Silver Case

No pictures of the house yet. We were all too busy organizing the rooms and cleaning things up.

If I had a camera today, I could have photographed:

1. The Malayan Bridle Snake (I think that is what it was) crawling among the potted plants on the patio. Luke was initially scared of it, but after a few reassurances tried to crawl close enough to touch it, before it vanished into the rain grille.
2. Walking to the playground next door stop in astonishment with everyone else as a huge black-and-white bird that looked like a toucan t nut. I thought these birds were fruit-eaters!
3. The bat fly into the family room, do a lap, and pop back out.

 I’ve moved into 41 Springleaf Height.  Matilda, Emily, Ling’s mom, and I spent the better part of Thursday through Sunday unpacking.  Thank Goodness for the women…all I did was sort my office, workshop, and attic.  I guess things are perhaps 80% done?

So far I am really enjoying the house.  The house affords a lot more privacy than previous places, both inside and outside.  The toilet met expectations, but the thing that really came through was my hot water.  My house is 100% solar hot water. No hot water tank anywhere.  I had subsequent misgivings that maybe the water would be unsatisfactory.  Truth is, it puts out extremely hot water in copious quantities. The shower is as good as the Grand Hyatt Roppongi’s.

I made Indian food yesterday in the kitchen, basically my first meal prepared there. Things worked ok. Still fine-tuning the layout of all the kitchen gear in the different drawers. Don’t have the gas oven hooked up yet — still waiting for the infrared grill.

Unfortunately I’m working full-time now.  I really am not used to an honest day’s work after the last five months of very dishonest “work”.  It’s 10pm and I’m shagged.  Perhaps that is why I’ve had a low-grade sore throat persisting for the last two weeks.

…started work already (a bit ahead of schedule) — going to be a lot more work than last place.

…movers come tomorrow to pack up 18 Robin Close; they’ll deliver it on Thursday to 41 Springleaf.

…just dropped Luke and Ling off at the airport. They’re going to Sydney for the duration of the move, lest Ling goes insane, and all of us along with her.

…don’t think I’ll have much internet access for the next couple days at least.

Looking to install fresh DSL at my new house. Looking through the plans.

The $108/month plan gives me 10/1Mbps download/upload and along with the other rubbish (a wireless plan of dubious value) it gives me a free Windows Vista laptop.

Somehow if I give them $20 LESS per month, they give me the same 10/1 service and a MacBook instead of a Vista horror. Hahahah I would have paid $20 MORE to get a Mac rather than a dreaded Vista-encumbered unit. I guess I won’t tell them that.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Singtel also seems to be pushing some sort of on-demand television delivered over ADSL, called Mio TV.   They’re giving away some sort of Tivo-like set-top box with it.  I guess I’ll try it out.  Their keeness in pushing this makes me suspicious, however.

I originally planned to get a Knoll ‘Propeller’ conference table for my attic lair. But I found out they’re ridiculously expensive. For the amount one costs I could buy lots of other stuff for the house, including some nice office chairs. Instead I decided to stick with the trusty old table I looted from ArsDigita on Christmas Day 2001 and steal the antique hexagonal marble kopitiam table from our pantry room.

Ling argued that it all wouldn’t fit up in the attic. I thought it would. To figure it out for certain I downloaded SketchUp, fought with it for a while, and eventually built a model of the room and furniture that demonstrates, yeah, it will fit.

I don’t think I grok Sketchup fully. I doubt I did things the smartest way, but at least it worked reasonably well. Maybe I’ll be able to use it for some future projects.

Bottom left edge is where the built in desk/cabinets begin.  Entrance from the 9:00 corner.

Things continue to fill in at the house.

I stopped by tody and saw the electrician installing the new service to the oven. The obese Indian guy always reminds me of Prop Joe, except he’s doing house wiring, not fiddling with toasters, but still.

May I suggest an electrical parlay?

Of note, the 450v x 3 phases x 20amperes is inaccurate. It’s actually a 32 ampere service… so I guess it’s more like a 30hp motor, not 20hp.

Toto called. My Neorest has arrived. They sent over a plumber who will install the things (most won’t, for fear of damaging the senselessly-expensive toilet). He’s on vacation next week, so he’ll do it the following week, a day before I move in.

I approved the invoice for the intercoms.

