Our floor plan idea

We love our little house- but it is so darn little. We have a breakfast nook that we don't use at all and a laundry room off the kitchen that doesn't make any sense. The new floor plan will turn the breakfast nook into a small bedroom. Our old bedroom will become open to the common areas as a tv room. The akward hallway with 5 doors will be opened up. We plan on installing 6 craftsman columns where the old walls were. The laundry room will be gone and the kitchen extending to the Bush Street side of the house. We are planning to completely demo the termite infested garage and rebuilding it attached to the house. Hopefully with a small apartment on top. Pretty ambitious huh?

FINALLY the ugly starts coming off

We have been doing many many projects that are very necessary, but not visable to our neighbors walking by. No one can see that we have fabulous hydronic radiant floor heating system or our $8,000 on demand boiler in our attic. The new roof we put on the house looks great, but it's kinda like new tires on your car... everyone needs tires. Noah is my hero. He has painfully stripped all of the paint off our house leaving beautiful (and original!!!) wood siding. It took 3 different paint sprayers and 10 different types of chemic stripper to find the right combination. Some strippers has too much wax and clogged the sprayer. Other strippers were just not strong enough and took several applications. Sanding, filling and more sanding, we finally had smooth beautiful wood. You can see in the picture that we also removed all of the window trim. That will be replaced too.

Here is an example of our color inspiration. A lovely hotel on the Sonoma Square. We plan on using white trim, but making the windows a charcoal color..



We used an acrylic primer tinted to a similar color that the paint will be. We are still in the process of filling all of the little imperfections. We have also started putting on the window and door trim. We will be putting a nice sized apron under the sill and adding a lintil and bead at the top. First we just need to get this house painted!






























Finally, we are making the house less drafty by caulking around the trim on all the windows and doors. Noah is using about 1 tube per window. It looks great and will keep our wonderful heat in and the cold OUT.Lets hope we get some REAL painting done!

Putting humpty dumpty back together again...

The bathroom was a hundred years of nasty. The brown carpet was the first to go when we finally got the keys to our little house. Putting the bathroom back together has been a long and expensive process that has spanned the time we moved in last spring to now... a year later. We have gone without showers, baths, and toilets... and in the beginning a floor. When we were doing our roof last summer, we also had no gyp board in the bathroom, so I could take a bath(no shower) looking out into the clear blue sky. If I wanted to bathe, I yelled up on the roof to my brother in laws, and all the other men to stay on the SOUTH side, because I was taking a bath.

This is our tub now. We have re-enclosed it in a new box. The tub itself has been refinished. Our bath hardware is fabulous. The shower head is a generous 10" diameter. The shower rod is 32" wide x 54" long. We still have quite a bit of work to do in the bathroom. The flat walls need to be touched up. The window trim still isn't finished, and the floor has yet to be grouted. But we need to keep moving on to more pressing projects. The house needs to be painted and we need fencing.

Bathroom, Feel My WRATH!

The bathroom is unusable and disgusting. The main causes are as follows:

• Clawfoot tub is built into a tiled plywood box, tiles are falling off.
• Carpet on floor holds moisture, allows sub floor to rot and be spongy nasty.
• All fixtures and surfaces are from the 60's rental house period.

       What to do? Tear it all out! After a few hours of pounding, prying and gagging everything was down to studs and joists, the toilet was removed and the OG clawfoot tub relocated to the kitchen to hold tools. It is SOOOO heavy.
       I replumbed the sink and toilet in their new locations as dictated by Hali's cad drawing ;)
Hali wanted white subway tile so we decided to put the clawfoot back in a tiled box. New 5/8" ply on the floor joist with 1/4" hardibacker cemented on top. The walls got 1/2" hardibacker 4' high and green rock for the rest.
       It took many late nights (even after we moved in) to finish the tile. A lot of the delay was due to Lowes backorder stuff, but we finally made it. For my first real tiling job I'm pretty happy.

The Aroma of Stain and Varathane

        So, the floor is sanded as smooth as it's gonna get. I vacuumed up all the sawdust and wiped everything down with tack cloth. LET THE STAINING BEGIN! We chose Minwax Jacobean for it's dark deep feeling. Wearing two pair of rubber gloves was a good idea. The outer glove would get weak and start falling apart, that is when I would change them.
        To get the right color we put the stain on very heavy. A washed out gatorade bottle with a hole poked in the cap served well at squirting out the stain onto the surface. That way I could get enough down to rub in.
        It took a few days for the stain to dry and as soon as it did I put down the first coat of Varathane Satin. It took a few hours to dry enough to put down another coat, in all I did four coats. If you let it dry too much you'll have to sand between coats.

