A Comedy of Errors

Lost My Marbles

2011-10-18T18:16:00.000-07:00

I haven't written in a long, long time, haven't had a lot to say, haven't been working on the house at all. But all that is about to change. In a moment of sheer silliness, for lack of a better word, I volunteered to have the photo club Christmas party here. At my house. In Dec. Also now that my teenage daughter has gone to college and my husband is needing an office, there is going to be a whole lot of shaking-er rearranging going on around here. So cracks will be filled with joint compound, new paint will be going up, heck I might even paint my bedroom at long long last! And lets see...(mutters to self) I'm
gonna need new blinds for the mudroom windows, definitely some more Christmas decorations, and that reminds me, I don't have a Christmas tree anymore...*sigh* yup, it's official. I have lost all my marbles.

Splish Splash...

2011-05-18T21:22:00.000-07:00

So I'm sitting on my bed on Sunday night. The housework is done, the Mr's bag is packed for the airport in the morning and I figured I would get a few Facebook minutes in before sleep. I opened my computer and log in and in a minute or two I am absorbed. The Mr. is at the sink. He has a box of Just for Men mustache/beard dye in his hand and he is reading the label. I watch him out of the corner of my eye for a second as he sets the box down and picks up a pair of dog clippers (don't ask)(and don't worry he cleaned them first) and proceeds to shave half the hair off his head. Again absorbed in my Facebook world I hardly hear him as he interrupts my status update. "I need your help" he says. I glance up to see him looking at me with the clippers in his hand and half his hair gone. He can't reach the back. With a sigh of irritation I set the laptop down and walk over to the sink. I have never shaved anybody's head before and I haven't got a clue how to do this. I gingerly touch his head with the clippers and shave a little off. He watches me in the mirror. Bolder now, I shave a little more and then right as I get the hang of it I pause. I hear water running in the shower next to where we are standing. "Are you running water in the bathroom?" I ask him. "Yes" he replies, "I'm steaming my work clothes." Ummm ok, I'm thinking to myself as I resume shaving his head, But then I pause again. I hear water. And not from the shower. I hear splashing. "Umm are you running water in the other bathroom?" I ask him. He looks at me in surprise and then panic and then makes a run for the hallway as he hears it too. And then I hear the loud "OH NO!" "HELP!" "GET TOWELS!" "NOW!" followed by an "I'm so sorry". Now this is never good. Never ever ever a good combination. From the first "oh no" my heart sinks. I know that somewhere in my house there is a flood, but I'm not sure where yet. Is it the toilet in the other bathroom overflowing again? NO this is worse, much much worse! The bathroom in our bedroom, the one he is steaming clothes in sits right over the staircase. As I round the corner and look down the stairs I can see that there is a flood of water coming from the ceiling of the stairs, the floor of the bathroom above and soaking the wooden floors/stairs/landing that took me two years to refinish. I am sick. Really, really sick but I'm not wasting time thinking about it. I run back in the bathroom to see why it's overflowing. I step in the room into two inches of water on the floor. The shower is completely full and overflowing onto the carpet in our room. How did we not notice this? I turn off the water and see that the drain is covered by something keeping the water from escaping. I reach down and pick it up and stand there disbelievingly with what looks like a (now wet) square of toilet tissue in my hand. I don't have time to think about it as the water immediately starts draining and I grab towels and run down the the stairs, the site of the disaster, to help the rest of the family in their fight against the flood. I soon realize that this is fruitless, the water is still pouring from the hole in the floor above the stairs where the piping enters the bathroom and connects to the toilet from inside the wall. It is running down the hole, over the electric lights and pouring off the plastic light shields that cover the fluorescent in the hall. I look over at my husband with his half shaved head in his shorts and yell "upstairs, stop it upstairs!" He gets it. Running upstairs towel in hand he begins to stem the flow of water from above. After a few minutes we regain control. The towels are in the washer, every single one we own, there is a trashcan to catch the water with a trashbag on the floor underneath. The floor is dry. The stairs are dry. I turn on the light and inspect the wood. I am really relieved, so relieved, there is no damage. All the layers of varnish I put on years ago have done their work well and protected the hundred year old wood. I'm not exactly smiling as I head back up the sparkling clean staircase, after such an incident, which probably knocked a whole minute off my life, but I'm not too upset either. As I take up my post in front of the mirror, dog clippers buzzing in my hand, husband expectantly waiting, I feel the grin emerging. What a strange wonderful, and sometimes a little bazaar life.

Keeping it in Check

2011-04-24T01:11:00.000-07:00

Seriously. I know he (my daughter's boyfriend) must have thought I was crazy. I was standing in the mudroom in full temper tantrum yelling at the vacuum cleaner and swinging the hose around my head as fast as I could swing it and telling it in no uncertain terms what I was going to do to it if it didn't unclog itself right this minute!
The vacuum cleaner hose didn't seem to care what I thought of it and promptly wrapped itself around my leg with a painful SNAP as it hit me on the knee at approximately sixty mph. I promptly burst into tears.
I'm sure he didn't know what to say, the poor guy, or what to do to help this poor mentally deranged mother get a grip on herself before she committed vacuum cleaner murder. Or Eureka-cide as I like to call it.
Usually I am pretty good about keeping my temper in check when there is company in the house...mostly. Today I got up early because the family was coming over for Easter and the house needed cleaning first. I woke up the kids and set them to work cleaning up the mess they and their friends had made in the living room. The living room didn't smell so good. The cat box, (I know, I know, why the living room you ask? Because the cat has decided that's where she wants it, and I am not going to argue with her on that issue. I tried and found out real quick that she means business about her business. So the box goes in the living room.) The cat box needed cleaning. I got a walmart bag to empty it into and quickly did the job. Everything was done, I was thinking, as I walked from the living room through the dining room, and into the kitchen. Even the house smelled better...I was interrupted by an urgent "MOM!" and as I looked behind me I was horrified to realize that the trusty walmart bag had a large hole in it. And there was dirty cat litter all the way from the living room to the kitchen. All.over.the.carpet. I quickly got out my vacuum cleaner and broom and set to work. First I swept up all the litter. Then I vacuumed up all the litter in the living room. I just had one little bit to suck up, so I reached down to unhook the hose from the vacuum...and all.that.cat litter...came back up out of my vacuum and sprayed all over the room. Dirty cat litter. Clean room. Company coming...You can see where this is going...Dragging the vacuum behind me by the hose at an angry trot I got to a place where there was no carpet so I could figure out the problem...kitty litter leaking behind me all the way...What an unbelievable mess.
And it gets worse before it finally gets better...The next few minutes find me in full "shaken vacuum cleaner" mode as I shook it as hard as I could and yelling at it as loud as my voice would go. But I finally got all it all out. I never did figure out what caused all that litter to collect in the bottom of the hose. I just calmly collected my vacuum, put it all back together, apologized to my daughter's boyfriend, who was kind enough to not hold it against me. I cleaned it all up, the family came over. We had a great time.
Fast forward several hours. Late afternoon. I'm standing outside. One of the girls comes out and says "The upstairs toilet is overflowing (again!) and is running down the hall into Matt's room." At a full run I'm on it.
As I gallop up the stairs I can see that my son already has a handle on the situation. Having dealt with this problem multiple times he knows exactly what to do. This particular toilet seems to overflow about every six months, usually when we are having company. (last time my husband's eighty four year old grandma flushed the toilet and it overflowed and scared the poor woman half out of her mind!) When it overflows it runs out the bathroom door and down the hall and into my son's room. One time we didn't catch it fast enough and it ran all the way to the edge of the floor, under the baseboards and down the walls into the dining room below coming out through the window casings. Did I mention that I have been meaning to get around to getting rid of this old rocking and rolling toilet? I even have the replacement out in the garage. Have had for a year, just waiting for the right time to put it in. I decided, as I stood in a puddle of water with every single towel in my house employed in the cleaning thereof that now was that time. No matter that it was almost dark, no matter that it was Easter Eve and I definitely had other things planned. It must be now. I had had enough of that toilet.
So. After cleaning up the huge mess and carting down and entire basket of wet towels to the laundry I went out to get the new toilet. The box was heavy and I wasn't in a lifting mood, so I opened the box and took out all the pieces, one by one, and brought them up to the house. Now to understand what I am going to say next there must be an explanation. I have three bathrooms. The tiny downstairs powder room had been the site of a horrible sewer explosion in the past, due to a city problem which had been subsequently fixed by the city. But. I had installed a toilet in there that I called a "superflusher" before the problem was fixed, so that I would never have to deal with an overflowing toilet in there again.
Now that the problem was fixed I no longer needed the "superflusher" in there. It was obviously needed upstairs and that was the reason I had put off fixing the toilet situation so long. I didn't want to spend an entire afternoon slogging away on the floor with wax rings and flanges and sewer smells, so I put it off. and off. and off.
My plan was to put the new toilet in the downstairs powder room and move the "superflusher" to the upstairs bathroom. The "superflusher was a one piece toilet. It had been easy to install, had been up and running in less than fifteen minutes. I didn't expect anything different from the new toilet. I mean, yeah, I would have to install the tank on top of the seat, but how hard could that be, right? I got the "superflusher" off with no trouble. Got the old wax ring off, (ewwww) Got the base on the floor. And then the trouble started. Those silly flange screws just wouldn't stay in place. And those silly little nuts they give you don't fit the silly little flange screws very well. They keep getting stuck.
Keeping in mind that my daughter's bf is still here, I am determined to keep my temper. I bite my lip a little bit and maybe a few words might escape under my breath but I am able with a whispered prayer or two to keep it in check.
But I am sweating by this time. Down on the floor with my face next to the bowl, I can't see the screw for attaching to the tank because the bowl is only a few inches from the wall. I can feel it but I can't get it in there. Finally, finally...but the tank is too loose, and I think I might have done something wrong so I take it all off again. Taking out those nuts is a little nightmare in itself. They don't come off any easier than they went on. But with a little help from a power screwdriver with a socket on the end I finally succeed...only to realize that I had it right the first time.
So I decide to move on the the other toilet. Matt and I haul the SF up the stairs and set it aside. We get the rock and roller off and I see that the ring is almost non existent. I get off what remains, clean up under and around where the toilet was and set the SF down on the flange screws. And it's done in less than fifteen minutes just like before, except for one heartstopping moment when I realize it's leaking, and quickly find the leak (bolts on the inside of the tank loosened during moving) and it's fixed.
And I have mostly kept my temper.
Back to the powder room.
I am determined to finish the job and have a working toilet tonight. I realize maybe I just need some seasoned nuts. I find some in my bucket o'screws, and they are just the thing. They go on easily, no trouble. I tighten the flange screws, connect the water, watch it fill up, adjust the ball valve. And relax. I'm sitting on the bowl, backwards, watching the water fill up. "All done" I say, and look up at Ashley and smile. She looks back at me and very matter of factly says "Where's the seat?" I look down at the bowl I am sitting on and realize there is indeed, no seat. And as my mind goes back over the last couple of hours, the unpacking, and bringing it up to the house, I realize, there IS no seat. I go out to the garage, I double check the box. Nada. Nothing. Oh well. I will be making a call to Lowes on Mon. And I will be holding my temper. That's a promise.
Now, hours later, laying in bed on Easter morning, I think about the sacrifice Jesus made on the cross for me. He thinks I was worth it. Even in the midst of a foolish wild eyed, hair raising tantrum he thinks I am worth saving. He reaches down, picks me up, dusts me off, and shows me a better way. And loves me. Thank you, Jesus for all your love.

An Apology

2011-04-09T11:14:00.000-07:00

So....In some of my previous posts, some of the very early ones, I had a lot to say about the previous owners of my house. Since I didn't know them, and had never met any of them, other than the last couple, the ones who turned my dining room into a pool hall, it was easy to villianize them. They had no faces. All that changed this morning. I rolled out of bed with sleepy eyes, looked at the clock and realized there was somewhere I needed to be. I quickly got dressed and went to the local critter corner where for a donation to their cause they will give you a discount voucher for an animal spay/neuter. Since my dog is scheduled for surgery on Monday morning I wanted to take advantage of this program.
There was a lady at the desk in the office and she handed me a form. I filled it out and gave it back. She looked at me and then almost hesitatingly asked which house I lived in. I described the house and she smiled and said "I used to own that house." Then I knew who she was. To say I was thrilled would be putting it mildly. We talked for quite a bit. She brought up the sewer thing. We had a different city manager then, and she told me her husband had called him and told him the city needed to fix the problem. The city manager told him "Sir, if you don't like it you can move." Wow. So they did. They moved. I am so grateful for our current city manager. He went out of his way to fix things for us. I had told him I was thinking of moving, because I couldn't deal with the sewage coming up in my house any more. That I shouldn't have to deal with sewage running down my yard. He was very apologetic and it took some time but he was true to his word. He had them reroute the line from all the way down the street. He told me "No, we want you to stay, we don't want you to move."
She told me they put in the air conditioning system, for which I am grateful, and which I already knew. I was in the attic one day and found the specs for the AC system, crudely drawn out by the AC guys, a complete sketch of the layout of our entire house with the owners name across the bottom. They also built the garage. Apparently there was a really old falling down ramshackle garage and they tore it down and built a new one.

So it was nice to put a face on a previous owner and I will be nicer in my future posts, because I owe them a debt of thanks for the things they did to make this old house a better place to live.

Renewal

2011-04-02T20:09:00.000-07:00

It's ridiculous how happy a $2.98 cent piece of plastic can make me. I was shopping at Lowes for a new light fixture for the bathroom and saw these little babies. Top of the line they definitely aren't but for a couple of bucks they give off pretty good light.
Tomorrow after church I'm going to repaint the deck. Again. Install the new deck rails I bought. Maybe weedeat with my new weedeater. And that's probably about it. But it's a start. I have been slacking off since January and it's time to get back in the game.

Graduation is coming!

2011-04-01T20:28:00.000-07:00

I just realized the other day that there will be people, lots of people descending upon my house in June on the occasion of my daughter's graduation from high school.
Before June I need to:
repaint the deck. Again. *sigh*. for the fortieth time.
replace the missing deck rails.
do something about the yard.
do something about the carpet in the living room.
fix the gutter on my roof.
work on and hopefully finish the downstairs bathroom.
replace all the toilets in the house.
fix every stinking one of my kitchen appliances. Yes. Every one. except the fridge. and the washer and dryer.

get rich quick.

"Stinkerbell"

2011-02-07T22:31:00.000-08:00

My fridge has never been so sparkling clean

"StinkerBell"

The weather has been crazy around here. One day it's 80 degrees (in Feb?) and two days later it's sleeting ice and rain and 14 degrees. I seem drawn to the refrigerator time and again, not because I'm hungry but because I'm bored.
One of those times I opened up the freezer door to look for something to defrost for dinner. My eyes perused the contents of the freezer which were kind of getting low. There was that ground chicken Tommy bought...(Ground chicken? Really?) Noo...wasn't really up for that tonight...wait, wait, wait a minute, something dragged my eye back to that chicken, I looked at it a little more closely. It was completely defrosted. In the freezer. I touched it and there was no doubt. I then realized there was no ice. And the skirt steak was defrosted as well. Panic. I opened the other half of the side by side and looked at the contents realizing with dismay that everything was warm. Temp settings. All good. Plugged in. Check. Breakers. All on. Should have realized it wasn't the breakers, because the internal lights were still on.
I called my best friend who has an AC business with her husband and asked if there was anything I should do. I figured if anybody would have good advice at this time of night, it would be her. She and her husband got on the phone and talked me through some more checks. Fridge back off. Check. Compressor still hot. That's good, means it's still on. Fan. Uh-oh. There it was. Must be the fan motor, they said, as they talked me out of my hysteria.The fan was way in the back where I couldn't reach it. I poked it with a long stick to see if I could get it started again. Nothing. I unplugged it with a great big wintery sigh.
So...out to the garage in the 14 degree weather to find the cooler. I debated sending my daughter out to the Qwik Check for ice....but that would be ridiculous when so much is on the ground. I grabbed my shovel and got to work filling the ice chest.
Back inside I filled it with all of the things that needed refrigerating. It was disconcerting to me that I had just spent eighty dollars at the store and it only filled up half an ice chest. The dogs were nosing around me wondering what in the world Mama was up to tonight. This week we had an extra guest and an extra puppy so our small kitchen was full of people, animals, food and activity. We really needed that fridge. I knew there was no way anybody was going to make it out in this weather to fix it. About that time one of the kids looked out the window. "It's SNOWING!" And boy was it. It didn't stop for twelve hours.
Five days later there is still ice on the ground. And the fridge is still not fixed. I called the appliance place in town and they referred me to somebody else who never answered the phone. When I finally reached them they told me there would be a sixty dollar charge just to come out, even if I declined their services and furthermore that they couldn't be out for another week. I then did what I should have done in the first place and looked in the phone book. The first name that popped up was my Sunday school teacher? Hallelujah!
In the meantime I had to take Tommy back to the airport. I left the dogs in the kitchen as I always do when I leave. They were peacefully reposing on their beds when I left. When I returned the first thing I saw was the refrigerator cord. On the floor. Not where I had left it. Chewed. All. Up. It was a bad, bad moment. I sent the dogs, Sam and bad, bad Belle out to play. How can one tiny dog cause such havoc in a household? I think I will rename her "Stinkerbell"
So it's been a rough, rough week. There have been times I have caught myself walking around in a panic telling myself "I can't DO this anymore, I canNOT do this anyMORE!" But as the words crossed my lips again tonight I heard another voice. This one said Yes, you can. You can do ALL things through Christ who strengthens you.
It stopped me in my tracks. All things. That means these things. It means He has given me the grace to deal with a broken refrigerator in a house with a plethura of stranded people (who can't get home) who need food, a husband who is stranded in Ohio, cold, icy, wet, nasty, and did I mention cold weather, mud, mud, and more mud, dishes, dishes and more dishes, and dogs, dogs everywhere. And no school for kids for a WEEK. One stir crazy mess.
But by His grace we got through it. And will continue to get through it. One day at a time.