Our gardener came by to assay the front yard.  He’ll replace all the topsoil, put bamboo in the front, and make a privacy wall of some jungle plant versus our idiot neighbor.  He said grass won’t grow in the shady area under our newly-extended roof, so he’s going to install a small wooden patio/deck in that area.  Surprisingly, he’s a stickler for details and accuracy. He was making fun of the small deck built on the side of the house. He didn’t like that the slats weren’t long, were poorly nailed, and the seams didn’t match cleanly. I expect his will be better. Ling has seen other things he’s built, and says they are very nice.

Only equipment we’re waiting on is to get the Rinnai infrared grill.  The distributor didn’t call Ling back today.

Emily, Matilda’s cousin who we have hired, arrives Monday.  Ling’ll put them to work cleaning all the construction filth (dust, debris, etc)

The woman who runs the store we bought all our industrial kitchen equipment from (chiller, oven, and gas burner) drives us nuts.  She never follows up on any promises of action, never returns calls, etc.  Yesterday, things were supposed to arrive, but she fucked it all into a cocked hat, so instead we had to wait until  today.  I wish that was the only problem we suffered.

Today the workers were unloading the oven (it’s enormous) and Frank, our architect/builder comes by. He turns colors immediately and starts talking to the workers in dialect. Clearly something is wrong.

Even though Frank and Ling asked, confirmed, and reconfirmed with this woman that the oven ran on single-phase 20amp 220v circuit, in fact, no, it doesn’t.

It doesn’t run on single phase. It runs on triple-phase.

It isn’t 220V.  It’s 450V.

The only thing she got right is 20amp service.

So now Frank needs to get the electrician to rewire into the kitchen to provide adequate service.  All the cabinetry has already been installed, so this will be a stupid, unecessary, gross work.

Been here in Sandpoint since Saturday night. Today (monday) was the first day of my roasting seminar at Diedrich Roasters.  Learned the theory of developing and maintaining roaster temperature/time profiles.  Tomorrow will be roasting and cupping several batches of coffee.

Wednesday we’ll drive to Montana for the second half of the trip, which will include snow-shoeing, learning how to mush dog-sleds, and cross-country skiing.  We’ll be back in Seattle something like Saturday night I guess.

For a small town, Sandpoint is way, way better than other small shitty towns we’ve stayed in (Alice Springs and various Cootervilles across the Nevada/Arizona/California).  Had a nice bottle of Italian from Valpolicella tonight. Last night drank a bunch of bears and apple pie at a local dinner.

Posted on a flickr are a number of photos from my house, mid-construction.  All the workers left for Chinese New Year, and the photos aren’t very good, but give some idea of the cabinetry and final build-out of the room.  My internet connection isn’t very good here, so I am having some problems ordering and cleaningup up many of the photos.

http://flickr.com/photos/karavshin/sets/72157603850464619/

On Tuesday I was asked how much of my house is finished. I answered 50% and then on reflection said maybe more like 60%.  I think I grossly underestimated.  Yesterday I was at the house when all the built in cabinetry was arriving, and when the stairs and wood flooring was finished.  In fact, the house is very close to being done, perhaps 80% now.  There was an absolute mountain of cabinets in the living room, waiting to be installed into the bedrooms and kitchen.  If it weren’t for imminent Chinese New Year, the house would be finished by the end of February.
This reality, and the fact that tomorrow morning I’m leaving for a month in the USA, keeps pushing me to throw away more and more stuff from the basement storage. I’ve managed to reduce my books library by 90%.   My computer and old electronics rubbish, by 98%.   Practically the only thing I haven’t culled has been my collections of old memories and photographs.  I have trunks full of slide albums.

But having slides today is sort of like having Han Solo in ice.  I really have to want a photo to go to the trouble of re-installing my slide scanner and processing the slide. So much so that I haven’t scanned a slide in close to five years.

Thinking about this, I realized a great double-blow solution would be to use the Scan Cafe service.  I could get electronic scans of all these immobilized images. Then I’d (1) have access to them electronically, which is vastly more useful  (2) be able to throw out at least fifty pounds of crap from my house.

The Scan Cafe service comes well-recommended by Kevin Kelly Cool Tools.  I will want to do some more due diligence on their service, but I am very tempted to try this out.  If it works, maybe I’ll sponsor to have other family collections electronically thawed.  Dad has piles of carouselled slides somewhere in the attic.  They also scan photos, and I’d be thrilled to have a bigger library of photos of Pa and Nanny, for example.

I popped by the house for the first time since Saturday. They’ve accomplished a lot, but most interesting was the installation of my ladder.

The architect did it right. The ladder is easy to get on, safe to climb, and easy to get off. I’m very happy with it.

