Jeremiah took down the lighting fixture in my room - the one they cut a giant hole in the drywall to accommodate when the walls were going up. I use lamps, though, and track lighting is on its way. So the hole really only serves as a means of letting in light and sound directly above my bed. He had a tough time getting it down and we couldn't figure out what the holdup was.
So let's play a little game - it's called Guess What's Holding This Light Fixture to the Ceiling.
Think carefully about your response, based on what you know of Renard. The way this building was constructed, it could be anything. Shady wiring, duct tape, a colony of wasps, chewing gum...
So what is it?
If you guessed "supernatural involvement," you're correct!
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
Friday, June 5, 2009
the duplicity of industral neighborhoods.
Yesterday as I walked the dog, I got about twenty yards from Renard's front door before coming to a vacant patch of overgrown land. It smelled strongly of honeysuckle and queen anne's lace. Having been left undisturbed for so long, it was its own tiny forest starting to spill over onto the sidewalk. If I'd been there at night, sniffling the air with my eyes closed, I would swear I was out in the country.
You can see stars from our back porch way more clearly than any neighborhood I've lived in, including my first apartment that was two blocks from a dark and quiet beach.
Most of our neighbors have lived on this block for upwards of seven, eight years. Maybe living in an industrial neighborhood for extended periods of time forces a person to seek out greenery. I have learned that my next door neighbors are organic farmers, and they were of the opinion that I should "go meet Al." Al is something of the oracle of the neighborhood. He's the scatterbrained but lively expert on all goings-on in our neighborhood. After I met him (and was prompted to remind him my name about five times), he led us to the yard behind his house, which is bursting with greenery. There, under the big ugly slabs of concrete from the expressway, is a little community garden on a man-made hill. It was raining when I was first shown the garden, and my next door neighbor took the opportunity to produce a handful of cantaloupe seeds from his pants pocket and plant them right there.
"This little patch is empty," Al said, kicking at some tall grass with the toe of his shoe. "If you have anything to plant, go for it. Everyone'll leave it alone."
Even our landlord was just featured in a local newspaper for his efforts to organize a neighborhood-specific recycling program. He was delighted when we led him outside to show him our big DIY recycling barrels.
In short, for all the times I reference the house on Paper Street in "Fight Club" when discussing Renard's problems, it hasn't yet been my experience that we live in a typical industrial neighborhood.
But there are exceptions.
I will not write another sad-panda entry like the one from earlier in this week, because we're all staying positive. I will spare everyone the long list of offenses committed in our alley, tales of aforementioned spider invasion, or the odd occasional weird smell outside. Instead, I have to lament on what's turning out to be a big problem to me:
I can't sleep in this house. It has not been soundproofed, because it was clearly not built to be lived in.
I've never had a problem with sleep in my life. It used to be that I could sit anywhere and fall asleep within 20 minutes, and stay out for hours. I have slept through two earthquakes, the better part of a home invasion, problematic bouts of jet lag, and dozens of noisy roommates and neighbors. But Renard has proven to be a problem.
It would seem that the walls built in February provide zero reduction in noise. In my bed at night, I can clearly hear Michelle and Jeremiah speaking in hushed tones. I can hear their cats sneeze. Sometimes in that late-night haze of keen awareness, I can hear a single book being removed from a shelf and put back.
And if there's anything happening in the studio directly below my room, forget it. Paper cutters, machinery, the radio, people talking at normal volumes - anything - will wake me up. I had my suspicions this would be the case. Having a firm knowledge of the sorry state of these floors (and being able to identify what flavor shisha my roomies are smoking in their hookah in the basement while I'm in my bedroom upstairs), I had a feeling sound would be an issue.
While I could once slip into a solid ten-hour coma after five minutes of rest and unwinding, it now takes me an average of two hours to fall asleep. And if anything disturbs me, I wake up like a shot and require another hour to fall back asleep. Three days in a row, it's been people talking at completely reasonable volumes and rather late in the day, since the restless nights have been making me sleep past noon on a regular basis.
This morning, someone decided at 8:55 a.m. that since his or her constant knocking on the neighbor's door wasn't cutting any ice, he or she would knock harder, for a solid eight minutes. (Maybe it was knocking, maybe someone was using a hammer... at this point, I wouldn't bat an eye if it was an ant climbing up a wall based on what I know of the acoustics in this place.)
I'd only been back to sleep for two hours and was so crippled with exhaustion that as badly as I wanted to answer the door while dragging my baseball bat behind me, I couldn't stand up. The southern sun was blinding. An ambulance went by. Trains. Trash-pickers. I was awake and staring at my clock until the sun obscured the time... and when I finally dozed off, it was people talking and laughing in the hallway. Ugh.