Houston We Might Have a Problem...

2011-01-20T12:13:00.000-08:00

Well...I waited and waited...worried and worried...worked myself into the ground trying to get this house in order for the insurance guy to come in and inspect everything (they said he was coming and had until Jan 11)...and then I got sick. For three whole weeks I stayed in bed and did nothing, worrying about the things I left undone. Finally I was able to get up and around again and decided to quit the worrying, after all, what will be, will be, right? So to make a long story short the guy never showed up, never called and the world didn't fall apart. I wasn't about to make the call myself, I did not want some guy nosing around my house so I was really relieved the morning of Jan 12. I did check to make sure I was still covered, though. I am. No worries.

So that being said and onto other things...We had snow and ice the week before last and I noticed that the gutters on one side of my house really took the brunt of the storm. There really weren't any icicles anywhere else on the house except this one place where I tried to "fix" the sagging gutter myself a couple of years ago. I made it much worse because I bent it. Now it leaks so much it has rotted the trim on the bathroom window below and is causing problems on the chimney down below where it runs off and it's prematurely wearing out my roof. It must be fixed and soon.

THIS happened from the icicles dripping down the roof and off the corner of the house.

Also I came out my back door and bumped my head on the awning a while ago. The weight of the snow tore it out of the wall and now it is sagging dangerously. We are having high winds today, making things worse. Time to make a call and get that fixed before it hurts somebody.
uggh. I can't wait til spring.

Shoutout to the Trashman!

2011-01-11T00:09:00.000-08:00

I watched them from behind the blinds in my upstairs bedroom as they gathered up the neighbor's garbage cans in the twilight. Usually here by eight or nine AM at the latest, today they had been held up by frozen streets and mounds of leftover slushy snow. They came down the street working together, one dumping while the other was gathering, tossing the empty cans expertly from one to another as they finished. They worked with an easy camaraderie that spoke of much time spent together as a team. I was impressed by the garbage men.
This was not the first time I had been impressed. Several years ago I had a neighbor who passed away leaving no family. His landlord set all of his things out at the curb. All week people drove by and pawed through his belongings carelessly as if they were hunting a bargain at a yard sale. (I had forgotten how angry that made me!) By the end of the week everything was gone except a full sized sleeper sofa, box spring, a full sized mattress, a club chair and a desk chair.
Standing by the sink I heard the trash truck and parted the curtain to get a glimpse. My mouth literally fell open as I watched four garbage men lift the sleeper sofa and feed it into the mouth of the garbage truck. I was riveted. The garbage truck literally "ate" the sofa. I watched in amazement as it disappeared "bite by bite" and then continued to watch as they fed the monster mouth of the truck the mattress, club chair, box spring and threw in the desk chair for dessert.
I am thankful for my garbage men. I live in a small town so we only see them once a week, but I don't complain. They will take just about anything, including a lawn full of bags of old ceiling tiles, tons of empty paint cans, broken wood and paneling, old nasty carpet, if it's cut and rolled up, and all sorts of broken and discarded junk.
I have to admit on an occasion or two I might have asked too much. One of those times was when I set out two full trashcans full of wet soggy Sheetrock. I probably shouldn't have. They must have weighed 100 pounds each. And they smelled. Really. bad. They took them, but one of the Rubbermaid cans came back completely bent in half. I got the message.
My sister and I have shared stories about our local trash men. She is not renovating a house but is a single parent with two children of her own, two foster children and a full time job. She doesn't always have time to drag the cans from the side of her house down to the street on a winter morning (5 below sometimes!) with four kids in the van waiting for her to take them to school. Occasionally, on those mornings the trash men will actually leave their truck, walk all the way up to her house and bring the cans down to empty, and then set them back in the yard.
Of course I know there are some who are not so lucky. I heard about an elderly gentlemen who had one bag of trash that wasn't in a can (in a city not far from mine). The garbage men wouldn't take the bag even though he was running along behind the truck it in his slippers and robe, yelling WAIT! They drove off leaving him literally "holding the bag". Seems like the kind thing to do would to have just stopped and let him throw it in the back. Something. ANYTHING. Just don't make old men chase you down and then leave them in your dust.
Not so for us. We are blessed and I am grateful.
So here is my shoutout to the trash man. No reno would be the same without the weekly or semiweekly round of men to take away the debris left in the wake of creativity and hard work in the quest for a beautiful house and a beautiful life.

Such Is Life

2010-12-11T19:18:00.000-08:00

Lesson for today: Never paint your deck in the winter. Wait until the weather is warmer and less unpredictable.
So, that being said. It was almost dark last night when I came in from my deck painting project. The wind was blowing slightly but the air was dry. I figured it would be probably a couple of hours before the deck was dry enough to walk on, at the most. Enter the dreaded winter fog. I walked outside about midnight, that's about seven hours after I quit for the night. The deck was shiny. Too shiny. I reached down and swiped my finger through wet paint. It was as wet as the moment I laid it down. *sigh*. Will we ever have a project without drama?
This morning I woke up and the first thing I did was check out the deck. Still a little damp but the sun came out and pretty soon the whole thing was dry. (Whew! wipes invisible sweat off brow. I did NOT want to repaint that whole thing!)
I spent the morning finishing the paint on the closet and bedroom doors in prep for the new doorknobs. At one point as I stood up to take a break the Mr. grabbed me in a twirl and spun me around the room. The BeeGees were singing their little hearts out as we twirled and spun and shuffled and stepped for about fifteen minutes, me in my raggedy old painting clothes, and he in his pj's, snuffling with bronchitis. (Such is life, after almost 19 yrs of marriage.) Then it was back to work.
I had taken the knob set off of my bedroom door and closet door. They are on the same wall and when the closet is shut and the bedroom door is open they fall next to each other. It was as I was looking at them both, the closet door completely assembled, and looking fine, I might add, and the bedroom door still waiting, that I had an idea. I would use the new backplate from Van Dykes Restoration that I had ordered but I would reuse the original glass knobs instead of the pretty chrome ones that came with the set. But would they fit? I quickly took off the knob I had just put on and tried the glass one on for size. It was beautiful. And a perfect fit.

I wish I had enough original glass knobs to go on all the doors, but unfortunately there was only one set. I figured the door with the full length beveled mirror should be the one to get the glass. I used the same backplates on all the rest with the silver chrome knobs. I think it looks wonderful. The BeeGees like it too.

Seven Years

2010-12-10T21:25:00.000-08:00

It was seven years ago today that the Mr. and I walked into the title company and signed a mammoth sized stack of papers and left with a hundred thousand dollar debt to the bank.
As I look back over the last seven years I am amazed at the passage of time. My oldest daughter was 10 when we moved in here. She will be 18 in one month.
Matt was in the third grade. Third grade. He will be taking driver's ed after Christmas break. He turned sixteen in October.
My littlest was only six. She is now in seventh grade. Almost a teen ager.
And I, I have gained a wealth of knowledge in everything from how to frame a room and drywall to cutting and installing a tile floor. I have lost seventy pounds since I moved in (and unfortunately gained some back) and gained a few gray hairs as well.
My husband has been behind the scenes making it all possible by continuing to work and travel every week. He has put up with so much more than he ever could have bargained for from the never ending sawdust to the never ending smell of fresh paint fumes at two AM.
And we have been blessed along the way in a million different ways.

Today I did a multitude of small fix its, such as replacing the hardware on my bathroom vanity, to preparing my closet doors for their new doorknobs. I hate to replace original hardware, but the knobs just wouldn't stay on anymore, so we bought some really nice reproductions from Van Dykes.

And then I got an idea. I was outside touching up a spot outside my daughter's bedroom and looked at my paint. Then I looked at the deck. Then I looked at the paint again. I toyed with idea a minute and then made the decision. I would paint the deck. It wouldn't take too long, right? Ha. Well, they say a good paint job is all in the prep. The deck was covered in leaves and little prickly nutty things that had fallen from the tree above and lodged themselves in all the cracks. It took about an hour to get it all cleaned off and a wedge tool to clean out all the cracks. Then I began to paint. Previously we used stain on the deck but it wore off every year, even though it should have lasted two or three. Having not been stained in three years now, the deck was almost bare of any color. I never considered using paint before, but this was super durable exterior, and it has held up well on the exterior of the house, so I thought, why not. I didn't get to finish before it got dark, so it will have to be finished tomorrow, but I think it's gonna look great. I will have more and better pictures tomorrow.

Improvisation

2010-12-08T15:27:00.000-08:00

...It's the spice of a renovator's life, right?
Anyway I got some things marked off the long list I have. The plastic is up over the lovely flourescent hallway lights, I glued down some loose peel and stick tiles in the kitchen (again-previous owners), patched some of the places in the house that have been nicked and dinged with joint compound and then there was this:

When the company I hired to finish Kat's room the summer before this last one were almost finished, they glued this thin wood stuff to the outside of the bottom of the window. Over the year water has gotten in and loosened it and the top layer has begun to chip away. I needed to glue it back but had no clamps and no way to clamp it down if I did have clamps, so I improvised. Tomorrow I will paint it. It isn't great but for now it will do. I called the contractor and he will be coming to fix the broken windows next week. Things are moving forward. It's been a good day.

~~dishwasher~~
~~light covers~~
~~patch small holes in wall~~
patch cracks in Kat's room
windows
replace missing doorknobs on the closet
replace hardware on my bathroom vanity
toilets replaced
finish walls in downstairs bathroom
touch up paint everywhere
buy more fire alarms and batteries
buy two fire extinguishers
fix the window on Kat's car

2010-12-07T18:57:00.000-08:00

I am really sweating the insurance guy coming to my house. I don't know what he is going to be looking for so I'm stressing about everything, even things I KNOW won't matter. So then I thought well maybe I am getting all upset over nothing. Maybe he won't even come in the house, I will just call them and find out. I was really hoping, really thinking positively that he wouldn't have to come in and I could relax and enjoy the upcoming holiday season. *sigh*. No dice. He's coming in to look around. The good news? He has thirty days after the policy goes into effect and we have some control over the day, so it won't be tomorrow or even this week. This gives me a little bit of much needed time to finish the 101 things on my immediate list. (come on, every single one of you has one of these, I KNOW, especially you, housebloggers!) Then we can move on to the other list, of not as important things. (ha! like that's ever going to happen, right?!)
Anyway, I have made a deal with myself; If I just do one project a day for the next thirty days, that's thirty things off my list, right?
I started yesterday with the dishwasher. The thing is falling apart. It's unlevel and the door won't shut. When I took off the bottom and had a look the reason was immediately apparent. One of the legs was laying on the floor right beside the appliance. Hmmm...that would be why the bracket holding it to the underside of the countertop has pulled off. That would be why the dishwasher is literally coming out of the wall.
Problem: It's the back leg that has come off. I can't raise it up to put it back on way back in there. So I did the next best thing, got a skinny piece of wood and just jacked up the left side of my dishwasher. And it worked a treat. I then rescrewed the bracket to the underside of the counter and now I am able to shut the door, no problemo!
Today I didn't get around to doing much, just replacing the bulbs in the old chandelier...and for some reason I found the glass ball that hangs below the prisms in the corner of the living room last week. It didn't fall off by itself and despite my questions nobody has owned up to the crime. I don't think it was one of my own kids, they usually don't go around ripping things off of things in the downstairs. I think it might have been one of the jillion friends that ebb and flow through this house on a daily basis.
So I replaced it, with a mental note to watch the children that come in and out of here a little more carefully.
So tomorrow, since I did very little today, I think I will do two projects. The plastic light cover in the hallway needs replacing (I know, I know, plastic? what were the previous owners thinking?)
And I think I will work on the bathroom walls tomorrow. We will see. Supposed to snow tonight.

Rejunvination!

2010-12-04T21:14:00.000-08:00

I woke up early with the thought of the insurance inspector coming to my house next week. I got out of bed and pulled up the list I made for myself yesterday on my computer. What to do first...hmmm...the dishwasher needs fixing...again...not that has anything to do with the upcoming inspection, it just needs to be done. The new toilet is in the garage and needs to replace the one upstairs that rocks and rolls all over the place...most important are those five broken window panes that have needed fixing for a long time now. I can call the contractor to get those next week, so no worries about those today...then there is paint that needs touching up all over the place and that downstairs bathroom...ughhh.
With the thought of the bathroom weighing heavy on my mind I got up out of my chair and headed to the kitchen for a cup of coffee. Bearing the steaming cups upstairs I start to notice all the things on the way that I have been steadfastly ignoring for a year or so now. There are some nailholes in the wall that I never got around to patching, then there is the place on the stair wall where Ally put her foot through the sheetrock two years ago. I patched it but never painted it. I sighed as I entered the bedroom to begin the morning ritual; coffee while I think about things. Well, to be honest, coffee while I put things off for an hour.
A half hour later I head back downstairs with the empty cups and a clearer head. I need tools and in order to get to the tools I need I'm going to have to organize the laundry room. This may sound strange but that's where all my extra tool storage is in the house. For the last year since I have been avoiding house reno projects things have become disorganized and jumbled. I can't find anything.
So I set to work. An hour later I was finished and had found the tools I needed. It was a bonus that the laundry room was fairly organized now. I had been planning to do that project after New Year's and now I wouldn't have to. My heart was light as I contemplated what to do next. My mind went back to that bathroom. I had wallpapered it about two years ago (maybe more)and it was perfect. I thought. I went on vacation and when I came back it was all wrinkled. The walls had moved. I fixed it again. Again it wrinkled. I got so frustrated I ripped the wallpaper off the walls and that had remained the status quo every since. The bathroom was an eyesore with large shreds of wallpaper hanging off the wall, no sink, tile unfinished. No towel rack, no TP holder, nothing but a toilet in there. It was time to fix it. And suddenly I had an idea. An idea that excited me. I would just texture right over the wallpaper! What a great idea!
I wasted no time but went right to the hardware store and stocked up on plenty of joint compound. I came back and dug out my favorite putty knife and set to work. Texturing was something I had some experience at, having had to redo the entire kitchen after Tommy almost burned it down six years ago now. I applied the jc and made a few experimental swipes with the knife. It looked good...except it made the wallpaper bubbly. I scraped at one of the bubbles and the paper began to peel off beneath the jc. I soon found myself stripping wallpaper instead of applying more of the compound. This was all right for a while but was time consuming. After a bit I remembered I had a large sponge in the garage I had used for grouting several years ago. I got it and wet it and began to use water to help me release the wallpaper. Two long, and very tiring hours later I was still at it. How did I get myself into this? I was thinking to myself. I was covered from head to toe in jc. I had it in my hair. There was so much wallpaper on the floor I couldn't see the tile.
I finally had one wall free of paper and dry. I climbed wearily up onto my chair for the hundreth time and began to apply the jc as texture for a second time. My problem was my knife was too wide. The only other one I had was old and pitted and I couldn't get a smooth edge off of it. It looked bad. I almost started to whimper, I was so so tired.
Then I remembered something my friend Maddie had told me. She had told me that her contractor had used a sponge to smooth the jc instead of sandpaper. I leaned over and rinsed out my sponge and squeezed the water out of it. Then I smoothed over the damp jc very gently. All the whimpers went away as I stood back and looked at it. It was working! Encouraged I kept it up until the whole wall was done.
Then I had to give it up for the night. I just couldn't go another minute.
I had forgotten what it felt like to be excited about a project. Maybe Santa could bring me a finished bathroom for Christmas?? *grins*

Big Plans

2010-12-03T17:28:00.000-08:00

I just found out we have to have an inspector come out for the new insurance company. This puts me in a tizzy of work to be done this weekend. We need windows fixed,doors painted, doorknobs put on, toilets replaced and of course a whole house cleaning. Should be fun. We will see exactly how much we get done. Maybe this is exactly what I needed to get things moving again.

Dreaming Big

2010-12-02T08:49:00.000-08:00

My fountain design for a future landscaping project

Somewhere along the road (if you hadn't figured it out by my lack of posting) I just burned out on the reno. I just got so tired of being behind the eight ball all the time, so to speak, on the maintenance. Instead of moving forward to new projects I'm losing my mind over sagging gutters (a new development) and some broken windows we have acquired, as well as some other things that have popped up (like the nail I just noticed sticking out on one of the stair treads.)
Anyway, now that I'm done whining, I have to say that I have begun to think about the future of this reno and I'm dreaming big. I have a long skinny galley kitchen (probably twenty feet long from end to end and only three feet wide) with a 12 x 10 deck right outside the kitchen windows projecting into the back yard. My dream is to extend the kitchen to the end of the deck. Where I stand at the sink to wash dishes now could be my island in the future! I have a large connecting dining room (probably 10 x 15) with three large windows overlooking a large side yard. I want turn the windows into a french doors and add the deck to the dining room in the side yard. Usually I am all for keeping the original integrity of an old house, but we have 41 other windows, so I don't think it would be a serious crying shame if we changed things around a little as long as we keep to the old world style. Instead of another deck in the back yard we could have a flag stone patio. As long as I'm dreaming we could take out all the huge rocky stones that make up the bumpy bumpy driveway and use pavers instead. There are so many uses for all that beautiful stone and it's just being wasted and ruined in the driveway and makes for a very uncomfortable bumpity end to every drive, not to mention it can be somewhat dangerous in the dark. A couple of weeks ago while walking out to the car with an armful of dessert for a church function I tripped and fell amidst a shower of fruit tarts. I wasn't hurt but I lost half the dessert in the driveway.
Let me just say that in addition to dreaming big I am praying big too. God knows how much I love this old house and He knows every picture I have in my mind of how I want things to be. The key word here is want. I WANT to make this house perfect in every way but acknowledge that in the scheme of things sometimes what I think is important is not high on the list for God.
So, that being said, I can still pray for the desire, funds, and ability to finish this reno, but content myself with knowing that if God has another plan it will be perfectly OK.

