Excuse me... I'm just cutting in!

Ok, ok- here we are. We FINALLY (finally) (wooohoooo!!!) got paint on our house. The sanding and filling is over. We are no longer wandering in the desert of lead paint chips and 80 year old wood dust. We have entered the promise land and oh my goodness is it beautiful!

People have been stopping by and saying "I love that color, what is it?" I must say, I am resource guarding my color selection, unless you live in another neighborhood, in another town, in another state! Then I am willing to share. This lady with a giant red peace sign in her front yard (who lives 2 blocks from me) wanted the color name. Arrh! No way!

I am now in the process of painting all of the trim. Painting the sides of the trim boards is very tedious and needs to be done with a very small brush... turned out ok I think. The porch still looks horrible, because that is our next project. We will demo the porch and rebuild it with wood and brick. It will rock... you'll see.

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.