Back to work

I know it's been a long time since I haved blogged. As some of you might know, Eleni and I went on our East coast tour in suport of our latest album "Other Places." After the tour, we went to Europe for a month and a half ,visited some family, and played some shows there as well. If you go to Binge Cafe you can read about the tour. It's been great! We met a lot of cool people and ate great vegan food. I'm happy to be home.

Ok, here are some new updates of the house. I'm not going to go into a lot of boring details this time. That's right: short and sweet.

1) I put gutters on the house. It seemed that there was a lot of water under the house and it smelled.

2) Some of the outside wall and siding was rotted out and the bricks need to be cemented back into place.

3) I replaced the outside wall and some of the inside floor joist. The former kitchen sink's pipes burst a while ago. No one was living here at the time so the water rotted out the floor and the wall. There was a nice hole to the outside, which Greco (our cat) was using for a cat door. I replaced some loose bricks and stuccoed the brick foundation.

4) I decided that it was time to do some serious work on the foundation. There was all kinds of junk under the house. Apon cleaning out the basement I noticed a cracked pipe (not a crack pipe). The best part
about this was we hired some plumbers to fix the bathroom pipes. They connected the new drain pipes to the old cracked pipe. That's right! All this time water was draining under the house. Next time I'll just do the job myself. As you can see, the foundation columns aren't very straight anymore. Well...I had to cut the pipe out and replace it. As I was cutting it, it fell apart. Six hours later, we could take showers again. That old pipe was a pain to cut. More plumbing will need to be replaced in the future, but for now we need to move on to bigger jobs. I built some forms for the footing and dug a 4 ft. hole. I mixed concrete for the footer, and using cinder blocks, created a column by stuccoing the sides after piling the blocks into the footer (dry stacking).

More pictures to follow. I've had a few days off from this work, and been writing some new music with Beloved Binge, but will be returning to the nether-world tomorrow.

BB's New Recordings

Hello people,
On April 1, 2006 Eleni and I recorded our new album Other Places. We took a six hour drive to Atlanta and recorded at Zero Return Studios. I want to first say that the people at Zero Return Studios are fantastic, down to earth and easy to work with: www.zeroreturnstudios.com. They create analog sound recordings. We recorded 15 songs in two days. The drums and guitar were recorded live. Jim (who engineered the album and is in the picture to the left) isolated the guitar amps and we did some overdubs of lead guitar, bouzouki, keyboards and vocals on some songs. Jim is old school and has been recording bands since 1971. He is the best recording engineer I have ever worked with. When recording, I usually get very nervous doing my parts and sometimes things don't go very well. It didn't happen this time. Jim seemed to set this easy going environment. They have this great collection of instruments. Eleni played all the keyboard parts on the album. She used this 1960's Hamond organ on the Song Ossuary. I love the tone this thing makes! I can't spill all the beans. I'll let Eleni go into more detail about that on her blog Binge Cafe. On the song One Day to Walk Through I used a 1965 Ampeg Reverbaracket for the solo. I didn't use any pedals for that song. We turned up the Reverbaracket as loud as it would go to get the slight distortion I wanted for the solo. The sliding door behind me is where the guitar amps are isolated. I like to use my custom telecaster for all my guitar parts. It's a real clean sounding guitar. On the song Gray Fingers I use my Larrivee acoustic through a Blues driver distortion pedal. It's a muddy sound that works well for me. After working with Analog I'm not going to go back to digital recording. We own our own digital studio and it can be cool to record yourself, but it is of my opinion that Analog is better way to go and more honest. We are going to use our digital set up, as a tool to make rough drafts of the songs and to record practices. I would rather play music and not try to make it all perfect on the computer. I'm not putting down people who do that. It's just not for me. I'm going to leave it to the professionals like Jim to record us. Jim doesn't own a computer.
Thanks Jim

The Blue Room or...Syba has a friend

I've been slacking on the blogging. I'll try to get you guys up to speed. The first pic is of our guestroom/tv room. Some might call it the Blue room. We scraped off the wallpaper and fixed the cracks in the wall with plaster. I primed the walls and painted it a light green. Eleni painted those awesome blue swirls. We rented a floor sander and I sanded the hardwood floors in this room and the dinning room. Eleni sanded all the sides by hand. I'm real happy with the way it came out. Last time, I think I was a little hard on myself. Syba is into the new couch we picked up at a second hand store. Wait, I was talking about the floors. Next is a pic of our dining (green) room with the floors done. I know Syba's cute. Speaking of Syba, here is a picture of Chagall. He stayed with us for a few days. We also finished our front room and library. Here is a before pic of our front room, and following is an after shot. I know this was a fast blog, I just wanted to put something up since it has been awhile. Next time on this Sloping Band House, I'll be putting in a window where the door was (this was a duplex and has two front doors) and I will have pictures of another window replacement along with the rewiring of our living room chandelier. I also bought a new loop pedal for my guitar, which will also be featured next time. Now that half of the inside of the house is done, we are going to enjoy life a little more. I hope you take the time to as well.

