Home Improvement/Fire Update

Just wanted to post some pics of the house's progress. We've been working on all the rooms except the bathroom and kitchen. The bathroom is good enough for now and the kitchen is a whole other project.

I also wanted to give an update on the fire situation I mentioned last week. We got all our stuff out and it more-or-less survived. we were pretty lucky. More on that and some photos down below.

this is the first piece of furniture so far. porch chairs and an old table.

this is what's going in the kitchen. It's on order and should be here next week.

both bedrooms have new carpet and paint!

the miter saw. I used this to cut the crown molding.


before crown..

and after!

I did the living room and both bedrooms. all by myself*.
*Special thanks to Meg, Kathy, Celeste, Steve, Gordon, Dave and Dustin. Who helped make this all possible.

this is the skylight in the dining room

there's that... Now about the fire.


Friday afternoon I talked to a dude that we share our room with he said:

"We called the studio owner. He says our room was one of the better ones and appears to have survived. There was water damage but nothing burned. We're heading over as soon as he gets the room opened. Right now its either arson or an electrical fire."

So after some phone tag we got into the room Friday evening. The studio owner was being really evasive and didn't want anyone in the studio till Monday, despite an apparent OK from the fire dept. Worried that any salvageable equipment could be completely ruined by Monday friends of ours called around and got a hold of the owner of the building the studio is in and he came down to let us in.

We did get pretty lucky. The whole studio was trashed. the room next to ours had a new skylight.. 2nd floor was non existent.


our gear was wet but not soaked. Tons of sheetrock stuff was all over our stuff. But overall I think we're gonna be ok. Some amps and other electrical stuff might be damaged but the important things like guitars and drums I think, for now, are still ok.

After we got all our equipment out into the parking lot I went to get a truck to haul our gear and when I got back there was 4 cop cars there. Jesse got his last piece of gear out and the cop said "no one goes back in there" and they boarded up the entrance.

if the building owner wasn't with us, we might have all been arrested.

here's some pics. the quality sucks because the power was shut off.

So things are still up in the air about where we're all going to practice now. Also theres been murmers of litigation depending on what the fire deptartment finds. I know we didnt have insurance but we're also hoping theres some kind of insurance on the actual studio but we doubt it.

That whole place was a mess to begin with. I guess all in all, its good no one was hurt. There are benefit shows in the works now to help out bands that lost everything. We dont really have a full set of songs finished but we'll do what we can to help.

here's an update to the news article.

"does not come as a surprise to many of its tenants, who said they had long dealt with issues like overloaded circuit breakers, and a lack of adequate sprinklers and smoke detectors.

But the reason they tolerated these conditions, they said, was because there is no other local venue for small bands to rehearse and record."

http://www.mercurynews.com/breakingnews/ci_10217513