I admit it, the color selection defeated me. I called in the Big Dogs of Design, James Linville and Lina Husodo of Studio H+L, two very cool architects whom Bill and I befriended/worked with when we lived in Austin. They’re gonna help us take our house back to what it used to be, but better.

Hopefully we’ll get to see them soon. Maybe we’ll get lucky and see Bear and Della (their dogs, whom we adored as much as the design process) too.

I’ve added One Stop Modern to the Links & Resources page.

I’m happy to report that Popular Mechanics has given me permission to produce PDF versions of their articles as long as I don’t alter the content and provide a link to their home page.

This is very nice of them (and fairly unusual in today’s copyright-sue-happy world); I’ve got some of the articles as PDFs already online made from the photographs I took of the books.

I’m willing to do proper flatbed scans of articles if I can somehow get my hands on a decent scanner.

Since then it’s been our one-stop shopping source for all kinds of house stuff. Luther and Jenny (along with the rest of the employees) are awesome folks, and the staff really gets to know their customers and people in the neighborhood. For example when they’d been open a year, they stayed open late one night and had a one-year anniversary party for their customers.

Luther, Jenny, and their staff deserve a public thank-you for their efforts to help people out before, during, and after Hurricane Ike. They had no city power, but kept the store open with limited hours on a generator so people could come in and buy bottled water, charcoal, chainsaws, extension cords, batteries, and anything else they needed to cope with life without power after the storm. They did this every day for more than two weeks until they got city power back and resumed their normal hours of operation.

Good people like this are the kind of folks who I will go out of my way for to shop at their places of business.

The day after the storm was spent cleaning up fallen tree limbs and branches out of yards and off of roofs; everyone in the neighborhood pitched in and worked together to help. We got the generator running and ran extension cords all over the house; we ended up with a fridge/freezer, lots of fans, satellite TV (the dish didn’t blow off the house!) and surprisingly enough, DSL Internet access. I opened up my wireless network and let anybody use it that could reach it.

We’d parked the car in the garage; it came out just fine. Thanks to a natural-gas-powered hot water heater, we had hot water and the ability to take normal showers (in the dark) all week.

For the next week, we alternated between running off the generator and then an extra-heavy-duty extension cord strung across the street after the other side got power back before we did. City power finally came back on for us eight days after we lost it.

It’s a great example of Art Deco architecture, and I’m glad that it was saved instead of being bulldozed.

Edit: here’s some of my favorite pictures. Click a thumbnail for the Flickr page.

Speaking of that, last week was very interesting in terms of home security.

A new Ace Hardware store opened up in the shopping center at Tanglewilde and Westheimer about a month ago – they have a HUGE selection of stuff and it will be great to not have to go to Berings for small things.

Sadly, two weeks ago we had to cut down the tree in the front yard because it was rotting from the inside out and we were ending up with large limbs in our yard every time it stormed.

I’m trying to decide what we want to put on the stump that’s left.
Rodin’s The Thinker, maybe?

The plumber cut most of the waste pipe off, and replaced everything between the bottom of the sink tailpipe and the stub of waste pipe with a new PVC P-trap, pipe, and compression fittings/nuts.

Without the “late night emergency” charge, it would have only cost us $138. Not a bad price, really – we’ll give them a call (during normal hours) next time we need something done.

If you need good 24-hour plumbing service in Houston, give 911 Plumbing a call.

At least the plumber said I did an excellent job on the sink tailpipe.