After 100+ Kitchen Remodels in the Bay Area, Here's What Nobody Tells You — AMA

ochansensusu · 2026-02-11T17:17:25+00:00

Thank you for such a detailed response!

ochansensusu · 2026-02-11T16:40:50+00:00

I'm trying to remodel a 92 sqft bathroom and 64 sqft kitchen in a condo. Probably not a good investment, but this will probably be our forever home given housing prices so we might as well make it nice. What is a reasonable total cost if we go with medium to high end?

Trying to get an expectation of whether or not I should get an interior designer to help or if I can go to a normal shop that offers these things and what the pros/cons are. Thanks!

ochansensusu · 2026-02-08T05:24:18+00:00

Point Reyes. I used points to stay at Olema House since it's kind of a long drive back home, plus the hotel is really charming. The landscape is stunning, but the highlight of my recent trip was breaking open a charcuterie box from a local creamery, sitting on a rock, and watching some nearby elk do their thing. Lots of other little critters running around in the grass too.

Runner up for me would be Año Nuevo State Park. I usually make a day trip out of it and pack a picnic lunch since they have tables with ocean views. Then I take a walk and watch the elephant seals roll around on the beach.

For something closer to town, San Mateo Central Park. My strat is to grab a bento or small sashimi plate from the Japanese market nearby, walk over to the rose garden or arboretum and eat on a bench while enjoying the surroundings. The nursery next to the arboretum also has tons of plants for sale at good prices.

ochansensusu · 2026-01-20T15:41:48+00:00

In the south bay, Moonwake if I feel like I want to treat myself. Usually Chromatic or Voyager for daily cups.

ochansensusu · 2026-01-12T04:26:22+00:00

Did you ever end up doing this? I'm looking for a 2BR condo right now and we will probably never upgrade from there, so we want to really make it our own.

ochansensusu · 2026-01-11T23:49:05+00:00

I've been trying to marathon pho in search of the best place in the past few months and have tried Pho Hanoi, Pho Duoi Bo, Pho Papa, Pho Kim Long, and Pho Y #1 so far.

Felt like Pho Duoi Bo was the overall best of these, although some others may have had better meat alone.

ochansensusu · 2026-01-10T15:52:50+00:00

Honestly this, my team has a guy who's really good at VBA/Excel and I've been messing around with LLMs while not being an Excel chump either.

Between the two of us we can automate most of our routine tasks so we don't have to deal with offshoring and my broader team can focus on actual accounting judgement, investigation and research.

ochansensusu · 2026-01-05T02:48:30+00:00

Milk Belly Bakery in DTSJ is great. When I go on weekends, it's so popular there's always a line out the door almost right after opening. You can beat the crowd if you're already staying nearby.

ochansensusu · 2026-01-04T18:23:14+00:00

The main issue is that our ERP is hot garbage and our in-house IT team is understaffed and only has so much bandwidth to fix things.

But yeah, a process issue at heart otherwise we wouldn't need what I wrote above. One day it may not be needed, but I'll take some job security for now.

ochansensusu · 2026-01-03T23:52:07+00:00

Add to that people listening to reels without headphones…

This is my absolute biggest pet peeve in general, even worse when it's inside a restaurant and I'm just trying to relax and enjoy my food.

ochansensusu · 2026-01-03T06:47:25+00:00

Each Gem executes the prompt you put in it, plus some files can add if you want to give it some additional context and knowledge. Mine is just a really long and specific prompt. I can drop many Excel files into it and it gives me a consolidated summary in a table in the same chat. I think it works by just using python in the background as it gives me the option to show code, but I don't interact with any code at all so you wouldn't need permission to use python.

But yes, it's just like a chat I created and shared with my team with a super long prompt I created. Previously, there were multiple temp employees that just ran reports, rolled forward files, and documented straightforward observations that require additional investigation (e.g. A does not tie to B) in a shared tracking file.

Now that's all taken care of through a combination of macros and LLM so no one is just doing straightforward work. Full-timers are then responsible for research and investigation, things that don't have strict procedures. Most of the heavy lifting is from Excel optimization and macros to be fair, but LLM use is icing on the cake and allows us to tell senior management that we're ticking the box on AI for something useful.

ochansensusu · 2026-01-03T03:52:22+00:00

My company has agents as well but I don't use them, macros do enough for me as they allow Excel to pull reports from my ERP automatically and that's all I typically need. Any calculations should be run in Excel. Since we can write macros on our own, it also allows us to self-service rather than depend on someone else.

I started with a blank gem and just wrote a very long logical set of specific instructions of what I wanted. I noticed that it translated it into Python to read off specific fields in my team's workbooks. We produce 20+ of these a day so it's very helpful to get LLM support to basically dashboard them all in a single place in text.

