Year: 2011

Thank Goodness for Friends and Family!

August 13, 2011 / / 0 Comments

It has been a long process. Almost two months since we have closed and we still aren’t quite ready to move in.

However, I would be remiss if I did not thank my family and our friends for their help over these past two months.

Matt B. looking VERY tired after all of his hard work

Thank you Aaron, Eileen, Collin, and David for your awesome demoing and gardening skills. Thank you Matt L. for helping us move big items. Thank you Will for helping us remove cabinets and flooring. Thank you Matt B. for sacrificing your vacation days to come down and help. Thank you Dean and Siobhan for everything that you did, especially for the use of your truck and the kitchen appliances. Thank you Meg and Eriq for helping us install various items, clean walls, and the air conditioner. We have used it more than a few times! Thank you James for helping with the kitchen, the microwave/ladder, and for stopping by to see if we needed anything. Thank you Nikki and Rob for also helping us transport big items, for lending out your awesome tools, and for the amazing ceiling fans that you found. Thank you Tony and Jenn for the free dishwasher. The loan/gift of various appliances have made it so we can afford to do the structure right away. The free labor also helps us with this goal.

Sarah’s Dad

And, a very, very big thank you to my parents who helped us out every single week. Without your generosity with help and tools we would not be moving in on the 20th. You really do spoil the hell out of me. And if you ever need ANYTHING, please do not hesitate to ask. We are just a phone call away. 🙂

And, if I forgot anyone, thank you so much for everything! We have the best family and friends we could ever dream of.

The Little Things

August 5, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Sometimes the things that make a place seem crappy or nice are very small. Once the living room was painted I replaced the electrical outlets with nice new ones. The old outlets were just one more manifestation of the wealth of wrong that permeates the house like some fetid disease.

Every time we plugged in a fan, a delicate balancing act ensued where you tried to gingerly step away and not have the plug simply fall out of the outlet. “Why not simply spread or narrow the prongs on the plug, so it holds?” I hear you thinking. I mean, I’m paraphrasing, but that’s the first thing most people do when confronted with a plug that won’t stay in. Suffice it to say that indeed occurred to me as well and despite all manner of bending, it simply hung out of the outlet as though the plug felt dirty for being put into such disgusting places, and was merely trying to escape.

Old outlet

The outlet had been painted at some point or three, it was connected with fabric-wrapped corroded copper wire, and of course the polarity was backwards. After removing the old, broken thing, it disintegrated like a vampire exposed to sunlight.

Properly wired

The new outlet, one of the Decora-style Levitons I’m a fan of, literally makes the entire room feel newer. Now, the fans gleefully remain plugged in to its slick, tamper-resistant, hot-and-neutral-correctly-wired, properly grounded new outlet.

New outlet

It’s the smallest thing imaginable. Five minutes to install, less than three dollars for both the outlet and the vinyl, crack-proof cover, and yet such an amazing effect.

Busy Busy

August 5, 2011 / / 1 Comment

We’ve been working on the house so much that we’ve fallen behind on the blog! I published a post about trim that I actually wrote early last week and forgot to finish. We’ve made a ton of progress since then. Let me re-cap. To get things caught up I’ll jump back about a week and a half. We got a used stove and refrigerator from Dean’s with the help of Sarah’s family. Having more than a cooler was pretty nice with how hot it’s been recently. I took off work Wednesday through Friday because we had a party planned for Saturday. My friend Matt came down on Thursday and helped us a ton.

In the bathroom we stripped the sea-foam green stucco from the walls, which left the rough drywall paper. So Sarah and I plastered the walls and ceiling with joint compound, then she and Matt B sanded it and painted it. I scrubbed the tub, installed the mirror and light bar, and put up a towel hook. Unfortunately the light bar isn’t working, so that’s still on my to-do list.

Preparing to Paint

In the living room and dining room we got everything cleaned up and taped down plastic over the floors and windows. I took down the ceiling fan and broke out the paint sprayer. Between the cloud of paint, the speckles on the outside of my goggles and the fog on the inside I couldn’t really see what I was doing, but the paint sprayer was awesome just the same.

Painting with the sprayer

I ran into a problem halfway through the first room. The inlet hose on the sprayer briefly left the paint and I couldn’t get it to maintain pressure. It would spray for about five seconds and then start dribbling while the compressor ran noisily for thirty seconds. Matt B came to the rescue and suggested I prime it again. That did the trick and I was back at it. Something to note: don’t leave it on maximum pressure. We wound up with drips of paint on the walls and I went through a five gallon bucket in a room and a half. Oops! It didn’t take long to blast through the two rooms though. The good news is that the blue trim and almond walls are now a blissful white.

