at least we got it out of the way early.

Nothing like a good dose of blood-curdling fear to begin a new era.

Michelle, Jeremiah and Brad moved in yesterday. I think they had something ridiculous like an 18-hour day. Luckily, they had the all-day use of a giant moving truck. They left to pick up their final truck load at about 7:30 PM. 

Meanwhile, Man with the Plan and I ran out to Home Depot to buy some supplies for an interim shower curtain while we wait to save up for an actual shower door. We swung by Dominick's to grab some celebratory beers. We set up the shower curtain and paced the length of the kitchen and tried to come up with flooring solutions. (We decided on slate and are all gung-ho on it, except a few of the tiles we laid down for the purposes of cabinet installation of broke overnight. We have too much work to do before we can seal/grout slate, and it's not feasible to cut off the front of Renard from the bathroom and bedrooms while we wait for it to dry. We'll think of something.)

I walked through the living room for reasons I don't remember and stopped dead in my tracks at the end of the privacy wall by the reception desk. My senses became overpowered by this sickly sweet smell, like burnt sugar. I took a quick mental assessment - no food in the house. No spills. No open drinks. No garbage sitting out. The bakery had been closed for hours. I took another whiff, and this time I smelled that weird ozone/electrical smell that people will tell you doesn't actually exist. I checked all the outlets. No sparks, no charred outlets. Nothing. So for a brief moment I decided that either Renard is haunted, or I was moments away from my first stroke at 25 years of age.

Anyway, it was dark outside and the wind was kicking up. It had been a lovely 80 degrees out all day - perfect for moving - but there was supposedly a thunderstorm on the way. Man with the Plan and I stood in the gallery, drinking beers, when we heard a sound like a loud groan - as though the building was in pain - and all the lights went out. The emergency floodlights flashed on instantly. "Aaand the power's out," commented Man. "That's great."

"Oh no. How could that have happened? What do we have running right now? The overhead lights, the bathroom light... and whatever Brad's got going in the basement. Oh, the dehumidifier."

"Yeah, but that's not enough to knock out the power. Let me go outside and check."

We keep careful notes on our meters. I checked the sheet where we note the dials on the electricity meter twice daily. In 30 hours, we'd used about $3 worth of electricity, basically ruling out the possibility that we blew a circuit from overuse.

Man came back a minute later and reported that the entire block was out, including a gallery party and the salon where some hapless woman was getting her hair styled in total darkness. We made the requisite calls to ComEd and the landlord, determined that there were no elderly folks in the building who would need help, and then sat down in silence to sip our beers.

And then we heard what sounded like two gun shots a couple of houses down. Pop pop.

"What the hell was that?!"

"I don't know, but stay away from the windows."

My heart started racing. A minute later, a third pop in the same place. We called the police and I ran to the back of the house to try to find some candles. We weren't sure how long the emergency flood lights would last. Man almost tackled one of Michelle and Jeremiah's mannequins because it was leaned semi-ominously around the corner in the work room and was gleaming in the moonlight from the window. 

Outside, the wind was even stronger. I couldn't find any candles in my room, groping boxes and digging through them in pitch darkness. I got back up to the gallery, and we heard a fourth pop.

Man looked at the front door and then turned back. "There was a shooting a few blocks north of here tonight. I don't know if..."

"It can't be gun shots. Why four, all spaced out, sounding totally uniform?"

"It has to be a transformer."

"Yeah. I thought I smelled that electricity smell like ten minutes before the lights went out. But why would I smell it before anything happened?"

"I don't know, but don't touch any metal, okay? No door knobs, no windows, no door frames, just stay put. I've never heard four transformers pop at once. I'm going outside."

Man disappeared. I looked through the open door and watched Man walk down the street. Police cars were starting to zoom in and out of side streets and drunk partygoers were ambling down the street, oblivious to what we thought was certain danger. I sat in the silence of a blacked-out Renard and wondered where everyone else was and why their last trip was taking so long. 

I went outside too. 

Everything seemed okay aside from the minor quake of fear when a small black car slowly turned out of the alley and rolled up a few parking spaces over with their headlights turned out. I froze in place and could only breathe when a woman kicked the door open and went into the back seat to retrieve her baby. Phew.

Back in Renard, there wasn't much to do except wait for the others. I went for a second check for candles and then heard an ambulance. I peeked out my bedroom window just in time to see a truck pull up behind Renard. The others had returned! Man and I went out the back bedroom and told them a whole bunch of crazy stuff was happening, but they didn't seem too concerned.

As the house wimp, I found it necessary to mutter, "Yeah, but we should still make it quick, guys. There's a storm coming and moving stuff into a warehouse by flashlight is going to look really shady if any cops drive by."

"Yeah, good point," Jeremiah said. 

