remainder of the old staircase and get it out of the way, then it's on to running ducts and wiring up the heating/cooling equipment in it's new and final home.

Aside from the house...

The only big happenings of the spring was our trip home to Portland/Seattle in April. Both pups flew with us, and Cooper got his first taste of NW life. I think he liked it...













We had a lot of fun, and a very busy trip. We arrived on Friday, drove from Seattle straight to Emily's 30th Surprise Birthday Party in Portland. We then gathered with the Curtins/Blakers/Danielsons/Sundsteds to celebrate all the April birthdays in our family. I got to meet my new nephew, Cameron.

The highlight for me was going to the beach house for a couple of days. Duyen and James were able to join us, and we had TONS of fun. On Sunday night we picked up some crabs and oysters down on Tillamook Bay and came back to the house for a feast. Then we realized too late (as always) that we don't have a pot big enough to cook them at the house. So we went back to the Wheeler antique shops and found an old stainless steel commercial mixer bowl. It worked perfectly. We built a fire, had boiled crabs, oysters (raw and roasted), beet greens and bay shrimp. We all played on the beach while dinner cooked.

































We bought a kite, and because we all felt that it's themes of unicorns and rainbows made it by far the most gay-inspired kite ever produced, we decided to name it the gayest name we could think of.

Meet Troy.


Sadly, there wasn't a lot of wind, so Troy mostly hovered close to the ground. But someday he will be able to soar with the seagulls, and he's still at the beach house awaiting that day.

I took some decent pics that night, but this is one of the best I've ever taken...

Around sunset dinner was ready.

























After ending our dinner by nearly being drowned by a very large sneaker wave, we packed up and lit off some of the Thai lanterns we had left over from the wedding.


































So, that was by no means the whole trip, but it's where most of the pictures were taken.

Both dogs thoroughly enjoyed themselves, as did we.

Now, it's back to the Summer grind. We don't have any trips planned, as construction and job uncertainty for me has gutted any discretionary income. But we are starting to think about another big trip... SE Asia 2010? It's a long way off, but we have to start planning early.

I guess the idea of quarterly updates was even a bit optimistic...

Winter is pretty much over and it was another relatively easy one. That's three years in a row without more than a few inches of snow, and though this winter was nowhere near as warm as last year it still was not too bad.

Just before Christmas, we picked up a new and very photogenic addition to the family in Cooper (nee Otis). He came from a very nice guy here in town that took great care of him, but felt like Otis just didn't get enough of his time. I ran into him at the dog park and got to talking, the next day he called to ask if I wanted to take the dog.

At almost 3 years old, he's a little guy for a Vizsla, only 45 lbs when we got him. We've managed to put another 5 on him, and it seems like 50 lbs is about right. He's not quite the lover that Baker is, but he definitely loves attention. He and Baker get along well. Baker is the big brother, usually too cool for the little one. Cooper is the obnoxious hanger on. Cooper demonstrates his admiration for Baker by thoroughly licking Baker's face and mouth several times a day. They chase each other, and Cooper is much faster than Baker, but we don't have a big yard, and Cooper soon runs out of room. As Baker catches him in the corner, he nips at Cooper and give a throaty bark as if to say "tag". Then off they go to do it again the other direction.

We struggled to come up with a fitting name for him, one that fit into our (not very established) tradition of naming our dogs after mountains and ski areas. After a couple of weeks we settled on Cooper in honor of Cooper's Spur on Mt. Hood.

Hun spent quite a bit of time working and traveling over this winter, and during her last trip to Asia I took the boys out to Manassas Battlefield Park. It was a cold February day, so not too many other brave souls were out there, and we had several hundred acres of hay fields to ourselves.

We spent several hours out there and had a great time, though Coop seemed to spend a disproportionate amount of time posing for the camera.



Baker rarely stopped long enough to offer many good shots. In one boggy area where the tractors couldn't mow, the grass was over 5' high. I couldn't see which dog was where, but I would whistle and they would stop and stick their heads out of the grass like periscopes.

(Baker is on his hind legs in this picture)

There weren't any birds out there to flush, but they seemed to get the scent of something as they both became very interested in the same spot. It must have been a snake or mouse.


Both of them enjoyed working the tall grass.

This weekend I needed to get out of the house, so on Friday night the boys and I piled into the Trooper and drove up to the Tuscarora Trail in South Central Pennsylvania. The Tuscarora was once a backup to the Appalachian Trail, before the Park Service protected the AT in the '60s and ensured it was not run over by development. The Tuscarora was pretty overgrown, and in the 70's the area was decimated by Gypsy Moths. In the early 90's volunteers re-cut the trail through the brush under the dead forest. I thought it sounded like a good option, so we camped at the trail head on Friday night and moved out Saturday morning.

The boys did well in the tent, though at first they thought it was a trap and wanted out. The had to explore every square inch of the space. It was in the high 20's an the wind was blowing as we went to bed, so they eventually decided to lay down on their mat and let me wrap their sleeping bag around them. Throughout the night I would reach under the sleeping bag to check that their ears were warm. They seemed to do fine.

This trail follows the ridge line down from the mountain (2300ft) into the valley with all the fog/coal haze (1000ft).

