Alex Tsatsoulis
alextsatsoulis@gmail.com
Me on LinkedIn- BikeAlex on Twitter
- Our Home Repair Blog
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Info
- Development Officer at Sierra ClubNonprofit Organization Management | Greater Minneapolis-St. Paul Area, USExperience
- Nov 2010 - PresentDevelopment Officer / Sierra Club
- Jun 2007 - Nov 2010Team Challenge Program Manager / Crohn's & Colitis Foundation of America
Education-
2005 - 2007University of ChicagoMPP in Environmental and International Policy
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2001 - 2005University of MiamiBA in Economics, International Studies, Political Science
Activities: Friends of the Everglades
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Tweets
- Getting out of my neighborhood was hard work - what a slushfest! #Greenway was all clear but wet though. Smooth sailing! #bikereportmpls
- Finally more snow! Though it'll probably be slush and then gone soon. #winterbiking this year has been weird.
- Wow-Im clearly doing it wrong. RT @Wonkette SC Rep. Shares V-Day Tips on Twitter: 'Why Not Tke Ur Girl To a Strip Club' http://t.co/udnhOXEV
- Love that the @MEPartnership email I got today has a piece from @animalrightsmn on going green by going #vegan!
- Getting ready to go to the Twin Cities bike swap. Which is, ironically, in Blaine.
- @DangerKate Oh wow. RT @BirchwoodCafe gluten free, vegan, raspberry donuts with raspberry glaze and sparkly sprinkles. http://t.co/fSLKHi7h
- @MikeBikeMason "But you should see the other guy"
- Today's #bikereportmpls is that it's cold. Ha! First #bike ride with frozen eyelashes this winter!
- Cool idea - definitely worth a follow. RT @cycletc: Bike Report Twin Cities http://t.co/2plKWE6Q
- Wow. Crazy. RT @marikatogo: Komen Kicks Off P.R. Rehab by Promoting Pink Handguns http://t.co/h04aWdg3 #NoJoke #PinkWashing #ShameOnKomen
- Thinking about #solarheating system to keep garage above freezing in winter. Anyone have experience w/ it? Good resources online?
- @JenniferLSpies That said - we use Posterous, which auto adds social media share links - so it gives ppl the option if they want!
- @JenniferLSpies Have them on there, but doesn't really help much. More likely to get retweets and reposts when we post & tweet links to blog
- Use blog post for long content, easy #socialmedia share RT @elabuzz: Curious-As blog posts or other web content? RT @jenniferlspies: #nptalk
- Definitely! RT @karentgraham: A3: also think about readers on mobile devices and how images will appear there #nptalk
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Posts
- Garage upgrades
We’re pretty active people, and while we both keep on biking through the winter, we have a harder time braving the icy sidewalks and early nights to keep running year-round. Part of our goal in buying this house was to be able to give up our gym memberships and workout at home whenever we could fit it into our busy schedules.
Right now we do own a treadmill, but we’ve had to put it in the kitchen nook which is… a suboptimal use of that space. So! Keeping in mind that temperatures in MN can stay in the negative for weeks at a time in the winter, we took on insulating and heating the garage to build a home gym. It’s a work in progress still, but here’s the plan:
The walls are comprised of 2x4’s, so we’re fitting faced R-13 batts into the cavities and covering that with drywall:
Once the walls are done, we’ll work on cutting soffit vents into the roof overhang, and putting roof vents in. Then the plan is to close up the ceiling and blow in insulation. Unfortunately the previous owners of this house decided to build a garage with only three ceiling crossbeams, one of which they sawed in half to fit in a garage door opener motor. With that restriction in mind, we will probably install new crossbeams above the motor, and build the ceiling up from there. That will give us a higher ceiling, keep the current storage over the original crossbeams, and allow us to use the garage door opener in the future if needed.
More to come!
- The Porch - Part 3
The floor! This part was the most frustrating, just because of how patient we had to be with every single piece in order to not drew up the final result.
Step one was to put down a solid floor for the tile to go on top of. We went with cement board, which we set down with mortar and hundreds of screws. The board is really, really easy to fit - cutting involves just scoring one side with a utility knife and then snapping it. Have a battery charger and a spare battery for your drill handy, though - we went through three batteries putting down all the screws. But the floor is solid!
Once the mortar had set, we started laying out the tile on the floor to make sure we evenly spaced it out. We started in the middle, and made a cross on the floor with it.
We used little tile spacers to keep the same distance between the tiles - highly recommended! We also went with a porcelain tile - it was a little more expensive than the ceramic we liked, however porcelain tile is supposedly more resilient in cold weather and less porous. And it gets cold and snowy in Minnesota!
