Jim Alfredson

I promised back in April when I created my homage to de-Dunkle-fying our home (see this thread) that I would post pictures of my bathroom project upon completion. Well, I did complete the bathroom exactly one day before my wife and newborn baby Zora came home from the hospital and now I will keep my promise. The Alfredson 1st Floor Bathroom A photo essay of de-Dunkle-fying our old home - by Jim Alfredson When we were looking for a home to purchase, my wife and I had three criteria. We like older homes (pre-1940) We had to have a big enough home for a music room/rehearsal space In order to afford it, the house pretty much had to be a fixer-upper We looked at a lot of homes in Lansing, actually bid on one (ah, Beal St.) and lost and then finally found the one we're in now. We moved in last August (2003) and true to our criteria, this house needs some serious TLC. The last owners were completely inept at home maintenance/repair/remodeling but that didn't stop them from trying. Case in point: The 1st Floor Bathroom. When we first looked at this house I remember my wife having to use the bathroom. I was in the basement at the time and witnessed water pouring down from the drain onto the floor as the toilet flushed. The home inspector said, "Ah, probably just a leaky wax seal." Famous last words. Besides having a leaky toilet, the bathroom itself was absolutely hideous. Notice the strange yellow and orange "waveform" wallpaper. What the hell!?? Up in the top left corner you can kind of see the "shower rod" (I wish I had gotten a real picture of it.) This consisted of some 1" PVC pipe stuck through the drop ceiling. They didn't even bother to paint it. It's just bare PVC pipe. Beautiful! Here's the bathtub. It's only about 4 feet long, shoved into the corner about 10 inches or less away from the bowl of the toilet. I'm almost 6'3" tall and I like to take baths. Obviously the tube had to go. Notice they took showers with a freakin' hand shower thingy. The tub is really short so they could make space for this awesome home-made, built in cabinet. Actually it was a real piece of shit that was far too large for a bathroom. I think they may have kept ALL their linens in it. Ridiculous. Again, you can see some of the PVC shower rod in the upper part of the picture. I wish I had gotten a picture of it protruding through the drop ceiling. It was real slick looking. Onto re-modeling. First order of business, rip down the ugly drop ceiling. Once again, a drop ceiling is hiding something (a recurring theme in this house). Those are supply lines for the upstairs bathroom. There was no plaster left on the original ceiling since they opened it all up to add those lines. Notice the pipes on the outside of the beams. I eventually removed those, bore holes in the beams, and re-connected them so they were up inside the ceiling, raising the ceiling to above 10' (nice!) Removing the ugly sink counter unit. Don't get your hopes up. Those aren't real tiles back there. Oh no... that would be too classy for our previous home-owners. No, they are some weird metal tiles things that are glued directly to the wall! Awesome! Sink out. The trash can is about where the toilet was. Notice the water damage on the floor. That luon was put there only a few months earlier and it was already rotting away. They just placed a "new" floor on top of the old one before they sold the house. They didn't even bother to use glue on the cheap-ass, ugly linoleum they laid down. The just nailed it with a pneumatic nail gun. Sweet! The toilet had been leaking so long it had rotted through not only the luon, but the original floor and subfloor as well. It would all have to come out. How hard is it to replace a friggin' wax ring, people!?!? Bathtub out. For such a little tub, it weighed an absolute TON!!! It was pure cast-iron, and my buddy Bill helped me take it out. We lifted it up off the ground enough to get my organ dollies under it, strapped the dollies together (just like moving an organ!) and rolled that baby out to the garage where it sits to this day. Eventually I'll rent a dumpster for the rest of the trash we need to get rid of around here, take a sledgehammer to it, and bye bye! Notice the checkerboard floor. That's vinyl tile laid down sometime in the 1950's I think. So the tub must've been somewhere else before then?! Jim think's, "What the hell have I gotten myself into?!" as he realizes that the plaster will have to come down. But first: The really, really shitty part is that all that water damage had destroyed the original hardwood floor that was in the bathroom. It's the same hardwood that is in the rest of the house... 3/4" thick yellow pine. So I took it all up. You can see that even the subfloor is damaged. It'll all have to come up. Before messing with the floor further, I decided to tear down the plaster on the walls. It was just too far gone and most of it too covered with old wall paper to be worth saving. I did it all in one day and did not take any pictures during the process but let me tell you... the amount of plaster in a 6x10 room is absolutely mind-boggling!!!! It piled up on the floor about 2 feet thick! And all that dust! Yuk! I hope I don't have to do that with any other room in this house. What a mess! But there's the finished product.... looking at the window.