I really need to find a solution. But the walls are built, my bedroom floor is finished, and I can't very well tell people to refrain from talking at 12:30 in the afternoon. But something's gotta give, because I'm turning into a zombie.
You can see stars from our back porch way more clearly than any neighborhood I've lived in, including my first apartment that was two blocks from a dark and quiet beach.
Most of our neighbors have lived on this block for upwards of seven, eight years. Maybe living in an industrial neighborhood for extended periods of time forces a person to seek out greenery. I have learned that my next door neighbors are organic farmers, and they were of the opinion that I should "go meet Al." Al is something of the oracle of the neighborhood. He's the scatterbrained but lively expert on all goings-on in our neighborhood. After I met him (and was prompted to remind him my name about five times), he led us to the yard behind his house, which is bursting with greenery. There, under the big ugly slabs of concrete from the expressway, is a little community garden on a man-made hill. It was raining when I was first shown the garden, and my next door neighbor took the opportunity to produce a handful of cantaloupe seeds from his pants pocket and plant them right there.
"This little patch is empty," Al said, kicking at some tall grass with the toe of his shoe. "If you have anything to plant, go for it. Everyone'll leave it alone."
Even our landlord was just featured in a local newspaper for his efforts to organize a neighborhood-specific recycling program. He was delighted when we led him outside to show him our big DIY recycling barrels.
In short, for all the times I reference the house on Paper Street in "Fight Club" when discussing Renard's problems, it hasn't yet been my experience that we live in a typical industrial neighborhood.
But there are exceptions.
I will not write another sad-panda entry like the one from earlier in this week, because we're all staying positive. I will spare everyone the long list of offenses committed in our alley, tales of aforementioned spider invasion, or the odd occasional weird smell outside. Instead, I have to lament on what's turning out to be a big problem to me:
I can't sleep in this house. It has not been soundproofed, because it was clearly not built to be lived in.
I've never had a problem with sleep in my life. It used to be that I could sit anywhere and fall asleep within 20 minutes, and stay out for hours. I have slept through two earthquakes, the better part of a home invasion, problematic bouts of jet lag, and dozens of noisy roommates and neighbors. But Renard has proven to be a problem.
It would seem that the walls built in February provide zero reduction in noise. In my bed at night, I can clearly hear Michelle and Jeremiah speaking in hushed tones. I can hear their cats sneeze. Sometimes in that late-night haze of keen awareness, I can hear a single book being removed from a shelf and put back.
And if there's anything happening in the studio directly below my room, forget it. Paper cutters, machinery, the radio, people talking at normal volumes - anything - will wake me up. I had my suspicions this would be the case. Having a firm knowledge of the sorry state of these floors (and being able to identify what flavor shisha my roomies are smoking in their hookah in the basement while I'm in my bedroom upstairs), I had a feeling sound would be an issue.
While I could once slip into a solid ten-hour coma after five minutes of rest and unwinding, it now takes me an average of two hours to fall asleep. And if anything disturbs me, I wake up like a shot and require another hour to fall back asleep. Three days in a row, it's been people talking at completely reasonable volumes and rather late in the day, since the restless nights have been making me sleep past noon on a regular basis.
This morning, someone decided at 8:55 a.m. that since his or her constant knocking on the neighbor's door wasn't cutting any ice, he or she would knock harder, for a solid eight minutes. (Maybe it was knocking, maybe someone was using a hammer... at this point, I wouldn't bat an eye if it was an ant climbing up a wall based on what I know of the acoustics in this place.)
I'd only been back to sleep for two hours and was so crippled with exhaustion that as badly as I wanted to answer the door while dragging my baseball bat behind me, I couldn't stand up. The southern sun was blinding. An ambulance went by. Trains. Trash-pickers. I was awake and staring at my clock until the sun obscured the time... and when I finally dozed off, it was people talking and laughing in the hallway. Ugh.
I really need to find a solution. But the walls are built, my bedroom floor is finished, and I can't very well tell people to refrain from talking at 12:30 in the afternoon. But something's gotta give, because I'm turning into a zombie.
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
updates
Apologies for the long delay, but we've hit a couple snags. It's been a bad month.
We thought basement flooding problems would be solved with a three foot wide, fifteen foot long, three and a half foot deep trench in the studio. Sump pump was installed and secured and cemented over. It worked. The groundwater is now redirected through the foundation wall and into the empty field next door.