We started in one corner, putting down mortar and setting down tiles on top of it:
We had to measure and cut tiles for some of the edges - a borrowed wet tile saw made that a breeze. Honestly, it could not have been easier to use:
Once the mortar had set, we started applying the grout:
This was a pretty labor-intensive step, if only because since we’re new to this, we left too much grout on the tiles and had to continuously wipe them off and wipe off haze. The lesson here is, never slack on grout cleanup!
Finally, once the grout had finished setting, we put down a few coats of sealer over the grout and tile:
And we’re done for now! It’s gotten too cold in Minnesota to really move forward on this project until spring. When the weather warms up, we’ll put up tile as a border around the wall base, and finish setting a few pieces of tile that we didn’t get to. But for now, with a few carpets on it, we’ve got a gorgeous entryway!
- The Porch - Part 2
With the tile removed and the screens torn off, it was time to paint!
The first step was to pop out all the windows on the porch. We noticed the top of each of the windows had a series of numbers, reflecting the various orders they had been installed in on in different locations. Our porch clearly used to be an open deck, and at some point became an enclosed porch - and the builders reused windows from a different site! We numbered ours with painters tape on the panes of the windows.
Once the windows were out, we could see the original wood slats under the stucco on the front of the house, too:
The window frames were in pretty bad shape, with a lot of rotting and broken wood, and unfortunately we just don’t have the budget or time to rebuild them all now. So rather than go that route, we decided to just paint over them for the time being and rebuild when we are able.
The first thing we did was tape off all the glass. Katie’s stepdad Rick came up to help quite a few times:
Once that was done, we painted the walls an off-white, and started on the wood trim:
The windows took a LONG time to do, because we have 14 total. We had to paint one side, let it dry, flip over and paint the other side, dry, and repeat a second coat!
But the porch looks great! In Part 3 we’ll tackle the floor, and start installing tile!
- The Porch - Part I
We hated our porch.
When we first move in this March, our porch was this not-so-nice shade of green, and covered in a molding green carpet with crumbling linoleum tiles underneath:
While it’s not a heated space, it’s a space we’d like to be able to use three seasons out of four - so the renovation began! The first thing we did was throw away the filthy carpet and rip up the tiles:
We just used a 3” paint scraper and did them by hand since they generally popped off pretty easily. We were also worried about scraping up too much of the adhesive layer (the black stuff) because it might possibly contain asbestos. That fewer also prompted us doing the work in these:
The porch tile was fairly new, however, so we weren’t too concerned about that as a possibility, but just in case! Here’s the cleaned off porch:
At some point we realized that painting the porch was going to necessitate removing the screens from the outside of the windows to reach the corners. The screens were stapled to the porch, with wood around the edges. Here it is removed:
In Part 2 we’ll start the painting, talk a bit about some interesting house history, and explain why this project was way more work than we expected!
- Nerdy recycling tip
We kept running out of paper bags for recycling, so we decided to look up the actual requirements for Minneapolis recycling - and you can actually use your own (up to 10 gallons, and not for paper) containers! Just need to get a recycling sticker for them, which the city will send you for free with just a phone call. Sweet!
- Leaf composting
When we moved in this spring, under the mountains of snow were slightly smaller mountains of decaying leaves. Hours and dozens of yard waste bags later - the yard was cleared. But it got us thinking - could we compost all of those leaves we get in the fall to use in the spring instead of dumping them on the city to take care of?
To build our yard waste compost bin, we simply took a 8’x4x piece of trellis and cut it in half, and about 4 feet of a post. Screw them together to make a 90 degree angle:
And ta-da! Instant bin:
It not only looks nice, but it’s fairly cheap ($12 for everything) and quick to assemble. If you have a nice fence that you don’t want to rot, don’t do it this way; put something between the fence and the bin. Our fence is in fairly poor shape and needs to be replaced anyways, so it wasn’t a big deal.
Happy composting!
- Watering with rain
When we first built our garden, Katie ran out and got a 25ft hose for us to water all our delicious vegetables with. Unfortunately, the house only has one spigot outside - on the side of the house, almost to the front - so the hose was pretty useless! Fortunately we had a super-rainy summer, so we never had to worry about watering, and so we never bothered to buy an extra hose to attach to the first. Instead, we decided to install a rain barrel right next to the veggie garden for next spring!
We bought some inexpensive vinyl gutters, and installed them in about an hour:
They use these slide-in hooks which you screw onto wherever they’re going; in our case, the garage.
The gutters come in 10 foot long pieces, so we had to buy three and cut one down to fit it (the garage is 22’).
Installation is easy - just use a drill to drive in the screws on the plastic hooks, and then use a joining piece when connecting lengths of gutter. We used silicone to seal any leaks.
It’s a bit of a mess at the end - we had to tilt the gutter down slowly along the length of it to make sure it drains - and with all the cut pieces at the end it ended up looking a little weird. But it works!