Fall Transitions

2010-09-30T12:23:00.000-07:00

I had another almost free day today, nobody here, just me and the cat hanging around. I started cleaning a little but pretty soon got distracted. I have been meaning to revamp my table setting. It's getting a little old looking at the same thing day after day for a couple of years now. Plus the finish on the table is showing some damage, some scratches and thin places in spots, due to age and too much enthusiasm when it comes to cleaning. It needs a tablecloth. So I thought about what I had and went to check out my inventory. My linen closet is a mess, so I peered in and poked around some things and then caught sight of this piece of material. It's actually a shower curtain, brought home by my aunt as a gift to me, and purchased from Goodwill, I think. The great part? It only cost a buck. I have used it several times in different areas of my home and always intended its final home to be hanging above my fireplace mantel as a tapestry, but it will have to be altered for that because its too long. Meanwhile...It serves nicely here, with my grandmother's goblets, my other grandmother's silverware, and my other grandmother's (doesn't everybody have three grandmothers?) vanity mirror under the candles. I looked for a fall place setting amongst all of the settings I own, and would you believe I have everything EXCEPT fall. I have Christmas pine cones, spring roses, even sixties Metlox Poppytrail/Sculptured Daisy, but nothing appropriate for fall. So I just set the table without the plates for now. I love it. Everybody needs a little change now and then.

Tough Little Guy

2010-07-29T15:05:00.000-07:00

I have a chess set that sits on a handmade frame and hangs on the wall. About two years ago I knocked it over and dropped all the pieces on the floor. I found all but this little guy on the left. Never could figure out where he went. When David, the contractor, opened up the floor in my living room he reached down in and pulled this little guy out. "Here's a chess piece", he said, and I shouted in amazement, I've been LOOKING for that! I put it up next to the other pieces and couldn't believe how much deterioration had taken place under my floor. I'm glad to have a complete set again though. Something about having seven pawns instead of eight really bothered me, and I'm sure he is glad to be back with all his brothers.

Nasty Surprises

2010-07-29T08:17:00.000-07:00

Pulling it up with his bare hands.

Yes, those are TREE roots

Notice that at some point in time the concrete was cut and a piece removed and the joist was reworked leaving a larger than normal span in the space.

Almost done.

My husband surprised me last week by suggesting that we hire somebody to finish up some of these jobs around here. Since I have been totally burned out on the reno for about a year, and have done very little in the past year about bringing this place back, I was very happy to do so. I had heard some good stuff about a contractor from Dallas who was doing some work for my friend. I called and set up an appt to meet. The first thing I was going to have him do was look at the electrical around an old AC in my living room, which was tripping the fuses. We hadn't used it in about a year and we were either going to fix it if it was fixable or (my preference) dump the piece of junk.
So I woke up and got to work, I knew he was going to want to look at the wiring which runs under the baseboard, so I pulled the carpet back and got a nasty shock. Underneath the carpet a large area of the particle board floor was soaking wet. (I know, right? Particle board? I have some serious questions for the previous owners.)
It was completely rotten all the way through and moldy and smelled horrible. My heart sank. I figured this was going to be a long and costly job.
About that time the contractor showed up, along with the friend who had recommended him. We sat down for coffee and crumb cake (made by my friend, and OH SO GOOD) and got acquainted for a few minutes before he started work.
Abandoning the coffee we made our way over to the corner of the living room. The smell, as I said was horrible. He reached down and pulled a large chunk of the rotten particle board up with just his bare hand. Horrible stuff. He went to get his saw while I just stood there and shook my head. When he came back he marked off a large area of the floor, probably an area of at least eight feet by four feet and began to cut out the rotten particle board. Underneath was an interesting mix of joists, concrete and dangling wires and lots of wet dirt. And tree roots. Did I mention the tree roots? Some strange things were revealed about my house as we investigated the underside of the footings. The first thing he noticed was that the joists, instead of sitting on top of the concrete beam had actually been notched into the concrete. The second was that one of the joists, instead of sitting into the notch, nice straight and even had been angled to meet up with one of the other joists. That was a mystery we never did solve, but it was interesting to note that the concrete footing had been cut away in the area where that joist should have been notched. Somebody had been down inside here before. Also, to my shock, we realized that some of the joists had alligatoring and soot. My house at some point has been on fire.
Realizing the joists were not in great shape, but not terrible shape either, we decided the best thing to do for today was to sister the joists with 2 x 6,s and then block them so they wouldn't move and replace all the rotten particle board with plywood. He surprised me when he said he thought he could be done by five pm, I thought this was going to be a long, long job, requiring several days of work. Having seen his work at my friends house, and hearing the glowing reports she gave his work, I had complete trust that he knew what he was doing and I gave him the go ahead. True to his word, he had all the joists sistered, all the blocking done and all new plywood in place and screwed down by five pm.
We chatted as he was putting away his tools, and I asked if he thought he could come back for a day or two every couple of weeks (can't really afford more, esp since we are about to put a kid through college) to help us get the old place back in working order. He seemed very happy to say yes, and genuinely seemed to really like my house, which made me feel really good about the place, since lately I have been feeling like I am trying to "make a purse out of a pig's ear", if you will pardon the expression.
The end result? I am psyched. I am going to have professional help, just a little at a time for the things I just can't do myself. It is exactly what I have wanted and it means the difference between burnout and moving forward on this old house.
Next time we are going to work on removing the old AC (and putting a new one in eventually) and removing some of the dirt from the outside of the house. We finally figured out that the problem is that the soil on the outside of the house is at the same level as the floor, and the water is just wicking it's way in, and that tree is not helping things either. A drain system is needed in the very near future.

Quick and Easy

2010-07-20T16:30:00.001-07:00

Haven't had anything to write about for quite some time now, I have just been burned out on house stuff, but this week we are finally beginning to pick things back up. First I have to say that I was terribly disappointed, let me say, sick, when I went into my daughter's newly renovated bedroom last week, (yes, the one we spent so much time and energy on the last three years, and the subject of most of the last few blogs) and saw that there are multiple and growing cracks on every single wall. The tape in the corner of the room has torn all the way from floor to ceiling. I am frustrated and ticked off about it. But the reason we were in her room was to finish putting all the hardware on her new furniture and to help her with the computer she bought herself for her senior year of highschool and then(gulp)college. Did I say college? Did I mention that when we moved in here she was only eleven? How fast the time has flown. (takes a moment for a little tear-ing up here)
So, doing my best to ignore all the cracks that are screaming out failure to me, I arm myself with a screwdriver, the appropriate hardware, and think to myself, "wow, this is going to be quick and easy."
Huh.
The furniture in question used to belong to my sister. It is a beautiful set, with beautiful hardware, that she took off to paint and never got around to putting back on. Finally she bought a new set and asked me if I wanted this one, and of course I am never one to turn down quality furniture. The desk I was going to be working on was one with a hutch, and the top of the hutch had oblong glass doors that hinge onto the sides of the furniture, opening outwards. The hinges that came with the desk were rusty and I had been trying since January to unfreeze them with WD40 and several other things recommended by the experts at the hardware store, with no success. I decided today just to buy a new set of hinges and start fresh, ignoring the fact that the original ones were unique and probably irreplaceable. I would just drill some new holes, and presto, it would work out fine. So I got the doors out and start drilling. I got half the hinges screwed on, and then my aunt came to help me with the rest. Finally I took the doors into the other room with the desk and then realized with horror, that I have screwed them all in backwards. So I sigh and unscrew everything and start over. But now I am having a problem with the screws themselves. They are cheap. They are stripping. It is taking everything I have to get them to go all the way down, and some won't go even then. I am hot, sweaty and irritated, but holding onto my temper (now THERE'S a
miracle). My aunt has been a huge help but we are both getting a little tired.
So finally we get all the screws in and one of the doors screwed onto to the hutch. It has been two and a half long hours. I put the other door up to the hutch in it's position to make sure before we go any further that the doors will fit together correctly-and make another horrible discovery, the hinges I bought are too fat and now the doors will not close together.
I have to admit that some not so choice words came out of my mouth. I will leave that to your imagination. I resigned myself to never being able to finish any project properly and put the hutch back on top of the desk, unfinished.
While I was putting away my tools, my aunt disappeared from the room. In a few moments she was back and had all of the original rusty hinges in her hands. In amazing feat of some kind of black magic she had been able to do in a few moments what I had been unable to do in five months and all of the hinges were now moving freely and usable. I immediately took one of the hinges and went back to the hardware store for more screws. We would finish this project yet. When I got back I laid out all the little baggies of screws I bought (I bought three different sizes, so I couldn't go wrong) and we began putting the hinges back, this time on the doors first, instead of the hutch itself. As we finished the third hinge we realized that we were one short. Where was the fourth hinge? I was amazed at the ridiculous setbacks we were experiencing. What happened to "quick and easy"? As we began to look around the house, and then expanded the search to the car, I realized we (actually "I") must have lost it. It had vanished into thin air. It was by now full dark and too late to search the yard from car to house. I reasoned that I must have dropped it somewhere in between. I would find it in the morning. Meanwhile we finished putting knobs and handles on the rest of the furniture and left the doors to the hutch in the corner of the room. As I went to bed I said a quick prayer that God would bring it back to me. I needed that hinge, as I said, it was unique, and the three without the fourth were useless.
Next morning revealed that I had not dropped the hinge anywhere in the driveway, car, or house. I knew it had to be SOMEWHERE so I called the hardware store and asked "Hey have you seen any extra hinges laying around anywhere?", all the while chuckling at myself for asking such a ridiculous question. I described what I was looking for and where I had been in the store and they went to look. Nothing. So on a whim I got in my car and drove to the store, parked where I had parked, and got out. I walked around my car-and there-on the ground, right in front of the store was my hinge.
I said a very grateful prayer to the God who gives all good things and went home.
The look on my aunt's face when I walked in the door waving the hinge in her face was priceless.
I guess it's ok to be ridiculous on this journey to renovation-just as long as we eventually get there.

The Dreaded "M" Word

2009-11-14T07:40:00.001-08:00

So I noticed some time ago that when it rained mold would spring up in the corner of Ally's room. I treated this a couple of times with bleach and kept an eye on it. I knew at some point though that I was going to have to find the problem.
I forgot about it for a while until this fall when it rained for about a month with few breaks. One day I went in and was horrified to find big black flowers of mold climbing up the wall. This was not like the last time I had treated a little spot or two. This looked viral, if you can use such a word in this situation. It looked bad. It looked like flocked flowers, big furry circles of black mold and it was far bigger than before. I touched the wall and found it soaking wet. I reached down, and with far too much ease, ripped a piece of the wall off. I could not BELIEVE what I found behind the wall.
It was dirt. solid jam packed behind the Sheetrock and it was soaking wet. I pulled off more Sheetrock and scooped out some of the dirt. Now anybody in their right minds at this point would probably go get some gloves and a mask. But no, not me! I got into it then, really ripping off the Sheetrock.
It's kind of hard to describe what was behind the dirt. If you have been following my blog you will know that I have spent several years renovating my older daughter's room, right on the other side of this wall. Her room, behind the Sheetrock and paneling was lined with hundred year old green masonry on top of the exterior brick. No lathe, no structure, no framing, just exterior brick and then the green masonry and then paneling or Sheetrock. The green masonry all over their two rooms (used to be the old house's garage before being converted into bedrooms by previous owners) is crumbling and falling apart.
That was exactly what was happening behind the wall when I pulled off the Sheetrock. When I pulled out all the dirt I could see the green wall completely crumbling like sand. It was soaking wet and falling off. I could touch it and it would fall off. I decided to remove as much of the loose stuff as I could as far up as I could and use a mortar patch to fix it. I did a lot of that in my older daughter's room, so I am somewhat experienced. I pulled it off to a height of about five feet until I reached solid masonry that wasn't wet. Now what? I stood back and looked at it. I could see all the way out to the front yard through the exterior brick in several places. I had to patch that, but there was no way to reach all the way back to the brick, because the holes were kind of far back in a narrow slot next to the window casing. It was predicted to be a sunny week so I placed a fan in front of the area and left it for a few days to dry out before I did anything else and plus I needed time to think. Meanwhile my hands were stinging like crazy. It felt like I had glass in my hands. This went on for a couple of hours. It wasn't unbearable, it was just uncomfortable and I wished I had worn gloves. I never did figure out why that happened.
But back to the story:
When I began to pull off the Sheetrock next to the window casing I realized there was something weird going on. The trim around the window was paper thin. I accidentally pulled some off while removing the Sheetrock. Since I broke it I pulled the whole thing off and then realized that whoever put up the drywall didn't know how to end it gracefully so they covered up the original window casing with drywall and constructed a fake casing made of what looked like balsa wood around the window!
The actual window frame is much bigger than it appears!
So I was turning things over in my mind, planning to fix this problem this way, and planning things that way, but I really didn't know how I was going to get down in those deep cracks. I thought I might have to stick a caulking gun way back in there from the inside and caulk those holes and then let that dry and then fill in as much as I could with new mortar. Then I thought I might go outside with some mortar repair and work on the outside.
As I was mulling it over my husband came in the room and stood with me and then gave me a compliment which put a smile on my face. He said "you know, if this was five years ago and I saw this mess I would be really upset but I'm not worried. I know you can fix it."
Then he said something which I can only say was genius. He said "Why don't you get some expandable foam." Then the light went on in my head. "THAT'S IT"! I shouted at him. "YOU'RE A GENIUS!"
So I immediately went to the hardware store and bought some cans of expandable foam and proceeded to fill in all those nooks and crannys. That's where I am today on this project. I have to get a new blade for my sawzall and then we are going to cut some Sheetrock and get her wall fixed back up. But I have some niggling worrisome thoughts. I wonder what else is lurking behind that wall...

K's room preReno

2009-07-01T09:15:00.000-07:00

I ran across these pics yesterday while cleaning up my desktop. I had forgotten how really bad her room was. I walk in there now and I am just awed by the change.
Now that her room is done, though, I kind of feel stuck. I just sit around the house all day doing nothing instead of the million and one other projects that need to be finished. I guess I have been working on that room so long that I don't know what to do with myself now that it is finished.

Outside

2009-06-06T11:16:00.000-07:00

I wanted to utilize the tiny little patio outside Kay's bedroom window so I dug my old bistro table out of storage and bought some new cushions. I think it came out kind of cute.

The Grand Finale

2009-06-05T21:26:00.000-07:00

The paint color is called "Soothing Aloe". It looked very soothing on the paint chip and when applied to the wall seemed much brighter. It has a very crisp feeling to it when you look at it. My daughter, who loves everything green (see "Prom" on "Joolies World", her dress is as bright green as it gets) loves the color. She is happy.

The new carpet and window

The finished closet

She moves in.

The Middle of the End

2009-06-05T20:53:00.000-07:00

We got as far as finishing the drywall on the ceiling. After that the bedding and taping got too much for me to do.

Kay's room had an old door that wouldn't open all the way. The wood around the threshold was rotted from years of rain coming in under the door. I built a beautiful new threshold in the doorway to stop all that and drywalled all around it, thinking we might keep it.

I changed my mind, once the builders got there and decided a window would be better suited for a sixteen year old than a door. The irony of that is that the door was much harder to get open than the window.

They also built her a closet where there was none before.

The Beginning of a Long (long, long, long, long...) Journey

2009-06-05T20:24:00.000-07:00

I finally had to realize there are just some things I cannot do by myself. After two years of demolition and rebuilding from the walls up, we finally just broke down and hired someone to finish the job. I realize now it would have taken me another two years to do what these guys did in less than a week. My poor daughter would have been in her dorm room in college before her room here at home was done.
Here is a photo montage of where we have been. There will be more photos in the next post.
These photos are a series entitled "The Nightmare Behind the Walls", for obvious reasons. The day we discovered what was hiding behind the old beat up paneling we both almost had to be resuscitated from the shock. We just left the paneling we had removed on the floor and walked away for almost a year. That is plastic holding up some kind of green masonry, maybe plaster? There was no lath of any kind, no framing, no structure behind the paneling, just these one by two strips holding up the plastic that they had adhered the paneling to, and which had contributed substantially to the problem. By "they", I'm sure you have figured out that I mean the Previous Owners.

My dad came over and helped us (or should I say we helped HIM) frame up the room when we finally decided to tackle the problem. There was an old chimney hole in the middle of the wall and I bricked it up to keep out bugs and critters since I had no plans to put in any wood burning fireplaces.

Doctor's Orders

2009-04-20T16:13:00.000-07:00

Well, it looks like I am going to have to put the room on hold for about a week, as the doctor has put me on a new med that will have some side effects, such as light headedness, dizziness, and possibly blacking out, so I can't do anything strenuous, and especially can't climb any ladders. *sigh*.

Two Steps Forward One Step Back...

2009-04-19T14:49:00.000-07:00

Well, to make a long story short, the tape just wasn't working. I started to put down the second tape on the ceiling and the bubbles started appearing everywhere. I came to the conclusion that taping and bedding is not for the novice, nor for the faint of heart. After fooling around with it for a while and trying in vain to lay another layer of tape over a bubbled layer in vain hopes that the bubbles would just disappear, I just started taking down the tape. I'd rather go the long way and do it right than do a crappy job and get it over with. Of course the best thing would be to just do it right the first time...then we wouldn't be having this conversation. My daughter would be back in her bedroom and ecstatically happy and I could be moving on to some other waiting projects that need to be finished.

