Author: Matt

Garage Excavation Prep

July 8, 2024 / / 3 Comments

After a number of quotes, we bit the bullet and signed on to get the garage built. We made an initial deposit on Friday and they said they’d be in touch Monday to discuss scheduling. Instead, Monday they showed up with an excavator. Unfortunately, even though the concrete demo was done, we weren’t quite ready for them to start.

Monday morning surprise excavator!

Primarily, we needed to get the fences along the sides of the yard removed. We also needed temporary fencing, a porta-john, and while they had asked if we had a survey and we said yes, we actually needed the physical survey markers at the corners of the property. So they wound up leaving and left us to get prepared. Sadly, we also had to take down the swing set I built for the kids during Covid.

Fence panels removed on North side

We started with conversations with the neighbors to either side, getting permission to encroach temporarily on their yards during construction. On the one side, the fence was built during their renovation, but on our side of the property line. That made it our fence, so we just needed to make sure they were ok with closing off their access to the sidewalk along the garage while we removed it. They have a toddler and we want to make sure their yard is secure.

Fence posts removed, temporary fence delivered

On the other side, there’s actually two fences, a chain link on our side and a wooden picket fence on the other. We got permission to relocate the wooden fence about a foot back from the property line as long as it was secure for their dog. We got the porta-john, the temporary fencing was delivered, we got an expedited survey done, and took out the fence.

Chain link fence and stump removed, South fence moved

The fence posts and the tree that had grown in between the two fences were the bigger challenge. We picked up a “farm jack” which was a tool I was previously unfamiliar with but will use anytime we have a post to remove in the future. It lets you ratchet the post straight out of the ground, with or without the concrete footer attached. Sarah and I took out about eight or ten wood and metal fence posts in fairly short order. I wasn’t as lucky with the tree stump. That required some extensive work with a reciprocating saw and long blade, but I managed to get that ripped out of the ground. Sarah and I moved a few sections of the wooden fence on the South side back a foot and made it secure for the dog next door.

With everything removed and prepped and all of the fence debris and landscaping stones cleared away, we let the contractors know they were good to proceed. They showed up the following week on Tuesday and had the footings completely excavated in just a couple of days. They actually cut back the sidewalk on the neighbors side where it was over the property line, so we’ll need to fix their side gate once the walls are up.

Back Yard Concrete Demo

July 2, 2024 / / 0 Comments

I’m going to skip over all the things that I haven’t kept the blog updated about and go straight into covering various projects. So, I apologize that they won’t be posted in chronological order, since we’ve done a ton of projects since I fell off the posting timeline and the effort involved in getting caught up on everything is a big reason I haven’t bothered.

So, concrete demo. Let’s back up a step. When we bought the house, there was a two car garage in the back (we have an alley). It was probably a 1.5 car garage when it was built but they poured a three foot concrete pad next to the garage and literally moved the wall over, increasing the door size in the process and adding a single car door to the yard (maybe the original door? I don’t know) and extending the roof to reach the wall in its new location. So the garage was in bad shape, none of it was done well, and we tore it down years ago. In addition, the back yard had a concrete patio covering most of the area in back.

In addition to wanting a new garage, we wanted to get rid of the concrete patio. We plan to eventually put in a smaller paver patio. When we started getting quotes on the garage, we asked for removal of the patio concrete at the same time. When we took out the loan to finish the house, we wound up removing the garage because the overall price tag was just too much.

In hindsight, it may have been better to just do it, since the prices have not come down in the subsequent years. The garage quotes were really high and we started looking for any way to bring the price down. One of the ways to do that was demo the concrete ourselves.

So, we got a hand-me-down barely-used electric jackhammer from Sarah’s dad and set to work. As with most of these projects, it was harder and took longer than expected, but three heavy-debris dumpsters later, we’d completely cleared the back yard of concrete. The hardest bits were reinforced with steel mesh, and 4-8 inches thick throughout, with most of the patio being 6 inches thick.

The kids helped too, using the jackhammer (with supervision), hauling concrete chunks, and raking and shoveling the tinier bits. The neighbors did not really appreciate us using the loud jackhammer on and off for a couple months. We tried to limit how long we went and which days to be less annoying, but I’m sure we tried their patience. When we got to the back of the yard, we needed to remove and re-build the fence which was a project in and of itself.

In the end, all this was probably not worth it. If I’d known the patio was six inches thick with re-mesh, I may have just paid to have it done since while it absolutely saved us a couple-few thousands of dollars, it wasn’t so much that it felt truly worth the time and effort.

With the concrete removed, we still have a few steps before we’re ready to build a garage, but I’ll cover that in the next post.

Whoops

March 1, 2024 / / 0 Comments

Just a heads up that my WordPress theme died and now the site looks dumpy. Even though I haven’t been posting, I try to keep things working. I’ll hopefully get it straightened out soon.

In the meantime, let me tease you all with some projects we’ve been working on and I intend to write posts about: the front yard, the basement stairs, the basement exterior walls, the back yard concrete demo, and if we can get our act together, the garage!

Stay tuned. I haven’t forgotten about this thing.

