Nightmare on Elm St.

Smashed!

2006-07-24T22:05:00.000-04:00

This weekend marked the end of an era... the era of the ugly, nonfunctional patios and horrible rotten deck in preparation for the pretty new slate patio that goes in starting tomorrow. Aaron and I began late last week, removing plants that were good enough either to keep (my golden hosta, assorted lilies of the valley) or give away (tiger lilies, some scraggly hostas, and day lilies that wouldn't fit into the new garden plan), and cleaning out our fenced in storage area to make room for more stuff during the work. THAT was an adventure!

We've been so busy this year that we hadn't cleaned it out since last fall. Well, we've had a virtual avalanche of pine needles since then. Combine that with a big pile of rocks and a densly wooded area, and you get snakes. I was raking away happily when suddenly I saw a lot of wiggling and writhing on the part of the pine needle pile. I screamed, threw down my rake and ran across the yard so fast you would have thought that the snakes were chasing me with flames shooting out of their mouths! I kept yelling "SNAKES" at Aaron. Aaron was trying to be calm and rational and ask me questions about the snakes:

Aaron: Are you sure? How big were they?
Me: Yes, I'm sure! They were snake sized snakes!
Aaron: Hmmm. What color were they?
Me: Snake colored!
Aaron: Snake colored?
Me: Yes! You take the rake! You'll see!
Aaron take the rake and rakes for awhile...
Aaron: All I see are earthworms. I don't see any snakes!
Me: Well, they heard me yelling and decided that this wasn't a good place to live. They went somewhere else to be snakey.
Aaron: I really think that they were just big earthworms.
Me: If we have earthworms that big, then we've got bigger problems than snakes!

Anyway, we were up bright and early Saturday to arm ourselves with Gatorade, water, and beer. The beer would serve as payment for our two helpers, Jonathan, who works with Aaron and seriously came because he didn't have anything better to do. (I don't think that he had any idea what he was getting into.) And, of course, Mike, who comes around any time that we have to smash something. Aaron and I got stated around 9:30 am, at which time the backyard and porch looked like this:

Backyard before

Deck/porch area before

Closeup of poor condition of deck

Aaron and I started moving pavers out systematically and stacking them along the side of the house. By the time that Jonathan showed up at 11 am, we were nearly done with the center patio. With an extra big, strong guy we were done with all of the patios by 11:40 or so. We celebrated by drinking a Gatorade, and then started tackling the porch.

We tried taking things apart nicely, but it just wasn't working for us. Mike showed up around 12:00 or so and proposed liberal use of the sledgehammer and the circular saw. This method of brute force destruction went much faster. By lunchtime (around 1:30 pm) we were well on our way to demolishing the entire porch!

Aaron uses the circular saw to cut the boards into smashable pieces.

Aaron tries his hand at smashing

Mike, who seems to have a lot of pent-up aggression, demonstrates his mad sledging skillz for the internets

We made two trips to the dump and there are still a few boards left tht need to go! Between the two trips, we had a huge rainstorm that made the second trip a truly disgusting, smelly, muddy experience. We were all very glad to get a shower after the day was over!

Sunday, Aaron and I cleaned up the last of the debris and tuckpointed the wall behind the porch (it was in bad shape). We're very good at this now, so it went lightning fast. The biggest slowdown we faced was running out of sand! Check out our hard work...

None of that will show above the porch, so we didn't kill ourselves making it look perfect, just structurally sound was fine with us.

Sunday we also did a ton of yardwork. I trimmed back the perennial bed out front which is getting out of control. I thinned out the Mexican primrose and yarrow back in the spring and gave the extra plants away. I think that I did a good job on the primrose, but I should have been much more ruthless with the yarrow. Yarrow was eating all the other plants in the flower bed! So, I thinned it out liberally and now it looks a little more normal, plus you can see that pretty silver stuff and the St. John's Wort. The Russian sage was a similar story. I didn't cut it all the way back last fall, which was silly (although I felt like it was the first year, so I should baby the perennials, even the vigrous ones). So, I did some significant thinning of it as well, in order to rediscover my pretty pink phlox with the varigated leaves.

Trimmed up bed

The City no longer takes yard waste, and I generated a ton with all this trimming (and weeding) so Aaron and I used the big trash can that we bought when we moved in, but the city said was oversized (and ripped off all the stickers so we couldn't return it) to make a composter. I did a little internet research, and it said to cut a slot to remove the compost and drill a bunch of holes, which is exactly what we did. I filled this thing almost all the way up! Can you believe it???

I also finally ripped out the half dead pansies out front and replaced them with a few dahlias. There wasn't much to choose from at the nusery this late in the year. I didn't go overboard because I'll put pansies back in, probably in October.

We found tons of bricks in the backyard... more than I ever could have imagined. We're considering using them as a flower bed edging... we'll see. As for the pavers that we stacked on the side of the house, we had many piles going all the way along the side of the house, even taller than this pile of bricks:

Why no picture of all these pavers, you ask? Because I posted the pavers (assuming that no one would ever want them, just thought that I'd give it a shot) to the Frederick Freecycle group list and they were claimed within an hour! The people who took them made a trip out on Saturday night and got half, then came back at 11 am on Sunday for the rest (there were about 300+ pavers out there). The pavers were gone in less than 24 hours! If you have extra materials you'd like to get rid of, check to see if your town has a freecycle list! I found ours on the Frederick County Landfill homepage. I've also given away a doghouse and some old rusty garden fence this way and have been tremendously pleased with the response and the politeness of the people who have picked things up. It helps the environment, saves landfill space, and helps me feel better because I know stuff is being used!

I'll leave you with some post demo pictures of the area. It will be so exciting to see things going on out there!

Welcome Chicago Tribune Readers

2006-07-21T13:55:00.000-04:00

If you read about us in the article in the Chicago Tribune, welcome! We feel very honored to have all of this recent media attention. Feel free to poke through the archives, and come back this weekend for pictures of our latest demolition- the backyard porch and patios!

**** Chicago Tribune Article ****
True-life confessions of the weekend warrior
Bloggers detail the good, bad and ugly of rehabbing; call it 'therapy'
Advertisement

By Mary Ellen Podmolik
Special to the Tribune

July 21, 2006

Jocelyn Meyer and her boyfriend, Steve Gerard, spent a weekend in late June preparing nine doors, two windows and 1,900 feet of wood trim for stripping, a minor but time-consuming task in the multiyear renovation of their North Side 1910 two-flat.

And when it was all over, Meyer sat down and wrote about it, took some photos and posted it on a Web log, or blog, that details the ins and outs of their large project and snippets of their personal lives.

For some people, the idea of rehashing a job in painstaking detail and taking photos along the way might seem like overkill. But for Meyer--who adds to her blog as many as five times a week--and a growing legion of amateur rehabbers like her, it's therapy. And she has found an audience. On average, her blog, chicago2-flat.blogspot.com, gets 300 page views a day.

"It brings a feeling of closure," Meyer said of her postings. "And there's that whole `let me show people what I did' thing. If you're working full time and working on your house on weekends and nights, you can't have a super-rich social life. It helps to connect up on the blog. And you're showing [your work] to people who can appreciate it."

The growing popularity of blogs has brought together far-flung communities of every ilk, and rehabbers are no exception. Blogs dedicated to home improvement and renovation have given do-it-yourselfers a way to exchange advice on myriad subjects.

But the benefit of blogging is encouragement as well as education. Bloggers say there's a lot to be said for "chatting" with others who understand better than anyone how excited you were to spend your weekend taping drywall or finding a better way of laying hex tile.

Some rehabbers start a blog to update out-of-town friends and family on the progress of their renovations. Others find them by accident when they search the Internet for advice on various subjects, land on someone's journal and soon find themselves documenting their own work for others.

Three years after buying a 1914 Craftsman-style bungalow in Chicago and vowing to renovate it themselves, Aaron and Jeanne Marie Olson are seasoned home improvement buffs. They also are dedicated bloggers and have gone so far as to establish a Web site that aggregates other renovation blogs, houseblogs.net.

(Two other blog finders to check out are technorati.com/blogs/home+improvement and blogs.botw.org/Home/Home(underscore)Improvement.)

But that wasn't their initial plan at all. The Olsons established their Web site, www.houseinprogress.net, within a month of buying their fixer-upper to share pictures with family members. Others happened upon it. "Most surprising to us, we'd show up as search results when people would google `noisy radiator' or `smelly basement,'" Aaron Olson said.

They've shared details on the work done on two bedrooms and two bathrooms (including one that bloggers helped redesign), exchanged comments about the paint colors they've chosen, learned how to refurbish old wood windows and found better tools to strip paint. They find the online networking a critical part of a home makeover that will take an estimated seven more years to complete.

But they are careful to sound like homeowners, not renovation professionals.

"We don't tell people how to do stuff," Jeanne Olson said. "We tell people what we are doing with our house. There are a lot of caveats. We are not contractors."

Experienced bloggers say if they want to hear back from readers, it's important to detail the work clearly but in an engaging manner. They strive for the text to be personal, rather than just sounding like a how-to manual. An entry one day might focus on dealing with an uneven bathroom floor; the next day the topic might be dealing with children underfoot or the contractor who never showed up.

The other imperative is photos, and lots of them. Before, during and after shots are common, as are less-than-glamorous shots of homeowners or contractors performing the work.

Kim Bouldin, a Nashville-area homeowner, says she likes to use a lot of descriptive text and pictures on her blog, www.onewomanslife.com, ranging from before and after pictures of breaker boxes to the detailed to-do list on the side of her blog, with completed items crossed off. She'll spend up to two hours a day updating the work on her family's ranch home because she's determined to keep a warts-and-all journal and how it can tax homeowners financially and emotionally.

"Renovating is not a pretty, neat and tidy process," Bouldin said. "It can get ugly, really ugly. I think readers need to see that side, too--the good with the bad. And when I'm feeling discouraged because of the slow progress or a renovating goof we made or the mess, readers, often other house bloggers, provide encouraging words that keep me going."

Her candor has paid off. A kitchen designer who stumbled across her blog sent her oil-rubbed bronze kitchen hardware for free.

Bouldin acknowledges the potential downside of blogging: getting so caught up on the computer that the blog, not the project, takes center stage. "It's easier to write a blog or read other people's than to peel paint or sand," she said. "But if you're going to have pictures of anything, you've got to do the work."

Amanda and Aaron Forster knew nothing of home improvement blogs when they bought a 1915 duplex 45 miles north of Washington, D.C., two years ago. Then they found honeybees living in a wall, and Amanda went to the Web, seeking information on tuckpointing.

She landed on a blog. "I just got sucked into this whole world, reading about what people were doing to their houses, reading their personal stories," she said.

They decided to document their own progress, and her husband came up with a name: nightmareonelmst.blogspot.com. (Yes, they really do live on Elm Street.)

They've asked other homeowners about various types of drywall and gotten tips for making wood trim. At the same time, though, the couple feels obligated to share their travails and successes with others.

"There's a lot of things I would have been too afraid to tackle before," Amanda Forster said. "I've been helped so much by strangers that I feel it's only fair that I make the contribution to someone else."

- - -

Read it and weep

The thrill of victory. The agony of defeat. For renovators who blog, victory can manifest itself as one less trip to Home Depot or one more project crossed off the to-do list. The agony? It's everything from smashed hostas to the exhaustion that comes with never quite being done with those projects.

Take a peek at recent posts. If you've lived through a remodel, we bet you'll relate.

Chicago Two-Flat

chicago2-flat.blogspot.com

THE REMODELERS

Jocelyn Meyer and Steve Gerard, Chicago

THE POST

Please! Just don't hurt my hostas! (June 29, 2006)

"Here you see my yard yesterday. Peaceful and somewhat pleasing--a nice place to be--maybe even eat dinner.

Today the roofers came . . . and things have changed. They hurt my hostas. They thwarted some lilies, and my lawn is in tears.

As it turns out the original roof was still on the building. This is to say that there has never ever been a tear-off done. There were five or six layers of roofing on our roof. I know we did the right thing because this is way too much weight for our building, but it is not pleasant for my garden--at all."

House In Progress

houseblogs.net

THE REMODELERS

Jeanne Marie and Aaron Olson, Chicago

THE POST

After the baby is tucked in . . . (June 12, 2006)

"...what do DIY mommies do?

Do they get a glass of wine? Put their feet up? Read a magazine?

Not if they want handles on their built-in cabinet, they don't. Sigh."

One Woman's Cottage Life

www.onewomanslife.com

THE REMODELER

Kim Bouldin, Nashville

THE POST

Five-Day Home Improvement Marathon (July 2, 2006)

"There is nothing like the thought of company coming to get you motivated to work on your house. My mom and stepfather will be arriving either Thursday night or Friday morning and that means we have about five days to tackle a lot of projects. . . . Here is the list of things that I want completed by Thursday.

Mow the yard, weed and mulch landscaping beds, prune a few trees.

Prime and paint the gutted bathroom subfloor, make the space temporarily "cottage cozy" (a gutted bathroom cottage cozy in five days? Stay tuned...) The only working part of this bathroom is the tub, our only tub, so our guests will have to be in there.

Paint hallway and living-room floor white (yes, folks, we're living with subfloor here at the moment. I stare longingly at our beautiful hardwood stacked in the garage dreaming of the day that we can finally install it! )

Install cabinet doors

Finish putting lattice skirting around deck

Paint a small exterior portion of the house (deck area)

Clean, declutter, clean, declutter! Don't laugh, for all things are possible in the mind of a crazy woman."

Nightmare on Elm St.

nightmareonelmst.blogspot.com

THE REMODELERS

Amanda and Aaron Forster, suburban Washington, D.C.

THE POST

Tile tribulations (June 19, 2006)

"Tiling adventures continued this weekend. We're finally getting the planning for the weekend part of the equation down ... although I really do need the workweek in my nice, air-conditioned office to recover from our weekend warrior activities. We had all of our materials in place, as well as Diet Coke and sandwich supplies, so I didn't go to Lowe's or Home Depot once all weekend long! Isn't that awesome. I don't think that we've ever accomplished that feat before."
Copyright © 2006, Chicago Tribune

Some fixes

2006-07-18T15:16:00.000-04:00

A couple of site maintenance notes:
The OHJ post was killing my site, so I shrank the picture. If you can't read it, email me for a copy.
Lipstickface kindly pointed out that my links to her post were broken. I fixed all that in the post below. Her site is awesome- she has a lot of fascinating things to share... and she's very interested in hearing from you ranchbloggers...

Retro madness...

2006-07-18T09:45:00.000-04:00

My blogfriend Lipstickface has found her first home, a perfectly preserved ranch. All of you ranchbloggers out there, totally check out her flickr photoset- this place is out of control! Also, she's looking for some vintage linoleum sources... I know that y'all can help her out!
Check out her post about the house toward the middle of the page (direct link didn't work) Welcome to the Atomic Ranch Who knows, maybe we'll have another houseblogger amongst our midst.

Madgame Weekend

2006-07-17T17:46:00.000-04:00

This weekend was race weekend again, so we spent most of it at an SCCA event at Summit Point in West Virginia helping fellow blogger Mike out with his race car. Unfortunately, due to a series of small setbacks, Mike didn't make it through the race, again. We have high hopes for labor day weekend.

We're busy with community action stuff this week- trying to fight a developer trying to build garage apartments with only alley access behind our house, so posts/house progress will be light. Have a great week!

"Blog it to me" Editorial from Old House Journal Magazine July/August 2006

2006-07-11T16:34:00.000-04:00

I can't figure out how to upload a pdf so if someone else knows, I'd appreciate the help. Here is the scan of the editorial that sparked so much comment recently:

Get well soon Sandy Pants, and a quick update

2006-07-11T13:12:00.000-04:00

First and foremost, our yellow lab, Sandy, underwent surgery to repair a complete ACL tear in her left knee yesterday. This wasn't unexpected, we've repaired the right knee twice, and we finally felt she had recovered enough from her surgery in December to undergo surgery on the other leg. She's very woozy but is resting comfortably at home today. Please send love her way from all of the other pet loving housebloggers. To spare you the gratuitous Sandy Pants pics(as we call her at home, or Farts-a-lot, as Mike likes to call her), here are links for the interested of Sandy in healthier times:

Sandy

Sandy and Chester

On Friday we spent a long time at Just Cabinets trying to get the pricing right for what we wanted. They discontinued some of the cabinets that we needed (office wall cabinets in 42" tall), so we ended up having to make a couple of changes to our plan (switch a cabinet out for an open bookcase- yuck, dust), and eliminate one area of cabinets (only one one side of the shop door and not both). I was extremely impressed with the patience and professionalism of the staff at Just Cabinets in Frederick, and would definitely recommend them as of right now. I'll let you know what we think when we get them in! We ended up going with Kraftmaid birch cabinets in a shaker style with a chestnut finish. I can't remember the exact style, but it is very similar to the Tuscan Shaker style that Lowes' sells. We felt better about our single biggest purchase for the basement to date when we found out that our neighbor "Hasn't slept well since he paid for his cabinets..." and "Plan(s) to sleep in his kitchen for a few weeks when it's done..." Cabinets are expensive!!!

Also on Friday, we made a visit to Hardwoods, Inc. a new millwork and wood retailer in town. This was really cool. They have tons of different varieties of wood and do great custom millwork. We're having them make our stair balusters at a great cost savings vs. making them ourselves (we had to cut some corners to pay for the cabinets, and the walnut staircase from Stair Supplies was one of the first things to go. Home Depot stocks a red oak box newel and other componets we can live with, but we had to have the 1.25" square balusters made, as they do not sell those). Here is the best part- we paid for our order on Friday, and Aaron is picking it up today. That's so much better than another millwork shop we've used before, who takes weeks to make even simple runs of stuff, and still hasn't returned our phone call about the balusters. We talked to the owner of Hardwoods about some other projects we have in mind, and he even told us that Sassafrass is an excellent subsitute for the American chestnut trim in our house (similar grain, stains about the same...). We were really happy to get this information and plan to become frequent customers.

Saturday I got almost all of the suspended ceiling components painted. I still need to sand them lightly with ultrafine steel wool and recoat them with clear protectant. Overall, it's a good match for the tiles and I cannot wait to get the ceiling installed. Saturday we also made the difficult decision not to expose the brick walls in the bathroom. It was making a lot of construction headaches for us, and I wasn't sure it was even going to look good in the end. So, we built walls on Saturday afternoon and spent most of Sunday running the rest of the supply lines and testing all of the plumbing in the bathroom. Over the next few weeks, we will be making our own Craftsman style wainscoting, mudding, taping, and painting the walls, and finishing off the ceiling in that room so that we can get the tub! Once the tub is in, the rest of the bathroom can be finished and should go together quickly. Yay! Pictures to come soon.

Last night, we spent 4 hours at a planning commision meeting to discuss the proposed townhouses being built behind our house. Our agenda item never came up, so we have to go back next Wednesday to try to finish the meeting. It was good that we went, because now we have a lot more information about what they plan to build (in addition to the townhomes, they want to put in garages with apartments above them which will face a narrow and congested alley) and this gives us more time to convince our neighbors to attend the next meeting Wed. July 19 at 6 pm at City Hall! Call or email me for details if you're an affected neighbor.

Patio Scheduled and Mad Game Demolition

2006-07-07T12:26:00.000-04:00

I can't get the scanner to work to get the OHJ article up, but I will soon, I promise! Probably next week.

In other news, we scheduled the patio contractor... Contractor 5 starts on July 24. We are so excited, and this means that you, dear readers, will get another exposure to Mad Game Demolition as we bribe our friends with beer to destroy sh*t in the backyard. We're all very psyched to see those awful triangular patios go.

Tonight we have our meeting with the cabinet people, and hopefully I will be able to report that we've ordered our cabinets this time tomorrow. Who knew that spending thousands of dollars could be such a difficult task??? What has been your most frustrating experience with trying to order something? How many of you have had a good experience at the big Orange or big Blue box?

Finally, I'd like to introduce the newest member of the Nightmare on Elm St blog family, my friends new blog Mad Game Racing. I've referenced Mike's 1971 Volvo P1800 race adventures before, and astute readers will note that we periodically don't complete projects due to "race weekend". I've finally convinced Mike to start a blog (mostly by setting it up for him) about his adventures with his nightmare of a car, a.k.a. the Swedish Meatball, the Princess, or just plain old, the Volvo. Aaron and I will both be contributing occassionally to the blog, but almost all of the content is Mike's. If you are interested in SCCA racing, old cars, or just general silliness, you should go and check it out!

Contractors and Cabinets

2006-06-30T19:18:00.000-04:00

Hi everyone, remember our patio contractor conundrum? Well I am pleased to say we have made a decision. It's Contractor 5. I'll let you know how it goes! Contractor 7 came in over $2000 more than Contractor 5, plus Con. 5 is doing sod, too. Yay!