We set about moving everything as quickly as we could. This was not an easy task, as the last truckload was a bunch of old furniture - a drafting table, a light table, tables, counters, and huge metal filing cabinets.

I had the dog under one arm and the flashlight in my other hand. The dog hates wind and was starting to wriggle out of my grasp and whine at the gusts of wind hitting us from all directions. One of those winds brought the powerful ozone smell from the living room. It was then that what we were doing fully set in. We were standing in a large metal truck, unloading large metal fixtures in an alley possibly littered with downed wires and busted transformers, all with a thunderstorm on the way. In the dark.

At this moment, I started to survey the area with the flashlight, and fixed my gaze on the transformers. One of them was completely blackened. 

"You guys, look," I said. "That transformer blew up."

"ComEd's on the way," said Man. "They'll fix it."

"Yeah. At least we know nobody was out here shooting at-" I stopped when I saw a large, black SUV at the mouth of the alley. "Somebody's trying to get in, whoops."

As soon as I said this, the car pulled out of the alley in reverse and gunned it backwards all the way into a parking lot across the street. It sat there for several moments, idling with the headlights on, seemingly pointed directly at us.

Because I was the only one in the bunch nervously awaiting our fate of being electrocuted, then shot by thugs and arrested by police, I paid very careful attention to the black SUV. "You guys, he's not going anywhere, he's just sitting there."

The boys stopped what they were doing and all turned to look at the SUV. The driver immediately switched on the brights, left them on for about ten seconds, and then flicked them off. 

"What the hell is this clown doing?"

The others went about moving furniture into the studio by the side basement door. After a minute or two, the SUV was gone. 

I breathed a sigh of relief, and then was momentarily stricken by fear when a car pulled into the opposite end of the alley. I screamed, "HE'S COMING!"

It was a Lincoln towncar and everyone laughed at me. Jerks.

Jeremiah told me to relax. I had a giggle too, and then cautiously looked southward - and saw that the black SUV was parked right back in the same spot in the parking lot, headlights fixed on what we were doing. This is right about the time that my legs started to feel a little weak.

I know the others weren't afraid, so maybe they were just humoring me when Brad emerged from the basement with two hammers and announced that nothing bad was going to happen to us. This didn't lessen my fear.

While Brad was back situating something in the basement, the black SUV started up and looked like it was heading to the street. I took my eyes away from the scene for a brief moment to look at Man, who was inside the moving truck. I turned with the flashlight toward the end of the alley just in time to see a dark car driving full-speed toward the moving truck with no signs of stopping.

At this point, adrenaline took over and all I could do was scream "HE'S COMING, HE'S COMING.... STOP!" Everything was happening in slow motion as I became certain that this car was going to slam into the back of the truck and hurt Man and Jeremiah. My arm involuntarily wound up because for some reason in my panic, it became my plan to spike the flashlight through the car's windshield if the driver didn't stop. 

The driver slammed on the brakes and I heard Man shout "It's a cop!"

My knees turned to jelly and I quickly aborted the flashlight plan.

And then Jeremiah's dad cheerfully emerged from the car. He'd come to help unload.

I thought my heart was going to explode, so I just went inside to sit in the gallery and unwind a little. I'll spare everyone the details of how the pitch-black basement navigation went.

ComEd came and fixed the power less than five minutes after the move was completed. Of course.

I found the candles at last, put them in a very visible area on the gallery table, and then had a second beer. My hands stopped shaking, Michelle came over, and everything went back to normal.

Sounds like we're off on the right foot.

Tribute to the Beast

This is the Beast, a hole in the kitchen floor that goes straight to the basement. We're eventually patching it from beneath so we can finish laying down the hardibacker and start tiling.  But can you believe this thing?

the bedroom loft

I just though I'd post Michelle's pictures of how the bedroom loft is coming along!

Carpeted. Smart!

Yep, it's taller than it looks.

Cleaning out the ducts. Ugh. The ducts run the length of the space and we're all afraid to open them up and find 20 years of filth, but that's probably the way it's going to go. As soon as i can get my hands on a tall enough ladder, I'm going to get going on that. Yuck.

Testing the depth of the wall to see if recessed shelving will work.

Michelle and Jeremiah credit their friend Alex as being the mastermind of the project. It took the three of them one night to do the whole thing! The closet's going underneath.

All this business about recessed surfacing and maximizing of space has given me flashbacks to the Beatles movie "Help," which I watched every single day from 1996 to 1999. I was enchanted by their house, which I think was supposed to be an example of modern decor highly stylized to the point of comedy. But aside from the spy attempting to bite off Ringo's finger, it was a dream house to me. I'll see if Brad has any opinions about scrapping the basement bedroom and living in a hole in the gallery floor instead.

