Tomatoes and Windows

Yesterday we went up to Eatwell Farm for our usual Tomato Day festivities. This year, since we are living with a Kitchen in Exile at the Admiralty, we chose not to do our usual chopped tomatoes and week of sauce cooking, and instead we did canned chunk tomatoes like most other members of the team.

We call ourselves Team Tomato, and we set up a kicking assembly line every year to can up enough tomatoes for all our households' needs. That's about 2-3 dozen quarts each, though we use pint jars because they are more flexible for our needs, and this year one team member brought 1.5 pint jars as well.

So that was all day yesterday, and much of last week with the planning and last-minute shopping. I'm going to make a post later this week on preparing for this kind of event and what we have found works, so I can refer people to it when they ask how we do it.

Anyway, work on the house was less dramatic this week. The guys spent a bunch of time framing the roof for the bay window (I'm very impressed by that; I know how to draw that kind of roof but actually building it was a whole different kind of problem).

The window framing itself is mostly done, as well. This new bedroom is going to be VERY bright.

They also framed the skylight shaft for the new back bathroom:

There are no windows in this bathroom (they'd just look at our neighbor's roof, anyway) so the skylight is there to bring a lot of daylight in while maintaining privacy.

And speaking of windows, the Nanawall for the dining room arrived. This is our little touch of modernity in our old house.

I love the way a big glass wall can connect you to the outdoors even on cold miserable days. It may seem odd, considering that we bought a Victorian and that is a very specific kind of house, but my first real love in residential architecture is more like the Barcelona Pavilion than frilly chintz drapes. There's a lot I could say about why we are not living in that kind of house right now, but mostly it comes down to where we wanted to live, loving our neighborhood and the people in it, and the sort of house that is available here. Bay Area housing has gotten so expensive that moving locally isn't really an option for us, so this Nanawall is my little nod towards modernist design, without just making a total mess of the back of the house.

This is a busy week for me doing construction administration. I need to finalize the plumbing order, which I worked on today and need to circle back with the vendor about this week. I need to order the kitchen appliances. I need to flesh out all the interior elevations so the plumber can get to work. And we discovered a little weird area we want to use above the stairs to the basement and I need to figure out how we can use that without making something too weird.

posted by ayse on 08/07/16