Today I had the death appointment with the cabinet people at Lowes. I went in with a LIST OF THE ACTUAL CABINETS THAT I WANTED. I wanted to price it with 2 door styles and one option (glass doors or wine cabinet). I arrived for my appointment with SlowyMcPhony Face* at 3 pm, she didn't even sit down until 3:45. If you are asking why I had waited so long, it's because 1. I thought maybe I was mixed up and it should have been 3:30 and 2. It took me two weeks to get the stupid appointment in the first place. She spent the next hour and fifteen minutes typing things into her computer, filing paperwork, and answering the phone, then complaining about her clients to me. Finally she started giving me pricing options, but they made NO SENSE. Basically when I figured out about 5:00 that this was going to cost me nearly $10,000 for birch cabinets for my basement, I bailed. I remembered that last month, I'd received a faxed estimate from another cabinet company in town, and I pulled that out and started comparing. It was much more reasonable ($3000), so we ran a few errands and then went over there. They were very, very nice, very professional, and didn't talk on the phone at all when I was there. They are supposed to rework their estimate with a different door style and call me tonight with a price. I'll let you know how it goes.

*not her real name, but it should be...

"Blog It to Me... "? Oh, I'll blog it to you!

2006-06-30T14:13:00.000-04:00

Fellow houseblog brethren, I ask you to please explain to me the point of the editor's page article in the July/August 2006 edition of Old House Journal, authored by Gordon H. Bock. This article, ostensibly OHJ's nod toward those of us toiling on our money pits and blogging about it feels a little mixed in tone. For those of you who haven't read it, it may be available on their website, but I haven't checked.

Mr. Bock starts the article off by discussing 2006 as the year of the blog, and transitioned into mentioning the NY Times and Washington Post articles. He asks why people who are "bitten by the old house blog... ...feel compelled to not only keep a running journal of their construction exploits, but also to post it for all the world to read? Is it some sort of catharsis, where sharing the tedium of stripping paint helps purge the memory? Or is it the ego boost of having your own show where an audience of thousands follows your project in installments as if it were on TV?"

Let's discuss this paragraph before we move on. How is my little blog all that much different than the articles in OHJ's magazine? Basically, we cover the same topics- a few how-to tips, a discussion of renovation and transformation of a space, and analysis of available materials and a discussion of their pros and cons. Maybe blogging is cathartic... maybe there are times that I'm frustrated and I need to write about it. But maybe working on your house isn't all about the end result, the beautiful before and after photos with the smiling couple and the bowl of fruit on the counter. It's about being dirty, exhausted, and frustrated that you've worked a solid 12 hours and you don't have a damn thing to show for it. Maybe that's what I'm trying to capture. I don't feel like it's an ego boost to have people read about it. This is a way of telling a story, regarless of how many people listen. Maybe Mr. Bock doesn't like to talk about this dark side of house restoration. Most of the homes that OHJ feature in their stories have teams of architects, contractors, designers, etc. I know many of the kitchens featured cost more than my house! Not everyone can afford that kind of work, and I feel that maybe people read houseblogs to learn about the "real story" of home restoration, and maybe get some practical lessons on how to tackle problems for themselves. Basically, I started this thing because 1. I wanted to keep my friends and family apprised of what we've got going on (and why we never call you back) and 2. I wanted to contribute, in my own way, to something from which I have learned so much, not only how to do something, but a newfound respect for my home and the others in my neighborhood.

Mr. Bock goes on in the next few paragraphs to discuss the prevalence of photographs on blogs, allowing housebloggers to display even the smallest details of their restorations. He wraps up with a discussion of trends within houseblogging, and poses some question as to whether houseblogs will stand the test of time as well as the houses they are about. It is difficult to understand Mr. Bock's overall opinion on houseblogs. Maybe it is as mixed as his article leads me to believe. At any rate, I'd like to hear your thoughts about it. I love reading about what each and every one of you are doing, and I certainly hope this article doesn't discourage would be bloggers from diving in and tackling the challenge of documenting their restorations.

Soggy Update

2006-06-28T23:32:00.000-04:00

Yeah, it's still raining! For those of you who saw that some people died in Frederick, MD in flash flooding last night, tragically it is true. However, we're very blessed, we're doing fine, the basement is a little musty but fortunately very dry. (We had a frantic email from a friend this evening but were unable to reach her.)

We have both worked crazy hours this week, so we haven't had the energy to tackle the grout yet. We hope to get to it soon. Contractor 7 left us a message tonight to indicate that he has an estimate for us, so hopefully we'll get in touch with him tomorrow (although that may not happen due to our weird schedule this week- we've both been in by 9 and rarely out by 7 all week!). My birthday is coming up, and a new patio would be the perfect present (hint, hint, Aaron, hint, hint!) Tomorrow night we have an appointment with a kitchen designer to (hopefully) place an order for the basement cabinets. I'll let y'all know how that goes. Stay dry! The thunder is getting worse, and after talking to a coworker whose house was struck by lightning, I'm getting OFF the internet!

At least one little bright spot...

2006-06-26T21:44:00.000-04:00

The basement waterproofing has probably just paid for itself. After 7" of rain in two days, we're dry as a bone down there. There is a little water in the sump pit, but not enough to cause it to turn on. We also think that the new gutters have made a big difference. It really makes me feel good to walk down the hall at work and see water actually shooting out of a crack in the wall, and know that your home is dry and safe.

Here is a good aerial shot of the flooding. Thank God this isn't us. God bless those who are dealing with this crap. May the sun come out soon.

Weekend of Disappointment

2006-06-26T13:14:00.000-04:00

We have very little to show for this weekend, unfortunately. Between exhaustion, rain, bad moods, and Home Depot frustrations, very little actually happened.

First, a patio update:

Friday morning we met with Contractor 7, who is concerned about drainage in our backyard. The other contractor who was concerned about drainage ended up with a $15,000 estimate, so we'll see how that goes. Contractor 5 came back out on Sunday and reevaluated a few things that we had questions about. He really seems like a nice guy. We asked him about drainage, and he said that in his patio at home, there is enough space between the slates for the water to perc down into the soil, and that he hasn't had any problems. That made me feel better, but we'll see what the final numbers say.

Saturday I did accomplish one major feat, I matched the paint for the ceiling track to the tin tiles for the bathroom. This had me super stressed, especially when I couldn't find the paint color that American Tin Ceiling had recommended. I'm going with Rustoleum Bright Aluminum (left in the picture), with a coat of clear spray on top. Here is a picture without the clear spray.

The rest of Saturday was spent trying to get an angled wall built around where the supply lines drop for the bathtub. (Sorry no picture.) This sucked terribly and I don't recommend it. A neighbor dropped by and asked why we didn't just redo the supply lines so that we didn't have to angle the wall in, which didn't help matters any at all. Around 7 pm we just gave up and ate popcorn and watched TV the rest of the night.

Sunday we awoke to a tremendous downpour which lasted on and off most of the day. We spent several hours trying to figure out what we needed at Home Depot for the wainscoting, but were thwarted by (1) the lack of consistent lengths of lumber (2) confusing pricing (3) general frustration. We left to go home and reevaluate, and then went back out, only to get caught in a second tremendous downpour. We gave up (couldn't get the grout or wood out of the car in that mess, even) and went to the grocery store Sunday night. So, nothing happened Sunday. Here is a picture of the tile floor from last week, at least. I forced myself to go down and take this before work this morning b/c I had promised all of you. Maybe I'll grout it this week. Who knows...

Just a little internet entertainment

2006-06-24T10:33:00.000-04:00

This is so much fun I can't even stand it. Make a paper doll of yourself using this application at Designhergals.com! You can even order products using this cartoon version of yourself. Here is mine, accessorized with a paintbrush. I'm trying to accept the fact that she looks a LOT better than I do in real life! Ha! Many thanks to Whoorl and Nabbalicious for the link.

Maybe now Home Improvement Ninja will deem my blog cool, since it has a cartoon on it.

Tile wishes and patio contractor dreams...

2006-06-22T10:20:00.000-04:00

I'm finally done laying that stupid flippin' tile. At least for now. Aaron and I haven't been planning ahead very well, so we don't have the cabinets or staircase parts that will go in the room with the tile yet. So, we kind of marked out where they will go, and we'll lay all the tile that abuts (is that a word?) those regions once the elements that we're waiting for are in place. Tonight we'll return some of our tremendous overabundance of tile so that we can move on to even more fun activities, like grout. Grout is such a weird word? Does anyone know how the stuff between the tiles got that name? I'd love to hear about it. Sorry, no pictures yet. I was too exhausted and covered in thinset to look for the camera last night. (I have managed to avoid thinset burns this time, though. Versabond is less irritating to my skin than Laticrete. I looked some stuff up, and the acrylic modifier can actually end up being the problem, not the cement. If you've got sensitive skin and you're planning a tile project, keep that in mind.) I promise to get them tonight if it's not too late when we get back from Lowes.

Aaron and I got into a small fight about the patio last night. I say, just write down all the stuff we need clarified on the estimate for Contractor 5 and fax it back to him. Aaron isn't in to that at all. So, we're now going to try out Contractor 7. Contractor 7 has laid two patios on our street, and they're a family of Mennonites. Everyone who has worked with Contractor 7 has nothing but nice things to say. The father handles the business part of the company, and the sons provide all of the actual labor. Supposedly they are very polite and professional. If they will lay slate, and they aren't insanely expensive, then maybe we'll finally have someone to go with. I am worried that they won't lay slate because their sign mentions pavers, and the brochure that they left on our porch had the same effing paver brochure that I've gotten 5 times in it. I'm so sick of paver brochures. I know what I want, and it's slate. Aaarrgghhh! But, I'm hopeful that we can finally get this project off of the ground.

Jackson and Perkins Rose Sale- I can't resist a bargain!

2006-06-20T14:17:00.000-04:00

After successfully ignoring the rose catalogs and emails that I have been getting from Jackson and Perkins all spring, the last few days of their online rose sale finally got me. I'd been holding out since our backyard project is in such a state of flux due to our inability to secure a contractor. However, I just couldn't wait anymore. I'll plant the roses in cheap plastic pots and then transplant them when the patio is done. I bought two collections, one of lavender hedge roses and one of gorgeous English roses that I've been admiring for months.

The lavender hedge roses will go along the fence on one side of the patio. I plan to break up the roses with some hydrangeas and some white impatients.

I am going to create a separate garden for the English roses in one corner of the yard. There will be a bench that Aaron and I started work on last year, and hopefully a small water feature to enjoy the rose garden as its own little room.

I got all ten roses for about $65 with shipping. That works out to around $6.50 a plant. An awesome deal! I can't wait until my new additions arrive!!!

News Story: Park could open this week

2006-06-19T15:39:00.000-04:00

This is very close to my house- I'm excited for the opening!

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Park could open this week (click to link to actual story)

Publish Date: 06/19/06

By Liam Farrell
News-Post Staff

Staff photo by Bill Green

Construction of the Carroll Creek Park is nearing completion and is expected to open soon.

FREDERICK -- Waters previously passable only by small wooden spans or the Community Bridge on Carroll Street are now spanned by an arched stone walkway, designed as if plucked from Venice.

The red metal and steel wires of a suspension bridge are anchored by a single pillar set into the creek bed.

Barren concrete shores have given way to ornate brick paths, their angled patterns shifting to create unique sections of the creek's borders.

Dark blue street lamps line the paths, fountains spill into the water and wooden benches offer residents a chance to reflect on how far Carroll Creek has come in the almost 30 years since it overflowed its banks and ruined most of downtown Frederick.

The $10.2 million Carroll Creek Linear Park could open this week, said Richard Griffin, the city's director of economic development and the project director, and only a small list of items still need to be fixed.

"We've looked at every little nick," he said.

About 1,000 jobs will be coming to the creek area, Mr. Griffin said, and the park has attracted approximately $155 million in private investment in office, residential, retail and parking facilities.

"It's truly a mixed-use park," he said.

Portions are designed to match the surrounding buildings; near the Delaplaine Visual Arts Education Center, metal benches are used instead of wood.

"We have different 'rooms' of the park. We've intentionally tried to not make it homogenous," Mr. Griffin said. "We've tried very, very hard to integrate it (into downtown Frederick) É so you wouldn't have a clue that it's new."

Other park amenities include an amphitheater that seats between 350 and 400 people and an 80-foot-long enclosure that can be used for events such as art exhibitions and will house a boat rental company so people can paddle along the creek.

Electrical outlets are available throughout the park, Mr. Griffin said, so no external generators will be needed. In fact, one of the last requirements before the park can open is for Allegheny Power to turn on the electricity on the south side of the creek.

A primary emphasis for creek businesses, Mr. Griffin said, will be outside dining.

"The park has been designed to accommodate that and give people the opportunity to come outside," Mr. Griffin said. "We fully anticipate there will be more restaurants."

Hi-tech amenities will also be included. The entire area is a hot spot for wireless Internet, Mr. Griffin said.

The Carroll Creek Project is not finished, however, and the next phases, to finish the east and west edges of the area, are estimated to cost an additional $13 million in construction and design.

This Wednesday, from 7 to 9 p.m. at the Delaplaine Visual Arts Education Center, representatives from the city and HNTB, a design firm, will hold a meeting for residents to learn more about the next phase of the creek project.

Mr. Griffin said he has only been a part of the initiative and that many other people deserve credit, especially Dick Kessler, who was the chairman of the Carroll Creek Task Force.

"It's very rewarding (work)," Mr. Griffin said. "I'm very honored to work on a project like this."

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Tile Tribulations

2006-06-19T11:53:00.000-04:00

Ever since I was a child, I've always loved old fashioned bathrooms with gorgeous black and white hex tile (although by my math, they really appear to be octagons) and clawfoot tubs. My dreams are finally a little bit closer, although we have an interesting story about the colors that we chose. Several months ago, I started looking at tiles, and happened upon the hex tile with blue accents at our local Lowes. I really liked the blue tiles, they weren't flat blue, they have kind of a dimension to the glaze and they gave a little bit more interest to the floor. However, when we went to buy them to start tiling the bathroom, every tile that they had in stock was broken. They had plenty of black and white, most of it also cracked, so we had our store check the Gaithersburg store to see if they had any in stock. A shower and a very rushed ride down I-270 later, and every blue and white tile at the Gaithersburg Lowes was also broken. I convinced myself that I'd always liked the black and white better, and Aaron as well, so we bought black and white tile and came back home. The next day, we ended up back at the first Lowes, and were nearly mowed down in the parking lot by an angry consumer. (He actually honked at us as we crossed on the main crosswalk into the store- I didn't realize that it was protocol to run! We were moving at a normal pace.) Apparently not dragging the man from his truck and taking out a week of home improvement frustration on him paid off on the karma balance sheet, because Lowes had gotten in 10 more boxes of new, unbroken blue and white tile. We promptly snatched it up and came home. (Ironically, I had stopped to let that idiot cross in front of me when I was parking the car.)

I laid the blue and white hex tile all afternoon, which really sucks. Those are a lot of sides to line up, and they look like they can go down 2 ways, but it's really only one way, because of the fiber mat that the tiles are attached to. I also had a few minor panic attacks because the walls weren't square (but Aaron will shim out the wainscoting to make up that difference), and because a couple of tiles wouldn't squish down perfectly flat because some of our nail heads from the backerboard didn't sink properly (we used 1.5" Ramset fasteners in there, but switched to 1" to avoid this problem again this weekend). It was worth all of the hard work, though, because it looks great. There is a slight undulation in the line of blue tiles under the tub, but if you are laying on my bathroom floor with a level looking at the row of blue diamonds under the tub, then you've got bigger problems than I and you may want to check yourself into some sort of treatment center.

As long promised, pictures of the hex tile in the bathroom:

Tiling adventures continued this weekend. We're finally getting the planning for the weekend part of the equation down... although I really do need the workweek in my nice, air-conditioned office to recover from our weekend warrior activities. We had all of our materials in place, as well as diet Coke and sandwich supplies, so I didn't go to Lowes or Home Depot once all weekend long! Isn't that awesome. I don't think that we've ever accomplished that feat before.

Saturday we were up early (thanks to the five windows in our east facing bedroom, it's very difficult to sleep in on a sunny day), which was good, because we're really starting to get some hot summer weather. We got started laying out all of the backerboard in the basement. We were disappointed to find that due to the various corners, angles, and bumpouts, every single piece needed cutting. We ended up spending all day on Saturday fitting the backerboard around various objects in the laundry/bar area. At 4:30 we optimistically rented a tile saw from Rentals Unlimited. We rented Mixmaster Mike from them so many times that they actually still remember us, even though we haven't been in there in about 4 or 5 months. We walk in, and the guy at the counter said "Hey, do you need the cement mixer AGAIN?", so we told him no, now it's the tile saw, to which he replied, "What next, hardwood floors?" No, I don't think so, not over concrete- although I've pointed out to Aaron that they would have been easier (we did them in our old house). Sunday morning, we used the thinset to stick down all of the backerboard, and the Ramset to secure it all to the floor. We used 1" Ramset fasteners this time, as opposed to the 1.5" fasteners in the bathroom, and this worked a lot better. If you are questioning why we didn't just stick the tile on top of the concrete, the answer is that pouring your own basement floor is much harder than we expected, and we didn't get the floor perfectly level. The backerboard helped this a lot, although we still have to be very careful as we install the tile to get everything even. A couple of high spots remain. Sunday afternoon we got over 1/3 but less than 1/2 of the tile installed by 7 pm, when we decided to stop for the day. I wanted to water the flowers and clean up the yard a little bit before it got completely dark. Also, my fabulous neighbor Kelly gave me some impatients that she couldn't use, so I wanted to get those in the ground before dark, too. I made up some nice little containers with them, they will help the barren wasteland of a backyard that we currently have until we can get the patio contractor lined up.

We've decided to keep the tile saw this week and work on the floor all week long. We're through several of the worst areas, around the closet, the transition into the living room area, and around the stairs, so it may move faster now. The saw is very loud, so we'll only be able to work until about 8 pm every night, as that is our neighbor's little boy's bedtime. Our neighbors have been very tolerant of the noise that we make all the time, so we really try to keep from upsetting them too much and stop hammering, sawing, etc. at 8 pm every night. No pictures of the tile yet, I'll keep you in suspense until it's more complete.

So true...

2006-06-16T09:29:00.000-04:00

According to my sitemeter stats, someone searched "The Money Pit" on the houseblogs.net search feature, and ended up here! How true...

Unresponsive contractors

2006-06-15T21:22:00.000-04:00

Aaron and I have been trying to find a contractor to put in a patio in our backyard since early April. This has been one of the most frustrating projects we've ever undertaken, and no actual work has occured yet!

Contractor 1 showed up the first weekend in April, as scheduled. We had a written estimate from him emailed by the end of the weekend. So far, so good.
Contractor 2 did not show up. Three weeks later he called to try to reschedule, we didn't call back.
Contractor 3 showed up the middle of April, as scheduled. I had to call him to get our estimate, which he insisted on presenting in person in early May. When the estimate turned out to be 2.5x the amount of the first estimate, I sent him away, and he laughed at me and said that no one would do it for the price we wanted (which was bull, because we had Contractor 1's estimate).
Contractor 4 showed up in mid May, gave the yard a cursory glance, and gave us a very low, verbal estimate. Has not returned any subsequent calls.
Contractor 5 showed up in mid May, gave a detailed analysis, and promised to contact us with an estimate. We called several times, and received the estimate this week via fax. We have some questions, and our calls have not yet been returned.
Contractor 6 showed up in late May, and gave an extremely detailed analysis. He caught the fact that our porch is build on a over 6" deep concrete slab which cannot be removed. However, he works alone and cannot start until September. (Oy!) We have not heard back from him on price.

Contractors 2 and 3 are out. That leaves Contractors 1 and 4-6 to consider.
After much analysis, Aaron and I decided on slate. We told all the contractors that we wanted slate with varied results. Most have tried to dissuade us from slate in favor of pavers. I HATE pavers. I think that they would look silly with our old, brick house. I went on a garden tour of Frederick in mid-May, and saw dozens of beautiful slate patios. I want slate, dammit, and it's my patio. Contractor 6 was especially forceful about the pavers. He also addressed himself mostly to Aaron and not to me, which pisses me off.

So, what do we do? I'm kind of leaning toward Contractor 5. He was very professional, and his estimate was around the same as Contractor 1. I have tremendous concerns about Contractor 6 working by himself. Installing a slate patio by yourself doesn't sound like a fun job (or we would just do this ourselves). I don't like his September timeline either. However, our friends installed a patio themselves with the help of Contractor 6, and they've been enjoying it for weeks now. Theirs is made of brick pavers, and it looks really good. I'm embarrased to even contact Contractor 1 since he gave us his estimate over 2 months ago, and it's just asinine that we're still without a patio at this point. I don't understand why these people don't just call me back. I want to give you money to do something for me, I want to give you business, why not just call me back? Is my job that small? My business that unimportant? I just don't understand this business model that these people work towards, but it seems to be how all of these companies work. We'd appreciate hearing your thoughts in the comments section.

Rain- Nature's best air freshener

2006-06-09T14:40:00.000-04:00

Aaron and I cleaned the house this afternoon, using all sorts of cleaning products trying to rid the place of the fragrance of three dogs. I was just sitting down to check my email when I noticed cool breezes and fresh fragrances from the front windows. Due to our generous eaves and awesome front porch, we don't usually have to close the windows during a brief summer storm, which is what has just blown in. It's a wonderful "natural" way to air condition the house, and as an added bonus, the whole house smells like rain for a few hours afterwards. Mmmmm, rain. If someone could truly bottle that scent, they'd have a winner. It's much better than Febreeze.

