Colevault.com

Drinking establishments? Herbal remedies? Exotic plants? Nope, these are the paint colors Susan and I chose for our bedroom and bathroom, which were painted today. The closet, hallway, sitting area and 90% of the main bedroom will be Prickly Pear. We decided to highlight one wall of the bedroom by painting it a different but complementary color, Moss Green. (This is the wall that I am hoping to hang my plasma TV on - look for a subsequent post on how ridiculously hard it is to research and buy a TV these days, even with the web as research tool.) These two colors are considered cool colors by Kelly Moore. The bathroom is Tiger Balm, a deep warm yellow.

When we got home from work today and saw the painted walls, we both thought the Prickly Pear was a bit too gray and not as green as it appeared in the brochure. Perhaps when it’s completely dry and we can view it in natural light it will be closer to what we were looking for, but it’s not a big deal. The fact that they’re already painting means we are getting very close to being able to move back into our bedroom after living in our dining room since mid-December! Overall, the project is going quite well. (You can follow the progress by viewing the photos in the Remodel gallery, I’ll add photos of the newly-painted areas shortly.)

As you can see in the photos, the presence of backhoes and bulldozers indicates we’re doing quite a bit more than just remodeling our bedroom and bathroom. The majority of the house is currently being supported by two huge steel I-beams which in turn are supported by several massive wooden columns and a system of jacks. Once that structure was in place the whole rear foundation was demolished and 300+ cubic yards of dirt on the down slope behind the house was excavated to make way for a new lower level, directly underneath where we previously had a deck. The roof of that lower level will become a tiled veranda at the same level of the previous deck, accessible via the master bedroom, living room, and new family room, yet to be built. We decided to do the master bed/bath portion of the project first so we would have a nice new living space during the subsequent, more disruptive portion of the project. As soon as we’re back in our bedroom they will be literally razing the existing family room to the ground, boarding up the exposed side of the house, drilling 12′ deep pier holes for the new foundation, and starting on the new addition. Retreating to the sanctuary of our new expanded bedroom and bathroom will be most welcome during the chaos of the rest of the project.

And with the paint going up today there is light at the end of the tunnel. Yesterday the radiant floor heating was installed in the bathroom and the tile will be installed over it tomorrow. The radiant floor is controlled by a thermostat with a timer that can be set so we’ll have toasty warm floors every morning! After the tile all that’s left are the bamboo flooring for the bedroom and closet, crown moulding and baseboards, doors and trim, window trim, trim painting, the cultured granite wall panels for the shower and tub surround, the tempered glass shower door and wall, the new faucets for the sinks in the bathroom, the electrical outlets, switches, and dimmers, and the new ceiling fan. Whew! Maybe “all that’s left” wasn’t the right choice of words. But you’d be surprised how quickly some of these things happen, and other things, like taping and texturing walls, seem to take way too long. But the net net is that by the end of next week we should be back in our bedroom, with the final touches in the bathroom finishing soon after. I can’t wait.

Those who know me well know that I am a huge baseball fan, especially of the Oakland A’s, and one of the many things that intrigues me about baseball is its long history, and more specifically how its colorful jargon has crossed over into common English speech. Phrases like “out of left field” and “get to first base” obviously originated from baseball, but there are dozens of equally common phrases that we use every day without ever consciously thinking of their baseball etymology. “Ballpark figure,” “off base,” “touch base”, “dropped the ball” are so ingrained in our vocabulary that their connection to baseball has all but disappeared. And although “ground rules” doesn’t appear on that Wikipedia entry (perhaps I should add it?) it also has its origins in baseball. Since every ballpark has different dimensions, different fence heights, etc., there is a unique set of ground rules specific to each park. And that is my long-winded way of introducing the ground rules of this blog.

