Remodel Army

 I just peeked into this joint and realized I've been a baaaaad blogger; over a month with no new content.

Frankly, it's mostly because of this:

That's the kitchen. Well, that's where the kitchen used to be. 

The Little House has always been, well, little. It's barely 1,000sf, and it's poorly designed, with small rooms and a cluttered floor plan. I wrote about it back in 2020; the original wasn't great and the remodel the 1970s-80s owners did didn't make it much better. We wanted to open the place up a bit.

Here's what we started with:

And here's where we're going with that:

That's still the plan. But as Clausewitz (drink!) reminds us, between plan and execution is friction. And there's been...a LOT of friction.

Subcontractors not showing up.

Subcontractors showing up and then FUCKING up.

Ice Storms.

It's all been very stressful. I hate not having a kitchen. Cooking on a hotplate on the old dining room table sucks major ass.

That's my excuse, but it doesn't excuse me. I'll try to be better.

In my defense, I'm plugging sway on the promised "Frontiers 1914" post. It's going to be complicated. I've got two major sources right now; Terence Zuber's Battle of the Frontiers Ardennes 1914, and Dennis Showalter's The German Failure in Belgium, August 1914.

Remember that to try and make the post less insanely huge I decided to focus on the reconnaissance/counter-reconnaissance part of the fight. Well, the two sources are diametrically opposed on the subject.

The Showalter book focuses on what the German Army termed "Higher Cavalry Commands" (Höhere Kavallerie-Kommando), HKK, strategic assets directly under the Imperial Army HQ but assigned (sorta) to the Army commanders of the right wing (1st and 2nd) armies.

Their task was more-or-less purely strategic; find the left end of the Allied forces so the big Schlieffen Sweep could turn it. As you can tell from the title, Showalter doesn't think the Germans succeeded there.

The Zuber book, on the other hand, is tightly focused on - also as the title makes clear- the fight between the German 4th and 5th Armies and the French 3rd and 4th Armies in the Ardennes.

The general tone of the two is utterly dissimilar.

Showalter is zoomed in on the failure of the German Oberste Heeresleitung, the overall German Army HQ, to appreciate the criticality of the strategic mission and the degree to which the top brass either permitted (or encouraged) the right-wing HKK to faff about rather then go do what they were supposed to and the utter lack of urgency in applying the air assets.

This was supercharged by the organizational and logistical arrangements made to set up the HKKs (as well as the aerial recon elements, both fixed-wing and lighter-than-air) which helped make them less responsive and thus less useful in the right-wing fight.

Zuber, on the other hand, luuuurves him some German Army tactical training. His thesis is, so far as I can tell, to debunk the post-war French narratives of why the Ardennes sector was such a completely nutty cluster of fuck. He seldom deals with reconnaissance other than to point out the vast superiority of German tactical recon/conter-recon. Zuber seldom, if ever, deals with strategic reconnaissance at all.

(As an aside, Zuber also throws in a - to my mind - highly questionable defense of the German Army reprisals against Belgian civilians. These executions appear in the Showalter text as well, and are largely condemned as excessive responses to German friendly-fire incidents. There's actually a good discussion on the degree of 1) Belgian irregular resistance and the 2) German reprisals for it in the Wikipedia page covering the "rape of Belgium" - loaded term, but that was the most common one used for it...)

It's been a fun research project, but it's rapidly becoming obvious that discussing the subject is too massive for a single post. I'm leaning towards dividing it into three parts; a "Frontiers 1" dealing with the largely-strategic recon/counter-recon of HKK1 and HKK2 and air assets on the German right, "Frontiers 2" discussing the German center and left (including HKK 3 and HKK4 but more closely examining the divisional tactical cavalry, since the lack of open maneuver space tightly constrained the HKK's (and the terrain and foliage greatly limited the aerial recon), and a final "Frontiers 3" summarizing the main concepts of the first two.

So that's the plan, anyway.

Hopefully it goes better than the kitchen.

Men At Work

 So the Little House turned 100 last year. Yep. 1922-2022 and still going.

That said, there's a LOT not to like about the Fire Direction Center.