Front porch floor painted and some landscaping shots

2006-06-08T22:56:00.000-04:00

A few weeks ago, we had our fabulous painter Tom back to paint the concrete porch floor. We settled on the color "Copley Gray" from Benjamin Moore. It was a few shades lighter than the gray that we had used on the thresholds, and I thought that it tied in nicely with the brick. Tom used an oil based paint (as he always does) and mixed in a sand product to keep the steps from getting slick in the rain. If you wonder why we pay good money to get someone to paint, but we'll do our own A/C repairs, it's because Tom does such incredible work. It makes such a difference because the paint is the first thing that most people notice.

The weekend after finals, I redid the flower bed right next to the porch. It had been bugging me for some time... the bushes were small and ugly, and there was too much room for annuals (too much to keep replanting), and not enough visual interest in the winter. Apparently, I really felt that there was no visual interest, because I can't find any before pictures on the site- I was sure that I took one when we made the new lattice. Oh well... here is the front bed as it currently looks- almost. We trimmed back the red branched (for color in the winter) dogwood after it finished blooming earlier this week.

And finally, I share with you a picture of the street flowerbed this year. I no longer need the lantana to fill up the bed. All of the perennials are thriving! I'm very happy with how this has turned out, and only see about two places that I need to tuck in a another plant. I can't belive the growth that I've seen in just a year. I may be cursing that yarrow and evening primrose next year!

Finally, this year I'm trying out a new product- a self watering hanging basket for the front porch. Every year, I try to grow something in the hanging baskets on the porch, and every year they die midsummer because I can't water them fast enough to keep up with the heat. I found these from Gardener's Supply Company, (link takes you to the product) and they were relatively inexpensive, about $11.00 each. They have a reservior that holds the water in the bottom of the pot, and it is released to the plant by a wick system. It's been a couple of weeks, and the ferns are still green despite the extreme heat we had last week, and I've only refilled them 3 times. I'll keep you posted as to how they're doing.

Fantech Dryer Booster Fan

2006-06-08T22:48:00.000-04:00

Thursday we both ended up having to go in to work most of the day (some vacation! at least we were able to get the leave we had requested back). However, we came home after work and knocked out a HUGE project, the installation of our Fantech Dryer Vent Booster Fan.

The last time we moved out the dryer, when we disconnected the vent, we found a big ball of damp lint inside. We cleaned this out, but it kept coming back. (I'm a religous lint trap cleaner, too- so we knew that it wasn't due to that.) I did some searching, and it turns out that if you have more than a 14 foot run of duct, you should install a booster fan on the duct.

We did a lot of analysis of different options for our situation, and ended up buying the Fantech RVF 4XL exterior mounted fan (there was no good way to mount a fan inside of the house), a Fantech Dryer Booster Lint Trap Model DBLT4 to catch any lint that made it past our dryer's lint collector), and a switch to activate the fan by sensing pressure from the dryer called the Fantech DB10 Switch kit, all from the RE Williams online site. I was very happy with them- they provided excellent tracking information and the parts arrived quickly, packed sturdily, with all instructions and everything necessary.

The hardest part of the whole process was locating where to put everything. We ended up taking out the basement window that the dryer exhaust used to go through, removing the last remaining pane of glass, stripping the window (it was so hot that I boycotted the heat gun in favor of finishing up the old chemical stripper that I had bought last year, but it stripper dried completely in less than 5 minutes! I WAS still able to get most of the old paint off of the window.), and replacing the glass with plywood on Tuesday. Then we debated for 2 days on how to run the duct (we used flexible insulated 4 inch duct for most of it (like one would use for regular HVAC purposes- this was recommended on the Fantech site, and turned out to be the easiest way to get the duct to run where we needed), with a few regular sheet metal elbows, and a straight piece in a location where the flex didn't make sense). Finally, Thursday, we bit the bullet and connected everything together. A big area of debate was where to install the pressure sensing switch. The instructions say upstream of the first elbow, but that was technically right behind the dryer where the duct went into the wall before the lint trap so we ended up choosing a location about three feet from the second elbow, but the system works fine- thank goodness! Words cannot describe how sweet the sound of that thing kicking on the first time was!!! It runs exactly as it should, and the time to dry clothes has now been cut in half! We're thrilled with it, even though it was a bear to install. And it's fairly quiet, just a small whooshing sound over the regular sound of the dryer. (If you're wondering why I'm being so specific with the model names, etc. it's because I had a hard time finding info. on this, and I want someone who googles Fantech to be able to find this, in case it might be helpful to them.)

The big white box is the Fantech RVF 4XL, I still need to paint the window.

Here is a better (manufacturer's) picture of the fan itself

Here is our new Fantech lint trap. We've been amazed at how much lint we get out of it after every load. We're wondering if the dryer's lint collection system is working properly. Please no comments on the hole from the screw that I tried to drive in a stud-less location next to the dryer vent. Ooops!

Finally, the Fantech DB10 pressure sensing switch we had such a hard time locating. Fortunately, it works. I had no clue how to turn this picture, so adjust your head to get your desired view, whatever that may be.

It's not a very good picture, so here is a picture (again from the manufacturer)
of the DB10 switch

If you're having problems with your dryer not acting properly, and you've got a long run of duct, this fan may be an excellent solution. I will keep you posted on how well it continues to perform.

And they call this a vacation????

2006-06-08T21:51:00.000-04:00

I've mentioned before that Aaron and I were planning to take the week after Memorial Day off to work on the house. We were treated to a visit by Aaron's lovely sister Christy and her husband Tyson 5/26 through 5/29, so we were able to do some "normal" enjoyable weekend activities, including taking in a Washington Nationals game, and having a crab eating, off-track betting contest at the Cracked Claw in Urbana, MD. (For the record, Tyson won by one crab, which I think really constitutes a tie! And everyone lost on the horses.)

Memorial Day, we took Christy and Tyson back to the airport, then got to work on the basement. We've had pegboard, shelving, and assorted hooks and hangers to organize the shop for several months now, and we decided that we should tackle that project first to get more organized for the other projects to come. Here are a couple of pictures of our hard work on the shop. It makes a big difference not to trip on the air compressor, ShopVac, and assorted wood while trying to find a screwdriver!

These may not look like big changes, but I assure you that they are:

The wire hanging down in the second picture is our temporary phone line. We've run the new one, just still need to hook it up and pull the old one out.

In the process of all of this shop cleanup and organization, we developed a huge pile of things to return to Lowes and Home Depot. We went through and cross-indexed things to receipts, but most of them ended up being too old to get us money back. Store credit is good enough though- it kept us from spending a dime at either store until Friday June 2!

At some point on Monday we realized that the condensation pump for the A/C was running nonstop. We turned off the A/C and kept working, since it was still quite cool in the basement. Aaron spent some time trying to fix the pump, taking it apart, cleaning contacts, checking switches, etc. but it was all to no avail. On Tuesday, it was close to 100 degrees factoring in the heat index (of course- it knew that the A/C was out). It was incredibly hot in the house- the dogs just laid around and panted. I just laid around and complained. Aaron continued working like a trooper, but I just couldn't do anything. So, Tuesday (May 30) did not end up being a productive day at all. Aaron did finish the last of some of the plumbing. At some point on Tuesday night, we had a violet thunderstorm that cooled things off slightly, but neither of us slept much. Wednesday (May 31), I had a (FIVE HOUR! plus one hour prep time) conference call for work, so Aaron went to Noland's to see if they had replacement switched for our condensate pump. Turns out that they don't stock parts because the pumps are relatively inexpensive, around $40. So, Aaron just picked up a new pump, which solved the problem. Ah, blissful cool air. Wednesday afternoon and evening we made some excellent progress, finishing up the last few things to get to drywall since I wasn't laying around the house like a limp rag (I'm pathetic- I'm from South Carolina! This Maryland weather has spoiled me.)

Here is a picture of my new best friend, the condensate pump! It was only $40! I'm sure a service call would have been over $100!

Organic Pest Control With Ladybugs and a Rose Mystery

2006-06-07T22:27:00.000-04:00

This year, my roses seem to be growing not just gorgeous blossoms, but a bumper crop of aphids as well. Due to our proximity to the Chesapeake Bay, and my newfound aversion to all things chemical (except in cases of last resort), I explored the option of using organic pest control to take care of my aphid problem. Now, I know that growing roses is probably not organic, or sustainable or whatever, but I really enjoy them- working with them and watching them thrive, watching the buds open, the different fragrances of the different varieties, and of course, the cut flowers to bring in the house and share with my friends. I have a big rose garden in the front yard, which even contains two roses that we inherited with the house and moved to a better location. So, anyway, back to the ladybugs. I ordered 4800 ladybugs (that was way overkill for my yard, but I shared with my neighbors) from Gardening Zone. The price was right (about $12.00 for the ladybugs) but the shipping notification system from this company was abysmal. Also, although I paid for expedited shipping (the only option with live insects), the poor guys didn't show up for over a week after I ordered them. I think that I may choose a different site for subsequent orders. It wasn't all bad, though, because I did get the ladybugs, and the majority of them appeared to survive their journey unscathed.

The ladybugs arrived in a small cloth bag on May 19 (post is a little late, sorry), shown below. It was kind of freaky, how many ladybugs they had managed to cram into that little bag. This is only the tip of the iceberg!

Here is Aaron, dealing with spreading the ladybugs (there were just so many... it kind of freaked me out)

Here are some of the ladybugs on May 20th, doing their thing on my Shasta daisies.

And here are some roses that I cut last week from my Mr. Lincoln rose, which was pretty badly invaded.

The aphids are much diminished now, but not totally exterminated as they were a few weeks ago. I don't know where most of the ladybugs moved on to though- I have only seen the occasional one in the garden. I am considering ordering another batch, as well as some beneficial nematodes to control the Japanese beetles that I expect to show up next month. Does anyone have experience with the Nematodes? I'd love to hear about it.

Finally, a few gratuituous shots of probably my favorite (it's between this one and the Bellaroma) rose in the whole garden. This thing was a half dead little stick when we moved into the house, and Aaron moved it into the rose garden for me, where it has THRIVED! There were COUNTLESS blossoms on it during its last blooming cycle, which went early May to around Memorial Day. It wil continue to bloom in gorgeous spurts throughout the summer. Does anyone know what it is? It also has a beautiful shape, a very lush, full bush. If you have any info, just comment below!

7 lessons from a week of vacation

2006-06-05T10:07:00.000-04:00

I will post details from our week long home improvement marathon later, but really quick today, a list of the things that I've learned...
1. Dryer inline fans (such as those from Fantech) are very difficult to put in, but there are no words to describe the joy one feels when they hear that thing kick on for the first time! (And when the clothes actually dry in like, an hour.)
2. Densarmor (the paperless drywall, which we ended up installing), is completely impregnated with fiberglass, and after working with it for a few hours, you will feel like you were very intimate with a cactus.
3. Don't ever install that tile with the white octagons and the little blue diamonds. This will be a separate post entirely. Frustration, cuts, chemical burns. It does look nice. No mad tile skillz like Home Improvement Ninja, but anyone can line up SQUARE tiles... (just kidding).
4. Wonderboard smells like Playdoh, but that is where the fun ends.
5. An organized shop really does make it easier to work.
6. It's better just to pay someone to finish drywall.
7. Laticrete BURNS!! I have huge burns down my arms from reaching into the bucket. I can't let my arms touch my desk. Ow! (As a disclaimer as to why I didn't wear protective gear, I've worked with regular fiber reinforced concrete and mortar and never ever had a problem. I don't know what they put in acrylic modified thinset, but it hurts. Wear the darn gloves! OK, OK, I am a scientist, I should have understood the importance of personal protective equipment.)

Choosing Cabinets, Making Plans

2006-05-21T17:52:00.000-04:00

I am happy to report that I turned in my exam last Thursday as planned and am now done with school until August! Yay! Now, I'm checking the grade system obsessively to see if my grades have posted yet. Eeek!

This weekend has been all about relaxation, planning, and decisions. And a little yardwork. Not much blog-worthy, but I thought that I'd post a little about my struggle with choosing the basement cabinets. I am sure that many people can sympthasize with our storage dilemmas. There are only 2 useable closets in the entire house, both of them barely so, and both are stuffed to the brim with clothes. We have a good amount of storage space in the kitchen, and it is stuffed full. It's difficult to fit in extra closets because the house is only 14' wide, and we need almost every possible inch of living space. We want to incorporate as much storage as possible in the basement because we've lost a lot of the room where we just "dumped" stuff due to the reconfigurations. Our original plan called for cabinets against the other side of the bathroom wall, but that plan changed when we had to move the bathroom door over a little bit. Now, the plan is cabinets against the closet wall. I will have 5' of wall and floor cabinets there, wall cabinets above the washer and dryer, a sink cabinet for the laundry sink, and big office-style wall cabinets in the living room to hold books. I also hope to squeeze in a small cabinet to hold towels in the bathroom. I'm planning to use horizontal file drawers below those wall cabinets, which will hold not only files, but dog toys, pillows, blankets, DVDs, etc. As you can see, it's a LOT of cabinetry. I've been struggling with the choice of which brand, door style, and finish to go with. After going around to different stores and slamming cabinet doors, yanking on drawers, etc. we've decided to go again with Kraftmaid. We've got a lot of Kraftmaid cabinets in the house, and they're affordable and well constructed. Originally, I picked out a gorgeous style in cherry:

But, according to the pricing chart on the back of the doors at the store, it's in one of the highest price categories possible. The project is already over schedule and over budget. So, Aaron has made me choose a backup in case our first choice is outrageous. Here is what I've picked (probably in a chestnut color):

I'm a little concerned because it's listed as a veneer door style, but hopefully these won't get the abuse of the ones in the kitchen (additionally, it will be birch). I'll be sure to check them out carefully at the store before we make our final decision. Anyone have experience with either design? We'd love to hear from you below!

Examination Procrastination and another TREEmendous Night

2006-05-16T12:00:00.000-04:00

I’ve started several posts over the last few weeks, but I feel too guilty about having actual physical evidence of my procrastination to publish anything. As you can see, in the latter stages of my procrastination cycle, I don’t really care anymore. On May 1, my professor assigned 13 questions for our take home final, due May 15. That’s less than 1 question per day. Piece of cake, *right*? Enter the procrastinator! Since I figured that I had so much time to work on the final, and we hadn’t even covered most of the material on the final yet, I’d just work on my final project and wait until I got that done to start the test. Then, he extended the due date until this Thursday. Woo! More time! So, instead of working on the test last Saturday, as I had planned, I worked in the yard. I rationalized that it was going to rain, and that I needed to get it taken care of before the rain started. (That’s another post for another day.) Sunday, however, I really did start working on the test, with only a couple of short gardening breaks. Anyway, that brings me to today, with 4 questions still left to do, and wondering about a few things. It seems like a lot of you other housebloggers out there are in school, too. And it seems like a disproportionate number of you have spent insane amounts of time there. Aaron and I have about 9 years of graduate education right now, and I’m still going strong. Is there something to this? Is there something about many hours buried in old libraries and old buildings at our universities and instilled the love of old buildings, and of preservation? Is it the perseverance to see something incredibly difficult through to an ultimate reward? Does it just mean that we’re crazy enough (possibly as a result of all of those years locked up in the library or the lab) to tackle major life disruptions? I’ve concluded that Aaron and I just need too many things to do at once in order to feel fulfilled. What is it for you? I’d love to hear about it- you’ll be helping me procrastinate!

In other news, I didn’t get much sleep last night, because Elm St. has decided to wage war on invasive species, and one of the other Bradford Pear trees at the end of the street fell last night. It took out some cables with it and somehow demanded the response of not just the city, but 4 police units, INCLUDING a K9 unit! AND, they decided that it would be an excellent idea to get out the chainsaw around 1 am to cut the thing into firewood! So all night long, I heard the beep beep beep of the city truck picking up the branches and the vroom vroom of the chainsaw slicing it into teensy tiny little bits. At least that’s one less invasive species on the block (assuming that they cut the other half of the tree down soon.)

Aaron and I are gearing up for some big movement on the basement, probably involving vacation time. We’ve both been distracted by other projects, but please expect a return to houseblogging soon!

Invasive!

2006-05-05T22:36:00.000-04:00

It's the end of the semester, and work is really hectic, so I'm sorry not to have posted much lately.

I have been spending a lot of my time in the car, commuting between home, work, and school. The fabulous DC highway system allows me a lot of time to look at the "scenery" on the roadside, and the beautiful weather that we've been having has allowed me to spend much of my commuting time with the windows and sunroof open. I've noticed a lot of these trees, which have an very sweet fragrance, almost like grapes (reminds me of the kudzu flowers from my hometown down South). So, I decided to look them up and find out what they are.

My search lead me to the National Park Service Alien Plant Site. I found this site to be really interesting and informative. A lot of plants that I've seen growing around my house, like this garlic mustard, I wasn't familiar with (have I mentioned that I'm not from around here?), and had no idea were introduced by humans and considered invasive (it certainly does seem to be everywhere) and also lethal to butterflies! No wonder we had no butterflies in our backyard, the lot behind us is covered with this stuff. I was also shocked to learn that the pretty Empress tree that I'd admired on my commutes was considered invasive, and produces something like 2 MILLION seeds every year!

It came as no surprise that my old friend, the kudzu, was considered invasive. However, one of the biggest surprises on this list was the urban ubiquity, the Bradford pear. Our street is lined with them (anyone remember our experience with one from late last year?), and recently I've noticed entire fields full of them along I-270 near work- I kind of wondered if they were able to self-propgate, but I had no idea that they were invasive. This list references invasive plants of the mid-Atlantic region. I was shocked at some of the plants listed here- many are things that I've considered planting, or that I see commonly planted in my neighborhood- do you have them in your yard?

Butterfly bush
Wisteria vine
Mulitflora rose
Norway maple (those are gorgeous, and I've never seen any that weren't obviously planted, but NPS knows better than me...)
Honeysuckle
Periwinkle

So, first thing in the morning, I'm pulling as much of the garlic mustard as I can in the backyard in hopes that we get more butterflies this year. And please check the websites listed above before you head to the garden center this summer- there is no need to contribute to the demise of native species. Consider it outdoor preservation!

Welcome Washington Post Readers!

2006-04-21T16:58:00.000-04:00

We feel very honored to have been chosen for an article on houseblogging in the Washington Post, along with our good cyber-friend The Home Improvement Ninja. Here's a link to the article for all of our loyal readers-
Link to Washington Post Article.
To those of you who have found our site from the article, welcome! Take a look around through the archives, and we'd love to hear what you think!
-Amanda and Aaron

Drywall Dilemma and the State of the List

2006-04-18T22:03:00.000-04:00

First of all, it was a VERY productive weekend. We had tons of help from Aaron’s parents, and even managed to have a nice relaxing Easter weekend in the process! Thanks, J. and B.!

~~1. Finish plumbing to redirect heating exhaust and mortar in new concentric vent~~
~~2. Finish plumbing redo behind washer~~
~~3. Install door headers on back door and closet door~~
~~4. Finish building wall on other side of closet double door~~
~~5. Install closet double door header~~
~~6. Redo window framing (oops again)~~
~~7. Extend wall behind laundry sink (triple oops)~~
~~8. Finish toenailing by hand along door headers~~
~~9. Run all cable, speaker, and~~ telephone lines ~~to low voltage box~~ (only 2 phone lines remain- should take 10 min or so to complete)
~~10. Sink~~ all ~~walls into floor with Ramset~~ (only 1 remaining- need to move a big pile of stuff to get to it)
11. New addition- make stabilization blocks for outside corner of bay window bumpout framing.

Not only did we do all of that, but we rescreened every single window in the whole house and the back door! I'll put up a post about that later this week.

Now, the dilemma… we’ve read good things about the new paperless wallboard product DensArmor Plus, especially for damp locations like basements and bathrooms. It’s a little bit more expensive, but not terribly so. What bugs me is the texture of the front of it… it’s very rough. I love our smooth(ish- but that’s another blog post) plaster walls upstairs, but I’m fine with the smoothness of regular drywall as well. But, rougher than that? I’m not sure. Also, I’m not sure if this stuff will actually finish like regular drywall as the manufacturer claims. (Like will the joints be noticeably smoother than the rest of the wall when we’re done.) What’s your opinion? Either way, we’ll go with a moisture resistant product… it’s between the regular old greenboard and the paperless drywall. Another survey is posted below for your votes! Any general comments on drywall are also appreciated!

Ahead of the game

2006-04-13T19:22:00.000-04:00

Tonight we decided to tackle another project from THE LIST- that dreaded window header project. In trying to decide why we've dreaded this project so tremendously, we think that it was just because we had to remove some framing, which always sucks! The project went exceedingly smoothly, for a change!

Here is the window header with our bad framing removed:

This time we ACTUALLY MEASURED CAREFULLY!

We still had a few remnants of our old framing to deal with, at least Aaron has the tools for this nail removal job!

Aaron made a lot of cuts, and a lot of recuts, to get everything perfect!

We added my Dad's secret weapon for the final assembly- wood glue!

Final installation...

And finally... (drumroll please) a solid, level windowsill!

Woo hoo! List, you're going down! Grunt work strikes again!

Progress... and Top Ten

2006-04-11T22:14:00.000-04:00

We've made good progress on THE LIST tonight...
I've run 3/5 phone lines (I ran out of phone wire), I ran all the speaker wire for the basement, but I still need to run 2 lines outside for the backyard speakers. That all went pretty quickly, and it was nice to get those things checked off. Aaron removed the studs that we need to redo around the window and got ready to start that either later this week or this weekend. Keep your fingers crossed for us everyone, I can see the end approaching! Those tears of joy are right around the corner... hopefully.