• The first rule of Colevault is, you do not talk about Colevault.
• OK, that’s not true. On the contrary I want everyone to talk about Colevault. And if you have an opinion on anything I’ve written, please leave a comment. Better make it witty though!
• I highly recommend using Firefox to view the blog. Not having done much web publishing prior to this blog I’ve been amazed by how non-standards-compliant IE is. I’ll make a simple change to the stylesheet and it’ll look correct on Firefox but will be screwed up on IE. I’ve read that IE7 is supposed to be a vast improvement but until then I’d stick with Firefox. You can download Firefox via the link at the bottom of the side menu bar.  Note: I haven’t got a clue what this thing looks like in Safari or Opera. 
• Any text you see in red is a link that will take you to a site that’s relevant to the content of that sentence or post. I have an addiction, and it’s called the Web, so you can be sure these posts will be chock full of links to interesting sites that you might not otherwise come across. I also have a reputation for tracking down good deals online, so reading this blog could save you money!
• Images within posts can be clicked on to show the image in its full size, usually 1024 x 768. The image border turns blue when you mouse over it, indicating that it’s a hyperlink. (The link simply points to the full size image in the gallery.) Posts will just have a few representative photos relating to the post topic, the gallery will have many more (too many?) photos from the same time frame or event.
• Right now I have two albums in the gallery, one called Justin and one called Remodel, both of which can be accessed via the links in the header bar below the banner image. I will be constantly adding photos to these albums, as well as adding new albums later. The newest photos will always be at the top of the album, however when viewing the photos as a slideshow you can choose to view them in reverse order, which is useful if you want to view the remodel photos from the beginning. If you have any questions about how to use the gallery, or anything else, just send me an email.
• To subsribe to the RSS feed of this blog, simply click on the RSS link on the right-hand sidebar. You’ll be taken to my feed page on Feedburner where you can quickly add me to most RSS readers, including My Yahoo and Google’s customizable home page.
• If you have a blog and want me to add it to my blog roll just ping me.
• The banner photo was taken in Tuscany in 2002 and is one of my favorite photos from that Europe trip. I am an avid photographer and you will see many examples of my photography in posts and of course in the gallery. One of my goals for this blog is to scan and publish a bunch of classic “analog” photos from back in the day. My high school friends should be very afraid. (Someone needs to come up with a little Flash or AJAX widget that would enable bloggers to embed a Hot or Not applet on their site. Although in the case of my high school friends it would just be called Not.)

A little background on the domain name. If you’ve never tried to pick a domain name then you may not realize that pretty much every decent name is either taken or has been parked by some squatter hoping to make a buck (or two) by selling it. So of course all my first choices were already taken: cole.com, pete.com, thecoles.com, colefamily.com, etc., and as you can see most of them are not even in use. Bastards! (And yes, it had to be a .com rather than a .org or .net. I can’t live without the ctrl-enter shortcut which automatically adds the http://www. and .com to any domain you type in your browser’s address bar, and being a terrible typist I wouldn’t want to subject anyone to more typing than is absolutely necessary.) I even contacted the owner of cole.com (some bond trader in New York) and tried to buy it from him but he wouldn’t sell, even though he’s not using the domain. This is the one time I wish I didn’t have such a short and common name. But then again, even zensius.com is taken, so I suppose it’s a lost cause. (Jon, you snooze you lose!)

So I had to get creative. What clever wordplays could I come up with using my name? Aha! colemine.com! (Taken.) hotcole.com (Taken.) And on and on it went. I spent days thinking about this. For some reason, having a form of my name in the title was really important to me. (Actually, the reason is not hard to figure out: putting out your own blog is fundamentally an act of ego stroking so it follows that I would want my name prominently involved in the title.) Looking back, I should have dropped that requirement and just tried to come up with a cool name. But just as I was beginning to get frustrated I came up with Colevault! It was perfect: it had my name in it, had a nice little rhyming thing going (pole vault), and the site would be a “vault” which would house my thoughts, photos, etc. (And perhaps the site will “vault” me into blogging prominence, be acquired by Gawker and allow me to make a living publishing random musings about what I had for lunch and where to get good deals on high-end plumbing fixtures.) And the best thing about Colevault? It was available, just like I was every Friday night in high school. Problem solved, the vault is now open.

Hello, good evening and welcome to nothing much.  This is Colevault.com, the pulpit from which I will attempt to provide you, my soon-to-be loyal readers, with wisdom, wit, humor, and, most importantly, an endless stream of photos of Justin.  Thanks to Al Gore any clown with a laptop and at least two fingers can stake out a little piece of internet real estate, wax poetic on any topic he chooses, and broadcast it (for free!) to between 2 and 6 people, depending on the size of his immediate family.  What could be better?  Now excuse me while I dust off my clown suit.