New Hope

2009-04-18T21:34:00.000-07:00

It was with great interest that I read the comment on yesterday's post. I went to the link and read it all. I hadn't planned on doing any work on the room today, but as I passed it on my way out the back door I thought...why not? I first went to the hardware store and stocked up on some new tools and a great big giant gynormous tub of j.c. With all the new info fresh in my mind things went extremely well and I ended up working in there most of the night.
Thanks again to the Head Lemur. Your post comment was an enormous help. I can't believe I had an entire night with no tears, no cussing and I didn't even throw any power tools. Life is good.

Frustration

2009-04-16T20:41:00.000-07:00

The morning sun coming in through the front door. Sometimes when things are not going well I have to put my mind on the things I like about the house, rather than the things that make me want to run screaming straight to the looney bin.

Well, I thought I was done with the taping, but I just wasn't happy with it. Previously I had been using the net stuff to tape the walls (you will remember that I have no idea what I'm doing, everything is an experiment, and a learning experience), but the guy at the hardware store talked me into just the thin paper tape. I liked this so much that I decided to re tape all my seams. yup, that's me, doin' everything at least twice, before I get it right. *sigh*. So I re-taped yesterday, and today began sanding. Before long I was covered in joint compound dust and my hands were joint compound clubs. It was in my hair and I know I must have looked rather "ghostly". Actually I think the word is ghastly.
For some reason the tape was just not adhering correctly. Even though I was careful to get out all the air bubbles, I thought, once dry they just popped right back up. This is not going to look good in the finished product. At one point I plopped my fancy mudding knife back into the j.c. pot and just sat down on the steps and cried for a few minutes, with my dust covered cheeks in my j.c. clubbed hands. I am beginning to wonder if this project is EVER going to be finished or I am I going to be in j.c. limbo forever? And when it IS finally done is the finished product going to be worth the two years of blood, sweat, and tears I have poured into it? I decided to take a break for a while and went into the coffee lounge for a while. I picked up my Bible, (I washed my hands first) and opened it to today's passage, Psalm 63. As I read, my self pity began to ebb away and pretty soon I felt OK again. There is nothing like a Psalm in the middle of the day to sooth the renovation blues.

2009-03-18T21:56:00.000-07:00

I put the last piece of tape on the wall and smoothed it out with my trowel. There was just one more thing I wanted to fix...that one piece of Sheetrock by the door, the one with the light switch dangling through the hole...I just didn't like the way it fit up against the door. I carefully pried it off of the wall and with a really big sigh, put it on top of another piece of Sheetrock to use as a template. This time I would use a smaller width Sheetrock so it would fit better in the space. For once I actually cut it out with no mistakes and to my surprise it fit perfectly. I usually have to measure and re-measure, cut and re-cut. I screwed it on and went to pull the light toggle through the hole. I was having a little trouble...I jerked just a little too hard just a little too often and then I heard a little PLINK and the light went out. Oh, man!! Immediately I went to the breaker and turned it off. This shut off the power to the room, but what I didn't know was that the living room, hall and the front bedroom were all on the same circuit. Pretty soon the kids came running to find out what happened to the TV. K,s friend is an electrician, and she called him to help me figure out what went wrong and before I knew it he and his grandfather, a master electrician were at my door. They took a look and decided to come back in the morning with assurances that it would be safe to turn back on the power.
The next morning the electrician came out and tightened up the wire, which turned out to be hot, by the way, and showed me how to fasten the plastic light toggle to the inside of the joist. He left and I went out to run some errands. It was six o'clock before I was able to work on the room again. I tried putting the light toggle up against the joist, like he said, but it was very difficult due to the space constraints. I had been working on it for about thirty minutes, with the power off, by the way, when my screwdriver accidentally came into contact with the wire and a little explosion occurred. The light went out again. Well, this time I was already in a bad mood and this just threw me over the edge. I called all the local electricians in the book and no one would come out. I was going out of town the next morning, so something had to be done tonight. After I sat around feeling sorry for myself for a while, I approached my next door neighbor and asked him if he knew anything about electricity. He said he knew a little, and he got his tools and came on over. He spent about forty mins. trying to get the toggle attached to the joist, just as I had tried to do unsuccessfully, however he managed to get it done. Then he told me to turn the power back on on the breaker panel. I did that but there was no result. The light just didn't come back on. At this point I was envisioning having to stay home from my trip out of town to call the master elec. back in the morning. However he told me to go take a second look at the panel and make sure it was on. Guess what? In my panic, I was looking at all the switches that were off, not the little orange strips that indicate you have popped a fuse. And there it was. All that panic for nothing. I felt kind of foolish, but he didn't seem to think anything about it. I flipped the fuse and sure enough the light came on and the fan started turning. I breathed another big sigh, this time with relief. I'm so thankful I have such a fantastic neighbor.

The Evolution of Me

2009-03-12T21:00:00.000-07:00

Tonight I sit here sipping coffee. (don't worry mom, it's decaf) and thinking back on the events of the past month. Well to be honest, the events of the last several years. I've been drifting along in a state of hopelessness for a long long time. Time after time I have asked myself, "how can I call myself a Christian and be living like I am. I hate my life. I love my kids but they are out of control. I love my house but it's falling apart. I love my husband but our marriage is a desert of nothingness."
One day, on an infrequent Sunday Morning visit to church, I had a fight with my kids. They just refused to get ready for church. They just didn't want to go. They dawdled and I screamed and cursed at them. Typical Sunday. But by the time I got in the front doors something in me cracked. I got fed up with the garbage in my life. I told my kids that our once a month visit to church was not enough anymore, as we went in the front door, and that I felt like God wanted me to be more committed than that and we were going to start coming every week. Well this was met with sour looks and hostility as we entered and put on fake smiles for the few ushers that remained at the door to greet latecomers. I fired a parting shot at the kids before we went in. "Don't sit by me", I said, "I don't need your attitudes."
I sang along with the church but I was seething inside. I was really angry at myself for letting things come to this. Then the pastor began to speak. The topic was on casual Christianity. I sank down in my seat, both awed that God could reach my heart and ashamed that I was one of the ones "coming to church for my once a month charge", as he put it. It was like the finger of God pointing right at my heart. I knew things had to be different. I didn't know it then, but that sermon would have a dramatic effect on my life.
I came back the next Sunday, without the kids (they won the battle that week) and was actually early. I walked in and announced to the ushers that I wanted to become a member. This was met with consternation. I guess that wasn't the way it was usually done, but I had never been a member of a church since I had become an adult and didn't know that. They told me I needed to speak to the pastor, and so I waited until church was over and approached him. He told me I didn't have to do anything, just come on up to the front next time he called for new members.
So next Sunday, I dressed up. I was sure he was going to call us all up there, but he didn't. I was somewhat disappointed.
The next Sunday, I dressed up again, and again, nothing.
The next Sunday, I wore my old tattered jeans and tennies and a Dallas Cowboys t shirt and my hair in a ponytail.
They were just getting ready to dismiss when the pastor announced that a new couple wanted to join the church. He went on at length about who they were and where they had come from. Then I saw his eyes scan the audience and light on me for a second, as he paused and said that anyone else wanting to join should also come up and stand with them. I was horrified (why do always seem to get caught out in my worst fashion moments?) to realize I was going to have to stand in a receiving line with all these people. But knowing it was right gave me a boldness I didn't know I had. I stepped out in front of a large room full of strangers and gave myself over to three hundred handshakes, hugs, and congratulations, and one "it's about time".
So to make a long story short, I began going every Sunday. It was strange how the sermons always seemed to be spoken to me personally. It was probably six months before I began to go on Sunday nights, as well. This led to being invited to a home group, and this led to a Bible study on Monday mornings, and prayer on Tuesday mornings.
No longer was I sleeping away the day, angry at myself for wasting my life. There wasn't enough time to feel sorry for myself anymore. Even if I had nowhere to go, I still stayed up. I started to feel like I would miss something if I went to sleep. I began to spend time in my own personal worship every single day, because all of a sudden there was a love affair going on in my heart with Jesus Christ, and I would do anything to keep from losing it.
All this has led me to a place I have never been before. I feel like I am on the precipice of the unknown and God is asking me to step off with Him. Whatever the unknown is, I want to go there.

Getting There

2009-03-07T08:41:00.001-08:00

This time I didn't throw it, I swear. The screwdriver fell off the top of the ladder and landed point down and the bit embedded itself in the wooden sub floor. Now this led me to ask a question. Why DOES the screwdriver always land bit first and not the heavy end with the battery first?
Anyway, I dug it out and put it back in the screwdriver but somewhere along the line I must have lost the little bearing that holds the bit in because I spent the next two hours chasing it, as I would get to the top of the ladder and poise the screwdriver and it would fall out and down to the floor. Why did I not get another bit, you ask? Because the wood in the ceiling is so hard the screws do not want to go all the way in and all my bits are stripped. This is my last good tip and I only had maybe ten square feet left to put up, so I decided to just go with what I had rather than take the time to go buy a new one.
I did think at one point, that I was going to lose my mind. I made all of the measurements for cutting the very last piece of drywall (and for once they were exactly right and I was SO proud of myself). I marked them all. I got ready to cut the piece to fit. Then I realized...I HAD MADE ALL THE MEASUREMENTS ON THE WRONG SIDE OF THE DRYWALL!! When I put it up against the ceiling the backside of the drywall would be seen. So I turned it around with a big, big sigh (and only one cuss word) and started over.
BUT it got done.
Today I am going to compound all the joints. Then I'm going to texture. Then paint and carpet and trim. This has been a mammoth project. I'm so glad it's finally going to be over.
I would post pictures but they would be boring. I will post pics as soon as the texturing and paint and carpet go on.

Wallpaper

2009-02-12T13:29:00.000-08:00

I know this is a dark picture but if I turn the light on you can't see any of the wallpaper. I really love it. I just hope it stays this way. Normally I am not a big fan of wallpaper but the existing walls behind the paper are in terrible shape. I knew I would never get a good looking paint job out of it. Also I still have to put in crown moulding and trim. The bottom of the room will be covered in bead board. There will be a very small pedestal sink and a mirror below the light fixture.

Once upon a time all the wallpaper was completed in this bathroom. After the bathroom fiasco from (can it be a year already?) last Feb. I ripped everything out and replaced everything from the floor up, including tile, toilet and Sheetrock. By the time I got to the wallpaper I was really excited because it was really coming together. Besides I really loved this wallpaper. I had never hung wallpaper before but it looked easy. The bathroom is really small, only thirty sq. feet so, I figured, how hard could it be. The first tip off should have been the unlevel floor. And the fact that each Sheetrock piece had to be measured and cut individually because of the uneven height of the walls. So when I put up the first piece of paper I was confounded by fact that what should fit did not fit exactly. Nevertheless I persevered and managed to get the whole bathroom papered. I was really pleased that it worked out so well. The paper was lined up perfectly, all the triangles fit together in the pattern and you could barely distinguish where the seams were. Then I put it all up and happily went on vacation for two weeks. When I got back I took a peek in there and was horrified to find that the wall had moved while I was gone. The wallpaper which had been dry for a week before I left, and perfect, was now dragging down in one corner. There were bubbles all along the corner. It looked terrible. Then I stepped further into the bathroom and my heart just fell to the ground as I saw that not one, but THREE corners had moved while I was gone. Once again, a perfect project had gone awry. I was really mad at the house for a week or two. I took it personally. I was having to redo everything two and three times even when I DIDN'T make any mistakes. No wonder this reno is taking forever.
So I ripped down the corners and redid them. I'm sorry to say that I could not make the seams match as perfectly as before. I hate settling. (ha ha, that was a pun).
Today was a gorgeous day. I set up the wallpaper on my kitchen counter and set to work. It was all done in a couple of hours. Let's hope this time it lasts.
I had the same issue with the dishwasher "settling" the other day. I spent two hours trying to get it level with my counter, because it had never been installed properly (thanks Home Depot). They told me when I called to tell them I wanted it fixed right that it would cost me seventy five dollars to have them come out again. I declined to be ripped off a second time.
So it's been a problem. The legs don't hold it up anymore and the brackets that screw to the underside of the counter have bent with the weight of it. The doors wouldn't shut properly because it was unlevel and (something I can't fix) the inside racks are rusting to the point that the top tray has come apart and is always falling off when I load it. Did I mention that this dishwasher is only four years old?
So I spent quite a long time working on it, making it fit just right. When I was done it was perfect. I had made some shims to put under the legs, it was level, the door was shutting just right. I went to bed and when I woke up the next morning I saw that the dishwasher had kicked out again on the bottom, no longer resting on my perfectly made shims and the brackets were once again bending with the weight. Grrr...

A Mystery

2009-01-21T20:31:00.000-08:00

Before I unpainted it with the missing piece still unknowingly out in the shed.

temporarily set in place to see what it would look like.

So we had a warm day last week and I spent it cleaning out the old shed in the back of the yard. After I finished cleaning and the shed was completely empty of junk, I looked in the back against the wall and there was a lone piece of iron about three feet tall. I immediately realized that it must go to the stairs, but where? I had never noticed any missing posts even though I spent quality time with that stair rail. It was rusty, as if it had been outside, but other than that I could find no defect, and as a bonus it was still black. I brought it in and immediately made the connection. It goes at the top of the stair, right up against the newel. The questions remain, however about why it was out there? Did they take it away so they could paint the newel and just decide it was too much trouble to put back? Were they so tired of painting (what I just unpainted) they just gave up before they got to the last one?
I doubt I will ever solve that mystery, but one thing's for sure. It definitely looks better with the mystery piece installed and I intend to put it back first chance I get.

Back to the Old Grind

2009-01-21T18:44:00.000-08:00

Detail of the chandelier crystals

Years and years of paint buildup on the door. There were at least four different colors, the most hideous of which was this ugly green.

The view before and after of the door featuring the neighbor's house across the street. I stained the wood a Bombay Mahogany, which I LOVE. I also finally got around to adding to my chandalier the rest of crystal tiers that I won on EBAY two Christmas's ago. Somebody was breaking up a set of crystals and selling them in lots of twenty. I couldn't believe I ran across an exact match for mine. I bid an exorbitant amount (and found out that EBAY is like gambling for me, I have to stay away) and lost. I was really pumped up, with heart racing and sweating and hands shaking, and ticked off when I lost the bid. I thought about nothing else all week until the following week I saw the second lot for sale. I got pumped up again and was high as a kite on adrenalin when I outbid somebody and got them for a third of what I would have paid for the others. After that I decided to stay away from EBAY because it could be dangerous for my health.

c

After quite a long hiatus from any reno work I resumed working on the front door yesterday. It has been quite a long journey from start to finish, and I still have to apply just one more coat of stain to the frames around the window panes, but I am finally close to completion. Here are a few before/after photos to compare. True the door now makes the room appear darker but I wouldn't trade the results for anything. I wish I had better photos, but I am still relying on my camera phone for pics. *sigh*. In the process of reclaiming the original door I discovered that the hinges are made of copper. This was a happy coincidence for me, as I had already replaced all of the light switch plates and outlet covers with copper.

Drowning in Junk

2009-01-16T21:27:00.000-08:00

The weather for the last couple of weeks has been jumping up and down like a Mexican jumping bean. We have a couple of really warm seventy degree days and then we will have a couple of frigid 23 degree days. On the cold days I huddle up in my bedroom and thank God for central heat. On the warm days I try to catch up on the housecleaning and do small projects around the house.
One of these small projects was bringing back my "coffee lounge". A couple of years ago I had the idea of turning my breakfast nook, a square area about ten by ten right off the kitchen, into a lounge. It seemed ideal because two of the three sides are entirely windows and the light is phenomenal in there. So I dragged in my big easy chair that had previously been in the living room and brought in a table and a bookshelf and a red rug for the floor, and presto, it was a cozy little nook. I was happy with this arrangement right up until Christmas when I began the yearly debate with myself about where to put the tree this year. I finally decided that this year I wanted to have a "Christmas room". So I took everything out, except the bookshelf, because it weighs about a million pounds, and set up the tree. Problem. I bought a huge tree for a room with huge ceilings. Originally the tree went in the living room, where we have twelve foot ceilings. This was a seven and a half foot tree and I was trying to cram it into a room with a seven foot ceiling. So I put in on the edge of the coffee lounge, not in it, where the ceiling is about nine feet high.
With Christmas over I decided to redo the whole lounge thing. You know, really do it up. One of those warm days I went out to the shed in search of my "Black Stallion" book collection that I had as a teenager. As I opened up the shed door I was once again amazed at all the junk I have been carrying around all these years. The shed is full of it. I began going through the boxes looking for the books, but was soon distracted by things I had once treasured but were now forgotten. Oh, there was my half of the chess set that my BFF and I bought to share. Many of the pieces were broken and chipped. I dug them out of the bottom of a box of discarded papers and put them in a pile to bring in the house. Papers, there were so many of them. Boxes and boxes of papers. I have been keeping bill boxes since I got married almost seventeen years ago. Also kids school papers, year by year. And books. Cartons and cartons of books. I stood back and surveyed all the stuff. All the "junk in my trunk", you might say. I am thinking that this new year is going to start off with a purge of sorts. I am going to go through all that stuff and ditch out the things that are not valued anymore, like the large mirror the movers broke on the trip over. Why do I still have that? After I finish cleaning out the shed I am going to purge my closets. The closets have been a sore spot of mine for several years. I have offered to pay my kids to clean them for me, but they took one look at the job and wanted more pay than I was willing to give. I just didn't have the heart to make them do it just because I said so. I have grown weary of opening the door and having stuff fall out on the floor. Of not being able to walk inside without stepping on something and breaking it. (was that a VHS of Barney, I just stepped on? The question is not why do I still have that, it's why did I EVER have that. Not to mention my youngest child is almost eleven. There hasn't been any Barney watching in this house in about eight years.)
In the same way that our physical lives need purging from time to time, our spiritual lives need it too. I get so caught up in TV (CSI four hours a day on SPIKE TV) and the Internet and just everyday stuff that God's still small voice is shouted down by the loud stuff going on in my little world.
So this month I am taking time off. I can't believe I'm saying this, but no TV for me til the end of the month. I'm cleaning out the "junk" in my spiritual trunk. Hopefully it will make me less stressed and frantic about how out of control my life has become and get me back where I need to be.
Oh and the coffee lounge looks great. And now that I've put TV on the side, I have time for all the art projects I have been wanting to do, but not doing, because "there just isn't enough time in the world to do it all" (said in an annoying whiny voice). Correction: There is all the time in the world for the things we really value.