Update! I found a new theme that at least works similarly to the old one. I’m not huge on the menu bar being on the left, and it doesn’t have the same options as the old one, but I’ll take it.

Front door

Upstairs

January 23, 2023 / / 2 Comments

If you aren’t a regular reader or weren’t paying close attention, you might not even notice that an entire calendar year separates this post and the previous one. What can I say? I fell off the blogging horse. What happened in the past year? Is the house done? Well, I’m not going to cover a whole year of work, but the big development is yes, just one week after the last post, we moved upstairs.

One of the reasons I didn’t post right away when we moved is that people want to see pictures, and honestly, right after you move in things aren’t staged and pretty. It took us time to work through bins and boxes, unpacking things we’ve had in storage for years, getting new furniture, etc. We didn’t even have our new stove until March, with that space occupied by the old white stove from downstairs.

The contractors were only sort-of finished. They were still working on trim, the electricians didn’t want to come back because they didn’t think we were ready and we had to argue with them to get them to come back and finish up. We’d planned to have Sarah’s family over for an after-Christmas get-together, with her brother and sister-in-law flying in from Colorado and staying with us. The day they showed up was the day the electricians finished and Sarah’s family helped us move upstairs when they got here.

The list of projects yet to complete is ridiculous. Not just finishing touches, but major work including the basement and the garage and the yard. That said, we’re so happy to be out of the basement and so grateful to be in our (mostly) finished home. After ten-plus years of blood, sweat, and tears, all the help of family and friends, we’re living in our house and it’s beautiful. This past Christmas was our first chance to decorate upstairs and it was kind of magical.

I’m going to start blogging again. There’s been a lot of work this past year to catch you up on, but we also wanted to take a breather and a lot of life happened as well. There’s a lot to do yet, and I’m happy to share it as we go. We’re not going to be working as hard on the house as we did before, since the pressure is off and we’ve already spent so much time on this that we’re looking to take it easier, but there’s a lot to do and it’s not going to get done on its own.

Stair Balusters

January 11, 2022 / / 5 Comments

With the edging installed and the railings varnished, we moved on to balusters. I bought three different kinds of wrought iron balusters to make up a pattern: plain straight, a swirling pattern intended to tie with the front door that we called “squiggles”, and “baskets” where several pieces wrap around to make a ball. Originally I was planning to put “knuckles” for these, little diamond-shaped bits along the straight length, but Sarah liked the baskets and they were cheaper than the knuckles, which made it an easy call. I worked out a pattern and approximate quantities to order, along with “shoes” (the little piece that goes at the bottom), epoxy, and an epoxy gun.

One of the “squiggles”

The installation process was to first map out where the pieces would go, such that they was never more than a four-inch gap (per-code) and yet they didn’t land on the bullnose part of the treads. This probably wouldn’t have been that hard with all straight and basket pieces, but the addition of the wider squiggles meant I had to adjust spacing. I wound up having to be flexible to get this to work, with each run of steps having slightly different spacing.

Dean came over to help with this project, bringing his metal cut off saw (of course he has one of those) which made the process go much faster than if we had just used an angle grinder. We started with the horizontal run along the basement stair opening (the stairs that don’t exist yet). All of the horizontal sections were much easier to work out spacing, since there’s no bullnoses to work around, but it was my first one so it still took me a while. I put a piece of masking tape down, worked out the spaces, and then drilled holes for each one. I used my laser level to determine where the top should go and drilled those too. Drilling these holes took forever, and I wound up getting a new spade bit for the rest of the project, which was dramatically faster.

The other reason the horizontal sections were easier is because all of the balusters were the same height. Dean was able to cut them in bulk and get the ends ground smooth while I got the holes drilled and then I started putting them in with epoxy. The epoxy dispenser worked pretty well, and there was a decent amount of work time. We taped all of the shoes up before we put the balusters in so that we wouldn’t forget them and they’d be out of the way until the epoxy cured. You can’t come back and put the shoe on later if you epoxy the baluster in without it, so this was important.

We worked our way up the first flight, which got the two longest stretches of railing complete that day, but that was as far as we made it. Dean was nice enough to come back not once, but twice this week to help finish the project. I needed to get all of the holes drilled in the edging going up to the attic and in the attic hallway before the carpeting installation so we didn’t get sawdust in our new carpeting, so I got those sections mapped and drilled in advance. The first evening we finished all of the horizontal sections, getting into a good rhythm. The second evening Dean was joined by both his dad and Dan, and the four of us were able to get through the three remaining sections of stairs, cutting, grinding, taping, and epoxying.

The last run we did we encountered a new problem. The balusters are 44″ tall since the railings are 42″ high but they need to pocket in. Somehow, on several of the steps leading up to the attic from the landing, because the baluster aligned with the back edge of the step where the baluster is longest, we needed balusters taller than that. To solve this problem, we added little stubs to the bottom of the balusters where it will be covered up by the shoe anyway.

The kids went around and removed all of the blue masking tape, and then Dan came back on Saturday and used an allen wrench to tighten all of the many, many little baluster shoes in place.