I gotta post this one! She is getting so big so fast, I can't believe it! Clothes that didn't fit her just 7 or 8 days ago are now the perfect size and I'm sure she'll grow out of those real quick! So my wife played "Fashion Show" this weekend with her! Hehe! Daddy's little girl... (geez... it still seems weird to refer to myself as "daddy".)

Why does this stuff always happen when I'm out of town?

In reference to the posts that got you here, just remember... I giveth and I can taketh away.

Randy will have to answer the question. I couldn't go. Big storms rolled through Michigan that day and made me think it was going to be cancelled. But they moved faster than I thought and the show went on. Grand Rapids is an hour away from me and I was just tired from a full day of baby keeping. Randy told me the guy is a monster, though.

That last shot by A.I. yesterday was incredible! He gets on my nerves and I think he is the antithesis to the Larry Brown school of playing, but he is a damn good player, no doubt.

You're probably not using correct gain staging doing that if the jack is truly a mic input. Microphones have inherently low signals which must be boosted way more than standard line levels (which is what your phono preamp is outputting). Any amplification contributes some amount of noise and inexpensive computer mic preamps are especially noisy. Do you have to turn the input way down in order to not get distortion? Then it really is a mic input and you should use the line input if at all possible.

What if the 12 year old boy was YOUR 12 year old daughter and her 35 year old male science teacher? Would you still be cool with it?

And keeping her out of prison would do what?

UP!

mmilovan, I have the M-Audio Audiophile 2496 card and I've been very happy with it. And fortunately, I no longer need it so if it's something you want, I'd be happy sell mine to you. It is like new. The reason I no longer need it is that I have two MOTU interfaces for multitrack harddisk recording now. I've used it to transfer LPs onto CD (recording from an LP preamp straight into the RCA jacks on the soundcard) and have gotten fantastic results. It is very clean, very simple to use. Let me know.

? How long was it down ?

It's a little late, but the CD is OUT! Woofy Productions Catalog Scroll to the bottom of the page. It's the last disc in the list! Order yours today or pick one up from the man himself during our Northern Michigan tour which starts NEXT WEEK!!!

HEY!!!! I am no democrat!!! I know. It would be quite insulting....

Never been. Never had health insurance until now. Gotta go sometime. I'm scared but I know I have to go.

Neil Diamond. At least according to the guys in Saving Silverman.

Since jazz is now being defined by instrumentation (see Jamie Cullem) and not by the actual music, I guess what else can we expect?

If you look hard enough you can find pretty much all the Real Books in Adobe Acrobat format on the internet.

I'm curious as to what you suggest they do since they are "ignoring the situation." What's wrong with stuff going into the public domain? Would you rather the record companies convince Congress to extend copyrights for another 100 years? What good would that do?

I hope to get the new server around the middle of the month. The funds are here, it's just a matter of me having the time to put it together. I'm gigging my butt off lately, which is a good thing.

Yes you have! Thank you!

Cool! I didn't know you played vibes! She looks beautiful!

I wondered if anyone would see that. He is the first to be awarded such a distinguished title. I've thought about changing Berigan's to "Larry Flynt" but have restrained myself so far.

Alison will be coming straight from work and jumping in my car so we can make the show. I may be able to put something together. We'll play it by ear.

Seeing that last post made me get rid of the B-) smiley being b). It is now a B, then a -, then a ). That should make posts like these make more sense.