Pretending

2009-01-09T14:46:00.001-08:00

The window on the right is now clean. Tomorrow I will clean its twin and eventually I will get around to its forty two other brother and sisters.

Hello folks, it's been a long time, almost six weeks since I have written anything new. With Christmas and then being sick for over a week after Christmas, this is the first day I have felt energetic enough to do anything more than lay in bed all day and feel sorry for myself while honing my computer scrabble skills.
So today I woke up feeling pretty good. The sun was shining which probably accounted for about 90% percent of my mood change. That SADD syndrome really gets to me in the winter time.
I decided that it was time to put away the tree and reclaim my house from all the Christmas finery.
Trotting from the house to the shed with the tree parts and all the various boxes, I could almost pretend it was spring already. The wind was blowing and the air was balmy. The sun was shining and there were big fluffy clouds in the sky. I cleaned up all the needles left behind by my ever shedding tree and then caught sight of that broken window left behind from a birthday party we had in October. My son turned fourteen and about fifteen boys spent the weekend. I lost a window pane and a curtain rod before it was all said and done. Because the glass was firmly set into the putty, I had put off removing it, until now. As I worked the broken glass out of the old window, I dropped a piece down in between the window and the storm window. Problem: This particular window, as many of the windows are in my forty four window house, was completely painted shut. Sealed off. Unassailable. Well, unopenable, anyway. I uttered an oath or two. I knew I would have to get the window open to get the glass out, as it wasn't just a little piece that fell, it was half the pane. Maybe I should say it was half the "pain".
Anyway, I have done this a few times, so I gathered the tools. Putty knife, hammer, screwdriver. I applied the knife to the painted areas, separating the window from the window sash and sides, and used the screwdriver to remove the caulk from around the ropes on the sides. I used the hammer to drive the putty knife down the sides of the window, through all the years and layers of caked on paint. Then I applied all my strength into pulling upward on the window to get it open. Nothing. Not even close. Again with the putty knife, hammer, and screwdriver. Again, it wouldn't even begin to budge. Again and again I went over it. I almost gave up. Finally after over an hour, I felt it pop free. I raised the window, slowly, as all the accumulated dirt between the storm window and the sash became apparent. Then I removed the storm window and the screen and cleaned the window with Windex, something I have been wanting to do for a long, long time. It really bothers me to look at the outside world through dirty windows. The problem is that there are so many windows. Each one is a project in itself, in that they all have to be unsealed, and all the storms have to be disassembled to be cleaned properly. It seems crazy that the thing which attracted me most about this house, the many windows, is the thing that bothers me the most, because of the maintenence involved.
I have thought several times that I don't have forty four windows, I actually have eighty eight windows.
That's a lot of Windex, folks.
Oh, and as far as the pretending goes, I'm also pretending that I'm rich and that I'm not fat, as well.
I'll get back to reality tomorrow.

A Screeching Halt

2008-12-05T07:14:00.000-08:00

Old Man Winter has made his debut and I am loathe to leave my warm bedroom upstairs to traverse the cold halls of downstairs unless I have to, so all work has come to a halt until things warm up just a little. (We have Central AC/heat upstairs, space heaters, a gas fireplace downstairs, which don't do a whole lot to take the chill out of the air) Actually, at 29 degrees, my sister, who lives in South Dakota, would say I'm just a baby, and that it wasn't really that cold. When I was talking to her yesterday morning, she told me that it was only seven degrees, and it would only get up to sixteen for the whole day, with snow expected. So I guess I won't complain (too much), but as I say, work here is on hold.

The Trouble With Hammers

2008-11-03T20:19:00.000-08:00

I really got moving this weekend. I didn't get all the projects on my list done by a long shot. Well, to be completely honest I didn't get any of them done, but I came really close to finishing a couple of them. One of these projects was the wall around the built in AC in our living room. One of these days I will have HVAC in my downstairs as well as the up but for now I have to live with these non energy efficient ugly pieces of junk until I can afford the six thousand dollars it's going to cost me to put it in. Or until I convince my husband that the unit we have in the LR is costing us too much money and we need a new one.
So last year I felt wetness in the carpet near the AC and thought it was leaking. Having pulled up the carpet near there once and seen a large stain where there was a previous leak. I was immediately suspicious. I wanted to see if the unit was leaking into the wall and down onto the floor so I cut off a small piece of drywall, probably about two by three feet, and the baseboard. In retrospect I feel really stupid because it wasn't leaking and there was no mold, somebody probably just spilled something there. (I found out later the cat "spilled" something there. She is now an outside cat.)
So behind the drywall was solid wood walls. I didn't have time right away to replace the drywall so the bare spot in the wall has been sitting there staring at me for *muffled number* years. I'm embarrassed to say how long it has taken me to finally get around to this. So much other stuff was way before this on my long list of things to do.
I decided this weekend I just couldn't look at it anymore. I cut out the Sheetrock and fit it in and replaced the baseboard. I got out my plaster and filled in the holes that taking off the old baseboard had made. I thought this was the hard part. I dusted off my hands and went to bed.
The next day, plaster having dried, I painted it to match the walls. It looked great. You couldn't tell there had ever been a hole. Then I decided to make a mitred frame to surround the AC. It had previously had these really ugly dated doors on it (If you're thinking Snooker here, you'd be right. Only these didn't have the painted on cue balls.)
I had ripped them off a long time ago.
I had a bunch of trim out in the garage that I bought but never used. I went out and brought some in along with my mitre box and saw. A job this small wouldn't need any power tools.
HA! Little did I know I was in for the worst afternoon of my LIFE.
The problem is that I suck at math. I suck at angles. I suck at cutting with a mitre saw. I suck at measuring. And when I realize how bad I suck I start to get mad. This was one of those times. I'm ashamed to say that I was very liberal with my curse words. I'm sure the neighbors enjoyed the show. I re cut the top and bottom pieces of the trim THREE different times. There had been an excess of that trim in my garage, but not anymore. By the time I was done there were little chopped up pieces all over my floor. I finally got it right, but there wasn't even a quarter of an inch to spare. Then I got to nailing. This is where things really went south. I don't have a nail gun so I had to use the old tried and true claw hammer. I have a little one and monster sized one. I tried the little with some little trim nails, about an inch long. I don't know what I was thinking. By the time the nails made it through the trim they were too short to hold to the half inch drywall, much less to the solid wood behind it. So I dug through my nail box (an odd collection of old leftover nails from previous projects in which I bought a box and only used a couple) and got some longer ones. Ditto. THEY weren't long enough. Then I got really mad and got some mambo sized nails. about three inches long and kind of thick, but they had the right kind of heads. I also got out the monster hammer. (Ha HAA! I'll teach those boards a thing or two!) These worked but you had to hammer like H E double hockey sticks to get them in. I was tired and dirty after sitting there trying to make this thing work for like THREE hours, so I put a nail in and drew back the hammer and let it go fast and hard about ninety miles an hour. I let her rip. Only...I missed. Instead I got the end of my finger full on with the head of the hammer against the wall. I screamed really loud and my daughter came running from the other room. "Are you OK, Mom?" I couldn't answer coherently, so I just banged the hammer on the floor over and over and over. NO NO NO! She must have thought her mother had lost her marbles. There I was rolling around on the floor kicking my feet and banging the hammer on everything in sight. Who knew there were so many nerve endings in the tip of a finger?
After a few minutes I was able to speak and let her know I was OK. Then I determined that I would not be stopped for any reason, now I was REALLY going to finish this project and be done, working fingers or no.
And that's what I did. I finally finished it and tomorrow I paint it and the baseboard and then this project is finished.
I was telling my ten year old about smashing my nail with the hammer and she looked at me and said "That's the trouble with hammers!" I was immediately inspired to write a blog entry with that as the title.
Also this weekend I finally got all the old paint off the front door. It took hours with the sander and fifteen pieces of sandpaper and made a HORRENDOUS mess in the house, which Tom helped me clean up.(without asking!) The only bad part of that project was one sickening moment when I was sitting on the floor and scooted backwards, not realizing there was a piece of sandpaper under my butt. Of course it was upside down and left about an eight inch scratch on my beautiful hardwood floor. AAAHHH! It's not super noticeable, but I sure do see it every time I walk by and won't rest until I can fix it.
But speaking of rest. It's late and my finger hurts so I am going to bed.

Sand Storm

2008-10-30T19:56:00.000-07:00

So as you can see I got out the sander and made a huge mess. I got about half of the door sanded and ran out of sandpaper. At that point I had to clean up because the kids were coming home from school and I still didn't have Halloween costumes for them. It took me about an hour just to get the dust cleaned up off the furniture, the carpet, the stairs. It was just a mess. Finally I got it all cleaned up and went Halloween shopping. I came back with THIS.

Yes, I had to do it. Sherruff Sam. Notice the gun holster at his side. All that's missing in this picture is the silver star that I am going to pin on his gun belt. I can't wait to take him trick or treating.

Last Minute Rush (Before Winter)

2008-10-29T20:24:00.000-07:00

A close up of all those layers of paint on the door with an unintentional view of the house across the street.

How it looked when we first moved in. Notice the lovely fake parquet floor.

I've been having a problem with motivation. The problem is I'm just tired and don't feel like working on the house. I'd rather sit around on my computer all day and drink coffee, especially on the cold days. I have found on the days that I give in and do nothing I feel depressed at the end of the day because no progress has been made. Living in your renovation can sure have it's drawbacks.
Anyway, I decided to actually do something today, and that was to work on the front door. I have been working on the foyer for about two years and the front door is one of the last projects I have to finish. Actually the foyer has been many small projects rolled into one big project. It started with removing the old square parquet tiles covering the gorgeous oak floor, then removing the glue that was left. Then the stripping and staining and poly-ing that went on forEVer. The removal of the stair rail to be stripped of it's white paint was next and then the paint on the walls. Almost all that is left is the threshold entering the living room(just one more coat of stain and poly, and it's just one strip of three inch board) and the front door. When I moved in the door was painted white. I added to the layers and painted it cream. Then I decided I wanted to strip it completely and stain it a deep mahogany. I started stripping it about the time I first started stripping the floors, about two years ago. I found out there were a LOT of layers of paint, including a really pukey green hidden almost at the very bottom. (The same ugly green as K's room was, and the original stair risers, and the ceilings in both girls rooms, and the original wallpaper hidden behind the fireplace; The original owner must have had a thing for green.)
One day the summer before last I decided to take the door off. I didn't realize how heavy it was until all the hinges were out and it was resting with it's full weight on my arms. Tom was out of town, which left just me and my twelve year old(at the time)to carry it outside to be stripped. It must have been a couple of hundred pounds. It isn't one of those cheap hollow core doors, this thing is solid. The whole house shakes if somebody slams it. It has intricate detail around the windows and they were caked with eighty years of paint. As soon as I got it outside and really got into the job it started raining, don't you know. I had to get my twelve year old to help me get it back inside and back up. I never did finish getting all the paint off, especially in the grooves around the window panes.
So, as I say, I decided to do something with my day besides bite my nails over the presidental election. I got out my supplies and set to work. I stripped and scrubbed with an old toothbrush and stripped and scrubbed some more. After about three hours I had removed very little. The stuff was baked on or something. It just wasn't coming off, especially in the intricate areas. Finally I had to clean it up and get on with cleaning up the house. I neglected to do the daily cleaning so I could have more time to work on the door, and as a result Tom ended up cooking while I was doing housework.
So, back to the drawing board tomorrow. I think I'm just going to sand the door itself (*sigh*I swore I would never sand ANYthing inside the house again) and maybe go buy a dremmel to get in the small areas. I am so looking to being done, done DONE with this foyer project which has turned out to be the mother of all projects. This weekend Tom and I have slated to be a happy family work weekend. Well, the kids are not going to be happy about it, but we have about seven different things going on that are all near completion and we just need to get on with it. So hopefully by Monday we will have the drywall completely done in K's room, the wallpaper back up in the bathroom (that will be another blog), the front door done, the drywall back up around the A.C. in the living room( I thought there was mold behind the wall and removed a small piece to make sure there wasn't. There wasn't.) The carpet in the living room needs cleaning, and the yard needs to be mowed one last time before winter and last but not least I need to disconnect the fountain's solar pump before we get a freeze. And as long as I'm dreaming, I need all my closets and junk drawers cleaned out, my desk cleaned and paperwork sorted and a million dollars to finish this renovation and somebody to buy me a new bed with a tempurpedic mattress. Of course then I'll never want to get out of bed to do the work. Talk about your motivation problems...but I'm willing to take that chance.

Finally...

2008-10-18T17:42:00.000-07:00

Before...

After

...a step forward instead of back. Today there was PROGRESS. We had a really beautiful fall day. The problem was so much to choose from, as far as projects go. Clean the garage...work on K's room...work on the front door...and as always, housecleaning.
We opted for something that wasn't even on the list. While we were surveying the garage for trash and stuff to give to Goodwill, my husbands eyes lit on the now finished stair rail. I had been waiting to finish the foyer floor before getting it back up. I decided last week after the last application of poly that I was through with that, so why not.
Of course no project shared between us is complete without SOME kind of argument sharp words, or at the least, rolled eyes.
This started off with him asking if I knew where the screws were to put the thing back in the wall. "Of course, I do", I replied very scornfully, as if to say, "I NEVER lose things, fool."
All the while, my mind was searching frantically, because I couldn't remember what I had done with them. I don't know why I just couldn't be honest and admit I had lost them. So I went in the laundry room, (we keep our tools in there on shelves) which is the last place I saw them, and rooted around for awhile, but no dice. To make matters worse he kept popping his head in and asking "Have you found them yet?" I found myself starting to mutter angrily at myself again, just like when we were working on K's room.
Finally I spotted some screws that looked like they COULD be the ones. We tried them out and they seemed to fit. I was unsure they were the ones that actually came from the rail originally, but I wasn't about to tell HIM that.
We brought it in,very carefully so as not to scratch the new finish on the floor and between the two of us managed to get it up. The last time it was up it was white and the floor was those seventies wooden square parquet squares. The risers on the stairs also had parquet tiles. They weren't glued to the risers, either. They were glued to the back of some pieces of paneling cut to fit the space and THAT was glued to the stairs. Taking them off was so much fun. NOT. When I stood back and looked
I was unprepared for the beauty of the black wrought iron paired with the now refinished 80 year old oak floor. It took my breath away.
And a further surprise when I came downstairs at dusk. I had turned on the small stained glass hall lamp next to the rail. The resulting shadows on the floor were stunning. It reminded me of a violin scroll. I had been considering having the bulbous round part of the bottom of the stair rail removed because a)I didn't like it, and b)it took up too much space.
I changed my mind.
I love my hall.

I Thought This was Supposed to be a Comedy...

2008-10-04T21:54:00.000-07:00

I will not throw my power tools across the room
I will not throw my power tools across the room
I will not throw my power tools across the room
I will not throw my power tools across the room
I will not throw my power tools across the room...

Lately I think my "Comedy" is turning into a tragedy worthy of Shakespeare himself. I have been working like mad to get the ceiling in K's room drywalled, before T (okay I can't stand this Acronym business, I'm just going to call him Tom) gets home. He stated before he left that he was NOT going to do the ceiling. I decided that we were. So I waited until he left and then I went to the new hardware store down the street and bought a bunch of quarter inch Sheetrock. The first part wasn't so hard, I had help, (my tall daughter and her tall ex boyfriend) and the ceiling was low. It changes angles at about four feet in and goes from slanted and low to straight across and nine feet high. So I got most of it done before he came home.
Today I went in today to finish the high part. (I did some last night, all by myself, to my own amazement)
Things soon got difficult. I would carry the four by four feet pieces up on my head, making sure I had the screwdriver at the top of the ladder and plenty of screws, go to the top and use my head and forearm to hold it in place while I used the other arm to load the screwdriver and screw the piece on. I found myself using increasingly vulgar words. The screws kept falling out of the screwdriver and off of the ladder and I couldn't hold the Sheet rock straight. My back and arms were killing me. The screws didn't want to go into the old hard wood. I began to feel sorry for myself. I started muttering angrily out loud. I felt even sorrier for myself when nobody came to find out what I was muttering about. I knew I had lost control when I began stabbing one of the pieces of Sheetrock with my screwdriver. Over and over I let it have it. Then I threw my screwdriver from the top of the ladder across the room. Then I quit.
Hours later, sitting here recounting my experience, I find myself chuckling. Maybe it is a comedy after all. Of course I am ashamed that I let myself get so out of control. I should NEVER have thrown my power tool. (not the first time, though, last week, I threw it down onto a pile of Sheetrock four deep and it landed point down like a pole with a screwdriver flag. That WAS kind of funny.
The ceiling should be completed by tomorrow evening. I just have some small pieces down either side of the room. All the big pieces are up. All I have to do is mud and tape and the room will be ready for paint. And I promise not to throw the paint brush across the room...unless I have PMS -then I make no promises...

FLOORED

2008-10-01T19:36:00.001-07:00

Does this looke like satin to you? This is after it dried. You can clearly see the line between the previous application and the new application.