Additionally, since all the cool kids are doing it, I thought that I'd say how deeply honored I am to be included in the Top Ten Sources for Houseblogs, especially with such esteemed company, all of whom I read obsessively.

Also thanks to everyone who commented on our cabinet hardware issue. I've since fallen in love with the following from Restoration Hardware:

They won't be cheap, but they're worth saving for... so thanks everyone for all of your great suggestions and your votes!

The Bronze Dilemma

2006-04-09T11:26:00.000-04:00

I made very little progress on my list yesterday, however, I did go out to do a little ~~shopping~~research on materials for other projects that we have in mind. Aaron and I are both unhappy with the hardware on the kitchen cabinets. The satin nickel finish is rubbing off of the knobs and pulls, and we don't feel like the style (especially of the drawer pulls) really goes all that well with the kitchen in general. Here is a general picture of the kitchen:

While browsing the selection of knobs (I was just at Target, not one of the home centers), I kept finding myself drawn to the oil rubbed bronze selections. All of the original hardware in the house has the oil rubbed bronze look (although it is probably something else, like really dirty brass), and I really like it. Also, the warmer color would probably better compliment the buttercream cabinets and butchers block countertops. However, we have all stainless and black appliances (as shown above) and an unfinished tin ceiling. So, the silver color might be a better option.

Here is a photo of the old knobs and a simple oil rubbed bronze one that I picked up:

Here is a picture of the old cabinet pulls and a new one in satin nickel:

and again in oil rubbed bronze:

So, now thanks to Laurie and Eric from 1951 Ranch Redo, I've got this cool poll that you can use to vote. You're also welcome to leave comments if you have more suggestions. Thanks for your help!

Patios and Progress Report

2006-04-08T11:42:00.000-04:00

First, we've been busy trying to get ready for drywall. The current state of the list is as such:
~~1. Finish plumbing to redirect heating exhaust and mortar in new concentric vent~~
~~2. Finish plumbing redo behind washer~~
3. Install door headers on back door and closet door
~~4. Finish building wall on other side of closet double door~~
~~5. Install closet double door header~~
6. Redo window framing (oops again) [demo started]
7. Extend wall behind laundry sink (triple oops)
8. Finish toenailing by hand along door headers
9. Run all cable, speaker, and telephone lines to low voltage box
~~10. Sink~~ all ~~walls into floor with Ramset~~ (only 3 sections remain!)

Aaron is out of town, so I hope to tackle the rest of the demo on 6 and some of 9 this weekend by myself. The rest are really two person jobs.

Redirecting the heating exhaust was one of the most frustrating jobs that we've ever tackled on the Nightmare. It was just a really, really odd angle, and we needed to leave enough room to pass through so we could get to the electrical box. Here are some pictures of the job that we started last Saturday and finished on Thursday night:
In progress...

Completed!

While this ended up taking us a very long time and was very frustrating, it was definitely worth it to do it ourselves b/c the estimate from a local HVAC company to do it was $700!!!!!!!

In other news, we've been starting to gather estimates for a new, more functional patio and some retaining walls for raised beds in the backyard. We have a gorgeous stacked stone retaining wall in the front yard and we would love to duplicate this look in the backyard. Thus far, we're getting quotes for flagstone and slate, and they're coming out pretty high. We'll keep you informed as this project progresses. We have learned though- we won't start this project until we feel like the basement is nearly complete. We may be optimistic in assuming that we'll be done with the basement in June, though!

Powder Actuated Nailers

2006-04-07T14:47:00.000-04:00

Aaron's latest post on Powder Actuated Nailers is up over at Toolspotting.net!

Headed off at the pass...

2006-04-05T22:26:00.000-04:00

As I mentioned before, we put my poor, unsuspecting dad to work on the house this weekend making door headers. I didn't realize how detailed the process to make them was, so I took pictures for all of you that might be able to benefit from the experience. However, if you're framing in a room with a low ceiling, make sure that you double check all of your measurements before you start the headers.

Materials list
2x10 (or whatever you plan to use-- enough for both sides)
3/8" plywood, cut with circular saw or table saw to same width as 2x10
1x4 (enough for both sides)
nails
wood glue

Cut all the wood to the desired lengths for your door header.
Repeat for all the headers that you plan to make.
Stack all of the parts together for each door.
Then move on to assembly.

First, put wood glue on one side of both of the 2x10s

Next, make a plywood sandwich with the two pieces of 2x10 on the outside, the plywood on the inside.

Line everything up as carefully as possible, and then nail (we were out of framing nails, and used finishing nails instead) opposite corners to secure the header together while you continue assembly.

Turn the partially assembled header up on one side, and apply glue to the side. You can use a hand plane to smooth it out first if it's really irregular at this point. (We didn't have a plane, so that wasn't a possiblity for us.)

Next, apply the piece of 1x4 that you cut to the header.

And secure with a couple of nails at either end

and repeat for the other side...

I didn't get pictures, but we drove about 8 nails through each face and 4 nails on the top and bottom of each header with the nail gun to finish it up, and- Voila! Completed header!

Next, cut studs to fit under the header and on top of the bottom plate. We checked to make sure that the header would fit, then secured these on both sides with a few nails. Then, we lifted the header into place. The fit was a little snug, and it required a little persuasion to get into place. Then, we got as many nails in the structure with the nail gun as possible. We still need to buy some more nails and hand toenail the top on both sides. But, one header is done! Thanks, dad!

Oh, and Aaron's latest post is up at Toolspotting. It's a review of the miter saw cart that he's been using for several months now.

Toolspotting.net

2006-04-05T13:41:00.000-04:00

If you haven't checked out toolspotting.net yet, you should definitely do so! Aaron is one of the contributors, and he has had a few new posts up lately. I will start posting links from this blog in case our readers are interested.
Aaron's recent posts-
Hammernet
Magnetic Measuring Tape Holder

It's a little confusing, because Aaron from House in Progress is the site's creator and most active contributor, so Aaron's posts are listed under "Aaron Forster" to avoid confusion! As an aside, this brings the total of Erin/Aarons that we know (or cyber-know) to 6. Team Aaron/Erin unite!

So close you can taste it…

2006-04-04T22:02:00.000-04:00

Well, at least I’d like to say that…
Dad visited this weekend and showed us how to make door headers. I’ve got pictures of that to show those of you who may want to know. Unfortunately, we realized after we’d made up all of the door headers that they were too big, and we’d have to cut them down. Oops. This one was my fault- in our calculations; we were using 72” tall for the doors, when they’re actually 80” tall. Oops. So, anyway, we made door headers and then cut them back down. They’re all waiting to be installed. We won’t have any room for crown molding, but we should be fine for the door and window casings, which is good. I may spice them up a bit, since there isn’t enough room to match the ones in the rest of the house, so I can be creative. Period-appropriate, but still creative. More on that later.
Anyway, we now have a manageable list of things to do before we can be ready to drywall-
1. Finish plumbing to redirect heating exhaust and mortar in new concentric vent
2. Finish plumbing redo behind washer
3. Install door headers on back door and closet door
4. Finish building wall on other side of closet double door
5. Install closet double door header
6. Redo window framing (oops again)
7. Extend wall behind laundry sink (triple oops)
8. Finish toenailing by hand along door headers
9. Run all cable, speaker, and telephone lines to low voltage box
10. Sink all walls into floor with Ramset

I’ve said before that I will cry tears of joy when the drywall goes up! Let’s see if I can be held to that promise anytime soon! Aaron’s parents are coming Easter weekend to assist us with the drywall, so it would be ideal if we were ready to go then. However (there is always a however), Aaron has a trip out of town planned this weekend, so it may not happen. I guess that I need to accept that this “winter project” is rapidly also becoming a “summer project”. We had hoped that we would be able to redo the back porches this year, but we’ve got this one project at a time rule, so we’ll see. We may break that rule to ready the backyard for patio installation though. I made several inquires at different patio construction companies today, so hopefully I’ll have some messages from them when I get home tonight.
As an aside, I’m not feeling my blogger standard template anymore. Does anyone have any suggestions/advice on customizing it? I’d like something more unique, but I don’t have any mad internet skillz. I’ve searched around a little bit, but haven’t found much that I liked. Thanks in advance for your help.

Grunt work has arrived...

2006-03-27T13:08:00.000-05:00

You may remember my recent dismay at our lack of progress on the basement. Greg very kindly pointed out that we simply needed to order a case of his amazing grunt work, and all of our problems would be solved. Greg does need to add a disclaimer, though- grunt work can be a very dangerous consumer of time and energy. Those seem to be crucial ingredients to its success.

Friday night we continued to clean up the shop, and fixed a few previous issues with some of the systems that I won't get into here. It's sufficient to say that we were up until 2 am working on the basement. Finally we ran out of supplies and energy, and decided to call it a night.

Saturday we hauled 600 lbs of trash to the dump! Apparently everyone else had the same though, though, b/c we waited in line 30 minutes to exit the dump. I think that there should be a separate entrance and exit for the big contractors and junk removal companies who clog up the exit scale. Just a suggestion. Then we made another trip to Home Depot and started acquiring stuff to do all of the telephone, sattelite and speaker wire stuff. We're not sure that we will keep the TV in it's old location- we may end up flipping the seating arrangement in the room and putting the TV where the couch used to be. But, we're not sure, so we're just going to run cable, phone, and speaker wire to both sides so that we have the flexibilty to change it later. This will occupy us most of this week. Fortunately, installing the low voltage wires is quiet because we just need the staple gun, so we won't disturb our neighbors working on it after work. I'll put up a separate post about this when it's completed. Just an aside, why do the orange low voltage boxes cost, like $2, and the blue regular boxes cost like $0.20? We couldn't figure it out, so we just bought the cheaper ones. It seems like if it's good enough for electricity, it's good enough for phone line! We will write low voltage on them somewhere just so that no one is ever confused. We continued working on the issues that we were addressing on Friday until about 10 pm on Saturday. I was beat! That grunt work will really take it out of you.

In other news, Saturday night a bunch of teenagers went around the neighborhood smashing side mirrors off of cars. Apparently all of our good karma from the Devil Queen folks is working, b/c they didn't touch my car, and they just bent in Aaron's mirror. One of our neighbors with a Honda Accord got their mirror knocked completely off. And in Maryland, a car is inoperable without a side mirror, so they have to get it towed in to be fixed. They really need to establish some sort of entertainment for the bored youth in our town. Last summer, my friend's convertible got egged twice. You haven't lived until you've tried to help someone clean out dried egg from their speaker covers in 95 degree heat with a toothpick. I hope that all of this vandalism is revisited on these kids tenfold when they grow up and get their own property.

Sunday we slept in a little, and I had book club, so you might think that less was accomplished. Oh no, not with grunt work around! Aaron started to tackle some of the plumbing in the basement bathroom while I was gone. I finished tuck pointing the wall down there when I got back (I had one small section that I just hadn't gotten to- it feels great to have that done now!). When I finished the tuckpointing, I helped by cleaning and cutting pipes, and he sweated joints, and before we knew it, it was 1 am again. (NO LEAKS though! Woo hoo!) We made the unfortunate decision to go to Taco Bell, and then went to bed. One thing we both didn't fully grasp was that I had to be up at 5 am this morning to catch a plane to Atlanta for a business trip. Of course, we both slept through our alarms. Aaron was a sweetheart and took me to the airport (all the way to Baltimore, and then he had to drive back north of DC for work- he rocks!), which saved me time for parking, and I just barely made it to my plane. Whew! We've learned our lesson though- no starting plumbing jobs in the afternoon. This is the second time we've been up half the night trying to get the water back on so that we can shower in the morning. That grunt work is scary stuff!

Aaron plans to finish up the rest of the water lines tonight. He just has to run the last little pieces to the tub, toilet, and sink.

Spring Cleaning

2006-03-19T21:44:00.000-05:00

The batteries were dead in the "old" camera, so no pictures from this weekend. So sorry for that! (I didn't want to risk the nice new camera in the construction zone. It does take lovely pictures though!)

Friday night we came home and started trying to collect a lot of the trash and organize what we could. A lot of this organization involved finding things that we had lost when the lighting in the basement was diminished, and stacking up another big pile of crap for the dump and some big piles of scrap for the metal recycler. (We'll take all of that next weekend.) We finally insulated some of the hot water pipes (all the ones that we know won't be affected by the plumbing changes for the bathroom), which seemed to make a different in the temperature of my shower! We'd had the pipe insulation for at least a month and hadn't done anything with it besides get it dirty and smushed.

Saturday we had big plans, but unfortunately, I had a rather bad experience with my blood donation at the Red Cross, and felt so bad afterwards that I really was no good to anyone all day, and spent most of it passed out of the couch with the dogs. Saturday night Aaron and I babysat a 3 month old for our friends, so we didn't get much done after I had recovered either.

Today we bought a lot of organization materials for the shop and spent a long time down there trying to get things organized. Unfortunately, a lot of the wood that we've got is 12' long, and the shop is only 10' deep, so we can't fit those in that room. We'll have to cut those down to their eventual size in order to stack them on our new wood storage shelves.

I've got a few small projects planned for this week, but we've all heard that before. I don't understand how some of you get stuff done during the week (Greg)! You must not have my commute!

Disillusioned

2006-03-13T14:39:00.000-05:00

It was absolutely beautiful here this weekend. Unfortunately, I had a take home midterm due for my class (I spent about 16 hours on it!) and a birthday party to attend so I got nothing done on the house and barely even got to enjoy the nice weather. It’s so hard (I know, here goes the old broken record) to stay focused when these projects move soooooo slowly. At this rate, our basement will be finished in 2085 (apologies to Kristin)! We’re adamant not to hire the work out, but man! It would be nice to get through some visible progress. Aaron and admitted to each other that we’re falling behind on the laundry b/c we don’t even like to go down in the basement anymore. Ugh! Last night in bed, I couldn’t get my mind to calm down for all the worry of projects unfinished. Any words of encouragement?

am I slacking?

2006-03-08T12:35:00.000-05:00

Yes, I'm slacking on posting, but not in the house! Aaron and our friend Jason (see post below) taught me how to wire up recessed lighting fixtures, and I connected a ton of them this weekend. I also helped Aaron install fluorescents in his shop. I am still slacking on pointing the last little section of that wall but I'll get to it. At this rate, we'll be in drywall soon!

We may be back in a state of debate over the ceiling tile pattern. Since I can be a very anal person, I think that it's going to bug me if the lights don't line up perfectly with the circles on the tile that we picked. So, we may go with a pattern with no circles so that I don't freak out every time I look at the ceiling. One step forward, two steps back!

PS- Houseblogs didn't pick up my last post feed, so check it out below!

BRRRRRRRINNNNNNNNGGGG! Yip!Yip!Yip!Yip!Yip!

2006-03-07T20:09:00.000-05:00

If you have no idea what the title of this post refers to, one of my favorite old Sesame Street skits involves what I've finally learned are the "Yip Yip Martians" and their discovery of the telephone. For those of you who have forgotten, here you go(the feed is pretty bad- sorry).

Anyway, I've been drooling over this in the Pottery Barn Catalog for at least 1.5 years:

But I could never justify the $80 just for the phone (no tax or shipping included). Especially for a corded phone that is just for looks. I was talking to our friend Jason about this over the weekend- he has a love for all things vintage and antique, and was actually cannibalizing our house for old phone relays and line for his collection (he's also trying to figure out how to get the intact knobs from the old knob and tube down- any suggestions would be appreciated). Anyway, he clued me in to the fact that tons of people make old reproduction Crosley phones. He clicked a few keys and the next thing I knew, I had ordered this one for half the price that Pottery Barn wanted:

From this site! I'm very excited. I'll let you know how I like it when it gets here!

Your questions answered!

2006-02-18T10:55:00.000-05:00

Hi everyone. I decided to create a short recap post to answer the questions posed in the comments section of my last entry because this was really too long to post as a comment.

When we bought the house, it had a partially finished basement, with a living space, a closet, and a terrifying bathroom with scary, scary shower. The basement was finished sometime between 1950 and 1970 (hard to tell) in dreaded paneling and ugly vinyl tile. The POs carpeted over the tile and added a new furnace, water heater, and A/C. So, it was finished, but not nicely. When we moved in, we painted the ugly paneling, repainted the bathroom, and replaced the vanity, but we had no further plans to redo the basement, as it was functional, until it flooded, once right after we moved in (not badly) and then more so last spring. See posts here and here for more backstory. Last summer, we had a waterproofing company install an internal sump system with drainboard against the walls, which required most of the walls be ripped out. We discovered a lot of rot and water damage in the process, necessitating a much larger tear out than we had planned. We've stripped everything to a shell and are now working (slowly) to fix a lot of issues and create a great new living space, with a functional laundry room (previously the dryer and washer were across the room from each other), more storage, and an awesome new bathroom. We hope to finish this project sometime this spring.
The POs widened the staircase to the basement and relocated it when they remodeled the kitchen. The cut a few floor joists in the process and did some dubious stabilization, causing that whole thing where we jacked the kitchen floor up and re-supported it. The stairs are now very stable and don't bounce when you walk up and down, which is nice. The staircase is open to the room below and I think that we can make it into a nice feature for that room. The POs carpeted the stairs with $0.99/yd awful berber carpet to sell the house, but I pulled some of it back and found gorgeous hardwood treads. So, the plan is to install a period appropriate newel and rail terminating in a rosette on the support beam we installed. I should make a decision on what we're going to order this weekend, I'll post about that soon.

Stairway to indecision

2006-02-17T16:51:00.000-05:00

When we acquired the Nightmare, I knew that I'd have to do something about the basement stairwell. It was a decent width, but almost fully enclosed, with no railings or newels at all. I've been looking at different stair part suppliers for about 3 months now. I've acquainted myself with the terminology, I've scrutinized our main staircase, and I've thought carefully about what I want the staircase to the basement to look like. I've determined that replicating the upstairs staircase without having parts custom made is impossible. So, I'm trying to get as close as possible. Most suppliers that I've looked at don't carry the big box newels like I need in hardwoods, just hemlock and fir. However, today, I think that I've significiantly narrowed the field.
I was super stoked when I found LJ Smith, because they had a good selection of wood types and several box newels to choose from. But, their website is difficult to navigate, and big pet-peeve: no prices. I think that I finally may have found a place that meets my criteria:
1. Good selection, easy to navigate
2. Many hardwoods to choose from
3. Free shipping!
4. Prices on the website
5. Sells direct to homeowners (no dealers)
Where is this place do you ask? www.stairsupplies.com How did I not find them before? I have no idea. They even have a blog! Right now, I'm trying to figure out if we can afford to use walnut. I'll keep you posted as to my experience with this company.
There probably won't be much of an update this weekend, as I'm fighting with a cold and seem to be losing.

Nip/Tuck I

2006-02-17T11:35:00.000-05:00

I've been working hard on tuckpointing the brick walls in the bathroom. As promised, I'll be posting an informative series on tuckpointing and preserving interior brick walls for display.

Step 1: Evaluation and Cleanup
The first thing that you need to do is check the walls for major damage (missing or badly damaged bricks) and the condition of the mortar. Whatever mixture of mortar they used in 1915 on our house has basically deteriorated to sand. So, our usual protocol involves cleaning all the old sand out of the spaces between the bricks. I have mild asthma and the dust and dirt from tuckpointing really bother me, so I usually wear my respirator during this stage. I start by brushing or vacuuming the dirt and loose mortar off of the wall:

If you can't get the mortar off this way, then you can use a hammer and chisel, or a drill with a masonry bit to remove stubborn mortar that you want to replace. I usually would rather leave it alone if it's in good condition. However,if you want all of the mortar to match, or you suspect that it's not as solid as you think, these techniques more useful.

Step 2: Mortar selection

There is a wealth of information on the internet regarding mortar selection. Generally, you should remember that old bricks are very soft, and if your mortar is harder than your bricks, it will cause your bricks to crack. From what we've read, for our soft bricks, we need type "O" mortar, but we were unable to get that in Frederick, so we're using type "N" and hoping for the best. Since we're doing small repairs, we bought 1 bag of mortar and 1 bag of sand. We mix at 1 part mortar to 3 parts sand. I like the mortar a little wetter than Aaron likes to mix it, but either way, here is a picture of what our mix looks like (sorry too bright).

3. Actual techniques.
a. Spray with wall with water. I just use a small spray bottle for this, and I continue to mist the wall as I work.

b. I like to get some mortar on a large putty knife, and then use my narrow brick spatula thingie (sorry not more technical) to push it into the horizontal joint off of the putty knife. This reduces waste and increases efficiency.

I use a similiar technique for vertical joints.

c. Then I use a stippling technique and a large brush to remove the excess, push the mortar further into the joint (sometimes I need to apply more), and leave a nice finished surface. You may need to use a strike or other tool to match the finish of the surrounding bricks. Since I was doing almost the whole wall, I went with this method for everything. Outside, I used a strike to match the finish on the surrounding bricks.

d. Next, I use a smaller brush to remove some excess mortar from the edges of the bricks (they seem to get covered up easily, especially when I do vertical tucking.

e. Finally, I mist the wall again. I continue to mist it over the next few days to slow the cure of the mortar. This may not do anything, it was just how I was taught.