Living room painted

Taking down the paint, the room looked amazingly better. It honestly started to look like a place we could move into. Friday we did touch ups with rollers and really got everything smoothed out. Then we cleaned up the yard while Sarah planted her seedlings in the garden. With everything swept off Saturday morning we threw a nice outdoor barbecue for friends and got to show everyone how far the house had come. Sarah’s parents and brother brought down the first load of kitchen cabinets. A friend of the family was remodeling her kitchen and gave them to Sarah’s uncle, who then discovered his ceilings were too low to use them. So now we’re getting them, but we have to take all of them, and there’s a lot.

Sarah’s sister Nicole found a great deal on ceiling fans, and Rob got them installed earlier this week. We got the rest of the caulking done and are planning to get everything taped up today and tomorrow. Then we’ll paint the kitchen and bedrooms on Saturday. Saturday morning, Dean is helping us pick up a dishwasher from our friend Jenn. Sunday we’re off to Sarah’s grandmother’s to get the rest of the kitchen cabinets.

If everything goes to plan, we’ll get the cabinets installed and pack up the condo next week, so we can hopefully move the following weekend. We’re checking items off the list and trying to get everything coordinated, but it remains to be seen if we can keep on top of it all.

Getting Trim

August 4, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Things are coming along at the house. It’s starting to look like moving in isn’t some far-off fantasy. We created a list of things that need to be done for each room in order to move in, and we’ve been crossing them off as we finish. One of the bigger projects was the trim. Sarah removed much of the trim around the doors and windows in the kitchen because they were disgustingly dirty and the area behind them was packed with dead roaches (Ew). We cleaned everything out, Sarah and her mom washed all of the trim, and I put them back up with the help of Dean’s compressor and brad nailer.

Door edge

Not all of the pieces were salvageable, and with the pre-hung doors we put not being as tall or wide as the openings, we had to case in some spaces. The end result is a bit, uh, rustic, but it will work. We want everything closed up tightly and caulked so that in the event any of the nasty bugs are left alive they’ll be stuck in the walls and not in our cereal boxes.

It’s been time consuming. We got all of the doors and windows encased, put quarter round in the kitchen at the baseboard, and now are going around and filling all the gaps with spray foam, wood fill, joint compound, and caulk. We’ve gone through more than twenty tubes of caulk and are just about done with everything.

Installing trim

Looking Ahead

July 22, 2011 / / 2 Comments

We’ve been talking to the structural engineer, and while we haven’t figured out the exact plan we’re hoping to get the basement shored up. If we’re lucky we’ll find that the footings under the wall go a foot down below the basement floor. If that’s the case we’ll get the new steel header and steel support posts, as well as new concrete footings under the posts. Those new footings will be set deeper than the current floor, so that down the road we can dig out the basement floor and gain about 8″ of height. I was relieved to find out that we could do those two separately, because digging out the basement is expensive, and not something we really need right now. The support posts need to be done now, though, because the house needs to be leveled before we can remodel the first floor.

So far we’ve been working on the second floor and everything has been temporary stuff to make the house livable. The structural work is the first thing that’s actually fixing the house up, well aside from exterminating roaches. The exterminator told us we can move in, but I was disappointed to hear that we probably won’t completely eliminate them until we tear down the walls and then call the exterminators back to spray again. That means we’ll be sealing everything on the second floor up as tight as we can with caulk, wood fill, spray foam, and whatever else it takes. He said it was one of the worst infestations he’d seen.

Once we’re moved in and the condo is rented we’ll move forward on the structural repairs. Then we’ll work with an architect and plan out the rest of the project. In addition to the obvious stuff like new walls, drywall, and floors, we need to install new heating and cooling. We’d like to put in hydronic radiant heating and high velocity forced air cooling, but they aren’t cheap. High efficiency boiler, pumps and manifolds, condensers, blower and ductwork will run tens of thousands of dollars. We can do some of it in phases, but it’s probably the single most expensive part of the project. We’ve spoken with an HVAC guy and gotten some ideas, but it’s tempting to just go with traditional forced air, even if it means installing bulkheads.

We’ll figure it out once we get closer. Right now we’ve got more pressing needs, like getting the rest of the trim back up and the second floor painted, plus a laundry list of little tasks that add up to a lot of work.