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shannon_aI must admit that I entered this week with a bad attitude related to our handyman ("Tim"). He cranked up the price of our door twice last week, and also had really underbid on materials costs. Meanwhile, the joyful fact that he wanted to show up at 11am often turned into noon or 1pm, and then he wanted to stay until 6 or 6.30. Then on Tuesday, his first day back this week, he was scheduled to show up at 1pm and ended up here at 3pm.
Fortunately, things went smoother from there. He constructed the hatches for our crawl space under the house, and they looked quite good, minus the fact the he reused the frames from old, past hatches that were missing when we moved in. But we're hoping the house painters can clean that up. Then he did a good job of getting three of our ill-fitting doors upstairs opening, closing, and latching better (but still asked for the median of the variable price he'd quoted for four doors). Then he actually found a cartridge for the lock in our sunroom door and got it all installed and working beautifully. Those are all things that will definitely add to the value of the house.
I do feel like we got taken for at least $1000-1500 in the process, in that the bid which I originally thought was high got increased, with the materials also being underbid. But I'm doing relatively good at not caring. We'd been having troubles finding handymen, and at this point we really needed one for a variety of work going back years and years.
Did I say house painters? Yeah, getting that going was our big July initiative. I definitely wanted them to fix up and paint the wood on the outside of our house, but was willing to also look at a quote for the entire exterior. They *only* gave us a quote for the whole exterior, and it's expensive, but it was just over my number where I thought we should flat out take it. So, we've got them starting on Wednesday.
I'm not thrilled to have them so close after the handyman work, as it was exhausting managing Tim for four days while I kept the cats locked in my office (though part of the exhaustion was two days of simultaneously filing and shredding Skotos material). But Kimberly has thus far been our main contact on the painters. When they get here, they'll be more self-sufficient, and hopefully Kimberly and I can share the responsibility more when they need to talk.
My share thus far has been talking to neighbors. We have a teeny, teeny lot, just a bit bigger than the footprint of our house. So the painters identified two areas (the kitchen and bathroom walls on the east and the bathroom and back hallway walls on the south) where they'd need to get into neighbors' yards to safely put up their ladders. I thought the condos on the east would be more problematic, because their side walkway is locked and the painters wanted to put up some plastic to protect our closest neighbors and we needed to talk to at least two different households. But, I was able to get ahold of six different people (our two closest neighbors, then the owner and three tenants for another apartment accessible by that walkway) within 24 hours and everyone was totally cool. I thought the house to our south would be non-problematic, because we've worked together before (on killing Acacias) and the work is quite far from their residence, but I haven't heard back from them at all yet. (They could well be out of town, their comings and goings and usage of the house have always been mysterious.)
Oh, and I moved lots of boxes. You see, the work is going to start with power washing the exterior, and the painters' contract notes that this can cause leakage, particularly on older windows. We *have* redone about 50% of the windows in the house while living here, but almost all of the windows that I'd piled up boxes under ... happened to be old windows. So they all had to be moved interior. (I've got one line of boxes under the newer windows in my office, and hopefully they'll be fine, but maybe I'll pushing them back a foot or so after I finish up work on Tuesday, and can have my office more clogged up.)
A few more bits of house work and we're done: interior painting; fixing collapsed drywall and a closet and fixing some ripples in plaster (also to be done by interior painters); putting up a new exterior light and taking out an unused light switch (to be done by an electrician on Tuesday).
Weekends continue to be one of my prime restorative times, especially if it's a Saturday when I can hike or bike. So this weekend I decided to head out to the largest park in San Francisco that I'd never been to, which is John McLaren, number 3 in the city (at 312 acres) after The Presidio (1480 acres) and Golden Gate Park (1017 acres). Big jump there, and of course none of these reach the size of the parks I regularly hike in like Tilden, WIldcat Canyon, and Redwood Regional Park (which are all around 2000 acres) — but still pretty big for an urban park.
So, I BARTed out to Balboa Park, which I found is a world of difference from the affluent Glen Park area, just one stop up. It's a bit more of a run-down urban area. Not bad, but occasionally sketchy and the bike routes were much rarer, despite the streets being pretty busy. I stopped and had lunch at a Popeye's that was amazingly busy.
The actual park (John McLaren, not Balboa!) is one of those urban parks that gets lots of practical usage. So, the ugly southside of it is all kinds of sports parks while the northeast side has a lake and playgrounds. But there's lots of attractive, quiet park in between. The very middle was the only bit that felt like wilderness. I did a hike on the "Philosopher's Way", which is a loop with some side paths here and there that runs from the middle of the park up around the north and back. It was some pretty neat hillside walking toward the middle, and then some quieter forested areas around the north. There was really an amazing amount of diverse terrain in a relatively small area. And oh, there were beautiful views of the city and bay whenever I was walking on one of the edges.
One of the neat things about the Philosopher's Way was that it had these big granite trail markers which just featured understated arrows. They were really easy to make out, and kept you going the right way among the park's many paths.
Interestingly, the Philosopher's Way avoided all the more trafficked parts of the park. So I had to go out of my way to see the teeny little manmade lake to the northeast and to cross over some of the "Hidden Bridges" (which were very nice, long bridges among relatively forested areas, crossing over streams and ravines). Also, to go the Upper Reservoir, the park's sort of other lake — and also the only place I saw a homeless person all day, in an experience totally unlike modern-day Berkeley. Just past the "No Swimming or Wading" signs, he was bathing in the Reservoir. I also investigated the "Philosopher's Labyrinth", another one of those little stone mazeways or spirals that seem popular in San Francisco. And then it was back to my bike and down the hill to Glen Park Station this time (because I didn't want to mess with the streets and neighborhoods around Balboa Park Station again).