Next time, I'll show final cleaning of the bricks, replacing a brick, and how to apply a clear coating to an interior brick wall so that it can be left exposed.

Pictures added!

2006-02-16T21:32:00.000-05:00

I finally added pictures to Mixmaster Mike Redux if you want to check it out!

On Valentine's Day, many ask... What is love?

2006-02-14T10:15:00.000-05:00

Many thanks to Stace, who gave me the idea for this post, and who helped me come up with a lot of the below.

On Valentine’s Day, many ask the question, what is love? For us, love is many things…

1. Love is pouring concrete all week long so that we don’t have to pay any more rentals on Mixmaster Mike (but we still did!).

2. Love is marrying Bob the Builder (that’s the new nickname from Mike and Stace, even though the block already has a Bob who really is a builder).

3. Love is enduring endless "hey man's".

4. Love is framing a basement.

5. Love is picking out the perfect patio furniture.

6. Love is a promise that he'll never wear high socks and shorts and count them pants.

7. Love is the debate over the perfect ceiling tile.

8. Love is paying the bill for the wood restoration work.

9. Love is lead paint removal - and being banished from using the heat gun due to an incident.

10. Love is not said best with diamonds, but with three new knees for the dog.

11. Love is three-wet noses waking you up every morning.

12. Love is coveralls and power tools.

13. Love is a level concrete floor that will still require backerboard for tile.

14. Love is working hard, and hardly complaining.

15. Love is living in the Nightmare, and still being able to laugh about it.

Happy Valentine's Day, Aaron! I love you!

Mixmaster Mike Redux

2006-02-07T17:41:00.000-05:00

The guys at Rentals Unlimited laughed when we pulled up on Friday to rent, you guessed it, the jackhammer and the cement mixer. Again. Blech. You know, some people actually go on vacations with their vacation days. Not us. Noooo. We take days off to work on the house. This time we took out the old shower drain and made a great big hole so that we could run the drain for the new clawfoot tub. We were surprised to find that the slab was over 4” thick in this area, but that was a pleasant surprise, b/c we were going to rip out all the concrete that would have been under the tub and pour it to 4” to ensure it could take the weight of the filled tub. So, there we go. Pleasant surprise from the Nightmare. Wow, those are rare.

Outline of where tub will go...

So, you’ve seen it all before. I have some pictures, I may post them later. Aaron forgot to take a picture before we started pouring concrete, so we don’t have any of the pipe in the hole, actually, but I’m sure that you believe us. We did get two good tips from a plumbing supply place in town that we checked out. (1) We put a cup over the drain and poured the concrete around it so that we could still access the joint for the drain later. We’ll fill it before we finish everything up. (2) You can stack those little flangey things to raise up the toilet, so we didn’t have to rip that area up.

A picture of the hole... aren't holes exciting???

Two views of Aaron grinding off the old pipe. He learned from that exercise with the hacksaw last time!

Next, we laid the pipe in the hole (no picture) and poured more concrete. Mixmaster Mike came back (hopefully for the last time) to help.

So, there you go. That’s how we spent Friday and Saturday.

Sunday we were bound and determined to finish framing. For design purposes, we needed to frame an angled entrance to the bathroom so that we could walk past it down the hall and out to the backyard. This was not simple. We spent many hours scratching our heads and making sample cuts. We finally got something that would work and finished framing these two walls about 6:00 pm. We only took a break to sign the papers for our home equity line. (They come to your house for closing now. How cool is that?) We’re really happy about this, b/c we slashed our interest rate by 2 percentage points, and we think that we have a big enough line to finish the basement, backyard, and attic remodels.

General framing shot. Many of these got messed up when I tried to move them to Flickr, so this is the only one I'm posting.

I'll get some better ones this weekend. The camera batteries are dead now.

After finishing the two angled walls, we only had one real wall left to do. We will put cabinets on this wall, so to increase the chances of actually hitting a stud when we hang them, I had Aaron space the studs 8” apart. So, the wall will look strange when I finally post a picture, but it should be strong and hopefully we’ll thank ourselves later. We finished up by 7:00 and then flopped on the couch, ordered pizza, and watched football.

After many trial and error attempts at framing in this horribly unlevel house, we finally figured one thing out that helped a lot. After measuring and cutting the pieces for the top and bottom, we held a stud up to each floor joist that we would hit, on top of the other two boards and marked a line on the board for each joist that it would touch. Then, we cut the board to the shortest length indicated. Then we checked this board in the same manner to make sure that it would fit under each stud. Then we cut all the studs to this length- we usually didn’t measure this, but just marked each stud with the previous one to save time, and it only bit us in the ass once. All of the walls that we made this way went up very easily (before we figured it out, we had a couple get stuck and a couple that we had to shim a lot) and were nice and firm after they were attached and didn’t require any shimming. It was also much faster than trying to measure everything. So, if you’re framing in an older home, this may be a helpful tip for you. We’ve made a tremendous effort to make everything level, plumb, and square, but we had a lot of issues. One big issue that we had is with lumber. Most of it sucks. No framing lumber is older than 7 years anymore, apparently, and most of what we bought seemed fine, but twisted as it dried out in the basement. So, lesson number one is to buy the wood and use it as quickly as possible. (Someone commented somewhere in the past few weeks that Tom from This Old House has said “Level, plumb, or square, pick two.” which made us feel much, much better.) Anyway, drywalling this mess should be an adventure!

We had to rip out the little section we did last week b/c of the issues with the stupid vents from the furnace. It turns out that they were sized incorrectly and don’t have the correct number of bends (I found the furnace installation manual online and we poured over it for hours. It took a combined 17 years of science/engineering higher education to make sense of the stupid thing.) The parts that we need to fix it aren’t readily available so Aaron is meeting with Frederick Air tomorrow morning to get an estimate to move and resize the vent. I hate paying someone to glue PVC together, but we don’t want to screw this up and die of carbon monoxide poisoning. That carbon monoxide poisoning is a bitch. We do have a monitor, but that’s not the point.

Sooo, at least I can report that the framing is about 95% done. We have to put back in the section that is affected by the furnace vent and we have a few door and window headers to deal with, but none of that should be too difficult. We ended up framing out the bathroom for a 30” door so that it would have the clearance necessary to swing into the room. This was very important to Aaron for some reason. I was fine with just swinging it the other way, but he would have none of it! But, this will make for more interesting blog posts because the tub is 32” wide, and it will need to go into the bathroom before the door frame can be finished out. This kind of slows work in the main area of the basement while we focus our attention on getting the bathroom ready for the tub. This will be nice because it will give us a chance to try out a lot of the same things that we’ll do on a large scale in the rest of the basement in this small room. So, over the next few weeks, you’ll see a lot of posts having to do with the bathroom. We’re starting with a tuckpointing post hopefully coming up this week sometime! Oh, and for those of you that have been following, we’ve decided to go with the tin tile style #1 from the post of a few weeks ago.

Blood, Bricks, and Borers, Oh My!

2006-01-30T11:36:00.000-05:00

I know it's been awhile, but I promise to make up for my laziness in posting with good stories. So, the last time I posted, we were planning to finish (ha!) the framing and the shower in the bathroom was scheduled for a tearout.

On Saturday the 21st, I drove down to Rockville to meet a good friend for lunch, and left Aaron and his home-improvement partner in crime, Mike, to the demolition. I left before Mike arrived, so I didn't get to approve or disapprove his choice of work clothes for the demo of ceramic covered cinderblock. I imagine that you can all see where this is going. Mike chose to wear admittedly long basketball style shorts (the weather has been strangely warm this winter) and admittedly tall socks, but there was still quite a gap between the top of his socks and the bottom of his shorts of exposed, bare, leg. (But, I don't care how many times that they argue that that configuration is "like pants". It's not!) I knew from what Kristin at 1902 Victorian had posted about tile demo that it could be hazardous because the broken tile edges are really sharp. But, Mike and Aaron didn't think about that. Soooo, I have a nice relaxing lunch with my friend, and I call home on my way back to learn that they need all sorts of medical supplies because a shard of brick sort of lodged itself in Mike's leg, bleeding profusely (Mike was quoted as saying "Hey man, why are these bricks all red?") and probably requiring stitches. (Mike of course, wouldn't stop working to (a) partake of the medical supplies I went out to pick up for him or (b) to walk the 20 feet to the hospital at the end of our street for real medical attention. He had to make it to the dump before they closed.) I am very grateful for Mike's sacrifice, but I prefer everyone to leave with no injuries! Moral of the story- be careful when doing demo!

All of this blood and guts uncovered (finally) unpainted brick walls, but they need a lot of work in the tuckpointing department- no problem, thanks to our wonderful neighbors assistance, we feel pretty comfortable with that now. Also, there is something very odd going on with two beams shown in the picture below. They are very crooked coming out of the wall, but then become gradually straighter as they go toward the center of the room, and are more or less straight after about 3 or 4 feet. Is this intentional? Is this something that we need to fix? The more that we look at it, the more puzzled that we become. Here are three pictures of the area-

Any comments/suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Aaron and I did a little more framing on the 22nd, but had a lot of issues going around the back doorway, so we spent a lot of time and effort with not a lot of results. Going around that sewer pipe in the corner (with an angled wall to preserve as much space as possible) was not fun.

Aaron and I had a lot going on at work last week, so our plans to rip insulation down in preparation for the extermination of what our company called "wood borers" but I actually believe to be "powder post beetles" didn't happen until Wednesday night, at about 9:00 pm b/c Aaron had a dinner for work, and the Beltway was closed due to a big accident, so I had to take the Metro to school, which triples my commute time, b/c I have to go all the way into the city on one line, change lines and go all the way back out. Blech. Fortunately, we were able to rip it out really quickly (we had something like 20 trash bags stuffed full of insulation for the trashmen- I felt like we were throwing away money, but there was no way to put it back up, it got too destroyed, plus I was paranoid that the bugs were in it, too, which is probably crazy, but whatever.) The exterminator soaked everything really well, so hopefully they won't be back. We'll have three more treatments just to be sure.

Here is our poor ceiling with no insulation- we still have some tufts and furring strips to get down. However, the 1st floor is warmer now, so maybe ripping it down was a good thing.

This past Saturday was sunny and warm, so we took advantage of the good weather and went on a little antiquing mission downtown. We almost never take advantage of our fabulous location and walk downtown just for fun, but we needed to buy some bread, I wanted to try a new place for lunch, so downtown we went. After we ate, I was hoping to hit it big (ahem! doorknobs! ahem!) at our favorite architectural/salvage place. But they were closed! At 1:00 on a warm Saturday afternoon! I was disappointed, but we had a good time anyway at some of the other stores.

Sunday was rainy and windy, so we got back to work. We framed a few transition areas we'd skipped the previous weekend, and worked on the frame for the long, long doorway for the utility closet. Framing in an existing home is challenging b/c nothing is the same, and you have to work around so much existing stuff. We put in 2 hours on this doorway and then finally thought that we had it level, plumb, and square, only to find that the freon pipe for the A/C had pushed us an inch out from where we wanted to be. We don't feel comfortable moving the pipe (we will move the PVC pipes for the exhaust ourselves) so we're having them come to take a look at it on Friday. Hopefully they will be able to take care of it then, b/c it's holding us up.

In other news, Aaron was hit with a big brainstorm for the bathroom. As I alluded to in the first paragraph, we were disappointed to find that all of the brick walls in the basement had been painted, and would require a lot of work to expose. Seeing the pretty brick walls in the bathroom made me realize how nice this would have looked had it worked out, especially since we have to repoint the entire area. So, the plan is now to put wainscoting up to the brick line, and then expose the bricks on the back wall and the side wall (the other two walls will be wainscoting and drywall). In order to hide the water supply lines, we'll probably have to change to a single slipper tub, not a double slipper like we had originally wanted, but that allows us to keep the sink in it's original location, which made more sense, and eliminates the issue of dealing with the clearance around the tub. I'm excited about the new plan (especially since the tub will be cheaper) and I think that it will look great.

Aaron and I are taking Friday off to do more concrete work. Blech. We're relocating the drain in the bathroom for the new tub, and pouring a thicker slab under the tub to better support the increased weight in that area.

If we get to it this week, we'll publish a good post on tuckpointing with pictures! Stay tuned...

Mission Accomplished!

2006-01-18T22:10:00.000-05:00

Days of hard, dirty, dusty work... 4
Trips to haul concrete in my poor SUV... 5
Number of 80lb bags concrete poured...37 (that's 2960 lbs!, Thanks Mixmaster Mike!)
One level concrete basement floor... PRICELESS!!!

We're thrilled to be done. We're not thrilled that since we have decided to install one of these...

(possibly with chrome feet, not sure of that yet)

which has tremendously more aesthetic appeal that the scary shower you see in this picture...

But will require us to take a day off work, rent a jackhammer, dig out the drain for the shower, and relocate it to the place where we will need it to accomodate the tub. Then, Mixmaster Mike or one of his cousins will come back so that we can pour a new floor for the bathroom. My dad suggested that it's best that we do this anyway, as our basement floor is only about 2-3" of concrete over the original dirt floor, and he thought at least 4" was necessary to support the bathtub plus the water.

We will be able to enlarge the bathroom to a space that is 4'10" wide and 10' long. The tub will go against one wall, turned longways to maximize the space in the long, narrow room. The tub is 31" wide, which will leave a clearance of 27". We're not sure if that is quite enough, it may end up being a little tight walking by the bathtub. Any comments?

In other news, we purchased a termite warranty when we bought the house, since we had wood boring beetles in a floor joist when we moved in, which were treated. This warranty requires yearly inspections. Since we had the ceiling out in the basement, we went ahead and scheduled the inspection. They were able to get a really good look at all of the joists, and found some more in an area that they had not previously treated. Apparently these little guys are pretty hard to get rid of! They haven't done any structural damage, fortunately, (they're not nearly as destructive as termites) but it's important to take care of them as soon as possible, because it will require several treatments to completely irradicate them. We expect to have treatments every 3-4 months for the next year or so. This means that we need access to the ceiling for at least the next year, and would like to be able to get back in there to do the inspections beyond that. SOOO, we've decided to use the American Tin Ceilings panels that we had been considering, but instead of going with the nailup option that we had originally chosen, we're going to put in a dreaded (by many of you out there!) drop ceiling grid, and use their drop-in tin panels. We will paint the grid to match the tiles, and hopefully (if the pics in their brochure and on their website are any indication) it will look nice, and be easily removed. I ordered a color sample kit from them of the "whites". (We have the unfinished tin in our kitchen, and love it, but due to the low ceiling in the basement, we think that white is the best choice.)

Here is a picture of the color sample kit. We've chosen the second one from the left in the bottom row: "bright white satin".

Now we're trying to decide on a pattern. We're using recessed lighting, and some of the pictures show a cutout in the circle motif for the lights, which I thought looked nice. That narrowed our choices down to the following two-

choice 1

or

choice 2

If you have any opinion, please vote in the comments section below. Remember, they will both be matte white on our ceiling, and the ceiling is low, in a long, relatively narrow room.

Thanks for your vote!

Get a snack and a soda people, it's a long one...

2006-01-17T22:11:00.000-05:00

Well, I promised last night to post a longer entry today, and I'm a woman of my word! As I've mentioned before, the objective of the weekend was to level the basement floor. Thanks to homeimprovementninja, 1922 Colonial ,and Frederick Brick Works we had some good advice as to how to proceed. We had originally planned to use self-leveling floor cement, but we had too big of a drop off (1.25") and it's $30/bag, as opposed to Sakrete, which is $4/bag. So, we picked up a gallon of Leplex (latex concrete bonder), and 16- 80lb bags of Sakrete. The guy at Frederick Brick Works suggested that we use the angle grinder to cut a line in the concrete to the point that we're trying to level, so that we could push the concrete to that, instead of trying to feather it out,which was pretty much guaranteed not to work. By the time we picked up everything and dropped it off, including the rented concrete mixer, it was pretty late in the day, and Aaron had broken his glasses, so we spent the rest of the evening dealing with that and watching football with friends. Sunday morning, we were up bright and early and ready to get started. We cut the line in the concrete, and chiseled it out at an angle to give us more room to get the concrete in. Then we removed the toilet and vanity from the bathroom so that we could take care of that area as well, which first required removing the linoleum. Unfortunately, the toilet had been leaking (which we did not know) for a long time, and there was a lovely mildew or mold layer underneath the linoleum. I also don't know what they put this linoleum down with, but it didn't want to come off. We hit it with the heat gun, water, etc. all to no result. Finally, we got the plastic upper layer off, then soaked the papery bottom layer with a strong bleach solution and were able to scrape it off with floor scrapers. Nasty! Then, we were finally ready to get started with the concrete. By this point, it was pretty late, so we painted Leplex on half the floor and called it a day. We had Monday off, so we got up early and started mixing and pouring the concrete. We poured almost all of the bags, painted the rest of the Leplex and then we had a blood donation appointment at the Red Cross, so we took a break for that and for lunch, then came back and mixed and poured the rest of the concrete we had plus the other 6 bags that we had bought! This is why I was so tired last night. Tonight, we poured another 8 bags of concrete. We estimate that tomorrow night will require 8 more bags, and then we should finally be finished with a nice level floor and a rough, ready for tile surface.
And, for the pictures...

The line that we so carefully made in the concrete, and didn't actually use-

The nasty linoleum floor that was so difficult to remove-

Leplex action shot. This stuff is smelly and the consistency of Elmer's Glue

Aaron's a trooper! 1 pint down and he's still mixing cement!

Aaron smoothing the last area of the concrete that we did on Monday. I should have taken more before shots, but the floor sloped obviously to the left side of the picture.

Brooming the area by the door... this will hopefully give the thinset for the tile more area to stick to

Tonight, we decided to move the mixer (I like to call him Mixmaster Mike) down to the basement so that we could speed up the whole process, and also not freeze to death. This was a great idea, and made the whole process go much more quickly and easily, since we could just dump the concrete on the floor, instead of into two buckets, which we then had to carry downstairs. We will definitely finish this way. Here's Aaron finishing up the area that we did tonight. I promise that I do work, I just also take pictures!

Stay tuned for tomorrow night, when hopefully I can report that we're finished!

Update from the edge of exhaustion

2006-01-16T20:58:00.000-05:00

Top ten things I learned this weekend:
1. Latex concrete bonder looks and feels like Elmer's glue and smells much worse
2. Mildew can live under your linoleum
3. Mildew that decides to live under your linoleum may act like a bioadhesive, requiring several hours and some special tools to remove, and a lot of bleach to kill
4. You always need more concrete mix than you've calculated
5. A level floor takes more than 3 days to achieve
6. 22 bags of concrete is a lot, but still not enough
7. The termite warranty inspector shows up very early in the morning and bangs a lot
8. Wood boring insects are difficult to kill (at least they aren't termites)
9. Concrete work makes you very tired
10. We're still not done leveling the floor and I'm exhausted, so I'm not doing a real post tonight

So fresh and so clean...

2006-01-09T22:45:00.000-05:00

Well, this picture summarizes our weekend pretty well (it's the valve that gave us so much trouble and was eventually replaced, surrounded by SOME, but not ALL of the subsequent receipts for our trips to the big orange and blue boxes):

Aaron says that the compression fitting that is on the elbow is the one that was causing all of the problems. As the fitting was designed for a straight piece of pipe and not an elbow, when Aaron loosened it and retightened it, it started leaking. Oh well, it's been replaced by two separate valves now.

I decided to make excellent use of all his hard work and give our little schnauzer a much needed bath tonight. I haven't had a laundry sink with a faucet since I left my parents house, so this was a nice treat for me, if not for Ansley:

The amount of anger that she can express without even using her eyes is amazing!

Aw! All clean and very cute (I can't believe I got her to pose for me for once!) We keep her cut like a schnauzer in the summer, but in the winter she gets really cold and we let her coat grow out, that's why she looks a little shaggy.

I am also thrilled because we've been able to do laundry again! So everything around here is much fresher and cleaner!

Pipe Dreams II- The reality

2006-01-09T09:10:00.000-05:00

Well, Aaron never got the valve under the sink to completely stop leaking on Saturday night. It had something to do with the POs dubious use of a compression fitting on an elbow (I took a picture, but haven't had time to upload it). He put a bucket under the leak and we both showered, etc. then he turned the water back off again. He pulled everything back apart on Sunday and resoldered it, after that, no more leaks there. We had two more leaks in the laundry area, but got everything plumbed up by 2 pm on Sunday. Aaron said "Well, I probably sweated something like 50 joints, and only 5 of them leaked. Considering my experience level, that's pretty damn good." I have to agree, even though it meant that Aaron's birthday totally sucked. Stay tuned for a few exciting developments this week, including "How crooked is that basement floor?", "Shiny, Happy Toilet" and "FINALLY! We've sealed the deal with a ceiling decision!"