Disasters and discoveries

I had to check the date of my last entry twice. I feel like I just wrote yesterday but I guess it's been a week already. I don't even know where to begin with the updates. I guess I'll start with the bathroom.

We're all geeked on Hardibacker. Have you seen this stuff? We heard about it when we were just about tapped for ideas on the floor which is, as I mentioned a couple weeks ago, a patchwork of cracked cement, linoleum, cracked tile with more tile showing underneath, paint-stained and rotting wood, duct-taped planks (?!) and holes that lead straight through to the basement. At first we thought plywood would do the trick, but research led us to more questions and frustration. Plywood apparently does nothing for unlevel surfaces and is not guaranteed to settle evenly. Hardibacker is risky, tough to cut (heavy) and a bit expensive, but we've heard from multiple sources that it's going to save our necks. 
http://www.onlinetips.org/hardibacker-tile-installation

Installation went pretty well.

We had to take out the toilet to cut the last piece. Tossed the old wax ring once it was determined to be older than all of us combined - gross. After the toilet was taken out and parked in the hallway, we tore out some of the rotting nastiness of the back wall. We found old wood slats for plaster and a ton of mold. It was a disheartening find to say the least. Every day we demo, we find even more unpleasant surprises. We've decided to put up drywall in place of the old wall. We wanted to put up some more Hardibacker and just tile the whole bathroom for the purposes of easy cleaning, except hardibacker isn't really a weight-bearing material. So the idea was scrapped. 

We let the hardibacker set overnight. The next day, Sunday, was all about tiling.

We had a couple minor incidents of tile slippage, but not much else to speak of. And many of the final tiles were put down in the dark. We shut off a circuit due to some shady wiring we keep finding more of. We wanted to grout today, but couldn't because it rained. This may seem like a funny statement, but if you write it with heavy heart over the fact that the search for aforementioned shady wiring left a slight open strip in the ceiling that made way for a roof leak to spill freely onto your new tiling job, it's not quite so amusing.  

Supposedly, the back roof was replaced a few years ago for an astronomical amount of money. So we shouldn't have rain pooling and leaking into the house, but we do. And to top it all off, our search for the source of the leak was hampered slightly by a metric ton of proof that the upstairs resident has decided to let her dogs use the roof as a bathroom... again. Even after promising to stop. We need to work on the gutters and hopefully get a downspout aimed at an open field next to the building. And we need a five-inch cap to cover an old heating vent. That should take care of it... we hope.

Monday was spent waiting for the gas man to come check our meter and do a little inspection. He informed us that our water heater is spewing water everywhere and is costing us money. We were aware of this and just sort of blinked in response. The phrase "rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic" comes to mind. Water heater on the fritz? Cool. Maybe we'll get to it after we know the bathroom ceiling won't collapse and Jeremiah's done pulling out all the 60-year-old wiring that threatens to, y'know, burn us all to death in our sleep. 

The internet guy came on Monday afternoon too. Not to borrow from "Money Pit" again, but the look on the poor installation guy's face was priceless when he walked into Renard. There was a sink and toilet in the hallway, tools and hardware scattered through the work area, tile debris and dust on every square inch of the living room, a crazed chihuahua running laps around the kitchen, and junk everywhere. I was barefoot, drinking coffee and watching "Maury," now mostly oblivious to our quaint little disaster area. I half expected him to make a crack about bomb testing. But he quietly went about his work and left. The internet still doesn't work. Our account has been open for two weeks and we've had nothing resembling a connection. AT&T has bungled this operation from day one. They've fought us on every step of the way, be it through delays, outright lies, lack of communication, general ineptitude, you name it. We've spent many hours on the phone with AT&T and only tonight discovered that (surprise) it's a wiring problem on our end.

Brad has finally been able to start work on his room. This is going to be the bachelor pad to end all bachelor pads, people. He moved a drafting table and a swanky-looking fish tank setup down there before anything else and has said he's going with plexiglass walls, so I'm pretty excited to see how it'll turn out. With few space constraints, he's breaking ground on a big expanse of the basement. They started building today. But first they had to power wash everything and start painting over years of bad graffiti. 

 

The studio saga is ongoing. Jeremiah has determined that the studio floor is just shy of a two-inch thick slab of cement, and then dirt. This explains the mold and perpectual wetness. We aim to lay cement this week. 1200 pounds of it. The landlord is going to brick up some of the walls and then we can get cracking. But first, he'll have to pull out all the dirt someone cleverly used as insulation. This move was almost as creative as the cardboard crammed in the ceiling that Brad found when he was priming the basement walls.

Jeremiah found a bag of rat poison in the basement. It was unopened and the receipt placed the purchase to way back in 2000, but at least we know there is some here. We'll have to figure out a way to clean up any more that's probably in the house.