With the varathane curing, I will turn my wrath on the bathroom.

Started floor tear out or "Hepa is my friend"

          I had a realization. There is no way I'm going to get this place live-able and move in in three weeks. I broke down and hired some laborers to do tear out while I'm at work. Since the house is empty and broke down I don't mind leaving them alone. The pay was $10 per hour.....$12 if they worked hard. They ended up getting everything torn out and loaded onto the dump truck (a surprise from my brother, you ROCK Ben!)by the end of the second day. Well worth the money even with the distinct odor of weed in the house afterwards.
          That black stuff on the floors is tar paper. It had bonded to the floor over the last 80 years and was impossible to scrape off. I rented a floor sander, the drum kind, with lots of heavy grit paper and chewed through it. You've got to be really careful wit the drum sanders because they can gouge the wood really easily,never stop moving.
          I followed up afterwards with a vibrating pad floor sander to smooth everything out. There are still some minor grooves and waves in the floor from the drum sander but I don't think I can sand them out anymore....we'll see.

Lots of dust! Get yourself a Hepa respirator.

Why would anyone back out of such a good deal?

"Oh, that's why"
          It was time to do a walk through and find answers to questions like, "Why would anyone back out of escrow on such a low price?", "That roof looks old, think there's any water damage?", "Is that a porcelain knob up under the eaves?", or my favorite, "What's all this sawdust falling out of the front porch from?"
          Turns out there were reasons why it had sat empty for ten years. The heater was one of those reasons. I didn't turn it on because I'm particularly afraid of third degree burns.
          Oh and our good friend, the industrious termite! There was termite damage, mainly in two of the kitchen floor joists.
The roof was a good 50 years old, knob and tube wiring reigned supreme.
          Let's not forget the bathroom! Someone had tiled over the top of plywood, I only know this because I was able to pull the tiles loose by hand with little effort.
          There was also a lovely brown carpet throughout the house that smells like it was browner than originally intended. Under the carpet was a a layer of vinyl tile or linoleum, under that was an older layer of vinyl tile or linoleum and under that was layer of tarpaper that had become one with the lead based paint on the doug fir sub floor.
          So just to make it liveable.....we do have to live here, we had 3 weeks of evenings and nights to accomplish:

1. Tear out - Bathroom and 3 or so layers of flooring
2. Refinish wood floors
3. Remodel bathroom (minimum: working toilet and shower)

Did I mention we have one year old twins? Hali resigned herself to not having a husband and I resigned myself to not sleeping. YIPEEEEE!

Ducks in a row

          After we got a call that the house was available, it was time to get our affairs organized. I had already started to repair some of our young and foolish credit mistakes, but it had only been a few months. Would our credit scores reflect the changes? We need a real estate agent and a lender that won't have our best interests in mind. After getting some recommendations from friends we settled on our real estate agent fairly quickly. Finding the right lender was a difficult process.
          We met with a mortgage broker who had a safe sounding, conservative approach and another lender who's promises sounded too good to be true. Which way should we go? The further I went with the broker, the math started to make sense. safe and conservative was her way to get more of my money in her pockets.
          It turns out that Mr. "too good to be true" made it happen. We ended up with an Acorn loan and the CHDAP to buy points. He got us 0 down, 40 year fixed @ 5.25%, first 10 years is interest only. You might be looking at your monitor right now thinking "WHAT?!, that's too good to be true!" You would be correct, except for the part where ..... it is true. I don't know what he did to get us that loan and I'm not going to ask.

We bought a house!

          We bought this house in April of 2007. It's a 1925 craftsman style bungalow. The previous owner's parents had built it (and many other houses in the neighborhood) so you could say we are the second owners. The place had been abandoned for 10 years before we laid eyes on it. The daughter of the builders had recently past away and it was put on the market.
          Now I've done some remodeling in the past and Hali, my wife, has her degree in interior design, so we had been looking for something that we could put some sweat equity into. Hali saw it on one of our walks with our newborn twins, the "For Sale" sign had been switched to "Sold." She called me at work and urged me to call about it.
          Being the ever supportive husband, I replied "Why would we bother calling? It says sold. Besides I'm at work and can't waste time calling people to inquire about sold houses." "Can you please just find out?," she asked. I called and they told me, "It's in escrow but we'll call you if something happens."
          The next day they called back,"Our buyer backed out because the house was going to be too much work. Would you like to make an offer?" Shakily I responded ".................yes?" Now I would just have to find a real estate agent and a lender. That night Hali and I prayed that God would make it happen smoothly or frustrate our efforts.