From the Archives: Ode to Los Angeles

A year ago last week Emili and I ended our seven year sojourn in Los Angeles and moved back to our historical roots on the East Coast. As I sat in a coffee shop in West LA last February, between beating rush-hour traffic out of downtown and waiting to arrive at my last construction site visit, I wrote the following in my journal:

The last three months have been incredibly hectic. Since taking the Structural Engineering Exam in late October I finally decided to return one last time to academia, selected a school, found a new job, gave notice at another. Today is my last day at that job--Structural Focus. As this day has approached I've often wondered whether we are making the right move. I love my job, my co-workers, Los Angeles... Right now Charlottesville feels very provincial by comparison.

In many ways I've learned most of my engineering skills--career related ones anyway--while at Structural Focus. I'm extremely thankful to have worked there these last 2-1/2 years. I'll truly miss the friendships I've formed with my coworkers. And I'll probably never find a work environment with the same mix of professionalism and freedom--relaxed professionalism--ever again. 

Beyond leaving my current job, moving out of Los Angeles is the end of an era. Shortly after getting married Emili and I moved to a city that was 2500 miles from our closest family members. We moved with many friends to a city that none of us knew. In our seven years here many of our friends have moved on, moved up, moved away, left the bonds of fellowship. Now is our time to move.

Last week while driving to Big Bear to go snowboarding with my coworkers we drove by the hotel where Emili and I spent our second anniversary, past two different campsites where we spent weekends with friends from kairos, past scores of burned acres from our first close up encounter with wildfires in 2003.

 I definitely miss having a mountain like Big Bear so close to home.

Emili and I had dinner recently with Amy Murphy and Michael Maltzan, a fantastic couple who have shaped our story  in so many ways... We also shared a few hours with Gary and Pam Hilliard, who took the daring step into homeownership in Southern California with us and who re-taught me the joy of trail running... We had a meal wtih Ben and Lauren Thompson--a couple we have grown up with individually and together for 12 years. And tomorrow we'll share our final meal on the West Coast with Kevin, Annie and their son Luke for his 2nd birthday. Our sons will say goodbye and probably never remember this best friendship they had for two years. 

 Photo from an annual Kings Canyon trek. This is at the 'summit' of Glen

Pass, 2008. Relatively close to Los Angeles, a bit further from Virginia.

So many times I've second guessed. Not completely, but deeply second guessed whether moving "home" is what will make us happy. Obviously no place will completely make us happy; our choice to move East is what we want for our family. We have wonderful friends who have already gone East before us and are hoping to reconnect with them. But its impossible to live somewhere this long and not put down roots. I assume we're going to feel uprooted and unstable for months to come...[] For now reality calls me back to my last site visit on this my last day of work--to look at the nearly completed construction of a house I started designing my first month at Structural Focus.

We've been in Virginia a year now. Roots are starting to grow. This second year will hopefully see the inauguration of annual traditions. And while Los Angeles and California now feel worlds away, on occasion there is a strong call to return and "Go West...", again.

Progress: Jan & Feb 2010

For much of January and early February we attempted to put our kitchen back together. After removing the wall separating the kitchen and dining rooms (see this post for original kitchen / dining photos), we wired several new lights (the white pendants you see below), patched the floor, re-plumbed the sink and stove gas line, fixed a plumbing vent line, and plastered all the gaping holes back up. The other major effort was replacing the peeling countertops and re-orienting the fridge and adjacent cabinets to the side wall. 

 

  

  

  

We still have a lot of "finish" work to do in the kitchen. We plan on replacing the track and chandelier lights, painting the cabinets and walls, and possibly white-washing the floors. This work will be done over the next few months, once we have finished the cottage and exterior painting. 

The winter weather broke enough this weekend (we've now reached the all time record for snow; good year to do construction!) and allowed us to get some painting done, namely the front porch ceiling and primer on the back family room. In the photos of the family room you'll see that the contractors were able to add the new transoms between our most recent 10" and 18" snowstorms. 

 

Using sky blue paint for the porch ceiling helps prevent 

wasps and the like from building nests, or so we're told.

