nothingugly

Back of the house, anyhow:

  What have I learned… Hoo, boy. I’ll just list some random lessons.

• Employees: This is just like any other business, sadly. It’s just fuckin’ management. Employees run from negative contributor to rock star, with whistle stops at prima donna, whiner, moron, unlicensed and scary looking and EXCPTIONAL, consummate professional, ass-slow perfectionist, thief, ex-con, “you’re doing it wrong”, anger issues, works hard when they show up, fast & error prone, and substance abuse. In fact, pick any two. For everyone. I’ve had all of the above except for thief. Through it all runs a steady drumbeat of intricate rhyming obscenity.
• A house takes hours. I guess that’s obvious, but the lesson for me is that no matter how skilled I am (or anyone I hire is), it takes a few thousand hours to make a house. The more people I hire, the faster it’ll go. Since the lovely city of Oakland is doing everything they can to crunch down my schedule, this means that I have to hire big crews. That means money, and there’s just no way around it. On a slow day, it’s me and two carpenters. On a big day, it’s two carpenters, a labourer, an electrician, two plumbers, and me. No matter what, I spend most of the day tear-assing around and getting nothing done with my hands. Basically, it’s a combination of management and ineptitude on my part. Thankfully, I have great people working with me, and they keep things on track. I’ll list ‘em later.
• Plumbing the walls for wire: Yeah, nice fantasy. Works great if you have thick walls (ie: 2×6) but if they look anything like mine - forget it. Drill holes that big and you won’t have enough structure left to hold up your house.
• Trades: Tradesmen have three rates, essentially: Independent contractor rate, employee rate, and “friends” rate. The former is the highest, and it’s what you’ll pay if you’re doing your own general contracting like I am. If you do this, you’ll lose your shirt, because a GC is running a crew at “employee rate” (significantly less, but he’s also covering insurance and other overhead), billing high enough to take a profit, and STILL undercutting “contractor rate”. “Friends rate” - well, how close are your friends? And how skilled? Will you know if they’re doing a crappy job? If you’re confident and you have friends in low places, and you know what the billing rates are (Plumbers, for instance, can run $100/hr contractor, $40/hr employee (that’s low) and anything goes for friends), then go for it. The learning process can be expensive.
• Toilets: They’re delicate. We’ve killed TWO so far. The most recent casualty was the victim of a pair of linesman’s pliers dropped from a moderate height.
• Inspectors: They run the gamut from bitchy to wonderful. We had the head plumbing inspector gig us for minor crap the day before Christmas break. He was sore because he had to take unpaid leave (Oakland strikes again) and wanted to generate the maximum number of complaints to the city. We had an open muddy trench to the curb for two weeks. On the other hand, my regular inspector is a fount of wisdom and a genuinely nice guy. It probably helps that we’re doing a good job.

  More when I think of it.

-Joe

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  Well, the concrete is done. Not too much else to say except that this is a shot of the house at night, right before we poured the slab. More walls are up now - framing should be complete this week.

-Joe

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Last we heard, our hero had a small fire and had to move all his crap back into his old shop. Oddly, those worms didn’t respond well to being re-canned, so the shop is now just a pile of machines that prevent my long-suffering parents from parking in their own garage. However, over in the increasingly scary land of West Oakland (Thanks, recession!) my house is coming along nicely - an upstairs for me (1000 square feet) and a similarly sized downstairs for all my toys. The basement/ground floor will be done in about a month, and then my parents will be able to park again. A fairly sophisticated alarm system should preserve the toys during the remainder of the construction, which will likely last through July. And ain’t insurance grand?
  NIMBY - we found a place in East Oakland, in boring warehouselandia near the Coliseum. Of course, between building my house and having to tear down and move my shop, I haven’t been able to help much with the nonsense required to fix the accounting, convince the city, convince the new landlords, arrange the trucking, unstack the containers, fix the forklifts, break down every goddamn walkway in the place, etc, etc, ad nauseum. However, it’s all coming together. Now that the archeology has been done on the books, it seems that we need about - as of this writing - about 14K more to move to the new space. That includes the money to fix the old roof, and a lot of other scary details that I’ve successfully kept myself ignorant of.
  Oh, and we’re officially a non-profit. So! For all of you who are still employed and have extra money that you haven’t… oh, say… bought a house with… you might want to consider tossing a little at NIMBY. This is the only solicitation I’ll make, and I’m making it now because I think that it’s highly likely that this will happen.
The easiest way to send money is to paypal it (http://www.nimbyspace.org/ has a link) or - if you wanna save us (them?) 3%, mail a check.
Oh, and I’m doing the design of the new space (!!). Preliminary rendering here: http://www.nimbyspace.org/?p=223
Finally - we gotta get that building totally empty in less than two weeks. Anyone who doesn’t mind doing hard work in a grimy cold warehouse is strongly encouraged to turn up. We have bad beer, too. If it’s any consolation, I’ll be right there next to you.