Pipe dreams

2006-01-07T21:45:00.000-05:00

A few days ago, I mentioned that Aaron was moving some pipes in the basement and redoing some connections for the washer. Well, this project has turned into a much bigger job than we expected. (You would think, that after all this time, we would have figured out that nothing is ever simple, and anything that can go wrong, will go wrong and require at least 3 more trips to HD or Lowes! You'd also be wrong.) Anyway, we're at 28 hrs and counting with the water turned off, we've fixed 3 leaks and are working on the 4th, and hope to shower tonight. And, I might also mention that today is Aaron's birthday. Poor guy has spent the entire day in the basement, sweating joints and getting burned by hot solder. We were going to go out to dinner, but that's before the weird double valve (that neither HD in town carries) under the kitchen sink started leaking (we didn't even do that one-- it was already here!). We are celebrating with pizza, beer, 22 man hours in the basement (I say man hours b/c my role in this project has been limited, I undecorated and cleaned today) and 4 trips to Home Depot instead.

Here is the birthday boy under the sink (at least he isn't in classic plumber's position):

And here is some of his amazing handiwork. There were no pipes here yesterday:

Here's to hoping that a little birthday magic (or some fairies, I hear that they've been working hard all over the place lately) will get this leak stopped before the pizza shows up!

Got milk?

2006-01-05T19:48:00.000-05:00

We live in an interesting little town. One of the more interesting features of Frederick is its large community of organic farmers, where you can get not only fresh veggies, but milk, eggs, meat, poultry, bread, etc. etc. However, in the winter, there is no Farmer's Market, and we have trouble getting to the market even when it's open because we're always working on the HOUSE! I had known for a long time that South Mountain Creamery, the source of yummy organic dairy products, had home delivery available. I also noticed that since we stopped buying the yummy fresh milk, that I had almost stopped drinking milk entirely. SOOO, last week I bit the bullet and used some of my Christmas money to buy a milk box, and start up home delivery. So now, every Thursday, the milkman comes to my door and puts all sorts of yummy things in my shiny new milk box! Better yet, they charge a deposit, and use the old-fashioned glass bottles. So, for the first time in many, many years, the milkman is making regular visits to our little house!

Yummy goodness (they even deliver, cookies, coffee, and sausages):

Adorable milkbox:

Jumpin' Jack Floor!

2006-01-04T21:57:00.000-05:00

Hi everyone, sorry for the extended blogation, but blah blah holidays blah blah, you know how it is. Anyway, we did have a VERY busy New Year's weekend, the origins of which began the night of December 22nd, when Aaron was struck with the explanation of why our countertop was pulling away from the back wall of the kitchen at a concerning rate... of course, it was because the opposite side of the kitchen floor was sinking. Here goes my best attempt at explaining what happened.

At some point, our POs decided to widen the basement staircase, and may have ripped out a first floor powder room and pantry in the process. They also added some features that I love, like awesome tall pantry cabinets that can accomodate a full sized trash can, among other things. Anyway, when they decided to do this, they had to cut some of the floor joists next to the staircase, and they added a long board crosswise across the floor joists, which they hung from the floor joists using huge joist hangers at either end, and then toenailed it with like a billion nails into the floor joists. Unfortunately, without additional support, this was not enough to support the weight of our new giant fridge and all those cabinets, etc. etc. and thus the countertop pulling away from the wall. Sooooo, Aaron hatched a mighty plan to jack the floor back up and support it with two 2x6 boards nailed together and held by two posts made of 4 2x4s (which you will see below). This project had many phases, some of which are depicted below.

Phase 1, Friday December 30th- Mission: Turn basement floor into Swiss cheese:
Aaron rented an electric jackhammer from our local tool rental place, and tore up our thin concrete basement floor (it's about 2" thick, not enough to support what we wanted to support) so that we could dig two holes about 11" deep in which to sink our support posts. While we had the jackhammer, we also decided to get out the old drain pipe for the boiler, which someone cut off at knee level in order to make an extremely painful point about watching your step in the basement. Since we plan to tile the floor down there, Aaron also chipped out the concrete around the floor drain so that we could raise it up. In doing this, we determined that the sewer pipe connected to the floor drain had collapsed at some point, so we had a very old pipe broken right at a connection, making it very difficult to repair. A picture of this is below:

At this point, we weren't sure what to do. We didn't feel comfortable digging the pipe out and replacing it, that was a really big job. The pipe wasn't in immediate danger, because it went to the floor drain, all the water was designed to run down into the connecting pipe, so water wasn't going to come out of the pipe, but we still needed to figure out how to seal it. So, we did what all desperate people do when they are truly stumped... we called Dad! And he had a brilliant idea- a plug. Here is the pipe with the cute little red plug-

Here is Aaron with the pipe we've been running into for the past year and a half. It makes me so happy to fix something that has pissed me off since before we bought the house.

Here is our little capped pipe. It was quite a job sawing this guy off with the hacksaw, so Aaron gets mad props for his perseverance.

Here is Aaron, indicating that he is truly a JACK of all trades! Hahaha! I'm so punny! (Turn me off, please...)

Actually, when Aaron told his dad what we were doing, he asked if we had any "adult supervision." Ha!

Saturday, December 31st- Mission: Jack up the floor, hammer in the support, and pour the concrete in time to go to the New Years Party!

After all of the drama with the pipe, we could finally start the big project. Here we are jacking up the floor in preparation for the final support (note the swiss cheese floor in the background)-

And after much cursing, headscratching, leveling, moving, releveling, removing, digging, etc. Here is Aaron fastening in the final support:

(I do stuff, really! I just also take all the pictures!)

To prove my point about the eleventy-million nails in the floor joists that the previous owner did, check out the disclaimer that I left to any FOs (Future owners) who decided that they wanted to rip out the walls in the staircase:

So, we were pleased to have finished a project (no pics of the concrete pour, b/c let's face it: Concrete is boring!

How does one celebrate a New Year in an Old House?
DESTRUCTION!

We think that we've almost finished the demo in the basement now- demo is fun!

We finished up the weekend with a trip to the dump, and a little framing. Aaron is downstairs now rerouting some water pipes and upgrading the connections for the washer. I'll take some pictures when he's done and have him write a little post about what he's done. All I know is that the water is off! Hopefully, I'll have pictures to show finished framing this weekend!

A TREE-mendous Morning

2005-12-19T10:44:00.000-05:00

We had a huge holiday party this weekend, so I thought that I wouldn't have anything to share on the blog today because no work was done. I was very happy to be wrong, though! About 7:30 this morning, the tree crew from the city showed up. There was no way I was leaving for work with the street full of equipment and branches falling everywhere, so I watched and took pictures for the blog. It's so funny how seeing something like this is just as exciting now as it was 20 years ago. There's just something about the destructive powers of man vs. nature!

First went the canopy. This guy bounced around in the cherry picker in the power lines like a champ. I would have been terrified.

Periodically, the guys on the ground fed the big branches into the chipper.

I got better shots as the tree trimmer moved away from the sun.

Great action shot!

Giant bulldozer to move the trunk and the leaves (why are there still leaves on this tree in December?)

The broken trunk that caused all of this mess.

Goodbye tree!

It looks strange to see the house without the tree on the corner, but we'll get used to it. We have the option of getting a street tree in the spring in front of our house, but Aaron's not sure. A lot of the street trees have disrupted the sewer lines, so it may not be a good idea.

A TREE-mendous Evening

2005-12-15T22:14:00.000-05:00

The weekend after Thanksgiving, I noticed a large crack 2/3 of the way through the trunk of the tree in front of the other half of our duplex. The next Monday, I called the City Arborist (yes, we have a city arborist) and left him a message that I was concerned about the tree. We played phone tag for a few days, but he finally called me back. Our conversation went something like this.

me: I'm really concerned about this tree in front of my house.

him: It's actually in front of your neighbor's house.

me: Yes, I know, but it's badly cracked and it's in front of the other half of my house. I park under it, I walk under it, my friends walk under it. I'm concerned that it's going to fall and someone's going to get hurt.

him: Yes, it's on our dangerous trees list, we have to get through some other trees before we get to it, and the sidewalk has to be fixed (the tree roots have messed up the sidewalk) also. (That part made no sense, why do you have to fix the sidewalk to cut down a tree?) If I were you, I'd back my car up. (That really threw me- Aaron's cousin was nearly killed and is now in a wheelchair because a tree fell on her on a beautiful summer day, it was a freak accident, but this tree was designated as dangerous and they won't take it down???)

me: Okay. Thanks. (WTF?)

So, for the past few weeks, I've avoided the crap out of the tree, not parked under it, and told all my friends to cross the street when they walk their dogs by it.

You may have heard on your national news or weather channel about an ice storm affecting the mid-Atlantic states today. Well, we've been getting slammed with heavy freezing rain all afternoon. Tonight, Aaron and I were on our way to the store about 7:00, and I noticed my neighbor on the other side (not the other half of the house) had parked his car under the tree, which was covered with ice, but not leaning or anything. So, I went over and told him that the tree was cracked, told him the story about the city, and advised him to move his car (he's been out of town for a few weeks, so I hadn't seen him to tell him the tree story yet). He told me that he'd had a really bad day, he'd lost his wallet and spent the whole day trying to get new cards and a new driver's license, the last thing he needs is a tree crushing his car. So, he moved the car, Aaron and I went to the store, and I didn't think too much of it.

About 9:00, we came back from our errands, and as we drove down the street, Aaron started laughing. Sure enough, the tree was down (it fortunately fell in the middle of the street, not damaging any property, hurting anyone, or taking down any power lines). When we went inside, we had a message from our neighbor letting us know that the tree fell about 15 minutes after he moved the car, so thanks a lot! The city came by about half an hour ago and dragged it off. Sorry for the crappy pictures, it's dark outside!

Here is the remaining part of the tree-

The last part of the tree being dragged off- (two other huge sections have already been taken away)

A closer view of the above-

We're both going to call the city tomorrow and ask them to take down the rest of the tree, and tell us why the hell that they wouldn't take it down when I called a few weeks ago! I will keep you posted. Keep your fingers crossed that the rest of it doesn't go and take the power lines with it.

Happy Holidays from the Nightmare on Elm St.

2005-12-11T20:27:00.000-05:00

Happy Holidays to all of the Internets and Housebloggers!

You get what you pay for.

2005-12-11T19:44:00.000-05:00

This is Aaron posting today. Whether we want it to or not, HVAC has now become part of our remodeling effort. Apparently, the previous owners had a "connection" with a heating and air conditioning contractor. We do not know the name of the contractor, but I would like to give them a little advice about installation in old homes. I am no expert, but in dealing with our house there are three simple rules to follow:
1. Plan your installation carefully
If you have cut the opening for the floor register one floor joist across from where you cut the hole in ducting, it is not appropiate to make a huge S trap with the 6" duct line in order to connect the register to the duct. As you may have guessed, the S trap was in the way and we had to move the duct over one floor joist. Thank goodness for the advent of insulated, flexible ducting.

2. Balance the system
We have a horrible problem of our basement and kitchen remain hot, while the rest of the house is FREEZING. Our system has plenty of capacity, but there is a lack of vents in rooms with lots of windows and there are no baffles to reduce air flow to different zones. Hence, the house is a single zone!!!

3. An ounce of craftsmanship goes a long way.
If you cut extra large holes in the walls and floor for the registers and ducts, at what point do you take a step back and realize this looks like dirt!! I should really try to make the holes the same size as the vent to preserve the look of the house.

Behold, the innocent little vent that caused us about 15 person hours-

And our beautiful new duct

And then there was light...

2005-12-11T19:20:00.000-05:00

While we haven't been lazy lately...

(Well, at least not all of us...)

There hasn't been much progress to show pictures of. Just please believe that we've been chipping away at the framing in the basement. Here are some pictures of one of the last "photo-worthy" projects that we've completed-

The front porch lights! I'm sorry that I didn't post these sooner, as we put the lights up on the Wednedsay before Thanksgiving! The lantern by the door-

The overhead light (on our beautiful, never-painted porch ceiling!)-

And my incredibly handy husband freezing to death, but nice enough to pose with both the lights-

If you recall from my earlier post about the porch, this means that we only have the other lattice panel to build and we'll be done with the front of the house projects!

Sorry so silent

2005-12-08T11:03:00.000-05:00

Hi everyone! I'm sorry that I've been so silent lately. Not all that much has been going on at the house. We had Thanksgiving at our house, and my dad and his girlfriend stayed for a few days. It was a nice visit, and the highlight was a Segway tour of downtown DC. It was a blast. You may look a little silly on the Segways, but they are SOOO much fun! I got lucky because they were running out of working Segways, and I got the one that only had the red key left. (Segways have three keys- one black (beginner 6 mph) one yellow (intermediate 9 mph) and one red (advanced 12 mph). So, I was able to fly past everyone else! Aaron was very jealous!

We're chugging along on the basement! And Aaron got the porch lights up. I have pictures of those, but they're kind of boring. Most of the bsement progress walls are up, thanks to another wonderful neighbor who lent us his framing nailer and hasn't asked for it back yet. Maybe we'll be done with it this weekend, I'm not sure. Last weekend we took out the last section of wall that needs to be replaced and found original rough pine 2x4s behind it. This was really interesting to us for a few reasons-

1. We haven't found ANY original framing in this part of the house.
2. You can see where the lath was at one point attached to these old 2x4s, so there was a finished plaster wall down there at some point.
3. There was a thick layer of plywood underlayment behind the old nasty paneling in this area. We have not found this in any other part of the basement. This plywood was extremely water damaged, much more so than the rest of the paneling in the basement.

This got the two of us scratching our heads for a long time on Saturday morning. Why rip out the old wall? Why leave this one section of framing? Did houses have any finished basements in 1915? Aaron had an interesting theory to run by everyone here. In the 70s Frederick was flooded very badly, so much so that downtown Frederick (approx. 3 blocks from our house) was completely ruined and many businesses moved out of the downtown area. The city embarked on a multimillion dollar flood control project which is in its completion stages now. They buried huge culverts under the city to control Carroll Creek which flows to the Monocacy River, and was the cause of the big flood. While most of the creek runs underground ffrom Baker Park near our house, a small amount of the water flows in sort of a pond/canal thing on top of the culverts and attractively through the city. They are developing this part of Frederick now, and it should be very nice when it's done. The flood control project was also important because without the danger of flooding, many businesses started moving back in the late 80s and now downtown is thriving.
You can read more about this here. Here is a picture from the city website of Carroll Creek-

Here is a nice shot of Market St.-

Anyway, Aaron wonders if the basement flooded during the "big flood" in Frederick, causing the tear out and paneling nightmares. What do you think? Is there any way to tell?

So, hopefully we can finish the walls and start the drywall this weekend, but that may be rather ambitious. We also have to decorate the tree, put away the Christmas decorations that we're not using, oh and I have to finish my project for Solid State Physics. Should be a VERY busy weekend. Thank goodness, Mike, our knight in ripped purple home improvement sweatshirt is coming!

We're also debating which ceiling we want. I've spent some time looking into our original Armstrong ceiling tile option, which I posted about here. There are some issues including-
needs an air gap for insulation
cannot be installed next to incandescent bulbs (not good for those recessed lights on a dimmer we were drooling over)

We're considering real tin from American Tin Ceilingsinstead. We have a tin celiing in the kitchen and we love it. I'm thinking something subtle, with an antique white finish.

There is also always sheetrock. Boring. But cheap. However, we do like the idea of being able to take out a celing panel and get to the wiring, plumbing, and HVAC if we need to.

There are a lot of exciting issues to solve! Stay tuned and comment below if you have any suggestions on the ceiling.

One step forward, one step back...

2005-11-20T21:38:00.000-05:00

Aaron and I have been working crazy hard to try to get going on the basement. Here is a schematic of the basement BEFORE-

Here is a schematic of the basement plan AFTER-

We got 90% of the tear-out done on Saturday, and even had to take two trucks to get everything to the dump (and we still have a big pile in the backyard). Unfortunately ,we would have been more productive, but in true "redemption weekend" style (Mike's been calling all of these weekends "redemption weekend" because this is the weekend where we will make up for all of the stuff that went wrong the last weekend, unfortunately something always goes wrong...) we hit a snag. We went to our neighbor's house (also an Aaron) to borrow his compressor, nailer, and truck. (We have such awesome neighbors.) We got all the stuff together and put it in Aaron's truck and drove it to our house to unload (we could have walked it, but it seemed like a good idea at the time...). We unloaded the tools and then got back in the truck to go to Lowe's to buy lumber and supplies for the new walls. Of course, the truck wouldn't start, wouldn't even turn over. Aaron popped the hood to see if the battery cables were loose, and they were, but unfortunately, they were also so corroded that they couldn't be tightened. When Mike showed up, we were looking at the truck trying to fix it. One hour and a trip to the auto parts store later, we had the truck up and running with new battery connections. Woo hoo! We then had to go to Home Depot AND Lowe's b/c Lowe's didn't have the right nails for the nail gun OR an affordable temporary laundry tub. By the time we got back, Mike had ripped out almost everything that needed to come out, and broken a hammer trying to bust up the old concrete laundry sink! (he didn't know where the sledgehammer was). We are SOOO lucky to have a friend who likes to destroy things! I didn't take many pictures because I have been fighting a stomach bug all weekend, but here are Mike and Aaron fixing the other Aaron's truck:

More pictures to come... Mike is having Thanksgiving with us, and may do some work on the basement on Friday.

Paint perfect

2005-11-20T21:28:00.000-05:00

The painter is done, and has picked up his check. He said that he doesn't have any work lined up for the winter, but the payment from our job should make sure that he's okay until spring.

Here is the view from the actual porch

And backing up-- doesn't Aaron's carpentry on the trim work for the front porch look absolutely beautiful? You'd never know it wasn't original.

And backing up again-- he ended up having to replace all of the trim above the front middle window in the bay on the 2nd floor due to old rot from ice dams. Then, the new 1x6 tongue and groove stuck out, so I asked the painter to caulk the grooves to make them look like they had 90 years of paint. I think that he did a great job, even though Aaron and I had a silent trip to work from arguing about this.

And, finally a view from across the street. Mike thought that we'd replaced everything with plastic b/c it was so shiny.

We have two minor details left to take care of-
1. Aaron replaced the light next to the door, but he hasn't done the one on the porch ceiling yet. When he gets that done, I'll post pictures. The one he's replaced looks great, though!

2. We still have to replace the lattice under the right side of the porch. We have all of the stuff, it's just a matter of actually getting it done.

So, I'd say that we're 95% of the way done! Yay! It feels so great to have the bulk of this project behind us. Now, if I could just find a mailbox...

We do plan to have Tom come back next spring and paint the roof over the porch and the concrete porch floor, but we need to save up some money first!

Finally, Fancy Fun Fridge

2005-11-20T21:17:00.000-05:00

I've been meaning to post these for awhile, but sometimes houseblogging gets pushed aside for actual house work, plus work-work has been killing me lately.

This is right after the fridge was delivered- views from dining room and from back door-

Tonight, Aaron and I finished up with the matching trim pieces, so here are pictures from tonight (sorry that they're a little dark)

Overall, we're very, very happy with the fridge. We can't believe how much extra room we have in there now! What a difference 3 inches made! We still have some minor adjustments to the cabinet to the right when facing the fridge to make, but they're very low priority right now. Maybe when we install the desk, then we'll work on the cabinets at the same time. We've very pleased to have all of this done before Turkey Day, also.

Go Buckeyes!

2005-11-18T13:29:00.000-05:00

We interrupt this regularly scheduled Houseblog to bring you a message from Ansley the schnuazer!
Go Buckeyes! Beat Michigan!

Sewer Support, please!!!!!!!!

2005-11-03T16:25:00.000-05:00

Aaron and I are gearing up for the basement remodel. We also got the final bill from the painter for the exterior work, and it was almost $17k!!!!!!!!!!!!! We know that this restorative work isn't cheap but... whew! That's a lot of money. Forgive us if you see tons of shots of our freshly painted exterior for the next couple of weeks.
So, we're looking for some ways to save money. We were planning to pay a plumber to relocate a sewer pipe from the middle of the laundry room floor to the corner of the laundry room where it will be used as the drain for a sink. Now, we are wondering if we can do this work ourselves. Aaron feels pretty comfortable renting a small jackhammer to break up the concrete around the pipe, and in the area for where it needs to go, but he doesn't feel so confident with the plumbing- how to connect to the old sewer pipe, how to angle the pipe so the water flows down into the sewer, etc. etc. Is this a job for a professional, or can we tackle it? If so, how? Google hasn't been very helpful, but maybe housebloggers can come to the rescue once again. PLEASE don't be shy- comment or email with any tips. You'll have our eternal gratitude, and if you live nearby we can trade a work day, even.
Thanks!

Who be throwin' bricks at me?

2005-10-30T18:32:00.000-05:00

A good friend of mine, J__, tells this hilarious story about a friend of hers who lives in SE DC. This friend went to the grocery store one day, and was in the checkout line with several other people. A middle-aged woman wearing a large mumu was in the line also. She stepped up to the belt to put her items on, and a whole ham rolled out from under her dress. Everyone in the line froze to see how she would react- she slowly turned around to face the other people in line, and said "Who be throwin' HAMS at me?", turned back around and checked out as if nothing had happened. Any time J__ is persuaded to tell this story at a party, people say it to each other for hours. The story is much better when J__ tells it, but you get the gist.

Anyway, I was tasked with letting Aaron know when he had banged the basement windowsill in far enough. It was a pretty tight fit, and he had to bang pretty hard. He was banging away, and suddenly, the brick under the window started to give way, and shot 3/4 of the way out of the wall. The only thing that held it back was the two coats of elastomeric masonry paint I had slapped on there last month! It was pretty good I had done that, b/c I would have had a brick to the head otherwise! As we were replacing the brick (thanks to a neighbor for all of those tuck-pointing and masonry tips), Aaron picked up the brick and said "Who be throwin' bricks at me?", thus the name of the post for you housebloggers. Here is a picture of the basement sill. Aaron ended up banging it in a little farther after I took the picture (with me carefully holding in the brick), but you get the general idea.

