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You are here: Home / Personal / Handyman Dan (Part 2)

Handyman Dan (Part 2)

August 18, 2019

This summer has been pretty awesome. Between all the side gigs including two weeks at summer camp, training jiu jitsu, surfing with the boys and handling business at home; it’s safe to say that I’ve kept myself pretty busy.

One of the biggest and most expensive changes happening at the house is that Caitlyn and I decided to apply for the Mills Act. What this means is that we are going to be adding our house to the list of historic homes in Anaheim. This also means retrofitting the front of the house back to its original condition. The inside can be whatever you want but what the public can see from the street has to comply.

Most notably, the vinyl double pane windows will be swapped out for single pane wood framed glass and the brick on the front of the house has got to go.

Speaking of Which

Close up of brick facade in Anaheim Colony home
Detail of the shallow bricks and mortar glued to a 1/2 inch sheet of plywood on the porch.

When we were getting quotes for the windows, we had signed a contract with the first company because they were running a special deal but it was the guy from the second company that showed up and blew us away. His name was Brian and he spent like half the time with us chatting about the brick wall and why double hung windows are the best. It was only after he offered to grab some tools from his car and persuaded us to start demoing the wall right then and there that he actually measured the windows. Honestly, I could see why some customers would be turned off by this but for us, it was exactly what sealed the deal with us. He just cared so much and had such an appreciation for the craft and our house. After he left, we immediately cancelled with that first company and booked with them. Kudos Brian.

Brick facade broken away to reveal wood siding underneath in Anaheim CA Colony District
This is the little corner that started it all. Brian convinced me to grab the ladder and start chipping away right here to see what was underneath.

For the next few days, Caitlyn spent all her free time with a hammer and chisel working on the bricks. I get the fun job of using a little 3″ saw to rip the plywood and peel off the board. Caitlyn works for hours on the wall and I get the 3 seconds of pleasure. #marriage

Broken brick facade in dirt in Anaheim CA Colony District
Little piece of the past. As far as we know, this brick facade has been up since at least the late 70’s. Honestly, I think it held up pretty well but quality and looks wise.
View of porch under construction in Anaheim CA Colony District
Imagine all that wood siding under there…
Caitlyn smiling at camera with exposed wood siding under brick facade in Anaheim CA Colony District Mills Act
Turns out that the siding underneath runs vertically throughout the entire porch. The rest of the house is horizontal as shown on the left side of the photo. We got lucky and ended up in the best case scenario here. The wood is in great shape aside from these ugly white patches.
Caitlyn chipping away brick in Anaheim CA Colony District
This IKEA hammer eventually broke and we got Caitlyn a proper tool.
Pile of broken brick pieces in Anaheim CA Colony District
The damage from a day of chipping

The Front Lawn

While all this was going on, I decided that our sprinkler system needed to be updated because a few heads weren’t working and I was convinced that there was a broken pipe. so I watched some YouTube videos and did a little research. Turns out that there’s a pretty dope rebate on the B-Hyve controller system which makes it basically free or less than $20 for Anaheim residents. The most fun part was wiring up the controller and running the wires. Thanks Dad.

While Caitlyn was at work one day, I grabbed a shovel and dug up a line across nearly the entire yard to realize that the pipe was fine. Caitlyn comes home to a giant brown skidmark on our lawn and cue the awkward laughs of “what the hell did you do to our lawn?” Of course, I dug it up all stupid without thinking about putting the grass back nicely.

Hole in front lawn to install sprinklers in Anaheim CA Colony District
I can’t tell you how many bug bites I got in this whole foray into home improvement but it was more than 30 on just my legs even with bug spray.

At this point we also realized that our half of the parkway doesn’t have a sprinkler feeding it. A few minutes later and we noticed that the little bits of cement in the grass turned out to be an entire decrepit walk path from the original owners. Dirt and grass had covered it since who know when.

Just another weekend project to add to the list.

View of front of house showing old concrete pathway in Anaheim CA Colony District
The cement walk path that was hidden under years of dead grass and dirt. We’ll be busting that out in the next few.

At Last, The Garage

View of garage from alley in Anaheim CA Colony District
We pushed everything into the middle and scraped out the tiles nearest the walls. Eventually, we’ll get to the rest of it. Caitlyn vacuums while I take a photo break.

Ever since the last day of school, I had been planning/dreaming of getting the garage into a place of near emptiness with a neat little workshop area in the corner.

Patched up wall in garage with outlet
There was a lot of patching to do on the walls. Also the color of the room was like “vomit white” or something.

When we bought the place, there was already drywall and insulation up complete with a ceiling. We had been thinking that someone was living there in the past because there were holes in the cement where a freestanding wall has been erected and studded to the floor. We never found a drain, so where did they use the toilet?

Missing drywall in garage Anaheim CA Colony District
This piece of drywall was pretty damaged and we had an extra piece laying around. Why not?
Termite damaged wood in Anaheim CA Colony District
The termite damage behind the drywall in the corner of the garage where Caitlyn says all the “spookies” live.

Anyways, the garage was in pretty crappy condition. Luckily for us, we don’t have a ton of stuff and are able to park a car in the garage with everything pushed to the walls. We only had to patch in the new windows and wall areas, paint and reorganize to get it in a functional state. The floor will have to wait until after the Mills Act work gets done.

Carter laying in grass in backyard in Anaheim CA Colony District
As usual, Carter laying around making sure that we were doing our jobs correctly while he has it made in the shade. He’s such a priss, he won’t lay down unless there’s a blanket or something soft, as soon as that happens, he’ll immediately claim it for himself.
Lost queen bee in Anaheim CA Colony District
In the middle of the day, Caitlyn disappeared for a little while. She came back and told me that a queen bee was hanging out on our trash can by itself and it looked like it was dying. A quick text to Caralyn (who used to keep bees) confirmed her suspicions. I guess it was on a mating flight but didn’t make it back to the hive.
Detail shot of old electrical outlet in garage in Anaheim CA Colony District
Old meets new.

