Light under the house
When we did the re-insulation project in the crawlspace, we knew we wanted to do more. The space, now cleared of the huge ducts from…
Category: Update
End of 2020 Video
As is custom, I finally put together our end-of-year video (although a few days late). Enjoy!
Agatha
Yes, I’m still very much behind on posting new content, but I did manage to put this video together. Please welcome Agatha. Last month she…
Oh so busy
We’ve been incredibly busy, so the crafting of new posts has lagged significantly. One side project has involved playing with random cameras, like setting up…
Another Time Lapse Video
I’m a tad behind on writing stories for the site, but the time-lapse stuff has been a fun diversion from daily chores and project wrangling.…
The Lightning Storm and Resulting Fire in the Santa Cruz Mountains
This summer, I’m monkeying about with a time-lapse camera pointed westward over the valley. The first camera was a simple Brinno on a stake at…
More Furniture Finds
After buying the lovely table online at Michaan’s, I started visiting in person during their preview hours and, thanks to a friend, also discovered their…
A Trip to the Auction House
Soon after buying this place, Agent Smith and I discussed ways to furnish it that did not involve rushing off to IKEA, Restoration Hardware or…
Vacation Part 2
The chimney was stripped, the pool leak repaired, the closet holes patched, the Murphy bed put together, and quite a few smaller projects were completed…
Filling in the Holes
One last project completed while I was on vacation was the final cleanup of the crawl space and plugging the many holes in the concrete…
Stripping Down
A big, big project went down while I was on vacation in March/April 2019–the chimney got stripped. You’re probably scratching your head at that statement,…
Additional Pool Cover Notes
A super cool thing Agent Smith created for the pool is documented in the image below. That black dot in the middle of the cover…
Blue Room Refresh, Part 2
Continuing from the earlier post–in early February 2019 we ordered a Murphy bed from murphybeds.com, and it arrived at the end of the month. I…
Midge and the SCU Lightning Complex
As most of the world knows, much of California is currently on fire. Right now, the Purgatory area is currently beset with wildfires started by…
Blue Room Refresh, Part 1
One of the first big changes I made to the house was painting the blue room. Originally a very deep purple, as it housed the…
Leakage
The pool resurfacing project was completed in 2017. In winter 2018, we started to notice that water was leaving the pool at a faster rate…
Another Vacation for Stega
In March 2019, I left the ranch again for a much-needed vacation. This time I spent 16 days on Little Cayman, where I dove a…
Linens and Things
Continuing the theme of quality-of-life improvements, a very simple one a year or so ago was reorganizing the cabinets in the linen hallway. When we…
Long Lines
So this post is more documentary for our own purposes rather than entertainment for readers. During the rainy week when the power wall was being…
Another Bit of Electricity
Before Shelter-In-Place, something I regularly did, especially in the winter months, was turn on the courtyard lights when Agent Smith was nearing home (yea for…
Battery Backup: Hosed
The one casualty of the power wall project was the post that held the reel for a water hose we use a lot–sadly, the post…
Console Tables
(Sorry, no witty/punny title came to mind for this post.) In early 2019 I started scouring the interwebs for some tables for the foyer. A…
Gutter Addendum
When we moved in, the west side of the great room had a gutter above the windows to divert rainwater away from the door and…
Touching up some leaves
Shortly after the floors were done and the boys moved back into their place, I retouched the trees I painted on the walls a couple…
Can’t see the trees for the trees
Where we live in California, we have three seasons: winter, spring, and fire. If you pay any attention to current events you’ll know that fire…
Sanding is a Sandy Business
Once the repairs in the teak were finished, it was time to get down to the really messy part of the floor project–sanding and refinishing…
The Site is Now Open for Comments
When we started writing about all the stuff here, we kept comments disabled as moderating a ton of spam wasn’t something we–well, really I–was willing…
Arcadia
A somewhat odd fact about the living space at Purgatory is that we have many exterior doors for both the house and studio buildings. The…
If the same tree falls
In winter 2016, we had a tree near the north gate fall onto the electric line feeding the phantom power pole. PG&E came out, saw…
Friday Bonus Post
I’m pleased to announce that not only is spring finally here, but the garden areas, especially the north garden, are starting to go bonkers with…
Many Leaks
Once the dust from the furnace install settled, we noticed a few new issues–not with the new HVAC setup, but various bits of leaking plumbing.…
Under the House
After the furnace work was completed, I took a lot of pics and videos of what is under the interior of the house. We worried…