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There’s really nothing worse than an ugly toilet. Okay, there’s lots of worse things. Anyhow, this toilet had to go. It’s been hanging out in my down-to-the-studs workspace, begging to be smashed by mistake. Sadly, it’s a “Toto”, so this wart is worth about six hundred bucks. My master plan is to make a gift of it to my plumber (and friend) who is the kind of guy who would really value a six hundred dollar shitter.

I’ve been waiting for him to pick it up for 6 weeks - I call him every week or so. Today, they were scheduled to tear off my front stairs, so it really was time. I called Ralph to let him know that it was now or never, and he suggested that we leave it on the sidewalk and he’d pick it up later in the day (Side story: NEVER do this in the ghetto. I leave the results the reader’s imagination).

So, I ask the one of the stairs-demolishing laborers. His English is worse than my Spanish, but he’d far rather carry half a toilet than smash through 8″ of stair-crete. He takes one end, I take the other. When we get to the stairs, the top two steps are already history. During my puzzled pause (How the hell am I going to get this hundred pound pooper down the non-stairs?) he says, “No problemo” - takes the toilet, and heaves it onto the sidewalk.

I called Ralph to let him know that his toilet had died of a translation error.
-Joe

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  That’s what my house is worth, according to the Alemeda county assessor’s office. That’s an annual $8,697, or $725 a month - in taxes. Turns out that the assessors office is running “6 months behind”, according to Mary Vanderbeck, an “acting” asset service manager. I asked if there were any way that I could avoid paying the $4,964 semi-annual tax bill, and instead pay what I owed - about eight hundred bucks. “Nothing even comes into my mind” she said.

  “Aren’t you astonished that there’s no way to fix this? Ten thousand in taxes on a $135,000 house is quite a bit of money.” “The only thing that surprises me is that you got a $650,000 house for $135,000.” She added, “You were lucky to get a house from people who couldn’t afford to pay for it. I’ve heard some real eviction horror stories - people taking sinks, you name it.” They’ll refund me the difference. Eventually.

  I did let her know that this was a fix & flip gone horribly wrong, and that I was saving a house that was red-tagged in mid “fix” for a quick flip, but that didn’t seem to help.

  In other news, there’s a house for sale on my block for just a little less than a hundred grand. Why? Because the city has red-tagged it, too, and put a $50,000 “prospective lien” on it, just like mine. Because of illegal work done at least twenty years ago. We were informed by the Community and Economic Development agency that there is “no grandfathering” of unpermitted work. This means any house in Oakland can be slapped with this “compliance plan” nonsense at any time. Until the unpermitted work is repaired, you will accrue fines. This is being used all over West Oakland, and it’s done from the street - the inspectors drive by and make a judgement call based on what they see, not on the records (My neighbour’s “violations” included a fully permitted vinyl siding job and stair railings that dated from the original construction of the home in 1908). He was “notified” by inspector Kim Nguyen, who placed her business card under his windshield at 7 am with a note saying, “Please call me.”

  For those of you who get hit with this, FIGHT IT. I’m told (friend of a friend, so take it with a grain of sait) that signing the compliance plan is an admission of guilt. Get a lawyer, talk to other departments, do what it takes to not sign that document. Once you do, you’ll have to fix the violations, which means drawing your house ($2,500), pulling permits ($500?) and fixing the problem. And you have to do so on their schedule - and if you miss the deadlines, you’re out the $2,000 bond, and back to square one.

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  Walls? All gone.  Getting rid of the black mold has been a bit of a challenge - I don’t have detail shots of it, but the mold had grown all the way into the beams. So, after a longish quest to find sufficiently nasty chemicals, I ended up with Fiberlock’s “shockwave” (bough it from Abatix - nice folks, but bloody hard to find. Mail order it, it’s easier). This is essentially a disinfectant. It smells and looks like powerful soap, but the warning labels indicate that it’s quite toxic. I sprayed it liberally with my HVLP painting rig, and used a remote air supply (by allegro) .  This is one of those full face sealing rigs that allow the user to spray seriously poisonous car paint.

