San Franciso touring

A few photos of me during recent San Francisco explorations.

- Steph (photos kindly taken by visiting students from Tohoku University)

Photos: City, travel, family, food

We recently sorted through our photos and discovered that some good ones never made it onto the blog. We've compiled those photos in this post, broken down into city photos, travel photos, family photos and food photos.

City

Street art in the Mission

View from Coit Tower

Yerba Buena Gardens

Yerba Buena Gardens

San Francisco city hall

Market Street, near our old apartment

Slanted Door Vietnamese restaurant

Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival in Golden Gate Park

Travel

Lake Tahoe

Lake Tahoe

Driving to Kirkwood

Camping in Big Sur

Camping in Big Sur

Crossing the Golden Gate Bridge

Camping in El Dorado National Forest after the Amador Four Fires wine festival

Cabin at Hendy Woods in Anderson Valley for my birthday

Route 128 through Anderson Valley

Motorcycling in Marin

October trip to Healdsburg

Winter trip to the beach

NYC

NYC

Family

Doug's college graduation

Doug's college graduation

Kim on Christmas Eve

Ben and I cooked Christmas dinner

Christmas dinner: lettuce, red onion, mandarins and orange vinaigrette

Christmas dinner: Green beans in red wine and dijon vinaigrette

Christmas dinner: tenderloin

Christmas dinner

Ben's first Bruins game

Ben's first Bruins game

Alex

Alex and our snowman

Food

Rosemary lemonade, with lemons from our tree

Raspberry-blackberry ice cream

Fig compote

Coffee and fig ice cream

Homemade sushi

Homemade artichoke ravioli

Sangria

French toast for our anniversary

- Steph

Moving odds and ends

We moved! To a 1.5BR house in Berkeley. We'll post photos once we've settled in a bit more, but for now a few reflections on the moving process (it's been nearly three years since we last moved).

• It took us one full weekend and four weeknights to pack our 600-square-foot apartment. This was by far the most painful part of the process.
• Full-service movers quoted us $700-$900 dollars to pack the truck in SF, drive it to Berkeley and unload it. That price included the truck, but required us to pack ourselves. We didn't want to spend that much.
• Last time we moved, we hired two people via TaskRabbit for $80 to help us unload the truck. We planned to do the same thing again, except this time TaskRabbit quoted $65-$100 per person per hour. More than actual moving companies, no thanks.
• We knew we couldn't move all our furniture down three flights of stairs. We tried a number of different sites/companies and finally found movers for $31/hr on Thumbtack. They were great, they didn't damage our stuff and they were even good at figuring out how to fit everything in the truck. They arrived at 9 a.m. and by noon we were on our way to Berkeley.
• We considered hiring them to help us unload in Berkeley, but we're glad we decided against it. Unloading from the curb to our front door was a million times easier. Even with just the two of us, we had the whole truck unloaded by 4:30 p.m. (with a break for lunch from Chipotle).
• We made the smart decision to pay an extra $40 for a one-way UHaul rental. This meant we didn't have to drive back to San Francisco at the end of the day. 
• We had plenty of extra room in our 15-foot UHaul, but definitely would not have wanted to try to squeeze everything in a 10-foot UHaul.
• We moved on a Tuesday, which worked out wonderfully and which I would definitely do again. Ben was able to work an extra day the week before and take Tuesday off. We moved into our new place the first day it was available, which saved us from double-paying rent (waiting until Saturday would have cost ~$250). And if you've ever tried to cross the Bay Bridge at noon on a Saturday, you know it's not a pleasant experience. On Tuesday, we zoomed across, even in a UHaul. And we had the whole preceding weekend to get most of our packing done.
• We had saved most of our boxes from the last time we moved. We rescued a few more from the recycling bin at Good Eggs and asked a local grocer for boxes that were going to be thrown out. This meant we only bought about five total boxes.

Moving costs:

• Movers: $160
• Truck: $190
• Supplies: $46
• Total: $396

So overall, moving wasn't as bad as it could have been, but we're glad we waited until we found a place we love. 

- Steph

Classic SF

I took this photo for my dad and brother, who don't understand our love for kale. Something about this photo just screams "SF" to me.