I was very pleasantly suprised to find that the roof itself is safe, too. The edge wall comes up almost to my chest. There is no danger of flipping off the roof while running around the perimeter.

The concrete up there is pretty solid, and there is existing lightning grounding. I ought to be able to install a pretty solid antenna installation. Not sure exactly how, but I am sure there is potential. Suggestions?

It’s probably the least sketchy roof I’ve ever climbed onto, except perhaps 9V1PC’s top storey antenna farm in Jalan Kayu.

Mary laid out some criteria recently, but if you’d seen me cleaning out my basement today, you might have serious doubts about me.

All Slaters are hoarders. There’s never been a spare bit that we didn’t think  could be used some day, and tucked it safely away in a crate somewhere.  When I moved to Singapore in 1997, I started out with two (full) suitcases.  Yesterday, if you’d taken all my rubbish, you could have a filled up at 40ft, 2300 cubic-foot cargo container (maybe more).

We’re moving to our new house in March.  It’s reasonably large, but it lacks the 2000-square foot warehouse floor underneath the main house,  my current place enjoys.  Ling and I agreed things  needed to be culled.

I went down sheepishly at 4pm and started picking at my crates of computer rubbish.  I started separating the obviously really antique crap (DSL modems from three generations ago, dead cooling fans,  P3 CPUs etc).  The amazing thing is that some momentum took hold of me, and suddenly instead of pulling crap out of crates to get rid of, I might only pull something or nothing out to save and the rest was consigned to the bin.

What become more frightening was I next moved onto the book sections.  I probably have four hundred or five  hundred books kept in crates.  I’ve kept them for a long time, read almost all of them, and liked a majority of them.  I started by throwing out the crap I didn’t like (select PKD titles, for example) but then I remembered a quote I read from Cory Doctorow who said he gets rid of the books he read. If on the (rare) chance he needs it again, he can always buy it for pennies from Amazon.  This lit me off, and I threw out whole containers of books.  Dozens of travel guides, Dozens of war books, Dozens of old fictions, etc.   The only authors I systematically kept where Haruki Murakami, Edward Abbey, and Edward Gorey.

Before I knew it, I had a massive, massive pile of shit culled.  There should be more to go, but I was shocked by myself, as if I was Wolverine, newly discovering the steel talons that come out of my hands or something.  Perhaps there is hope to actually shrink NetSlaterVolume by the time we get to 41 Springleaf. (at which point the swelling most certainly begins anew).

People keep mocking me when I tell them about the marvelous toilet we’re installing at our house, a Toto NeoRest. But as the months have moved along, I realize what a trend-setter I am in choosing this. Take for example:

When Leonardo DiCaprio had his house remodeled recently, he installed the $3,200 Neorest® 500 toilet, which features an air purifying system, multi-directional bidet, automatic flusher, and a pre-warmed seat. Along with the no-smell aspect, the eco-friendly crapper also features no tank, no refill wait, no refill noise, and an automatic lid opener. “Leo loves his new toilet,” said a pal of his. “It’s more like a toy since it has a remote control.” You mean he can take a dump without getting out of bed? We hear he’s eating more fiber now.

But now I’m afraid visitors who use the guest bathroom at our house will feel short-changed by the conventional bowls. Everyone will be looking for an excuse to slip into the master bath.

They’re fabricating a ladder to run outside my house from my second-storey study to the roof so I can get to my antennae and weather station and other surveillance equipment.

It looks pretty good and solid.

How do they fabricate the 90 bend at the top of the ladder?

The stairs to the attic have been welded up, and now a (rough) crew welders is modifying the bracing to get the struts out of way of the room. These guys are a bit edgy and hairy… sporting black eyes and dark expressions. Seems appropriate that they’d be upstairs in a dark attack doing the loud, brutal work.

Staircase from the attic down to my study

The 41 Springleaf update I received today

•   started tiling works at kitchen and bathrooms
•   awning works still in progress
•   electrical and plumbing in progress
•   concrete works at side and backyard done
•   started drainage works
•   covering floor at attic done partially.

Found a few sofas we like today. We need a big L-shaped thing for the living room. We’re going to get the L-configuration of the Natuzzi 2410 in a dark brown. (hides dog and kid stains, and isn’t as slippery). This sofa is a lot more comfortable than it looks. I like its looks because it manages to seem simultaneously modern and retro. Suits our Bauhaus home.