  

  

 

This week we're hoping to paint the walls and get a finish coat of sealer on the concrete floor in the family room so we can begin using it (3 months late!). Though we still have a bit to do things are starting feel more finished.

a lesson in patience

Its probably too early to fully detail what our home renovations have taught us. However with the almost daily anxiety we're experiencing trying to finish everything up, we've learned many things already, as they say, "the hard way".

Luckily the new porch rafters were sized for snow loading! Three days after "substantial completion," Charlottesville enjoyed the largest single-drop snowfall in 40+ years. We ended up with 24" pushing down on the new rafters.

The major lesson looming in my mind recently has been how quickly we took on the renovations, how un-patient we were to get going. Conventional wisdom says to live in a house for a year (or more) before deciding what to do with it. For us, after two 30 minute walkthroughs--one open house and one deciding what needed to be renovated--we defined most of our current scope of work (a front porch, back family room, cottage renovations, central heat and AC, and new exterior siding) and plowed forward with the loan process. I mean, between the two of us we're an interior designer and a structural engineer. We can remove walls and re-arrange the guts of the house. Why wait?

The terms of the renovation loan we were offered also made doing the work up front rather than waiting very appealing. Added to the attractive loan terms was the need to have the design approved by the appraiser / underwriters before closing on our loan. And with future plans for me to begin working on another degree in the fall of 2010, we decided now was the time to go for it.

This decision led to a hastily assembled set of plans and a relatively loose scope of work, particularly with the details. One benefit of not detailing everything out was that it allowed us to make game day decisions on many smaller issues--how the soffit would look, where exactly the porch columns should be located, etc. And lots of details needed to be decided during construction rather than beforehand because we didn't have access to the house while developing the final plans (the previous owner didn't want us frequenting the property during escrow to take measurements, decide on massing, ...). The downside to the quick design period has led to several change orders, lots of miscommunication with the contractor, and even questions like: "What do we really need this family room for anyway?" shortly after the foundations were excavated.

The back-yard facing family room is on the left. It is still unpainted due to the cold weather.

Many times over the last few months we have wished we'd lived in the house longer before plunging in; wished we made different decisions during construction; wished we had the help of another two dozen sets of eyes (maybe even an architect!). We've wondered what we could have done with money we spent on portions of the project we had already finished--especially with the family room. "You know, for the price of that room we could have traded our scratched floors for newly sanded ones, purchased replacement windows that don't leak volumes of cold air, and an expanded our kitchen design from the relatively simple one we're pursuing." And after living in the house three months all of these details--new floors and windows and a better kitchen--became "priorities" that the two 30 minute walkthroughs didn't reveal. On the flip side, we're fairly certain that we would not have worked out the massing of the front porch or the roof tie-in over the entry room unless we had the family room addition at the back. And this, from an exterior perspective changed the entire feel of the house in a way that we are very, very happy with.

In short the renovations are a mixed-bag of victories and losses. At present we're certainly happy with more of the decisions than we're disappointed with. But we'd have hoped that with all the money we've paid out and inconvenience we've lived with for 4 months, that everything about the design would fall under the positive category. I should know by now that no project is ever 100% what the owner wants. Still...

We've found it extremely difficult to be patient with our house. We want everything done up front so we can enjoy not renovating it once we're done (with our house in California we did many projects right before selling and we regretted not being able to enjoy them longer). Just this week we made another impatient decision: we rushed in an bought a sink online without checking local dealers. We saved money on the sink but not on shipping and we ended up ordering the wrong sink anyway (due in large part to a misleading photo on the web page). Now we can't return it. After calling around we learned we could have bought the same sink locally for less than the cost of the online sink plus shipping (and we wouldn't have had to deal with the extremely unhelpful "customer service" people at efaucets.com). I suppose soon enough we'll be finished with construction and can practice patience watching our bank account recover from the past 6 months!

So would more time up front have led to fewer regrets? Probably. Would it have eliminated all problems? Surely no. Were we able to do it over again I would have tried to pass a preliminary design by the appraiser and then modify it after 3 months of living there--before bringing in the earth moving equipment. Though on that that schedule the excavators would have been breaking ground right when the 24" of snow dropped. Unfortunately renovating a home is so infrequent an occurrance that it is difficult to learn and apply the lessons from one project to the next. This is where conventional wisdom could have helped us. If only we had listened better.