Overall, it was nice to see a new neighborhood of San Francisco, and nice to see a new, interesting park.
I have no idea what San Francisco's fourth or fifth largest parks might be, but I've been to many of the largest green areas in the city at this point.
Fortunately, things went smoother from there. He constructed the hatches for our crawl space under the house, and they looked quite good, minus the fact the he reused the frames from old, past hatches that were missing when we moved in. But we're hoping the house painters can clean that up. Then he did a good job of getting three of our ill-fitting doors upstairs opening, closing, and latching better (but still asked for the median of the variable price he'd quoted for four doors). Then he actually found a cartridge for the lock in our sunroom door and got it all installed and working beautifully. Those are all things that will definitely add to the value of the house.
I do feel like we got taken for at least $1000-1500 in the process, in that the bid which I originally thought was high got increased, with the materials also being underbid. But I'm doing relatively good at not caring. We'd been having troubles finding handymen, and at this point we really needed one for a variety of work going back years and years.
Did I say house painters? Yeah, getting that going was our big July initiative. I definitely wanted them to fix up and paint the wood on the outside of our house, but was willing to also look at a quote for the entire exterior. They *only* gave us a quote for the whole exterior, and it's expensive, but it was just over my number where I thought we should flat out take it. So, we've got them starting on Wednesday.
I'm not thrilled to have them so close after the handyman work, as it was exhausting managing Tim for four days while I kept the cats locked in my office (though part of the exhaustion was two days of simultaneously filing and shredding Skotos material). But Kimberly has thus far been our main contact on the painters. When they get here, they'll be more self-sufficient, and hopefully Kimberly and I can share the responsibility more when they need to talk.
My share thus far has been talking to neighbors. We have a teeny, teeny lot, just a bit bigger than the footprint of our house. So the painters identified two areas (the kitchen and bathroom walls on the east and the bathroom and back hallway walls on the south) where they'd need to get into neighbors' yards to safely put up their ladders. I thought the condos on the east would be more problematic, because their side walkway is locked and the painters wanted to put up some plastic to protect our closest neighbors and we needed to talk to at least two different households. But, I was able to get ahold of six different people (our two closest neighbors, then the owner and three tenants for another apartment accessible by that walkway) within 24 hours and everyone was totally cool. I thought the house to our south would be non-problematic, because we've worked together before (on killing Acacias) and the work is quite far from their residence, but I haven't heard back from them at all yet. (They could well be out of town, their comings and goings and usage of the house have always been mysterious.)
Oh, and I moved lots of boxes. You see, the work is going to start with power washing the exterior, and the painters' contract notes that this can cause leakage, particularly on older windows. We *have* redone about 50% of the windows in the house while living here, but almost all of the windows that I'd piled up boxes under ... happened to be old windows. So they all had to be moved interior. (I've got one line of boxes under the newer windows in my office, and hopefully they'll be fine, but maybe I'll pushing them back a foot or so after I finish up work on Tuesday, and can have my office more clogged up.)
A few more bits of house work and we're done: interior painting; fixing collapsed drywall and a closet and fixing some ripples in plaster (also to be done by interior painters); putting up a new exterior light and taking out an unused light switch (to be done by an electrician on Tuesday).
Weekends continue to be one of my prime restorative times, especially if it's a Saturday when I can hike or bike. So this weekend I decided to head out to the largest park in San Francisco that I'd never been to, which is John McLaren, number 3 in the city (at 312 acres) after The Presidio (1480 acres) and Golden Gate Park (1017 acres). Big jump there, and of course none of these reach the size of the parks I regularly hike in like Tilden, WIldcat Canyon, and Redwood Regional Park (which are all around 2000 acres) — but still pretty big for an urban park.
So, I BARTed out to Balboa Park, which I found is a world of difference from the affluent Glen Park area, just one stop up. It's a bit more of a run-down urban area. Not bad, but occasionally sketchy and the bike routes were much rarer, despite the streets being pretty busy. I stopped and had lunch at a Popeye's that was amazingly busy.
The actual park (John McLaren, not Balboa!) is one of those urban parks that gets lots of practical usage. So, the ugly southside of it is all kinds of sports parks while the northeast side has a lake and playgrounds. But there's lots of attractive, quiet park in between. The very middle was the only bit that felt like wilderness. I did a hike on the "Philosopher's Way", which is a loop with some side paths here and there that runs from the middle of the park up around the north and back. It was some pretty neat hillside walking toward the middle, and then some quieter forested areas around the north. There was really an amazing amount of diverse terrain in a relatively small area. And oh, there were beautiful views of the city and bay whenever I was walking on one of the edges.
One of the neat things about the Philosopher's Way was that it had these big granite trail markers which just featured understated arrows. They were really easy to make out, and kept you going the right way among the park's many paths.
Interestingly, the Philosopher's Way avoided all the more trafficked parts of the park. So I had to go out of my way to see the teeny little manmade lake to the northeast and to cross over some of the "Hidden Bridges" (which were very nice, long bridges among relatively forested areas, crossing over streams and ravines). Also, to go the Upper Reservoir, the park's sort of other lake — and also the only place I saw a homeless person all day, in an experience totally unlike modern-day Berkeley. Just past the "No Swimming or Wading" signs, he was bathing in the Reservoir. I also investigated the "Philosopher's Labyrinth", another one of those little stone mazeways or spirals that seem popular in San Francisco. And then it was back to my bike and down the hill to Glen Park Station this time (because I didn't want to mess with the streets and neighborhoods around Balboa Park Station again).
Overall, it was nice to see a new neighborhood of San Francisco, and nice to see a new, interesting park.
I have no idea what San Francisco's fourth or fifth largest parks might be, but I've been to many of the largest green areas in the city at this point.