And then for the family room, we found this semi-vintage looking couch from Natuzzi that is also insanely comfortable.

Since we finished selecting all our kitchen appliances, our layout is pretty much finished.

Workers are bricking walls and installing door frames now.

The L-Shaped Kitchen

The Workshop

Master bathroom

Front corner

Last week we bought a bunch of appliances, including a 4-door commercial refrigerator, a Lainox combi-oven, and a gas hob.   Last night I ordered a custom Diedrich HR-1 coffee roaster (custom colored (RAL 7008) and pin-striped (RAL 1015) hahaha).

Today we finished up most of the major appliance shopping.  We bought a Bosch SGI 58MO5EU dishwasher, two De Dietrich DHD492 fume hoods, and a De Dietrich DTI309 5-zone Induction Hob.  [finding links for these products is AWFUL. Lots of different id’s for the same product, pages locked behind awful flash pages, etc]

The First Battle of Grozny was the Russian army’s invasion and subsequent conquest of the Chechen capital, Grozny, during the early months of the First Chechen War. The attack lasted from December 1994 to March 1995, resulted in the military occupation of the city by the Russian Army and rallied most of the Chechen nations around the separatist government of Dzhokhar Dudayev.

The initial assault resulted in very high federal casualties and an almost complete breakdown of morale in the Russian forces. It took them another two months of heavy fighting, and changing their tactics, before they were able to capture Grozny. The battle caused enormous destruction and casualties amongst the civilian population and saw the heaviest bombing campaign in Europe since the destruction of Dresden.^[1] Chechen separatist forces recaptured the city in August 1996, ending the war.

Our architect has started renovation. I visited this afternoon. It looked and sounded like 1980’s Beirut.

I saw the cases of five massive Makita jackhammers and a Makita chainsaw (I thought my house was made of concrete?) in the space formerly known as the living room. Basically everything has been blasted out of the house. It’s barely more than a concrete shell at this point.  I didn’t go far inside, because the sound of five jackhammers tearing apart the house was insanely deafening.

My favorite work was someone that had taken a sledgehammer and literally beaten a 3′ diameter hole through the middle of a brick wall. It looked like something from “Escape from Stalag 10.”

Completion due March 1st.

Make Room Layout

OVERVIEW

I want to turn my attic into a refuge where I work on all my various projects and other hobby stuff. It also needs to be an overflow guest room. It’s a 4.5m x 7.5m room. The staircase comes into the middle of the west wall. South of the staircase the wall will be replaced by a glass wall that overlooks onto my office below. Everything else is wall. If I’m lucky, I’ll get a skylight, but not counting on it.

What would I like to get in here?

• Ham radio and other instrumentation (weather stations, geophones, microntroller stuff, scanners)
• Sewing lab (I may end up buying a heavy-duty machine for leather, or perhaps a more advanced embroidery machine)
• Framing equipment for prints and photos
• Games room for playing board games
• Photography equipment, possibly even smallish studio
• Random art (drawing, etc)
• Reading room
• Inevitably many other things

HOW

Electronics instrumentation bench. I’d like to get something that resembles an electronics lab bench. Not especially deep, but with a desk and then racks for gear to be mounted high above, and with a light bank at the top. Brainstorming what features it might need:

• Access to rooftop antenna
• Heavy power bus circuits
• Variable power supply for projects
• Grounding/Static
• Easy cabling access
• Reconfigurable shelves and bracketing

Room Table. The obvious choice is a table with configurable shape and on caster wheels. The Knoll Propeller conference tables are the perfect solution.

Couch/Bed. I have a perfectly fine futon frame, it just needs a better (not cheap) cushion. I’ve always regretted buying the cheap-o cushion for that fucking thing.

The ? Shelf Area. This is where the real mystery is. What’s the clever thing to do here? Just install a lot of shelving where I cram everything? Or should I be attempting to install little kiosks? I’m tempted to leave it mostly as shelving because with a highly configurable table, I should be able to do most everything on that. On the other hand, like ling pointed out, for example, some sort of inbuilt sewing machine kiosk, so I am not forced to conitnually unpack/pack stuff. She knows I’m a mess and inevitably any table I have becomes a total pile of junk. Don’t believe me? Let me snap my iMac’s camera for a second.

Uploaded with Skitch!

Uploaded with Skitch!

So what I’m looking for is something clever to do here.  Afterall, it’s a bespoke room, I’d like something better than some generic shelving.