Week 13-14 (Dec 21 through Dec 28)

When we started designing the renovations back in June we decided we would spruce up the kitchen by painting the cabinets. We liked what we saw in our two walkthroughs (as well as the photos we looked at again and again during escrow) and therefore set aside only a minimal amount of money for kitchen improvements. Our final renovation decisions included a new Family Room, Front Porch, Air Conditioning, Siding, and improvements to a detached "cottage". Below is the floor plan showing the porch and sunroom additions as well as a key plan of the kitchen showing original photos.

Photo 1: Back of the kitchen

 

Photo 2: Side of the kitchen

 

Photo 3: Kitchen wall adjoining dining room

Photo 4: Dining room wall adjoining kitchen

After a few months of living at the house we found that we rarely used our dining room. We set a small table in the kitchen and ate almost all of a our meals in there. With two small children almost half of our dinner time is spent getting up and down for things we forgot and cleaning up spills! The exception to the kitchen "nook" dining has been two birthday parties we hosted because we needed more space.This became comical when we ate Thanksgiving dinner in the dining room and our three-year old son requested that we sing happy birthday because all former meals there were birthdays. We'd thus come to realize that our kitchen and dining rooms were too detached--both from one another and from the rest of the house--and that some modification was needed.

Unfortunately this realization came after we had burned through most of our contingency and reserve funds, so modifications had to be relatively inexpensive. We couldn't do new cabinets but the countertops cried out to be replaced; the laminate had de-laminated in several spots and was cracked and severely stained in others. Our "ultimate" kitchen design would have included taking over the small bathroom adjacent to the kitchen and making it a breakfast nook. In addition the wall between the kitchen and dining rooms would be removed.


We explored this option for several weeks. Around the same time however, a construction mishap (for lack of a better term) at the sunroom sapped most of our remaining reserve fund. Thus, our kitchen re-do would have to be shoestring. We opted to remove only the non-bearing wall between the kitchen and dining rooms and add an island coutnertop between them. The fridge and adjacent cabinets would be moved to the interior wall and we would paint the cabinets (as originally planned) to freshen them up.

The photos below show only a few days of work in this area, basically the removal of the wall. The impact already is amazing! We anticipate a couple more weeks to get things functional again, though it will likely be a month or more until we have things buttoned back up. Until then, we're eating breakfast in our hallway and dinner at my inlaws.

Photo in the same direction as "4" above.

 

Photo in the same direction as "3" above.

Weeks 10-12 (11/30 through 12/14)

These few weeks saw the substantial completion of the contractor's work, including--with much excitement on my part--the siding. Since Week 2 way back in October we have had Tyvek or plastic on substantial portions of our 2nd floor. I've been somewhat skeptical regarding the purported water-proofness of the Tyvek system (and less so of the plastic sheeting), especially after the entry room ceiling showed signs of leaking (after the new roof was added. The entry room is the one story portion on the right of the house; see below).

Siding completed on the front | Tyvek still on the side

Apparently water was getting in behind the roof flashing because the flashing was installed over the Tyvek. The new siding, installed on top of the flashing, has corrected the issue. Anyway, waterproofness caused only part of my anxiety over the last several months. Our house sits on top of a ridge. Being as such, we have pretty decent winds on a regular basis. And when wind gets behind Tyvek, especially if its not nailed super well, it produces an incredibly loud whipping sound. It's loud enough to have caused many sleep-deprived nights for Emili and I as well as our children (which in turn, makes for more sleepless nights for us!)

Siding mostly complete on the back | We still need to paint the addition siding!

Needless to say, we are incredibly happy to have the siding complete. Everyone is sleeping better. There appears to be no more leaking. And the visual impact of the new siding is striking (the old siding was a cracking and mold-stained wavy asbestos).

"Finished" front elevation with a (relatively) clean front yard

At this point the contractor has only very minor things to complete, including, as I'll detail in a later post, a fairly substantial construction mishap. Other than that, we're still awaiting the concrete floor in the entry room as well as a carpet / vinyl in the rental. We also have lots of painting to do and the weather in Charlottesville has been less than cooperative lately. Finally, last week we also decided to demo one interior wall in the house--the one between our kitchen and dining rooms. The initial impact has been amazing (more in a later post). Its currently causing a bit of a challenge in terms of eating at our house, but in the long run will be totally worth it.