  It turns out that borates are a great way to kill mold, too, and they’re non-toxic. I’m going to do a second application Shockwave - on a cold day, so it doesn’t just evaporate off. The longer the contact time, the more effective it is. The bottle recommends ten minutes, and it really does need to soak into the beams. Finally, I’ll do a liberal treatment with a borate solution. This is 1 cup of “20 mule team borax” to one gallon of water. The borates will remain in the house, and should retard any future recurrence of mold. Apparently, borates are added as a mold retardant to insulation batts.

  I no longer have the “headache in my lungs” feeling that I used to get with just a few minutes in the home - and any trace of the mold smell is gone. It’s not even musty in my basement. And that’s after just the first application.

  In other news, I need half a new roof. Though I have to say, I love the look of the place in its current state… more skylights. Hmm.

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I’ve lost my shop at NIMBY, at least until we relocate. Details here.

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I found this gem at Urban Ore. I find their marked prices to be offensively high, but they do dicker. I’d imagine more so now that the housing boom went phut. This piece was marked at $200, (over an older tag for $1000). I got it for a hundred bucks. It’s clearly art nouveau, and it’s not new. It’s foil, so it’s not THAT old. Hand blown clear glass (I can’t tell if the coloured glass is hand done). The ring and post design looks like a Greene and Greene bungalow detail. I’ll need to restore it (I’ve got the local glass vendor hunting for a match for the clear glass). It’ll likely end up inside my pocket doors. Miss p. added for scale. It’s four and a half feet in diameter.

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I got a question about the previous post, and it’s been on my mind.

Nice post. So here’s my question: why bother? I grew up in the Bay Area and know Oakland well. I would never live there. Crime is bad. The city government is corrupt and inefficient. The housing stock is falling to pieces.

However, these are things you’re obviously well aware of. So you must have a very good reason for buying a place in Oakland. What is it? I’m not trying to argue. I’m trying to figure out why a smart, energetic person is bothering with Oakland. Can you help me out here?

  I’ll go one step further. Why live in a place where they’ll burn your house for complaining to the cops about drug dealing? Or where there are two recycling centers in easy walking distance - and one is a polluter and the other is a haven for crack-heads?  In a city that has a well deserved national reputation for street crime?

I’ve done some travel overseas, and when I’m asked about the US, I’m usually stumped.  After all, most Europeans seem to think of the US the way most Americans think of Texas… boorish, belligerent, and in poor taste. I answer, “Well, the US is really REALLY large.” In other words, we’re talking about people, not “crime rates”. In city hall, I’ve definitely run into my share of obstructions, and I haven’t even applied for permits yet. However, I also found Betty Marvin, who ran the Oakland Cultural Heritage Survey. She has every block of West Oakland memorized, and when I mentioned my address, she asked what had become of the church two houses down. At no cost, she provided me with an overview of Oakland architectural heritage, and found a picture taken of my house in 1987.  I’ll be using it as a restoration guide, and the Mills Act she pointed me at may help mitigate tax issues.

  Finally, my immediate neighbourhood. My right hand neighbour is a good friend and fellow NIMBY denizen. On my left, there’s a gracious family whose roots in that house go back almost a hundred years. I’m across the street from brand new yuppie condos. 7 minutes from the bay bridge toll plaza. 8 minutes by bicycle from a Bart station. I’m a 5 minute walk from my woodshop. Many of my friends in the area are either in the trades, artists, or both - so there’s a ready supply of skilled friendly help for this project.

  On Friday night, I attended Art Murmur on my friend’s double decker bus. We drove through the Acorn projects in the wee hours of the morning and got nothing but smiles.

  There’s even a potential upside. West Oakland was gentrifying quickly before the crash, and condo projects are starting - even now. As gas prices skyrocket, the suburbanites who bought places in Tracy have moved to be closer to their jobs. I’m within four blocks of Emeryville, Pixar, and more condos than you can shake a stick at. Ten years ago, it was solid industry.

  Finally - if I’m lucky - this house is my way out of cubicle life. I’ve paid cash, and I have some left to fix up the house with. In a year, I’ll be broke, unemployed, and I’ll own my own house free and clear. How much money does it take to live a life well? I’ve made some compromises, but I get to live the life I want to be living, surrounded by happy people who have made a similar set of choices.

  There is risk. I’ll lose some tools. I may get mugged on the street. It’s possible my house will be broken into. I’m panhandled daily. Shopping carts rattle by the front window all day. But you know what? It beats the shit out of Walnut Creek!

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