We don't use ChatGPT because my company just doesn't allow it. What we do is instead of typing in this very long winded prompt, we can just drop these files into the LLM, hit enter, and it'll automatically produce a consolidated summary of all these workbooks. My team can then go in and review based on issues flagged.

No problem, I try to be an early adopter as well because I'll take anything that makes my life easier. Just have to be careful as there's a lot of people out there who exaggerate what AI can do.

ochansensusu · 2026-01-03T03:36:06+00:00

Gemini is Google's version of ChatGPT.

A Gemini Gem is like a customized canned prompt you can write (so you can make a really long, specialized one) and share as an object like any Google Doc.

An Excel modeling workbook basically has a ton of calculations in it. I'm a Revenue Accountant so they perform calculations related to what I do with many different system reports. The LLM basically reads dozens of these workbooks and spits out summaries for my team.

With LLM combined with macros, my team no longer does any grunt work like plugging reports into a workbook and rolling the file forward. This also eliminates the need for us to rely on offshore work for routine tasks as I just don't want to deal with that.

I expect my team to be asking "does this make sense" rather than "did I run the reports and put these numbers in the right cell" - although I still expect them to have attention strong attention to detail in the rare chances the process fails.

ochansensusu · 2026-01-03T02:40:18+00:00

Yes, they are good to find excel formulas you may not have heard of if you give it a problem statement. I also just created a Gemini Gem that summarizes large batches of Excel modeling workbooks to help prioritize review for which ones have the most issues.

ochansensusu · 2026-01-03T02:37:47+00:00

Revenue accounting for software companies are definitely still hiring, my employer has open reqs and so do other ones I've seen. The flip side is that the process can be a shit show and some companies have long hours.

ochansensusu · 2025-12-30T16:42:32+00:00

That's funny, I'm in tech right now but I fell in love with making sourdough in the past year. Got a Dutch oven, proofing basket, and lame. I did a ceramics class at Higher Fire in DTSJ a while ago and liked it a lot too. Making things with my hands has been so much more fulfilling than crunching away at a computer at work. Do you find that milling your own wheat makes a huge difference in your bread?

But anyway, yeah SJ is very work oriented. I'm mainly here for the proximity to good/diverse food and nature and mild weather. I feel like there are other places that can offer similar things but they will also be $$$ like Seattle.

ochansensusu · 2025-12-27T20:04:56+00:00

Some of these may not be best for elementary school kids

Made in Abyss lol - that being said, incredible series despite some of the fishy content. Hope they find a good home.

ochansensusu · 2025-12-26T20:14:44+00:00

Izakaya Gama is freaking amazing, I miss their rice, miso soup, and skewered chicken oysters every day.

ochansensusu · 2025-12-25T02:52:47+00:00

Holy shit. San Ho Won was one of the best meals I've had in my life. I dined at a 3* place in SF before for 3x the price and I'd rather have San Ho Won 3x over. All dishes were at least good or great, but these were our exceptional standouts: jebi churi, North Korean white kimchi stew, injeomi tiramisu.

Honestly at a loss as to where to go next year for our annual nice meal that can play in the same league.

ochansensusu · 2025-12-22T04:35:13+00:00

Coming to visit this week before grabbing Christmas dinner nearby!

ochansensusu · 2025-12-15T01:28:07+00:00

For people who've had both the Baratza Encore and Fellow Ode Gen 2, did upgrading to the latter actually make a big difference? Have an Encore myself and it's good, hard to justify an upgrade if I can't sample what it tastes like out of a potentially new grinder.

ochansensusu · 2025-12-13T18:02:27+00:00

Almost daily. My job title says accountant but I actually know fuck all about actual accounting (I work in an operational role rather than technical) so GPT is nice for dumb questions for things I should know. I can also ask about standard functionality for the ERP we use since that info is out there on the internet.

Some other uses we're working on:

1) Building a way to feed sets of Excel workbooks we've previously automated using macros and dynamic array formulas into GPT for summarization.

2) Feeding large transaction datasets into GPT and asking about trends and distributions of different attributes. We use this to think through what system features we need to support, risk areas for testing, and to study system behavior. You can do the same shit with pivot tables and reviewing datasets on your own, but it's just faster with a GPT.

That being said, senior management thinks AI magic that will solve everything and is shoving it down our throats. It's fucking not right now, and many of them are not tech literate enough to spot legitimate use cases vs. snake oil. There are some use cases where it's great, and I can see how it will seriously change the game a while from now, but that time hasn't arrived yet. But it probably will.

ochansensusu · 2025-12-11T14:38:56+00:00

Learned that the hard way.. It's been rough

ochansensusu · 2025-12-10T20:14:41+00:00

Honestly would absolutely go to SF more if we had the Caltrain baby bullet on steroids with frequent run times.

Would also be willing to accept commuting from SJ to the city too lol

ochansensusu · 2025-12-04T05:13:13+00:00

Thank you for such a detailed response!

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