- Steph

Our brand new dresser, via Ikea hacking

We spent the past several weeks building ourselves a new dresser. We were in the mood for another woodworking project, but with our limited amount of woodworking space, we weren't sure whether building a whole dresser was feasible. Then we realized that IKEA sells a few pieces of unfinished furniture and decided to try "IKEA hacking."

IKEA has two types of unfinished wood dressers: the Rast and Tarva lines. There are lots of hacks online for Rast dressers, but we wanted something bigger. Most of the Tarva options were also on the small side for two people, so we settled on combining two Tarva 5-Drawer Chests (pictured above). They're made out of solid pine, so no particleboard or engineered wood. Miraculously, we even fit both dressers into a two-door electric BMW that we had rented for our trip to IKEA.

As you can see we made a number of modifications:

• We bolted the two dressers together.
• We routed the edges of each drawer.
• We routed across the middle of the top drawers, to make each look like two drawers.
• We replaced the two top boards with a single piece of 1" thick solid pine and routed the bottom edge.
• We added molding around the bottom.
• We shortened the legs.
• We painted and stained.

All of this (of course) turned out to be a lot more work than we expected.

The routing wasn't difficult, just tedious. First, we experimented with different bits and depths on a throwaway board. Then we mounted each board to the saw horse. We had to cut fast enough to not burn the wood but slow enough to be smooth, and routing all 10 drawers took almost an entire day.

Fitting the molding perfectly was a challenge. To cut the ends at 45˚ angles, we used a simple plastic miter box. (The next big tool on my wish list is an electric compound miter saw.) We cut the legs to be tall enough for the molding plus 1/2" (most of the gap sinks into the carpet). For the molding to be flush with the front of the drawers, we added 1/4 shims to offset the molding from the legs. Unfortunately, between the width of the saw, the thickness of the pencil marks, the imprecision of the ruler, and simple error, we cut the front piece of molding almost 1/4" too short. Cutting a tiny piece off the end of the spare molding, we created a shim that we spliced into the gap with wood glue, which after polishing with a little wood filler and painting, is barely noticeable.

You can see the molding we added on the left and the routing on the right.

Unlike our media cabinet, we didn't have to measure and saw most of the boards — they came pre-cut by IKEA, and the top board we had sawed at the lumber store. But there was still plenty of sanding and routing, which we did in the driveway under our apartment, producing a lot of sawdust. Despite vacuuming constantly, and cleaning the dust off the neighbor's cars, our neighbor complained (reasonably) about "blanketing everything" with dust. So we've probably burned our political capital on that front for a few months.

Choosing colors was the hardest part. We had a vague idea of wanting a dark stain on the top and a light paint on the rest, but went through dozens of paint swatches and stain samples before we settled on the combination. The stain is "espresso" by Varathane, and the paint is "indian muslin" from the Pittsburgh Paints palette (though we weren't impressed with their actual paint, so we got the equivalent color from Benjamin Moore). The paint wasn't exactly as we expected — on the swatch it was a little darker, more pink, less off-white — but it came out nicely enough. One pint was enough for two coats on the whole thing (with primer underneath).

We used "clear satin" finish, two coats of oil-based polyurethane on top (over the oil-based pre-stain and stain) and two coats of water-based polycrylic finish over the water-based paint. (The knobs we stained with the same espresso color, no finish.)

The funny thing with this dresser project was it was actually the second iteration. Several months earlier, we saw a large, very nice-looking dresser on the street corner, and carried it into our driveway. It was old and worn, but we thought it was made out of good wood and worth re-finishing. So we stripped the paint off the whole thing, and started to replace the rotted wood runners with new metal ones, when we realized it was all just particleboard. (The giveaway was when a little rainwater that got through the tarps caused the top to puff up significantly; real wood wouldn't have done that.) We decided the low-quality materials weren't worth the work. Despite feeling foolish at having spent so much time working on it, we sold it on Craigslist pretty quickly, defraying the cost of "v2".

Our first attempt. What it looked like when we found it (left) and what it looked like when we sold it (right).

Our rough estimate for what this all cost:

• 2 Tarva dressers: $218
• Stain: $14 (including one can we didn't use)
• Primer: $11
• Paint: $8
• Top board: $37
• Hardware: $20
• Assorted materials (drop clothes, miter box): $21

Total: $329

And the reason we went through all this trouble in the first place? Steph has been using a bookcase as a dresser for the past two years. We thought it was time for an upgrade.

- Ben