Home Improvement

A few weeks ago, Yuki and I hammered out some ideas on what we want to do to the house to update it. A contractor that my mom and step dad use was consulted and we got a fairly decent quote to do the following: clear the atrium and place pavers inside while repairing the deteriorating wood lattice; replace the bathroom, swap out the sliding glass doors in the two back bedrooms to windows, and tile the kitchen, entryway, and bathroom. A separate contractor was going to get called in to lay down some wood laminate. Naturally, we discussed this with Angel and his parents as they are very knowledgeable about home renovations as they constantly do things to their own houses. After some budget crunching and calculations, we discovered that we could add in some canned lighting to the house and add granite counter tops to the kitchen and reach the same quote given by the first contractor. The decision on contractor was fairly simple, and the first week of May, we started to buy and order most of the necessary raw materials. Dry walls, canned lighting sets, tiles, wood, etc. The stuff was piling up in the front living room.

This post will not follow a chronological order as I wanted to group the various projects together from start to finish for a easier view on the changes from old to new. Some projects were interminably finished to help with the progression of other areas.

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Joshua Tree and a Return to the Unicorn Gundam

The memorable points of this weekend was an evening back in Joshua Tree and a few hours of work on the giant Unicorn Gundam statue. So the recent addiction is trying out astrophotography, well as much as that’s even possible with my current setup. The weekend before this past one, Yuki and I drove up to Joshua Tree as a scouting mission to see about snapping some pictures of the dark sky. Funny thing is that the last time I was out in this area, I was riding along with MarkW as we ventured out to Jame Zee Doyle’s (aka JED from old model building RAAM/CoM sites) house to pick up some kits that he was no longer going to build. MarkW’s Sazabi original owner was JED.

While there was no moon to saturate the night sky with lighting, there was however lots of clouds that worked to reflect the lights from Palm Springs effectively. The goal to snap pictures of the night sky turned into just snapping pictures of the land, clouds, and my car in the calm desert night. The good thing is that I did get some more practice with nighttime photography. This weekend we were a little more successful.

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Continue ReadingJoshua Tree and a Return to the Unicorn Gundam

This past weekend was the first build gathering of the year, and it marks the 54th build gathering since we started. The gathering was the usual size with a few new members to the group. I was late in snapping pictures as there were also two good football games, well technically 1 good football game and the other was just a sad slaughtering of horses; and also a Lakers game that didn’t go well for the Lakers either.

In other news, we got Yuki an annual pass to Disneyland, so the past week has been spent sprinkled with little visits to the happiest place on earth.

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