Category: Livable Second Floor

Getting us to the point where we can move into the second floor apartment.

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

It Can Be Fixed!

July 19, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Towards the beginning I decided to tear some tiles off the wall in the second story kitchen by the living room door.  Here is a picture of me in the process…

You may be wondering why I did it?  Well, the tiles were only half-glued on in the first place.  And, there were cockroaches running under them.  So, I tore them off.

But, I had to fix the mess I made…

Aside from the chimney stains already coming through the Spackle, it doesn’t look too bad.  I will need to prime it before painting it (maybe a couple of times), but I generally pretty proud of the Spackling job that I did. 🙂

Bit by Bit

July 19, 2011 / / 0 Comments

We’ve continued to work, and in fact I’ve taken a lot of photos with the good camera so I can publish several projects once I get some time (ha!). Until then, I have some shots from the cell phone that I can put up fairly easily. I’ll see if I can cover the stuff we’re currently occupied with. Last week we started to really focus on the upstairs. We have an incredible amount of work to do everywhere, but since we need to get the second floor livable quickly, that’s where things are happening.

First of all, we installed a new pre-hung door for the bathroom. All of the interior doors had been mangled pretty badly by the previous occupants, who saw fit to reverse them all so that they opened out of the rooms and into the hallway. Knowing from previous experience how awful hanging doors is, we bought a cheapo pre-hung door. It went in much more easily than mortising out a new hinge and trying in vain to level the awful door frame. The downside is it left a rather large hole above the door, because the doorways are much taller than a standard 80″ door.

Dirty

Sarah’s parents came down Sunday to help us and while Sarah and her mom washed the roach crap from the door and window trim that had been taken down, Sarah’s dad got the stove outlet installed, going through a couple of Dremel bits cutting through the nigh-indestructible tile. The only remaining wiring to run will be for the range hood above the stove, which fortunately doesn’t involve cutting through any more tile.

I took on the back bedroom, washing the walls and then spackling the exposed top edge of drywall that went around the room. It’s been hot recently, being mid July, and without air conditioning in the house it’s sweaty work. I went through three shirts on Sunday. After I finished the circumference of the room I repaired the wall in the closet, where they had seen fit to install drywall over the brackets for a shelf, and over the trim of the door they were covering. After a lot of mudding and edging, that too was looking a bit better. The rest of the closet still needs to be cleaned, as it currently looks something like Shelob’s lair.

Getting cleaner

We installed some make-shift trim in the kitchen, cut some more to put above the bathroom door due to the aforementioned five-inch gap between the top of the pre-hung door and the top of the door frame. Dean lent us his nailer and compressor which is helping it go up much more easily.

I’ve been trying to get things ready to paint, but every day we work on the house it seems further away. Yesterday Sarah started caulking the trim, and we bought another pre-hung door for the back bedroom. I got the old door frame out, but we still have to hang the new one. Sarah’s been painting the new trim pieces we bought and washing the door frames behind the trim so that we can put it back up.

Clean

Once we have all the trim pieces back up and the door installed, and all of the trim sealed with caulk we need to do taping and masking. I bought a paint sprayer because I want to go through the painting quickly, but it also means that everything needs to be ready to paint at once. A couple weeks ago I wanted to paint on this past Sunday. Then I just wanted to get all the taping done by Sunday. Now’s it’s Tuesday and I’m hoping we can start taping by the end of the week.

We have flooring to repair in the dining room, tile to grout in the bathroom, trim work nearly everywhere, some finishing work on the edges of the kitchen floor, the rest of the bedroom closet needs to be spackled, and I’m sure I’m leaving things out. We’ll get there, but it takes time, more time than I ever expect.

We had the structural engineer out yesterday. He’s going to get us a quote in the next few days. The exterminator is back out on Friday, along with the water department to install a new meter. Saturday Sarah’s sister is coming down with a trailer so we can pick up a stove and refrigerator from Dean’s place. I’ve taken off three days next week to make a press to be done by the end of the month, but we don’t yet know when we’re moving or how long until we have the condo rented.