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

The Move!

Last weekend, we officially moved into our house, regardless of the fact that work was still being done by us and by the people we hired. We don't have a lot of photos from the move weekend because, well, we were moving.
We had made a couple of trips with stuff prior to the weekend of the move, and we hired movers to move the furniture and a couple of boxes of stuff we had packed already, but we underestimated just how much stuff you can fit into an apartment and, more specifically, a kitchen! We get a D- for organized packing, but a B+ for our Tetris skills. Too bad it'll be a while before I find the cups packed within the pots or the other stuff that got packed into the closest box, bag, or container. Highlights of the last two weeks (the list included stuff worked on by Gail, Eric, and workers):

• Pulling up the rest of the staples in the hallway and the guest bedroom. The two rooms and the hall probably took about 5-6 hours of staple pulling. 
• vacuuming the floor upstairs
• mopping the floor upstairs
• having workers skimcoat the upstairs ceilings
• vacuuming out old rats nests in both the attic crawl spaces with a borrowed shop vac (thank you Candice!!!) (ok, maybe this was a lowlight, but let me assure you, I was in as close to HAZMAT gear as I could get on short notice) The highlight of this was finding a page of a newspaper from 1957 in the attic.
• first pile of trash hauled away
• lots of cleaning, including vacuuming out the garage after the trash was removed
• vacuuming leaves out of the box that covers the gas meter
• having the HVAC system completely overhauled, moved out of the closet in the center of the house and into the garage, and completely new ductwork run through the house to the relocated registers. We replaced a 22-year-old system
• adding on a new tankless water system when Eric heard horrible sounds coming from the 16-year-old water heater after a toilet was flushed. 
• adding the holes for all the old registers and ductwork to the to-do repair list for the drywall guys to patch
• mopping the floor upstairs
• buying a washer and dryer
• having a washer and dryer delivered, but the gas line too short due to having moved the very large HVAC system into the garage
• having electrical problems arise in the garage at the end of the HVAC install, resulting in us getting to plug in either a washer OR a dryer via extension cord to get clean clothes
• having workers paint the ceilings, then buying different paint when they weren't happy with the coverage (we ended up with Dunn Edwards low VOC paint and block-it primer). They managed to finish the upstairs ceilings 3 hours before the movers arrived with our furniture.
• taking all the gaudy bathroom fixtures out of the downstairs bathroom and replacing the cabinet pulls.
• mopping the floors upstairs yet again and washing out all the upstairs cabinets while the movers load the furniture
• furniture arrived!...mostly into the garage :( but we have beds and a temporary computer setup
• hiring a gardener
• taking more trips than we thought we needed to bring over the rest of the stuff, finishing at midnight on Sunday, just in time to go to bed and go to work Monday morning
• Costco run for food. Our meals for the week centered on salad and rice for dinner (occasionally with meat) and muffins, yogurt, and tangerines for breakfast. Lunch at work was fend-for-yourself!
• multiple trips to Home Depot, Dunn Edwards, etc, etc.
• more removal of cabinet liners - this time in the bathroom
• removing carpet from the bathrooms
• scraping out/recaulking the bathroom showers and the downstairs bathroom window.
• having our plumber fix a leak that had been dripping on/in the old furnace unit, as well as extending the showerhead to make the shower usable for someone who is not a hobbit.
• getting interlocking exercise mats to place in the bathrooms and kitchen until we get the flooring fixed. 
• having a minor anxiety attack mid-week when I was exhausted, having no success at finding missing paperwork, and having no bathrooms clean enough to shower in.
• finally getting to shower in the bathroom! *major highlight!!!*
• Working air conditioning!
• reinforced joists where they had been cut by whoever installed the old swamp cooler
• an insulated ceiling in the living room
• the 21+ holes slowly disappearing under the skillful hands of our drywall experts. 
• blackout shades installed in the master bedroom! (the first two days was taped sheet for curtain)
• All the ceilings primed and painted. 
• My coworker Janet's dad coming to help us fix our electrical woes. 

I've started keeping tally of the random comments I've been receiving at the home improvement stores:

• "You want to use a power sander on kitchen cabinets?! I don't think that's a good idea." It worked like a charm, so suck it random guy. 
• "You're going to do it yourself?! It's good that a woman wants to do it herself." I don't remember exact phrasing, but that was the gist. And I choose to see it as "impressed" and not "condescending."
• "Justin Beiber!" YES, i did get this comment shouted at me when i was walking in the parking lot. And no, no one else was around.
• "I can't believe you fit that in YOUR car, and it's color coordinated!" A very impressed guy watched me fit exactly two batts of Rock Wool insulation in the back of my Prius C. They fit precisely, with just a slight smashing of one corner to get the trunk closed. Also, the package happened to be orange. :)

I got one coat of white on one cabinet, before the painting had to be put on hold because of drywall work/moving

Tuesday, November 19, 1957

Want some ribs?

How 'bout a nice glass of Beefeater Gin? love the illustration!

removing staples kinda sucks

furniture moving

shhhh! this isn't packed yet!

Our furniture's new, temporary, home. The HVAC ducts loom in the background.

randomly duct-taped drywall hole in the kitchen cabinet to be fixed

progress on wallpaper removal in the dining room, and another hole. 

Guest room gets furniture.

oops! a bit more damage during electrical repairs 

The empty apartment bedroom. Byebye!

isn't that a thing of beauty? I have a full matched set for any takers!

a 10-minute fix makes a world of difference!

ugh! just no. dirty does not a happy gail make.

it's a mess, but a livable mess!

So much for the initial coat of paint. More painting yet to do! And laundry.

blackout shades in the dormer...a thing of beauty!

shades!

we have built safe passage to the toilet!

the wall that had all the damage from the wood paneling is clean and there is now a ceiling in the room again

the makeshift kitchen: toaster oven, rice cooker, crock pot. The dirty cups aren't done because they would just collect drywall dust. 

our stuff. in the garage.

trash pile #2 in the back yard

carpet removal from the downstairs begins! yay! It's a thing of beauty.

byebye hole in ceiling, and old register holes

hello new register!

yes, i just painted this recently. yes, i'll paint it again!

another one bites the (drywall) dust

it ain't pretty yet, but it's livable!

we've got the essentials: computers and pringles. we're good

look at that amazing piece of precision cutting! It's amazing what a difference a clean(-ish) looking floor will do to the feel of a room. I have a few more cuts to make to finish the temporary floor, as you can see in the back corner behind the toilet.

don't tell anyone, but i got it by creating a paper template first!

we've been taping plastic over both of the doors before work each morning to contain the drywall dust downstairs as much as possible. and we have a floor mat at the top of the stairs

the closet starts to come together! now to do the rest of the laundry.