SonicChicken blog

I’m already reaping the benefits of houseblogs.net. One of the other families mentioned in the WSJ article referenced the story, so I decided to check their blog — Their tagline is “Humphrey House - Transforming an Arts and Crafts Bungalow into a Green Home for the Future”. (”Arts & Crafts” and “Green Home” are two major cool points right there!)

One of their recent posts is Installing a Loopy Rain Barrel, which looks like an excellent project for our property. Our shop building will have about 1400 ft² of catchment area, and it’s right next to the garden. (Unfortunately we won’t be able to take advantage of Chicago’s discounted rain barrels.) The downspout diverter is the slickest part of this system, and something that would be an absolute necessity in Sacramento–lots of rain in the winter (when we won’t need it for the garden), so once our barrel is full we’d need some automatic way to dump the excess.

I’ve been busy working on the wiring lately, so I haven’t posted anything for a while. This turned out to be a good thing, because Don and J Moreno read my last post and hadn’t seen anything new on the blog, so they dropped by for a visit last weekend. Sorry for not sending out personal invitations to all of our friends/family! We really appreciate the company (and a chance to rest and chat!), so drop by any evening or weekend–More than likely, at least one of us will be home and working on the project. You can call ahead if you don’t want to take a chance on missing us…

Serious construction on our addition/remodel began on 12 April 2007, almost 24 weeks ago, although it doesn’t feel like it’s been that long. (At least to me–my family may feel differently.) Our next major milestone is rough frame inspection, which includes rough electrical, plumbing, HVAC, and (since we’re getting a stucco exterior) lath inspections. Here’s how the project is going right now:

Rough plumbing is all but done. We need to connect the new water heater’s T&P valve to its drain pipe, and we need to tie the old vent pipe from the garage sink into the kitchen vent stack. There’s no plumbing in the shop, so nothing to do there.

I spent last week doing electrical wiring and made a lot of progress, but I didn’t quite finish. Now I’m back to working on the project during lunch and in the evenings. Even so, I hope to finish during the coming weekend. Mostly it’s just little stuff remaining: an outlet or two in one room, a few lights in another, etc. The only big electrical job remaining in the house is the kitchen, and that’s only a “big” task because I have to do some framing first. We need to add some furring strips to the old kitchen-garage wall, I have to frame in the openings for two doors that we removed, and I have to re-frame the ceiling joists where the range/hood vent will poke into the attic. After that, it’s just a matter of dropping a few dedicated electrical circuits for the microwave, range hood/blower, dishwasher, and garbage disposal.

I haven’t done much of the electrical in Barb’s quilt shop, although I did get the most difficult job done–the three floor outlets. (The worst part was snaking 12-3 Romex through the conduit. The second worst part was kneeling on the concrete to wire up 3 outlets. The third worst part was paying almost $60 each for the brass floor plates. “Ouch!” to all three.)

The HVAC was finished a few weeks ago. I wish I’d finished the wiring before all the ductwork was installed! It’s been a bit of a pain having to crawl under the ducts, whereas I used to be able to walk upright through nearly all of the attic. Live and learn, I guess…

Barb and I took our salvaged doors out to U.S. Building Materials last Saturday for new jambs and hinges. While we were there, we ordered our gable vents. Those should arrive next week. We’ll need to have these installed before the stucco crew can apply lath and building paper. But before we can put up the vents we’re going to have to finish sheathing the gables! We learned a few tricks when we did this on Barb’s quilt studio, so hopefully the house gables will be easier for us to knock out.

An article in the Sacramento Bee last week highlighted a couple of locally-owned sandwich shops:

• The Sandwich Spot at 1630 18th St
• Dad’s at 1310 S St

I haven’t been to either place yet, but I wanted to get the information up here so I’ll remember to check them out.

On her last night in the US, Claire made crepes for us from her mother’s recipe. They were amazingly good! Try these with some Nutella if you dare! Yum…

• 250 g (2 c) flour
• 3 eggs
• 1/2 L (2 c) milk
• 20 g (1.5 Tbsp) butter, melted & cooled
• pinch of vanilla sugar (we got ours from Ikea), or salt if you can’t find it
• 1 “petit veue” (sp?) (2 Tbsp?) rum or Grand Marnier

Put flour in a mixing bowl. Add 1 egg and ~1/3 of the milk and mix gently (don’t beat yet). Repeat until all the eggs and milk are incorporated. Mix in butter, salt or sugar, and rum or Grand Marnier. Beat until smooth. Let rest for 2-3 hours. Cook over high heat in a lightly oiled frying pan. (Claire suggested keeping a paper towel and a small bowl of oil near the stove–just wipe the pan with the paper towel lightly between crepes.)

If you’re planning to eat plain crepes, the Grand Marnier tastes better (imo), but the rum crepes seem to go better with fillings.

The first two times we made this recipe, we used 2 Tbsp of butter and 1 cup of flour due to conversion errors. (Insert standard rant on the stupidity of US measuring system here.) According to a butter conversion applet I found, it’s actually 1.4 Tbsp. On the same site I found that there are 4.5 cups of flour per pound, so at 2.2 lb/kg gives 9.9 cups/kg. Next time we’ll try a little less butter and a lot more flour.

We had a great time when we took Claire to San Francisco, but there were a few things we could have done to improve the trip. I’m documenting all this Continue reading ‘San Francisco touring suggestions’