And On The Last Day

Before heading back to school, I spent nearly the entire day in the garage putting up pegboard, a surf rack, hanging a mirror, mounting a vice and resurfacing the workbench. I’m so pumped with how it all came out.

I’m so excited to have a little space to keep clean and work on house projects. I had to rewire the sprinkler controller to fix an issue and within 30 seconds, I had a wire nut, my wire strippers and some 14 gauge wire in my hands. Like I tell my students all the time, it pays to be organized.

Pegboard and workshop in garage in Anaheim CA Colony District with milwaukee tools
It’s only recently that I discovered how much red stuff I own, not just tools but even my camera equipment and other things too. I never really thought of red as my favorite color but I guess red chose me in the past few years. Milwaukee, wanna sponsor me?
wide shot of garage and pegboard with surfboard in Anaheim CA Colony District
Wide shot of the workspace area. I got my surfboard out of the way and in a safe place. Kudos to my dad for installing the windows a few months back. It took us a while to get the drywall and windows looking good but man, it was worth it.
Close up of pliers on pegboard in Anaheim CA Colony District
Obligatory artsy shot of the plier wall.

Update 9/4/19

Been doing a little more around the house in the past weeks between starting school and preparing for our first hosted event at the house for my bday. We finally finished tearing down the entire brick wall on the front of the house but before I did that I spent five hours hunched over the sprinklers trying to get them perfect.

What I realized about installing irrigation is that doing the whole thing at once is really easy. What makes it so simple is that you have control of the endpoints for instance completely redoing the pipes. You start at your water source and do whatever you want until you get to the actual sprinkler heads. If you miss the mark by an inch or need to nudge a pipe over, easy peasy.

You can see here that I had to get three sets of pipes all at different lengths to meet up with minimal fuss. I should have taken this photo before covering up the bottom half with dirt so you could see the symphony of PVC I laid.

What’s super hard is making two pipes meet when you have no control over the endpoints. That’s what happened here. In short, we had three older water valves with a much short width between the inputs and outputs. When I replaced them, I had to rig up some crazy double street elbow set up with a swinging arm to get the angle right. I ended up going to Home Depot so many times that the last time I went I just bought like 12 pieces of everything and brought the store with me, no more running out for some bullshit 3/4 connector piece cause I ran out.

As you can see in the photo we got rid of the horizontal wood beams on the front porch because they were added much later (maybe the 70’s) and needed to go for historic purposes. I’m gonna miss the footrest support but I like how open the porch feels now. I can’t wait for the brick planters to go to open it up even more. Lots of porch hang time in the near future.

To zip these pieces out, I used some old SKIL saw that my dad gave me a few years back. With all these new battery operated tools it’s easy to forget the raw power of the plug in. These cuts only took 10 seconds of AC/DC fury.

Lastly, you can get a full view of the front porch in all it’s original wood glory. All those white marks are holes that were shoddily patched up with drywall mud (wtf?) Turns out that the whole front wall was drilled into to pump insulation between the studs. Our best guess is that is was done in reaction to the nightly disney fireworks. It could also be the alternative which we just found out about.

Damn that wood looks good. Hopefully we can just get it repaired rather than have to paint over it and lose the wood grain.

Check this out

In the garage, there are marks in the cement where studs were blasted into the ground and anchored down. The entire garage was already drywalled up and even had an insulated ceiling installed. Since the beginning, we thought that someone may have lived there at point. Without a drain in the floor, that thought slowly faded away but the question still lingered as to why the garage was set up like that. The previous owners used it like a swap meet sales floor with boxes everywhere and were surprised that we wanted to fix it up. For sure, they had nothing to do with it.

Our neighbor Ed, who’s lived there forever told us that the previous tenants before them were in a serious christian rock band and spent hours practicing in the garage. They were worried about the incessant noise thus put up some money and insulated the walls. This would explain the secondary floating wall in the middle of the room nearest the garage door. They wanted to keep the sound in while cranking out the tunes. Anyways, it’s pretty cool what you can find out when you actually talk to your neighbors…

Update 10/1/19

The walls are closing in, literally.

As we count down the last few weeks before our Mills Act deadline, we decided that we needed to repaint our fence and knock out the ugly brick planters near the front door.

First the bricks, then the concrete below.

Every weekend up until this point has been spent either lesson planning or working on the house. The nice part is that this process has brought us closer together and strengthened our marriage. Honestly, it’s pretty fun getting you hands dirty with the one you love.

We’ve been trying to curb our spending, so I opted to remove the bricks with a 3lb hammer and chisel instead of buying a sledgehammer. Truth be told, I did a much more methodical and cleaner job had I had 10lbs of fury slamming down on the concrete.
Caitlyn prepping the fence boards. We decided that at least primering the bottoms BEFORE installing them would be easiest and provide the most protection from termites. This photo totally reminds me of those french paintings of people in a field working. I’m really in love with this
The Man, The Myth, The Legend. The only and only Joe Meza.
Fence is up ready to be painted. That’ll have to wait until another weekend.
The picket fence needed some serious work. Apparently the previous owners put the fence up and it sat untreated for a couple of years before they slapped on a quick coat of white paint. Speaking with a neighbor, the guy who painted it was a homeless guy living in the neighbors backyard who worked for beer money.
Angela’s dad Eddy lent us his pressure washer to strip the fence.
Caitlyn having a little too much fun with it on the sidewalk after the fence was done.
Belly laughs are the best laughs.

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Filed Under: Personal Tagged With: Anaheim, domesticated life, home improvement

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