Well, I'm floored. I can't believe it. I want to scream and cry and throw things. I have been working on the foyer floor for a year and a half. I have been waiting for everyone to be gone from the house at one time (which almost never happens) so that I could put the final coat of poly on. (Last time I tried to poly with people at home, Tee tried to jump over the wet area and tripped on the stairs and almost broke his leg. I decided then that it wasn't worth killing a family member to fix the house, I would wait to do floors until the house was empty.)
Today was the day. Tee was on a business trip, the kids at school. I planned the whole day around finishing the floor. I swept it, I cleaned it with wood cleaner, I got the tack cloth out and got up every smidgen of dust. Then I got out my brand new can of Minwax Fast Drying Satin Polyurethane. I opened the can and stirred it up and then began the application with my brand new brush. It looked great. I only did a small strip, about three feet wide by about five feet across, because I wanted to be able to get up my stairs, and because since that is the area in the house that gets the most foot traffic that part needed another coat.
I put up the supplies and straightened up the house and went upstairs to pay bills and watch TV.
After a couple of hours I realized it wasn't drying. I went to the garage and got a little fan and closed all the windows and turned on the AC full blast, thinking that lowering the humidity would help. A little while later, while looking at it, I reached down and touched it. OMG. It WAS dry. I broke out in a cold sweat. Those of you who have read my previous blogs about all the trouble I have had with the foyer floor will know why I suddenly felt sick in the pit of my stomach. Why why WHY???! I went and looked at the can. Yes, the can said SATIN, plain as day. But the floor was now as glossy as it could be. Now I had a floor that was three fourths satin and one fourth glossy.
Now I could just do the whole floor glossy, but that is not what I wanted. This hundred year old floor is imperfect. I wanted to give it a satin shine so that every little divot, speck of dust and minute dip in the wood (especially with all the trouble with the belt sander, before) would not show.
So I called Minwax, and they tried to tell me that I didn't stir it. I told Minwax that yes I did stir it. They checked the batch number and said they hadn't had any trouble with that batch. They offered to refund me the money for the can, and told me I could use some fine sandpaper (I will use steel wool) and scuff it up and then apply the finish I intended. All I know is This means a whole lot more work on that foyer floor, when I would have been totally finished tomorrow.

Water Heater Woes

2008-10-01T19:32:00.000-07:00

Well, apparently the water heater is jealous of all the attention the air conditioner has been getting lately, because it continues to cause me problems.
I called the plumber to check out the thermostat a couple of weeks ago, and he replaced it (no sweat, 20 minutes and 40 dollars).
But then a couple of days ago it began leaking from the top, right under under the valve that turns the water on and off to the heater. The water was running down the back and into the drain pain and then dripping on the floor. Tommy got up on a chair and tightened the valve and it stopped running and we thought that was the end of it. I put a bucket underneath to catch the residual water runoff that was still dripping on the floor and then walked away and forgot about it.
Again we come to the beginning of the weekend and again, we are strapped for cash, when standing at the stove in the kitchen I hear a suspicious little "drip". I look around the corner and see that the little trash can is full to the top with water. This alarms me because it has been three full days since Tee fixed the valve. This should have dried up by now. Apparently that residual drip was not from the top of the water heater, but it must have been coming from inside the water heater. Again I called the plumber and he came out and confirmed that the water heater has ruptured. We are going to have to buy a new one.
That said, I decided to do some more research on the Internet. I have been thinking for a long time that when the water heater finally kicked the bucket I would go ahead and get a tankless. They are supposedly more energy efficient (thirty percent savings over the tank style for gas, and seventy percent savings for electric), supposedly you never run out of hot water, they take up less space, and if you get them installed by someone who knows what they are doing and you get a quality brand they can last up to twenty years.
So I got on my computer and immediately became inundated with all kinds of information that clogged up my brain in a hurry. I've heard of MPG, but how about GPM (that's gallons per minute). In order to make a good decision about which kind would be the best for your home, this is something you need to know. Do you need a whole house heater that can run more than one major application at a time, such as a shower a dishwasher and a sink? ( A shower runs about one and a half gallons per minute, ditto, for the dishwasher, so for two applications you would need something that runs at least three gallons a minute. As much hot water as we use, based on the six hundred fifty dollar electric bill we got last month, I think we need one that heats about seventy five GPM) Or if you have a smaller household, can you just get by with something that will only heat enough water for one application at a time, such as a dishwasher. After you read that line two or three times, then you move on to the electrical. How many amps do you need? Do you have enough "amperage" (for lack of a better word) in your fuse box, or do you need to have a special fuse box made just for the water heater? How cold is the weather in the winter where you live? Because the difference between the low temperature outside and how warm you want the water determines how hard your water heater is going to be working to keep your shower hot. And whatever you do, DON'T let the plumber attach copper lines to your steel applicance, or you will have corrosion and failure in five or six years, And by the way, you will have to have both a plumber AND an electrician out to install the thing after you finally decide which one is best for you.
Anyway, I'm taking a roundabout way to say that I was somewhat intimidated by all the information.
I haven't made a decision, yet. I would really like to get a tankless, despite the fact that I feel like I am in over my head. The problem of course is the cost. I found one I really like but it's a thousand dollars, BEFORE the installation. Now THAT'S intimidating

Post script.
I intended to buy a new one right away but the dripping slowed down and finally stopped, enabling me to save a little bit of money for it before the end of the water heater's life. We finally decided after much debate that we just couldn't afford to put in a tankless at this time, and that as much hot water as we use for our family of five, that this would not be the best choice for us anyway. Finally one day, while I was at the very end of a long drive home from visiting my Dad and almost home, I got a frantic call from Tommy. He was shouting into the phone "How do you turn off the $%&*^$%^$*& WATER!! It's everywhere! I can't get it to stop!"
I put my foot to the floor and got home in record time and by this time he had found the shutuff, and was mopping up a big mess in my laundry room.
I called around, of course you KNOW it was a weekend and plumbers were charging a premium. I had one estimate of 1200 dollars to replace the one we had with one exactly like it. Thinking this was a little pricey I called Home Depot, ordered one over the phone and they delivered and installed it the next day. The whole thing only cost me six hundred dollars and I have not had a water heater worry since that day.

The Impossible Becomes Possible

2008-10-01T18:40:00.000-07:00

I changed my mind. I decided I absolutely did not want to do the drywall in K's room. I really wanted professionals to do this job. I didn't want to screw it up, and I knew I would. I again put her room on the back burner, for a month or two.
Then one day, Tee talked me into putting up one piece. Just one. I put it up, and hated it. I took it down. I put it up again, and took it down again. I hated the whole thing. I hated the weight, I hated the feel of it. I hated cutting it. I hated the way it crumbled if you looked at it wrong. I was primitively cutting the drywall with a box knife and a yardstick. It was backbreaking. I had wanted to use quarter inch Sheetrock but Tee made a shopping excursion without me one day, and had come home with half inch Sheetrock instead. I was more than a little ticked off about that, since I would have to be doing most of the work, that he didn't consult me before he changed the plan. Our budget, being constrained, as of late, he talked me into not hiring professionals. I reluctantly agreed that we would have to do it ourselves if we wanted it done.
Every day I would go in there and cut a piece and put it up. Sometimes Tee would come in and help me screw it into place. Every day it got a little harder for me to do. Mentally I was shot. Every time I would put up a piece I would worry that it wasn't exactly right. I would go to bed thinking about how I would change it in the morning. First thing the next morning I would take it down and start over. Tee began to make comments about how we never progressed because we kept putting up the same pieces over and over. I couldn't help it, I just wanted it to be RIGHT. Half arsed just wasn't good enough for me.
Then I started sneaking. I would wait for him to leave the room and sneak a piece down and try to replace it before he came back. It would be OK if it was done when he came back, and done better than when he left. Inevitably, however, he always seemed to catch me in the act. "What are you DOING?? Taking down ANOTHER piece?"
And there was the aggravating fact that as long as I was working alone I could do OK measuring. But if he came in and watched or tried to help I mismeasured every single piece and had to recut it. This began to really boil my blood. I would say "trust me, honey, I know what I'm doing. I know this doesn't look right, but it will come out right in the end." And then I would go to put it up and the outlet hole would be three inches too high or two inches too far to the right. EVERY SINGLE TIME!! I started to develop a complex. Every time I would hear him coming, I would start muttering to myself and be angry with him before he would even get in the room. He would come in and start to work, and after a few chilly minutes he would ask "are you mad at me?" "No." I would growl back. The person I was really angry at was myself, for being so incompetent.
But it got better. We made a trip to Lowe's and bought a whole bunch of new tools to work with. One of these tools was a SAWZALL. I had never seen one of these until Dad came to do the framing. I decided right away that I HAD to have one. What I didn't know, as I took it out of it's box and snapped the blade on is that it would cut drywall like butter. (said in a whispered voice, with much amazement).
The other thing that finally got us moving was the laser level. I had always wanted one, and now it made making the measurements on the drywall a dream. The room was not square so each piece had to be measured independently of each other, and each side of each piece had to be measured, as well, since one wall would be 88 inches tall on one side and 87 and a half on the other side of the wall. The numbers were mind boggling, and I am no math genius. But the laser level changed all that. I could make a mark on one side of the drywall and make the corresponding mark on the other side, use the level to line up the two marks and cut it with the SAWZALL in a matter of a couple of minutes. I finally stopped taking down the pieces because they were finally right. The room really started to come together.
Yesterday, I put in the final piece of drywall, and began mudding and taping. I stood looking around the room in amazement that the impossible had become possible. I could not believe that WE had made this happen. Then K came in and looked around and got the happiest grin on her face. She's finally going to get her room back. That makes me happy too.

So that's where we are at in our home renovation. Of course I realize that my other daughter (A's room) is going to have to go through the exact same thing. (later, MUCH later) The two rooms are exactly alike, running along one side of the house. They used to be one room, the old garage, when the house was built. So since they share that horrible green wall, we will have to remove the paneling we worked so hard to smooth out in there, back when we first moved in. We will have to do this whole drywall thing AGAIN!!

K's Room

2008-10-01T17:51:00.000-07:00

While I was thinking about whether or not we could or could not do the drywall in my daughter's (K's) room, I had a talk with my dad, who lives about five hours away. I asked if he knew anything about framing, and it so happened that he did. I asked if he would be willing to donate a weekend to help us frame up the room. It just so happened that he would. I began to be excited. Maybe we really COULD do this by ourselves.
That said, I waited anxiously for Dad to show up on Friday night. I didn't really expect him to start work right away, since he had been up since four thirty AM, and had worked all day at his own job. But, as I found out, there are still things, even after forty years that I am still learning about my Dad. He arrived and within ten minutes I heard him tearing down the rest of the paneling in K's room. I would have thought he would have been exhausted after a full day of work and a five hour drive on top of that.
Tee and I joined him, and in about fifteen minutes we had the rest of the paneling down and all of the walls exposed. Since Tee and I were celebrating our sixteenth wedding anniversary that night I talked them both into taking a rest then, and coming into the dining room to share some anniversary cake with me and my step mom, or Bonus Mom, as we call her now days.
The next morning, early, I awoke to the sounds of more demolition coming from the bedroom. Dad was already on the job, trying all by himself to remove a huge hearthstone that had taken up about an eighth of the room. The thing was about five feet long and must have weighed two to three hundred pounds. Between the two of us, we took it out to the yard, to be used in pieces in the garden, later on.
Then the framing began. Mostly Tee and my dad did the framing while I ran back and forth to the hardware store for supplies. This put my nose out of joint just a little, since I had been doing most of the reno work up to this point, and now felt like I was being pushed aside. I tried to contain my irritation, however, as I made a second, third, fourth, and then a fifth trip to the store.
One one of those trips, as I was checking out, my mind must have wandered. I had been sent to buy some non treated two by fours, and I looked straight at the lady and asked her if she had any non insulating insulation! She just looked at me blankly. My Bonus Mom looked at me with pity and started laughing. She didn't miss a beat. She looked at the girl behind the counter and said "It's alright, honey, were taking her back to the home, as soon as we get out of here!" Then I just started laughing. Did I really just say noninsulatinginsulation? Maybe I really DO have the early Alzheimer's.
I bricked in the hole where the old wood burning fireplace stood in times past (before us), removed all the loose masonry material, got rid of that awful plastic that was keeping everything up, used mortar to fill in all the large cracks, swept the room and finally we were ready to begin drywalling. That would be an uphill battle all the way.

The Nightmare Behind the Walls...

2008-10-01T10:00:00.000-07:00

I finished with the floor in the foyer and decided to take a break from reno for a while. I was worn out, tired and depressed. One day, feeling somewhat better, I decided the time had come to remodel my oldest daughter's bedroom. Her bedroom used to be the back half of the old thirties garage. It was very dark, with just one window and a door and beat up white paneling. I figured it would be an easy job to just replace the paneling with drywall, paint and recarpet. HA! how the gods must have laughed as I moved my daughter out of her room and into my youngest daughter's room. I told them it would only be temporary, just until we could get the other bedroom back in working order. HA! (Two years later, they are still in the same room)
I started by attacking that ugly white paneling. I pulled off a large piece and then I just stood there with my mouth open. I could not believe what that paneling had been hiding. Underneath was a green (ugly, ugly, thirties green) stucco? Concrete? at any rate some kind of masonry wall. The stucco was falling off. There were huge cracks and large pieces of it had fallen to the floor. The P.O.s (previouse owners) had placed plastic across the entire bottom half of the wall, I presume to hold in the pieces as they fell. I reached out and touched a loose piece of wall and watched it fall to the floor as my hand moved away. Worst of all there was no framing whatsoever. Behind the chipped cracked wall was the exterior brick of the house. The P.O.s had nailed one by twos into this masonry and then the paneling on top of that. The nails were not holding into the wall, they were loose and had actually worsened the cracking in the wall.
After a few minutes of looking at this, I decided to take a look at the other three walls. I pulled off some of the paneling around the door. It was even worse then the first.
At this point I knew I was in way over my head. I just left the paneling where it lay and walked out of the room. I pretty much gave up. What little knowledge I had about home renovation did not extend to framing and drywall.
So while that project was sitting on the back burner, I began working on my downstairs bathroom, the one that had previously had sewer problems. These problems being resolved, I decided now was the time to get it up and running again. You will recall from my last story that there was no toilet sink or walls left in there after the last sewer explosion.
I decided that I wanted to try to tile the bathroom. I had never tiled anything in my life before but I had seen it done so many times on HGTV and This Old House and so many other shows, that I felt really confident. (I used to work at Michael's doing demostrations on the latest craft ideas and got really got at reading and watching instructions on video and then following through with the project, so I knew I could do totally do this.)
I bought the tile (Hubby and I almost got divorced over the tile selection) and a tile saw and came home and got to work. I could not believe that for once, a project actually went the way it was supposed to go. I laid it all out, mixed the thinset according to the directions, troweled it out and laid the tile and made it as level as I could in the unlevel bathroom. Then I mixed the grout and applied it. It came out wonderful.
After the floor was done I decided to try my hand at a little drywall. I had left the top half of the drywall up, since the rising water had only damaged the lower half of the room. I measured and cut, and remeasured and recut. I'm not good at math, so I think I had to recut everything twice. They way "Measure twice cut once", but for me, I have to measure three times, just to get it right. But in the end I was successful. The drywall came out great. The electrician who came to put in the new light fixture was impressed when he found out I was the one who did the work.
This got me thinking. Maybe we could drywall my daughter's room, after all...

The Dark Side

2008-09-24T21:03:00.000-07:00

After we had been in the house about three years I began to sink down into what I call a "renovation depression". The fun had worn off and I was tired all the time and had seriously begun to question my sanity. I became really angry at the house for falling apart. About that time I watched a renovation show on TV where a guy who was a "flipper" bought a house unseen and was unprepared for the catastrophic events that would almost bring him to his knees. There were about twenty abandoned cats living in the vacant house along with a whole ecosystem of rats and roaches. They had to call in a hazmat team to clean it up, costing thousands and thousands of dollars. Then they found out the sewer was broken in several places and it cost about thirty six thousand more dollars than he estimated. Then his family quit helping him with his business and he was alone working on and financing that house. By the end of the show he was so stressed out that he beating up the cabinets with a sledgehammer and screaming "I HATE YOU HOUSE?!"
When he finally sold the house he stood outside and yelled "I BEAT YOU HOUSE!"
Of course, he was off his freakin' rocker. The guy was a nut. But nevertheless, I found myself identifying with him in my feelings about the house. That feeling of never getting ahead because you're stuck in the day to day maintenance of caring for the place almost overwhelmed me for a while.
Now days I feel better about things, even though there are those days when I want to scream "I HATE YOU HOUSE!". But since I haven't yet lost my sanity, although I have come close, I decided to go the civilized route and just write it all down. This is what I wrote.

I STOOD BACK and looked at the floor. Finished, at last. Three sandings on my hands and knees with three different sanders, one coat of cherry stain, and four coats of poly, and it was finally done. Instead of the usual rush of satisfaction, however, all I could muster was a sigh of relief to be through with this, the mother of all home renovation projects. That's when I knew that the honeymoon with the house was over. Oh, I still loved the house, but the joy I felt when I bought the house was gone, replaced now with an irritated feeling of just wanting to be finished with it all. I had, after all, been working on it for three and a half years, and had really only scratched the surface of things needing to be done. That was the rub. Still so much to do, and no matter how much I put into it, there always seemed to be something else needing to be fixed. How could I do the renovations when I was so busy trying to keep up with the regular maintenance on the house. I lay in bed and worried about it at night. I stared off into space thinking about it during the day. I shook my head in frustration every time I passed the bathroom down the hall with the wall paper hanging in shreds and the vinyl tile half off of the floor. I really was going to get around to finishing that project soon. As a matter of fact, now that the floor in the front hall was done, that was next on my list. Well, that is, after I get the air conditioner fixed, that started leaking freon and water, in the attic, last week.
I guess I'm just tired. Somewhere between the second and third sanding, on the downstairs hallway, the joy just evaporated. All I can think about if finishing fixing what I can, and moving to a place where I can put my feet up, and sip my coffee while I watch the kids play in the water hose, and not have to worry about getting back to sanding, or stripping wallpaper, or replacing worn out toilets. I just want my life back.

