Bird House Remodel

Here's the eagerly awaited Bird Avenue house update.

We finished the remodeling more or less on time, although some paint got chipped off when the carpet installation took place, so Mr. Chen and crew had to go back in and touch things up. While some of the details are not 100 percent perfect, overall, I'm pretty happy. Mostly it's good to just get it over with and move on to the next phase, which is renting the place out.

So a summary of the "updated" items: completely redoing 2 bathrooms, new interior and exterior paint, new carpet, replacing 2 windows, and patching up an area in the back wall of the house where the redwood had grown too close to and damaged it. Also was suppose to seal up the roof area, but turns out it was very difficult to do due to the way it is done. Although it doesn't look perfect, some was refunded for that, so I guess it's fine.

There are still some minor stuff which I had to take care of on my own. They include changing a few door knobs and putting up some blinds and moving all the furnitures back into the house and generally cleaning up the place up a bit. (Update, I also had to do some touch up on painting and fix the gates and fence in the backyard.) But overall, it's pretty much done! Yay Ya!

Okay, now on to the task of renting the place. Sandy's been taking charge of this task for the most part, posting the ads on craigslist and calling the correspondents. So far, there seem to be a fairly high level of interest. We've gotten about 15~20 calls and basically had an "open house" of sorts for all the interested renters to stop by and have a look this past Saturday. Some of the potential renters we feel pretty comfortable with, others seems a little bit more iffy. Fortunately we had enough that we have a little bit of choice. Unfortunately, seems like the renters for the most part don't actually want the furnitures, which I thought was a plus.. So, I'm going to have to move everything right back out and either donate them or stack them up in Henderson or something..

Oh.. also arranged to have a gardener to come and fix up some of the broken sprinklers and do monthly maintainence, so that the place will look nice and we won't have to worry about the renter neglecting the yard like I did for the past 10 years, haha.. Anyways, will give an update when we get the place actually rented out. It'll be quite a relief when we finally do :)

Bird Ave Remodel Kickoff!

Day 1 of remodeling

After a couple months of delay due tree removal application process, we've finally started the remodeling now that the trees have been removed.

The list of things we're having the contractor (Mr. Chen) take care of include the following:

• complete redoing of 2 bathrooms
• replacing 2 windows
• replacing the carpet
• removing wall paper and repainting the entire house
• repair wall and roof eave area damaged by the redwood trees.

Mr. Chen was recommended by a couple different people and have done work for several of my relatives before. His price is very reasonable but there has been some mixed review of the quality of work. I think it really depends on the experience of the particular crew working on the job at the time and whether there are any custom work that requires special attention. As my remodeling should be fairly simple, being a single story with no custom or special finishing involved, I'm hoping it will turn out just fine. There's also no assurance the more expensive contractor will do a perfect job either. Chatting with my friends, it seems that often times there will be some details that are not perfect after the job is done, so for now, we're going with the low cost approach as we're treating this as an investment (intending to rent it out afterwards, and costly improvement may not translate to too much extra in rent and would be hard to recoup). Perhaps I can tell him that I'm writing about this job and posting it on the internet so that he'll make sure to pay extra attention and do a really good job, hehe..

So far, I'm pretty happy with the progress, it's day 1 and they already gutted the bathrooms and tore down all the wall papers.. But I guess it's really how it looks like when it gets all put back together that matters, so I'm holding my breath.

Mighty Timber! (Part 1)

Hope I don’t get any hate mails as a result of this posting. But today we started cutting down the 2 redwood trees in my backyard. I took a couple days off to “supervise” the work. I really didn’t have to, but I think it keeps the crew on their toes when someone is at the property watching over them and it actually really somewhat fascinating to see them work. Well, to me anyways, others could probably careless. I’ve always found construction / heavy equipment curiously interesting. It’s certainly not something I would do myself though even if I knew what the proper techniques are, which you definitely have to, in order to cut down 75~80’ tall trees that are right up against the house without damaging them. My brief 2-3 weeks working as a “College Pro Painter” one college summer has convinced me outsourcing hard manual labor is the smart thing to do!

9:30 AM

Their progress is super fast, seems their powerful gas chainsaws cut through the wood like tofu. It makes me envious with my puny electric chain saw which tends to break down when I even just try to tackle an occasional fallen branch.

So far the crew has been excellent. They showed up early, around 8:35 am when they originally said 9 am, so I’m glad I got here early 8:00 am. I wanted to get here early to post the signs (the tree removal permits has to be posted close to the sidewalk) and to take some pictures of the “before” scene. My original intent was to make sure if something does go wrong, I would have picture proofs and things. Hopefully I don’t have to use the pictures for that purpose. I am taking plenty of pictures though and it’s going to make some great blog material. Anyways, been watching them work the past half hour or so before stopping in to write things down in the blog. They’ve already got a good chunk of the branches trimmed off one of the redwood already. Time for me to head out to the backyard and survey the progress!

10:55 am

The crew has basically cut down one tree completely, and is working on cutting the pieces into small enough pieces so they can remove it. It appears that they’re planning on just hauling away all the stumps as debris, which is a bit of a shame, as they’re probably quite valuable, being redwood and all. But alas, so it goes, it’s not possible to fall the entire tree in the setting, and without the trunk available in long pieces, it’s probably not useful to anyone except perhaps craftsman/artist. By the way, I’m glad I did take the day off completely, as I’m trapped here with no way to get out of the garage. Tomorrow I’ll be smarter and not park inside the garage but somewhere along the side streets. Also getting rather hungry, looks like time for me to walk over to Jack in the Box or something.

12:35 pm -After lunch

The crew took only a short break and has started working one tree number 2. I think by now I’ve seen enough to describe the process:

The whole process/method is very interesting. There are 4 persons in the crew, one guy is the main tree climbing/cutting dude, and another guy helps him with the ropes/pulley. Then two more guys are at ground level, pulling away the cut down branches and hauling everything away.

To start things off, the climber dude goes way up the tree, I would say probably about two third the way up at least, where he sets up a pulley point. Then, his saw is attached to the rope and sent up to him. He then actually comes down to about only one quarter of the way up the tree, where the branches start to sprout out, and starts cutting from there.

Each branch is first attached to the rope (I have no idea how they tie/hook it, but somehow it doesn’t come loose) before cutting. The guy controlling the rope/pulley makes sure it doesn’t fall to far down and crash into things. Then the 2 others guys come and actually pull it out and away from the house, where the may do some additional sawing so that it can be hauled to the front where there is a big truck with the machine that chews up all the branches and even tree trunks, provided they’re cut down to manageable sizes. When it’s basically all cut down, everyone chips in cutting the huge trunk pieces into more manageable pieces and hauls them away to be wood chipped.

2:25 pm

I just watched the crew work for another 25 minutes. Tony moved a couple more people over here, I guess he had some guys on another job in the morning and that’s done, so now I have 6 guys here working the tail off. I must say they seem motivated. It’s probably because they get paid the fixed amount, and the faster they get done, the faster the get to go home and relax. It might also be because they want to beat the rush hour, since my street is actually a pretty busy street during rush hours and having the huge wood chipper truck blocking half the street could cause a pretty big traffic jam.

3:00AM Midnight Owl again.. Just posting what I wrote while over there (before my laptop ran out of battery). Wait for part 2 for more details and the conclusion of this tree removal job!