My crap Hardwood floors

Why is it that some of us know the right way to do something, but don't do it? Is it being Lazy or is it wanting something so bad we go about it haphazardly? In my case. I know that when sanding hardwood floors, you start with a rough grade of sandpaper, medium grade and then fine grade. Stain the floors and add some polyurethane etc. I didn't do that. Disclaimer: Don't do what I did! You can sand through your floor and fall in! I used this machine. It's a monster. I never used it before . The old floor was gone before I knew it. Some parts were harder than others and took more than one pass. Parts of the floor have small dents in it now. I only used a rough grade and then stained/polyurethane the floors. I did do some what of a fine sanding by hand after the first coat of the polyurethane.
It took a few days for the floor to dry and the smell was getting to me. I'm thinking that I will redo them some other year. I guess the floor is better than before and we can put down some throw rugs. Some times, I'm my own worst critic. Syba seems to like the floor and Eleni loves it. Next time, I will take the time to do it right so I'll like it .

Moving the Outlet & the Closing of Beloved Cafe

As you faithful readers of the sloping house know, I knocked down a wall the other day. In that wall was an outlet that I had to move to another wall. The existing electrical wire wasn't long enough to hook into the new socket, so I had to install a junction box underneathe the house, splice the wire, and attach a longer piece of wire that would reach the outlet.
Here are some basic tools that I used:









The first thing I had to do was drill a hole into the floor so that the wire could come up through it. Then I pulled the wire up through the wall to the new outlet.

Next I attached the junction box (pictured here) and spliced the wires. The code requires that the copper wire, or ground wire, is secured to the junction box. After the wires are spliced, and the ground wire is secured, I twisted each of the two pairs of matching wires together (white to white and black to black) and put the twisted wires inside the covers (red and yellow pictured below).
After this I went upstairs to connect my outlet. Here is the basic outlet box I used upstairs which is used to secure the outlet to the wall.
After cutting a hole in the baseboard for this casing, I ran the wires through the holes in the casing. Then I matched and attached the existing wires together as I explained before. I used my CB tester on this outlet to make sure the polarities were matching the existing outlets and they were. I was concerned about the wires at first because the newer wire looks smaller than the existing wire, but when I tested the gage on the copper they matched up to what they were supposed to be.

Disclaimer: I am not an electrician. I only have a father who was.

If you follow my steps, you may burn your house down. OK, my wife wanted me to say that last statement.

I am sad to say, dear friends, that Beloved Cafe is closed due to a lack of customers. It seems Binge Cafe has reopened and stole all my people.

However, there is some good news. Beloved Binge will be hitting the studio in Atlanta. We're very excited to be recording in analog. We have some new tunes and some that you might know that we'll record. Hopefully we'll be done by the middle of April. I've been playing a lot more guitar these days and Eleni has too.

Beloved Cafe

Hey folks,
I just wanted to show off my new stew. It's all vegan and you will leave the table as full as a if you were at Thanksgiving. I used fresh Carrots, green beans, Braggs, rice and some other stuff. I also made a nice plate of fruit. It was a great dinner. This next dish is what I call Robey Delight. It has a little of this, a little of that and a lot of vegan love. I sound like Bob Ross. How would you like to wake up to this plate. It has tempeh, mushroom, garlic, potatoes and nutritional yeast flakes. Yum!! I know they both kind of look the same. Well I'm off for a bike ride to Whole Foods and Ninth Street.

Dust & Cake

I feel like blogging but I don't know what to blog about, so this will probably be another chapter in useless blogness. This picture here is me after sanding the plaster in the front room (the room where the wall was taken down - see last blog).
Now that the room is opened up, I had to redo some of the plaster by repairing the cracks caused by the house shifting over time. I never really worked with plaster before but it doesn't seem to be too hard once you get the right mixture of plaster:water.
We had to peel off all the wall paper before plastering t0 ensure the cracks were completely filled. Most people would say to knock out all the plaster and put drywall in. I find plaster walls a lot better because they are more acoustically sound, so to speak. They are also less fragile than drywall; these walls were built to last. I don't really care if the walls are completely flat or perfect. I want to spend my life living making music etc. rather than spending my whole life making this the house someone else would like ("marketable"). Not to say that having plaster walls isn't a good selling point. I love all the old charm and craftsmanship put into the house.

Oh yeah. Here I am baking a cake. I also made seitan with ginger/bbq sauce. My wife got mad at me. She was baking scones that were longer than the chesapeake bay bridge, and I asked if they were square, and she started accusing me of not appreciating her efforts to bake all the time then stormed out to lift weights (see our new set below). About 2 hours later she came out and told me to make meals for awhile. The scones tasted fantastic but not as good as my cake:

I don't know what Bingecafe is going to do without any new food. I guess she can copy my recipes.
(wife note: the seitan was like a charred log)
Until next time, from the sloping band house,
NL