Renovation Blues

2008-09-23T18:20:00.000-07:00

I took this photo of the finished floor while it was still wet, thus the gloss. It actually dried to a beautiful satin finish.

IT WAS a really bad moment. I lay my head down on the floor from my kneeling position and cried. I had been working on the hardwood floor in my foyer for about six weeks, and this was the make or break moment. I was crushed.
From the first time I viewed the house, three years ago, I made a mental note to myself that the old seventies parquet wood tiles covering the foyer floor would have to go. They were worn out, and loose, and to my eyes, ugly. I knew there was real wood underneath, because I sneaked a peek underneath one of the loose ones, one day, not too long after moving in. There were other priorities on my to do list, however, so the foyer floor had to wait.
Now I had finally gotten around to getting all those tiles off. I literally sat on my hands and knees for about a week, pushing a screwdriver under each one, until it popped off. Underneath, I found about a quarter of an inch of hardened wood glue, covering about fifty square feet in total. Underneath that was a beautiful oak floor, just waiting for someone to bring it back to life. I was pretty optimistic about this project. I could get the glue off with some stripper, and then sand, stain, and poly. It would be easy. It would look great. No sweat.
Getting the glue off was messy and smelly, but finally I looked at the floor with satisfaction. It was pretty scratched up, but I thought it would be a piece of cake to clean it up.
I went to the store and bought a large roll of plastic, and sealed off the foyer from the rest of the house to eliminate dust. My husband and son have asthma, so keeping the dust down was a big priority. I began sanding with a little mouse sander, and quickly realized this wasn't going to work. Even though the space was small, it was taking too long. I decided to just go big and rent a sander from one of those do it yourself places. That said, I came home with the sander and set it all up. I started having problems right away, however, because the big buffer pad under the sand pad just wouldn't stay on. It kept coming off, and I kept getting irritated. Also it seemed to be putting out a lot of dust. I should have taken it back right away, but the store was an hour away, so I decided to make it work the best I could.
I finished the job and took it back, and then came home and got out the stain. The very first brush mark, I knew something was wrong. I hadn't been able to see the very large machine scratches on the floor when the wood was raw. With each brush of the stain, new scratches appeared. I just kept staining, in hopes that it wouldn't look too bad when it was done. When it was all done, I stood back and looked at it and realized that the scratches were about five feet long. And about two feet wide. I knew then that the rental sander had scratched up my floor. I called the store and got my money back, but I still had to do something about it. I considered calling in a professional, but my natural optimism talked me into having another go. I got out my trusty belt sander, and started over. Now I have had previous experience with the belt sander. I knew all about the little grooves left behind by a careless sander. That had happened upstairs, when my husband let my twelve year old have a try at sanding one of the floors. I was determined to be careful. And I was. It took about a week of sanding and not much of my sanity was left at the end. Every day I got up and put up that plastic curtain, and got to work. Every day that plastic stayed up just a little bit less until the final day, when it just fell down. Even thumb tacking it wouldn't make it stay. But the floor was done and it looked great.
Again I applied the first brushstroke and sat back and looked. Again my heart sank. As careful as I had been, little groove marks began to appear. I again kept staining, in hopes that it would get better. It didn't look as bad as last time, but it wasn't good either. Maybe a second coat of stain would help. I started the second coat, but something was wrong with the stain. It was coming out muddy looking and spotty and thick. I had made the classic mistake of using the can to paint from, rather than using the roller tray, and the pigment had all settled to the bottom. I tried to sand some of the spotty parts down a little, and then that optimism that kept getting me into trouble took over again. I decided it wasn't too bad, and to go ahead and polyurethane over it. I told myself it would be okay. I applied the poly and waited for it to dry...only it didn't. Eight hours later it was still sticky...and so shiny. Why was it so shiny? I looked at the can and sure enough I had grabbed the wrong can! The rest of the floors are done in a satin, and I had grabbed the super glossy. I just shook my head. How could one project go so wrong? I let it dry and then lightly sanded over the first coat so that I could apply another coat. But the more I sanded, the lighter the wood became, and those little ridges, almost invisible, before, began to appear. That was the moment that I broke. I just had nothing left.

I didn't know what to do, so for a week or so did nothing. Then that optimism slowly made it's way back, and I decided to try one more time. I got out my trusty palm sander and set to work. This time, everything went as planned, and today the eighty year old floor lives again. I wrote a Haiku about the whole situation. It goes like this:

I bought and old spent house
Made it new and wonderful
Now I'm old and spent.

That about says it all.

EPILOGUE:
My favorite part of this project was the patch I put in the floor. There had been a hole near the shoe moulding where an electrical cable once ran through, about an inch in diameter. I was watching This Old House sometime last year and it just so happened that Tom Silva was demonstrating how to fill a hole in a wood floor using a dowel. I remembered that episode and did exactly what he did. I cut a piece of dowel, placed it down in the hole, with wood glue. The dowel was just a little smaller than the hole, so I filled in around it with wood putty. Then when it was dry I got out my colored pencils and colored the putty to match the grain of the wood around it. The result was a patch that was an exact match to the rest of the oak floor. I then poly'ed over it. Today it is difficult to find the spot.

Bye Bye Snooker

2008-09-08T20:55:00.000-07:00

One day, with nothing much to do, I decided to get rid of the snooker cabinet. The P.O.s had used it for their stereo equipment, I presume to accompany the clink and click of longnecks and billiard balls. I also was using it to hold my vintage 1977 turntable and all of my eighties cassettes. It was large, probably about three feet deep and two feet wide and high. The back of it protruded into my laundry room, taking up precious space above my dryer, so it had to go.
Taking off the doors posed no problems. That only took a hammer and a few minutes. When I got the doors off, though, the problems began. The whole inside of the cabinet was made of plywood and screwed into the studs with four inch long wood screws. And they weren't coming out. Thus began a battle of wills between myself and those screws. They WERE coming out. One way or another. For an hour I fought and sweated and yelled and cursed the P.O.s and gave it everything I had until finally they began to give way. (Also I found out that demolition is a lot more fun and profitable if you can manage to have a fight with your spouse right before you pick up the hammer, but I digress.)
So I got all the plywood out, but now I had a large hole in the wall. Since the plywood on the inside of the cabinet had been flush with the outside wall there was nothing to apply the new drywall to.
So I improvised. I cut a two by four into small pieces and Tee screwed them into the side of the hole. Then I screwed a piece of plywood onto those and then the drywall on top of that. Taped and bedded and painted and was done. The transition from pool hall to dining room was complete.
I was really proud of the job. Until the next morning. When I went into the laundry room to do a load of laundry, I noticed that most of the screws had gone through the drywall and plywood into nothing. We had totally missed the two by fours holding the whole thing together. I stifled a wave of irritation at a once AGAIN project gone awry and added it to my already long list of things to be redone. But then as I walked away, I let out a chuckle as I thought about the dynamics of bad screwjobs. Oh get your mind out of the gutter. You know what I mean.

Water Heater Wonders

2008-08-31T23:30:00.000-07:00

Today I'm taking a break from the house narrative to muse upon the wondrous workings of the water heater. There it sits, quietly plugging away, keeping you and your family warm and comfortable, with nary a thank you. You never really think about it much, until you have to, and then it gets your full attention in a hurry.
In my case, I have been aware that the water heater has been approaching the end of it's life span for quite some time now. The handwritten date on the outside says "installed in 1994". Typically water heaters start heading south for the winter when they are about ten years old, so you might say I've been expecting a problem.
When it came, it was sort of an anticlimax. I was envisioning gallons and gallons of gushing hot water pouring out of the bottom. (well, that's how it happened for my father in 1977). Instead the water got super hot and burned my hands a couple of times. I just thought that was kind of strange, but let it go by with only a comment or two. Then the water just went cold. Of course we were in the very beginning of a three day holiday weekend, wouldn't you know. I didn't have any money for a plumber (especially on a holiday weekend) and I had five loads of laundry to wash and a load of dishes in the dishwasher. I panicked. Then I called my step dad and he reassured me that it didn't have to be the whole water heater, it could just be the thermostat. My tears dried up instantly. "It could?" I asked with just a little tremor in my voice and suddenly a lot of hope.
I hung up and went upstairs and typed in "Electric water heater failure symptoms".
I clicked on the first one and up popped a whole bunch of electrical diagrams and instructions on how to read something called Ohms. Ohh.
Hit the go back button. If there is one thing I know it's that I don't know anything about electricity. I will happily leave that to the pros.
Clicked the next site.
Then the angels began to sing as light began to emanate from the computer...
well, maybe not, but I did find out how to fix the problem. The only hitch? It would probably be temporary.
The problem was that the thermostat was not working (could be due to many things, even rusted on the inside and broken off) and the water was getting too hot, causing the reset button to trip.
I ran downstairs and grabbed my trusty screwdriver and proceeded to unscrew the only panel I could see on the entire thing. Problem, I didn't see anything but insulation, and I didn't want to mess with that. So I put the panel back on and went back for another read.
Ahhh. I was supposed to move the insulation out of the way and supposedly the innards would be revealed.
I ran down and unscrewed the whole thing again, this time dropping the metal panel on my toe like a little guillotine. I didn't have time to stop though, 'cause I was on to something. Removed the insulation and there it was. The magic button. I tentatively reached in and pressed it. Nothing happened, at least that I could see or hear. Only time would tell. I waited a few minutes and went over to the sink, and then the angels really did begin to sing and golden light...okay, well, we did get hot water.
Of course as soon as it gets too hot it will again shut off. But it's okay, cause I'm calling the plumber in the morning.

Some interesting things I learned:

Did you know??: That you are supposed to use a garden hose to drain five gallons of water out of the water heater every six months to remove the sediment build up on the bottom of the water heater and increase the longevity of your appliance? (That ticking noise you hear when water starts heating up is the sediment in the bottom.)
That the water heater is the second biggest user of energy in your home right behind your air conditioner? (Hmm, that would explain my 652 dollar electric bill last month.)
That if a bird or anything else blocks the flue of your gas water heater that it can blow up?
That it is (supposedly) easy to change out the heating element by yourself? (Said with skepticism.)
Of course as with any appliance, before doing anything to it, you should cut off the power at the fuse box. That was nothing new to me, but I was in too much of a hurry to read that part. Of course I wasn't doing anything but pushing the button, but that leads me to the most important thing. If you don't know what you're doing, call a professional. Amen to that. I've got him on my speed dial.

A Dirty Little Secret

2008-08-16T10:27:00.000-07:00

WARNING: This is a really GROSS story. If you have a weak stomach don't read this.

We were enjoying having our own place at last. We were doing some work on the house, mostly painting and cleaning up from the fire. The kids were settling in, more or less, with a few bumps in the road. I was pleased that my oldest daughter, then eleven years old had made a new friend. The friend was over for a visit one day, and we were visiting with her mother. Tee had to go outside for a minute, and when he came back in, he gave me a really funny look. I waited until after the friend and her mother left, and then we consulted. "Come outside", he said, "I want you to see something." "Okay", I said, kind of uncertainly. I followed him outside to the sewer clean out behind our house. I leaned over and looked. There appeared to be something all around on the ground. It took me a minute to realize it was macaroni. As in Mac and Cheese without the cheese. Also there was all this white stuff on the ground. It took another second to sink in that this was TOILET PAPER. We were alarmed, but assumed that the "stuff" had just come up because the cap to the clean out was unscrewed. We screwed it back in and cleaned up the mess, very carefully, and went on our merry way.
About a month later, while downstairs in the kitchen, I heard a funny noise coming from powder room adjacent to the mud room, which was adjacent to the kitchen. I went to investigate.
It was water. Brown water. Coming out of the toilet. Nasty water. Stinky water. Sewer water. I didn't know what to do or who to call. Totally stressed out and yelling at the top of my voice, I sent Tee out to take the cap off that sewer thingee outside. As soon as he did, all the water stopped and went away, leaving us with one horrible mess to clean up. This we did, with a lot of towels, (which we threw away), lots of bleach, and gloves and masks. Of course the wallpaper and the vinyl flooring were completely ruined and would have to be torn out.
We both heaved a sigh of relief as we finished that clean up job. Clearly this house had a dirty little secret that no one had disclosed to us when we bought it. The mystery of why the sewer cap had been left off when we bought the house had now been made crystal clear.
I called the city sewer people and told them what happened. I told them that I had a dilemma: put the cap on the sewer clean out to keep stuff from coming up in my yard, or risk city sewage coming up in my house. What was I supposed to do? I certainly didn't want "stuff" coming up in my house, but I sure didn't want it in my yard either. His advice to me was less than steller. "Well" he said to me in his best Texan accent, "Iffen I was you, I'd leave that cap off outside, cause iffen I had to choose, I'd rather have the stuff come up in my yard than in my house." And that was the best he could do.
So we left it off. And the "stuff" came up in the yard on a regular basis. Not just macaroni, either. Every couple of months like clockwork, usually after a good rain. I had a number to call, and they would come out anytime, day or night and clear the line, but it all started to get a little old. I told my step mom about it, and she decided to call the state and have it investigated for me. They wrote me a letter saying they were investigating, came out and talked to the city people, were satisfied with the explanation that it would be taken care of (eventually) and then promptly closed the investigation. Meanwhile I ripped out the entire bathroom, except toilet and sink. Took out the drywall, ripped off the wallpaper, tore up the vinyl flooring, which was rotted anyway, all around the toilet. And for two years the water didn't come in the house again.
I started to believe that the problem had resolved itself, but there was still just a niggle of doubt which kept the plans for rebuilding on hold.
Fast forward two more years. (I still had not replaced the walls or floor, for fear it would happen again.)(And we are lucky enough to have three bathrooms, so losing this one for a while wasn't a big deal.)
I was in the kitchen, and again I heard a sound in the bathroom. Again I go in, and again, the same old story. Again I freaked out and again, we cleaned it up. (by now I am running seriously low on towels) I went outside and sure enough, the city clean out was backed up and running down the yard. When I went back inside to call the number, I accidentally tracked the "stuff" all over my kitchen. I must have gotten a little too close and stepped in it. This finally put me over the edge. I got really, really angry. I called the number, as usual, but this time I went a step farther and emailed the city manager. I told him I had had enough. That I couldn't live like this, and shouldn't have to. That is was dangerous for me and my family, and we were thinking of selling and moving away. I told him I needed some answers, not just advice on how to live with the problem. (On that particular day, when the city showed up to unstop the line, the guy recommended that I "drill a hole in the sewer cap to relieve the pressure.")
To my surprise he was very sympathetic and promised me they would take care of this. I hadn't expected that. (It's a shame when you live in a world where kindness is unexpected.)
A couple of weeks went by. Nothing happened. I took out the toilet and put a rubber stopper on the hole. Thank God (and I mean that) I did, because less than a month later it happened again.
This time I awoke to hear the toilet running in the upstairs bathroom. This didn't surprise me because the chain was too long and I hadn't gotten around to fixing it yet. It kept hanging up and making the toilet run. I jiggled the handle and went downstairs.
But I was concerned when I got downstairs and saw that the kitchen sink was stopped up. It hadn't been stopped up when I went to bed. I fooled around with the garbage disposal, and then put that problem off for a few minutes to get the kids ready for school.
My now fifteen year old hopped in the shower. Then I heard it. That old familiar sound. This time, though, there was a difference. It was NOT coming out of the toilet, because there was no toilet, and because there was no toilet, it wasn't brown. (gross, huh, shoulda been there.) AND IT WAS COMING OUT OF EVERY FAUCET IN THE HOUSE DOWNSTAIRS! The kitchen sink was overflowing, the bathroom sink, the drain pipe on the washing machine, all running over. For about twenty minutes it ran and ran and ran. There was water everywhere. Again I sent Tee to take the cap off of the clean out, but when he got out there, the cap was already off, and the pipe was sitting in about a foot of standing water. There was nothing we could do. I called the number but no one returned my call. And the water just kept on running. By this time, Tee and I began taking out our frustration out on each other. We were screaming at each other over the sound of the running water and scaring the kids. Then we stopped yelling and just stood and looked at each other, with sweat and tears pouring down our faces, while the water continued to run.
Finally, realizing that my daughter was still in the shower and going to be late for school, I yelled up the stairs for her to get out. To my consternation, when she turned off the shower all the water downstairs stopped running as well. Then we realized what the problem was. The stopped up city pipe outside our house was keeping all our waste water from leaving our house. All our daughter's shower water was coming out of every faucet in the house. That explained why the sink was stopped up in the kitchen when I got up. The water running from the tank in the upstairs toilet was going straight into the kitchen sink.
I called the city manager again, and this time I'm not ashamed to say I used my womanly wiles. I cried. I didn't fake it, it was genuine, but I didn't hold back. I cried buckets.
Later that day he sent out the "Head of Something" (water works? parks and recreation? I don't remember.) to look at my house. This guy tried to tell me that something was wrong with my "stack". I immediately called Rotor Rooter and had a consult, (at a cost of 175 dollars, I might add) and it became clear that the problem was not my "stack". They put a scope down the city line and discovered that it was completely overgrown with weeds and tree roots.

I'm happy to say that the next owner of my old house will not have to deal with that dirty little secret. The problem is solved. The city manager had the sewer people dig all the way down from two blocks away, through four backyards to bring all of us a new sewer line. They tore up my yard, but I did not care. I was just so happy, and so were the neighbors. After it was all done, my immediate neighbor came up to me and thanked me profusely for getting us all a new line. Turns out he had been having the same problem since the early seventies. Turns out all the neighbors on my side of the street had been having sewage backup in their houses and yards for years. (HOW did they cope with that for so long?) He chuckled as he told me that his bathtub had drained fast for the first time in thirty years. They had been promising to fix it as long as he has lived here, so he had been kind of skeptical that they ever would. He's still talking about it. Hee Hee. Womanly wiles. Never underestimate 'em.