Aaron found that he had to do some epoxy wood repair on the area over our bedroom window, so he completed that and will try to finish up the rest of the repair while he waits on the fridge tomorrow afternoon. 3.5/4 ain't bad for the weekend, especially with me fighting a cold.

Gettin' Nasty with the Basement

2005-10-30T15:20:00.000-05:00

You may remember about a month ago, we decided to set up Aaron's workshop and try to get better organized. If not, go here. Well, we've worked on that in fits and starts ever since, but since we need to move the old fridge down there, this morning we worked down there for a few hours and finished up most of the organization and got ready to start demo again. We've got a few things that still need to go up to the attic, but we've made a LOT of progress.
Here is one view of the workshop about an hour ago-

And another view of the workshop-

We're almost done with the workshop area. All that remains in there is to redo the electrical, work out a better storage solution for the long pieces of wood, and put in the windowsill.

Here is a view of the living room area of the basement. We got all of the stuff that can't be moved out during the demo shifted to the middle of the room and covered. We've got to demo the ceiling, the paneling off the red wall, and the yellow back wall in here, then box in our utilities closet, put a partition wall up to separate the shop, and add studs to the outside wall. Then we'll drywall and put down new carpet. Hopefully this will be enough to refinance and finish the space off nicely.

Here is the picture of the laundry area. This area will need a lot of work. The bulk of the work for the utility closet will be in here, the laundry sink has to be demo-ed, the dryer needs to be moved next to the washer, and we have to relocate an old sewer pipe that is sticking up 3' out of the floor. Then the floor has to be leveled. Then we need walls and sheetrock before the refinance. After the refi, this room will get nice cabinetry and we'll use the granite countertop that we bought in here to made a laundry/wet bar combo area. One day...

Stay tuned for an update as Aaron races to finish the exterior trim before sunset. Isn't it fitting that things are so busy at Nightmare on Elm St. right before Halloween???

Kitchen cabinet sideways shuffle

2005-10-29T20:13:00.000-04:00

After a long, hard day, Aaron & I finally got the cabinets moved over the requisite 3" for the new refrigerator.
First, Aaron ripped out a lot of the old wall studs and replaced them and readjusted them for the shift to the right:

We plan to eventually redo this entire wall, sheetrock it on the other side (right now it's just unfinished beadboard paneling from Lowes), and tie it in more effectively and attractively into the ceiling. Since we don't want to start any more projects right now, Aaron did the minimum necessary to the wall for the meantime.

We hit one small snag, though- about 5:30, when we thought we were done, we realized that we forgot to account for the little 1/2 flange-thing on the front of the cabinets, we made the fridge opening too small. This meant we had to pull down and rehang the cabinets! I'm surprised that our supervisor didn't catch this. She must have been off napping somewhere when we made the measurements.

We went to the grocery store for a break, and then came back and started over. This time, things went much more smoothly, and no one, for example, got hit in the shoulder with a cabinet. (Ahem!) We've ordered spacers that match the cabinet, but they aren't in yet, so we're using temporary blocks of wood for now. Hopefully, we can unscrew the cabinets and bang the wood out, then slide the new piece in, but that's probably a story for another day. Here is Aaron replacing the doors on the above-fridge cabinet.

According to the other project managers, the work seems satisfactory!

We're very happy to have this project behind us, but tomorrow will be a busy day, with trying to fix the trim over the bedroom window, and putting storm windows back on the house. It should be a nice day to work outside, though, with a high of around 66 degrees, much nicer than today's windy 54!

Technical Difficulty

2005-10-29T12:08:00.000-04:00

I've got some technical difficulties with the photo sizes. The "medium" size from Flickr is too large and moves all my sidebar links to the bottom of the blog page. The "small" size distorts the pictures. Please comment below if you know how to fix this, and in the meantime, please click on the pictures to see them properly.
Thanks for your patience!

Today's Projects

2005-10-29T11:17:00.000-04:00

After the painter finished there, we noticed some sagging in the trim over our bedroom windows. We tried (unsuccessfully) to get a carpenter to give us an estimate, so the painter, Tom, said that he would take a look this week. He pulled off the old trim and found evidence of old ice dams. (the primary cause of rot on this house) He recommended that Aaron take a closer look at it this weekend and see if he can fix it. Tom also recommended a different hardware store, way out in Woodsboro, MD that would have more of the odd cuts of lumber, etc. that we need with this house. We went there this morning and were very happy to find that they had everything that we needed, and they were friendly and helpful. Here are some pictures of the progress on the porch and exterior trim repair, stripping, and painting.

Here is the corner that Aaron worked SOOO hard to repair all summer, with its final coat of "Kryponite" as Tom calls it. Tom said that in the "annals of painting" our house will be known as the "green house" because he's filled so much of it with his fiberglass-epoxy wood filler. In many cases, it was the only way to save our 90 year old exterior trim. He said that a bucket of the green stuff usually lasts him a year, but he's now on his 2nd bucket, just for our house.

Here is the final, finished column base, no longer rotten, but very much composed out of the Kryptonite. There is almost no wood left on this side, but it looks great. Tom is not only a painter, but a sculptor as well.

Here is a picture of the side of the house, which is pretty much done- it looks wonderful!

The front, not so much- here is the huge hole over our bedroom window:

Hopefully, that will be gone by the end of the day! Stay tuned...

DDP, oh how we love thee, let us count the ways...

2005-10-28T22:28:00.000-04:00

We started moving the cabinets tonight to accomodate the fun, frivolous fridge. Why we thought DDP* wouldn't throw us a curve ball, I do not know. Will we ever learn?

Ways that we love DDP... in his words...
1. Drilling is for suckas! I hate my nice Kraftmaid maple cabinets that I paid a ton of money for! To ruin them, and make them impossible to get apart, I shall cast my drill bits aside and simple fasten them together with 3" long drywall screws, driven directly into the maple!! Ha Ha, this is genius and such a timesaver! Who cares if I split the wood? Who cares if it's nearly impossible to back the screws back out? Why would anyone want to do that? I am DDP and my craftsmanship is of such high quality that no one will. ever. want. to. change it. ever.

2. Why cut this stud to fit? I can simply notch the other studs to accomodate this one. Ha ha, these people who measure and cut are so stupid! I will show them with my fabulous craftsmanship.

3. What, I need to screw the bottom of the cabinet to the base? Ha ha, the drill bits again? Didn't you learn that I don't need those? Ha ha, you silly, silly people! I will show you! So what if I split the front cabinet support? I DON'T NEED THAT ONE! No, the load will be distributed over the other three. Didn't you people take physics? Why do I have to work with such idiots?

4. Phone line? You want a phone line in the kitchen? Oh you silly, silly Americans! Why would you want that? I guess that I'll have to get the drill bits out now. Since you HAVE to have this phone line and all. I know- I will just drill through one of my nicely notched studs and pull the wires around through the back of the cabinet. Yes, that will work wonderfully! Plan ahead, ha! What are you people thinking? I am such a genius.

5. Oh, you want the wall of heavy pantry cabinets stablized? Why the hell would I do that? Hmmm. I know! I'll just run this one stud to the ceiling. I didn't want to cut it anyway. No one will notice it up there. They'll just think that it's part of the tin ceiling. No, we don't need to paint it or trim it or anything? Why would we do that? Ha! Ha! You make me laugh with your "finish carpentry" and your "paint". What are these things of which you speak?

Stay tuned to see how we conquer DDPs fabulous craftsmanship.

So, yes, we love you DDP! You make every task worth tackling! Can we have the 25k we've put into the house back now? Oh, what? You took that and went to Florida? Oh well... I hope that you have fun ruining another house down there! At least we know that the next owner down there won't pull old nasty rugs out of the rotten trim over their bedroom window placed there to stop the ice dams? BUT, that's a subject for another day...

*The previous owner, if you haven't followed earlier posts.

I finally learned how to use Flickr

2005-10-28T22:23:00.000-04:00

Here is a nice picture of our new fence-

Here are two pictures of Aaron busting out the old basement windowsill

And finally, here is the granite countertop we bought from Craigslist for the basement remodel. Granite is HEAVY. Do not attempt to remove granite from the second story of a row house in DC if it's just you and your husband. It's NOT a good idea!!!!!!!! We got it home, though!

Floor pictures, as long promised

2005-10-28T22:11:00.000-04:00

WAAAAAYYYY back in September, we had the floors refinished, and they look AMAZING! I am finally getting around to posting pictures of the gorgeous new floors. I remembered to take a few before shots-

First, the living room before

close-up before- it really makes the floors look SOOOOO much better than they actually are

And AFTER-
Living room after

Dining room after

Kitchen after

Closeup after

We're really, really happy with how everything turned out. And doing the entire first floor (while a very dusty, dirty, and smelly proposition that required one night in the hotel and a lot of time in the backyard for the pooches) was cheaper than replacing just the first floor. We used Olde Towne Hardwood Floors in Walkersville, MD and we couldn't be happier with the final result. We have seen some dog-nail scratches over the past month, but we're getting more used to it. We used an oil-based finish, which we were told is being discontinued, but looks MUCH better than the old water based finish, and is supposed to be much more durable than the water-based finish. The kitchen, which gets the most traffic, had absolutely no finish remaining on the floor when we refinished it. Now, it looks like a totally different room!

Rain, rain go away...

2005-10-26T14:50:00.000-04:00

Maryland has more than made up for our dry September. It rained again all day Fri. and Sat. and again Sunday night, Monday, and Tuesday. It has also cooled off in a major way now. All the rain has some pluses and minuses-
1. We got the porch trim totally finished Sunday but we didn't get the last piece of lattice done. That's not a big deal, though, we can do it at any time.
2. The painter hasn't been able to come by since last Wed. or Thurs., I can't remember which. It's supposed to frost tonight, so we're rapidly approaching "too cold to paint" land. I hope we can beat Mother Nature to the finish.
3. We ARE ready to reinstall the storm windows, and boy oh boy, I couldn't be happier. Last night the inside of the house was at 61 degrees, and it was cold! Even the dogs seemed cold, but we all enjoyed snuggling up together to try to get warm. We're holding out on turning on the heat (Washington gas said that we should see a 20-32% increase in prices this winter, and I had them adjust our budget payment for the 32% increase) b/c the old windows are still pretty leaky and we'll just be paying to heat the outside. So, this weekend we'll be washing and repairing lots of storm windows.
4. We FINALLY picked up our new basement windowsill from the mill shop. Tom (the painter) is supposed to prime it for us this week, and we'll install it on Saturday (too rainy last weekend to deal with it).
5. The basement isn't leaking, but one of the new gutters is either leaking or has already stopped up. We haven't had many leaves fall yet (just pinecones), but we don't know what the culprit is.
6. The fun frivolous fridge will be delivered on Monday. In preparation, we have to move two cabinets over to make the fridge opening bigger. I JUST KNOW that this will lead to some other project. Hopefully nothing will go majorly wrong and we can rig up something that will work.
7. We're hard at work on planning the basement and hope to have lots to show you over the next few weeks! I'd love to have significant progress down there before Thanksgiving.
I've got another test on the 2nd, so posts will be sporadic between now and then.

Reason 8,999,999 why the house hasn't been getting much love lately...

2005-10-21T14:00:00.000-04:00

The weekend before that, we spent getting soaked in 7" of rain with Mike (see previous posts) and his race car, the Meatball... Here's a great picture of the Meatball before it blew the radiator...

Reason 9 million why the house hasn't been getting much love lately...

2005-10-21T13:52:00.000-04:00

Last weekend we made some new friends and participated in the Walk for Diabetes with Aaron's former coworker, Tom, and his wife Smitha. Last week, we hadn't raised much money for the walk, so Tom had the idea of getting people at Aaron's former workplace to pay $2/pound for Aaron to carry a backpack during the walk. Before we knew it, the backpack's weight got up to 100 pounds!!!!!!! Fortunately, we have plenty of construction materials at the house, and we had 100 pounds of mortar and sand to fill up a backpack.

After walking 3 mi with 100 pounds on his back, Aaron came home and hung trim on the house for 2 hours. He's my hero!!!!!!!! (Yes, that's me with the hair in my face.)

Today's post was brought to you by the letter "F"

2005-10-18T09:09:00.000-04:00

The following is an email correspondence that I had with my friend (and neighbor) the other day:

Me: I'm so sorry that we missed Happy Hour on Friday night. I got stuck at work until 7 only to come home to a fridge on the fritz. We ended up spending the evening at Sears picking out a new one. Fortunately, ours is intermittently working, so we'll be okay until the new one comes on Oct. 31. I hate that we missed the good time! Hopefully we'll be able to make it next time!

Her: You guys have all the luck. Did you get a fancy fun fridge or did you get just a functional fridge???? Today is "F" day at school, can you tell? (My friend is a teacher) We missed you Friday and hopefully we can catch up with our friends the F___s (our last name starts with F) very soon:) Beth
P.S. We just bought a Subaru Forester isn't that freakin funny??? Shut me off

Me: It's a fancy fun fridge, not a functional fridge. We fought for a furlong about the frivolous fridge, but at the finish, we thought we would have more fun with the frivolous fridge. So Halloween is now freaky fridge day for the F____s! And yes, we have all the f-ing luck.

So, yeah, after we promised our firstborn to the painter, we've now promised our second-born to Sears for a new Kenmore Elite side by side. If we just replace the dishwasher, we'll have replaced or done a major repair on every appliance in the entire house. Yeah, nightmare!!!!!!

Quick update

2005-10-12T21:07:00.000-04:00

I'm trying to conquer my off-the-blog guilt by posting a quick (no picture) update. I have been putting pressure on myself to get good pictures, but it's making my postings less frequent... anyway, here we go...
1. Two weekends ago the open house on the beautiful rehab down the street went on the market-- they're asking 725k! For a duplex! I'll be surprised if it sells for that, especially with all the talk of the DC bubble deflating, but we'll see... I'll keep you posted.
2. No resolution on the dogs barking issue. We haven't had any other complaints, but we haven't been out of town for the whole weekend again yet, either. (We've only had complaints when we were out of town for the weekend, not just during the day when we're at work or trips to the store or something.)
3. The painter is still hard at work on the exterior. It looks beautiful! Unfortunately, our long spell of dry weather has come to a screeching halt. We had 7" of rain over the weekend, and it's been raining on and off all week! The good news is that the new gutters and the basement waterproofing have been successful investments, and the basement is nice and dry! The bad news is that we're also rapidly approaching "El Broke-o" status. AND I don't forsee any free (this weekend was free, next two are not) and dry (wet again this weekend) weekends until it's too cold to paint. So we may have to keep the Legend Alive and bite the bullet to pay the painter to paint the porch for us. AARGGGHH! I just want the porch to be done! I know everyone gets to this point, but we've been there for awhile now.
4. Porch update- after seeing the painter's awesome skills with what he calls "Kryptonite" this green fiberglass filler stuff, we paid him to fix the rotten column base. It's looking really good! And Aaron is almost done with the trim on the porch! He's only got about 4 more feet of quarter round to trim everything out with and then it's on to putty and caulk. As we've heard, "A little putty, and a little paint, makes the carpenter what he ain't!". Seriously, though, I'm just kidding. The trim looks great, but Aaron is (as usual) being hard on himself. Hopefully, we'll get a quote from the painter this week that won't be tooooooo painful and we can put the exterior work behind us for the year.
5. The aforementioned 7" of rain beat my beautiful zinnias to the ground. I found a few things out about these remarkable flowers when I ripped them out on Monday:
a. The seeds that they make sprout from the flower heads, then the flower heads fall off and the seeds take root that way. When I was a kid, my grandmother and I used to save the spent flower heads for seeds to spread the next summer, (I actually did that again this year) but I'd never noticed this behavior before! We'll see how many of these little guys come back next year.
b. The zinnias really attract centipedes. Centipedes (anything with more than 4 legs, actually) really, really freak me out. They move too fast or something, and they're the same color as a cockroach, and they look like they can sting me. I beat several of them up with a hoe, but there were just way too many to kill. We had a lot of (gloved) contact as I planted 8 big pansies, 64 grape hyacinth, 20 jumbo daffodils, and 36 crocus in that bed! Does anyone know anything about the small centipedes that are native to central Maryland? Are they harmful? They probably are good for the dirt like earthworms, but the earthworms look much more friendly to me.
6. Other garden news, the lantana that I bought to fill out the perennial bed in front in its first year has gone totally insane! I keep cutting it back and using it as filler with the roses for cut flowers in the house, but it's still taken over. The plus is that the neighbors like it. I've had a lot of compliments from people walking by. I hope that it doesn't choke out my perennials, but my rule is that if it doesn't come back, it didn't pass the test and it doesn't get replaced.
7. Two other reasons that I've been off the blog are that I had a test in solid state physics (I got it back, a B+, not perfect but I'll take it); and my husband's good friend Mike finally got his Volvo P1800 ready for it's first SCCA race. This is a project that would be good fodder for another blog, and I'm trying to convince him to start one. We were at Summit Point in West Virginia with him (crew!) almost all of last weekend. Aaron has many, many hours of work in on that car so it was a thrill for both of us to see it run (even in the 7" of rain that soaked all 3 of us to the bone!). It was so rainy on Saturday for qualifying (and Mike, also El-Broke-o didn't have rain tires) that Mike couldn't see and didn't push the car very hard. On Sunday, for the race it was much drier, but he blew something (probably the radiator) on the 5th lap and was not able to finish the race. Does that sound like an old house to you? Did to me, too! We're just so glad that it finally made it to the track and are really, really excited for next year.

Well, that's it for now. Maybe I'll just do a picture post over the weekend.

The bark is actually worse than the bite...

2005-10-02T17:44:00.000-04:00

This weekend hasn't been very productive, as we went to Western Maryland for my best friend's wedding. Congratulations, Erin and Frank! We returned today and Aaron got back to work on the porch while I studied for my first test in 3.5 years or so on Wednesday. Yikes, this school stuff is hard. Anyway, we had a petsitter while we were gone, but unfortunately, the dogs must have barked a lot while we were gone, b/c the other half of the duplex neighbors complained and said that we must do something about the dogs barking while we're away. The dogs have also terrorized the painter (barking, jumping at windows, painter was afraid that they would bite him, and/or break the window) to the point that they have to be locked in the basement bathroom during the day (only room in house with no windows) while he's here. They're very sweet dogs, a miniature schnauzer, Ansley, a lab, Sandy, and a golden/bloodhound mix, Chester. They would never hurt anyone, they just bark (especially when Aaron's not here) at the slightest noise. We're considering a couple of options but welcome any suggestions. Here is what we've thought of-
1. Kennel the dogs while we're away. The drawback here is expense (at least $100/day around here for the three of them), availability (most kennels aren't open Sundays and have difficult hours for us to deal with), and stress. All three of the dogs hate to be kenneled. Sandy has chipped 2 teeth (one had to be removed) chewing on the kennel gates trying to get out, and they usually end up with severe gastrointestinal distress for a few days after we get home.
2. Bark collars. We borrowed a friend's citronella one for Ansley for awhile, but they're expensive and she hated it. It might be easier if all the dogs had one. I do worry about the collar getting off and one of the dogs chomping on it, which wouldn't be a first. There is always the shock variety, but both Sandy and Chester ignore an invisible fence, so I'm not convinced that it would work on them. Has anyone used these before?
3. Soundproofing the basement and keeping them in there while we're gone. We're doing all this work on the basement anyway, maybe we could incorporate this into the plan. How much is sound deadening material? Could we use some sort of home-theater setup for this? It might be cheaper just to kennel the dogs, but at least this solution would allow us some enjoyment from the expense!

This isn't the first dispute that we've had with our neighbors about noise. Restoring the house isn't quiet, and we're young without kids, so we have been know to have the occasional party. We've been good about stopping loud work after 7 pm, and have minded every request to keep it down, but I hate having conflict with people that I see every day, so it's important to me to find a good solution to this problem. Thanks for your help!

Porch in Progress...

2005-09-18T12:04:00.000-04:00

Aaron is working on the porch trim right now. I'm writing between helping him, actually! Here was the progress as of a few minutes ago. It's slow and steady. I can't imagine how the original builders did this without power tools!

I just thought that I'd post a total front exterior shot- to quote Aaron "It really looks like a Nightmare now!"

You can't get the full effect from a photo, but the painter has stripped almost all the windows and doors on the house to bare wood, which looks pretty ugly. (Yes, we decided to pay a fortune- $320/window to save what we had. And then we added the door frames- $400/each. I wish we had the time and patience to do this ourselves, but with me back in school this semester- (I'm trying the Ph.D. program again- this time at the University of Maryland. I'm starting out by taking solid state physics. I'm clearly insane.) The gutters are down and they've left gorgeous rust stains behind on the fascia boards. The painter sent the gutter people away after they took the gutters down and replaced the fascia so that he could work on the fascia boards, but he's still been working on the windows. We trust him, and he's a great guy, but the gutter people said that it would be an extra charge if they came out twice. Since we didn't tell them to come out twice, the painter did, hopefully we won't get charged the extra fee, but I seriously doubt it.