Baker got to try out his dog pack. At first, he didn't mind wearing it, though he was carrying 5-6 liters of water in there. He clearly didn't appreciate the extra 10-12lbs, so I switched it out and gave him the sleeping bags. With less weight he was more inclined to run, but the extra width proved to be dangerous to me. He would run by and clip one of my knees with the extra width of the pack.


That lasted about 1/2 mile, before he became annoyed with the fact that Cooper was still running circles around him and I was annoyed with the constant kneecapping. I took pity on him and soon I had the dog pack strapped to my pack.

As we hiked the trail, the pups accidentally flushed two Grouse from the edge of the trail. All were surprised to see each other.

I saw movement at the edge of the trail, and Baker pointed at the brush, but we never did figure out what it was.


After about 3 miles of easy hiking, it became clear why those that hike the Appalachian Trail call this region "Rocksylvania".


The trail turned into a field of basketball sized rocks, and my pace slowed to a crawl. The rocks threatened to turn an ankle at any moment, and I got to be a bit paranoid as the dogs stuck their noses into the big rocks off to the side of the trail. All I could think of was a big den of rattlesnakes.



Eventually, we came to a rocky outcropping that was clearly the start of the descent into the valley. I really had no desire to drop down 700 more feet on such a crappy trail in a dead forest with nothing to take pictures of and not much else to see on a cold and hazy day... so I decided to make some lunch and turn the trip into a day hike.

As you can see, lunch was a delightful blend of the lightweight and the not so lightweight. Both items on the menu were nice and warm(ing).


The pups posed for a few more pictures and we made our way back.

Only 500' more feet to reach the truck. That is, 500' up, still about 3/4 of a mile out. I chose to take the direct trail up, instead of the switchbacks the jeep trail takes. That was not very smart. You can see where the direct trail branch off up in the distance.



Now, to the house...

The last several months have been all about our first bathroom project. This bathroom serves the two basement bedrooms (currently our bedroom and living room), but it also serves the laundry/mudroom.

For that reason, I decided to continue the shower tile all the way around the room as wainscoting. The walls are white subway tile, the blue tiles are glass.

The pictures are pretty self explanatory, except that it's hard to take decent pictures in such a small space, sorry.

I built the vanity out of Mahogany, which was a pretty straightforward project. I ran low on Mahogany, so I need to pick some up to build a frame for the mirror.

We haven't been able to find a light fixture we like, so for now it's just a bare bulb.

The window hasn't been trimmed out, though I have the trim all ready to go when I get around to it.

Each blue tile on the floor was placed by hand. Most mosaic tile is glued to a sheet of mesh. The white tiles in this case were glued to each other, and most inconveniently, the tiles that held everything together were the ones I was replacing with the blue tiles. So the border had to be laid down by hand, tile by tile.

We haven't been able to agree on a paint color for the walls. Feel free to suggest anything you like - the only rule is this: not yellow.



A very lovely toilet.

















This shower was designed as much for the canines as the humans.

I don't know if you can see it from the pictures, but the muddy paw prints seem to indicate they appreciate it. They had the inaugural bath last weekend.

The hand shower is set at a height so that one can reach it while kneeling on the curb.


After the bath was up and running, getting a door in place was the next item on the list. Because I can never do anything the easy way, I decided to build the doors for the house. Thanks to the open design we have planned, there aren't that many doors that need to be built - and thus far the experiment has gone well.

The door is made of solid poplar with MDF panels. It's heavy, probably about 75lbs.

If I could even find a door in this profile, it would be very expensive. As it is, this one cost less than $100 to build, and probably took around 6 hours. I can shave a lot of time off the next one by paying to have my stock run through a commercial planer, rather than my small bench top planer.

Totally assembly time was only about 2 hours.

We bought a $2 used doorknob at the salvage warehouse. When we find a door hardware style we like we'll swap it out. The door still needs to get it's final fitting and a coat of white paint.

There is also a chance that the poplar will not be stable and the door will rack or twist. I hope this doesn't happen, but this door is sort of a prototype to see how it works out. If I have problems, I'll go buy slab doors in a boring profile. For now, cross your fingers.


I've gotten so accustomed to the open hallway with no doors, it feels strangely claustrophobic to see it closed in.

That's the extent of this winter's work. It went slowly, but I learned a lot and I'm generally very happy with the work. There are lots of little details to work on throughout the basement. The bath needs more trim and paint. There are lots of bookcases and built ins to build. The laundry room needs cabinets, fixtures and tile. But it is so nice to have a clean, modern bathroom.

The next big project on the horizon is a new staircase to the second floor. That might come this spring, or it might wait until summer. I'm kinda itching to take a break from all this finish work and go back to demo and rough carpentry, so it shouldn't be too long. As of now we can only reach the second floor via step ladder, and it doesn't have any electricity up there.

Lastly, we are on the verge of having air conditioning for the first summer since 2004! We have all the equipment, we just need to move it into it's final locations and make all the connections. Probably around late April or early May, as soon as the heating system isn't needed any more, I can take it all apart (in it's temporary locations) and move it to its new home. I guess the days of our $30 summer electric bills are over, but I suspect we'll find a way to work it into the budget.

Goodnight from the Senate Finance Committee
Brookland Field Office