The walls are closing in!

The stairs were just a tasty appetizer to the main course of finish work. (No one said I was a writer!) The drywalling has begun in earnest, and in a day they were able to cover over half the house! We have to get all the "rock" up before the outside can be stuccoed, since the nailing will cause the stucco mud to fall off. So in a couple of days, the mudders will be here too.

Over the weekend we moved more stuff to our house and to the storage pods. The scraper is almost empty; this coming up weekend we'll have a few more dribs and drabs to move. Our landlord was very nice and is allowing our furniture to have a home for an extra week, since his demolition permit has been delayed. This will allow our contractor to finish putting the cabinets in the garage, which can't be done until the wall adjacent to the new office is rocked. So we can really use the extra week! We turned off all our utilities as of yesterday, so hopefully he'll be able to get the gas meter pulled soon. He promised to let us watch the demolition, since we didn't get to witness any bulldozer drama with our house.

We are now housesitting at Kurt's folks' house. It is so nice to be in a house with light, a working bathroom with decent faucets, and hot water that lasts for more than five minutes! The kitchen is close to the bedroom, so you don't have to walk a mile to get a cup of coffee as you did in the scraper. The south Palo Alto location is very convenient for me, so I can ride my bike to work. (That being said, yesterday I got a ride to work, but I did walk home!)

Over the weekend we decided to look for short-term rentals as a possible plan B of not having gas. We found a 3-bedroom place nearby that was okay with pets. It's amazing how having a dog (or smoking) cuts you out of so many places. Kurt says I should start responding to ads that say "No smoking or pets" since we don't smoke. But I suspect they really meant they don't want either.

Our current plan B is actually quite clever, I think. Hopefully the city isn't reading this blog. We are going to get an always-on electric hot water heater installed for our master bath. This kills two birds with one stone: we will truly always have hot water, which has been a problem, since the hot water doesn't last through the two of us showering; and it allows us to bypass the whole need for gas. Since it's spring we can live without heat, but we need hot water for showering. The electric always-on heaters sit between the pipes close to where the water goes. Energy wise, the usage is approximately what it would be for having a gas hot water tank; in other words, the electric tankless heater is approximately the same energy use as the solution we have now. (In the ideal world, we would put in a gas tankless heater, but we don't have gas at the moment, so electric it will be.) We had actually asked our contractor to install a larger water heater in the garage; if we have thought of this solution in time, it's possible that we don't need to do that at all, which would make this a wash cost wise, since it will probably be about the same price (or cheaper) than installing a new water heater. Of course I haven't heard back from our contractor yet as to why this _might_ not work... so the jury is still out.

We'll continue to scan the postings for short-term rentals. If a furnished rental at a reasonable price comes up, we might just jump ship for a while. In the meantime, we continue to clean out the two relatively untouched rooms in our house, prepping it for our arrival. Kurt's folks were nice enough to give us a section of their garage, so we're storing breakables and smaller furniture there, at least until the cabinets get installed in the garage (at which point we may be able to move some stuff back into the garage cabinets).