Oh, here is a good PO story. The painter is also going to reglaze all of the windows, fix the broken pieces of glass, etc. Most of the window glazing comes right out b/c it's very old and brittle. HOWEVER, the PO (DDP, if you recall from earlier posts) thought that window glazing was for suckas, and he thought that caulk, his very absolute most favorite compound in ever the history of remodeling (useful for filling holes in walls, grouting tile, etc. etc.) would be an excellent choice for you got it, reglazing windows (at least just in our bedroom). The painter said that he would try to make it look a little better but there was no getting it out. Thanks DDP!

Gotta go sand more blocks for the trim- like I told Aaron- thank goodness the house was built in the Arts and Crafts period, with its nice simple trim. Our newbie carpenter skills would have not held up to one of those ornate Victorians with the complex trim!

I can't find the bleepin' hammer in this mess!

2005-09-18T11:35:00.000-04:00

Yeah, don't try Hello from Picasa. It sucks. (Hence last post.)
Here's a more normal post, with me fighting Blogger's Image Uploader-

It all started b/c we had to replace one of the windowsills in the basement (totally rotted out, only about 2 inches worth of solid wood (hello, leaky basement, nice to see evidence of you again!). So, Saturday morning, the scene was this-

It took a LOOOOONG time to get to this stage b/c it's so difficult to find anything in the warzone that is our basement right now. We've been having this problem all summer long. We pretty much abandoned the space after the walls came down on one side for the waterproofers. There is a LOT of work to do down there, but we've been trying to finish the exterior work before it gets too cold to do anything outside.

However, I think that it would make life much easier if we had a staging area for the rest of the work. Thus, we decided on Saturday morning to take down the rest of the walls for the area that will be Aaron's workshop when we remodel the basement. Here is a picture before the walls came down-

And three hours and a lot of hammering and crowbaring and sawzalling later-

Isn't demo great! Last night we removed the carpet (peel & stick vinyl will go in there- just to cover up the suspect old 9"x9" tiles) and I started painting the filthy, crumbly walls with this nasty elastomeric masonry paint from the Big Blue Box. It's thick and stinky and our walls seem to slurp it right up. Aaron picked "warm chincilla" which was kind of a light green-gray for the walls, but it turned out pretty depressing- like a stormy January day-yuck. Fortunately, one gallon only got me halfway across the back wall, so I'm going to change it to something a little less depressing (the idea is to WANT to work in there!) when I go back for more paint today. Hopefully, I can get the last section of the wall painted this afternoon while Aaron and his friend try to get Aaron's truck in moveable condition (that' s a story for another blog). I'm just kind of trying to get the first coat on the best I can- the wall is really hard to paint, so hopefully I can do a better job on the 2nd coat. Maybe I'll even get the floor started this afternoon! As soon as the floor gets finished and the walls are painted, we'll put up shelving and pegboard and move the tools in there so that we can get organized. We've been making little piles for each project, but we're constantly borrowing from each little pile for the next project and it just evolves into a huge mess. I'm excited to have a useable space that will make life a little easier.

View of new fence and removed storm windows...

2005-09-18T11:34:00.000-04:00

The many, many storm windows we've pulled off of the house- stripped screws made this a loud, bangy job!

Midweek progress report

2005-09-14T10:23:00.000-04:00

A quick update- I'll post pics later...
Friday and Saturday we cleaned dust from the floor refinishing off of every concievable surface in our house. I was very thankful for our good friend the Shop Vac! It made everything much easier, and we really needed to clean the ceiling fans anyway, so this was a good excuse. I really wish we had done this before we moved in, but we could barely afford the house last year, so it wouldn't have been possible. It was worth all of the work and money though, because the floors look awesome- it's like a different house. Sunday we finished up the last of the cleaning, and removed storm windows from most of the house (that was a job- at least they came off easily once the screws were out, but every single screw on every single window was stripped and had to be beat upon with a hammer and screwdriver to get it out). The painter started right on schedule Monday, and the work he has done so far looks terrific. I'm so excited to see the end result. We were just going to have the windows stripped and repainted, but now we're extending the work to most of the house. I forgot to take before pictures on Sunday- I was really tired when we got the last window off, but I'll post pictures of the finished work. The gutter guys start today as well, so it looks like most of the outside work on the house should finish before the end of September--- if we can get the porch finished!

And then there was lighting...

2005-09-09T16:45:00.000-04:00

I've been looking for lights for the front porch since we moved in. Finally, this week, I found something that I liked from Hinkley Lighting. These are from the Tahoe collection, and I think that they'll go very nicely with our front door. Our current light is bent, rusted, and cracked, so these should be a huge improvement! I can't wait until they arrive. I ordered them from Lightingshowplace.com, because they were the only online lighting store that I could find that had a reasonable return policy (no restocking fee, 30 days to decide) and free shipping, plus I found a coupon code that saved me $20 on my order!

This lantern will hang next to the front door. We've had a hard time finding something that would work in this narrow space. And I'm still looking for a cool Arts and Crafts style vertical wall mailbox, if you have any suggestions. I love the Post wood vented mailbox from Crafthome.com but it's too wide- we need one about 7 or 8 inches wide.

Finding a cool overhead flush mount fixture for the porch ceiling has been the biggest challenge. I didn't want something that would hang down b/c the original, pretty stained beadboard ceiling is marred from the current flush mount overhead fixture. (A Builder's Basic or whatever from Home Depot- seriously like $12.99 and frightfully ugly.) I really like this one. Hinkley had a great selection if this is something that you're searching for also! I'll let you know how I like the company when these come in. Have a great weekend.

Rot Repair

2005-09-03T21:32:00.000-04:00

Well, Blogger ate this the first time, and it took me awhile to bring myself to rewrite it. Please bear with me, it was really witty the first time I wrote it!
After we got the porch stripped and sanded, it was time to address the rot issue that got us in this predicament in the first place. Aaron started by removing the trim to get to the rotten boards, using various tools of destruction including hammers and pry bars of various sizes. He also ended up needing several cans of wasp spray, as several of the little buggers didn't like being so rudely evicted from their nice cozy home in our eaves. I managed to avoid their stings, but Aaron wasn't so lucky. Good thing he's not allergic to bee stings!

Here is Aaron prying off an area of the trim to get at the rot. (above)

After we got the boards off, it turns out that there was quite a bit more rot than we had initially realized. This picture, taken from the ground looking up shows the giant gaping hole where Aaron removed rotten wood.

Aaron wasn't quite sure how to address the extensive rot to our big oak porch roof support beam, but with a little help from our friendly housebloggers, especially Bill at Enon Hall, and a trip to a Woodcraft, cool woodworking shop in Towson, MD, Aaron was able to devise a plan. Here he is with a new piece of wood to patch the rotten area in the support beam. He used wood glue and lots of crinkly fastners and nails to attach it to the beam.

Aaron thinks that the fix is really ugly and while he feels that it's extremely sturdy, he worries about the next owner seeing it 90 years from now. Hopefully, it's sturdy enough, and the new gutters that we're getting work well enough that no one will ever have to see it again!

Aaron stabilized everything with our good friend Rot Fix, which was rather runny and messy. I'm a polymer scientist by trade, and Aaron is a chemical engineer, so you'd think that we would be able to come up with a better application method, (or a better product) but you'd be wrong. Anyway, he ended up drilling some small holes and injecting the Rot Fix into the wood with a syringe and needle. Hopefully that will stabilize everything. He filled everything that needed it with Sculpwood and sanded it smooth.

Aaron finished up by cutting new trim boards and nailing them into place. He had a lot of trouble getting things to fit, due to warping in the boards themselves, and in trying to measure big pieces single-handedly on a ladder while I was at work. He finally gave up on mitered joints and just did a regular end-exposed (what the technical word for that?) joint. We then primed the rest of the porch. It looks so much better even to be at this stage, I just don't even know how to describe it. Maybe by the block party Sept 24th, we'll have this project completed! That's our goal, anyway!

We were able to pick up the new dental mold pieces from Ingalls on Monday afternoon (over $100 just in lumber, but it's nice fragrant cedar), and stocked up on their 25% off tool sale while we were there, getting Aaron a new cordless drill (our poor Dewalt's battery is in such bad shape that you can drive about 2 screws before it dies on us, it was just time for a new one), a grinder, which he has been hinting about for awhile now, and a Sawzall, which will come in handy for our basement remodel and eventual back porch demolition.

Monday afternoon, we got the lattice frame built and lattice attached for the front side of the porch. Hopefully, we'll get some work done on the lattice frame for the other side of the porch, too. We ended up using the white vinyl small hole privacy lattice with white vinyl frame that they sell at Home Depot. We both agreed that regular wood lattice looks much better, but couldn't seem to agree on which one of us would paint the wood lattice every year or so. The best compromise was the vinyl, although we try hard not to use too many plastic products on our house. We can get away with saying we wanted the two sides of the house to match, as it's the same stuff our neighbor used.

As for the column base, you may remember that I posted about needed to replace one of the rotten column bases here last month. We've been looking that whole time, even looking at special order options (all of which seem to be that plastic stuff) but we cannot find anything that comes in the dimensions that we need. We're really limited b/c we cannot trim the columns at all due to where the porch rails come up to meet them, and most of the bases are 5" or more tall. We need a base that's 4" tall. I suppose we could raise everything an inch and trim off the tops of the columns, but I'd like to see if we can do anything with the column base we've got before we go to that extreme. I think that it might be hard to get everything to look nice and level again, and we've been to a lot of trouble to strip and sand all of this stuff.

One last thing... I'm thinking of painting just the hand rail of the porch a nice taupey-beige, and then of course, everything else white. Several of my neighbors did this, and it looks nice. However, the other half of the house has an all-white porch. Do you think that would look bad? I thought that it would look nice with the red front door. Please comment if you have an opinion!

The Black Hole

2005-09-03T20:50:00.000-04:00

Blogger, why do you eat my posts? :(

The Exterior Paint Stripping Experience

2005-09-03T20:02:00.000-04:00

I have seen a lot of posts about interior paint stripping to expose stained wood trim using a heat gun, chemical methods, or the various infrared heat gun methods. I have not seen any posts on stripping exterior paint, such as on porch posts and rails. Please allow me to give you a little background as to how we got ourselves into this project. As usual, it all started with something relatively simple. Aaron noticed that water was pooling on top of our front porch roof and surmised that the gutter must be clogged. He borrowed a ladder from a neighbor and disconnected the gutter external part of the gutter and used a hose to flush out the internal gutter segment to remove the clog, which all worked quite well. While he was up there, he started poking around at the trim around the porch. He very quickly realized that problems with the gutter have probably plagued the house for some time, and it appeared that the years of water had started us out on a nice case of rot, which a PO had fixed by nailing a board over the rotten area of the porch trim. Aaron removed the board, and found that the wood was dry, but very, very soft. Our neighbor suggested that if we were going to have to replace the trim on the corner, we should consider stripping off the approx. 1/4" thick paint caked on the porch while we were at it. He and his wife and done this about 5 years ago, using heat guns and scraping very, very carefully. We decided to undertake the project (The ugly porch paint had also been bothering me since we had moved in, so I jumped on rather naively.) and went to Home Depot and purchased two heat guns, both Milwaulkee brand, and a bunch of scrapers, along with some respirators to protect ourselves from the certainty of lead paint. After about a month of extruciately hot, slow progress, another neighbor suggested that we switch to a blowtorch. We asked around, and while this is a dangerous method, it is much faster than the heat gun. Keep a garden hose handy and don't torch any area that you know may have dry rot. We don't accept any responsibility for anything that you choose to do on your own. This is simply presented here to relate our experience and hopefully help you out. I don't have much in the way of before pics, but this is a middle of the project shot-

Here is a shot of our work prep. area, where I assembled the following-

Respirators, propane, propane torch with fan attachment, assorted scrapers, torch lighter, scissors, plastic (to protect work area), extension cords, heat gun (I still use the heat gun b/c I'm scared of the torch), and a screwdriver (to change blades on the scraper). Not shown- garden hose or fire extinguisher.

Basically, you use the torch just like the heat gun, aiming it at the area of paint that you desire to strip, keeping it moving all the time, and stopping when the paint starts to bubble and get toasty, as shown below. If you see smoke, stop!

Aaron demonstrates this technique from a different angle. You can use your left hand to hold the torch and your right hand to scrape if you're really efficient.

Scraping (see how thick that paint was?) as with anything else, you have to be careful not to gouge the wood. The more paint that you get off, the better. We took most of the porch back to bare wood. The primer used in 1915 is like Play-Doh when it gets hot, and it sticks like white on rice. We were unable to remove ALL of the primer from the wood, but we got a lot of it.

This technique can leave some char on the wood. This char must be sanded or scraped off or paint will not adhere to your new porch and you will have to start back over. We found out mid-project that our neighbors who suggested this project actually had this situation when they moved in, and were only stripping off the two layers of paint that were put back on the porch after their POs torched and scraped the porch.

I used a Black and Decker mouse sander, regular sandpaper, and a Ryobi detail sander to get in all the little crevices, especially in the porch railing. I used medium grit sandpaper in all instances. Aaron used our large Porter Cable random orbital sander with 60 grit sandpaper on the columns and flat areas of the porch trim. A different neighbor is doing this to his back porch, and he actually disassembled the railings to make stripping and sanding them easier.

Here is the porch after stripping, scraping, and sanding. You can see the water damage to the corner as a dark, discolored area in the photograph.

Coming up... attempting to fix the water damage.

Quick update

2005-08-30T13:40:00.000-04:00

Sorry I haven't posted in so long. This month has been super hectic. Aaron is changing jobs, and has August 15th through Sept. 6th off between the two. He's been working like a demon while I've been languishing at work. Thus far, he has:
-addressed all the rotten wood on the front porch (it was much more extensive that we had originally thought, we'll post on that later w/ pics).
-finished stripping the paint on the front porch (again, porch post later), filled holes, sanded, and caulked around cracks.
-primed most of the porch (still waiting on some trim pieces we had to have custom milled at the lumberyard)
-ripped off lattice under porch, determined that me + hammer = unsalvagable lattice frames, and begun work on new lattice frames for under the porch

He also set up the new saw I bought him last month, busted up a big concrete slab for the fence guys, oversaw the fence guys, oversaw the guys who finally repoured our sidewalk correctly, and rebuilt the rock wall in the front flower bed.

If he gets the trim completed around the porch, then we'll be able to finish priming and painting this weekend. And we went to the beach for a week. I'm very proud of him for not lounging and playing golf during this time.

So, our list this week/weekend looks like this-
-Finish porch trim
-Prime porch trim
-Paint porch
-Move furniture for floor refinishers

Sounds pretty doable, and should leave time for project planning, attending a wedding, and hopefully creating some detailed how-to porch repair blog posts!

Rotten column base

2005-08-09T13:27:00.000-04:00

I had hoped to just post when we were done with this project, but things don't always work as you've planned. We've been stripping about 1/4" thick paint off our front porch all summer long. We have 1/2 of 1 large column left and about 85% of a porch post left. We've discovered that the base of the large column is very, very rotten. We need to replace just the base of the column, but we can't find any column bases that match the one on other side of the porch. Can anyone recommend a good source for column bases. We're considering replacing both of them if we have to, in order to get them to match. We'd also consider replacing them with something other than wood (provided that it's paintable) in order to avoid replacing them again down the line. Please comment with suggestions on mail order/website/anywhere in the DC area that we can go, etc. We have already tried Lowes, Home Depot, the Nonprofit Building Supply in town, and the architectural antique store in town- Edwards and Edwards, with no luck. The column is a traditional round porch column, 10" in diameter. Thanks!

Backyard (con't)

2005-08-05T09:45:00.000-04:00

I forgot to include this picture to show why we're redoing the back fence- as you can see, it's a little wonky-

This picture is just random, I was so proud of myself for finding a way to reuse this old galvanized metal candle once it was burned up. I broke most of the candle wax out, spray painted it red to match the rest of the decor, and filled it with sand for an ashtray (we have many friends that smoke). I was shocked at how well it turned out for just a few minutes work-

Backyard

2005-08-05T09:41:00.000-04:00

The blackeyed susan's are blooming and the backyard is looking nice. I just wanted to share-

I finally found a little table for the back porch, and I sprayed our old Ikea wicker chairs-

This picture shows why we want to redo the porches, in addition to their instability, they are terribly mismatched with the other half of the house-

Bulk trash find

2005-08-05T09:38:00.000-04:00

Here's the sewing table that we found the other night out with the trash! If you know anything about tables like this, please comment below or email me. I think that it looks really cool, and will be really neat when it's cleaned up.

Antique store finds

2005-08-05T09:34:00.000-04:00

Here are our antique store purchases from last weekend-
The clock, which is actually still working and was carefully wound again last night-

The new sideboard, which looks great from a distance but has some veneer issues when you get up close- oh well, like I said before, it's just more character...

A salvaged stained glass window from England to dress up the kitchen- I need the light for the orchids, but I wanted a little more privacy from the neighbors. I'm telling myself that this is filling those needs, but it's really just pretty.

It's Picture Page!

2005-08-05T09:31:00.000-04:00

As promised, here are some pictures of the basement in all it's new glory-
A long view of the wall

Closeup of the new sump pit, the exposed drainboard, and lookie- they tore up and repoured the ugly slab that the oil furnace used to sit on (I think).

Now, we're in the furious planning stages, as we have to wait 4-6 weeks to put up new walls. Sigh...

This and that

2005-08-03T12:13:00.000-04:00

Sorry that I've not posted pictures of the basement yet. We've been trying to avoid it since the concrete isn't cured yet and it is terribly dirty from all of the jackhammering. I will try to go down there tonight and get some pictures of our lovely new concrete, and our beautiful new sump pit. Isn't it funny the things that make a houseblogger happy?

In other news, it's bulk trash week, so the Mr. and I spent a lot of time yesterday driving around and casing the trash. This sounds like something out of Sanford and Son, but LOTS of our fellow townspeople do it (the streets were crowded with cars casing the piles), even our neighbors and friends. We bought a 1920's era sideboard at an antique store on Saturday (the price was right but the veneer is not in ideal condition- more "character" right?), so we set out the old desk, and an ugly picture that was replaced by a really cool 20th century (no additional markings) clock that we picked up from the same dealer. I kept telling the Mr. (who was very reluctant to purchase) that the clock looked like it went with the house and we HAD to have it. He finally relented, but then spent the next two days trying to get the clock to actually work. Some gears or something were stuck, but now it keeps good time and even chimes correctly. Anway, our neighbor was super excited to get both the old desk and the ugly picture, which made me happy. It's nice to know that someone is going to get good use out of the stuff that you don't want anymore, especially if it's someone that you know. We picked up a cool old sewing machine table from a house across the street and down a bit. I'll take pictures to show it's restoration to you. I don't know much about it, but the bottom is all wrought iron and it says "Davis" on one side. I hope to clean it up, replace the top and use it as a side table. We almost had a big stainless steel sink for the laundry room, but we didn't get back around the block to it in time! Oh well! There are always tonight's treasures to examine. We have noticed that, contrary to what we would have thought, the streets with the super-expensive homes don't throw much out. I even checked the alleys in case they throw trash back there, but nothing! Hmmmm... maybe they're just slower- have to get Jeeves to take it out to the curb or whatever...

We hadn't heard anything else from the floor refinishers, and it had been about 2 weeks, so I called this morning, and they have no record of ever meeting with us! (It's a good thing that I called.) Subsequently, we couldn't get the refinishing scheduled for the same week as our beach trip, but we are on the schedule for after Labor Day, which I guess will work out fine. The office manager was going on vacation until Friday, but she said that she'd mail the proposal on Friday or Monday and I should have it mid next week. Has anyone ever done this before? We're worried about the dogs being in the house with the smells from the refinishing fumes. We're thinking about just leaving them in the yard while the floors are being stained and sealed. Or should we board them at the kennel? Any advice would be appreciated.

We heard back from all the gutter people, and the first guy was the cheapest. He was right (he would know, I guess), it was more for the half round white aluminum gutters, but I really want to stay true to the architecture of the house, and I'm willing to pay the extra money. So, as soon as we find out from him how to schedule to get the trim painted between old gutters off and new gutters on, we'll schedule that. Fortunately, the hurricane-remnant torrential downpours have slacked off, so the gutters haven't been so much of a problem lately.

The highly recommended porch carpenter left us a voice mail that we should have his estimate today. I'm a little worried about the overall cost of this estimate, because he said that using pine instead of the mahogany that he recommended didn't make a big difference in the overall cost estimate, due to the extent of the job. Yikes! I'll know it's bad if my mailbox is shooting flames when I get home.

Last one- the highly recommended painter (he does great work- we're following the advice of watching the rehab down the street and talking to the people who seem to do good work) says that he can scrape and paint our windows for one price, but we'll have to do it every year, but for three times more, he could strip them with the heat gun and repaint them, and then we'd just have to paint them normally. My dad pointed out that we're to the point of new windows if we pay this much to save them, but I have no intention of ripping out our beautiful old windows and putting in vinyl replacement ones (dad thinks that I'm crazy, I think that he's crazy). What do you think? The good fix or the temp fix? I DO NOT want to strip the windows b/c I'm terrified that I will break the glass and I HATE stripping paint.

That's all for now! Pictures soon of things that I've promised.