Compost

May 13, 2015 by Evan Hart in diy

I am new to composting but I need to get rid of food scraps and put some life back into the soil and garden.

Overgrown trees everywhere have blocked light to the soil and stopped the natural processes that create rich soil. It's a lot of dry, exposed dirt. Worm "casings" as they are called euphemistically, helps bring nutrients back to the soil.

I'm going to try an experiment to start out composting. I call it the two buckets technique. Two 5 gallon buckets will allow me to turn over the compost between them to access the casings and aerate the soil. So to not start from scratch, which you can do, I'm going to use half a bucket of high quality topsoil.

Here I have some green leftovers from pho and artichokes we ate over the last week. It is all green waste.

It's good to have a balance of foods so you can add some strips of newspaper to help provide and alternate type of food for the worms. Strips are important to let air into the compost. Composting is an aerobic process. Brown food should be half the weight or less relative to green food for the worms. That means you probably can't put in your whole weekly newspaper unless you have a serious operation going.

I filled up a bottle of wine so I wouldn't add too much water, just enough to dampen the newspaper and soil that dried out in the sun a bit

I got some red wrigglers from the bait shop. 3 packs of 50 worms. Go to town boys!

I hear it's also good to have layers because it streamlines the composting process. I put the green at the bottom, then newspaper, then worms, then topsoil. After a while, as the food is eaten off the bottom, I can flip the buckets and the casings will be on the top and the food I will have been adding on the top will be the new bottom food. This is just a theory. The bottom is also the most wet and if the food is rotting more than being eaten by the worms, I'll change up the operation.

Day 2

I was worried that the compost was too wet so I flipped it today. It definitely was too wet. Penicillin like fuzz was already growing. I think I'll flip it every day for a while and leave the lid off to help it dry out.

I did get to see the worms getting after the newspaper!

Bunch of worms already eating that newspaper.

The thing feels very much alive already. It's pretty cool. Wriggling worms, roll-e-polies, different types of flies, and the stink of the wet greens says there's something, probably anaerobic, eating them. If it's too wet it will stink a lot. You shouldn't be able to squeeze out water drops with your hand.

Painting Grandma's Patio set

May 11, 2015 by Evan Hart in diy, furniture

OK not my grandma but somebody's grandma...

I had been looking for a mid-century patio set for the house. Like pretty much everyone, I love mid-century furniture but mid-century modern was not going to work with a very rustic house from the '20s.

But mid-century furniture is not all about modern. Sub-styles of mid-century, that are NOT modernist, include ranch style (poorly named humble suburban homes), Hollywood Regency - tacky floral faux gold etc., and even mid-century Art Deco revival embodied in the disco era Xanadu movie.

Woodard was a brand famous for patio furniture from this era and now a search term that exemplifies what I was looking for. They made a range of metal outdoor furniture, from very modern to very old fashioned and floral. I was charmed by a set on an estate sale listing that was kinda halfway between floral and modern and I got on the lookout for a set with $300 as a goal for a good price. It seemed to be a pretty popular set at the time because I saw the set a few times online, and then ran across the exact set at an estate sale on Sunday (last day) so they wanted to get rid of it and were willing to let it go for $225. That's too good to say no for a matching, vintage set of four chairs and a table. I wanted to brighten them up so I ordered a six pack of large 15oz. cans of heavy duty blue enamel and got to work.

All done! Looks awesome I think. Paint is Rustoleum Professional High Performance (Industrial Strength) Enamel in some commercial blue color. I love this stuff. 15oz. cans ordered from HD online for about $33. You will need 6 150z. cans or about 7-8 regular 12oz cans.

Got the Gothic lights working

May 11, 2015 by Evan Hart in lighting, diy, decor, electrical

After installing the lights, I wasn't getting them to turn on. First thing to check with my beeper (electricity detector) was power to the switch box. I wasn't getting anything from the switch boxes so I checked the fuses to see if there are any burnt ones. So I decided I should tie into the power going to the other switches by the front door. I used a piece of spare wire, held by my wire strippers (with insulated handles) to jump power from the hot light switch to the living room 3 way. I touched it to one pole on the 3 way and the light lit up! Nice! Then I connected it to the other pole and POP! Blew a fuse. The reason for this is there actually was power to the box but I just have a crappy beeper. Connecting a 110v hot to another 110v hot makes 220v.

Even for people like me who are pretty good with 3 ways, it helps to make notes. The old knob and two wires were not labeled so I had to figure out which was which.

Now I know that B wire is hot in (supposed to be black), C goes to the light somehow and when B is switched to A (common), it goes to the other switch (beeped for hot over there). Since there are only three wires, I know that if the hot comes in her… — Now I know that B wire is hot in (supposed to be black), C goes to the light somehow and when B is switched to A (common), it goes to the other switch (beeped for hot over there). Since there are only three wires, I know that if the hot comes in here, the other switch box must be connected to the lights

I started labeling the wires with tape. A legit electrician would use different colored electrical tape to mark them. I started sketching it out:

Gothic Mid-Century Mexican Wrought Iron light fixtures for the living room

May 10, 2015 by Evan Hart in craigslist, decor, lighting, diy, electrical

The tall ceilings in the living room are missing a matching pair of light fixtures, likely made by "Otar - The Lamp Maker, Santa Cruz, CA" (from the historical documents).

I talked to the man who grew up there whose parents bought the house in 1960 about the lights in the living room. He said they were brass carriage lanterns but were stolen when the house was unoccupied.

He said this is the closest picture he could find of what they looked like

He also said that there used to be one next to the front steps.

I wasn't sure whether these were original since I haven't seen brass fixtures in any Maybeck houses. I got the idea to use some wrought iron lanterns from this picture of the Geisler House (1924), which could be what the originals in this house looked like.

So I started looking for a pair of light fixtures of this type. I found a similar kind I really liked that was made around the '50s-'70s. Made in Mexico from wrought iron, with textured glass (a tipoff that it's mid-century), also in amber. It wasn't too hard to find one at a time, but they were usually around $100 for one. However, I couldn't just buy two separately since there was a lot of variation in the finer details of the design and glass color and texture. I lucked out and found a pair for $50! They were rusty because they had been outside but that wasn't a problem for me. I drove down to San Jose to pick them up.