And it would seem that the one problem that's been plaguing us since the day we found the space has finally been solved - the arrangement of the kitchen. The major appliances are in place and three of our four cabinets were bought today and over the weekend. We found an arrangement that fits. We're drawing up plans for an island (that Brad's kickass dad is going to help us with). By the end of this week we aim to stain the cabinets, find a sink, lay down hardibacker and tile, hook up wiring and outlets to the appliances, and maybe even build a wall between the kitchen and living room. 

It never ends. But at least now it's happening quickly.

The good, the bad, and the... vermin.

To say we've been busy would be putting it mildly. It's been one of the busiest weeks to date and we've had more than one snag, but we're working through it.  Just to give an idea of how things have been going:

Good: We found three essential kitchen appliances for cheap on Craigslist. They're relatively new and in fantastic shape.

Bad: As soon as they were in the space, we realized for the first time that they're cream-colored and will not match anything we own.

Good: Appliance paint is always an option.

Bad: We can't fully agree on colors yet. And even if we could, the large expanse of exposed brick in the kitchen has severely limited our color options.

Good: We worked out some ways to run power trials to figure out where our leaks are, what uses the most energy and if anyone else is using our grid without paying. (The first floor was abandoned for a number of months and while we do trust our neighbors, we can't rule out the possibility that this has happened.)

Bad: As soon as we patted ourselves on the back for coming up with solutions, we called the electric company and were informed that based on past bills for the space, a $1100 security deposit will be required. This estimate is incorrect for multiple reasons - the space used to be twice as big, was zoned commercially at the time, and was a late-night gym that sucked up tons of power. We asked to be transferred to another operator. After 25 minutes of pacing,  foot-stomping, hand-wringing and more than a few swear words, we have bypassed this requirement.

Good: Bedroom #1 is painted and the ambitious lofted bed/closet was built over the weekend. It's a sight to behold - it's going to be the kind of bedroom worthy of being splashed across Apartment Therapy and design magazines. Well done, roomies!

Bad: We've been told we're crazy if we consider laying down Bedroom #1's cement floor before summer, and we really need it done now. It doesn't help that it's been 40 degrees for something like thirteen consecutive days.

Good: After finally coming up with a kitchen layout that works, moving all work-related things to the gallery, and honing in on a final date for a completed bathroom, Renard is finally starting to resemble a home instead of the cold and dirty semi-abandoned space it once was.

Bad: While we were all out for Easter, a little mouse wandered into the workspace in the furnace room and quietly gave up the ghost. Not only do we not want vermin (obviously), the point was raised that mice don't typically come right out into the open to croak. It makes me believe he ate something that didn't agree with him. I'm hoping it was sweeping compound or something. If we have rat poison anywhere on the premises, we're in trouble. We have three cats and a dog moving in and once rat poison has been put out even in one location, the little buggers disperse it everywhere and you'll never find it all. We'll keep our eyes open for more bitty corpses.

Good: The print work is taking off, our independent art endeavors are paying well, and most of us are due some pretty good tax returns.

Bad: Nothing. Ba-ZING!

Broken bones, plastic surgery

Plumbers #2 visited yesterday, charging the Landlord $400 to shoot a camera down the building's sewage drain. Camera made it 37 feet before hitting a wall. Tons of disgusting rank up until the 37th foot.

Building is 80-90 years old. Building's main exit pipe is clay. Pipe is probably cracked.

Two options: (a) hydrojet it every 6 months ($2000) or (b) tear up the major street out front and replace the pipe permanently ($14,000). Ouch. Landlord is getting a third opinion.

We're ordering lumber and Hardibacker today. Lumber to build a loft/bed/closet in Bedroom #1. Hardibacker to prep floor and walls in the bathroom. Ceramic tile can never go on plywood.

The rest of the flooring will be raised 1/2" with plywood to smooth it out. Kitchen will be more hardibacker as we'll lay ceramic there. So much to do, but need another $5000 to get it done. Looks like April 22nd to May 9th will be a lot of work. Hopefully we discover a lot of free time to do it.

I'm still excited more and more.

adulthood is...

... discovering that shower stall walls were built in your unfinished bathroom overnight, and finding yourself  immediately overcome with a giddiness that rivals Christmas morning.

...and then turning the corner into the hallway and realizing in your zeal to be finished with priming and painting, you packed in all the supplies without priming a huge area. You know, the gigantic one that's been casting its neon purple and aqua disco glow all over the place since day one. Nice.

The sewage pits have been filled and cemented, so it looks like Brad has the green light to start his bedroom.

Meeting with the plumbers today, and picking up a fridge later.

I've saved the best news for last: we may not have a working sink for the next few days, but as of yesterday, we have hot water.