It’s missing a piece directing water to the barrel - but otherwise good to go! An easy and quick Sunday afternoon project!
- Gutters!
We have had a crazy-wet spring and summer, and while it’s meant we never have to water our garden, our house itself has NOT been handling it well. You see, at no point in the nearly 100 years of its existence had anyone thought to put gutters on it - something we see as a bit of a necessity. This lack of gutters has led to a steady erosion of the concrete on one side of the house, and water was getting into the basement every single time it rained.
Over the years different half-assed approaches were taken to deal with the problem - angled cement was put up against the foundation to push away water (which just broke into pieces, and trapped water behind it), water resistant paint was applied on the foundation (not effective!), and someone even thought that digging small holes along the concrete on the side of the house would work to pull away the water.
Well, we decided to use our whole ass, and got gutters installed. Because our house had crown molding on the outide, a number of contractors refused to work on it, but after a few months of calls we finally got someone to install them! The installation involved removing the molding, disposing of it properly (because of lead paint yay!), and finally adding 2x4’s to provide a flat surface for gutter mounting.
Before:
After:
We clearly need to pain the 2x4’s (and the house, if that peeling paint is any indication), but it’s not too visible behind the gutters.
The white line on the bottom right of the pavement there is where water had been falling from the roof onto the concrete before the gutters were installed:
Anyways! The water in the basement has ceased, proving once and for all that you shouldn’t put off for 100 years what you can afford to do today!
- Motion Detector Light
Our neighborhood has had a bit of a rash of burglaries lately, and while we have a motion sensor light on the side of our garage that faces the house, we don’t have one facing out towards the street. With a weak streetlight there, it can get pretty dark at night - until now!
Our friend Roman was in town, and using some of his know-how and tools we installed a motion sensor light on the front of the garage in a little under an hour. First we had to drill a hole to pass the power wire through, and then mounted the base of the light on it:
Inside, we had to add a switch box to install a light switch. This isn’t a necessary step, but in case we want to be able to turn it off, or if it goes on the fritz - it’s useful to have!
Faceplate installed:
If we ever insulate that garage, we won’t have weird floating boxes like that anymore. Then we had to route the cable from the switch to a power source, in this case an outlet a few feet away. Make sure to turn off power to the garage before doing this!
And there it is! Easy install - thanks Roman!
- Trash talk
When we were renting, we never had to worry about the cost of trash pickup or recycling - those were all included in our rent. Now, though, we’re trying to figure out how to reduce the monthly cost of our utilities as much as possible!
Our first step - getting a smaller garbage can! The standard cart the city provides is 94 gallons - we weren’t coming anywhere near to filling that - even without composting! On a tip from a coworker, we called 311 and asked the City to replace our cart with a smaller, 22 gallon one. We’re still not getting close to filling it, plus instead of the standard $5 monthly rental fee the big cart has, it’s only $2 a month for the little guy. It’s a small sliver of our overall utility bill, but we’ll keep hacking away at it!
- Building a garden
With all this warm weather comes gardening! We’ve always wanted to be able to grow our own vegetables and herbs but being apartment-bound made them pretty much impossible. Our past attempts all died sad deaths indoors or were eaten by the cat, so with a big yard - it’s veggie time!
Being unsure of the quality of our soil, it made sense to build a raised-bed garden. The first step was to construct the boxes - we went with two 8’x4’ beds to maximize the veggie growing space we’d have. We also went with cedar over treated lumber to avoid any chemicals leaching into the soil:
Construction of the box is very easy - we had the hardware store cut the 2x4’s before we left the store, and we just had to buy a single 8 foot post and get that cut into 8 pieces. Then it was just a matter of lining everything up and drilling holes!
With the box built, we dug a suitable hole (about 6 inches deep in the hopes that rabbits and other animals wouldn’t burrow under the box too easily) - this first one already had a sandbox in place, so we had to take that apart first.
With the hole dug, we put landscape fabric down and then fit in the box. Then came the dirt, which we purchased at a local landscaping company (it’s 3/4” of a square yard!)
The plants we got at the Friends Plant Sale, and in they went!
It was a pretty easy job, actually, and took only a few hours with construction and everything. We still need to put up some chicken wire to keep out the rabbits and squirrels, but so far all the veggies are growing great!
- Reduce, Reuse, Grill
Summer is hereish! With a backyard, we knew it would only be a matter of time before we started grilling out - but having lived in an apartment so long we didn’t own a grill.
We could have bought a new grill, but there are always a ton for sale on Craigslist, plus the US already buys 15 million grills a year (!) so we thought we’d buy used and try to reduce our footprint a bit.
The grill we got (dirt cheap!) needed some work:
It all held together fine, but it was pretty ugly, had surface rust, and needed a good cleaning. We cleaned out the inside as well as we could, and then taped down some of the metal vents and legs to repaint it:
A few coats of Rustoleum high-heat paint, and it looks (and cooks) as good as new!