The single bathroom, increasingly constraining for four adults.

The cheap fittings and appliances, many of them courtesy of former owners, that are a constant, low-grade nuisance. The - as my Bride call them - "ugly bones" of the house itself, a legacy of the pre-mid-century spec-house throw-it-up-quick-sell-it-cheap pedigree of this joint.

This year we finally had enough. Time to gut some of the interior and rebuild.

Specifically, the kitchen and bathroom.

The vanity was perfectly representative of the way this place was furnished.

The countertop was painted over linoleum, and the paint continually peeled and chipped. The sink was a gimcrack Home Depot-grade porcelain-over-cast-iron thing which had a big chip over on the left that had never been repaired and was rusted out, spreading red runoff whenever it got wet.

The drawers were fabricated from the cheapest three-ply with junky hardware. The outlet behind the sink never worked (which is why it has a blank cover over it.

Just around the corner...

...is the tub/shower and toilet. Both leak. The tub is interesting because it appeared to be a stock model that was about three inches too short for the space it was shoved into. The "solution" the architectural genius devised was not to find a larger tub but to fabricate a weird little stub-wall on the right side of the tub as you see it.

The whole setup was cheap and felt cheap, and my Bride hated it.

So...

...the vanity went first.

Note the long stick of white PVC pipe where the sink drain used to be. The plumber noted that it was utterly outside any close relationship to a sink drain per City of Portland code. Which fits with the rest of this house, which seems to have been remodeled and altered repeatedly without bothering with details like that.

Then the shower:

Note the faint pattern on the floor underneath the former tub location. That's very old - as in probably 1940s or earlier - linoleum. My guess is that the original bathroom had a standing claw-foot-type tub with a linoleum floor underneath which was left in place when the fitted-tub was built in the 1950s-1960s.

The real revelation, though, was underneath.

I mentioned that the tub leaked, right?

Okay, well, that leak began just days before the demo crew was scheduled. Well, fuckadoo, I figured it wouldn't kill us if we were without a shower one extras day or two, so I went downstairs to find and close the shutoff to the bathroom.

No such thing.

Not only that, but I looked at the plumbing - really looked at it - for the first time since we moved in more than twenty years ago. Guess what?

It's as fucked up as everything else around here.

Pipes going every which way. Random stretches of copper spliced directly into the original galvanized (which, BTW, is a big plumbing no-no; the iron and copper are incompatible and the solder (or clamp) will eventually fail and leak...). Lack of shut-off valves everywhere (except for the dishwasher, weirdly, but probably because it's a very late installation).

The sanitary stack is the original 1920s ductile iron, which I shudder to think looks like inside after a century of literal shit going down the drain. If the house next door - which is an exact mirror image of ours and was built by the same outfir - is an example the connection to the sewer main is old-school precast concrete, notorious for being invaded by roots (as the next-door house's was..).

I talked the plumber into looking at this literal plumber's-nightmare to give me a guesstimate on unfucking it. We'll see how that comes in.

And then there was this.

The kitchen remodel is going to include knocking out part of the wall to open the kitchen up to the front room. To do that we need to add additional support to the remaining wall, meaning a pair of new posts extending from the first floor to the ground.

This is the first attempt at one of them.

What's funny in a not-funny way is that, footings?

That's what I do. What I did, anyway, for thirty years. If I'd bothered to look at this fucker when they were building it I'd have screeched like a wounded eagle. That's so not-right it's not funny. Either the footing or the post are in the wrong place, seeing as how the one is supposed to be centered on the other.

The City inspector came in, peeked at it, and said "You fail". THAT's when I looked and was like "Ohfuckyeah".

The earthwork crew came and redid the work pro bono. Then it passed.

Oh. And the other thing.

The general contractor employs designers to work on, well, the interior design. We had one early who left, and were working with her replacement all the way up to the start of construction.

When we found out she'd been canned. Because, among other things, she failed to order parts and materials we needed. Among other jobs she'd fucked up the same way.

So we're two weeks behind on the shower tile.

That's...not great.

So if you'll excuse me, I gotta run to the gym.

To use the shower.