Now that that's out of the way, the cursed walls of Renard continued to emit moisture - only this time through the sewer and the living room ceiling. It would seem that the upstairs hot water heater has been spewing water, and the new upstairs tenants didn't stem the flow or call the landlord. I guess they didn't know it was such a dire situation. So imagine Brad's surprise this morning to come upstairs to see a lovely waterfall cascading down the living room wall.
It's a long story, but many holes were drilled to relieve the pressure of 70 gallons of water that have all this time been hanging out on top of the drywall. Lovely.
So the studio is dry... but the sewer grate spews all sorts of horror every time the water is used upstairs.
A chain of highly improbably vehicular incidents has left us minus one car and plus hundreds of dollars in parking ticket/boot fees, money that was supposed to be spent finishing the kitchen.
The landlord's younger family members are apparently still under the impression that our house is their playground, and have taken to breaking into the basement and screaming and knocking things over.
Spiders. We have spiders.
The trash-pickers and vagrants of this neighborhood are causing problems with the alley, ignoring the sign painted on our back door, and conducting all sorts of fascinating business just inches from bedroom #1.
There's nothing positive to say lately.
We thought basement flooding problems would be solved with a three foot wide, fifteen foot long, three and a half foot deep trench in the studio. Sump pump was installed and secured and cemented over. It worked. The groundwater is now redirected through the foundation wall and into the empty field next door.
Now that that's out of the way, the cursed walls of Renard continued to emit moisture - only this time through the sewer and the living room ceiling. It would seem that the upstairs hot water heater has been spewing water, and the new upstairs tenants didn't stem the flow or call the landlord. I guess they didn't know it was such a dire situation. So imagine Brad's surprise this morning to come upstairs to see a lovely waterfall cascading down the living room wall.
It's a long story, but many holes were drilled to relieve the pressure of 70 gallons of water that have all this time been hanging out on top of the drywall. Lovely.
So the studio is dry... but the sewer grate spews all sorts of horror every time the water is used upstairs.
A chain of highly improbably vehicular incidents has left us minus one car and plus hundreds of dollars in parking ticket/boot fees, money that was supposed to be spent finishing the kitchen.
The landlord's younger family members are apparently still under the impression that our house is their playground, and have taken to breaking into the basement and screaming and knocking things over.
Spiders. We have spiders.
The trash-pickers and vagrants of this neighborhood are causing problems with the alley, ignoring the sign painted on our back door, and conducting all sorts of fascinating business just inches from bedroom #1.
There's nothing positive to say lately.
Sunday, May 10, 2009
this and that
Brad cutting tile for the bathroom
Row#1 is down and ready for cabinet installation
Laying the slate
Creative ways to contain bisbehaving wildlife, number 738
Grilling
Just before the rest of the cabinets went up
Saturday, May 9, 2009
plumbing and electrical surprises.
This is an old one and I don't know how it slipped through the cracks, but since Blogger's tweaking out and won't let me post any photos, let's have another video. It's from three weeks ago when we were trying to figure out some solutions for the bathroom walls.
Monday, May 4, 2009
We entertain, therefore we are.
Last night was our first miniature shindig at Hotel Renard. A couple of bags of charcoal, a reused circle grill discovered at the property, a run to Dominick's and Whole Foods, and we were set. Many were invited, only a few showed up, but that's why you invite so many in the first place.
A mixture of vegans, vegetarians, pescatarians and carnivores made it a Chicago experience. Battles on the grill for clean space ("Don't let your lamb touch my meatless sausage!"), a fine time outdoors with a worklight blasting 300 watts at us all, and closing the night with peaches and cream in the hookah.
As people dispersed, we were all impressed with how well everything held up. We still have no kitchen sink (or floor, or upper cabinets). The bathroom has a floor and equipment but is unpainted and has no real lighting. The living room holds more boxes than people, but it all went smoothly.
As things progress in the coming weeks, the sense of dominoes falling will overwhelm all of us as work clutter disappears, leaving real clutter that has to be sorted, stored and shelved. The final step is making the official announcement: "we're home."
A mixture of vegans, vegetarians, pescatarians and carnivores made it a Chicago experience. Battles on the grill for clean space ("Don't let your lamb touch my meatless sausage!"), a fine time outdoors with a worklight blasting 300 watts at us all, and closing the night with peaches and cream in the hookah.
As people dispersed, we were all impressed with how well everything held up. We still have no kitchen sink (or floor, or upper cabinets). The bathroom has a floor and equipment but is unpainted and has no real lighting. The living room holds more boxes than people, but it all went smoothly.
As things progress in the coming weeks, the sense of dominoes falling will overwhelm all of us as work clutter disappears, leaving real clutter that has to be sorted, stored and shelved. The final step is making the official announcement: "we're home."
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