This Really F-ing Old House

Honestly, this is my third blog and I’ve never told you guys this because I felt guilty but I managed to buy a two-unit building in San Francisco back in 2011, when the real estate market had tanked so hard they REDUCED the price twice to sell it. It was strange time.

Actually it was all luck. My sister broke up with her boyfriend and I was like “Sure, you can stay with us in our 750 square feet place in Noe Valley” and we honestly had a lot of fun (I mean, me, my wife, and my sister) but after a while it just gets to be too much, you know? And someone suggested looking at places to buy not just rent so we got a frankly clinically insane real estate agent and like three weeks later we were signing papers. And that’s how we came to be TIC owners in San Francisco. (I always say I should send my sister’s ex a Christmas present every year because we would have never thought to try to buy a house if he hadn’t broken up with her.)

Time passed and now we are pretty much trapped there because our place has like doubled in value and everywhere else has too so we can’t really ever afford to move. So one day I got an idea.

WHY DON’T WE RENOVATE THE KITCHEN AND BATH

I mean, I want another bedroom and bathroom and something like this would be perfect but whoops it’s 2.65 million dollars. Plus our daughter has informed us we cannot move and, in fact, it is my wife and I who will be moving out when she turns 18 so she can live in our house. Further negotiations on this point will be required.

So we decided to do the next best thing. Since we can’t move, let’s pretend we moved into a house that’s identical except with a better kitchen and bath. So we found a contractor and pretty soon our kitchen looked like this.

OK then. So they rip all the walls out and there are the beams that probably floated down the Russian River to get here.

You see, our house was built in 1906. Presumably the latter part, and presumably in the wave of building that swept the city after, you know, the unpleasantness. You didn’t need any fucking permits or inspections back then. You just got some guys and put it up.

(A while back, I researched the history of our building and it’s pretty interesting but that’s another post.)

So any time you open up a wall in an old building, you never know what you’re going to find but it’s often not good news. Before we first moved in we did a quick and dirty kitchen fix-up and the guys opened a patch in the ceiling and learned that our building still has active pipes for natural gas FOR LIGHTING back when you had installed natural gas fixtures. And along the line someone just capped them off and said “That should about do it.”

Anyway, the good news is they didn’t find anything super bad this time. Some of the plumbing was rusted out and had to be replaced, but it’s God knows how old so that’s cool. Nothing truly alarming that would require, you know, rewiring the whole building or tearing it down and starting over.

So it’s in process, much like we all are, towards a better and brighter future. When you’re getting a kitchen and bath remodel you get used to getting texts like this:

I mean, it looks fine to me I guess. My wife and I are both blessed with Not Really Caring That Much about details so it makes the project a lot easier. Honestly, I don’t know what other “layout” you would do but I guess people have very particular ideas about that.

ANYWAY I know I’ve been gone for a while and there’s been a lot going on and I don’t want to turn into a ranty political blogger, god knows there are enough, so I’ll try not to dwell on the Horrors that much.

NEXT TIME: My temporary neighborhood and why it’s good to live somewhere else for a while.