Memorial weekend, part 1

I think we've had enough adventures in the past two days to warrant a blog post, even though the weekend is far from over. Plus, I have time to kill before friends arrive for painting and dinner. Boy, do I know how to woo 'em.

We kicked off our weekend with rooftop adventures! Namely, sweeping the incredibly large pile of leaves off of our back pergola. This pile was blocking the exhaust to the stovetop, so while our stove works, we have yet to use it. We probably had a bit too much fun with this task, filling a 1.5 residential trash bins with leaves--only the ones that fell in the bucket on first push off the roof. The remainder of the leaves we swept off the patio for the lawn maintenance people to take care of at a later date. Eric also trimmed a few overhanging branches while we were up there, but the bulk of what we need to trim back will need to be handled by a professional crew, since they are significantly higher.

We also began sorting through some of the belongings in the garage in an effort to get to the table buried under everything. We sorted mostly kitchenware and any of our still-usable "rejects" will be brought to my work next week to find a new home. Whatever is not taken home by someone else will be donated.

Saturday DAY was spent out of the house to give us a bit of down-time, since we have a long weekend full of multiple days of work. We drove around the backroads between our place and Santa Barbara, mostly to give us an excuse to eat at Ca'Dario in SB for our favorite ravioli! We came across a small farmstand on one of the back roads that had a narrow suspension bridge that provided access from the road/farmstand area to their actual farm! The owner very nicely let us cross the bridge and check out the farm on the other side. She said there were pigs roaming about, but, alas, they didn't come out to visit.

Saturday evening requires a bit of backstory. Throughout the week, we've been noticing that some of our foodstuffs that was in the garage were being nibbled on by little critters, making a mess of our cornstarch and flour. To dissuade them from visiting our house, we've been moving the pantry staples into the kitchen and tossing out anything that was previously invaded. Then our hamburger buns INSIDE the house got nibbled on. Uh oh. We promptly applied bits of steel wool to any of the holes that we've been able to locate inside the house and have plans to call a rat-abatement company after the holiday weekend is over. So Saturday evening, I go to refill the drink in the kitchen and hear a noise. While trying to scan for what caused the noise, I see movement in our empty trash/recycling can. Upon further inspection, (read: Gail yelling at Eric to promptly get over here and us cautiously approaching said container) we discovered that we had inadvertently trapped a small, cute specimen of the rodent variety. Like supercute. Now what do we do?! We did not kill it, but took it to an undisclosed location where it could range free in the wilds and fend for itself there. We wish it the best. We still have at least one critter in the attic since we heard something scurrying about this morning, but we now have one less.

Upon return, we looked for further holes to fill with steel wool and I did something that I will not mention that could have landed me a page in the next Darwin Awards book and had me freaking out about a potential fire all night. 'nuff said, moving on. The house is still fire-free this morning. 8-)

This morning we moved some more furniture and stuff into the house, which I will be sorting right after this blog post. And in the process of this, I dropped my phone just right to completely shatter the screen. Oy. Looks like I might be trying out an android phone for a while, since Eric still has his old Nexus 5 and a sim card adapter is MUCH less expensive than a new phone at this stage.

Eric on the suspension bridge

leaf sweeping

behold the ever-stylish wardrobe of a Gail that's cold doing housework. I should win an award or something.

leaves and twigs everywhere!

the culling of stuff

He's (she's?) so tiny!

We call him Ratty McMouse. The interwebs say he's a mouse. 

the pretty farm on the other side of the suspension bridge.

in front of the bridge.

flowers and cables. 

more wildflowers growing

and I drew him in my sketchbook--wouldn't you?

D'oh!

Computer room

Scott came up to visit again this weekend and knowing that his arrival was eminent, I spent my Friday "vacation day" preparing the guest room for his arrival. I primed the newly repaired areas of the guest bedroom, computer room and master bedroom, all except for one wall that I need to do some serious sanding of, which I keep putting off because of the dust it will generate.

We also purchased a small Weber charcoal grill, which Eric assembled during the week.

After the primer dried, I used Edgelock blue painters tape on the top edge of the walls, right along the seam of the ceiling, to give a clean and easy border to the paint. I'm not entirely stressed if we do get the paint there entirely perfect, since we will eventually be putting up crown moulding, but this will give an added visual interest until that time. (note: final edges turned out amazing.)

Then I went through and put a first coat of color over all the primed areas, to bring it to a state that matched the already painted walls. At this point, we decided that was good enough to hang curtains so there will be privacy for our guests. We reused drapes from our condo in the master bedroom and they went perfectly with the wall color. We only had to buy one additional panel for the dormer window, which at some point I'll need to ask my sewing-savvy friends to help me hem.

I will be going back with a final pass of paint in the next few weeks to even out the color and make everything perfect. We determined that the time would be better served by finishing the paint on the computer room, which would allow us to move the computers OUT of the guest room, allowing for more room to work when I get to the final coat of paint.