A Badly Needed Laugh...

2008-08-12T01:07:00.000-07:00

In the end, I decided not to paint the newel post and stair rail white again. It had been so much trouble to get 75 years worth of paint off, and the stain really didn't look too bad, after another couple of coats. It took another two months before we had REfinished refinishing the hallway floor, and my son's bedroom floor.
One day, while while cleaning my closet in my bedroom, my attention was drawn to a show on TV. It was a home and garden show, and a lady was getting ready to sand her daughter's bedroom floor. Of course this peaked my interest. What really grabbed me, though, was when I heard her say she was going to use a belt sander on the floor. I found myself talking to the TV. "Oh, no, not a belt sander, it won't work. You'll have marks all over the floor." Sure enough, two minutes later, "Wow, look at those marks on the floor. This isn't working, it's taking off too much. Get out the mouse sander." By this time I was laughing hysterically. I had had this exact conversation with Tee a few months before.
So they got out the mouse sander. I started talking to the TV. again. "No, no, that will take much too long. You don't want to go there." Of course the woman never heeded my advice to just break down and go to Home Depot, and rent a floor sander. I watched with a strange feeling of De ja vous, as she discarded the mouse sander and went back to the belt sander. I just shook my head and went back to work on my closet.
The next minute though, I popped my head out of the closet, and my attention was snapped back to the TV. A new show was on, and a man was telling the story of his house renovation. It all started, he said, with a pair of pliers, and removing a thousand staples out of the ceiling...

The Slippery Slope

2008-08-12T00:47:00.000-07:00

I MUST BE OUT OF MY MIND... I thought as another drip of stripper fell on my foot. What could I possibly be getting out of this? I’m dirty, I smell, I’m tired. I should quit for a while. Just let me finish this one little piece... two hours later I was still standing in the hall, scraping, scraping, scraping. The only sound in the entire house was the scrape of my blade on the wrought iron rails, as I scraped off what felt like one millimeter of paint per millennium. Everybody else was asleep, but I kept my lonely vigil with the stair rail, intent on bringing it back to it's original glory.
It took two whole months, but I finally got all of the white paint off of the wrought iron rails, and started sanding the newel post. This led to removing the carpet off the top step to get all the way to the bottom of the newel post. this led to taking all of the carpet off of the stairs late one September night. when I saw the horror that lay beneath, I put the carpet back on even faster than I took it off. The p.o.'s (previous owners) had used the steps as a paint brush rest. There was so much paint I could barely see the wood. And of course, as always, there were five thousand more staples. So I spent the next month sitting on the stairs removing staples, and nails, and paint, and lots of dirt. Worst of all were those wooden carpet tack strips. I cursed the previous owners on a regular basis. finally I had all the paint removed. Sometimes, though, I would stand at the top of the stairs and doubt my sanity. Was it all going to be worth it? A couple of the treads were cracked, and there were marks that sanding all the way to, well..., you know where..., would not remove. Staining became a test of endurance, because I had to leave myself a way to get upstairs, and this meant avoiding every other step for up to several hours each day. every day I would leave a note at the bottom telling the kids which steps they couldn't use for the day.
I would stain every odd step one day, and every even one the next, and then do it again, the following two days, and then do the same again when I used the polyurethane. Finally one day I stood at the top and looked down at the finished steps, and all the doubts about my sanity vanished. It HAD all been worth it. Of course, while waiting for all the stain, etc, to dry, I had begun attempting to stain the newel post and rail to match the stairs. The problem was, that whatever the wood is, it just will not take a stain evenly, despite using a good wood conditioner on it. I have tried everything, including about four different stain colors, and as a last resort, I even used a tube of oil paint, thinking that would help even out the color. Now the irony of the situation is that after all that work to remove the paint, I'm thinking of painting it white again.
And then there's the story of the upstairs hallway. I was almost finished with the entire stair project, and looking forward to finally being finished with the whole blasted thing, when my husband came home with a new belt sander. I had just finished staining the upstairs hallway the day before, and was getting ready to put the first coat of polyurethane on it, when I heard the belt sander, and felt a cold chill run down my spine. You guessed it, he decided to start with my upstairs hallway. Of course he had never used a belt sander before, and the end result is that I am going to have to re sand the entire upstairs floor in the hall. (I have since realized that it is my destiny to repeat everything I do at least once, if not twice before it is finally finished the RIGHT way.)
One day, while taking a break from the "Hallway to hell" (sorry, parody of an old A/C D/C song) I decided to remove the carpet from my son's room, which adjoins the hallway. This was a really nasty job and revealed, underneath, as always, MORE STAPLES! I'm beginning to think my whole house is held together with staples. Not just any kind of staples, though, they are the kind that break off when you pull them out leaving just enough sticking out to poke your foot on, but not enough to pull out with a pair of pliers, leaving you no choice but to hammer them down into the floor. So after the carpet was all gone, and I stood looking around at his now empty room, I saw, to my dismay that his room was unlevel on one side. Immediately, I saw the correlation between all these months of work, with one thing that led to another, and another, and then another, and the slope on one side of his room. I'm keeping a good attitude about it, though, I just think about how much fun he will have rolling his cars and marbles down the hill in his room.
(Fast forward again, about two years; we had the foundation experts out to estimate how much to fix our sinking house, and ((gulp!)) fourteen THOUSAND dollars, which we don't have at the moment.)

Burnin' Down the House

2008-08-08T22:35:00.000-07:00

Things were going along pretty good. I had painted the kitchen a sky blue to match the existing tile. We actually had money in savings for the first time ever. Not much, but something. I was starting to feel pretty psyched. I decided one afternoon to use my new found energy to clean out the garage. I thought it would be kind of nice too, if the garage floor was painted. I started taking all of the stuff out of the garage. There was a lot of it. We had been married about twelve years and had three kids, and I had never been a big believer in throwing things away, so you can imagine...I had everything all over the back yard and was just finishing up the garage floor when I heard this bloodcurdling scream. I looked up into the window of the kitchen and saw FLAMES! I dropped my paintbrush and came running in at full speed. My husband Tee was standing at the stove with a pan of fire, and there were flames licking up the wall and inside the microwave. There was smoke everywhere. I immediately dialed 911. I was screaming at the operator. HELP, THE HOUSE IS ON FIRE! Tee ran over to the door and threw the pan outside in the grass and we started throwing water at the flames. By this time the wall was scorched and the light fixtures on the ceiling were melted and hanging in ribbons. We got the flames out, and about that time we heard the sirens. We got the cat and ran outside, in hysterics of course.
The firemen came with their trucks and their hoses and were just about to flood our house with water when I stopped one of them and told them the fire was out. They still had to come in and air out the place and make sure the fire was not going to start up again. That was something I will never forget. Standing out on the sidewalk with the cat in my arms and my children all clustered around me and every single person on the block staring out of their curtains. It was surreal. Just about the time the hysterics went away, I remembered all that STUFF on the lawn in the backyard, and hysterics gave way to acute embarrassment. Everybody in the neighborhood is staring and all these firemen are in my house, and my backyard is LITTERED with junk. I felt like we should have had a guest spot on SANFORD AND SON. (For those too young to remember the series you can catch it on TV land sometimes, then you'll understand what I mean.)
What had happened was that Tee had been cooking French fries for the kids, and had gone upstairs for a minute on an errand. It only took a second for the pan to catch on fire, and spread to the microwave above. Tee came running back downstairs when he heard the alarms, and the girls yelling, and was trying to figure out how to get the fire out, when I came running in.
We sent the kids to their grandparents house for the weekend, and started the long cleanup process. All in all there was about six thousand dollars worth of damage to the kitchen. We decided to do all the work ourselves and use what insurance money was left to replace the vintage 1982 dishwasher that was shorting out the fuse box on a regular basis. Unfortunately, because we couldn't cook in the kitchen, we ended up using all our hard earned savings eating out. That really stank, but looking at the big picture I'm not complaining. I'm grateful to God that my kids were OK, and that the house didn't burn down. It could have been so much worse.
On a side note, during the clean up it was necessary to remove the ceiling tiles (ceiling tiles? in the kitchen?) that had melted to ribbons. Holding up all these tiles was...you guessed it, 5000 more staples, just waiting for my expertise to come along and yank them out.

Crown Moulding Muddle

2008-08-07T21:48:00.000-07:00

At this point my husband and I had been married for about eleven years. We thought we knew everything there was to know about each other. What we didn't know was that this house was about to teach us a lesson in marital politics. We started filling in the lines in the paneling with the joint compound. I was in favor of putting on several light coats and building to the right depth. He was in favor of really loading it on but only sanding once. After watching him do this a few times I felt compelled to say something about it. I didn't want lumps in my walls, nor did I want to sand each spot for an hour to smooth it out. Clearly MY way was the best way. (I was the oldest of three girls, my way was ALWAYS best, just ask my sisters.) Clearly he thought his way was the best. I ended up giving in and letting him do what he wanted to. I did my part my way, but it ended up taking forEVER to finish all the sanding. By the time we got to the ceiling tiles, the honeymoon was over with him. In the middle of pulling out the five thousand staples, he went upstairs and didn't come down again for three years. I didn't mind too much. I like to do things my way, and I'm sure I made him feel like he was getting in the way. Oh, yeah, and he had to work. Almost forgot about that.
The ceiling was a puzzle for me. Underneath the old white tiles was green bead board.
The paint was flaking and looked really old. I was pretty sure it had to have lead in it. I knew it would have to be encapsulated. I went to the hardware store and bought some Sheet Rock. That lasted about two minutes. That would be the two minutes it took me to haul it in the house. I didn't realize how heavy it was. I knew there was no way we were going to get it up on the ceiling by ourselves. We were broke and couldn't afford a drywall lift. Actually at that time I didn't even know there WAS such a thing. So back to the old tried and true. We bought new ceiling tiles. I consoled myself as I took them out of the box that at least these new ones had style. I dragged out the staple gun and put five thousand new staples in the ceiling.
Then onto crown moulding. The problem was that the room was angled. About halfway across, the ceiling began a downward slant. This made for a lot of time standing in the middle of the room just staring up. Could I do it this way?...No, that won't work...how 'bout this way...No, maybe if I turn it around...upside down maybe? I finally tried one piece. Then I was lost and never finished that project. To this day there is still just one lone piece of crown moulding in her room.
Most days I do a pretty good job of pretending it's not there, but every once in a while I just shake my head and vow that tomorrow, TOMORROW, I WILL get after it and figure out how to do that.
Two years later I was to learn that her room would have to be completely redone. All that I had done would have to be undone and then redone from the studs up, not because I had done anything wrong, but because we found out what was behind that paneling, and it wasn't good. But more on that later.

Oh, and while shopping at Lowe's yesterday, I ran across something called an "angle finder". This would really have come in handy like, oh, FOUR YEARS ago.
Oh, well.

Trial and Error

2008-08-07T20:36:00.000-07:00

The first thing we decided to do once we moved in was to paint. I had never painted anything before but my confidence was high as we picked out our colors with excitement at the store. We came home with more equipment than our car could hold and broke out the brushes. Now anybody who knows anything about painting will tell you that the paint job is only as good as the prep work. We must have missed that episode of THIS OLD HOUSE. We didn't bother to remove any of the nails from the walls, or fill any holes with Spackle, and we weren't too great about keeping the plastic down on the hardwood floor either (something we are still living with, four years later). Plus, the color we picked out, called cool melon, which looked really good at the store looked sickly in our dining room. No matter: we boldly went where no man should have ever gone, at least without some kind of instruction.
The result was pretty ghastly. The in-laws made no bones about how much they hated it. We would get comments like WOW! It's so...bright.
Not to be put off by the negative comments, we moved right on into our daughter's soon to be bedroom. It had originally been part of a long garage attached to the left side of the house. The garage had been divided into two bedrooms and the walls were now paneled with beat up white paneling. The ceiling was covered in really old beat up white ceiling tiles with little spaceship stickers all over them.
We weren't sure what we were going to do with the walls, at first, either take them down and put up Sheetrock, or paint them, or what. But wait! We were just about to discover JOINT COMPOUND! We decided to smooth in the lines of the paneling with the joint compound. And then paint.
So it began. Weeks and weeks of filling and scraping and sanding and filling and scraping and sanding. I thought it would never end. I dreamed that I was sanding in my sleep. Then came the ceiling tiles. They were easy to take down. I would pull on one and three would come down. Underneath was about twenty years of yucky nasty dirt waiting to fall on my hair and get in my clothes. After we took out the five hundred bags of tiles to the curb it was time to tackle the staples left in the bead board ceiling. Again I dreamed of staples in my sleep. There must have been five thousand of them. (Hey, there's nothing left to prove there weren't five thousand, there coulda been) Finally we began to paint. This time we picked out a mint green and paired it with a shocking pink and a bright yellow. Stripes. Like CANDY LAND on steroids. My five year old would have been in the loony bin in a month if she had to live in that room, so I quit in the middle and started over on the paint. This time I picked a more sedate pink and wallpapered teacups and cupcakes around the room.
Along the way, I learned to use a miter box for trim, how crown moulding works, (How it works for other people, I could never get it to work for me.) How to PROPERLY prep and paint a room. How to use a power screw driver (don't laugh, I had never used one before I bought this house) How to use a drill, and last week I used a Skill saw by myself for the first time, to build a gate for my fence.
But those are all later stories. Suffice it to say that eventually we picked a different color for the dining room, a pretty yellow, and this time we did the prep work first and the end result was SO much better. I don't just live with it now, I love it.

The Saga Begins...

2008-08-07T20:20:00.000-07:00

The front entry when we first moved in. Some things you just don't know about a house until you move in and live there a while. One of the things that has given me the most pleasure is the light that comes through the front door in the morning (faces the east) and shines on the opposite wall above the stairs. I love the old wavy glass.

It wasn't what I'd had in mind. I had planned on moving to a bigger city, much farther away. In fact I had actually put down earnest money the week before on another house, and then changed my mind. I weighed the pros and cons in my mind as we swung around the block for another look. Pros: The house looked very nice from the outside. It was an old house, which was what I wanted. We could afford it, because it had a nice price tag. The one I looked at last week was about thirty thousand more dollars than this one.
Cons: This was a small town. A very small town. We had come from San Diego just three years before and had had trouble adjusting to the size of the town we were currently living in, which was approximately four times BIGGER than this town.
Also, this was far away from the airport. We were blessed enough to be able to live anywhere we wanted job wise, because my husband, the breadwinner of the family traveled for a living, but it would be convenient to be near the airport. This was about two hours away on a good day.
As we passed the house again I decided to at least look at it. We called the realtor (from the far away town we had planned on living in) and had him come out and take us around.
I can't say I fell in love right away. My husband was the one who persuaded me. For one thing, two of the bedrooms weren't really bedrooms, they were an old garage alongside the house that had been converted into bedrooms.
The walls in both of those rooms were covered with shabby white paneling and really old square tiles on the ceilings with little outer space stickers all over them.
The kitchen had been remodeled in the fifties and had pine cabinets with particle board shelves. Also there were fluorescent lights everywhere. I hate fluorescents.
But there was a beautiful crystal chandelier in the foyer, and I loved the front door. And there were a lot of windows. I mean a lot. (Later I would count them...there were 44, all with the old wavy glass) The living room was huge. The master bedroom was enormous at about 25x19. It had a really cute breakfast nook and a large backyard. It had three bathrooms, although I wasn't sure whether this was pro or con, because two of the bathrooms were really tiny, and one had a window about six inches away from the toilet.
When we looked at it, the dining room had a pool table in it instead of a dining room table and the owners had built a custom recessed cabinet into the wall for the pool equipment with a lovely painting on the doors that said "Snooker played here". This was completed with a lovely rendition of a rack of balls and two crossed cues.
But the living and dining room were spacious and open. The house had potential. We decided to go for it. It didn't look like it needed too much work, just a little painting and some cleaning. And maybe some new carpet and new cabinets. And that wallpaper in the downstairs toilet...circa 1982...were there wood floors under the carpet...hmmm...maybe we could refinish those...

Do You Take This House...

2008-08-06T00:19:00.000-07:00

From this day forward...for better or worse...in sickness and health...
I never thought I would apply those words to any other than the husband I married sixteen years ago. But the more effort (insert blood sweat and tears here) I expend on this house the more these words seem to beat in my head.
There are days that I wouldn't trade the house for any thing in the world. I look at the beautiful wavy glass in the old six on six and four on four windows or the beautiful wood floor I brought back to life in the foyer and feel such a rush of satisfaction that I chose to live here.
Then there are days I long for a divorce from the house. Days when I swear I'm going to catch the next bus out of this town (if this podunk town was big enough to HAVE a bus) and never come back. Screw the house, I say. I'm leaving. Days when cracks appear in walls that were picture perfect just yesterday or toilets decide to overflow in the upstairs bathroom and run all the way down the hall and through the window casings of the dining room before anybody notices.
Those days there is a rush of despair that the job will never be finished that is every bit as strong as the satisfaction felt on a good day and it takes everything I have to hold on and get through it all.
Today was one of those good days. Standing on my elliptical machine trying to work off the twenty pounds I have gained over the past year, my mind wandered. I looked at the living room with the white mantle and the green tea leaf walls, to the beautiful ochre colored foyer , the twelve foot ceilings. Sure there is still much to be done. New carpet, refinishing the floors in the dining room and bedrooms and a non functioning bathroom still needing a toilet, among other things. But it's okay. Days like this it certainly seems "for better" than "for worse".