- Rusty railings
It’s been raining pretty much all week this week, so we haven’t been able to get to the next project until today - repainting the front railings! They’ve been neglected for quite a while, and are covered in rust and peeling paint:
Check out that green leaf on the bottom of the photo! Spring is kinda here! Anyways, it’s pretty simple to clean up all that rust - just make sure you’ve got some gloves,a mask (check out the red on the mask; that’s all rust I would have breathed in), a wire brush and a sanding brick thingie. Oh, and some good primer to serve as a base to paint over.
Sanding the railing took some time since we wanted to make sure we got every bit as smooth as possible. Any bumps would look terrible once painted. We then wiped it all down with a dry and a wet rag - and then it proceeded to rain for three days, so it got nice and clean!
Here’s the first coat of primer - we used some packaging paper to protect the house from getting paint on it.
And the next day, the finished product:
And, in keeping with the theme of the post:
Lagwagon - Rust
- Little things
Making sure our bikes are safe has always been a challenge for us; living in Minneapolis is particularly tricky, as the snow and road salt can quickly eat away at any bike left outside. When we lived in an apartment we used to keep four to five bikes at a time in it - things were pretty crowded! Our hope this this house was to start storing our bikes in the garage (plus to have an actual bike workspace instead of the living room floor!), but our garage was woefully unsafe for any long-term storage.
The biggest problem was the lack of any real door security - a cheap padlock held on by some thin metal won’t cut it. Last weekend we got out the drill and installed a deadbolt:
It’s really not hard to put in your own deadbolt if you have the right tools; we didn’t have the right drill bits, but $15 later we had the 2 1/8” bit and 1” spade bit to put in the deadbolt. A little bit of drilling and a security strikeplate later, and our garage is a little harder to break in to!
- Sunday afternoon project - The Fan
One of the first things we noticed when we were looking at this house was the lack of a bathroom fan in the bathroom - it seemed odd to us since every house we’ve lived in has had a fan, and this being Minnesota, leaving the window open during a shower is impractical half of the year!
Installing a new fan can be tricky, but it’s not impossible. With the help of Alex’s coworker Joshua, we installed the fan this Sunday afternoon.
First, we went into the attic and found a beam we could bolt the fan onto. After drilling down into the bathroom from above, we traced the fan motor onto the ceiling so we knew where to cut.
Then in the attic, we began attaching the piping to the fan which we drew out of one of the front vents in the attic. Normally you should leave these vents open, but our roof has a TON of vents (6 vents, and 6 soffit vents too), so this one was going to blocked off by the insulators when they came next week anyways. So we pulled the pipe out of there.
Our attic is filled with styrofoam and some vermicullite, as well as some pieces of fiberglass insulation. While digging around in there to clear room for the pipe, we found old scraps of newspaper (Minneapolis Star and Tribune) as well as old puzzle pieces.
The newspaper was particularly useful for us, because it showed us that not so long ago this attic had been used for storage, and maybe even a sort of living space (that explains the puzzle). In fact, it’s large enough that we could always make it into another room if we need to down the road. There are already some creepy hangers up there:
We got the piping all wrapped up and connected, and screwed it onto the vent so it won’t come loose if it’s windy or rains. We also shoved some of the fiberglass insulation in there, just in case squirrels try to get in before the insulators can seal it off for good.
We didn’t feel we were qualified to run the wiring for the switch, though, so while the mechanics of the fan are all ready to go, the switch will be put in by an electrician on Tuesday. And then we’ll have a bathroom fan finally!
- New couch day!
With a new house comes a new living room! Thanks to some very generous housewarming gifts from our family we found ourselves holding some IKEA gift cards and big ideas - but no way to get those ideas home in our car. Now, the car is by no means small - it’s a pretty big sedan - but like most passenger cars it’s pretty useless for hauling large cargo. We were able to get the love seat in the trunk, but more than half was hanging out, and it’s no fun driving on the highway praying you don’t lose a bungee cord at 65mph!
The couch was definitely a no-go for the car, so we thought - why not bike to IKEA and get what we need? It’s actually a pretty easy ride from Minneapolis - trails most of the way - and IKEA even has bike racks right in front of the front door! We rode over there this Sunday, which was a great way to spend such a sunny, gorgeous day. I’m happy to say we got a new couch, lamp, rug, and some baskets on our trip, and they all fit with no problem on our Bikes At Work trailer:
It was about 10 miles in each direction, but just as with our move, once we got the trailer moving, nothing could slow us down! The trails were a bit narrow with snow and with all the other bikers and runners out, but we were happy to be on there instead of the busy car-filled streets.
So that was how we spent this last gorgeous Sunday - out on our bikes, starting to furnish our new home!