The computer room followed a similar process: prime, tape, first coat color, then final smooth coat for a clean finish. After that and a bit too much retail therapy at Target to purchase the curtain rods and grey-and-white patterned curtains for the computer room. I hung all the curtain rods, because I like using power tools :)

Do not think that I did all the projects this weekend, because that is far from accurate. You get to hear about mine mostly because I'm writing the blog post, but the truth of the matter is that my projects were easy compared to the guys' task. They were on demolition duty with the master bathroom broken linoleum tiles that mostly covered the floor. It took two of them about 4 hours to chisel out that flooring. EIGHT HOURS to remove that floor! Then if that wasn't enough, they got to schlep all the computer stuff downstairs after vacuuming, mopping, then vacuuming again when I made a mess drilling the holes for the curtain rods.

I don't have a great 'before' shot, but this shows where the tiles were damaged and missing right by the tub.

These tiles do NOT come up easy, but rather in teeny tiny bits that need to be chiseled away.

we hate you tile.

the subfloor revealed.

Mission accomplished!

The drywall guys used paper floor covers instead of plastic or canvas. Since I have a roll of kraft paper always on hand, I decided to mimic them.

priming the drywall

more primer over the patches

I forgot to get an in-progress paint shot of the computer room, but this is the reveal after removing the paint. I'm really itching to get the trim around the doors painted a crisp white, but I need to give the freshly painted walls some time to cure before I start putting tape on them.

It is surprisingly difficult to find decent angles to photograph in this room without a wide-angle lens, but I love the added depth and detail the white edge at the top of the wall gives the room. 

drilling the pilot holes. The instructions came with awesome templates for perfectly positioned holes every time. 

I heart power tools. 

We interrupt your regularly scheduled broadcast to bring you this delicious zen. There is a smidgen of a chance that an obsessive artist lives here.

The curtains

I really like the square geometric pattern, which we carried through nicely in the square finials on the rods.

The final setup. This is only a temporary home for my computer, which will ultimately find a home in the art studio. 

The guest room curtains are hung. I'll take down the rod when I'm ready for the final pass of paint.

chillin' and grillin' spicy burgers as our reward for a job well done.

Progress, slow and steady

The past two weekends have been half downtime and half work on the house. Mostly, we've been pulling staples out of the floors downstairs. We've spent MANY hours at this task and very much appreciate the inexpensive kneepads we purchased for this task. They made a huge difference on how long we were able to work on this at any one time.

Overall, the floors are looking pretty nice. There's wear-and-tear, which is to be expected on any flooring 60 years old. The stairs got the most damage when the tack strips were being removed, but I'm hoping it will be something that can be repaired when we refinish the flooring. The damage is to the back portion of each step, so while it's not pretty, the stairs are fully functional.

We made our first trip to Habitat for Humanity ReStore, which was pretty fun! We found a lot of paint, which alas, i have plenty of right now. A miscommunication with our drywall guys that finished the ceiling meant that we have a leftover 5-ish gallon of untinted paint. So I'll be taking that back to the paint store to get tinted, and it will be the color used in the living room/hallways/stairwell/kitchen walls. It will be put to good use. But back to ReStore. We found some cool aluminum and wood chairs that I liked, particularly at $20/chair, but we decided to hold off on purchasing them since we're not quite ready for furniture yet. Instead, we found some nice ceramic tile that we will be using to retile the downstairs bathroom floor at the end of May with the help of some friends. We also found another store down the street that we'll be checking out, since it's a home furnishing outlet and we didn't have time that weekend to check it out.

After determining that we were adding tile to the list of projects for our BBQ/home repair shindig weekend, I realized that we can't tile a bathroom AND remove wallpaper from said bathroom at the same time, so I reprioritized some of the projects and have started working on removing wallpaper from the bathroom.

Other things that are progressing along with the help of some contractors, including my coworker's father:

• Electricity in the garage restored, and some other minor electrical work started
• extended the shower heads in both bathrooms so the showers will work for someone beyond a hobbit.
• Changed the leaking faucet in the upstairs bathroom. This faucet will stay in whatever final bathroom renovations occur, even if the rest of the sink area does not. 

new subfloor plywood in the dining room to cover up the floor joists

carpet removed, with lots of staples yet to pull

dirty stairs sans carept

pulling staples

pulling more staples

stairs, from the other direction

we like our new old hardwood floors

The entry hallway

our first crockpot meal, and prepping the right cabinets to move all the kitchen stuff into, so I can go back to painting the other kitchen cabinets. 

What's our first meal in the slow cooker? chili, of course!

How to eat without a stove or microwave: 1. rice in rice cooker, 2. salad, 3 protein cooked in convection oven (pot roast!) This has been our general meal plan for the last week and a half. The stove works, but the exhaust is currently full of leaves and we have no ladder at the moment to get onto the roof and clean it out.

Tile! it's apparently called "hexagonal dot" even though it's technically an octagon.

Oops! we're a little short. Luckily, we found an extra box of it online that should be arriving before our install weekend.

new faucet.

just when you thought the wallpaper/cabinet liners couldn't get any worse.

byebye roses

the adhesive/paper layer with the wallpaper remover sprayed on. I wasted part of the bottle spraying it on the first layer, which did nothing, but then I mastered the process.

Step 1: remove top layer. Step 2: spray and wait. Step 3: repeat steps 1 and 2 until all paper removed.

Step 1b: having the right tools helps!

The mess

The pasty green is only a slight improvement. Some patching, Killz, and painting will make everything better.

Some of my downtime was hanging out at Phil's while the guys installed a new microwave at his house.

The install in progress