Draft floorplan of Office

OVERVIEW

This is the gross floorplan of my office at 41 Springleaft. It’s 4m by 5.5m. The east door leads out to the upstairs living room. The north door leads to the bathroom it shares with Luke’s room. I just told the contractor move the stairs to the north side of the room. These stairs lead to my attic Lab and Craft room. If they were on the south side, as previously drawn, then it would break up the room even more and force me to have my desk in view of the door, which I hate. West wall is a large window facing the jungle.

PURPOSE

• PC desk (iMac, three printers, UPS, network storage, and many other peripherals)
• Store electric devices (ipods, cameras, phones, etc)
• Household administration (bills, taxes, accounting, finances)
• Recordkeeping (files)
• Stationery storage
• Charging station for all my electronic rubbish (cameras, phones, ipods, etc)
• Book storage (we have crates and crates and crates full of books)

HOW

CS: Charging station, this needs to be a cabinet, or set of shelves, or some preferably clean, tidy, clever way to keep that huge bundle of stupid wall warts, chargers, usb hubs, cabling, extension cords organized and preferably hidden. I can’t think of a good way to do this, frankly.

Generic Danish Modern Secretary

DMS: Danish Modern Secretary. I want to get a nice example of a Danish Modern Secretary desk. I can keep all the shit adminstration that I hate doing in one place, take care of it, and then close the door and forget about it. I want all that stuff as segregated from the rest of my life and work as I can. My danish friend is helping me monitor the many Danish-equivalents of eBay (Lauritz and to Bruun Rasmussen, for example) find a nice one of these.

FC: File Cabinets. My calculations show that three file cabinets standing four drawers high and 60cm deep will be adequate to handle all my files for the next five to seven years minimum. Possibly ten. I’d love to get James Jesus Angleton-style “File Safes” — file cabinets made from armor with giant combination locks on the front, in some hideous government drab. I dont’ know if I can. Shipping 2,400pounds of file cabinets overseas sounds ludicrous.

The Question Mark (?): I don’t know. This is dead corner space. Pinched on one side by 5-foot tall file cabinets. Pinched on the other side by a desk. What do I put in that area? I was wondering if I could findsome sort of giant lazy susan to cram back there and keep stuff?

UNANSWERED QUESTIONS

• Where can I keep a large fraction of my crates-and-crates-and-crates of books in here?  The best I could come up with was to have high bookshelves above the filing cabinets going to the ceiling.  I would prefer to keep the area above the desk free of anything, leaving room for art.  I also thought to wall in the staircase and mount bookshelves high up on the room-side of the staircase wall.  I don’t know how well (gross?) that would be.
• How to organize/arrange all the printers and crap and the infamous “charging station” into something not irritating?
• Where to keep all my stationary?  Presumably a lot of this could fit into an adequately sized Danish Modern Secretary?
• What clever shit am I not thinking of?

Met up with contractor today to see revised set of plans on the house. The Physical Engineer approved converting the dead-space attic into a proper room. Now the project chief, Frank, wants to get us decided on wiring and plumbing so that he can proceed with the ripping-up works.

Deciding on outlets and power service is a big deal, particularly in the kitchen. It’s forcing me to decide soon on what appliances I’ll be using.

To that end, I met with two different kitchen guys today to talk appliances. One is the distributor for an Italian commercial-quality line. The other is a a specialist in used commercial equipment. He’s the guy who I bought my Nuova Simonelli Mac 2000v espresso machine from three or four years ago.

The Italian line guy will send me a quote. I’m expecting it to be very expensive.

Ling and I talked with the used equipment guy for a long hour or two tonight. His advice was basically that I could buy everything used except the refrigerator. He didn’t recommend buying used refrigerators because you cannot judge the compressor or health of the machinery. But for the other equipment, he told us that instead of paying $12,000 for a new Lainox combi-oven, we could get a used one for $3,000, for instance.   The brands I would buy here all have long-term reliable support, not fly-by-night agents.  On Saturday we’re going to a couple dealers to look at equipment first hand and further refine what we want.

It’s also forcing me to decide on how the layouts of my rooms (the workshop, the attic, and the office) will be. This is also not trivial, as I need to decide how to break up all my equipment and projects. I don’t want to be lazy about the design and just default to the desinger, for, as I told Ling, it’s very infrequent we get chances to design rooms nearly from scratch.

meter dimensions of the three rooms

Anway, that is current status as I do more strategizing about room layouts.   Somehow I woke up at 6am today, and now I realize it is closing in on 2am, so I had best get to bed.